Brian > Brian's Quotes

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“...if you aren't, at any given time, scandalized by code you wrote five or even three years ago, you're not learning anywhere near enough”
― Nick Black

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
― Niels Bohr

“But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling,' Jong continued. 'Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love or having Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we're all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: You're not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let's see the Senate fifty percent female; let's see women in decision-making positions--that's power. Sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven't come.”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.”
― Donald E. Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Volume 136)

“I've always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else's”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“Vulgarity is no substitute for wit”
― Julian Fellowes

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Read. You can always talk with another reader.”
― Rorke Denver, Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior

“The rating agencies were not exceedingly competent”
― Timothy Geithner, STRESS TEST

“You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Sooner or later, you will discover which kind of father you are, and at that moment you will, with perfect horror, recognize the type. You are the kind of father who fakes it, who yells, who measures his children with greatest accuracy only against one another, who evades the uncomfortable and glosses over the painful and pads the historic records of his sorrows and accomplishments alike. You are the kind who teases and deceives and toys with his children and subjects them to displays of rich and manifold sarcasm when--as is always the case--sarcasm is the last thing they need. You are the kind of father who pretends knowledge he doesn't possess, and imposes information with implacable gratuitousness, and teaches lessons at the moment when none can be absorbed, and is right, and has always been right, and always will be right until the end of time, and never more than immediately after he has been wrong. And when your daughter's body begins to betray her, and her sky flickers in the distance with the heat lightning of sex, you clear your throat and stroke your chin whiskers and tell her to go ask her mother. You can't help it--you're a walking cliché.”
― Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

“In Hidden Writing, a main plot is constructed to camouflage other plots (which can register themselves as plot holes) by overlapping them with the surface (superficially dynamic plot) or the grounded theme. In terms of such a writing, the main plot is the map or the concentration blueprint of plot holes (the other plots).”
― Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

“At the federal level, this problem could be greatly alleviated by abolishing the Electoral College system. It's the winner-take-all mathematics from state to state that delivers so much power to a relative handful of voters. It's as if in politics, as in economics, we have a privileged 1 percent. And the money from the financial 1 percent underwrites the microtargeting to secure the votes of the political 1 percent. Without the Electoral College, by contrast, every vote would be worth exactly the same. That would be a step toward democracy.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“I always say that the way you write a novel is for the first 83 drafts you pretend that nobody is ever, ever going to read it.”
― Anne Tyler