Pushing Brilliance Quotes

“Over time, I conditioned myself to calibrate my psychological response to dangers based on their probability. I learned to evaluate before I react.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“transportation hubs.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“Q”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“done before. In Moonwalking with Einstein,”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“into”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“In Moonwalking with Einstein, I’d read that a person could win the US Memory Championship by practicing an hour a day for a year. Sounded pretty cool to me — not to mention therapeutic.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“Sergeant Dix told me that at Fort Bragg they found that two to three days of constant tension was what it took to figure out if a soldier was going to break. Most who made it to the Special Forces Qualification Course could take anything the Army cared to throw at them for forty-eight hours. But by day three, with reserves depleted and nothing but misery on the horizon, a soldier’s core became exposed. His baseline ability. His essence. Superficially, this was evidenced by the decision to quit or continue, a temptation the drill sergeants dangled every time they spoke.  The real game, of course, was mental. Beating the Q boiled down to a soldier’s ability to disassociate his body from his mind, his being from his circumstance. This was relatively easy during the mindless procedures — the hikes, runs, and repetitive drills that form the backbone of military training. Disassociation became much tougher, however, when the physical activity was paired with judgment calls and problem solving. If a soldier could engage his higher-order thinking while simultaneously ignoring the pain and willing his body to continue beyond fatigue, then he had a chance at making it to the end. If he couldn’t, then the strength of his back, heart, and lungs didn’t matter.  Dix had concluded that the Q-Course was as much about self-discovery as a prestigious shoulder patch.  Katya was in that discovery phase now.  The big question was what we’d do if she decided to quit. She broke the silence after a few miles. “Do you ever get used to it?” “The killing?” “Yes.” “We’re all used to killing — just not people. We kill when we spray for bugs, or squash a spider, or buy a leather bag, or order a hamburger. I don’t think of the individuals I’ve killed as people any more than you thought of the last steak you ate as Bessie.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“And how do you plan to do that?” “It will be a combination of what I do and don’t do. I’ll avoid cautious movements and furtive glances since they arouse suspicion — triggering alarms built into our DNA. My goal will be to avoid detection altogether, so as not to generate any reaction at all, but even if I get stuck walking past an audience that can’t miss me, all I’ll have to do is keep my head up and shoulders back like an authority figure. That posturing triggers the submissive sectors in most people’s minds, and usually lets one slip under the radar without a second glance.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“I painted my grief as a big gray blanket on the canvas of my mind, heavy and coarse and damp with tears. I folded it in half and half again until it was a manageable size. Then, reverently and temporarily, I set it aside.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“Sting’s Mad About You, and Taylor Swift’s Style.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“TIME LIES. It masquerades in symmetrical guise, using clocks and calendars as accomplices. They cloak it in perfect uniformity, regular as hatch marks on a ruler, stretching forward and backward without variance of size or scale or import. As anyone who has lived even a little knows, this is a grand deception. I was about to be served with the most pivotal of days, and the longest of my thirty-one years. The day that would forever split my life into before and after.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“oh, by the way, if you tell anyone about it we’ll kill you?”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“PUSHING BRILLIANCE Also in the Kyle Achilles series . .”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“Achilles chose to live a short life of glory, rather than a long life of obscurity. His personality is the archetype of everyone in this room. Nobody here would have chosen different if they’d known the truth. It’s a lock. A glorious life versus an obscure chance of some disease. No contest. Hell, look at cigarettes. No glory in those, and the warning’s crystal clear. Smoke these, get cancer. Yet people pay big taxes and slink off into corners to light up by the millions.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance

“quote by Martina Navratilova popped into my mind. The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else.”
― Tim Tigner, Pushing Brilliance