Something Is New Quotes

Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. [ ... ] Consider a word that refers to a thing- " umbrella", for example. [ ... ] Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function. [ ... ] What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? [ ... ] the umbrella ceases to be an umbrella. It has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore it can no longer express the thing. ~ Paul Auster

Dear Oscar

I don't know how to say this any other way but, you see, I need to explain something. I can't stop thinking about that night when you rescued Barney with you tart – and how good and kind I realise you've always been. It wasn't until this morning when you sent me an apple tart of my own that I finally knew what it is that I have to tell you.
The timing is pretty terrible, but, you see, the reason I haven't wanted to go away is because I've wanted to stay here, and the reason I've wanted to stay here is because of you.
I've nothing against New Zealand or anything but because of how I feel, specifically about you, the whole world looks different.
I don't know whether it's because of everything has got darker or lighter. I guess that depends on how you feel about me which is, I hope, the same.
So anyways, look, you've convinced me that I should, as you say 'embrace the adventure' so that is what I have decided to do. It was the taste of you apple tart that finally made up my mind to give this my all. But I need to know you'll be here when I come back.
I love you Oscar Dunleavy.
I've been falling in love with you since that day we first met.
I need to have some idea about whether you feel the same way about me. Send me a sign.
Anything will do.
Love,
Meg ~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new, fat, lean, and particularly the rarely visible nocturnal art of poetry.
We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power is not an acceptable surrogate. ~ C.D. Wright

Bramble had taken another pencil from Delphinium, and Azalea's napkin, and wrote something new.
You're afraid of the King. Admit it.
Azalea grimaced at her untouched food, burning in humiliation as Lord Bradford took the napkin and read it. This time, he looked to be discreetly writing something back beneath the table.
Fairweller blinked at the King for a moment, in which Lord Bradford handed Bramble her napkin. She opened it and turned a rosy pink.
My lady, it read,who isn't?
Bramble pursed her lips and kicked Lord Bradford beneath the table-hard. His face twitched befre regaining its solemn expression.Azalea buried her face in her hands.
"All we ask is for you to consider it. That is all," said Fairweller.
"Oh." Lord Bradford's voice was slightly strangled. "Yes. Thank you."
Bramble threw the pencil-smudged napkin onto her plate. "I'm done," she said. "May we go to our room now? ~ Heather Dixon

When you start to crack open, don't waste a moment gathering your old self up into something like you knew before. Let your new self splash like sunlight into every dark place and laugh and cry and make sounds you never made & thank all that is holy for the gift ... ~ Brian Andreas

Really great design is hard. Good is the enemy of great. Competent design is not too much of a stretch. But if you are trying to do something new, you have challenges on so many axes. ~ Jonathan Ive

Ask yourself what you like to think about. Problems associated with your technical specialty? Would you be unhappy making a career shift into a new area? Do you see yourself, in the future, as more of an individual contributor or a manager?

If you do think you want to specialize, here is the acid test: Your skills and talents are sufficiently deep and leading-edge for you to be able to complete a sentence that sounds something like this: "I am uniquely qualified for this because I am one of a handful of people who have the depth of knowledge to… ~ Barbara Moses

In Persia we call the meeting of two opposites bar-khord. Bar-khord happens when two strong elements touch and something new forms at their point of intersection. It is not a clash of opposites, more like an intermingling. This in-between state is in constant flux. It doesn't set opposites against each other; it is the source of a third element, something completely new that draws on the opposites and bears no major similarities to either one or the other. ~ Nina George

Horror films had died a little bit before Scream came around. That was one of the reasons I wrote it. I wanted to write something that wasn't being made right now and maybe sell if I come up with a new horror film. Because no one is watching those movies. Let's do it. That was my whole goal, and it paid off. I feel like it's never stopped. ~ Kevin D. Williamson

If a man approaches a fact in the world around him with a judgment arising from his previous experiences, he shuts himself off by this judgment from the quiet, complete effect which this fact can have on him. The learner must be able each moment to make himself a perfectly empty vessel into which the new world flows. Knowledge is received only in those moments in which every judgment, every criticism coming from ourselves, is silent. For example, when we meet a person, the question is not at all whether we are wiser than he. Even the most unreasoning child has something to reveal to the greatest sage. And if he approach the child with his prejudgment, be it ever so wise, he pushes his wisdom like a dulled glass in front of what the child ought to reveal to him. ~ Rudolf Steiner

Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self - the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give this complicated process is fear. [...]

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
(p. 218) ~ Don DeLillo

I've always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way, that some divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love for freedom and the courage to uproot themselves, leave homeland and friends, to come to a strange land. And coming here they created something new in all the history of mankind-a land where man is not beholden to government, government is beholden to man. ~ Ronald Reagan

If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it's new you are confronting problems and challenges you don't have references for. ~ Jonathan Ive

His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.
And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.
At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.
My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer. ~ Steven Moffat

Money actually becomes even more difficult than other things because it's very hard to imagine what the benefits are to saving. So, imagine that you see a new bicycle, a new pair of shoes, or something today. You know exactly what you are giving up if you are not buying it, what are you gaining in the future if you are not getting it. So, you are giving up the bicycle today, what is it in the future? What will happen if you send another $1,000 to your retirement fund? What difference will it make? It is very, very hard to figure out. ~ Dan Ariely

You want to be the first to do something. You want to create something. You want to innovate something...I often think of Edison inventing the light bulb. That's what I want to do. I want to drive over the bridge coming out of New York there and look down on that sea of lights that is New Jersey and say, `Hey, I did that!' ~ David Keirsey

The reaction on the part of the apes, limited as it was to about one subject in every three or four, has just that character of being common, yet individual, that belongs to aesthetic experiences. Some are sensitive to the sight, and the rest are not; to some of them it seems to convey something
to others it is just a thing, a toadstool or what you will. ~ Susanne K. Langer

So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I've done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I'm scared they will never leave. I say that I don't want to take the drugs anymore, but I'm frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together.
In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page:

I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it - I will love you through that, as well. If you don't need the medication, I will love you, too. There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship - the lending of a hand from
me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace - reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people. And then they speak. They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it's like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.

More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born….a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift …. if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It's not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. ~ Yuri Herrera

As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable." ... In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention
not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God. ~ Victor J. Stenger

I believe that having something new happen, no matter how small, is what makes for a healthy day, no matter how many days may be left. ~ David Greenberger

The personality is seldom, in the beginning, what it will be later on. For this reason the possibility of enlarging it exists, at least during the first half of life. The enlargement may be effected through an accretion from without, by new vital contents finding their way into the personality from outside and being assimilated. In this way a considerable increase of personality may be experienced. We therefore tend to assume that this increase comes only from without, thus justifying the prejudice that one becomes a personality by stuffing into oneself as much as possible from outside. But the more assiduously we follow this recipe, and the more stubbornly we believe that all increase has to come from without, the greater becomes our inner poverty. Therefore, if some great idea takes hold of us from outside, we must understand that it takes hold of us only because something in us responds to it and goes out to meet it. Richness of mind consists in mental receptivity, not in the accumulation of possessions. What comes to us from outside, and, for that matter, everything that rises up from within, can only be made our own if we are capable of an inner amplitude equal to that of the incoming content. Real increase of personality means consciousness of an enlargement that flows from inner sources. Without psychic depth we can never be adequately related to the magnitude of our object. It has therefore been said quite truly that a man grows with the greatness of his task. But he ~ C.G. Jung

Parnet: I want you to talk about desire. What is desire, exactly? Let's consider the question as simply as possible. When Anti-Oedipus...

Deleuze: It's not what they thought it was, in any case, not what they thought it was, even back then. Even, I mean, the most charming people who were... It was a big ambiguity, it was a big misunderstanding, or rather a little one, a little misunderstanding. I believe that we wanted to say something very simple. In fact, we had an enormous ambition, notably when one writes a book, we thought that we would say something new, specifically that one way or another, people who wrote before us didn't understand what desire meant. That is, in undertaking our task as philosophers, we were hoping to propose a new concept of desire. But, regarding concepts, people who don't do philosophy mustn't think that they are so abstract... On the contrary, they refer to things that are extremely simple, extremely concrete, we'll see this later... There are no philosophical concepts that do not refer to non-philosophical coordinates. It's very simple, very concrete. What we wanted to express was the simplest thing in the world. We wanted to say: up until now, you speak abstractly about desire because you extract an object that's presumed to be the object of your desire. So, one could say, I desire a woman, I desire to leave on a trip, I desire this, that. And we were saying something really very simple, simple, simple: You never desire someone or so ~ Gilles Deleuze

Be vulnerable. Take a chance. Step outside your comfort zone. Try something new and daring and audacious. Maybe it's changing jobs or changing cities or simply changing your hair color. But do something different than what you do every single day. Take a risk. Even if you're not ready to. Because you never know how important and vital the sentence you're writing today is to the bigger story your life is trying to tell. ~ Mandy Hale

With McClure's support, Steffens embarked on an odyssey. For the better part of three years, he called on people in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, and Madison. "My business is to find subjects and writers, to educate myself in the way the world is wagging, so as to bring the magazine up to date," he explained to his father. "I feel ready to do something really fine. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Is that a stake, Bones, or are you just happy with my new dress?"
"In this case, it's a stake. You could always feel around for something more, though. See what comes up. ~ Jeaniene Frost

You ever feel like home is the one place you can't go back to? It's like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I'll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can't go back because the house expects something from you. ~ Marlon James

Who cannot sympathize with the imprisoned Dmitri Karamazov as he tries to make sense of what he has just learned from a visiting academic?

"Imagine: inside, in the nerves, in the head - that is, these nerves are there in the brain ... (damn them!) there are sort of little tails, the little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering ... that is, you see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin quivering, those little tails ... and when they quiver, then an image appears ... it doesn't appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes ... and then something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment - devil take the moment! - but an image; that is, an object, or an action, damn it! That's why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at all because I've got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness. All that is nonsense! Rakitin explained it all to me yesterday, brother, and it simply bowled me over. It's magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man's arising - that I understand.... And yet I am sorry to lose God!"

Dostoevsky's prescience is itself astonishing, because in 1880 only the rudiments of neural functioning were understood, and a reasonable person could have doubted that all experience arises from quivering nerve tails. But no longer. One can say that the information-processing activity of the brain causes the mind, or one can say that it is the mind, but in either case the evidence is ov ~ Steven Pinker

I like using LEGO bricks as a medium because I enjoy seeing people's reaction to artwork created from something with which they are familiar. ... My goal is to elevate this simple plaything to a place it has never been before. I also appreciate the cleanliness of the LEGO brick. The right angles. The distinct lines. But, from a distance, those right angles and distinct lines offer new perspectives, changing to curves. ~ Nathan Sawaya

Fact: life is a giant classroom and every day is an opportunity to learn something new.
Fact: you have to be prepared for pop quizzes, because they can come from anywhere or anyone.
Also fact: I wished I'd called in sick today.
What I learned from professor Frosty?
How to properly boost cars. The guy could do wicked things with a single piece of wire.
"I'm a criminal now," I lamented as we soared down the highway. Killing in self defense didn't count.
"I'm an accomplice. A thief."
"Actually," he said smoothly, "you're a freelance valet. All you're doing is moving a car from one location to another. There's nothing wrong with that, now, is there? ~ Gena Showalter

I used to think that pain was my body's way of telling me something was wrong. Now I think that while that is sometimes true, more often pain is some little bit of my body bitching about being asked to do something it doesn't want to, but once it figures out that I'm serious, it shuts up and delivers. My new rule of thumb is that if something hurts, unless it's debilitating, I give it five kilometers to go away. It usually does. ~ Paul Klipp

A sailor was stranded on a desert island and managed to survive by making friends with the local natives - such good friends, in fact, that one day the chief offered him his daughter for an evening's entertainment. Late that night, while they made love, the chief's daughter kept shouting, "Oga, boga! Oga, boga!" The arrogant sailor assumed this must be how the natives express their appreciation when something is fantastic. A few days later the chief invites the sailor for a game of golf. On his first stroke, the chief hit a hole in one. Eager to try out his new vocabulary, the sailor enthusiastically shouted "Oga boga! Oga boga!" The chief turned around with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "What you mean, 'wrong hole'? ~ Osho

It all comes down to what you truly love doing, and what I love doing is overdubbing and making new sounds out of things that are sometimes quite ordinary on their own, but when you put them together, they make something new
or something that sounds new. Just discovering things like that musically is a pleasure. ~ Jeff Lynne

Today Monopoly added a new game piece: the cat. The new piece was chosen after weeks of online voting. Is that a surprise? Whenever there's a vote for something on the Internet, the cat always wins. ~ Craig Ferguson

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a "disposable" culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society's underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised - they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the "leftovers". ~ Pope Francis

Because while you don't have a choice about what you are, you have a
choice about what you show. You always have a choice about whether you "out" yourself. Every time you meet someone new, it's a decision. You always have a choice about whether you practice. Practice, of course, means a lot of different things. Probably something different to everyone. You can practice every day, or just once in a while. But if you don't ever practice, you'll never know what it could have meant to you. You'll never know who you might have been. If you don't practice, you'll probably even feel awkward claiming that identity: if it has no function in your life, what's the point of saying it? It's still there, of course. It'll never go away. But if you don't practice, it can never change your life. Honestly, with the world the way it is, it's probably easier not to practice. You'll fit in better. If that's what you want. Me, though, I've never been that interested in fitting in. ~ Naomi Alderman

Immigrants to America help us with the work they do. They challenge us with new ideas, and they give us perspective. This is still the nation that more people around the world want to come to than any place else. That has to tell us something about ourselves. If around the world this is the place people want to come to so much, maybe there's more here than many of us realize-and that many of us can take advantage of. ~ Rudy Giuliani

And as each new character is merely a metamorphosis from something older, in these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but beyond all else the rosy, moony, tender glow which ~ Marcel Proust

The point is that everyone needs some exposure to the various ways of life. People buy things out of catalogues too much. They see in Time magazine that they're suppose to be feeling in such and such a way, and they dash off a check and buy that life-style sight unseen. A pig in a poke if there ever was one, for once you've bought the thing there's no refund. We ought to be able to try things before we sign up for them. Used to be you could listen to the records in a record store before you bought them. Now they're sealed, for your protection, they say. Bullshit! It's for their goddamned protection, not ours. We don't need to be protected. We need to be allowed to get a taste of something before we accept it. ~ Arthur Alexander

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new. ~ Nick Cave

Is that permanent?" I ask, reaching out to touch her new pink hair before she slaps my hand away.
"I'm trying something new," she says, undaunted. She points to Barbie's Dream House and says, "We enter through the sky-light in the master bedroom. Here."
Rosie points to the Barbie jeep and says, "Where are we going to get our mobile observation unit?"
"Noah's going to borrow his mom's van," Megan says.
Rosie nods, but Noah just says, "I am?"
"You are," Megan says. ~ Ally Carter

Walt reorganized the fickleness of audiences and the challenge of always providing something new. For me, this great entrepreneurial adventure was an exposure to 'yes if' consulting as a more useful format than 'no because'...'Yes if' was the language of an enabler, pointing to what needed to be done to make the possible plausible. Walt liked this language. 'No because' is the language of a deal killer. 'Yes if' is the approach of a deal maker. Creative people thrive on 'yes if'. ~ Harrison Price

If you are one of those people who can't hold a lot in mind at once - you lose focus and start daydreaming in lectures, and have to get to someplace quiet to focus so you can use your working memory to its maximum - well, welcome to the clan of the creative. Having a somewhat smaller working memory means you can more easily generalize your learning into new, more creative combinations. Because you're learning new, more creative combinations. Having a somewhat smaller working memory, which grows from the focusing abilities of the prefrontal cortex, doesn't lock everything up so tightly, you can more easily get input from other parts of your brain. These other areas, which include the sensory cortex, not only are more in tune with what's going on in the environment, but also are the source of dreams, not to mention creative ideas. You may have to work harder sometimes (or even much of the time) to understand what's going on, but once you've got something chunked, you can take that chunk and turn it outside in and inside round - putting it through creative paces even you didn't think you were capable of!

Here's another point to put into your mental chunker: Chess, that bastion of intellectuals, has some elite players with roughly average IQs. These seemingly middling intellects are able to do better than some more intelligent players because they practice more. That's the key idea. Every chess player, whether average or elite, grows talent by practicing. It is the pr ~ Barbara Oakley

This is the Middle East, where every week you have something new; so whatever you talk about this week will not be valuable next week. ~ Bashar Al-Assad

The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the 'wisdom' of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious - such as digging up and mutilating the dead. ~ C.S. Lewis

To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard. ~ Bill Gates

Something I've learned over time, and trying to remind myself this week as I am back in New York and feeling pretty anxious, is that things always seem less dire when you're in the country than when you're outside. I don't exactly know why it is, except that people just have to get on with their life, so they do. And you don't have time to do anything other than keep going. ~ Rebecca Hamilton

The layman always means, when he says reality that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality. ~ Wolfgang Pauli

Every time someone reads a story about the politics poisoning the global warming stuff it makes it feel like a political story, meaning it's Us and Them, instead of what it is: this profound challenge we face given our energy norms right now, the fuels of convenience toward something new. No matter what the politics are, it's still an enormous transformation that has to take place. ~ Andrew Revkin

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability. ~ Anne Carson

If they think they are doing something new, they ought to do what I do every day - spend at least two hours every day listening to Johann Sebastian Bach and, man, it's all there. If they want to improvise around a theme,which is the essence of jazz, they should learn from the master. He never wastes a note, and he knows where every note is going and when to bring it back. Some of these cats go way out and forget where they began or what they started to do. Bach will clear it up for them. ~ Coleman Hawkins

It's been the longest time
Since I've been in this place,
Where I spend my whole day
Hoping I'll see your face.
Then I script things to say,
And maybe what you'd say back.
You don't know it yet,
But, girl, it's a fact

That I can see us
Staying up late,
Talking all night,
But I guess I'll have to wait.
'Cause it's brand-new,
Yeah, I know we just met.
I want to be there with you,
But not just yet.

Girl, you've got that look,
Like you're hard to impress.
So I'm bumbling with words,
'Cause my mind is a mess.
You were out of the blue
And you caught me by surprise,
With a slight smile, that long stare,
And a challenge in your eyes

I could feel all this
In that single look,
Like you could see my soul.
You could read me like a book,
And I think it's something.
Though I know we just met,
I'm gonna get there with you.
You just don't know it ... yet. ~ Emery Lord

Egypt is a fertile valley of rich river soil, low-lying, warm, monotonous, a slow-flowing river, and beyond the limitless desert. Greece is a country of sparse fertility and keen, cold winters, all hills and mountains sharp cut in stone, where strong men must work hard to get their bread. And while Egypt submitted and suffered and turned her face toward death, Greece resisted and rejoiced and turned full-face to life. For somewhere among those steep stone mountains, in little sheltered valleys where the great hills were ramparts to defend, and men could have security for peace and happy living, something quite new came into the world: the joy of life found expression. Perhaps it was born there, among the shepherds pasturing their flocks where the wild flowers made a glory on the hillside; among the sailors on a sapphire sea washing enchanted islands purple in a luminous air. ~ Edith Hamilton

Just as abruptly, he'd become a father. While preparing the book for publication, he'd been dating a woman named Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist at MGH. They were evenly matched in many ways: sharp-dressed, sharp-tongued, and devoted to their careers and personal freedoms to the exclusion of any serious interest in so-called romance. They spent ten months together. A few weeks after they broke up -- Sarah initiated the split -- she called to say that she was pregnant. "It's mine?" asked Affenlight. "He or she," replied Sarah, "is mostly mine."

They named the child Pella -- that was Affenlight's idea, though Sarah certainly had the final say. For those first couple of years, Affenlight conspired as often as he could to show up at Sarah and Pella's Kendall Square townhouse with expensive takeout and a new toy. He was fascinated with his daughter, with the sheer reality of her, a beautiful something where before there'd been nothing. He hated kissing her good-bye; and yet he relished, couldn't keep himself from relishing, the total quiet of his townhouse when he walked in, the scattered books and papers and lack of baby-proofing. ~ Chad Harbach

I think what we're going to ultimately recognize is that capitalism was a transitional and immature system. It got the planet to be globalized and now something else has to emerge. We have to be the ones. We can't wait around. Nobody else is going to do it for us. We have to be the ones who create that new emerging system. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

When texting begins to take the place of substantive in-person conversations for any of us, we are training the language and speech centers of our brain for a new, unnatural, and superficial model of connection. When that training starts early, as it does now for young texters, they get so used to it at such a young age that, unlike the newborn baby who innately knows something is missing and complains about it, our older tech-trained children don't even know what they have lost. ~ Catherine Steiner-Adair

Open the "book of life" and you will see a "text" of about 3 billion letters, filling about 10,000 copies of the new York Times Sunday edition. Each line looks something like this:
TCTAGAAACA ATTGCCATTG TTTCTTCTCA TTTTCTTTTC ACGGGCAGCC
These letters, abbreviations of the molecules making up the DNA, could easily mean that the anonymous donor whose genome has been sequenced will be bald by the age of fifty. Or they could reveal that he will develop Alzheimer's disease by seventy. We are repeatedly told that everything from our personality to future medical history is encoded in this book. Can you read it? I doubt it. Let me share a secret with you: Neither can biologists or doctors. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

YOU CANNOT IMAGINE YOU ARE IN A POSITION TO EFFECT A SHUTDOWN, BYRON."
"Can't I?" Zhang's eyes are wide now, gleaming with something new
a kind of madness to match the computer's. Not the look you want to see on the face of an enemy as intelligent as this one.
"DID WE NOT ESTABLISH THIS DURING YOUR FAILED ATTEMPTS ON THE BRIDGE? YOU CANNOT HOPE TO MATCH ME. MY COMPUTATIONAL POWER IS ALMOST INCALCULABLY SUPERIOR TO YOURS. TO ONE SUCH AS MYSELF, YOU ARE THE INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENT OF A PROTOZOA."
"True." Zhang pauses, glancing into the emergency supply cupboard, gaze lingering on something inside. "But I have something you and protozoa don't."
"AND THAT IS?"
"Hands, mother******. ~ Amie Kaufman

I don't even make multiplayer games much, so dealing with multiple characters is something new for me - or, rather, something I've had to recall from my days as a roleplaying adventure designer where the party was everything! ~ Warren Spector

Once upon a time, one looked to society
or class, or community
for one's normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.
But the individualism of the new Left respected neither collective purpose nor traditional authority: it was, after all, both new and left. What remained to it was the subjectivism of private
and privately-measured
interest and desire. This, in turn, invited a resort to aesthetic and moral relativism: if something is good for me it is not incumbent upon me to ascertain whether it is good for someone else
much less to impose it upon them ("do your own thing"). ~ Tony Judt

For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Making lists of favorite things is, for me, a task ridden with anxiety. What if I've accidentally excluded something I love? What if I discover something new tomorrow that I love even more? ~ Sara Zarr

Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

Some people engage in retail therapy, buying new things to make themselves feel more secure, and others engage in knowledge therapy, amassing new ideas to make themselves feel like they know something. We consume for comfort. We rely on certainty to shield us from the pain of confusion. The truth is staggering, colossal, unfathomable, so we cling to our bite-sized lies. We organize knowledge into bulleted lists and line graphs while the wisdom of the present moment sits patiently at the doors of our perception. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the 'God is dead' phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: 'Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.'

This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn't prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals) ~ Frans De Waal

Drag queens always love a portmanteau of combining words and making something new, because this whole world is shilarious. And so you have to contain yourself with words. Shilarious is just something that is a really hooty kiki funny item. ~ RuPaul

Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor's paunch. ~ Richard Dawkins

There is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in his treatment of the supernatural. In English literature, I believe there is no exception from the time of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to our own day. And this introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember to have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance: there is something ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture. It touches something within us that relates to infinity ~ Lafcadio Hearn

I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things…My nature is designed entirely for brief habits…I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction - brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity - and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it…But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it - as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith - this indestructible fool and sage! - that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The church is always to be under the Word; she must be; we must keep her there. You must not assume that because the church started correctly, she will continue so. She did not do so in the New Testament times; she has not done so since. Without being constantly reformed by the Word the church becomes something very different. ~ David Lloyd-Jones

Radar Data #12

It was in the absence of light
as when near new moon and
no moonlight; as when a part

of a picture is in shadow (as
opposed to a light); as when
in the condition of being

hidden from view, obscure,
or unknown - in concealment,
or else without knowledge

as regards to some particular;
and of the weather, season,
air, sky, sea, etc., characterized

by tempest; in times, events,
circumstances etc. subject to
tempers; inflamed, indicative,

predictive, or symbolical of
strife (harbinger of coming
trouble) - a period of darkness

occurring between one day &
the next during which a place
receives no light from the sun,

and what if it is all behind us?
I no longer fear the rain will
never end, but doubt our ability

to return to what lies passed.
On the radar, a photopresent
scraggle of interference, as if

the data is trying to pretend
something's out there where
everything is lost. ~ Lytton Smith

Sin is often, if not always, the perversion of something good. In the midst of all our sinning, though, God is willing to forgive us, change us,
and give us a new power to overcome that sin. ~ Billy Graham

There's a freedom there and an understanding of my career and the things I've done. I'm seen here as primarily a comic actor, which is OK, but I can go to New York and I do something that's very emotional. It would be lovely at some point to do something like that on film. ~ Nathan Lane

When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world
the world of fixed traits
success is about proving you're smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other
the world of changing qualities
it's about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself. ~ Carol S. Dweck

Live your life like the novels that you love to read. Only do the things that when you look back, you are proud of what you accomplished, feel good about how you treated others and didn't regret not doing to trying something. Every day is a new chapter, write something. ~ Taylor Berke

Creativity shouldn't be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn't be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other 'creative types.' The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y. ~ Jonah Lehrer

Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.
If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy. And if you really want to open your mind, open your heart first.
If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the "other" group, you'll find it far easier to listen to what they're saying, and maybe even see a controversial issue in a new light. You may not agree, but you'll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Whatever the flows of our modern times are the idea is that you can create something new out of nothing. ~ Pascal Bruckner

The human heart was created in the context of the perfection of the garden of Eden. But we don't live there now.
This is why our instincts keep firing off the lie that perfection is possible. We have pictures of perfection etched into the very DNA of our souls.
We chase it. We angle our cameras trying to catch it. We take twenty shots hoping to find it. And then even our good photos have to be color corrected, filtered, and cropped.
We do our very best to make others think this posted picture is the real deal. But we all know the truth. We all see the charade. We all know the emperor is naked. But there we are, clapping on the sidelines, following along, playing the game. Trying to believe that maybe, just maybe, if we get close to something that looks like perfection it will help us snag a little of its shine for ourselves.
But we know even the shiniest of things is headed in the direction of becoming dull. New will always eventually become old. Followers unfollow. People who lift us up will let us down. The most tightly knit aspects of life snag, unravel, and disintegrate before our very eyes.
And we are epically disappointed.
But we aren't talking about it. ~ Lysa TerKeurst

and here instead's another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which sophia is the kind of character she'd choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather's been cold enough and how something at the heart of us, at the heart of all our cold and frozen states, melts when we encounter a time of peace on earth, goodwill to all men; a story in which there's no room for severed heads; a work in which sophia's perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she's in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that's thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank god, the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the fut ~ Ali Smith

When you get on God's payroll, He'll make sure you are well compensated. If you would let people off the hook and stop thinking they owe you something, your life would go to a new level. They may have done wrong, and it may have been their fault, but it's not their fault that they can't pay you back.
If you spend your life trying to get from them what only God can give, it will ruin that relationship and the sad thing is, you'll take that same problem into the next and the next and the next. ~ Joel Osteen

Goldfish in a glass bowl are harmless to the human mind, maybe even helpful to minds casting about for something, anything, to think about. But goldfish let loose, propagating themselves, worst of all surviving in what has to be a sessile eddy of the East River, somehow threaten us all. We do not like to think that life is possible under some conditions, especially the conditions of a Manhattan pond. There are four abandoned ties, any number of broken beer bottles, fourteen shoes and a single sneaker, and a visible layer, all over the surface, of that grayish-green film that settles on all New York surfaces. The mud at the banks of the pond is not proper country mud but reconstituted Manhattan landfill, ancient garbage, fossilized coffee grounds and grapefruit rind, the defecation of a city. For goldfish to be swimming in such water, streaking back and forth mysteriously in small schools, feeding, obviously feeding, looking as healthy and well-off as goldfish in the costliest kind of window-box aquarium, means something is wrong with our standards. It is, in some deep sense beyond words, insulting. ~ Lewis Thomas

When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your custo ~ Steven Johnson

I will travel with my kids as much as possible and as far as possible.
And I don't mean traveling to Disney World or the Great Wolf Lodge, but travel deep into the heart of communities around the world.
I want my children to experience this world outside of the little box they were born in.
I choose to surround my kids with people who are different than them. People who see the world from a entirely new perspective than what they've been accustomed to. I want them to see a variety of different kinds of normal and learn to see that our differences as humans are not something to be afraid of.
I don't want them to grow up scared of new traditions and cultures, but rather, to embrace what they can learn from them. People often scold me saying, "your kids need roots, they need a religion and traditions of their own."
My response is this, "the world will be their roots and they will grow to see the beauty in all religions and traditions. Why must they pick one? Why not let ALL the colors of the world and all of our differences be part of who they are? ~ Brooke Hampton

I constantly get out of my comfort zone. Looking cool is the easiest way to mediocrity. The coolest guy in my high school ended up working in a carwash. Once you push yourself into something new. And whole new world of opportunities opens up. But you might get hurt in fact you will get hurt. But amazingly when you heal
You are somewhere you've never been ~ Terry Crews

...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation. ~ Stephen Graham

I cannot sufficiently be astonished that such is the insanity of some men, such the impiety of their blinded understanding, such, finally, their lust after error, that they will not be content with the rule of faith delivered once and for all from antiquity, but must daily seek after something new, and even newer still, and are always longing to add something to religion, or to change it, or to subtract from it! ~ Vincent Of Lerins

For it is not inertia alone
that is responsible for human relationships repeating
themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and
unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes
nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation
to another as something alive. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?"
A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You
ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.
Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting
that information. It's probably nothing.
The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal
in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can't sell drugs
in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at something.
The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash
before. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and
each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.
But a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at
such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls
the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen,
turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen
it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug.
The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has an
utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which would
be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense.
Hiro's trying to read some clues in the ~ Neal Stephenson

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, 'It's all in Plato' - meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.

[The New York Times interview, 2000] ~ Philip Pullman

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...

Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different? ~ Annie Dillard

What is it?" I hissed at Kamala. "I thought you were going to talk right then and there and then we would've been thrown out."
Kamala wouldn't look at me. "It's the Dharma Raja."
I froze. "What about him?"
"I can sense him." The blue veins that once stood out so prominently on her skin had begun to sink beneath pearlescent hair. Even the garnet gaze of her eyes had receded into something bright and black. Thoroughly animal.
"And?"
"He was here, but only for a moment."
"Where did he go?"
"I couldn't tell you that, not for all the salk-skin in the world." Kamala sighed.
"Do you know where he was?"
"That's the thing I was trying to tell you, maybe-queen!" exclaimed Kamala, pawing at the ground. "He was at the Chakara Forest. You were right."
I was right. There was a soft glow of warmth in that knowledge, even if knowing that I had just missed him rent through me like a new wound. I had trusted my instinct and it had been right. ~ Roshani Chokshi

I have to say I am a 'Strictly' fan, which is why I am in it. I've always watched it for years. I am not an 'X Factor' fan, and I just think it is a different show. One is about learning something new and having a great time, and the other is rather desperate. ~ Felicity Kendal

She was having fun, but her fun emerged from misery. Fun isn't pleasure, it turns out. Fun is the feeling of finding something new in a familiar situation. Fun almost demands boredom: you need the sense that nothing good could possibly arise from an experience in order for the experience of finding something there to smolder with the hot pleasure of surprise. Likewise, ~ Ian Bogost

It's just exciting to be part of something that is brand-new. ~ Brian McKnight

I do not live happily or comfortably
With the cleverness of our times.
The talk is all about computers,
The news is all about bombs and blood.
This morning, in the fresh field,
I came upon a hidden nest.
It held four warm, speckled eggs.
I touched them.
Then went away softly,
Having felt something more wonderful
Than all the electricity of New York City. ~ Mary Oliver

I think Northern California is the most beautiful place on earth. And I adore New Orleans, but there's something about the air in SF, for instance. It changes from moment to moment, like one's thoughts. ~ Hilton Als

We live in a big world, and it is important for us to be aware of culture other than our own. Learn something new, whether you think you're interested in it or not. That's the opposite of having a closed mind or a closed door. ~ Donald Trump

I think audiences ultimately want something new. I think the business model for a franchise is such that it's very low risk because you have data and studios love data. ~ Gore Verbinski