Jul 2015
When I was younger, I tried to freeze the world.
"So you pick up this picture, this two-dimensional image, and you say, 'That's me.' Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, 'This was me when I was a year old, and then later I had long hair, and then we moved to Riverdale, and now here I am.' So it takes a story that's actually a fiction to make you and the baby in the picture identical to create your identity."
- From the movie Waking Life
"'So it is with atoms in crystals, too; and two different crystals of the same substance can have quite different physical properties.' He told me about a factory that had been growing big crystals of ethylene diamine tartrate. The crystals were useful in certain manufacturing operations, he said. But one day the factory discovered that the crystals it was growing no longer had the properties desired. The atoms had begun to stack and lock--to freeze--in different fashion. The liquid that was crystallizing hadn't changed, but the crystals it was forming were, as far as industrial applications went, pure junk. How this had come about was a mystery. The theoretical villain, however, was what Dr. Breed called 'a seed.' He meant by that a tiny grain of the undesired crystal pattern. The seed, which had come from God-only-knows-where, taught the atoms the novel way in which to stack and lock, to crystallize, to freeze."
- From the novel Cat's Cradle
"One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said 'Here's a picture of me when I was younger.' Every picture is of you when you were younger!"
- Mitch Hedberg
"'Now think about cannonballs on a courthouse lawn or about oranges in a crate again,' he suggested. And he helped me to see that the pattern of the bottom layers of cannonballs or of oranges determined how each subsequent layer would stack and lock. 'The bottom layer is the seed of how every cannonball or every orange that comes after is going to behave, even to an infinite number of cannonballs or oranges.'"
- From Cat's Cradle
- From the movie Waking Life
"'So it is with atoms in crystals, too; and two different crystals of the same substance can have quite different physical properties.' He told me about a factory that had been growing big crystals of ethylene diamine tartrate. The crystals were useful in certain manufacturing operations, he said. But one day the factory discovered that the crystals it was growing no longer had the properties desired. The atoms had begun to stack and lock--to freeze--in different fashion. The liquid that was crystallizing hadn't changed, but the crystals it was forming were, as far as industrial applications went, pure junk. How this had come about was a mystery. The theoretical villain, however, was what Dr. Breed called 'a seed.' He meant by that a tiny grain of the undesired crystal pattern. The seed, which had come from God-only-knows-where, taught the atoms the novel way in which to stack and lock, to crystallize, to freeze."
- From the novel Cat's Cradle
"One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said 'Here's a picture of me when I was younger.' Every picture is of you when you were younger!"
- Mitch Hedberg
"'Now think about cannonballs on a courthouse lawn or about oranges in a crate again,' he suggested. And he helped me to see that the pattern of the bottom layers of cannonballs or of oranges determined how each subsequent layer would stack and lock. 'The bottom layer is the seed of how every cannonball or every orange that comes after is going to behave, even to an infinite number of cannonballs or oranges.'"
- From Cat's Cradle
