Askorbinka > Askorbinka's Quotes

“Horses, Death felt, shouldn’t grin. Any horse that was grinning was planning something.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—​and it was not written in English.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“his poor-man’s Ionesconian exchanges with Jude suddenly dissolved when he needed Jude to do his calculus homework, at which point Ionesco abruptly transformed into Mussolini,”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“he sometimes wished he had a mind like JB’s, one that could create stories that would delight others, instead of the mind he did have, which was always searching for an explanation, an explanation that, while perhaps correct, was empty of romance, of fancy, of wit.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“didn’t everyone only tell their lives—truly tell their lives—to one person?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“There were over five hundred ways of spelling the word ‘through’ and over sixty of the pronoun ‘she’, which is quite hard to imagine.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“The English Bible has often been called a preacher’s Bible. Written to be spoken, written to spread the word in the language of the land, a cause for which Wycliffe and Tyndale and hundreds of other English Christians had lived and died.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Shakespeare shoved into bed together words that scarcely knew each other before, had never even been introduced.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“The word ‘immigrant’ is an American invention. Migration of people had occurred in the Old World but in the New it was the single common defining experience.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.”
― David Crystal, The Story of English in 100 Words

“The more choices you give people, the more help with decision making you need to provide.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: The Final Edition

“It is usually good to provide people with lots of options, but when the question is complicated, sensible choice architecture guides people in the right directions.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: The Final Edition

“Never mind the fact that what she described was the content of LITERALLY EVERY VOICE MAIL IN HISTORY. Name, hello, please call back. Not really a boatload of charm on display. To fail this test, a guy would have to leave a message that said: “No greeting. This is a man. I don’t remember you. End communication.”
― Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance

“But Tinder added a key feature that Grindr—and Blendr, for that matter—didn’t have: the mutual-interest requirement”
― Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance

“a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“with a sharp nose like a sharp autumn evening,”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“with a sharp nose like a sharp autumn evening, inclining to be frosty towards the end.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Breaking down a huge question (“Do you know anyone we should hire?”) into lots of small, manageable ones (“Do you know anyone who would be a good salesperson in New York?”) garners us more, higher-quality referrals.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“You can automate a lot of things, but you can’t automate relationships”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“If after we go public I see any lamborghinis in our parking lot, you better buy two of them because I’m going to take a baseball bat to the windshield of any parked here.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“(Though, sadly, both Larry and Sergey, who take only $1 per year in salary, declined my offer to raise their salaries by 10 percent … to $1.10 per year.)”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“we found that women are less likely to nominate themselves for promotion, but that when they do, they are promoted at slightly higher rates than men.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Another way to frame the issue is that leaning in when you have significant caregiving responsibilities requires an intensive support structure at home and lots of flexibility at work. Think about simple physics. Imagine a tree leaning over the water”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“leaning in when you have significant caregiving responsibilities requires an intensive support structure at home and lots of flexibility at work.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Mayeroff lists a number of elements necessary to be a good caregiver, attributes that are just as necessary to be a good employee or manager. His roster includes knowledge, patience, adaptability to different rhythms, honesty, courage, trust, humility, and hope.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“It is a road map for growing a child into a separate, independent being who assumes responsibility for directing their own life and for the choices they make.”
― Deborah MacNamara, Rest, Play, Grow: Making Sense of Preschoolers (Or Anyone Who Acts Like One

“I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Venice had cured him of any nostalgia for the banks of the Thames.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“If another man were saying this, he’d be trying to start a fight. When Thomas More says it, it leads to an invitation to dinner.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall