Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying "Blood...blood...blood...blood...
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.
Emotional damage is never easy to measure, but mothers who are alive but psychically absent impose filial burdens which knot their children's feelings in a way biologic orphans are spared.
The finest flowers are those transplanted, for transplanting means difficulty, a readjusting to new conditions, and through the effort put forth to find adjustment does the plant progress.
Boys," said Hermione Granger, "should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!
Only by keeping oneself in constant process of growth, under the constant influence of the best things in one's own age, does one become a companion halfway good enough for one's children.
Honest people know that the road to success and virtue always involves shared sacrifice, hard work, and gratification postponed. Telling people otherwise isn't leadership, it is pandering.
The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.
Russian young people spend countless hours online downloading videos and having a very nice digital entertainment lifestyle, which does not necessarily turn them into the next Che Guevara.
I guess in my own egotistical way I like to create my own library of Batman books that doesn't run contrary to a single thing that has been published before, but it also stands on its own.
Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.
What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.
But I feel convinced, and I venture even to prophesy in this regard, that the time will come when there will also be a minister of peace in the cabinet, seated beside the ministers of war.
Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time.
Dictatorships sometimes fall unexpectedly and quickly. And [Vladimir] Putin knows that for him, the loss of power doesn't mean a comfortable retirement, but something completely different.
There are thousands of causes for stress, and one antidote to stress is self-expression. That's what happens to me every day. My thoughts get off my chest, down my sleeves and onto my pad.
(The raindrops) played across the coast all through the night, until the soft new day shrugged itself awake, tried on amethyst and lavender for a while, and finally decided on pale yellow.
My writing isn’t a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.
You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.
There is a thematic continuity here within Bigelow's work: 'The Hurt Locker' serves up a military equivalent of the thrill-trips that Lenny Nero was hustling in her earlier 'Strange Days.'
The struggle to save every possible species and ecosystem from the current wave of destruction is worthwhile. One day, perhaps within our lifetimes, they could repopulate a thriving world.
But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.
it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.
Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.
The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.
People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things.
The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.
You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would be.
After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised.
A garden should be in a constant state of fluid change, expansion, experiment, adventure; above all it should be an inquisitive, loving, but self-critical journey on the part of its owner.
Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.
The last thing it [government] ought to do is to ground its proceedings on the ignorance of the people, - to yield them that which they will hereafter despise the donors for granting them.
I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.
The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.
Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.
Exerting yourself to the limit over and over again, that is the essence of running. Running is painful, but the pain doesn't leave me, I can take care of it. That agrees with my mentality.
I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.
The fundamental principle of human action, the law, that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion
One of the things I noticed when I worked at Vibe was that backstage at a fashion show, they always referred to the black models as "black girls." I thought, "They never say 'white girls.'
There may be a jump on electronic LSD with virtual reality, and the problem just with saying LSD, enough time has gone by that there is no distinction between psychedelics and other drugs.
thats why you cant be worried about the world. theyll just do you in anyway. you can't depend on them because sooner or later theyll turn on you or just disapear and leave you there alone.
Fears, indecision, and frustration feed on words. Without words they usually stop. . . . Words are at times good for looking back, but they are confining when I need to act in the present.
I think I'm Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can't imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I'm very Swedish - I don't dislike to be alone.
That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies.
Never follow somebody else's path; it doesn't work the same way twice for anyone... the path follows you and rolls up behind you as you walk, forcing the next person to find their own way.
If you mean you think it is my job to go into the secret passage first, O Thorin Thrain’s son Oakenshield, may your beard grow ever longer,” he said crossly, “say so at once and have done!
And here he was, a little halfling from the Shire, a simple hobbit of the quiet countryside, expected to find a way where the great ones could not go, or dared not go. It was an evil fate.