Curious Accounts Quotes

Who Am I? Well, I am the Imaginary Friend. You know-the one you conjure up for conversation when you're consumed with loneliness, greed or visions of imminent doom. I have listened to thousands of stories and it would be a shame if they just stayed with me, never to be heard again. I have chosen to share only the ones I found to be particularly... curious. Have you ever been troubled by nightmares? Were you relieved when you woke up? No matter. Are you sure you can tell the difference between the nightmare and the waking state? Think it through before giving me your answer. Sometimes only an imaginary friend can truly listen to your deepest troubles and most distressing woes. Wouldn't you agree? ~ P.S. Gifford

In northwest Seattle, there is an immensely popular 'old-fashioned' ice cream parlor. It is modern, spotless, and gleaming, bursting with comfortable looking people on a warm summer evening. The parlor is dedicated to nostalgia, from the old-time decor to the striped candy, the ragtime music, the costumes of the smiling young waiters, the Gibson-girl menu with its gold-rush type, and the open-handed hospitality of the Old West. It serves sandwiches, hamburgers, and kiddie 'samiches,' but its specialty is ice-cream concoctions, all of them with special names, including several so vast and elaborate that they cost several dollars and arrive with so much fanfare that all other activities stop as the waiters join in a procession as guards of honor. Nobody seems to care that the sandwiches and even the ice cream dishes have a curious blandness, so that everything tastes rather alike and it is hard to remember what one has eaten. Nothing mars the insistent, bright, wholesome good humor that presses on every side. Yet somehow there is pathos as well. For these patrons are the descendants of pioneers, of people who knew the frontiers, of men who dared the hardships of Chilkoot Pass to seek gold in the Klondike. That is their heritage, but now they only sit amid a sterile model of the past, spooning ice cream while piped-in ragtime tinkles unheard. ~ Charles A. Reich

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient. ~ Edmund Wilson

The Marquis de Palancy, his head turned sideways on his craning neck, his great round eye glued to the glass of his monocle, moved slowly around in the transparent gloom and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts by, unaware of the crowd of curious visitors, behind the glass wall of an aquarium. Occasionally he paused, venerable, wheezy and moss-covered, and the onlooker could not have told whether he was unwell, asleep, swimming, spawning or simply taking breath. ~ Marcel Proust

I'm just curious, how'd you get into this line of work?"

"Gradually, and then suddenly ~ Emily St. John Mandel

The real reason for withholding taxes is the unwillingness of workers to share their incomes with the government and the consequent difficulties of collection. To overcome this handicap, the government has simply impressed employers into its service as involuntary and unpaid tax collectors. It is a form of conscription. Disregarding the right of privacy, which is an essential of liberty, the government's agents may, under the law, invade the employer's office, demand his accounts, and punish him for any infraction which they believe he has committed; they can impound his property and inflict a penalty for not having collected taxes for the government. ~ Frank Chodorov

We will talk to the CIFAS members, financial institutions, about the possibility of closing accounts of people who have no right to be here. If you're going to create a hostile environment for illegal migrants ... access to financial services is part of that. ~ Theresa May

I think about and study people. I think I make people uneasy sometimes by being so curious as to why they do what they do. I find myself thinking about this fairly obsessively, and I can't stop until I've found an answer. ~ Antonya Nelson

It seemed sometimes as if love and hate and jealousy and adverse winds at sea might also find their proper remedies among the curious wild-looking plants in Mrs. Todd's garden. ~ Sarah Orne Jewett

There will never be a good time, financially, to get married, unless you're Shaq or Ray Romano. But somehow people manage. If your man is using money as an excuse not to marry you, it's your relationship that's insecure, not his bank account. ~ Greg Behrendt

As the world of science has grown in size and in power, its deepest problems have changed from the epistemological to the social. ~ Jerome Ravetz

God gets me into a relationship with Himself whereby I understand His
call, then I do things out of sheer love for Him on my own account. To
serve God is the deliberate love-gift of a nature that has heard the
call of God. ~ Oswald Chambers

Wise cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,
a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In geology the effects to be explained have almost all occurred already, whereas in these other sciences effects actually taking place have to be explained. ~ James Croll

Unless science is controlled by a greater moral force, it will become the Antichrist prophesied by the early Christians. ~ Charles Lindbergh

The neurotic, as long as he must adhere to his illusions about himself, cannot recognize limitations, the search for glory goes into the unlimited. Because the main goal is the attainment of glory, he becomes uninterested in the process of learning, of doing, or of gaining step by step - indeed, tends to scorn it. He does not want to climb a mountain; he wants to be on the peak. Hence he loses the sense of what evolution or growth means, even though he may talk about it. Because, finally, the creation of the idealized self is possible only at the expense of truth about himself, its actualization requires further distortions of truth, imagination being a willing servant to this end. Thereby, to a greater or lesser extent, he loses in the process his interest in truth, and the sense for what is true or not true - a loss that, among others, accounts for his difficulty in distinguishing between genuine feelings, beliefs, strivings, and their artificial equivalents (unconscious pretenses) in himself and in others. The emphasis shifts from being to appearing. ~ Karen Horney

Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things. ~ Robert Walser

In science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it ... In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement. ~ Bertrand Russell

Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market - so a doctor told me at the time - have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor's office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer's title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.

....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one's own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street. ~ Zadie Smith

Be patient, is very good advice, but the waiting makes me curious. ~ Oliver Wallace & Paul J. Smith

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars - they would think the country has gone insane. ~ Noam Chomsky

Your insult has offended me. If we were at the Peaks, we would have to duel in traditional alil'tiki'i fashion."
"Which is what?" Teft asked. "With spears?"
Rock laughed. "No, no. We upon the Peaks are not barbarians like you down here."
"How then?" Kaladin asked, genuinely curious.
"Well," Rock said, "is involving much mudbeer and singing."
"How's that a duel?"
"He who can still sing after the most drinks is winner. Plus, soon' everyone is so drunk that they forget what argument was about."
Teft laughed. "Beats knives at dawn, I suppose. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not mitigate how little the system accounts for the patient's best interest. Just when you are at your weakest and least able to make all the phone calls, traverse the maze of insurance, and plead for health-care referrals is that one time when you have to - your life may depend on it. ~ Ross I. Donaldson

Then the pulse.
Then a pause.
Then twilight in a box.
Dusk underfoot.
Then generations.

-

Then the same war by a different name.
Wine splashing in the bucket.
The erection, the era.
Then exit Reason.
Then sadness without reason.
Then the removal of the ceiling by hand.

-

Then pages & pages of numbers.
Then the page with the faint green stain.
Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded,
is thrown onto a wagon.
Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else.
Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else.
Then the page scribbled in dactyls.
Then the page which begins Exit Angel.
Then the page wrapped around a dead fish.
Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean.
Then a nap.
Then the peg.
Then the page with the curious helmet.
Then the page on which millet is ground.
Then the death of Ursula.
Then the stone page they raised over her head.
Then the page made of grass which goes on.

-

Exit Beauty.

-

Then the page someone folded to mark her place.
Then the page on which nothing happens.
The page after this page.

Then the transcript.
Knocking within.

Interpretation, then harvest.

-

Exit Want.
Then a love story.

Then a trip to the ruins.
Then & only th ~ Srikanth Reddy

Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive. ~ James Anthony Froude

It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none. Some people would agonise over minor slips or mistakes on their part, while others would feel quite unmoved by their own gross acts of betrayal or dishonesty. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Something wild can happen to anybody and I caution anybody that walks out on the street, just settle your accounts before you leave the house every day. ~ Bill Murray

I was curious. Here was a character where I just didn't know how they were going to write him into 13 episodes without it being one note. My fear was that I didn't want to join something where I was just going to be this prop and this mustache twirling character. ~ Shawn Hatosy

I've been curious about certain things, but didn't let them get in the way of my life. I don't know how people becoem successful with some kind of habit. ~ Tobey Maguire

Respectability, n. The offspring of a liaison between a bald head and a bank account. ~ Ambrose Bierce

The United States, knowing no distinction of her own citizens on account of religion or nationality, naturally believes in a civilization the world over which will secure the same universal laws. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

It is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature; but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation: greater care is still required in representing life, which is so often discoloured by passion, or deformed by wickedness. If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account; or why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind as upon a mirrour which shews all ~ Samuel Johnson

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. ~ Louis Pasteur

The struggle of the mind to keep itself free from every sort of
bondage
to remain curious, open, unsatiated in all its
relations with nature
is tenfold more difficult than the
cultivation of a stable, satisfying point of view, but a
thousandfold more precious. ~ Gardner Murphy

Happiness comes from ... some curious adjustment to life. ~ Hugh Walpole

I am not dead" argued Edward. "There are nefarious villains who would have you believe I died. But any accounts of my demise have been grossly exaggerated, I assure you, for here I am, very much alive. ~ Cynthia Hand

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. ~ Niall Williams

But it is one thing to transmit the divine through a blasting storm of holy noise, another thing entirely to write a history forged from human voices, imperfect memories, self-interested accounts. ~ Geraldine Brooks

Sometimes women's attraction to true crime is dismissed as trashy and voyeuristic (because women are vapid!). Sometimes it is unquestioningly celebrated as feminist (because if women like something, then it must be feminist!). And some argue that women read about serial killers to avoid becoming victims. This is the most flattering theory - and also, it seemed to me, the most incomplete. By presuming that women's dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts are drained of their menace. True crime wasn't something we women at CrimeCon were consuming begrudgingly, for our own good. We found pleasure in these bleak accounts of kidnappings and assaults and torture chambers, and you could tell by how often we fell back on the language of appetite, of bingeing, of obsession. A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us. ~ Rachel Monroe

Honoria nodded and was about to say something utterly
forgettable when she saw that his hand had been bandaged.
"I hope your injury is not severe," she said politely.
"Oh, this?" he held up his hand. His fingers were free to waggle,
but the rest of it looked rather like a mitt. "It's nothing. An
altercation with a letter opener."
"Well, please do be careful of infection," Honoria said,
somewhat more forcefully than was de rigueur. "If it grows red, or
swollen, or even worse, yellow, then you must see a doctor at
once."
"Green?" he quipped.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You listed so many colors about which I must be wary."
For a moment Honoria could only stare. Wound infection was
not a laughing matter.
"Lady Honoria?" he murmured.
She decided to proceed as if he'd said nothing. "Most
importantly, you must watch for reddish streaks spreading from the
wound. Those are the worst."
He blinked, but if he was startled by the turn of the
conversation, he did not show it. Instead he looked down at his
hand with a curious eye and said, "How red?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"How red do the streaks have to be before I must worry?"
"How do you know so much about medicine?" Lady Danbury
cut in.
"Do you know, I'm not sure how red," Honoria told Mr.
Bridgerton. "I would think anything stripey ought to be a cause for
alarm. ~ Julia Quinn

Tomorrow is not a day. It's an attitude. It's a symbol of the human spirit's desire to keep getting better. It's that curious mind that asks 'what's next'?

Tomorrow is not ushered in by the cock's crow. Tomorrow dawns when today is better than yesterday...when we create something new. ~ Sola Kosoko

The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin's ~ Garry Kasparov