John > John's Quotes

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Arete is simply excellence and the striving for excellence in all things,” said Odysseus. “Arete simply means the act of offering all actions as a sort of sacrament to excellence, of devoting one’s life to finding excellence, identifying it when it offers itself, and achieving it in your own life.”
― Dan Simmons, Ilium

“The high and humble crowded into the sept together to pray.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“This was not a political party. It was an army. The purpose of the display, Lloyd figured, was to give them false authority. They wanted to look as if they had the right to close meetings and empty buildings, to burst into homes and offices and arrest people, to drag them to jails and camps and beat them up, interrogate and torture them, as the Brownshirts did in Germany under the Nazi regime so admired by Mosley and the Daily Mail’s proprietor,”
― Ken Follett, Winter of the World

“This was worse than a Fascist march: it was a Fascist march with police authority. What kind of message did that send to the Jews of the East End?”
― Ken Follett, Winter of the World

“Welsh chapelgoers automatically sang in four-part harmony, and when they were in the mood they could raise the roof. As he joined in, Lloyd felt this was the beating heart of Britain, here in this whitewashed chapel.”
― Ken Follett, Winter of the World

“No storm can shake my inmost calm While to that rock I’m clinging Since Love is Lord of heaven and earth How can I keep from singing?”
― Ken Follett, Winter of the World

“They are made to believe they cannot behave without their imaginary friend watching over them. Some of them set out to demonstrate this too. They feel they have no purpose without this magic father in the sky, and their leaders make it so they are too weak willed to have any purpose other than being steered like a herd of tranquilized cattle. Looking to an imaginary paradise, which will never come, they pledge their real lives to slavery, keeping themselves captive.”
― Damien Ba'al, The Satanic Narratives: A Modern Satanic Bible

“is drilled into us that having too much fun is wrong. Quite the contrary, it is the entire point of being alive. As life serves no particular purpose other than to perpetuate itself, we must all find our own meaning. The”
― Damien Ba'al, The Satanic Narratives: A Modern Satanic Bible

“It's tempting to trivialize the power of metaphors. To each of the earlier examples, the natural response is to say, "Well, of course the right metaphor is more useful. The other metaphor was wrong!" Though that's a natural reaction, it's simplistic. The history of science isn't a series of switches from the "wrong" metaphor to the "right" one. It's a series of changes from "worse" metaphors to "better" ones, from less inclusive to more inclusive, from suggestive in one area to suggestive in another.”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete

“If a rule prevents me from making a spontaneous choice then it’s too restrictive. • If a rule negatively impacts someone I love then it’s probably doing more harm than good. • If a rule was created more than five years ago then I may have outgrown it. • If a rule makes me sad, angry, tired, or anxious then I need to question its origins.”
― Cynthia Kim, Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life