Amy Rhoda Brown > Amy Rhoda 's Quotes

“Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.”
― Neal Stephenson, Reamde

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“She always said, 'When I'm home, I've got to get things done, even if there are visitors. Elizabeth knows how to relax in her own house.' And then she would shake her head, as if Elizabeth had remarkable powers.”
― Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

“What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that hed been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.”
― Neal Stephenson, Reamde

“Life’s disappointments are harder to take if you don’t know any swear words.”
― Heather Shumaker, It's OK Not to Share and Other Renegade Rules for Raising Competent and Compassionate Kids

“If you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
― RuPaul

“Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“Don't live the same year 75 times and call it a life.”
― Robin S. Sharma

“I sketched a picture of Jean-Claude in my notebook; he saw me, so I showed it to him. He erupted in pleasure. It seemed I'd found a way into his trust and his company—into his world. It was easier to do this with the residents than I had imagined. There were not rules, no prescribed routes: you went with what was available, with the most human thing you could catch on to.”
― Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son

“I understand how insubstantial this seems, how minor: man buys a coffee in French! But it was Gégé and Jean-Claude, and my own Walker, who reminded me how to do that simpest thing. They reminded me not to be ashamed. That is never a small accomplishment.”
― Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son

“Le Cardinal's conclusion suprised him. L'Arche produced a collective intelligence that was greater than the sum of its parts; interaction between the able and the disabled produced points of view that were more sophisticated than either group reported on its own.”
― Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son

“Going on intuition is like picking up a beat and dancing to it. Using intuition is a hard thing for grownups to do, and that's the main reason I think it might be the right thing for us to do. Kids, after all, operate on it about eighty percent of the time.”
― Stephen King

“The function of hegemony is to transform ideology into culture, into a "world view" that is seen as "normal" and "natural" by everyone from the controlling classes to the subordinate classes. Today, the major means of establishing the hegemony are the mass media.”
― Rupert Woodfin, Marxism: A Graphic Guide

“The success of a book, far from elevating its author, belittled him, transforming him into merchandise.”
― Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity

“Public homage was like a humiliation. The author was caught in a psychologically damaging confusion between his social being, reduced to only a face and a body, subject to gawking and applause, and his moral being.”
― Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity

“I know now that music is not about fingers or bows or strings, but rather a connective vibration flowing through all human beings, like a heartbeat.”
― Rosamund Stone Zander, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life