Diagrams Quotes

I know that carrot is not the right word. I've
seen dragonflies and beetles, flying around, stuck together, one on the back of the other; I know it's
called mating. I know about ovipositors, for laying eggs, on leaves, on caterpillars, on the surface of the
water; they're right out on the page, clearly labeled, on the diagrams of insects my father corrects at
home. I know about queen ants, and about the female praying mantises eating the males. None of this is
much help. I think of Mr. and Mrs. Smeath, stark-naked, with Mr. Smeath stuck to the back of Mrs.
Smeath. Such an image, even without the addition of flight, will not do. ~ Margaret Atwood

Normally, her mind was like a busy beach - all day long she would run back and forth, leaving footprints, building small mounds and castles, writing out ideas and diagrams with her fingers in the sand, but when the night tide came in, she would close her eyes and allow each wave of rhythmic breath to wash in and out over her day's accumulation, and before long the beach would be clear and empty, and she would drift off to sleep. ~ Gavriel Savit

Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares. ~ Charles Yu

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world ~ Robert Farrar Capon

The Mad Arab speaks of the Gates several times in his opening remarks, and then goes on to give quite emphatic instructions as to how the Gate should be opened, and when, and accompanied by what words, diagrams, etc. He also insists that, once having begun the process of going through the Gates, one should not stop along the way but continue straight through until all seven have been passed. The reason is clear: passing through only a few of the Gates is enough to let something Other in. ~ Simon

Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald's. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, "Because I am Feynman!" The young man went, "Ahhhhh!" ~ Richard P. Feynman

Questing is hard. Fortunately, Thomas is here to spoon-feed them answers. We're one step away from him giving them an instruction sheet by Ikea, with cartoonish diagrams and a little goddess-slaying allen wrench. ~ Jim C. Hines

the goal of a mapping effort isn't to complete an artifact, but to address the challenges the diagrams help discover and understand. Diagrams ~ James Kalbach

It was Ernie Haller, who had photographed Bette Davis in Jezebel and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, who was solely responsible for the visuals in Mildred Pierce, said Crawford. "Ernie was at the rehearsals. And so was Mr. [Anton] de Grot, who did the sets. I recall seeing Ernie's copy of the script and it was filled with notations and diagrams. I asked him if these were for special lights and he said, 'No, they're for special shadows.' Now, that threw me. I was a little apprehensive. I was used to the look of Metro, where everything, including the war pictures, was filmed in blazing white lights. Even if a person was dying there was no darkness. But when I saw the rushes of Mildred Pierce I realized what Ernie was doing. The shadows and half-lights, the way the sets were lit, together with the unusual angles of the camera, added considerably to the psychology of my character and to the mood and psychology of the film. And that, my dear, is film noir." "Mildred ~ Shaun Considine

More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves
our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. ~ Margaret Atwood

More than that, these adverts sell a dubious world view. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Microcellular Complexes, their Neutrillium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Végétal and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly under-represented in the sciences. ~ Ben Goldacre

Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer. ~ John Pipkin

The principles are exactly the same as those of QED: everything is built out of propagators, vertex diagrams, and coupling constants. But there are new actors and whole new plot lines, including one called QCD. ~ Leonard Susskind

You can see from a flow diagram who depends on you and whom you can depend on. You can now take joy in your work. ~ W. Edwards Deming

... our aim has been to provide anyone who is seriously interested with an introduction to the world of the archetypes, and to make this introduction as simple as possible. For this reason we have included ... a number of schemas, or diagrams, which as experience has shown, make things much easier for most people, though by no means for all. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, p.xii. ~ Erich Neumann

Another assumption is labelled 'regression', and here the reader encounters strange diagrams purporting to represent the direction of psychical energy within the mind. ~ Sigmund Freud

Still, this whole grim reaper thing should have come with a manual. Or a diagram of some kind. A flowchart would have been nice. ~ Darynda Jones

Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books ... I was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind. ~ Agnes Smedley

A noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die. ~ Daniel Burnham

(D) Write a political treatise - not to exceed 250,000 words or 500 sides, whichever is less - detailing your solution to stabilising relations in the region. Military force above brigade level is not permitted, nor is divine intervention. You may include diagrams. ~ Jonathan L. Howard

As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, "See my motor here; watch me reverse it." I cannot begin to describe my emotions. Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally, I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence ... ~ Nikola Tesla

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence. ~ Daniel Burnham

The newspapers kept stroking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. Evidence suggested that we were not doing well. Researchers gloomily agreed. Environment psychologists were interviewed. Damage had 'unwittingly' been done. There were 'feared lapses'. There were 'misconceptions' about potential. Situations had 'deteriorated'. Cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The populace was confounded, yet didn't care. Unpublished studies hinted that we were all paying a price. Scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be very worried. No one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. And no one argued back. No one challenged anything. Anxiety was soaking up most people's days. Everyone had become preoccupied with horror. Madness was fluttering everywhere. There was fifty years of research supporting this data. There were diagrams illustrating all of these problems – circles and hexagons and squares, different sections colored in lime or lilac or gray. Most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. You couldn't help being both afraid and fascinated. Reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn't seem very important in the long run. We were doomed. We deserved it. I was so tired. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Let's see, you will need a project plan, resource allocation, a timeline, test cycles, a budget, a contingency budget, lots of diagrams, flowcharts, a media release, a strategic vision, a charter, technical specifications, business rules, travel expenses, a development environment, deployment instructions, a user acceptance test, stationary, overtime schedule, a mock-up, prototypes ... "
"Tell me," she said, "did the people who built the pyramids have any of those?"
"Mostly, they had beer. Come to think of it, if there had been such a thing as a Business Analyst in ancient Egypt, then the hieroglyph for it would have been very graphical, if you know what I mean. ~ Sorin Suciu

A metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares. ~ Edward Tufte

Trenton," Nick said patiently, "it is simple: your pizzle, her quim, you both enjoy each other until you can't move. Nothing simpler. You have three children, for pity's sake, need I draw you diagrams? ~ Grace Burrowes

Between the onion and the parsley, therefore, I shall give the summation of my case for paying attention. Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God's image for nothing. The fruits of his attention can be seen in all the arts, crafts, and sciences. It can cost him time and effort, but it pays handsomely. If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil's Cathedral. Or how much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the inside of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses and the juice of pine trees to realize he could turn them all into the first fiddle. No doubt his wife urged him to get up and do something useful. I am sure that he was a stalwart enough lover of things to pay no attention at all to her nagging; but how wonderful it would have been if he had known what we know now about his dawdling. He could have silenced her with the greatest riposte of all time: Don't bother me; I am creating the possibility of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas.

But if man's attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him - every t ~ Robert Farrar Capon

Across the room, Hale smiled slightly. 'We can draw you a diagram if you need it.'
'No thanks,' Nick said. 'I think I've got everyone but you. ~ Ally Carter

I thought to do something good by giving an interview to People, which was exceedingly foolish of me. I asked Aaron [Asher] to tell you that the Good Intentions Paving Company had fucked up again. The young interviewer turned my opinions inside out, cut out the praises and made it all sound like disavowal, denunciation and excommunication. Well, we're both used to this kind of thing, and beyond shock. In agreeing to take the call, and make a statement I was simply muddle-headed. But if I had been interviewed by an angel for the Seraphim and Cherubim Weekly I'd have said, as I actually did say to the crooked little slut, that you were one of our very best and most interesting writers. I would have added that I was greatly stimulated and entertained by your last novel, and that of course after three decades I understood perfectly well what you were saying about the writer's trade - how could I not understand, or miss suffering the same pains. Still our diagrams are different, and the briefest description of the differences would be that you seem to have accepted the Freudian explanation: A writer is motivated by his desire for fame, money and sexual opportunities. Whereas I have never taken this trinity of motives seriously. But this is an explanatory note and I don't intend to make a rabbinic occasion of it. Please accept my regrets and apologies, also my best wishes. I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only hope that they will die off as the dee ~ Saul Bellow

Libchaber's spectrum diagrams showed vividly the precise pattern of period-doubling predicted by the theory. The spikes of new frequencies stand out clearly above the experimental noise. Feigenbaum's scaling theory predicted not only when and where the new frequencies would arrive but also how strong they would be-their amplitudes. ~ James Gleick

End of the sixties, Keith Blazey interested me to work on GdAlO3, an antiferromagnet on which he had done optic experiments. This started a fruitful cooperation on magnetic phase diagrams, which eventually brought me into the field of critical phenomena. ~ Heinrich Rohrer

Chickens are true creatures of zen - they live only and absolutely for the moment. Their actions one particular second will not necessarily have any influence or bearing on their actions in the next second, nor are they necessarily influenced by their actions of the prior second. Chicken thoughts arrive in their tiny mad little minds like flashes of a strobe light, each light being an action, each flashing with the brilliance of a not very brilliant thing. Each action utterly random. The complete randomness of chaos. Chickens are notorious escape artists, not due to their ability to devise cunning plans as they huddle together in their coop beneath a bare light bulb, scratching out complex diagrams in the dirt, but simply out of sheet unpredictability. They are the pachinko balls of the animal kingdom, effecting their escapes through the simple device of, say, turning left for no particular reason. ~ Jeffery Russell

If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language. ~ Hilaire Belloc

I really see no harm which can come of giving our children a little knowledge of physiology ... The instruction must be real, based upon observation, eked out by good explanatory diagrams and models, and conveyed by a teacher whose own knowledge has been acquired by a study of the facts; and not the mere catechismal parrot-work which too often usurps the place of elementary teaching. ~ Thomas Huxley

We've found that magic happens when we use big whiteboards to solve problems. As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome. A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team. ~ Jake Knapp

Through the judicious employment of symbols, diagrams, and calculations, mathematics enables us to acquire significant facts about extremely significant things (universal laws, even), not by first forging out into the cosmos with teams of scientists, but rather from the comforts and confines of coffee tables in our living rooms! p. 72 ~ G. Arnell Williams

And yet the city is not dead: the machines, the engines, the turbines continue to hum and vibrate, every Wheel's cogs are caught in the cogs of other wheels, trains run on tracks and signals on wires; and no human is there any longer to send or receive, to charge or discharge. The machines, which have long known they could do without men, have finally driven them out; and after a long exile, the wild animals have come back to occupy the territory wrested from the forest: foxes and martens wave their soft tails over the control panels starred with manometers and levers and gauges and diagrams; badgers and dormice luxuriate on batteries and magnetos. Man was necessary; now he is useless. For the world to receive information from the world and enjoy it, now computers and butterflies suffice. ~ Italo Calvino

He was raised by wolves", she said, "wolves with pressing engineering diagrams to draw. ~ Sam Starbuck

Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams. ~ Rudolf Arnheim

Unforunately, string theorists are, at present, at a loss to explain why ten dimensions are singled out. The answer lies deep within mathematics, in an area called modular functions. Whenever we manipulate the KSV loop diagrams created by interacting strings, we encounter these strange modular functions, where the number ten appears in the strangest places. These modular functions are as mysterious as the man who invented them, the mystic from the East. Perhaps if we better understood the work of this Indian genius, we would understand why we live in our present universe. ~ Michio Kaku

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me. ~ Antonin Artaud

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

I admit that these terms and the diagrams connected with them repel some readers, and fill others with the vain imagination that they have mastered difficult economics problems, when really they have done little more than learn the language in which parts of those problems can be expressed, and the machinery by which they can be handled. When the actual conditions of particular problems have not been studied, such knowledge is little better than a derrick for sinking oil-wells erected where there are no oil-bearing strata. ~ Alfred Marshall

I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something. ~ Neil Gaiman

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson