Which half? One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?" The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room hesitantly replied, "Yes, that's what I had in mind." Then the visitor's fist really came down as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death!" God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, "Which half?" E.E. Peacock Jr., Seeing With Fresh Eyes science
To the Lighthouse A Novel by Virginia Woolf gutenberg.net.au All the lives to beThe alphabetGone crookedExtinguishedA thing you could ruffle with your breath+5 More solitudemelancholyloneliness
All the lives to be And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves. nature
The alphabet Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. death
Gone crooked He was coming to see himself, and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.
A thing you could ruffle with your breath It was a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.
A coherence in things There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune to change, and shines out…in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby. time
All dark and spreading Beneath it is all dark, it is spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
There, with a dash on the beach How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. life
They would never know She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that. melancholy