Quotations I like

Some quotations that speak to me, compiled together from LiveJournal, text files stored on old Unix accounts, .signature files, .plan files, FirstClass resumés, old versions of my web site, and old random .signature files.

One-liners | Lyrics | Longer

One-liners

• It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

  -- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

• Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.

  --Sarah Vowell, "The Nerd Voice" (in The Partly Cloudy Patriot)

• Having the gumption to live different and the sense to let everybody else live different. That's the hardest thing, hands down.

  -- Alice Venable Middleton (quoted in William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways)

• ...If you are a woman, if you're a person of color, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you're a person of size, if you're a person of intelligence, if you're a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world.

  -- Margaret Cho, "The Notorious C.H.O."

• The future is not google-able.

  -- William Gibson

• If pots couldn't call kettles black, there'd be a lot less talking going on.

  -- Larissa Ranbom

• Republicans are the leading cause of underage drinking.

  -- Marianne Terrot

• God help you if your stack runs into your heap.

  --Lyn Turbak

• They killed, they maimed, and they called information for numbers they could easily look up in the book.

  -- Woody Allen

• (What the world needs (I think) is not (a Lisp (with fewer parentheses)) but (an English (with more.))))

  -- Brian Hayes, "The Semicolon Wars" (in American Scientist)

• Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Syntax rules like a macro.

  -- Albert Lai (on #haskell)

• I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

  -- Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

• Modesty...is both alien and irrelevant to people who are happy in themselves, in their beings, in their skins, their natures, their capacities.

  --Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA

• People tell me I'm not very feminine. Can you believe that? People actually tell me that? Well I just tell them to SUCK MY DICK.

  -- Roseanne Barr

• I like my terminals like my women: VT100 compatible with Tektronix extensions.

  -- Sean "Teki" Dobbs

• I am never gratuitously rude. My rudeness is carefully calibrated to the stupidity and obtuseness of the people I am dealing with.

  -- Adam Carr

• Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines'.

  -- Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

• Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.

  -- Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

• ...real programmers often wear climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room.

  -- anonymous, "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche"

• ...Debugging-by-printf is a universal theme that transcends cultures and concrete syntaxes. This shit is Joseph Campbell, yo.

  -- Jason Reed

• Our biggest mistake: using the scary term "monad" rather than "warm fuzzy thing".

  -- Simon Peyton Jones, "Wearing the hair shirt: A retrospective on Haskell"

• I liken learning Haskell to tipping over a vending machine. You can't just push it, you gotta rock it back and forth a few times building up momentum until bam! suddenly the flash of insight hits and it all makes sense.

  -- John Meacham (lambdabot quotations page)

• Anyone who spends their life on a computer is pretty unusual.

  -- Bill Gates (as quoted in Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley)

• I started reading the conferences and began to post my own messages. Writing as a performing art! I was hooked in minutes.

  -- Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community

• Unfortunately, there is no algorithm for making human relationships work.

  -- Robin Williams, Jargon: An Informal Dictionary of Computer Terms

• We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much -- if at all.

  -- Steve Jobs, quoted in Wired magazine: "Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing", Gary Wolf, Issue 4.02, February 1996

• Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

  -- Edsger Dijkstra

• If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.

  -- Paul Graham, "Revenge of the Nerds"

• Progress doesn't come from early risers -- progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

  -- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

• In retrospect, the algorithm is entirely obvious, yet we spent ages trying half-baked hacks, none of which quite worked, before finally biting the bullet and finding it quite tasty.

  -- Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow, "Secrets of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler inliner"

• ...We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake -- like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door.

  -- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind

• What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger -- or puts you on a talk show.

  --Carrie Fisher

• In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

  -- Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas

• Knowledge was power, as long as one did not muck it up by confusing one piece of knowledge with another and trying to ingest it and turn it all into blood and feelings.

  -- A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden

• I don't like your I-can-use-anything-as-an-adjective attitude.

  -- Larry Wall, Usenet article <1994Nov12.013919.21133@netlabs.com> (1994)

• ...Much can be said for the desirability of incompletely specified formalisms; indeed, this incompleteness is the basis of the axiomatic method in mathematics and is also the basis of many good jokes.

  -- Donald Knuth

• Why should I observe the Sabbath when I could observe dick?

  -- Margaret Cho

• The butt is not a magical place that only gay people can visit, like a leather bar or the Liberace Museum.

  -- Dan Savage

• Despite what Pope Benedict would have us believe, sex without love can be fucking amazing.

  -- Dan Savage

• One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy.

  -- Dan Savage

• He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: It fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination--but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips, if it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.

  -- Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

• Once you've gotten two hands up somebody's ass, you aren't likely to feel jealous of a penis.

  -- Patrick Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex

• Yes, being an adult is a drag, but the orgasms are terrific.

  --Matt Groening

• When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.

  --Matt Groening

• If you live in a society that wishes you didn't exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible.

  -- Patrick Califia, Macho Sluts

• I want to get an abortion. But my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.

  --Sarah Silverman

• The erotic is not sexual, only when you're lucky.

  -- Robert Hass, "Santa Lucia" (in Praise)

• I was asked if my first sexual experience was homosexual or heterosexual. I said I was too polite to ask.

  -- Gore Vidal

• Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

  -- Lynda Barry, Big Ideas

• It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.

  -- Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

• I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.

  --Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

• Both of them are to world religions what JavaScript is to programming languages.

  -- Juli Mallett, on Satanism and Wicca

• All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

  -- Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

• There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.

  -- Robert Graves

• THEY CAN KILL YOU, BUT THE LEGALITIES OF EATING YOU ARE QUITE A BIT DICIER

  -- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

• • Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

    -- anonymous

  • In the long run we are all dead.

    -- John Maynard Keynes

• It's never too early to start drilling holes in your car.

  -- Tom Magliozzi

• Silly is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again.

  -- Mike Myers

• When nothing remains of me
  Not a particle,
  I shall sparkle in the footnote of an article.

  -- Daniel Aaron

• We must always be prepared to admit when a theory is merely lyrical but fucked in practice.

  -- Ben Marcus, Notable American Women

• That wasn't so much a "hero story" as a "protagonist story".

  -- D.M. (paraphrased)

• ...I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.

  -- Anne Lamott, Hard Laughter

• People. Can't live with 'em, can't legally set fire to 'em.

  -- Sheree Schrager

• There's just no point in spending time with lifesucking bitches, unless you're being paid well.

  -- Larissa Ranbom

• Alarm clock wakes you in the morning, dreams get you out of bed
  Half of everything, it seems, is all inside your head

  -- Cormac McCarthy, "Dreams"

• Would you be my clock if I promise not to hang you
  Too close to the window or the picture of the pope?
  I won't set you back and I won't push you forward
  I just want to look in your face and see hope
  

  So much to do and so much time to do it
  I try hard to concentrate, I try hard to think
  I got a new oven that cooks food in twelve seconds
  Now I'm eating so quick, I've got hours to drink
  

  Time's unpredictable, just when you think that you've
  learned how to save it, you spend all day on hold
  I need someone who can show me the difference
  Between using it wisely and just growing old
  

  -- Dom Leone, "Buck Tempo"

• Up above the misty mountain, up above the rushing river
  Up above the bed of longing, the eagle takes the wind
  The eagle takes the wind, my friend, the eagle takes the wind
  It makes me think like this, my friend, 'where does the eagle live in me?'
  

  -- Ferron, "Misty Mountain"

• To be who you are is one thing
  To be who you want, now, that's something else.
  

  -- Ferron, "Sunken City"

• One of these days and it won't be long
  Going down in the valley and sing my song
  Gonna sing it loud, sing it strong
  Let the echo decide if I was right or wrong
  

  --Bob Dylan, "Silvio"

• For the dream to live there comes a time when you have to work
  Time to roll the sleeves up on your shirt.
  And sometimes if you think of what's involved, it can hurt your head
  A labor of love can be the hardest labor.
  

  -- Trout Fishing in America, "Dreaming"

• I go to school, I write exams
  If I pass, if I fail, if I drop out, does anyone give a damn?
  And if I do, they'll soon forget
  'Cause it won't take much for me to show them my life ain't over yet.

  -- Steven Page, "What a Good Boy"

• You can't always say goodbye with a kiss, but I'd have kissed you
  I wish I'd kissed you once more.

  -- Nerissa Nields, "I'll Meet You in the Sky"

• Whisper it to the wind, tell the stars to tell the rain
  But the rain won't want to tell you
  And the rain won't want you to know
  I've got something to tell you, baby
  But I think I'll just let it go.
  

  -- Jenny Reynolds, "Whisper"

• Take me out tonight
  Where there's music and there's people and they're young and alive
  Driving in your car, I never never want to go home
  Because I haven't got one anymore

  Take me out tonight
  Because I want to see people and I want to see life
  Driving in your car, oh, please don't drop me home
  Because it's not my home, it's their home, and I'm welcome no more

  And if a double-decker bus crashes into us
  To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die
  And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us
  To die by your side, well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine
  

  -- Morrissey, "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"

• 'Cause i like you
  but i know you don't know it
  i like you so much,
  i talk to everyone but you
  and i wonder
  what you would think of this little number
  Yeah, i wonder
  what you would say if you knew...
  

  -- Ani DiFranco, "Hell Yeah"

• i know the biggest crime
  is to throw up your hands
  say "this has nothing to do with me
  i just want to live as comfortably as I can."

  -- Ani DiFranco, "Willing to Fight"

• i always feel i have to take a stand and there's always someone on hand to hate me for standing there
  i always feel i have to open my mouth and every time i do i offend someone somewhere

  -- Ani DiFranco, "What If No One's Watching"

• don't you understand
  in the day to day
  in the face to face
  i have to act just as strong as i can
  just to preserve a place where i can be who i am

  -- Ani DiFranco, "Talk to Me Now"

• I like the fact that
  you talk incessantly
  I got a thing for assholes
  who tell good stories
  

  -- Ani DiFranco, "Used to You"

• No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful
  Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.

  -- They Might Be Giants, "Don't Let's Start"

• Go ahead, try to figure out what my future looks like
  

  -- Tegan and Sara, "Divided"

• There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.

  -- Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

• Eight solid light-years of lead...is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.

  -- Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

• Walt: Dad, what's gradual school?
  Garp: Gradual school?
  Walt: Yeah. Mom says her work's more fun now that she's teaching gradual school.
  Garp: Oh. Well, gradual school is someplace you go and gradually find out that you don't want to go to school anymore.
  

  -- John Irving, The World According To Garp

• Computer science is good because it has two words and I like both of them. I also like "butt" and "futz" but you have no degree in futz butt.

  -- Eddie Kohler, "Statement of Purpose"

• There had been a nasty moment when his life has flashed before his eyes...Most of the good bits had involved Susan, he realized. Susan or computers. Never Susan and computers--those had largely been the bad bits.

  -- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

• [The -d-core-lint option] turns on heavyweight intra-pass sanity-checking within GHC. (It checks GHC's sanity, not yours.)

  -- The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System User's Guide

• I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.

  -- Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

• There's a reason "Stepford wife" has entered the American lexicon. It expresses, dramatically and succinctly, two compelling and in some ways competing explanations for women's subjection within marriage: Men insist on it, and women---other women---insist on it. In the 1970s, when feminism was new, both these truths were obvious. Now, they are obscure: Women have learned to describe everything they do, no matter how apparently conformist, submissive, self-destructive, or humiliating, as a personal choice that cannot be criticized because personal choice is what feminism is all about. Women have become incredibly clever at explaining these choices in ways that barely mention social pressures or male desires. How many bright little essays have I read by young brides who insist that giving up their names is just the sensible, logical, mature, modern, feminist thing to do, the very proof of their marriage's egalitarianism? Probably they actually believe this. And yet, were it not for those social and masculine pressures, it is difficult to imagine that women would make some of the "personal" choices they now truculently defend.

  --Katha Pollitt, "Sex and the Stepford Wife", in Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time

• 'I don't really want to look pretty. I don't want to look feminine. You know why? Because feminine is dumb. Or at least that's how I feel. Look around at the women in academia, the women who make their living from their brains--especially those in the so-called masculine disciplines like math and physics, to take two random examples. They all feel it too. They're telling you with the way they look and dress, the way they hold themselves and speak: feminine is dumb. You've got to stamp out all traces of girlishness if you want to be taken seriously by the others, but more importantly by yourself. I know. I can see it in myself and can't do anything about it. It was okay to be a girl when I was only a student, but not anymore. When I'm attracted to a man and start playing the part of a woman, there's a voice sneering inside of me. Dumb. You dumb cunt. You just can't be a cunt with intelligence. You can have a brain and a prick, there's no incompatibility there. 'Brainy prick' sounds all right, but 'intelligent cunt' is ridiculous, a contradiction in terms. We've all swallowed it. I tell you, I think it would be an act of feminist heroism, an assertion of true liberation from the chauvinist myth, to wear eyeliner and mascara. If I ever saw a female physicist dressed to kill and wearing makeup, I'd be impressed.

  But it won't be me,' she continued. 'I don't care what the others will think; I care what I'll think, what I'll feel like. I can't manage to regard myself as a woman and a physicist, so one of them's got to go. And I suppose being a physicist is more important to me, so goodbye, sex. Men don't have to make the choice, but we do. For us it's either-or.'

  --Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem

• A male in our society receives his exaggerated social valuation with the application of the pronoun "he" before he can even smile over it. A female receives her concomitant devaluation with the pronoun "she" well before she can protest.

  Again: The system is not neutral. For every situation, verbal or nonverbal, that even approaches the sexual, the easy way to describe it, the comfortable way to respond to it, the normal way to act in it, the way that will draw the least attention to yourself -- if you are male -- is the sexist way. The same goes for women, with the difference that you are not quite so comfortable. Sexism is not primarily an active hostility in men towards women. It is a set of unquestioned social habits. Men become hostile when these habits are questioned as people become hostile when anything they are comfortable doing is suddenly branded as pernicious. ("But I didn't intend to hurt anyone; I was just doing what I always...")

  A good many women have decided, finally, that the pain that accrues to them from everyone else's acceptance of the "acceptable" way is just not worth the reward of invisibility.

  "I have never made a sexist editorial decision in my life."

  There are no sexist decisions to be made.

  There are antisexist decisions to be made. And they require tremendous energy and self-scrutiny, as well as moral stamina in the face of the basic embarrassment campaign which is the tactic of those assured of their politically superior position. ("Don't you think you're being rather silly offering your pain as evidence that something I do so automatically and easily is wrong? Why, I bet it doesn't hurt half as much as you say. Perhaps it only hurts because you're struggling...?" This sort of political mystification, turning the logical arrows around inside verbal structures to render them empirically empty, and therefore useless ["It hurts because you don't like it", rather than "You don't like it because it hurts."] is just another version of the "my slave/my master" game.)

  There are no sexist decisions to be made: they were all made a long time ago!

  --Samuel R. Delany, "Shadows", in Longer Views: Extended Essays

• Many more people have not completely given up on learning but are still severely hampered by entrenched negative beliefs about their capacities. Deficiency becomes identity: "I can't learn French, I don't have an ear for languages;" "I could never be a a businessman, I don't have a head for figures;" "I can't get the hang of parallel skiing, I never was coordinated." These beliefs are often repeated ritualistically, like superstitions. And, like superstitions, they create a world of taboos; in this case, taboos on learning. ...These self-images often correspond to a very limited reality -- usually to a person's "school reality."

  --Seymour Papert, Mindstorms

• "Some complain that e-mail is impersonal--that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. Some would say that's not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately."

  -- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

• Now, don't bother to flame me, because by the time you read this post I will be a different person from the one who wrote it. You cannot step in the same river twice.

  -- Sarah Barton

• An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

  --David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

• My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said "You're having trouble with this problem because you don't know anything and you're not working very hard."

  -- Phil Greenspun

• I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction--you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

  -- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night

• The sad truth is, there's very little that's creative in creativity. The vast majority is submission--submission to the laws of grammar, to the possibilities of rhetoric, to the grammar of narrative, to narrative's various and possible structurings. In a society that privileges individuality, self-reliance, and mastery, submission is a frightening thing.

  Samuel R. Delany, "Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student", in About Writing

• The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

  --Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community---a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole.

  -- Wendell Berry, "Standing by Words"

• I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me--to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

  I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered--to leave and to be left--to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving. I would like to drive forward and at other times rest or be driven. When I sit and play in the waters of my bath I love to feel the deep inside parts of me, sliding and folded and tender and deep. Other times I like to fantasize the core of it, my pearl, a protruding part of me, hard and sensitive and vulnerable in a different way.

  -- Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

• I remember when OB tampons came out and you could hold them in your hand, and I'd walk down the hall holding my little OB tampon and I thought, 'If I open my hand and show this to anybody, the whole building is going to explode'.

  --Judy Roitman, on being a woman mathematician

• Bliss is, after all, so near at hand; the perfect egg, a good night's sleep, reconciliation with one's mother or the Palestinians, a theory to account for the surprising lack of dark matter in the universe, a radio station that does not merely parrot the lies of government flaks and corporate media outlets -- such things can often feel so eminently possible here, given the intelligence and the passion of the citizens. And yet they continue to elude us. Who is responsible? Is it us? Is it you? What are you doing, there, anyway? Don't you know the recycling truck won't take aluminum foil?

  -- Michael Chabon, "The Mysteries of Berkeley"

• No one moves to Berkeley by accident. We didn't come here for the domestic tranquility. I won't soon forget the rational, sensible people who came to Council meetings dressed as fish.

  --Polly Armstrong, quoted in the Berkeley Daily Planet

• A lot of people think I'm crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stop to wonder why I'm not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren't like me.

  -- Florynce R. "Flo" Kennedy

• Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But some people -- and especially doctors -- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up to the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

  -- Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

• Morrison's novel aligns itself with the Fantasy Police. Reading it, I find myself asking: What's wrong with wanting to be different from what you are? The assumption that wanting to be other than you are means that you hate yourself is pathological and patently absurd. A much clearer and more articulate argument might be posed that to desire effectively to be different, actually to expend energy to bring that difference about (to become surgically a woman if you are born a man; to become surgically a man if you are born a woman; to reconstruct your foreskin if you were circumcised before you could consent to it; to straighten your hair if you don't like it kinky; to wear blue contact lenses if you have brown eyes and dark skin; to wear dreadlocks if you were born with straight blond hair; to pierce, or tattoo, or decorate your body in any way at all; to exercise or diet or contour your body toward whatever ideal you set yourself) requires much more self-confidence and a clear sense of who you are than those who never question or wish to adjust their bodily reality at all.

  -- Samuel Delany (writing about The Bluest Eye), from "Letter to Q--" in About Writing

• When government steps aside, it is not as if nothing takes its place. Paradise does not prevail. It's not as if private interests have no interests, as if private interests don't have ends they will then pursue. To push the antigovernment button is not to teleport us to Eden. When the interests of government are gone, other interests take their place. Do we know what those interests are? Are we so certain they are better?

  -- Lawrence Lessig, Code

• The truth is, most of the good things about this country have been fought for by liberals (indeed, by leftists and, dare one say it, Communists)---women's rights, civil liberties, the end of legal segregation, freedom of religion, the social safety net, unions, workers' rights, consumer protection, international cooperation, resistance to corporate domination---and resisted by conservatives. If conservatives had carried the day, blacks would still be in the back of the bus, women would be barefoot and pregnant, medical care would be on a cash-only basis, there'd be mouse feet in your breakfast cereal, and workers would still be sleeping next to their machines.

  -- Katha Pollitt, "Let's Not Devalue Ourselves", in Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time

• Our complaint about the crisis is not that it is so appalling but that it is so trivial. The consequences of the atomic cataclysm that are being relentlessly published seem mild alongside the burning loveliness of a fall morning, or the flash of a southbound bird, or the wry smell of chrysanthemums in the air. We examined everything said yesterday in the council chambers of the mighty and could find not a single idea that was not trifling, not a noble word of any calibre, not one unhurried observation or natural thought. The newspaper headline prophesying darkness is less moving than the pool of daylight that overflows upon it from the window, illuminating it. The light of day---so hard at times to see, so convincing when seen.

  -- E.B. White, "Daylight and Darkness", in The Second Tree from the Corner

• Ventura: ...We are living in a Dark Age. And we are not going to see the end of it, nor are our children, nor probably our children's children. And our job, every single one of us, is to cherish whatever in the human heritage we love and to feed it and keep it going and pass it on, because this Dark Age isn't going to go on forever, and when it stops those people are gonna need the pieces that we pass on. They're not going to be able to build a new world without us passing on whatever we can---ideas, art, knowledge, skills, or just plain old fragile love, how we treat people, how we help people; that's something to be passed on.

  Hillman: Passing on what you love can also mean taking action---political action, civil disobedience, even if you know you're going to lose. Because the memory of actions taken is an important way that things get passed from generation to generation.

  -- James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse

• We learn to tolerate, like a low flame on the fire or like a low fever in the body, a "reasonable temperature-level of admitted cynicism." We learn to feel that it is not intolerable to "be" self-compromised if one is open and amusing in discussion of that matter; or, again, that cynicism, charmingly admitted-to and interestingly described, in some sense cancels itself out. It is not corrupt to "be" corrupt so long as a person is perceptive and articulate concerning his corruption. At this point, as we know, the word itself becomes a distant and quite bearable designation, one scarcely having to do with our own being any longer, but a label identified rather with some interesting character of our late-at-night imagination.

  Few people end up totally cold and icelike and removed from their own feelings of self-accusation, but it is a type we strive for and it is a model to which we often gruesomely aspire. It is this, that we should strive with all our hearts to find such desert regions, that appears to me most frightening and most horrible.

  -- Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home

• Violence stinks, no matter which end of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan. Sometimes people are just begging for that frypan, and if we weaken for a moment and honor their request, we should regard it as impulsive philanthropy, which we aren't in any position to afford, but shouldn't regret it too loudly lest we spoil the purity of the deed.

  -- Tom Robbins

• We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as persons. In any case, I don't know of a single person who enjoyed this respect as a child and then as an adult had the need to put other human beings to death.

  -- Alice Miller, For Your Own Good

• One of the things I tend to resent about biography is that it's so confident, and it always makes people's lives too interesting. There's never a chapter called 'The Boring Bits.' There's never a chapter that says, 'He did his laundry this week. And he did it exactly the same way as he'd done it last week. And it was just as boring as the previous week. And as he sorted his socks into pairs, his mind was as empty as it had been the previous week.'

  -- Julian Barnes

• I had lives before this, stems
  of a spray of flowers: they became
  one thing, held by a ribbon at the center, a ribbon
  visible under the hand. Above the hand,
  the branching future, stems
  ending in flowers. And the gripped fist--
  that would be the self in the present.
  

  --Louise Glück, "Formaggio"

• My own point of view, speaking out of black America, where I had to try to answer that stigma, that species of social curse, it seemed a great mistake to answer in the language of the oppressor. As long as I react as a "nigger", as long as I protest my case on evidence or assumptions held by others, I'm simply reinforcing those assumptions.

  -- James Baldwin (quoted in Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, p. 105)

  When the keystone of a life structure that you have erected turns out to be a falsity falsely fixed, the whole does not necessarily collapse to the concrete in a cloud of steel, masonry, and glass. Too many microstructures have been set in place to support things, so that the initial keystone bears no present condition for any reality it might once have sustained.

  -- Samuel Delany, Dark Reflections

  "That's the way it works in movies," said Suzanne. "Something happens that has an impact on someone's life, and based on that impact, his life shifts course. Well, that's not how it happens in life. Something has an impact on you, and then your life stays the same, and you think, 'Well, what about the impact?' You have epiphanies all the time. They just don't have any effect."

  -- Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

  "We none of us know why we have come to this great vale of tears. But it's no excuse for not getting on with the job, is it?"

  I explained that this was precisely the reason for not getting on with the job, the irrefutable justification for accidie, excess of black bile, Melancholicke Disease, call it what you will. Some of us arrive in the vale of tears and feel disinherited by Fate; others---I leave you to guess---immediately get out their daypack, fill their waterbottle, check their supply of Kendal mint cake, and stride off up the first footpath they see, ignorant of where it leads, yet convinced that they are somehow "getting on with the job," and confident that a pair of waterproof trousers will be protection enough against earthquake, forest fire, and carnivorous raptor.

  -- Julian Barnes, Love, Etc.

  Of course, it may be that the art of photography and the art of writing are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he may communicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous and grotesque syntactical situations. In photography, the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens at a knothole.

  -- E.B. White, "Peaks in Journalism", in The Second Tree from the Corner

  Now turn for a moment to your correspondent. The thought of writing hangs over our mind like an ugly cloud, making us apprehensive and depressed, as before a summer storm, so that we begin the day by subsiding after breakfast, or by going away, often to seedy and inconclusive destinations: the nearest zoo, or to a branch post office to buy a few stamped envelopes. Our professional life has been a long, shameless exercise in avoidance. Our home is designed for the maximum of interruption, our office is the place where we never are. ... It has occurred to us that perhaps we are not a writer at all but merely a bright clerk who persists in crowding his destiny. Yet the record is there. Not even lying down and closing the blinds stops us from writing; not even our family, and our preoccupation with same, stops us.

  -- E.B. White, "Writers at Work", in The Second Tree from the Corner

  I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

  -- John Updike

  "Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it."

  -- Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

  ...My conclusion was this: that as you go on living with someone, you slowly lose the power to make them happy, while your capacity to hurt them remains undiminished. And vice versa, of course.

  Not an optimistic view? But one only has a duty to be optimistic in the eyes of others, not for oneself. Ah, you will say--Oliver would certainly say it--that was just with Gordon, he just ground you down, it was not a fair trial, give it another go, love. Well, it is not just from living with Gordon that I decided this: I have eyes for other marriages. And I till you this in all honesty. There are certain truths which you can live with if they have been demonstrated to you only once. That way they do not oppress you, there is room for an interrogation mark beside them. But if such a truth is demonstrated twice, it will oppress and suffocate.

  -- Julian Barnes, Talking It Over

  I do not have a problem being pals with a fine babe. If you have to hang out with someone, they might as well be fine, so you can stare at something nice while they're talking, unless you're in love with them, and there's no hope, and they're breaking your heart, and every moment in their presence splinters it a little more. You gotta keep the antinuclear shield up around the heart. No, you gotta strap your heart to a nuke like Dr. Strangelove, so it's whooping and yelling and waving its hat, missile whistling toward its fiery end.

  -- Lynn Breedlove, Godspeed

  If equal affection cannot be,
  Let the more loving one be me.

  -- W.H. Auden, "The More Loving One"

  But yield who will to their separation,
  My object in living is to unite
  My avocation and my vocation
  As my two eyes make one in sight.
  Only where love and need are one,
  And the work is play for mortal stakes,
  Is the deed ever really done
  For Heaven and the future's sakes.
  

  -- Robert Frost, "Two Tramps in Mud-Time"

  I was synthesizing obscure and disparate bytes of memory now at incredible speed, and all at once my aimless scribbling of the last two years fell into place in an orgasm of intellect. A thesis, a central idea, the heretofore-missing core of my dissertation, took shape in my mind. Seizing the nearest paper--a scrap of newsprint torn from the previous day's sports page--I recorded like a fanatic scribe each spasm of inspiration. I wrote until I was spent. For safekeeping, I folded the paper and slipped it in the first volume of Doctor Syntax, which happened to be lying nearby. Modern critical brilliancies I had produced, one after the other, like a frogwife laying her eggs. From such prodigious ova would my reputation as a scholar hatch.

  -- Michael Petracca, Doctor Syntax

  But grumble though it might over the start of the academic year, the university world became more positive and purposeful. Here was a new year, a fresh morning in which to forget the terrifying nightmare shared by the town's collective unconscious: that the research won't pan out, or worse, that it won't matter a hoot if it does; that one's lifework is just so much mental onanism in the night. September brought the light of day, chased the nightmare away. No, no, it is important work, it does matter.

  --Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem

  It is not that I wanted to know a great deal, in order to acquire what is now called expertise, and which enables one to become an expert-tease to people who don't know as much as you do about the tiny corner you have made your own. I hoped for a bigger fish; I wanted nothing less than Wisdom. In a modern university if you ask for knowledge they will provide it in almost any form--though if you ask for out-of-fashion things they may say, like the people in shops, 'Sorry, there's no call for it.' But if you ask for Wisdom--God save us all! What a show of modesty, what disclaimers from the men and women from whose eyes intelligence shines forth like a lighthouse. Intelligence, yes, but of Wisdom not so much as the gleam of a single candle.

  -- Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

  'I love you because you are very clever,' he elaborated, to show her that he now knew it.

  'I love you because you can write.'

  'Are those good reasons?'

  'Well, novels would say not. People in novels don't love each other because they can both see that Racine is -- is what he is. Like maths, really, only I can't do maths, I was going to say sensual but it isn't, or at least, the sensual pleasure is geometry, not sex. Actually, I don't know much about sex, I shouldn't talk. What was I saying? Oh yes, if we were in a novel it would be most suspect and doomed to sit here drily discussing metre.'

  'If we were in a novel they'd cut this dialogue because of artifice. You can have sex, in a novel, but not Racine's metre, however impassioned you may be about it.'

  -- A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden

  'Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?'

  'So easily that, to tell the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.'

  -- Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

  'From what you tell me, Brother John, not many people seem to be your kind."

  'I'm not impossibly choosy: I just ask for a high level of intelligence and honesty about things that really matter.'

  'That's choosy enough to exclude most of us.'"

  -- Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

  The miracle of life is that, despite the best grip we can get on reality, it continuously manages to surprise us. The beauty of science is that, notwithstanding all our tacit assumptions, these surprises can get through.

  -- Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism

  "Security?" I marvel to myself "what is that? Something negative, undead, suspicious and suspecting; an avarice and an avoidance; a self-surrendering meanness of withdrawal; a numerable complacency and an innumerable cowardice. Who would be 'secure'? Every and any slave. No free spirit ever dreamed of 'security'--or, if he did, he laughed; and lived to shame his dream. No whole sinless sinful sleeping waking breathing human creature ever was (or could be) bought by, and sold for, 'security.' How monstrous and how feeble seems some unworld which would rather have its too than eat its cake!"

  -- E.E. Cummings, "i & self-discovery: nonlecture three" (i: six nonlectures)

  Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows. One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else. Love for the future is self-love---love for the present self, projected and magnified into the future, and it is an irremediable loneliness.

  -- Wendell Berry, "Standing By Words"

  I couldn't understand why he was so forgiving. Only gradually did it occur to me what a strange sight I must have presented -- a middle-aged man with a rucksack, visiting a place like Weston out of season for no evident reason, fetching up at their hotel and bellowing and stomping about over a trifling inconvenience. He must have thought I was mad, an escaped lunatic perhaps, and that this was the safest way to approach me. Either that, or he was just an extremely nice person. In either case, I salute him now.

  -- Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island

  "If I seem to be raising my voice," Mohole said in a calm tone, "it's only because I recognize your right to correct me. I wouldn't be yelling if I didn't respect you. Yelling is a bond between people who respect each other despite invalid corrections. We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other's views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals. If we didn't accept the burden, we'd be sworn enemies. Friendship is exasperating at best. But think of the alternative."

  -- Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

  it's what we all want, in the end,
  to be held, merely to be held,
  to be kissed (not necessarily with the lips,
  for every touching is a kind of kiss).
  

  -- Alden Nowlan, "He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded"

  since feeling is first
  who pays any attention
  to the syntax of things
  will never wholly kiss you;

  -- E.E. Cummings

  Graphics blind the eyes.
  Audio files deafen the ear.
  Mouse clicks numb the fingers.
  Heuristics weaken the mind.
  Options wither the heart.

  The Guru observes the net
  but trusts his inner vision.
  He allows things to come and go.
  His heart is as open as the ether.

  -- Unix fortune file

  There once was a girl from Dundee,
  Who never programmed in C.
  She felt that destruction
  Lacked the seduction
  Of referential transparency.
  

  -- Torben Mogensen

  Data and procedures and the values they amass,
  Higher-order functions to combine and mix and match,
  Objects with their local state, the messages they pass,
  A property, a package, a control point for a catch--
  In the Lambda Order they are all first-class.
  One Thing to name them all, One Thing to define them,
  One Thing to place them in environments and bind them,
  In the Lambda Order they are all first-class.
  

  --Abstract for the Revised^4 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme, MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Memo 848b, November 1991

  This program posts news articles to thousands of machines 
       throughout the entire civilized world.  Your message will 
       cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send 
       everywhere.  Please be sure you know what you are doing.
   
       Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?  [ny]

  -- warning message, trn and tin newsreaders, c. 1995

  1.2.3.3) I have a stupid question about computers. Is this a good place to ask it?

  There are no such things as stupid questions. There are only questions that let anyone even mildly knowledgable realize that the person who asked them has zero clue and a negative chance of ever getting any. Questions that make the reader realize that it unfortunate for all involved that the questioner was ever allowed within twenty--no, fifty-- feet of a computer. Questions that make the average tech support person want to track down the person posting the question and engrave the answer on the querant's body a million times with a soldering iron.

  This is not a good place to ask questions like that.

  [Thanks to Jake (ST102315@brownvm.brown.edu) for that rather lengthy but totally correct discourse.]

  NOTE: *Any* question becomes a stupid question if you ask it enough times. This applies to proto-bobs as well as lusers. If you are privileged enough to be given information, retain it.

  NOTE2: 'Enough' can frequently mean '2'.

  1.2.3.4) That's a bit of a rude attitude, isn't it?

  Yes.

  -- alt.tech-support.recovery FAQ

  My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that.

  -- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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