Fractions Quotes

MiSSS SScott
points to the numbers
along the wall.
I count up to twenty.
The class claps
on its own.
I'm furious,
unable to explain
I already learned
fractions and how to purify water.
So this is what dumb feels like. I hate, hate,
hate it. ~ Thanhha Lai

His lifetime was less than a fraction of a second in infinity. Or maybe he did not even exist; maybe human beings, the planets, everything in Creation were a dream ... an illusion. He smiled with humility when he remembered ... ~ Isabel Allende

Someday, in the moment of death, your whole life will pass before you. In a few fractions of a second-because time no longer applies-you will see many incidents from your life in order to learn. You will review your life with two questions in your consciousness: Could I have shown a little more courage in these moments? Could I have shown a little more love? You will see where you let fear stop you from expressing who you are, how you feel, or what you need. You will see whether you were able to expand into these moments, just a little, to show love, or whether you contracted. ~ Dan Millman

But to carve the Grand Canyon, Earth required millions of years. To excavate Meteor Crater, the universe, using a sixty-thousand-ton asteroid traveling upward of twenty miles per second, required a fraction of a second. No offense to Grand Canyon lovers, but for my money, Meteor Crater is the most amazing natural landmark in the world. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating and adventuring. Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime. ~ Herbert Otto Gille

If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy) ... ~ Doug Pierce

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

I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there. ~ Sebastiao Salgado

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence ... the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason ~ Steven Pinker

The whole universe was stilled as if listening for a voice. For the space of one heartbeat there was peace on earth. For one fraction of a moment there was no deed of violence wrought on earth, no hatred, no fire, no whirlwind, no pain, no fear. Existence rested against the heart of God, then sighed and journeyed again. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary. ~ Diana Gabaldon

We stare into each other's eyes and softly kiss speaking and saying more with the movement of our lips and the tips of our fingers than words will allow us to say. Words can't say this. The one word love means too little for what it is. It means everything and that is still not enough. It doesn't communicate even a fraction of the feelings involved. Love. The word is not enough for what it is. Love. Love. ~ James Frey

One day he finally got a math concept (converting between hours and fractions of hours, as I remember) he'd been struggling and struggling with, so I praised him up and down, and told him it was a good day, a day to remember. "It was just one minute," he said. "What's the rest of the day gonna do for me?" "Sometimes you only get one good minute a day," I said. "You just have to make the most of it. ~ Claire Cook

However divided we may feel within ourselves, it is the sum total of our warring fractions that make us who we are - fragmentary but indivisible. ~ Maria Popova

Stock prices have been quoted in fractions for two centuries, based on a system descended from Spanish pieces of eight. Each dollar was cut into eight bits worth 12.5 cents each.. ~ Charles Jaffe

I cut off a piece of meatball dripping with sauce. I tried to make my face right. I tried to smile and not grimace, tried to close my eyes in delight , not panic; tried to swallow, not gag. They watched me like hawks.
'Delicious,' I said, still chewing. They tasted like salt and shit and gristle.
'As good as you remember?'
'Better.'
I got through two. I drank a lot of water. I broke them down into fractions of themselves, sixteen more to go, fourteen more, eight, one. In my head I said sorry to grandad, and to the lamb or pig or mixture of creatures I was eating. I put my knife and fork together with four of them still swimming on my plate. ~ Jenny Valentine

Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about. ~ Dallas Willard

It's funny when I read the tabloids and they're reporting on only a fraction of the life I'm leading. ~ Zach Braff

In my sport, we're measured in millimeters and fractions of millimeters. ~ Matt Emmons

Education is thus a most power ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings? ~ Charles Francis Potter

There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Rigging is like Zen meditation. You must bend over the boat until your back is breaking, until your brain is filled with numbers and fractions of numbers, until you can accurately measure an oarlock's pitch without bothering to use the pitch meter. Only then will you see the way of eternal rigging happiness. ~ Brad Alan Lewis

If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution, you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to. ~ Richard Dawkins

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder. ~ Bill Bryson

It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know. ~ Joan Didion

Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

The same system that once gave us subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock market trades that occurred at fractions of a penny at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand. ~ Michael Lewis

I think there's always something about design that is going to be very difficult for more than a small fraction of people to really get. ~ Khoi Vinh

We reduce the deity to vulgar fractions. We place our own little ambitions and label them ?divine messages?. With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity. ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

We live our lives by measures of weeks, months, years, but the creatures we truly are, those are exposed in fractions of moments. ~ Joshua Gaylord

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction ... ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

We live but a fraction of our lives. ~ Henry David Thoreau

For an enzyme to be functional, it must fold into a precise three-dimensional shape. How such a complex folding can take place remains a mystery. A small chain of 150 amino acids making up an enzyme has an extraordinary number of possible folding configurations: if it tested 1,012 different configurations every second, it would take about 1,026 years to find the right one. . . . Yet, a denatured enzyme can refold within fractions of a second and then precisely react in a chemical reaction. . . . [I]t demonstrates a stunning complexity and harmony in the universe.21 ~ T. Colin Campbell

The irrevocable events of our lives happen in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds. ~ Greg Iles

With a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Iraq war, the US and Australia could ensure every starving, sunken-eyed child on the planet could be well fed, have clean water and sanitation and a local school to go to. ~ Bob Brown

You have a "turn" every time you have an opportunity to choose. But most of us only see a tiny fraction of the choices we have. ~ John Ortberg

Every person has only so much attention to give, and politics and government takes up only a fraction of what it did 25 years ago. ~ Robert Teeter

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph. ~ Sally Mann

All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across. ~ Julian Simon

For every child who wants to be accepted wholly and loved unconditionally, there are others who simply want to be accepted for who they are, even if they receive only a fraction of love. I don't think one cancels out the other. I don't believe that there is any right or wrong ... we simply coexist. ~ Natsuki Takaya

I don't think writers -in general- ever achieve the fame of movie stars. For the simple reason that only a fraction of the population reads. But I guess there are exceptions. ~ Augusten Burroughs

Five out of four people have trouble with fractions. ~ Steven Wright

I wrote these letters in the mornings before work, in the library, during my sessions of prolonged loitering in Commons, where I remained every evening until asked to leave by the janitor. It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overheard, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in my life, ever. ~ Donna Tartt

Despite its widespread acceptance and the number of lives it has improved, what most of us in the West commonly associate with yoga represents only the tip of the iceberg that is yoga, a tiny fraction of what is a vast and profound science. ~ Rod Stryker

It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overhead, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in the life, ever. ~ Donna Tartt

In any series of elements to be controlled, a selected small fraction, in terms of numbers of elements, always accounts for a large fraction in terms of effect. ~ Vilfredo Pareto

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness? ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix. ~ Kenneth P. Thompson

You have to realize that people who bother to log on to anything and talk about a television show is a very specific fraction of the audience. It's not the general audience, so you can't get too crazy listening to just that. That's not representative, but they are the most dedicated. ~ Ronald D. Moore

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

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state. ~ Milton Friedman

What the American family does not want is to pay an increasing fraction of their budget, their precious dollars, for energy costs. ~ Steven Chu

If even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and drug rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to users could be dramatic. ~ Milton Friedman

Each finite creature can reflect only a fraction of the divine nature; thus, in the diversity of His creatures, God's infinity, unity and oneness appear to be broken into an effulfgence of manifold rays. ~ Edith Stein

A reciprocal of a fraction is found by flipping it upside down. If you want the reciprocal of a mixed number or a whole number, just convert it to an improper fraction, and then flip it! ~ Danica McKellar

The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run, these are the only people who count. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water. ~ Richard Dawkins

Past, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy ... Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one-the knowledge and the dream. ~ Ambrose Bierce

When you're younger, you think of your age in fractions. 4 1/2, 5 1/2. You don't hear 36 1/2. You become 2, you turn 40, you reach 50, you make it to 60. By now you're going so fast you hit 70! ~ Mark Lowry

I had now arrived at my seventeenth year, and had attained my full height, a fraction over six feet. I was well endowed with youthful energy, and was of an extremely sanguine temperament. ~ Henry Bessemer

Maybe the reality-based fractions of red and blue America are reaching a sort of consensus: Just as Republicans are beginning to get why George Bush makes so many Americans want to rip their hair out, a lot of Democrats have finally, viscerally come to understand Clinton-loathing. Mutual, symmetrical disillusionment; it's a start. ~ Kurt Andersen

When you see that you are not the body, that the body comprises only a small fraction of the aggregate of your awareness, then death is no fear, life is no fear, there is no fear. ~ Frederick Lenz

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. ~ Andre Breton

Somewhere in the endless spinning of eternity that one, tiny, fraction of a second where our lips met is lost forever. ~ Lauren Oliver

Communistic evolution, according to the Senate committee that examined it, is responsible for 135 million deaths in peacetime. There's no religion that has a tiny fraction of that many deaths on its conscience. There are scientists who will admit that there's not one iota of scientific evidence to support it. ~ D. James Kennedy

Goals should be broken down into parts, and then think over the plan of their implementation ~ Sunday Adelaja

Over half a million women are raped in this country every year, and only a fraction of them report it because they're too ashamed. It's a really screwed up world, but its not your fault, and what happened to you, it doesn't make you the monster. ~ Mariska Hargitay

All of the physical universes put together, stretching out endlessly, are only a fraction of the totality of reality. In other words, all of the physical universes are only part of the physical dimensional plane, and there are thousands of dimensional planes. ~ Frederick Lenz

Later: I'm seeing everything in pieces and fractions, like a series of photographs shuffled randomly together. ~ Lauren Oliver

The different policies reduce damages by only a modest amount. Indeed, one of the surprises is how little the policies affect the damages from global warming. The reasons are that, because there is so much inertia in the climate system and because the Protocol reduced the global temperature increase by only a fraction of a degree over the next century. ~ Henry Sylvester Jacoby

Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding. ~ Thomas Pynchon

When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction. ~ Richard Heinberg

This much I'm sure of. Chances for winning = 1 - (# of math students playing)/ (# of math students cheering). That's a fraction. ~ Danica McKellar

If there were a mile high mountain of granite, and once every ten-thousand years a bird flew past and brushed it with a feather, by the time that mountain was worn away, a fraction of a second would have passed in the context of eternity ~ Lois Duncan

I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth. ~ Warren Buffett

Without leadership ability,a person's impact is only a fraction of what it could be with good leadership. ~ John C. Maxwell

The factor most ignored in discussing interstellar flight is the kinetic energy that must be invested in the ship to make its tons of matter move at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. ~ Barney Oliver

He had no one but himself to blame, for he'd opened himself up to it. Just a fraction at first, like a crack in a window. But the funny thing was, once
you welcomed in a breeze, there was no stopping what came next. A wind, a storm, thunder and lightning, until you could no longer reach the
window to close it - and didn't really want to anyway. That's what this new darkness was. Evil in its purest form ...
-Paris ~ Gena Showalter

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me. ~ Patricia McCormick

Love is insistent on its own continuation. Every fraction of a second, someone somewhere falls in love, a former enemy becomes a friend, and a newborn baby is born into the world. ~ Marianne Williamson

I might be more kindly disposed to this ultra-secular notion that whenever bad things happen someone must be held accountable if a curious little halo of blamelessness did not seem to surround those very people who perceive themselves as bordered on every side by agents of wickedness. That is, it seems to be the same folks who are inclined to sue builders who did not perfectly protect them from the depredations of an earthquake who will be the first to claim that their son failed his math test because of attention deficit disorder, and not because he spent the night before at a video arcade instead of studying complex fractions. ~ Lionel Shriver

Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables ... ~ Anne Tyler

On the whole, at least in the author's experience, the preparation of species-specific antiserum fractions and the differentiation of closely related species with precipitin sera for serum proteins does not succeed so regularly as with agglutinins and lysins for blood cells. This may be due to the fact that in the evolutional scale the proteins undergo continuous variations whereas cell antigens are subject to sudden changes not linked by intermediary stages. ~ Karl Landsteiner

A very receptive state of mind ... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it. ~ Minor White

The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. ~ George Santayana

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions. ~ Charles Dickens

During the year, our schools are busy slashing P.E. and recess to make more time for math. During the summer, we get ourselves worked into a tizzy that our children will forget their fractions. ~ Darell Hammond

Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas. ~ Aldo Leopold

There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures neatly divided into the fractions of an inch that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter or fidelity of a sister or the capacity of a housekeeper. ~ Virginia Woolf

In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation. ~ John Tukey

Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions. ~ Paul Gauguin

Multiplication is vexation, division is as bad, the rule of three perplexes me and fractions drive me mad!
(the story girl) ~ L.M. Montgomery

We have to make education a priority, but all this debate about education and testing is almost beside the point. We only spend a fraction of the money on education that we spend on arms buildups. Under a Kucinich administration, education becomes one of the top domestic priorities. We put money into it. We cause the government to be vitally involved in it. And we make sure our children have the love of knowledge. ~ Dennis Kucinich

But how can you love a person who is not whole? Because you, like the moon, are not only beautiful when full. In all of your phases and fractions and ivory-white pieces, I love you. ~ Beau Taplin

The Sun and the Moon

Aim for a love
that reminds you
of the devotion
the sun has to the moon.
Whether she is in fractions
or she is whole,
he still shrouds his intense light
in the darkness of the night.
To give her the entire sky,
without judgment,
so she can shine in any way she wants to.
You deserve someone
who adores you
on the days you are
in broken fragments too.
You deserve someone
who lets you glow
in every way
you need to. ~ Nikita Gill

Our physical senses and our embodied brains allow us to perceive only a small fraction of reality. We cannot see microbes or untraviolet light, for example. We can hear only a small range of sounds. When we try to describe the otherworld of energies and spirits, we are limited not only by our bodily constraints but by the expectations, assumptions, and language patterns ingrained in us by the culture we were raised in. ~ Starhawk