Deadhouse Gates Quotes

We are not simple creatures. You dream that with memories will come knowledge, and from knowledge, understanding. But for every answer you find, a thousand new questions arise. All that we are has lead us to where we are, but tells us little of where we're going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off. ~ Steven Erikson

She watched with morbid fascination as they gathered at the stumps at the ends of the man's wrists, the old scar tissue the only place on him unclaimed by Fener, but the paths the sprites took to those stumps touched not a single tattooed line. The flies dance a dance of avoidance - but for all that, they were eager to dance. ~ Steven Erikson

People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth. ~ Steven Erikson

A civilization can easily drown in what it knows as in what doesn't know. Consider,' he continued, Gotho's Folly. Gotho's curse was in being too aware - of everything. Every permutation, every potential. Enough to poison every scan he cast on the world. It availed him naught, and worse, he was aware of even that. ~ Steven Erikson

He swam at my feet,
Powerful arms in broad strokes
Sweeping the sand.
So I asked this man,
What seas do you swim?
And to this he answered,
'I have seen shells and the like
On this desert floor,
So I swim this land's memory
Thus honouring its past,'
Is the journey far, queried I.
'I cannot say,' he replied,
'For I shall drown long before
I am done.'
Sayings of the Fool
Thenys Bule
Steven Erikson - Malazan Book of the Fallen 02
Deadhouse Gates ~ Steven Erikson

Tis the grand stupidity of our kind, dear Cutter, to see all the errors of our ways, yet find in ourselves the inability to do anything about them. We sit, dumbfounded by despair, and for all our ingenuity, our perceptivity, for all our extraordinary capacity to see the truth of things, we hunker down like snails in a flood, sucked tight to our precious pebble, fearing the moment is is dislodged beneath us. Until that terrible calamity, we do nothing but cling.
"Can you even imagine a world where all crimes are punished? Where justice is truly blind and holds out no hands happy to yield to the weight of coin and influence? Where one takes responsibility for his or her mistakes, acts of negligence, the deadly consequences of indifference or laziness? Nay, instead we slip and duck, dance and dodge, dance the dodge slip duck dance, feet ablur. Ourselves transformed into shadows that flit in chaotic discord. We are indeed masters of evasion--no doubt originally a survival trait, at least in the physical sense, but to have such instincts applied to the soul is perhaps our most egregious crime against morality. What we will do so that we may continue living with ourselves. In this we might assert that a survival trait can ultimately prove its own antithesis, and in the cancelling out thereof, why, we are left with the blank, dull, vacuous expression that Kruppe sees before him."
~Kruppe, ~ Steven Erikson

The software is where the magic is. If you're going to have all this power be simple enough, appealing enough and cool enough, it's going to be because the software is right. ~ Bill Gates

We could spend time together during the day and just kind of talk and enjoy each other and enjoy the moment. But it was interesting we both knew that once you walk through the gates of that stadium, then it was on, the game was on. ~ Ralph Boston

How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose. ~ Bill Gates

I can see it now: Osama bin Laden goes up to the pearly gates where George Washington comes out, starts beating him and is then joined by 70 other members of the Continental Congress. Osama will say, Hey, wait! Where are my 71 virgins? And George will reply It's 71 Virginians, you asshole! ~ Robin Williams

In the developing world, it's about time that women are on the agenda. For instance, 80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men. ~ Melinda Gates

Bill Gates, who is the classic computer nerd, as opposed to Steve who is, like the coolest guy in the world. And who is really doing things to make the world a better place? ~ Alex Gibney

I want to spend my time between the creation of ideas and the creation of things. ~ Theaster Gates

As a child I'd longed for Thomas Stone or at least the idea of him. So many mornings I waited for him at the gates of Missing. I saw that vigil now as necessary, a prerequisite for my insides to harden and cure just like the willow of a cricket bat must cure to be ready for a lifetime of knocks. That was the lesson at Missing's gates: the world does not owe you and neither does your father. ~ Abraham Verghese

Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. ~ Melinda Gates

In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation ~ Charles Petzold

Bill Gates is said to be Aspergian. Musician Glenn Gould is said to have been Aspergian, along with scientist Albert Einstein, actor Dan Aykroyd, writer Isaac Asimov, and movie director Alfred Hitchcock. As adults, none of those people would be described as disabled, but they were certainly eccentric and different. ~ John Elder Robison

If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds. ~ Plato

Happiness is like those palaces in fairytales whose gates are guarded by dragons: We must fight in order to conquer it. ~ Alexandre Dumas

A shortage of airports runways and gates along outmoded air traffic control systems have made U.S. air travel the most congested in the world. ~ Ray LaHood

All our institutions rest upon business. Without it we should not have schools, colleges, churches, parks, playgrounds, pavements, books, libraries, art, music, or anything else that we value. ~ Charles Gates, Jr.

The potency of prayer hath subdued the strength of fire; it hath bridled the rage of lions, hushed anarchy to rest, extinguished wars, appeased the elements, expelled demons, burst the chains of death, expanded the gates of heaven, assuaged diseases, repelled frauds, rescued cities from destruction, stayed the sun in its course, and arrested the progress of the thunderbolt. ~ John Chrysostom

Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It's what propels societies forward. ~ Melinda Gates

I really love it in Belfast. I always stay in the most bombed hotel, the Europa! ~ Gareth Gates

Ridiculous sums of money can be confusing. ~ Bill Gates

Being yourself sounds like a saccharin prescription for how to make it in an aggressive culture but it's not as sweet as it sounds. It means not acting in a way that is false just to fit in. It's expressing your talent, values, and opinions in your style, defending your rights, and never sacrificing yourself respect. That is power. ~ Melinda Gates

A company's ability to respond to an unplanned event, good or bad is a prime indicator of its ability to compete. ~ Bill Gates

My first experience with the creative was mopping tar. If you let the tar sit, it can get cold pretty quickly. And because the mops are so heavy, you've got to dip it and then ride it really fast. ~ Theaster Gates

We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.
These seem like contradictory principles, but they are not. Free will can take us far, suggests Dr. Schwartz's research, but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.
We might call this the "rubber band theory" of personality. We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only so much. ~ Susan Cain

The yearn of the faithful
The call of the wild
Two conflicting worlds collide
Steadfast in a world spiraling out of control.
One foot to the earth
One head in the clouds ~ Morris R. Gates

The lake i had grown up on was protected by thousands of acres of private forests. It kept out the reality of a harsher world and surrounded me with fun and privilege ~ Michael Gates Gill

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty. ~ Bill Gates

The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahmanistic, or what not. Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods, nothing but pain and persecution, have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder. Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon the earth. ~ Emma Goldman

For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn't the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn't centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don't yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn't falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn't distort the enduring realities of black poverty. ~ Henry Louis Gates

All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan. ~ Henry Louis Gates

If we [the USA] don't innovate in education, it's literally going to mean less people get to go have that education at a time when more people are going to want it. We've got to put courses out on the Web, we've got to put interactive learning out on the Web. ~ Bill Gates

That's why there are ten gates to pass through before you reach the garden. If life were easy there would be one gate. There would be no gates at all. ~ Alice Hoffman

I could say 'I love you' - and I do." Raising his lids, he met her gaze. "But it's not that simple… not for me. I never wanted a wife." He drew in a breath. "I never wanted to love - not you, not any woman. I never wanted to risk it - never wanted to be forced to find out if I could handle the strain. In my family, loving's not easy - it's not a simple sunny thing that makes one merely happy. Love for us - for me - was always going to be dramatic - powerful, unsettling - an ungovernable force. A force that controls me, not the other way about. I knew I wouldn't like it - " His eyes met hers. "And I don't. But… it isn't, it appears, something I have a choice about."

His lips twisted. "I thought I was safe - that I had defenses in place, strong and inviolable, far too steely for any mere woman to break through. And none did,"not for years." He paused. "Until you.

"I can't remember inviting you in, or ever opening the gates - I just turned around one day and you were there - a part of me." He hesitated, studying her eyes, then his face hardened, his voice deepened. "I don't know what will convince you, but I won't ever let you go. You're mine - the only woman I could ever imagine marrying. You can share my life. You know a hock from a fetlock - you know as much about riding as I do. You can be a partner in my enterprises, not a distant spectator standing at the periphery. You'll stand at the center of it all, by my side. ~ Stephanie Laurens

Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates. ~ John Ruskin

It is self-love and its offspring self-deception, which shut the gates of heaven, and lead men, as if in a delicious dream, to hell. ~ Christian Scriver

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used - if necessary, terror, slaughter. ~ Isaiah Berlin

I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence. ~ Bill Gates

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal. ~ Stewart Alsop

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them passes a wild motley throng. Men from Volga and Tartar steppes. Featureless figures from the Hoang-ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav, Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws, In street and alley what strange tongues are these, Accents of menace in our ear, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew. - THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH, "UNGUARDED GATES," 1882 ~ Neil Gaiman