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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 745e548 | It's pronounced wee but spelled O-U-I. It's all you'll want to say when you're sitting at one of the thousands of little cafes that line the streets and you're looking at a menu full of foods you just want to eat for days. And then you wake up early, and the sun is rising in shades of pink over the white buildings as you make your way through the sleepy streets until you're upon the fresh markets! | Giada De Laurentiis | ||
| 3945ef0 | You just need a little perspective. Warmed chocolate can give you that. | Giada De Laurentiis | ||
| 1c92d2e | The French and their food. They put each meal on a pedestal. | Giada De Laurentiis | ||
| 73d987f | A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off. | freakonomics men money relationship women | Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner | |
| e2598f1 | People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 1e5f8d9 | Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially--with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect--are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| cc069bc | Thinking like a Freak may sometimes sound like an exercise in using clever means to get exactly what you want, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if there is one thing we've learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| e7da01e | Just because you're at the office is no reason to stop thinking. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| ac5f908 | So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't. Such are the vagaries of life. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| aa76656 | Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| d61882c | Since the science of economics is primarily a set of tools, as opposed to a subject matter, then no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 5a5d488 | But being confident you are right is not the same as being right. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| a6eaf5e | Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| f6f4ab8 | With any problem, it's important to figure out which incentives will actually work, not just what your moral compass tells you should work. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| d71f84a | Most people are too busy to rethink the way they think--or to even spend much time thinking at all. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| d498196 | Consider the kind of questions that kids ask. Sure, they may be silly or simplistic or out of bounds. But kids are also relentlessly curious and relatively unbiased. Because they know so little, they don't carry around the preconceptions that often stop people from seeing things as they are. When it comes to solving problems, this is a big advantage. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 3d15735 | Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. They were also the first humans to leave behind strong evidence of burying their dead and caring for their sick. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 5e883da | There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before. Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth's net productivity (that is, the net energy captured from sunlight). With the world's h.. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 6c0b27a | Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. | Jared Diamond | ||
| c83c20e | Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20--25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source .. | history | Jared Diamond | |
| dcba922 | It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel? | Jared Diamond | ||
| 2ffd98d | Yes, world history is indeed such an onion! | Jared Diamond | ||
| 5729954 | She remembered something her mother had told her when she was a teenager: "The boy you date is different from the boy you're engaged to, the boy you're engaged to is different from the man you marry, the man you marry is different from the father of your children." She might have added, "And your ex-husband is going to be different than all of them, too." | Barry Eisler | ||
| c31b04d | A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. | Barry Eisler | ||
| fe5fff4 | We fell in love. We pursued that love sexually and emotionally. I don't think he's as comfortable or as open with his sexuality as I am with mine, so he ended the relationship. It was a beautiful thing, like the most perfect healthy colorful blooming flower, while it lasted, it was like a flower from heaven. Now it's like a bomb went off in my heart. I'll probably never be the same. | James Frey | ||
| ad8a83e | Readers find most flashbacks intolerable. Yet a lot of neophyte writers flash back like mad. Why? No one but the Creator of the Universe knows for sure, but there is a likely answer: they find the conflicts in the "now" of the story produce anxiety in themselves." | James N. Frey | ||
| da6b4e7 | Before you go ahead with a flashback, ask yourself if you can make the same impact on your reader through conflict in the now of the novel. If the answer is no, then the flashback is necessary, but remember that within the flashback all the same principles of good dramatic storytelling which apply in the now of your story--fully rounded characters, a rising conflict, inner conflicts, and so on--continue to apply. | James N. Frey | ||
| cf526d0 | There is a publication classification in an upper corner. It reads Religion. I'm immediately skeptical <...> because I've always group books such as this in a category with crap like Astrology, Aromatherapy, Crystalology, Pyramid Power, Psychic Healing and Feng Shui <...> that anyone would actually believe that these things could solve their problems, really solve them, instead of just making them forget about them for a while, is asinine t.. | James Frey | ||
| a22644c | I always felt I had a hole in my heart, this big black hole that made me feel lonely and empty and worthless. I tried to fill it, everybody tries in some way, and it just got bigger and bigger. | James Frey | ||
| 20de762 | There is one thing. One thing that haunts me from page one to page twenty-two. I have never spoken of it. I have never told another person | James Frey | ||
| fa9a42e | As we stand to leave, I look across the dining hall and through the glass at Lilly. She is smiling at me and the smile hurts. | James Frey | ||
| 1b8b584 | The life of the Addict is always the same. There is no excitement, no glamour, no fun. There are no good times, there is no joy, there is no happiness. There is no future and no escape. There is only an obsession. An all-encompassing, fully enveloping, completely overwhelming obsession. To make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, th.. | addict addiction alcoholics-anonymous alcoholism | James Frey | |
| 49b1ff3 | When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a "drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall." So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, w.. | Donald T. Phillips | ||
| 0cb4165 | You need no call, you were born to this destiny. But you will be tested. You will cause pain and suffer for it ... | Jean M. Auel | ||
| c068b73 | If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice of the world, it's our job to realize it and get down to business. | Steven Pressfield | ||
| e2628b3 | Alexander operated by the same principle. Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies. | Steven Pressfield | ||
| 2395ffa | Listen to me, young Hardy. A day will come for you when play becomes torment. When you are drowning, not in water but on dry land. In that hour remember me. I will preserve you. | Steven Pressfield | ||
| 2dd224e | Don't prepare. Begin. | Steven Pressfield | ||
| 97c2a1a | The fundamentalist (or, more accurately, the beleaguered individual who comes to embrace fundamentalism) cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past. He returns in imagination to the glory days of his race and seeks to reconstitute both them and himself in their purer, more virtuous light. He gets back to basics. To fundamentals. Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thi.. | Steven Pressfield | ||
| bafc32d | Rationalization is Resistance's right-hand man. Its job is to keep us from feeling the shame we would feel if we truly faced what cowards we are for not doing our work. | Steven Pressfield | ||
| 413dc44 | A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. | soul | Steven Pressfield | |
| e1edd2f | Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel | Steven Pressfield | ||
| 71a6530 | Remember, Resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others. It wants us to stake our self-worth, our identity, our reason-for-being, on the response of others to our work. Resistance knows we can't take this. No one can. | Steven Pressfield | ||
| bde1bab | fear doesn't go away. | Steven Pressfield |