Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The beauty of the innovation that flows from the open web is that no one has to ask for permission, get a credential, or win a Disrupt or Launch award to go prove their idea is worthy. They just... put up a page on the web, iterate, iterate, iterate... and eventually, a Facebook emerges.
No matter what we're trying to accomplish, there's always a barrier of some kind to overcome, and it's often something over which we have no control. Instead of focusing on the barriers, let's work to become so good that we'll succeed no matter how many bad calls the ref may throw at us.
Such indeed is the superior longevity of the fair females of Surinam, compared to that of the males (owing chiefly, as I said, to their excesses of all sorts) that I have frequently known wives who have buried four husbands, but never met a man in this country who had survived two wives.
Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
All life is sacred. Since life is an affirmation of the Creator, I shall live on, even when I am gone. In trailing clouds of glory shall I return to my Creator only to find that I had never really left. I shall walk among the lilies of the field and leave my trail in stardust in the sky.
The conventional asset-allocation method is like sheet music. It is prescribed, it has right answers and wrong answers and it sounds about the same every time. But jamming is different. Jamming is when you make the music. When you improvise and adapt to conditions. When you are creative.
The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity, but straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. So we confidently believe it will be with our great national parks and forest reservations.
There was a double-wide mobile home directly across from (New Prospect Baptist) church, .. The mobile home even had tie-down straps on it, but it was thrown clear across the highway. Part of the mobile home struck the church, and part of the frame ended up in the woods behind the church.
The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate.
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?' she asked. 'I don't see how it could be any other way,' said Lee. 'Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.
I think every parent knows that, like, boys and girls are different. And we just don't take that into account in schools on those things like required reading lists. 'Cause that was my experience, say, with my son, who had to read 'Little House on the Prairie' when he was in third grade.
And it's the President of the United States who said he wasn't going to spike the football and all this, we shouldn't gloat about it, running campaign ads, gloating about it and saying the other guy isn't good enough to do the tough things that I did, which I think is, one reprehensible.
I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.
When we look at the flowers, we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we'll join them in the cold ground.
Even at the cross, God permitted what he hated - the unjust and agonizing death of his own precious Son - in order to accomplish something he prized above his own Son's cruel death; that is, salvation for a world of sinners. So the world's worst murder becomes the world's only salvation.
If you really want peace of mind and inner calm, you will get it. Regardless of how unjustly you have been treated, or how unfair the boss has been, or what a mean scoundrel someone has proved to be, all this makes no difference to you when you awaken to your mental and spiritual powers.
After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it.
I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.
My university degree is in art and, yes, I do a lot of drawing for all my books. I have a big drafting table set up in a spare bedroom and I cover it with maps and house plans and sketches that I use in the books. Also, I truly love architecture, so that plays a big part in all my books.
I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.
Don't we all deserve forgiveness? I hope we do; I believe we do. Forgiveness says as much about the character of the person bestowing it as the person receiving it. Learning to forgive may be the most difficult of human acts,and the closest thing to divinity, whatever you decide that is.
Compassion has to become a discipline. It's something that you do. It's no good thinking that you agree with compassion or not, you've just got to do it. Just like it's no good agreeing that it's possible to float, you just have to get into the pool and then you learn that it's possible.
I didn’t ask. Some things are better left unsaid. He looked at me and I shivered. I never get enough of him. Never will. He lives. I breathe. I want. Him. Always. Fire to my ice. Ice to my fever. Later we would go to bed, and when he rose over me, dark and vast and eternal, I’d know joy.
I always thought fainting showed an inherent weakness of character, but I understood it now. It was an act of self-preservation. Confronted by emotion too extreme to handle, the body shuts down to keep from running around like a chicken with its head cut off, potentially injuring itself.
I've come to realize I'm more spiritual than I am religious. What I mean by this: As far as praying to God goes, I'm more about looking inside for inner guidance - tapping into our own abundantly powerful inner resources - which, I suppose, is where some might say God does indeed reside.
I try to write about small insignificant things. I try to find out if it’s possible to say anything about them. And I almost always do if I sit down and write about something. There is something in that thing that I can write about. It’s very much like a rehearsal. An exercise, in a way.
My father, Cecil Banks Mullis, and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker, grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad's family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things.
Fairytales work on two levels. On a conscious level, they are stories of true love and triumph and overcoming difficult odds and so are pleasurable to read. But they work on a deeper and symbolic level in that they play out our universal psychological dramas and hidden desires and fears.
Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.
During the whole 'Jeopardy' experience, I felt like I was living a bit of a double life, I would be secretly flying out to L.A. to tape new shows, hoping that none of my coworkers would notice the absence and figure out what was going on. 'Jeopardy' tries very hard to keep their secrets.
If this glorious birth to death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have ..if our grand exhilarating fight of life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway,compared to the eons of rounds before and after-then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it?
I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son "A Personal Matter," I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our "personal matter," and society.
I'm not so stupid as to believe that you've completely forgotten about your former boyfriend. I know you think there are others here more suited for me and this life, and I wouldn't want you to rush into trying to be happy with any of this. I just... I just want to know if it's possible.
I scooted over, patting the bed next to me. "No such luck. And now you get to watch forty straight hours of Easton Heights with me!" He turned on the first disk, shaking his head, then got onto the bed next to me. "Small price to pay for getting to hold your hand." I wasn't cold anymore.
This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.
Though the white man is a kind of Satan, and though the black man is Satan for selling his own children into bondage and assassinating the image of his own mother, because he himself wants to be white'I can assure you that Africa has known no greater Satan than the twins, Arab and Islam.
One of the great truths of Scientology is that increased awareness is the only factor which offers any road out. That is an awfully simple truth, but you'll find out that people don't know that. They think that less awareness is the road out - and that is the road down into the basement.
A workman is not just a workman. A laborer is not just a laborer. An office worker is not just an office worker. They are living, breathing, important pillars on which the entire structure of our civilization is erected. They are not cogs in a mighty machine. They are the machine itself.
Edward Eager wrote a series of children's books that are in danger of being forgotten. But they're divine: stories about ordinary kids who stumble on magical things - a coin, a lake, a book, a thyme garden, a well. The magic changes them, they try to change the magic, the magic moves on.
People love to talk about the things that are important to them, but oftentimes as a journalist, if you're entering a world that's pretty esoteric and difficult to penetrate and has many barriers to outsiders, then the people inside that world just don't have the same language as you do.
As long as you are free, you are free to select and choose alternatives, provided that you are willing to accept the responsibility for being free. And after you've tried your alternatives, and they don't work as you would wish, don't blame me. Blame your choice. Try another alternative.
When we sit at the table, there is more going on than satisfying hunger. It is sad to think of those who eat simply to satisfy their hunger and who do not permit themselves to linger under the many spells offered by a good meal - the satisfaction of our hearts, our minds and our spirits.
I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.
I wondered what I’d end up looking like once I bloomed. I couldn’t even guess. If I had to be stuck in my own skinny, gawky, coltish body forever… well. It probably wouldn’t be so bad. I wouldn’t mind a little more in the chest, though. But wild horses wouldn’t drag that out of me. Ever.
She read it again. It was fascinating and surreal, like reading a diary that had been hers when she was a teenager, secret and heartfelt words written by a girl she only vaguely remembered. She wished she'd written more. Her words mad her feel sad and proud, powerful and relieved." p 272
Dealing with the impossible, fantasy can show us what may be really possible. If there is grief, there is the possibility of consolation; if hurt, the possibility of healing; and above all, the curative power of hope. If fantasy speaks to us as we are, it also speaks to us as we might be
Morgant?" Taran asked, turning a puzzled glance to Gwydion. "How can there be honor for such a man?" "It is easy to judge evil unmixed," replied Gwydion. "But, alas, in most of us good and bad are closely woven as the threads on a loom; greater wisdom than mine is needed for the judging.
After high school, I worked as a messenger boy at a local bank. I was miserable. I felt like Robin Hood chained in the Sheriff of Nottingham's dungeon. As a would-be writer, I thought it was a catastrophe. As a bank employee, I could barely add or subtract and had to count on my fingers.