Decimals Quotes

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent. ~ Randall Jarrell

She hums. And when she lifts her gaze to look me in the eye, it's a challenge not to humiliate myself.I wind her hair around my hand and quietly convert carpentry fractions into decimals. Three eighths is .375. Five eighths is…
She gives a good, hard suck.
"POINT SIX TWO FIVE!" I bellow.
Her mouth makes a popping sound as she releases me. "Come again?"
"I'm trying not to," I gasp. ~ Sarina Bowen

In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals. ~ James C. Maxwell

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. ~ Sylvia Plath

I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me. ~ Bill Nye

So Aunt Jillian quit her job and hitched her wagon to Brant. Lived off food stamps and her savings account in a spare bedroom at Brant's house for two years. Then she brokered their first deal and all of the Sharps moved their bank account decimals seven places to the right. ~ Alessandra Torre

The finite interval 0-1 on the Number Line is thus even more inconceivably crowded. There's not only an infinite number of infinite sequences of fractions, but also an infinite number of surds, each of which is itself numerically inexpressible except as an infinite sequence of nonperiodic decimals. Let's pause to consider the vertiginous levels of abstraction involved here. If the human CPU cannot apprehend or even really conceive of (infinity)s, an infinite number of individual members of which are themselves not finitely expressible, all in an interval so finite- and innocent-looking we use it in little kids' classrooms. All of which is just resoundingly weird. ~ David Foster Wallace

Note for a Textbook

The question is never answered, never resolved,
The circle of love and anger never squared,
The stubborn instinct not translated yet
In decimals, accurate and predictable
In union dues or payroll cuts or blood...

Always a symbol lost in the lovely theorem,
A fraction that will not fit in the sum of the system,
A jutting thrust in the graph of the commissar's forecast,
A troublesome blank in gauleiter's careful accounting,
An awkward hitch in the plans of the second vice-president.

The answers worked on the slate are never the same,
And the answers proved in the back of the book are wrong. ~ Charles Bruce

Black folks are judged by quantity, not quality. It's a decimal point or figure. How different is that from slavery? There's no moral code, it's just about successful business for America. ~ Chuck D

I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second ... to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different-in some decimal place-for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish. ~ John Tukey

For the record, do I know anyone not a demon or a freak?" – Nick
"Yes, you do. Not sure if Bubba and Mark go into the latter or not, though. I'm too tired to mentally categorize them. You figure it out, and I'll go with your Dewey decimal." – Caleb ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system. ~ Will Durant