#wit

One person can take papers, photograph them without getting excited, return them, and give them away without any scruples; while someone else has to overcome an enormous obstacle. ↗

— Markus Wolf

#away #else #enormous #excited #getting

Well, the first thing to say is that we've worked hard to maintain compatibility, so that any program written with an earlier version of Mathematica can run without change in 3.0, and any notebook can be converted. ↗

— Stephen Wolfram

#change #compatibility #converted #earlier #first

To get over artist's block, make shitty art. ↗

— Dave Horowitz

#dave-horowitz #writers-block #writing-life #art

The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man. ↗

— Arthur Young

#intending #know #lack #machinery #machines

I don't say tis impossible for an impudent man not to rise in the world, but a moderate merit with a large share of impudence is more probable to be advanced than the greatest qualifications without it. ↗

— Mary Wortley

#greatest #i #impossible #impudence #impudent

But I'm a selfish man. I've wanted you since you fell into my office. You are exquisite, honest, warm, strong, witty, beguilingly innocent; the list is endless. I'm in awe of you. I want you, and the thought of anyone else having you is like a knife twisting in my dark soul. ↗

— E.L. James

#fifty-shades #witty

For what the horse does under compulsion, as Simon also observes, is done without understanding; and there is no beauty in it either, any more than if one should whip and spur a dancer. ↗

— Xenophon

#any #beauty #compulsion #dancer #does

The next four years, there won't be a week that goes by without a discussion of climate change. It's a naturally Conservative issue. ↗

— Tim Yeo

#climate #climate change #conservative #discussion #four

Little Marjorie was born an only child some forty years ago. She had lost her mother at a young age and her father never remarried. All her life she had been cursed with the need for her ‘coke-bottle’ glasses with the practical over-sized frames. And then there was the unfortunate appearance of her protruding front teeth. She had always been a slight child, but when children begin to grow into young men and women, slight becomes scrawny and her lack of fashion-sense and self-worth had sealed her social fate. Marjorie had never gone to Prom, nor any dance for that matter, and when the boys chose mates and began the next phase of the great circle of life…little Marjorie Morningstar had not been included. --From The Great Northern Coven ↗

— Bruce Jenvey

#witches #age

I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again. ↗

— Cheryl Strayed

#anger-at-losing-a-mother #grieving-the-loss-of-a-mother #loosing-your-mother-too-young #losing-a-mother #anger