Daniel Pritchett > Daniel's Quotes

“By now Ferris had come to the grudging conclusion that his client was “a plumb good sort.” Garrulous in the cabin, Roosevelt on the trail was quiet, purposeful, and tough. “He could stand an awful lot of hard knocks, and he was always cheerful.” The guide was intrigued by his habit of pulling out a book in flyblown campsites and immersing himself in it, as if he were ensconced in the luxury of the Astor Library. Most of all, perhaps, he was impressed by a casual remark Roosevelt made one night while blowing up a rubber pillow. “His doctors back East had told him that he did not have much longer to live, and that violent exercise would be immediately fatal.”64”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“I’ll grab her Kindle,” Sandy murmured. “She’ll like that.”
― Kendra Elliot, A Merciful Fate

“Doob had known for a while that he was not the easiest guy to be related to. During his last ten weeks on Earth, however, he sometimes feared he was pushing his family’s patience beyond human limits with his lust for camping.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“Ivy was the only person awake, her face lit up by her screen. And for the first time in a long time, it looked the way it had used to when she’d been on the track of some fascinating science problem: alive, intent, fiercely joyful.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“worked.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“They made it into grand opera, eh?” “That’s as good a description as any. I am still coming to grips with it. Of course, we rarely see content from the Red side of the ring.” “Just the propaganda,” Ty said. “Yes, and when we see that, we have a laugh at the overwrought style, the baroque production values, while harboring an inner sense of anxiety that some people within Blue might—” “Might actually believe their shit?” “Exactly.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“He finds a ramp that leads down to the beach and lets gravity draw him towards sea level, gazing to the south and west. The water is pacific and colorless beneath a hazy sky, the horizon line is barely discernable.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Your thoughts on numerology are most interesting,” Waterhouse says loudly, running Mr. Drkh off the rhetorical road. “I myself studied with Drs. Turing and von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.” Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he’s just taken a fifty-caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he’s about to go down in flames.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Comstock glances beadily at his wire recorders, makes sure those reels are spinning. He is a little unnerved by how rapidly Waterhouse is coming up to speed. But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one’s own fears, to project confidence at all times.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Look,” says Uncle Red, “all we want to accomplish here is to make sure that your mother’s legacy, if that is the correct term for the possessions of one who is not actually dead but merely moved into a long-term care facility, is equally divided among her five offspring. Am I right?” This is not addressed to Randy, but he nods anyway, trying to show a united front. He has been grinding his teeth for two days straight; the places where his jaw-muscles anchor to his skull have become the foci of tremendous radiating systems of surging and pulsing pain.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“The question reduces,” Uncle Red says, “to a mathematical one: how do you divide up an inhomogeneous set of n objects among m people (or couples actually); i.e., how do you partition the set into m subsets (S1,S2, . . . ,Sm) such that the value of each subset is as close as possible to being equal?” “It doesn’t seem that hard,” Aunt Nina begins weakly. She is a professor of Qwghlmian linguistics”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“That console was in my bedroom from the time I was born until I left for college,” Aunt Nina says. “By any decent standard of justice, that console is mine.” “Well, that brings me to the breakthrough that Randy and Tom and Geoff and I finally came up with at about two A.M., namely that the perceived economic value of each item, as complicated as that is in and of itself, viz the Knapsack Problem, is only one dimension of the issues that have got us all on such a jagged emotional edge. The other dimension—and here I really do mean dimension in a Euclidean geometry sense—is the emotional value of each item. That is, in theory we could come up with a division of the set of all pieces of furniture that would give you, Nina, an equal share. But such a division might leave you, love, just deeply, deeply unsatisfied because you didn’t get that console, which, though it’s obviously not as valuable as say the grand piano, has much greater emotional value to you.” “I don’t think it’s out of the question that I would commit physical violence in order to defend my rightful ownership of that console,” Aunt Nina says, suddenly reverting to a kind of dead-voiced frigid calm.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“My dear sir,’ said Jack to Stephen, measuring the Sophie’s increasing speed and the distance that separated her from the embattled cat – in this state of triply intensified vitality he could perfectly well calculate, talk to Stephen and revolve a thousand shifting variables all at once – ‘my dear sir, do you choose to go below or should you rather stay on deck? Perhaps it would divert you to go to into the maintop with a musket, along with the sharpshooters, and have a bang at the villains?”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

“What private lives the young led, he reflected, how very much apart: their happiness how widely independent of circumstance.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

“He and his officers stood rigidly with their hats off, and as soon as the last roar had died away over the harbour, echoing back and forth, he called out, ‘Three cheers for the Amelia!’ and the Sophies, though deep in the working of the sloop, responded like heroes, scarlet with pleasure and the energy needed for huzzaying proper – huge energy, for they knew what was manners.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

“a sweet and powerful Positive obsession”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“I imagine you’re actually rather good at what you do, in spite of certain disadvantages. Disadvantage and peculiar competence can go hand in hand, I find.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“She just had to remember how to set up distributed logging.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“The furrows in his forehead said he knew he was losing her. Hopefully it would make him tighten the presentation up, skip the boring parts, and get to what he wanted so she could say no and get back to her job.”
― James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising

“Bobbie had known and worked with Amos Burton for years, and he kept being able to surprise her. For the next two days, Amos took the lead, moving through Medina Station apparently without any particular aim or purpose.”
― James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising