Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.
On a submicro scale, pure diamond is billions of billions of carbon atoms bonded to one another. If you shrunk yourself down and stood inside the diamond, you'd see nothing but carbon in a perfect pattern in every direction.
Spanish is a poetic language, in particular the Spanish of Mexico which has a wonderful animistic attitude you might not see in the Spanish of the peninsula. I think it has to do with the indigenous way of looking at nature.
You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.
Believe it or not, Mexican cooking, for those of you who have not gone farther south than Taco Bell, uses a lot of vegetables. But those vegetables were not brought here, like corn mushrooms, huitlacoche, or squash blossoms.
The Best of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Hailey and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine all topped the charts in the '50s. Load a playlist of rock n' roll royalty. You're spoilt for choice.
I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself fo the next hit, and fel something. Something grainy and samll, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park. Oh Cass, I thought. I miss you so, so much.
No one was perfect. But we all did the best we could. I guessed you had to forgive when you could, move on when you couldn't, and love your family and friends for who they were instead of punishing them for who they weren't.
I've said before, I've always had difficulty with anxiety and depression. I've been on medication for it since I was about 18 years old, varying degrees of medication. I've had big ups and downs with it and very bad periods.
sasha growled low in his throat. "Send the wolf to watch them," he mocked in falsetto. His nostrils flared. "I swear Z, if I live, I'm going to rip that damned goatee off your face and stick your shaving cream in the fridge.
(Zarek attacks Valerius.) Cease! I know it’s been a long time since you were around another Dark-Hunter, Z, but remember, whatever you do to him, you will feel it tenfold. (Acheron) Pain I can take, it’s him I can’t. (Zarek)
I find you irritating. (Kat) I haven’t even begun to irritate you yet. Imagine what I could do if I applied myself? (Solin) I can imagine. I can also imagine ripping your throat out and tying my shoes with your larynx. (Kat)
Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.
Abraham Lincoln because he was a man filled with great compassion who believed that all men are created free and equal, and was not afraid to stand on that platform. The way Lincoln lived his life has served me well in mine.
I do think New York prepares you for the crossection of personalities and realities on display when you leave the country, and I'd live somewhere else if I had a reason or burning-the-the-point-of-discomfort desire to do so.
When I was a teenager, I met a comedian who I admired, and he was very rude to me. That's why when people come up to me I try not to be rude. I don't want to name who he is, but it really put me off watching his stuff since.
but you see, just because we've been...dealt a certain hand...it doesn't mean we can't choose to rise above- to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted. to try to retain whatever essential humanity we can.
The way you move — you orient yourself around him without even thinking about it. When he moves, even a little bit, you adjust your position at the same time. Like magnets… or gravity. You’re like a… satellite, or something.
'Temes' [technology-enhanced memes] don't care about us - they simply want to create more of themselves. Don't think we created the internet for our own benefit - think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.
writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
I'm not a very fancy person. I've been a writer a long time, and right now 'The Hunger Games' is getting a lot of focus. It'll pass. The focus will be on something else. It'll shift. It always does. And that seems just fine.
For the most part, romance is written in third person, and it's written in multiple points of view, so you're in the hero's head, and you're in the heroine's head. I've always said that I'm more of a narrator than a creator.
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
What we have within the Sunni tradition is this clash between the literalists and all the other trends and the Salafi movement, that are very much acting on the ground and using the popular sentiment to act against the West.
I do think reading is the best practice for writing, along with writing all the time. I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.
I am a Justin Bieber fan, but I am also so fascinated by how weird pop music can be and how manipulated it can be, so I enjoy thinking about that side of it too. I feel bad for him. I could never imagine growing up that way.
The level of trust is extraordinarily low and the level of suspicion extraordinarily high, and with good reason and on both sides. The press has hunkered down for very good reason, because it's being treated like a mushroom.
What right has a man to ask Jesus to forgive him, when his heart is still burning with hatred or festering with grudges against a fellow-creature? Confession, to be of any avail, must let go of its hold on the sin confessed.
If you are creative enough to select the ideal vocation, you can win, win big time. The really brilliant millionaires are those who selected a vocation that they love, one that has few competitors but generates high profits.
We have an idea that if something we're doing isn't actually earning money, or spending it, then it's completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level.
My own, purely personal view is that reading, study, poetry, and scientific experiment might be more rewarding than a job or children, so I would never advise anyone against university if they're going for the right reasons.
I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.
It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds
The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.
I found college useful for a lot of other reasons. It exposed me to a great many influences I wouldn't otherwise have encountered, and gave me a lot of time with some very intelligent people whose thoughts are still with me.
Fame often rests at first upon something accidental, and often, too, is swept away, or for a time removed; but neither genius nor glory, is conferred at once, nor do they glimmer and fall, like drops in a grotto, at a shout.
I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing.
I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson.
I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.
Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
I think you have to play the game on every level. If you need a friendly, charismatic, good-looking guy to be the mouthpiece, then so be it. And maybe Ralph Nader should just be behind the scenes telling that guy what to say.
I hate to express political ideas directly in a book. I don't want my books to be seen as an expression of this or that political idea. At the same time I want to show a kind of rebellion and transgression, something further.
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
To be a miracle worker you do not have to get a doctoral degree, become a minister, eat a particular food, or be able to meditate for long hours. All you need to do is to begin to see beauty in your life and those around you.
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
Not in our make-up, to be sure - not in the pose which is preceded by the tantaras of a trumpet - do the essential traits in our character first reveal themselves. But truly in the little things the real self is exteriorised.