Charlie > Charlie's Quotes

“Cung said, “I have researched Vietnamese People fleeing to the land of the Uc da Loi! On the 26th of April 1976, the first boat carrying Vietnamese refugees arrived in Darwin. (Uc da Loi means Big Red Rat. The Vietnamese People named Australians as such because of the red kangaroo painted on the sides of Australian military vehicles. They did not know what a kangaroo was and so, they thought it was a rat. Hence the name of Uc da Loi.)

(A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)”
― Michael G. Kramer

“One year from now, a decade, a century, half a millennium, will things be different? Dare we dream it? When we are seen for ourselves, not just as the conduit of progeny, heirs, lineage, not just as beautiful objects to be protected, inspected, appreciated, but for who we are at the core . . .”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“the new wave of artificial intelligence does not actually bring us intelligence but instead a critical component of intelligence—prediction.”
― ajay agrawal, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

“In traveling about the city that day, Dodd was struck anew by the “extraordinary” German penchant for Christmas display. He saw Christmas trees everywhere, in every public square and every window. “One might think,” he wrote, “the Germans believed in Jesus or practiced his teachings!”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“Ugliness was the chance to make beautiful. Sadness was the chance to make glad.”
― Fynn, Mister God, This is Anna

“ومتى تعلق إنسان بإنسان آخر فهو لا يرى فيه إلا حسناته وخيره”
― ليو تولستوي, آنّا كارنينا

“The rain came down upon my head - Unshelter'd. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“panegyrics.”
― James Herriot, Every Living Thing

“Some people say
Rhyming is but a sin.
Little sins are fun
So try, before you bin.”
― Max Nowaz, Timbi's Dream

“Do you know the song Violet Crowned Athens?” he asked. Yellow hair like hers was rare among the Greeks. Though some people say that Helen of Troy . . .”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.”

These traditional words were often repeated on Jeju, but we all nodded somberly as though hearing them for the first time.

“When we go to the sea, we share the work and the danger,” Mother added. “We harvest together, sort together, and sell together, because the sea itself is communal.”
― Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women

“The official report was a collection of cold, hard data, an objective "after-action report" that would allow future generations to study the events of that apocalyptic decade without being influenced by the "human factor." But isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of individuals not so different from themeslves? By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it?”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“I understand my parents quite well. They think of a wife as a man’s luxury, which he can afford only when he is making a comfortable living. I have a low opinion of this view of the relationship between man and wife, because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a lifelong contract from the man because of her more favourable social rank . . . Which”
― Robyn Arianrhod, Young Einstein: And the story of E=mc²

“Suffice it to say, during the whole long day I came not to the conclusion, even once, that the southern slave, fed, clothed, whipped and protected by his master, is happier than the free colored citizen of the North. To that conclusion I have never since arrived.”
― Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave