Romke Visser Quotes

Old people were forever telling her that they had been young once, but it was always hard for her to imagine. Especially when it seemed that they had forgotten what it was really like to be young. They usually spoke in terms of carefree swanning about without obligations, seeming to forget all the rules, the confusion, and the sheer frustration of trying to make sense of adults. ~ Nils Nisse Visser

Well, yeah. Fireworks, the seventh Shy Maiden to dance out of the tree, stuff like that. ~ Nils Nisse Visser

Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture. ~ Margaret Visser

What kept me going through all the years? More than anything, the love of and respect for competition. That's what it comes down to for me. That's why I do this. ~ Lesley Visser

The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives. ~ Margaret Visser

First, to create the violent distortions of space and time necessary to travel through a wormhole, one would need fabulous amounts of positive and negative matter, on the order of a huge star or a black hole. Matthew Visser, a physicist at Washington University, estimates that the amount of negative energy you would need to open up a 1-meter wormhole is comparable to the mass of Jupiter, except that it would need to be negative. He says, "You need about minus one Jupiter mass to do the job. Just manipulating a positive Jupiter mass of energy is already pretty freaky, well beyond our capabilities into the foreseeable future. ~ Michio Kaku

We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community. ~ Margaret Visser

Jake, our fearless leader. On a crazed kamikaze mission. I'd never seen him like this. Even in our lowest moments, he'd always been steady. Resolute. He weighed the costs, made a decision, forged ahead.
And I'd always wondered how he did it. How he kept it straight in his mind. Yeerks. Visser One. Aliens conquering humans, conquering the planet. Fighting the enemy without becoming like them. How did he sort through all that? The emotions, the ethical dilemmas, the moral crises? How did he wrap his brain around it all so he could make logical decisions? Smart decisions. The kind that saved the lives of his team. The kind that set the enemy back a small step or two.
But now I knew.
Jake didn't understand any of it better than the rest of us did. If he defeated the Yeerks, freed humanity, rescued Earth, that was good. But that was just a bonus. His main goal was much simpler. To save his family. That goal was what had given him strength. That goal was what had kept him sane. Allowed him to retain a center of calm focus amid the awful chaos.
His family. ~ Katherine Applegate

Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to need it. ~ Margaret Visser

A meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled, enticements, variety, patterning and plot. As in a work of art, not only the overall form, but also the details matter intensely. ~ Margaret Visser

For instance, Visser, the Dutchman, had sold German machine guns to the Chinese, spied for the Japanese and served a term of imprisonment for killing a coolie in Batavia. He was not an easy man to handle. ~ Eric Ambler

All the cameras shifted from the players to me. ~ Lesley Visser

As people grow up, they teach themselves to do what distinguishes adults from children: they will choke and cough until they have mastered the cigarette, or force themselves to down bitter beer until they are ready to join the group that actually likes it. ~ Margaret Visser

capital flows to wherever the social or environmental standards are lowest. Not only this, but capitalism is designed to create the instability that we have seen in the markets, and those that suffer the most from this volatility are always the most vulnerable, namely the poor of the world. ~ Wayne Visser

The three most important things for a sportscaster are knowledge of the game, a passion for sports and the profession, and the stamina to struggle. ~ Lesley Visser

I'm proud of my status as a pioneer in this business. ~ Lesley Visser

Guys do not have a genetic blueprint that allows them to understand or love sports. ~ Lesley Visser

Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction. ~ Margaret Visser

That I've lasted is one of my greatest accomplishments. Maybe my greatest. ~ Lesley Visser

Food-what is chosen from the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with whom and when, and how much time is allotted to cooking and eating it-is one of the means by which a society creates itself and acts out its aims and fantasies. ~ Margaret Visser

Salt is the policeman of taste: it keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing over the weaker. ~ Margaret Visser

I went to the top of the Cotton Bowl by myself, sat down and cried. ~ Lesley Visser

Everything is working. ~ Lesley Visser

This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind - to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen. ~ Margaret Visser

Drowning,
Drowning on the land,
Drowning,
It doesn't end. ~ C.G. Visser

He has so little energy in his body that he can only walk to the bathroom on the other side of the hallway twice a day.

After a few meters he is worn out, much worse than after the marathons he used to run. He was a triathlete, he earned a brown belt in judo, became Dutch champion in hockey, until he contracted pneumonia in 2005 and never recovered. Ever since, he has a headache, vertigo, and insomnia, but worst of all the fatigue: after minimal effort his muscles would lose all their strength and take days to recover. Only after a few years did he get a diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). ~ Ellen De Visser

I don't know if everybody is ready to hear a woman tell them so-and-so is going to run off left tackle. But you know what? They're going to hear it. ~ Lesley Visser

Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was willing to labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and of mythic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its links with experience of the sacred. ~ Margaret Visser

There are moments when suddenly our eyes blink open and we recapture the excitement of living. Life becomes an adventure and we, adventurers. ~ Wayne Visser

Sussex wun't be druv!

Old Sussex motto indicating that they are not very keen on 'foreign' ways outside the old county borders. Especially not the source of chuckle-headed rules: Lunnon. ~ Nils Nisse Visser

Everything we do in life reflects through the virtues of a nation. For example if a nation is ruled through Fear, the Manifestation of War rises; If a nation is ruled through Love, War would not exist and Harmony would find its way. ~ Nynke Visser

Believing in fate has probably always arisen in part because of the delights and terrors of storytelling. We have to realize
to learn
that in life we are not the readers but the authors of our own narratives. ~ Margaret Visser