charles > charles's Quotes

“the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.”
― Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

“It should probably be said that the virtues of the society of the self are entirely debatable. Orienting laws around individuals led directly to an entire tradition of human rights and the prominence of individual liberty in legal codes. That has to count as progress. But reasonable people disagree about whether we have now tipped the scales too far in the direction of individualism, away from those collective organizations: the union, the community, the state. Resolving those disagreements requires a different set of arguments—and values—than the ones we need to explain where those disagreements came from.”
― Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Life wasn’t only about expressing feelings and giving hugs.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“Death had come to seem no more than the breaking down of an organism: the last exhalations of the lungs, the final pumpings of the heart, the brain deprived of blood.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“Below the ice, rivers of meltwater flowed at high pressure, depositing sand and gravel as they went. These deposits, which remain as ridges called eskers, crisscross the landscape in the woods outside my home in Boston. They are responsible for a variety of odd landforms, including the world’s only vertical U-shaped riverbeds.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“Our most lasting relic will probably be the layer of plastic we’ve deposited across the planet. By digging up oil, processing it into durable and long-lasting polymers, and spreading it across the Earth’s surface, we’ve left a fingerprint that could outlast everything else we do.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They’d want to join the club, so they’d get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They’d marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“what was rational about a midlife crisis? Weren’t they always a little absurd? They were beginning the next phase of their lives together. She was not afraid of it. Let it come, she thought. He’ll be in good hands.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“Every rumor carries a seed of truth,”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“In the Clarendon Library at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell “rings” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.”
― Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“(one good piece, ladies, and choose it well; everything makes a statement, nothing speaks quite so loudly as cheapness).”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“the failing of a student to learn is the failing of the teacher to teach.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“You’re not alone, and you’re not the one in charge,” Mother said gently. “Ask for help when you need it, and give help when you can. I think that is how we serve God—and each other and ourselves—in times as dark as these.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“You are my sunlight in the dark and the ground beneath my feet.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“Their kiss was sad, an apology almost, a reminder of what they’d once shared.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“Ji was one of more than 200 000 Chinese workers who went to Russia during the Great War to assist in the Allied war effort. Some 135 000 Chinese men were also sent to France and Belgium between 1916 and 1922, but Russia would receive the majority of China’s wartime labourers.”
― O'Neill Mark, From the Tsar's Railway to the Red Army: Penguin Specials

“More than 40 000 Chinese workers joined the Red Army. Many of this number died fighting for the Revolution and are buried in unmarked graves all over the country. Some became bodyguards of Lenin and others joined the new Soviet secret police, the Cheka.”
― O'Neill Mark, From the Tsar's Railway to the Red Army: Penguin Specials

“In the 1880s, however, Russia began to be alarmed by the large influx of Chinese, and the term ‘Yellow Peril’ entered the vocabulary.”
― O'Neill Mark, From the Tsar's Railway to the Red Army: Penguin Specials