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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2fa5a25 | Running away is pretty pathetic, but it's even worse getting caught. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 27f5fed | With that, I splashed some water on my face, fixed on a smile, and stepped out. I would find Jerome. I would make him explain to me what I was missing. We would laugh, then we would kiss with tongue, and all would be well. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 2f581a3 | You have to imagine your way through. Never say something can't be done, even if it's weird. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 41324d6 | 10/30/38 Where do you look for someone who's never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair | riddle | Maureen Johnson | |
| 942193d | It took about three minutes for the unassuming Waffle House to become the new offices of the law firm of Amber, Amber, Amber, and Madison. They set up camp in a clump of booths in the corner opposite from us. A few of them gave me an "oh, good, you are still alive" nod, but for the most part, they had no interest in anyone else." | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 65136b1 | It makes you very cool," he said, taking big, jumping steps to get in front of me. "CNN would interview you, for sure. Daughter of Flobie! But don't worry. I'll keep them back!" | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 695853a | No matter what I do now, there are certain doors I have already closed, certain opportunities I'll never get back. There's nothing to be done, I guess. It is what it is. | Blake Nelson | ||
| 5ffe2f7 | Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming villa.. | civilization philosophy | Daniel Quinn | |
| 5adc3e1 | How easy it is first to leap to a false conclusion about someone and then to view everything he does in light of that conclusion. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 13668b2 | The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. [...] Naturally a well-run prison must have a prison industry. I'm sure you see why." "Well... it helps to keep the inmates busy, I suppose. Takes their minds off the boredom and futility of their lives." "Yes. Can you name yours?" "Our prison industry? Not offhand. I suppose it's obvi.. | life-lessons plain-truth prison world-changer | Daniel Quinn | |
| 32e282b | If there are forty thousand people in an area that can only support thirty thousand, it's no kindness to bring in food from the outside to maintain them at forty thousand. That just guarantees that the famine will continue." "True. But all the same, it's hard just to sit by and let them starve." "This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not *let* them starve. I will not *let*.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 1765f0c | The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan. | James Baldwin | ||
| 0d048ae | Either this is madness or it is Hell." "It is neither," calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, "it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily." | Edwin A. Abbott | ||
| 48e28e4 | He walked down the passageway with her and cursed silently. Obviously, he'd grossly overestimated his appeal. Perhaps he should have taken her at her word at Gobhann when she reminded him that she had no use for mages. Perhaps he should have realized sooner that she - ...had reached behind his back and taken his hand. | Lynn Kurland | ||
| c0138aa | It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling. | James Baldwin | ||
| 9c3ce2b | You don't know, and there's no way in the world for you to find out, what it's like to be a black girl in this world, and the way white men, and black men, too, baby, treat you. | James Baldwin | ||
| 433e43d | People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough. | James Baldwin | ||
| c260927 | I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine. | suicide thoughts | James Baldwin | |
| d180624 | I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. [...] The wind of my life was blowing me away. [...] I take the blue envelope...and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me. | James Baldwin | ||
| 14a49b3 | And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn't, as far as could be discovered, read either--they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes. | James Baldwin | ||
| ae0abe9 | It's a long way," John said slowly, "ain't it? It's a hard way. It's uphill all the way." | James Baldwin | ||
| 829d317 | It's astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body - the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life. | James Baldwin | ||
| b2b24cb | In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge--revealed, in fact, that they.. | prejudice white-liberals | James Baldwin | |
| 85197af | The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality--for this touchstone can be only oneself. | James Baldwin | ||
| f8d697d | Do I dare disturb the universe? Yes I do, I do. I think. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 52e586f | Yes, they think we're dumb. They call us the "common people." But I've been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what's so common about us. I think they're guilty of a gross mis-statement of fact-we are the uncommon people-" -- | humanity | Ralph Ellison | |
| 65cc7ae | It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 94051be | It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| c49449f | I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound." | poetic | Ralph Ellison | |
| 73bb837 | I will learn by screwing up. | learning success-strategies | Greg Bear | |
| b8fab99 | Seeing a patter doesn't mean you know how to put it all together. Take baby steps: don't focus on the folks whose skills are far beyond your own. When you're new to something-or you haven't tried it in a while-it can feel impossibly hard to get it right. Every misstep feels like a reason to quit. You envy everyone else who seems to know what they're doing. What keeps you going? The belief that one day you'll also be like that: Elegant. Capa.. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| a08d000 | It is one of the striking generalizations of biochemistry--which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical text-books--that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. As far as I am aware the presently accepted set of twenty amino acids was first drawn up by | gamow generalizations george-gamow james-d-watson james-watson nature nobel-laureate science striking watson | Francis Crick | |
| 31f0075 | I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 90a2eb2 | if we were to name the most powerful assumption of all, which leads one on and on in an attempt to understand life, it is that all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 84d9f49 | How much do you value life?" "Sixty-four." | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 5af6e3e | Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make a.. | scientific-method theory | Richard P. Feynman | |
| d422087 | There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal p.. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 4438104 | Once you start doubting, just like you're supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don't know what's true, we're trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 6a2d044 | Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a ge.. | favorite feynman funny genius humor joke read richard-feynman richard-p-feynman richard-phillips-feynman | Gian-Carlo Rota | |
| c99c3ff | I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| a15c086 | So our problem is to explain where symmetry comes from. Why is nature so nearly symmetrical? No one has any idea why. The only thing we might suggest is something like this: There is a gate in Japan, a gate in Neiko, which is sometimes called by the Japanese the most beautiful gate in all Japan; it was built in a time when there was great influence from Chinese art. This gate is very elaborate, with lots of gables and beautiful carving and .. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| dee81c8 | Sometimes, the only way to solve your problems in life, the only way to conquer your fears, is if you face them. If you face your problems, they just flee. But if you flee instead, run away from them, they only get bigger, and they can totally destroy you. | bravery christian fear monsters motivational problems | Elizabeth Newton | |
| 2d951c3 | The last one's hard. Marriage is always a balancing act, and it's never a good idea for one partner to get too big a head, but I'm afraid that's what's going to happen here. People write a lot of things about Eric Dillon's talent, and most of it's true. But nobody writes about the important things. The fact that he's a wonderful father and the best husband a woman could have. That fact that he cares about other people so much that he someti.. | Susan Elizabeth Phillips | ||
| 10f8934 | I'd like to add some beauty to life . . . I'd love for people to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn't been born. | L. M. Montgomery |