Literary Geekery Redux

Persistent Sentences of the Moment, Part II:

1) "Whether you take a doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit." -Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

2) "What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie." -Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

3) "We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe." -Jimmy Carter, Voyager Spacecraft Statement

Great because:

1) This is exactly the sort of sentence one needs to have in one's arsenal for those times one's philosophical friends require reality checks.

2) It is so satisfying to read words crafted by the sort of mind competent enough to carry an apt metaphor across several sentences. Also, I'm a sucker every time for complication of Truth.

3) How incredibly, movingly optimistic, unselfish, and good-willed. Sadly, the world is a different place these days.