Purdue Owl Block Quotes

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I have a free couple of hours," I told him, walking toward my car, which was parked on the next block. "There's a very private, very secluded barn in Lookout Hill Park behind the carousel. I could be there in fifteen minutes."
I heard the smile in his voice. "You want me bad. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.
There's a woden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean
a river dried to its bed ~ Charles Simic

At the core of all successful societies are procedures for blocking the advancement of bad men ~ Paul Collier

It is a good idea to become involved with sports and athletics. It makes you strong. You need to be strong to deal with this world and the powers and forces that block enlightenment. ~ Frederick Lenz

Over the long term, however, too much adrenaline produces scarring on the insides of your blood vessels. These scars become magnets for molecules to accumulate, creating lumps called plaques. These can grow large enough to block the blood vessels. If it happens in the blood vessels of your heart, you get a heart attack; in your brain, you get a stroke. ~ John Medina

Bennie's corner of Brooklyn looked different every time Sierra passed through it. She stopped at the corner of Washington Avenue and St. John's Place to take in the changing scenery. A half block from where she stood, she'd skinned her knee playing hopscotch while juiced up on iceys and sugar drinks. Bennie's brother, Vincent, had been killed by the cops on the adjacent corner, just a few steps from his own front door. Now her best friend's neighborhood felt like another planet. The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn't get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don't-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn't find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides--as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one. ~ Daniel Jose Older

I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees. ~ Lawrence Block

I made sure to pay attention to everything I was doing. To be fully in the moment. Because that's all life is, really, a string of moments that you knot together and carry with you. Hopefully most of those moments are wonderful, but of course they won't all be. The trick is to recognize an important one when it happens. Even if you share the moment with someone else, it is still yours. Your string is different from anyone else's. It is something no one can ever take away from you. It will protect you and guide you, because it IS you. What you hold here, in your hand, in this box, this is my string.

"Until recently, I thought it was death that gave meaning to life--that having an endpoint is what spurred us on to embrace life while we had it. But I was wrong. It isn't death that gives meaning to life. Life gives meaning to life. The answer to the meaning of life is hidden right there inside the question.

"What matters is holding tight to that string, and not letting anyone tell us our goals aren't big enough or our interests are silly. But the voices of others aren't the only ones we need to worry about. We tend to be our own worst critics. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: 'Most of the shadows in this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine.' ... Wisdom is found in the least expected places. Always keep your eyes open. Don't block your own sunshine. Be filled with wonder. ~ Wendy Mass

Structure influences behavior. Design spaces that make you feel "you are welcome here and that you came to the right place." ~ Peter Block

If a bacterium is trying to infect you, it won't secrete alone, because your immune system will block it. Bacteria will hide until they can all act together and make an impact. ~ Bonnie Bassler

What's wrong with creative block? Might it not just be that periods
even extended ones
of productive hiatus are essential mechanisms of gestation designed to help us attain higher standards in our pursuit of creative excellence? ~ Alexi Murdoch

I'm often wary of using the word 'inspiration' to introduce my work
it sounds too much like a sun shower from the heavens, absorbed by a passive individual enjoying an especially receptive moment. While that may be the case on rare occasions, the reality is usually far more prosaic. Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing. ~ Shaun Tan

Why else were we here except to love? ~ Francesca Lia Block

I'd say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts. ~ Stephen King

A little kid asks my dad why that man is chopping down the tree.
Dad: He's not chopping it down. He's saving it. Those branches were long dead from disease. All plants are like that. By cutting off the damage you make it possible for the tree to grow again. You watch - by the end of summer, this tree will be the strongest on the block. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

The most empowering thing one can do is give themselves permission to fully love themselves. Often we experience relationships that are toxic and we block ourselves off from love in all directions including within. The most important thing to remember is your relationship with your being is crucial for yourself and all other relationships. ~ Shalom Melchizedek

We don't consider the Wizard of Oz or Father Christmas to be too old. They're still magical characters, and the fact they've been around the block only adds to their magic. ~ Peter Capaldi

A book that is shut is but a block. ~ Thomas Fuller

Gerard's spirit animal is a gazelle - that's how he's always answered - Frankie would definitely be a wolverine, I would be a shark because of my inability to sit still, and Ray? Ray would be ... I'm thinking super intelligent, super articulate, I would think owl. ~ Mikey Way

Our perceptions shape whether challenges are obstacles that block our path to success or important arrows that steer us in the direction we want to go. ~ Julie Connor

Just then, with a wink and a sly normal lurch, The owl very gravely got down from his perch, Walked round, and regarded his fault-finding critic (Who thought he was stuffed) with a glance analytic. ~ James Thomas Fields

She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore. ~ Lawrence Block

I have yet to face Writer's Block and I don't believe I ever will. It is much more difficult for me to shut my imagination down to get a good nights sleep than it is to prod it to life. ~ Kenneth J. Ester

Nonetheless, writing regularly, inspiration or no, is not a bad way to eventually get into an inspired mood; the plane has to bump along the runway for a while before it finally takes off. ~ Alice W. Flaherty

I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God? ~ James Comey

Harry Potter, he sends a message on Owl Mail while us poor old muggles have to make do with instantaneous emails and texting. Oh, if only we could be like you Harry Potter, with your four day owl delivery! ~ Craig Ferguson

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests. ~ Alice Sebold

You know what my greatest personal stumbling block is? My shyness. ~ Susan Lucci

Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer's block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I'm projecting here. ~ Nick Cave

When generally people make race-based jokes to me - even if they're not technically racist, they're sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever - on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context. ~ Kumail Nanjiani

Just because there were times you were frightened doesn't mean you weren't brave. ~ Christine Brodien-Jones

Unlike some of my peers, I haven't really hit a writer's block. When I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick. ~ Joni Mitchell

From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space. ~ Kenneth Frampton

One should, when overwhelmed by the shadow of a giant, move aside and see if the colossal shadow isn't merely that of a pygmy blocking out the sun. ~ Novalis

When the sky fell in
When the hurricanes came for me
I could finally crash again
And that's how I became the sea. ~ Owl City

What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the "lower" animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block? ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

I once burned block-wide curse words into the streets of new york and declared cosmic jihad on the people of earth ~ Jason Aaron