Kaila Stair > Kaila's Quotes

“Value versus Cost Economists tend to focus on cost, and, as economists, we are as guilty of that as anyone. The entire premise of our first book, Prediction Machines, was that AI advances were going to dramatically reduce the cost of prediction, leading to a scale-up of its use. However, while that book suggested that the initial uses of AI would be where prediction was already occurring, either explicitly in, say, forecasting sales or the weather, or implicitly in classifying photos and language, we were mindful that the real opportunity would be the new applications and uses that were enabled when prediction costs fell low enough.”
― Ajay Agrawal, Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence

“ “We think a spy scheme could be brewing with one or more of the Middle East scientists going to Los Alamos.”
― Karl Braungart, Fatal Identity

“Laurel had one thousand year-round residents and our share of bar fights, car accidents, marital disputes, and an occasional breaking and entering.  What we didn't have were missing teenage girls.”
― Albert Waitt, The Ruins of Woodman's Village

“After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Isn´t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“You have a peace about you. You have a wisdom. You have a way of living life that kicks my butt and pushes me around, and it beats me out of my idiocy and narrow-mindness. You, Addy, you, have shown me what life is all about”
― Heath Sommer

“Here is something I have learned: you should never expect help from someone who perpetually has their hair in curlers.”
― Kate DiCamillo, Louisiana's Way Home

“People of uncommon abilities generally fall into eccentricities when their sphere of life is not adequate to their abilities.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“He motioned for Elpidio to sit down after watching him pace the room in circles. Elpidio pulled out a chair and admitted, 'I've messed up in more ways than I can count.”
― Carolyn M. Bowen, Legacy of Shadows: An International Crime Thriller

“We’re not here to argue with you about the wisdom of our alliance that has kept the Persians at bay for forty years. An argument requires a measure of equality between those in the dispute and Samos is not the equal of Athens.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Black considered shooting him here. That idea lasted about a second. Thought about pushing the barrel through the man’s skull. That lasted a couple more.”
― William Kely McClung, Black Fire

“Let someone take away any sense of privacy or security you might still possess. Then have someone use that insecurity to satisfy their own twisted curiosity.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The storm in our private lives had picked him up and put him out of place. Me, too. I, too, had been picked up from one place and set down in another. I, too, had been stranded. We both needed help resettling.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, The View from Saturday

“the nation's young men have
been proved by surveys to be completely unmarriageable, and as a result there's a whole
generation of single girls like me with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and
don't need to wash anyone else's socks.”
― Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary

“People had Jewish friends, good friends; Jewish employers, good employers; Jewish employees, hard workers. They obeyed the laws, they didn’t hurt anyone. And here was Hitler saying they were to blame for everything. ‘So when the vans came and took them away, people didn’t do anything. They stayed out of the way, they kept quiet. They even got to believing the voice that shouted the loudest. Because that’s the way people are, particularly the Germans. We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. It enables us to build an economic miracle while the British are on strike, and it enables us to follow a man like Hitler into a great big mass grave.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File

“A brief whiff of her mother had come through a cracked window that opened to a weed-infested courtyard. It was a fragrance that almost spoke to her, saying, 'Yes, it was an unjust end to the life of a good man.' A man who had accepted gratitude in the place of love, and who knew Magdalena's heart would always remain with Ales's father.”
― Victoria Dougherty, The Bone Church