Terry Brown > Terry's Quotes

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“diverse teams make better mousetraps.”
― Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient”
― Marilynne Robinson

“The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Said differently, in the modern work environment, the cycle of learning, unlearning, and learning again demands that workers embrace their agency to act and work in ways that make them more creative, more productive, and more fully human. Workplace leaders must risk the vulnerability to admit they don't have all the answers and willingness to discover together with their teams. The honest and fearless embrace of your own vulnerability builds the psychological safety that enables your team to be active, adaptive learners.”
― Heather E McGowan, The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce

“To possess another language is to possess another soul.”
― John le Carré

“I walk: I prefer walking.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion