The Basic Eight Quotes

I think I've always believed that there is one person in the universe who you're truly meant for–for whom you are truly meant–and the fact that sometimes there are two or even more people on the earth you can fall in love with really bothers me. It suggests that if you work hard you can be meant for anyone. ~ Daniel Handler

With the publishing of The Basic Eight, it was often assumed that I was really immature and callow, and with the publishing of Watch Your Mouth, it was assumed that I was oversexualized, and with Lemony Snicket, it's often assumed that I'm erudite and depressed. But all the voices more or less came naturally to me. ~ Daniel Handler

When it was first optioned, I was told that the chances of The Basic Eight becoming a film were slim because no one was making teen movies, and then later, I was told that the chances were slim because there were so many teen movies, and then I was later told that the chances were slim because teen films were over. I'm not sure when the magic window of opportunity was, but perhaps it's still on the horizon. ~ Daniel Handler

She spun the car through a right turn that would have killed us all had we been minor characters. ~ Daniel Handler

Basic stewardship of resources for married couples who are believers centers around understanding and practicing two fundamental financial principles: tithing and budgeting. Herein lie the seeds of dominion - the secrets of fruitfulness, increase, and filling. Tithing recognizes God as the source of our resources while budgeting recognizes our responsibility ~ Myles Munroe

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably. ~ Pauline Kael

The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of habits and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

When young we have a vivid sense of basic values like trust and warm-heartedness, which we tend to neglect in today's competitive world as we grow up, yet from birth we all have a need for affection. The emotions we experience today have not changed much over the last few thousand years, but the interest increasing numbers of people are showing in their inner world and how their emotions work is a sign of maturity. ~ Dalai Lama

You can't possibly adopt stray French monsters; wherever would you put it?"

"I have no idea," she said. "It doesn't appear to be in bad shape; honestly, I think someone's been taking at least basic care of it - no mats or snarls, it's a decent weight for its size, completely tame. It's not a thoroughbred, though, which means either it's an adopted stray or it's been summoned, which is a little odd. God knows why anyone would bother doing that kind of magic, but whatever - I suppose Parisian monster fanciers have to get their jollies somehow. I think it's come to visit, not to stow away in my suitcase."

"If this keeps up, you are going to be the most absurd Disney princess of all time," Ruthven told her. "Instead of happy little bluebirds perching on your finger to sing duets, you will be hung about with monsters like a tree with monkeys, and it will thoroughly complicate your personal life. ~ Vivian Shaw

People who live at subsistence level want first things to be put first. They are not particularly interested in freedom of religion, freedom of the press, free enterprise as we understand it, or the secret ballot. Their needs are more basic: land, tools, fertilizers, something better than rags for their children, houses to replace their shacks, freedom from police oppression, medical attention, primary schools. ~ Mao Zedong

Marriage means handing over yourself, your body, your future, your keeping to the one whom you dearly love, although this person may, in many ways, remain a stranger. This tremendous act of faith is something that can unlock in each lover powers of compassion, generosity, joy, passion, fidelity and hope that no one guessed was even there. That is why the confidence of young lovers is not foolish or arrogant, but an expression of a basic fact in human experience that the greatest of human gifts are set to work only when people are prepared to risk everything and first you risk it before God. ~ Ravi Zacharias

We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Though gay lifestyles have certainly moved into the open, there's little evidence that society has become more open in its basic attitudes or that entertainers should feel cozy in emerging from the velvet underground. ~ Peter Bart

I have seen people paralyze their entire existence around that greatest of mysteries, shaping their every movement, their every word, in a desperate attempt to find the answers to the unanswerable. They fool themselves, either through their interpretations of ancient texts or through some obscure sign from a natural event, into believing that they have found the ultimate truth, and thus, if they behave accordingly concerning that truth, they will surely be rewarded in the afterlife. This must be the greatest manifestation of that fear of death, the errant belief that we can somehow shape and decorate eternity itself, that we can curtain its windows and place its furniture in accordance with our own desperate desires.

Perhaps the greatest evil I see in this existence is when supposedly holy men prey upon the basic fears of death of the common folk to take from them. 'Give to the church!' they cry. 'Only then will you find salvation!'. Even more subtle are the many religions that do not directly ask for a person's coin, but insist that anyone of goodly and godly heart who is destined for their particular description of heaven, would willingly give that coin over.

And of course, the world is ripe with 'Doomsdayers'. people who claim that the end of the world is at hand, and cry for repentance and for almost slavish dedication.

I can only look on it all and sigh, for as death is the greatest mystery, so it is the most personal of revelations. W ~ R.A. Salvatore

What if the book (of Genesis) is describing a dawning awareness of the world? The anthropologist Edmund Leach has argued that the 'bit' or binary digit is the basic unit of pre-logical communication. Genesis is a sprouting of 'bits', ie elementary binary distinctions ... ~ Charles Hampden-Turner

The future is meant to be a secret for those that can't handle life. Premonitions and the ability to see into the future, are only given to those that have the wisdom to make the right decisions, from which, accepting happiness is the most basic one. ~ Robin Sacredfire

We need to spend a trillion dollars rebuilding our schools, our roads, our basic science and research here in the United States. ~ Barack Obama

What does it mean to be an American? While each of us may have our own specific answer to that question, we likely can agree on the basic principles of America: freedom, equal opportunity, and rights accompanied by responsibilities. ~ Ben Nelson

I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist - probably to be found working in universities - who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale. ~ C.A.R. Hoare

At its most basic level semantic search applies meaning to the connections between the different data nodes of the Web in ways that allow a clearer understanding of them than we have ever had to date. ~ David Amerland

So it can be seen that the trouble with the motion picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise. ~ Garson Kanin

I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place? My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam? ~ Irshad Manji

Feeling angry is a universal human phenomenon. It is as basic as feeling hungry, lonely, loving, or tired. The capacity to feel angry and to respond in some way to that feeling is in us from birth. ~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

The feeling of rank is one of the most basic human instincts. To gossip about someone is to elevate yourself above him or her. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I see a couple of things missing. Any society, any community, even in the family, when the elders don't do their jobs, the youth suffer. We have no done our job. I'm saying anybody 55 and up. We didn't teach people the basic things. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

Basic economic theory. People behave differently based on how much they think something's worth. Because everyone got their chips for free, people made huge bets on every hand - no matter what they were holding. People who play with everything on the line - for real - don't act like that. ~ Elle Lothlorien

You don't have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver's chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions - nursing homes and intensive care units - where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. ~ Atul Gawande

There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation. ~ Donald Davidson

For example, when Christians discuss sex, it often sounds as if we are somehow "against sex". What we fail to make clear is that sexual passion (the good gifts of God's creation) is now subservient to the demanding business of maintaining a revolutionary community in a world that often uses sex as a means of momentarily anesthetizing or distracting people from the basic vacuity of their lives. When the only contemporary means of self-transcendence is orgasm, we Christians are going to have a tough time convincing people that it would be nicer if they were not promiscuous. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers Communist and the disarming of the bourgeoisie the middle class. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Remembering Mom's Clothesline -- There is one thing that's left out. We had a long wooden pole (clothes pole) that was used to push the clotheslines up so that longer items (sheets/pants/etc.) didn't brush the ground and get dirty.
I can hear my mother now...

THE BASIC RULES FOR CLOTHESLINES:

(If you don't even know what clotheslines are, better skip this.)
1. You had to hang the socks by the toes... NOT the top.
2. You hung pants by the BOTTOM/cuffs... NOT the waistbands.
3. You had to WASH the clothesline(s) before hanging any clothes - Walk the entire length of each line with a damp cloth around the lines.
4. You had to hang the clothes in a certain order, and always hang "whites" with "whites," And hang them first.
5. You NEVER hung a shirt by the shoulders - always by the tail! What would the neighbors think?
6. Wash day on a Monday! NEVER hang clothes on the weekend, Or on Sunday, for Heaven's sake!
7. Hang the sheets and towels on the OUTSIDE lines so you could Hide your "unmentionables" in the middle perverts & busybodies, y'know!)
8. It didn't matter if it was sub-zero weather... Clothes would "freeze-dry."
9. ALWAYS gather the clothes pins when taking down dry clothes! Pins left on the lines were "tacky"!
10. If you were efficient, you would line the clothes up so that each item. Did not need two clothes pins, but shared one of the clothes pins with the next washed item.
11. C ~ Unnown

Often the features metaphysicians are interested in, like causation, time, and essence, involve features that seem so basic or are so generally embedded in the way we experience the world that it takes special attention and focus to draw them out and develop an account of their nature. ~ L.A. Paul

No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine. ~ Arthur Kornberg

It is intolerable that around 1 in 5 of the world's adults are illiterate. How can we build equitable information societies or thriving democracies if so many remain without the basic tools of literacy? ~ Koichiro Matsuura

You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It's more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that's all you get. You're probably not compatible with them for anything long term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don't plan long term because if we do we'll just get our hearts broken. It's best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it. I am not asking for sympathy. I am just trying to explain, on a human level, how it is that people make what look from the outside like awful decisions. ~ Linda Tirado

We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life. ~ Jimmy Carter

Human activity is destroying the natural systems that we depend upon for our survival. Our most basic instinct as humans is to survive; yet we continue to destroy our life-support machine. Connected humans understand this terrible contradiction; disconnected humans are not able to.

Not all humans are responsible: just those who are part of Industrial Civilization. Industrial Civilization depends on economic growth and the unsustainable use of natural resources, so it has developed a complex set of tools for keeping people disconnected from the real world and living a life that keeps civilization running. Humans have been manipulated in order to be part of a destructive system.

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. ~ Keith Farnish

Self-preservation was a basic directive, but there wasn't a robot functioning that prioritized it at the top of the list. Like biologicals all robots were seeking a purpose. Autos and drones were lucky enough to have that built into them. A bot had to find his own way and I'd figured out that functioning for function's sake was pointless. The real question was finding a directive worth getting scrapped for. ~ A. Lee Martinez

This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself. ~ Milan Kundera

The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

If you'll remember, helping people was one of the two basic things Fat has been told long ago to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channeled into saving people. Better he had kept on with the dope. ~ Philip K. Dick

Immediately on my arrival at the Project I began studying linguistics, because that seemed imperative to me. I was soon amazed to learn that, when it came to the primary, most fundamental concepts in this field - a field supposedly precise, quantified, mathematized - there was absolutely no agreement. Why, the authorities could not come together on so basic and preliminary a question as what exactly morphemes and phonemes were. But when I asked the appropriate people, in all sincerity, how in the world they could accomplish anything, given this state of affairs, my naive question was taken as a sneering insinuation. I ~ Stanislaw Lem

You may be sure of appearing as good, safe, stay-at-home wife material, and he will have the utmost respect for you, as he would for a faithful cook, but he'll not respect you for the one most important asset every woman who has the wherewithal to employ it - you looks! Vanity not only keeps a woman young, but also gives her something to live for, and if you get saddled to a man who stifles this basic female urge, yet ogles its effects in other women, he could well be knocking years off your life. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . .

But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . .

The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . .

Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . .

Our whole republic rests upon the notion of "obedience to the unenforceable," upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . .

Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . .

Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines - but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything!

Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent.

Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of li ~ Neal A. Maxwell

The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex! DR. STEPHEN T. COLBERT, D.F.A. ~ Christopher Ryan

A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape. ~ Robert Macfarlane

In 1970, I had begun work on the basic pancreatic trypsin inhibitor which has later become the model compound for the development of protein NMR, molecular dynamics, and experimental folding studies in other laboratories. ~ Robert Huber

The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies. ~ Judith Warner

Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself. ~ Jonathan Kozol