Brooks Quotes

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’d
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“For a close, remember this, that your life is short, your duties many, your assistance great, and your reward sure; therefore faint not, hold on and hold up, in ways of well-doing, and heaven shall make amends for all.”
― Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices

“What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”
― Frederick Brooks

“The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers,
fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming.”
― Frederick Brooks

“We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems

“Of course. I should have realized. You’re so brave, Eureka. How do you handle it?”

“I don’t handle it, that’s how.”
― Lauren Kate, Teardrop

“Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“-how do you handle it?
-i don’t handle it, that’s how.”
― Lauren Kate, Teardrop