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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8b20469 | but it's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters. | Norton Juster | ||
| 718ae8c | every time you decide something without having a good reason, you jump to Conclusions whether you like it or not. | Norton Juster | ||
| 1e0af6e | Does everyone here grow the way you do?" puffed Milo when he had caught up. "Almost everyone," replied Alec, and then he stopped a moment and thought. "Now and then, though, some- one does begin to grow differently. Instead of down, his feet grow up toward the sky. But we do our best to dis- courage awkward things like that." "What happens to them?" insisted Milo. "Oddly enough, they often grow ten times the size of everyone else," said Ale.. | Norton Juster | ||
| bdcb869 | I stood there, watching her. The whole world was a dream, I realized. Everyone was acting in a bad soap opera. The whole world was one big FOX TV show. | dream reality fox-tv real fake | Blake Nelson | |
| 1d5f568 | Of course I'm frivolous," [Antryg] replied mildly. "You yourself must know how boring gravity is to oneself and everyone else." | Barbara Hambly | ||
| 19bec41 | Can you tell me the difference between a witch and a wizard? Sure, a wizard is what they call you when they want to hire you, and a witch is what they call you when they're getting ready to run you out of town. | humour witty | Barbara Hambly | |
| c108c17 | He prayeth well who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best that loveth best All things both great and small; | Edwin A. Abbott | ||
| 339f3ed | Ah, never," Nicholas said, rubbing his hands together. "Such an interesting word." "You know, Your Majesty, the only reason I'm not swearing at you right now is because I was taught to be kind to old men." Nicholas laughed merrily. "Cheeky whelp." "Does that mean you won't slay me for telling you that you're a thoroughly obnoxious, interefering, exasperating..." Runach took a deep breath. "Good breeding prevents me from saying more." Nichol.. | Lynn Kurland | ||
| a20faa7 | There is no getting into the future except by waiting. | James Gleick | ||
| ec54545 | But unpredictability was not the reason physicists and mathematicians began taking pendulums seriously again in the sixties and seventies. Unpredictability was only the attention-grabber. Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but.. | James Gleick | ||
| d971fbd | The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos. | James Gleick | ||
| f36f432 | Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage--patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions, and (a special case) computer viruses. In a way, these are the most interesting--the memes that thrive to their hosts' detriment, such as the idea that suicide bombers will find their reward in heaven. | James Gleick | ||
| fdd9b1d | The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned.. | James Gleick | ||
| 705631d | It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe. | James Gleick | ||
| ef0fe1f | The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy. | James Gleick | ||
| a5b47a1 | Nullius in verba was the Royal Society's motto. Don't take anyone's word for it. | James Gleick | ||
| 38a32aa | Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world. | geometry | James Gleick | |
| 57eb267 | the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it. | geometry | James Gleick | |
| 9c96cc0 | Where, then, is any particular gene--say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance--or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the .. | James Gleick | ||
| 8e92c9f | The macromolecules of organic life embody information in an intricate structure. A single hemoglobin molecule comprises four chains of polypeptides, two with 141 amino acids and two with 146, in strict linear sequence, bonded and folded together. Atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and iron could mingle randomly for the lifetime of the universe and be no more likely to form hemoglobin than the proverbial chimpanzees to type the works of Shak.. | James Gleick | ||
| 09975ef | And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him today something that he must remember and understand tomorrow. He watched her face, his heart swollen with love for her and with an anguish, not yet his own, that he did not understand and that frightened him. | James Baldwin | ||
| e91ea87 | The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power--and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. | James Baldwin | ||
| 77fee28 | I thought she would be fun to have fun with. | fun | James Baldwin | |
| 39bae33 | Don't think I don't know you love me. You believe we going to make it? | James Baldwin | ||
| 48b6058 | It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. --The Price of the Ticket, "No Name in the Street" (1972; repr. 1985) The" | James Baldwin | ||
| b55bd58 | And the darkness of John's sin was like the darkness of the church on Saturday evenings[...] It was like his thoughts as he moved about the tabernacle in which his life had been spent; the tabernacle that he hated, yet loved and feared[...] The darkness of his sin was in the hardheartedness with which he resisted God's power; in the scorn that was often his while he listened to the crying, breaking voices, and watched the black skin glisten.. | imagery | James Baldwin | |
| 93d6fe3 | Life, it is true, is a process of decisions and alternatives, the conscious awareness and acceptance of limitations. Experience, nevertheless, to say nothing of history, seems clearly to indicate that it is not possible to banish or to falsify any human need without ourselves undergoing falsification and loss. | James Baldwin | ||
| b6662db | There seems to be a vast amount of confusion in the Western world concerning these matters, but love and sexual activity are not synonymous: Only by becoming inhuman can the human being pretend that they are. The mare is not obliged to love the stallion, nor is the bull required to love the cow. They are doing what comes naturally. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8aa667f | She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey. | James Baldwin | ||
| aecc107 | Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire. | James Baldwin | ||
| 592bef2 | If men don't know what's happening, what they're doing, where they're going--what are women to do? If Richard doesn't know what kind of world he wants, how am I to help him make it? What am I to tell our sons? | James Baldwin | ||
| 5989b6f | It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3b091f3 | It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5f0d562 | Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped, after all, I was a school teacher; or that Sonny had, he hadn't lived in Harlem for years. Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny's face, it came to .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1955a9b | It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless. | James Baldwin | ||
| b218361 | The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover and Time, for my father, was the ultimate cultural authority. In the last decade, the magazine whose red border twice enclosed the face of James Joyce has devoted covers to Scott Turow and Stephen .. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 385b1c9 | But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5c25876 | Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have 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. | reading | James Baldwin | |
| c45f478 | Everything was as it had been between us, and at the same time everything was different. | James Baldwin | ||
| f1166cc | That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with. | fun love meet girl drink | James Baldwin | |
| 680c2a4 | In this endeavor to wed the vision of the Old World with that of the New, it is the writer, not the statesman, who is our strongest arm. Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8816637 | He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear. | writing writers | James Baldwin | |
| 123305b | She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb--upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain. | James Baldwin | ||
| bd1b46f | I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain. | James Baldwin |