#relative

I had some fears as a kid, but I was also relatively fearless. Maybe that's a result of living half the time in reality and the other half in fantasy. ↗

— Suzanne Vega

#fantasy #fearless #fears #had #half

The relative property of the Son is to be begotten, that is, so to proceed from the Father as to be a participant of the same essence and perfectly carry on the Father's nature. ↗

— William Ames

#carry #essence #father #nature #participant

Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I sat that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be...well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#language #perfection #relatives #death

The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. ↗

— Herbert Marcuse

#choice #criterion #entirely #free #free choice

A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too. ↗

— P. J. O'Rourke

#nothing #only #quiet #relative #tasteful

As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children. ↗

— P. J. O'Rourke

#any #become #becomes #children #cruelty

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#important #insignificant #matter #productivity #really

I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot. ↗

— Douglas Feith

#chamberlain #done #had #i #kid

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female. ↗

— Susan Griffin

#economically #feel #female #force #had

The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things. ↗

— Dean Inge

#man #relative #things #value #who