People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart -- but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way of real thought.
I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Dru...
That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.
I thought he should have realized sooner that important people don't show up very often, and you should hold on to them when they do. Maybe I was smarter than he was all along, because that was something I'd always known.
There was a pleasant party of barge people round the fire. You might not have thought it pleasant, but they did; for they were all friends or acquaintances, and they liked the same sort of things, and talked the same sort of talk. This is the real se...
Oh, this coming back to an empty house,' Rupert thought, when he had seen her safely up to her door. People - though perhaps it was only women - seemed to make so much of it. As if life itself were not as empty as the house one was coming back to.
I watched the leaves change colors, and I thought, “People do that too. Their hair changes color as they age.” I remember that as my grandpa got older, his hair went from green to yellow to red, like a traffic light, only with slightly less honki...
We were probably the last people in the country to get a VCR and we didn't have cable. There wasn't any admiration of glamour, no, 'I want to look like them or have that lifestyle', because everyone in my town had the same lifestyle. So I didn't thin...
I was cocky and arrogant when I was younger. I thought that if I delivered a good performance, and put my best foot forward, that would be enough to get people's attention. So in my naivety, I cut my legs off at the knees, because I didn't realize th...
As a teenager, I was teased at school about my height and long legs, but now they are my best assets. Kids can be mean. When I was at school, I considered myself ugly, but that was when I was silly enough to believe that what other people thought mat...
Though it's impossible for us to legislate one's thoughts and feelings, we still need things like affirmative action in place because without measures like it, people in charge would not have, sadly, enough impetus to do, as cliched as it sounds, the...
Happiness is corny. It is a word you do not find in Dorland's medical dictionary. When people are feeling tops, really at peace with themselves and others, they are not happy. In the medical sense, in that condition they are thought of not as happy, ...
Clearing your head of everything you thought you knew, even your most cherished ideas, will give you the mental space to be educated by your present experience--the best school of all. You will develop your own strategic muscles instead of depending ...
And I managed to arrange to get some research support and to stay in Hong Kong for another year and a half, interviewing people coming out of China, both Westerners and Chinese. And that was my first real research study on thought reform or so-called...
People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and e...
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an ide...
The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn't have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.
I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as...
Never be afraid to ask when you don't understand. It sounds like a little thing, but awful things have happened, international incidents have flared, and markets have collapsed just because people couldn't make sense of what was being said. They didn...
I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you c...
The collective consciousness of the people we associate with on a daily basis has an influence on our consciousness. Which holds us back from our true potential. Even if we believe that we are fully aware of our thoughts, feelings and emotions. The b...
