Intermittent Quotes

From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans-we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the "three meals a day," "eat in moderation" idea has tested it empirically to see whether it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts.

But Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity) knew it, of course-just as they knew the need for debt avoidance-and so they had fast days. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

question. On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had met this moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia. Captain Baker thought at first that he was in the presence of an unknown sandbank; he even prepared to determine its exact position when two columns of water, projected by the mysterious object, shot with a hissing noise a hundred and fifty feet up into the air. Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then, which threw up from ~ Jules Verne

I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember. ~ Patti Smith

He had long been curious at leaders intermittent calls for a return to past values and had tested the notion by trying to build a house from the sky downwards ~ Steve Aylett

Speaking generally, however, when you interact with someone else, you are doing outer work (physical time, play time, connecting time) ... as many sociologists have pointed out, this area of life used to dominate everyday existence, at a time when families sat around the fire of an evening and ate every meal together.
That's no longer true. Families today are often loose constellations. Contact is intermittent and rushed. everyone has their own space. Activity is scattered all around town, not confined to the home. Cars have made everyone mobile, but central heating may be the most powerful force in shaping modern society. ~ Deepak Chopra

At some point in the night she had a dream. Or it was possible that she was partially awake, and was only remembering a dream? She was alone among the rocks on a dark coast beside the sea. The water surged upward and fell back languidly, and in the distance she heard surf breaking slowly on a sandy shore. It was comforting to be this close to the surface of the ocean and gaze at the intimate nocturnal details of its swelling and ebbing. And as she listened to the faraway breakers rolling up onto the beach, she became aware of another sound entwined with the intermittent crash of waves: a vast horizontal whisper across the bossom of the sea, carrying an ever-repeated phrase, regular as a lighthouse flashing: Dawn will be breaking soon. She listened a long time: again and again the scarcely audible words were whispered across the moving water. A great weight was being lifted slowly from her; little by little her happiness became more complete, and she awoke. Then she lay for a few minutes marveling the dream, and once again fell asleep. ~ Paul Bowles

The study of history reveals that human progress has not been continuous and regular, but intermittent and spasmodic, often depending upon apparently accidental causes. It is difficult to get a cross-section view of society at any given stage. ~ Charles A. Beard

As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest. ~ Michael Shermer

Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes?It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist. ~ A.S. Byatt

The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. ~ Erik Larson

This intermittent desire to desire unselfishness was, of course, in itself entirely selfish. ~ Adam O'Fallon Price

Longing is the call of ney to ney to restore the direction broken by the horses' hooves in a military campaign. It is an intermittent ailment, neither contagious nor lethal, even when it takes the form of an epidemic. It is an invitation to stay up late with the lonesome and an excuse not to be on equal footing with train passengers who know their own addresses well. It is the transparent fabric of that beautiful nothingness, gathered to roast the coffee of wakefulness for the dreams of strangers. ~ Mahmoud Darwish

In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the
sufferer, but which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary
instincts accidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young
man's gayety, dispels his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks for a cause to explain his
suspended faculties, he can find it only in the presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet
that image pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by
an unaccustomed tragic earnestness and a new capacity for
suffering and joy.
If the passion be strong there is no previous interest or duty that
will be remembered before it; if it be lasting the whole life may
be reorganized by it, it may impose new habits, other manners,
and another religion.
Yet what is the root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct,
normally intermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which
has here managed to dominate a human soul and to enlist all the
mental powers in its more or less permanent service, upsetting
their usual equilibrium.
This madness, however, inspires method; and for the first time,
perhaps, in his life, the man has something to live for. ~ George Santayana

One of the reasons intermittent fasting can work is that it reconnects you with what hunger feels like. ~ Chris Mohr

Freedom of choice comes at the price of intermittent insanity. ~ Abram Gitspof

Love is intermittent reinforcement with spouses and children alike. The child is love-bombed when the narcissist feels the child reflects their false self. The moment the child fails to do so, the narcissistic parent blithely discards them. ~ M. Wakefield

Mental life consists, according to the textbooks, of thought and feeling, according to the poets, of addressing an inner voice (or voices), and according to the dramatists, of internal monologues. In my experience however it consists mainly of intermittent silences, and humming. Humming accompanies habitual and semi-automatic activities, as well as stoppages. Humming accompanies a sort of incomplete concentration on oneself. Humming is characteristic of psychological states in which we are not exactly miserable, and states in which we are not exactly ecstatic. Which amounts I think to more or less always. ~ Miroslav Holub

'Freedom dieters' often do well with programs that incorporate pretty basic rules, like intermittent fasting - simply don't eat for X period of time, then eat healthy foods. Very simple. ~ John Romaniello

Even if three centuries of outsider status and intermittent persecution had tested the endurance of individuals and communities, coping with the patronage of a newly Christian emperor posed a challenge. The challenge was all the more threatening for its moral complexity. Was it right for the churches to accept the Emperor's favour, knowing full well that if they did so, they also tacitly accepted his right, so evident in all other aspects of life in the Roman Empire, to call the shots? ~ Kate Cooper

And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch - it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to another - but rather, it is everything you leave behind. At that moment.
Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts - that they were on the edge of lifelong happiness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow. It was as if, long ago, a part of him had broken off inside, and now finally, he recognised the dangerous fragment that had been floating in his system, causing him intermittent pain over the years. As if he could now say of that ache: Ah. It was you. ~ Anne Michaels

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dor beetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window.
[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train.] ~ Virginia Woolf

Obama's stern demeanor punctuated by intermittent flashes of his wide, relaxing smile is his greatest weapon in defusing pent-up angst. ~ Tina Brown

My new life was marking me. It was happening so quickly. There were intermittent spells of resistance, during which I'd pluck and moisturize and exfoliate, and then there was a period of grieving for my old self, who seemed to be disappearing toward the horizon, and then I relaxed into it. ~ Kristin Kimball

Please guide this ship away from harm and make her safe - keep her warm...
Attention and lust all she desires - and the time it takes to stoke those fires
You may invite her to your lair with sensuousness and a passionate flair
her draw irresistible, hunger insatiable - your thoughts no more your own

For she has taken place there, in you, the queen upon her throne.....

Sensual bliss one of many rewards, but stolen heart and pointy swords
Your skills and gift of most import, for when they wane, pain, and love's cut short....
May crack your inner strength some day and truly steal your time (heart) away....
For a muse but one of intermittent bliss starting from the first kiss
And ending only when she's done - then you're left alone as one..... ~ Lady Blossom

Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility. ~ Tom Hiddleston

Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success. ~ Richard M. Weaver

The intermittent rays of light interrupted by pockets of dark patches create an almost mystical look ~ Unknown

Over the course of seventy years, Isobel had learned how indiscriminately unkind Life could be. She also knew that cataloguing and reviewing examples of such cruelty was, in itself, a masochistic exercise. One that she'd habitually and rigorously trained herself to refrain from engaging in. Better to focus on those events that demonstrated the grace and beauty with which Life could perform, without rival, when bestowing on her captive audience a distinctively intermittent yet consistently welcomed generosity of spirit. ~ Ella J. Fraser

No emotion, any more than a wave, can long retain its own individual form. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Testing intermittent use (3 times a week), a recent study showed a similar result with zolpidem (Ambien). After several weeks of use, those taking this sleeping pill were sleeping better when they took the drug but then worse when they skipped it.[26] Overall, after several weeks of use, their sleep was averaging no better than a group taking inactive placebo. ~ Daniel F. Kripke

The main problem with solar on the Earth's surface is that it is so intermittent, and we don't have decent storage yet. ~ Stewart Brand

Through the door came a being of intense vivacity, impeccable sartorial integrity, and intermittent intelligibility. ~ Terry Bisson

Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man's beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, ~ Richard Adams

A novelist can shift view-point if it comes off ... Indeed, this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge - I find one of the great advantages of the novel-form ... this intermittence lends in the long run variety and colour to the experiences we receive. ~ E. M. Forster

Random intermittent positive reinforcement can be found in gambling... and bad relationships. ~ Jose N Harris

Sincere repentance is continual. Believers repent until their dying day. This dropping well is not intermittent. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Music never stops; it is only the listening that is intermittent. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Wit is an intermittent fountain; kindness is a perennial spring. ~ Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

I call it your source-fracture wound, the original break in your heart from long ago. It may have happened in an instant--a little rejection, a shocking abandonment, or a slight misattunement that suddenly made you realize how alone you were in this world. Or perhaps it was a bit-bu-bit splintering as over the years you met with an intermittent meanness, an unpredictable but repetitive abuse, or a neglect that stole your childhood inches at a time. Wherever, however, or whenever it happened, one thing we can assume is that no adult helped you make accurate meaning of your confusing and painful experience. No grown up sat you down and lovingly said, "No, honey, it's not that you're stupid. It's that your big brother is scared and insecure." "It's not that you don't matter, angel. It's that Daddy has a drinking problem and needs help." "It's not that you're not enough. It's that Mommy has clinical depression, dear, and it's neither your fault nor yours to fix." Without this mature presence to help explain to you what was happening to your little world, you probably came to some pretty strong and wrong conclusions about who you were and what was possible for you to have in life. And those conclusions became a habit of consciousness, a filter through which you interpret and then respond to the events of your life, making your grief all the more complex. ~ Katherine Woodward Thomas

The take-home message: Even if you achieve only intermittent reinforcement - that is, you experience success only sometimes - having some successes will make your behavior much more resilient, and you'll be less likely to give up. Therefore, whenever you start something, focus on getting your first few successes. ~ Alice Boyes

Sitting there on the deck during intermittent periods of dozing I thought that it's really hard on a soul to admit how much of life we have spent being full of shit. ~ Jim Harrison

He was again showing recklessness in giving voice to these spasmodic outbursts of worldly knowledge. The champagne perhaps caused this intermittent pulling aside of the curtain that concealed some, apparently considerable, volume of practical information about unlikely people: a little storehouse, the existence of which he was normally unwilling to admit, yet preserved safely at the back of his mind in case of need. ~ Anthony Powell

It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room. I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mine alike go roaming. A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid, say the precepts of our masters, and even more so their examples.

A thousand poets drag and languish prosaically; but the best ancient prose - and I scatter it here indiscriminately as verse - shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and gives the effect of its frenzy. To poetry we must certainly concede mastery and preeminence in speech. The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in a frenzy whatever comes into his mouth, like the spout of a fountain, without ruminating and weighing it; and from him escape things of different colors and contradictory substance in an intermittent flow. He himself is utterly poetic, and the old theology is poetry, the scholars say, and the first philosophy. It is the original language of the Gods. ~ Michel De Montaigne

I saw that I had forgotten how beautiful the drive to Thunder Bay was; the towering sighing groves of fragrant Norway pines, the broad expanses of clean white sand, the sea gulls, always the endlessly wheeling sea gulls; an occasional bald eagle seeming bent on soaring straight up to heaven; the intermittent craggy and pine-clad granite or sandstone hills, sometimes rising gauntly to the dignity of small mountains, then again, sudden stretches of sand or more majestic Norway pines -- and always, of course, the vast glittering heaving lake, the world's largest inland sea, as treacherous and deceitful as a spurned woman, either caressing or raging at the shore, more often turbulent than not, but today on its best company manners, presenting the falsely placid aspect of a mill pond. ~ Robert Traver

The noise of the city is very loud, in recollection it's like the sound track of a film turned up too high, deafening. I remember clearly, the room is dark, we don't speak, it's surrounded by the continuous din of the city, caught up in the city, swept along with it. There are no panes in the windows, just shutters and blinds. On the blinds you can see the shadows of people going by in the sunlight on the sidewalks. Great crowds of them always...

[...] Outside it's the end of the day, you can tell by the sound of the voices, the sound of more and more passers-by, more and more miscellaneous. It's a city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night. And night is beginning now, with the setting sun.

The bed is separated from the city by those slatted shutters, that cotton blind. There's nothing solid separating us from other people. They don't know of our existence. We glimpse something of theirs, the sum of their voices, of their movements, like the intermittent hoot of a siren, mournful, dim. ~ Marguerite Duras

I watched her.
I was a ghost in the woods, silent, still, cold. I was winter embodied, the frigid wind given physical form. I stood near the edge of the woods, where the trees began to thin, and scented the air: mostly dead smells to find this time of the season. The bite of conifer, the musk of wolf, the sweetness of her, nothing else to smell.
She stood in the doorway for the space of several breaths. Her face was turned towards the trees, but I was invisible, intangible, nothing but eyes in the woods. The intermittent breeze carried her scent to me again and again, singing in another language of memories from another form.
Finally, finally, she stepped on the deck and pressed the first footprint into the snow of the yard.
And I was right here, almost right within reach, but still one thousand miles away. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We are tomorrow's past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks - a ship, a cottage, sun and moon, a nosegay. The dial turns, the ship rides up and sinks again, the yellow painted sun has set, and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go. The whirr of the spinning wheels has ceased in our parlours, and we hear no more the treadles of the loom, the swift, silken noise of the flung shuttle, the intermittent thud of the batten. But the imagination hears them, and theirs is the melody of romance." ~ from Mary Webb's introduction to her novel Precious Bane. ~ Mary Webb

If you want to live long, sleep more and eat less ... Intermittent fasting was associated with more than a 40 percent reduction in heart disease risk in a study of 448 people published in the American Journal of Cardiology reporting that 'most diseases, including cancer, diabetes and even neurodegenerative illnesses, are forstalled' by caloric reduction. ~ Christopher Ryan

Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause.
It is unending.
I heave myself over the final lip and strain to pull myself clear of the edge.
I clear the deep powder snow from in front of my face. I lie there hyperventilating.
Then I clear my mask of the ice that my breath has formed in the freezing air.
I unclip off the rope while still crouching. The line is now clear for Neil to follow up.
I get to my feet and start staggering onward.
I can see this distant cluster of prayer flags semisubmerged in the snow. Gently flapping in the wind, I know that these flags mark the true summit--the place of dreams.
I feel this sudden surge of energy beginning to rise within me.
It is adrenaline coursing around my veins and muscles.
I have never felt so strong--and yet so weak--all at the same time.
Intermittent waves of adrenaline and fatigue come and go as my body struggles to sustain the intensity of these final moments.
I find it strangely ironic that the very last part of this immense climb is so gentle a slope.
A sweeping curve--curling along the crest of the ridge toward the summit.
Thank God.
It feels like the mountain is beckoning me up. For the first time, willing me to climb up onto the roof of the world.
I try to count the steps as I move, but my counting becomes confused.
I am now breathing and gasping like a wild animal in an attempt to devour the oxygen that seeps into my mask.< ~ Bear Grylls

Their reflections merged together, rippling on the dark surface of the mirror that recorded only the intermittent pale blurs of their faces and the gracious, rocking-chair, three-hour rhythm of their bodies, spinning between the waltzing walls. Laughing, breathless, they whirled to the invisible rhetoric of a hundred violins. The patches of candlelight illuminated only their feet for odd moments, and then they were back, dancing in darkness again. They neared the extravagant climax of the dance.
'Da – dee dee da – dee da! dum, dum!'
But when the time came for parting and bowing and curtseying to one another, Honeybuzzard instead convulsively crushed his partner in a fierce embrace, pressing his sweating face deeply into the other's shoulder, straining bruising fingers into neck and back, wet mouth fastened on his throat, clinging as if he would never let go until the round world toppled into the sun and the last bell-tower rang midnight and everything was extinguished. ~ Angela Carter

This leads to a pattern in which the child cries out and either gets nothing or gets an insufficient or intermittent response. Then the child becomes exhausted and collapses, either from depleted energy or giving up to conserve a sliver of energy (Lowen, 1971). It is often at this point--collapse--that the caregiver eventually takes care of the child. This "teaches" the child that he or she has no effect on the world and that nurturance comes when they are collapsed. ~ Elliot Greene

Overeating regularly eventually leads to underliving. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When is it that you can say you believe? It's tricky, since belief is often so intermittent; is so often checkered through or stippled through with disbelief; is so much something come upon, or sensed out of the corner of the mind's eye, rather than securely possessed. Is it when you feel you've found something? Or is it much earlier: when you feel the need that will make you start looking? When you do start looking? When you fail to find anything and yet somehow don't give up the hope that you might find something some day? Maybe it's when you hope at all, in this direction. ~ Francis Spufford

Hell, he now understood, went beyond simple torture. Hell inflicted agony with intermittent reprieves to maintain the hope of peace. Hell was not endless dark, but rare rays of sunlight to keep one's eyes longing for their bright beauty. Hell forced hours of suffocation beneath the freezing water with times of release to keep one accustomed to the joy of breath, to let needful expectation be repeatedly stabbed by deprivation. ~ Daniel Ionson

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom. ~ Margaret Drabble

Almost no abuser is mean or frightening all the time. At least occasionally, he is loving, gentle, and humorous and perhaps even capable of compassion and empathy. This intermittent, and usually unpredictable, kindness is critical to forming traumatic attachments. When a person has suffered harsh, painful treatment over an extended period of time, s/he naturally feels a flood of love and gratitude toward anyone who brings relief. But in situations of abuse, the rescuer and the tormentor are the very same person. ~ Lundy Bancroft

If someone tells you calories don't matter, they have no credibility. But if someone tells you calories are all that matters, they have even less. ~ Martin Berkhan

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted aurora near the poles of both Saturn and Jupiter. And on Earth, the aurora borealis and australis (the northern and southern lights) serve as intermittent reminders of how nice it is to have a protective atmosphere. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaquaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged into torment plunged into fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished ~ Samuel Beckett

Still, they continued to be intermittent lovers for almost 30 years, thanks to their musketeers' motto : unfaithful but not disloyal. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And the way
Though discontinuous, and intermittent, sometimes
Not heard of for years at a time, did,
Nonetheless, move up, although, to his surprise
It was inside the house,
And always getting narrower. ~ John Ashbery

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event. ~ Fernand Braudel

We are literally children of the earth, and removed from her our spirits wither or run to various forms of insanity. Unless we can refresh ourselves at least by intermittent contact with nature, we grow awry. ~ G. M. Trevelyan