People tend to think that mathematicians always work in sterile conditions, sitting around and staring at the screen of a computer, or at a ceiling, in a pristine office. But in fact, some of the best ideas come when you least expect them, possibly t...
I'm not sure if you've noticed this yet, but Jenny Sullivan likes to overuse people's first names. It's a technique she read about in a book called Own It - Take Life By The Bollocks. She once said my name so many times I disconnected from it entirel...
Sometimes people leave us because staying becomes an impossibility. Because the world just gets too small. Or, sometimes, because there is just one boat, and too many hands. ...Because maybe, life can be a bit bigger than it exists today. And because...
Have you noticed how nobody ever looks up? Nobody looks at chimneys, or trees against the sky, or the tops of buildings. Everybody just looks down at the pavement or their shoes. The whole world could pass them by and most people wouldn't notice.
You are a very special person. There is only one like you in the whole world. There's never been anyone exactly like you before, and there will never be again. Only you. And people can like you exactly as you are.
More often than not, what animals require our protection from is not hurricanes or fires, but abuse at the hands of other people".
The world rains on everybody, Laura. We just have to figure out a way to get a bigger umbrella than a lot of other people need, that's all. ~from-Here Comes The Heroes~
I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.
Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world'...
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguis...
What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (-- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Chi...
My father knew he was a bastard. He was the venomous serpent in a bed of roses. Apparently, he didn't just acknowledge that fact, he beat people over the head with it. All that was missing was a neon sign that read EVIL AND CONFLICTED ABOUT IT with a...
In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own experience. Often this honey was dirty ...
People of Panem, we fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice!” There‘s dead silence on the set. It goes on. And on. Finally, the intercom crackles and Haymitch‘s acerbic laugh fills the studio. He contains himself just long enough to say, ...
I think if I were to sit down in a bid for power, I would ask myself what I should control if I want to control the people. The answer would be sex. Money. And definitive knowledge of the afterlife. Then I’d make fantastically pleasant rules surrou...
People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin--a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celeb...
What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we eve...
That first shrink I saw when I got back to Clayton Falls told me no one is a lost cause, but I think that’s bullshit. I think people can be so crushed, so broken, that they’ll never be anything more than a fragment of a whole person.
You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.
Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you've always dreamed, yet you don't have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to make it move.
Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the bett...
