The Postman Did It Quotes

When one day fate visits us again, Jessa comes running into Hannah's house to tell us the news that they've caught the serial killer. Her tone is hushed and I try hard not to look at Jude, who is working on the skirting boards. But I can feel the humour in his gaze as it falls on me and I know that I will never live down the fact that I suspected him.
When I ask her, "Who?" slightly curious, she's already out the door looking for Hannah and Tate. "No one important!" she shouts from the other room. "Just some postman in Yass." I look at Jude's face and I see it whiten and we vow never ever to tell the others. ~ Melina Marchetta

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply. ~ Neil Postman

Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more Malinowski the more compelling the book. No Malinowski, and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all. ~ Neil Postman

For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in 'Brave New World' was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking. ~ Neil Postman

The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America. I raise no strong objection to this fact (at least not here) and have no intention of launching into a standard-brand complaint against the corporate state. I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:

Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch. ~ Neil Postman

When did it become okay to be more offended by what someone with no power says than by what someone with power does? ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

What Sam Walton did was to go into one of the most mature industries of all and find a way to make it grow, grow, grow, double-digit, month after month, year after year. He did it by innovation, customer focus, and above all, speed. ~ Jack Welch

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop. ~ Neil Postman

I'm sort of ... coming off a bad relationship"
"When did it end?"
"Slightly before it started. ~ Rainbow Rowell

When you kissed me that night, did it mean anything to you?
How could he give her an honest answer? When he'd kissed her that night, it had meant little. But there'd been moments in the years since - dark, harrowing, nightmarish moments - when that kiss had come to mean everything. Hope. Salvation. A reason to drag one mud-caked boot in front of the other and press on, while men around him fell. He had remembered Cecily, in times and places he hadn't expected to think of her at all. In places a delicate, well-bred lady had no business intruding.

-Luke's thoughts ~ Tessa Dare

I have had to make do. Whose eyes had he been looking into, all those years? Cristina wondered as she leaned forward. She didn't know why she did it, exactly; maybe it was the way his eyes stayed fixed on hers, as if he couldn't imagine anything more fascinating than looking at her. ~ Cassandra Clare

Coup de foudre; perhaps it was real. One went from believing, when twenty, that it was the one kind of love that was real, to believing, once closer to forty, that it was not only fragile but false
the inferior, infantile, doomed love of twenty-year-olds. Somewhere between, the norms of one culture of love were discarded, and those of the other assumed. When did it happen, at midnight of one's thirty-first birthday? On the variable day that, while browsing a grocery-store aisle with a man, the repeating refrain of the rest of one's life for the first time resounds in one's ear? ~ Susan Choi

I was ten years old, and I was still playing conkers and knocking off sweet shops while she was sitting on the linoleum floor of her cell sawing at her wrists with a bit of broken glass she'd got from heaven-knows-were. Cut her fingers up, too, but she did it all right. They found her in the morning, sticky, red, and cold. ~ Neil Gaiman

desktop and the letter fluttered onto the stack of bills. Minutes ticked by. All those late nights - the clinic, the gym, the hospital, the conferences. She should have guessed. When did it start? ~ Nancy Allan

An inappropriate attraction to your friend's fiancé was grounds for disbarment from the Woman Club. Neither did it make a lick of sense. He was uncouth, uneducated, uncivilized. All of their conversations back then had been unholy bicker fests where they charged from the opposite ends of the spectrum, determined not to meet in the middle but to rip pieces out of each other on the drive by. ~ Kate Meader

Maybe it was easier if you knew your child was dead. It was a thought that stopped him in his tracks sometimes but he knew that it was the truth. If the child was dead then you had to figure out a way forward. It was being locked in this permanent state of limbo that was keeping Sarah in bed.One night he had come home from the day with a story of one of the young lads sliding through some fairly big cow pats. The boy had landed on his butt and there had been laughter all round. Restrained laughter but, still, it was funny. He had sat on the edge of the bed and related the story to Sarah and she had smiled and then released a small giggle. Immediately he could see her regret it and he had watched her bite down hard on her lip. Hard enough to draw some blood.
'It's okay, Sarah,' he had said gently. 'It's okay to laugh.'
'Bullshit, Doug,' she had spat back at him. 'How can you laugh if he's not laughing? How can I laugh knowing that he may be suffering?'
'I . . . I . . .' Doug had started, then he had left the room.
If a child died did it end this struggle? Could you put your faith in God and heaven and know he was in a better place, laughing with other children? Was that how you were able to move on? ~ Nicole Trope

In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthy conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse. If so many American poets and playwrights committed suicide or ended up addicted to drugs and alcohol it was not their creativity that did it but an artistic scene that promised much, gave few rewards and left nine out of ten artists neglected if not ignored. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

DeAngelo blew up my bus, so I filled his car with shit. Genius, right?"
"DeAngelo didn't blow up the bus," Connie said. "I just got the report from the fire marshal. The coffeemaker shorted out and started the fire."
Some of the color left Vinnie's face. "Say what?"
"Oh man," Lula said. "DeAngelo is gonna be pissed. Least he won't know who did it."
"I left a note," Vinnie said.
Lula gave a hoot of laughter and fell off her chair. ~ Janet Evanovich

Buttressing this argument (that you can prevent children from learning to read or ride bicycles but you can't stop them from learning to talk), Chomsky had pointed to two other universals in human language: that its emergence in children follows a very precise timetable of development, no matter where they live or which particular language is the first they learn; and that language itself has an innate structure. Chomsky has recently reminded audiences that the origins of the structure of language - how semantics and syntax interact - remain as "arcane" as do its behavioral and neurologic roots. Chomsky himself finds nothing in classical Darwinism to account for human language.* And for that reason, says Plotkin, linguistics is left with a major theoretical dilemma. If human language is a heritable trait but one that represents a complete discontinuity from animal communicative behavior, where did it come from? ~ Frank R. Wilson

My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling. ~ Neil Postman

He loved her. It was dead simple, the way he loved her. Seamless. His love was like a wall that he'd built around her, and there wasn't a chink or flaw in it. Or so he thought. But then she started to float out of the real world, his world, and he was like a little boy trying to dam a stream with stones and mud, knowing that the water would always break through at a place he wasn't looking at. There was nothing desperate about the way he did it, though. He was always calm, it seemed. Expecting the worst and determined not to crack. She started to get up in the night and turn on all the taps, and he would get up too and stand quietly beside her watching the endless flow of water as if he found it as fascinating as she did. Then he'd guide her back to bed before turning the taps off. One night I heard something and went into the living room and saw the two of them standing out on the balcony. He'd wrapped his dressing gown around her, and I heard him say, "Yes, you are right, Marijke. The traffic is like a river of stars. Would you like to watch is some more, or go back to bed? ~ Mal Peet

- She studies mathematics at the Sorbonne.
...
- Perhaps it's her way of rebelling. You know a thing or two about rebellion, I think.
- Yes, but I did it in the proper way. I drank and smoked and took lovers. Who rebells with mathematics? ~ Khaled Hosseini

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything. ~ Neil Postman

I am very sorry, sir, but I cannot give you the Windsor crown," Rita said calmly. "I do not have it, and even if I did, it is not mine to give away."
"I don't know if you heard me correctly," the sergeant repeated, his words falling like bricks. "I said, hand it over."
Rita smiled serenely and stood, holding her thin hands clasped in front of her. Nora glanced up at her, a worried look in her eyes.
"Quite possibly it was you who did not understand my reply. I said, I am very sorry, but I am afraid I cannot give you the crown. But I can offer you a nice cup of tea, and I just baked a batch of cheddar scones."
A muffled snicker went through the room. I could even see Wesley, who stood by the door, trying not to smile. ~ Galaxy Craze

The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich. ~ James Surowiecki

All I want is a chance to start this over with you. We did it backwards, and that's on me. I get it. But damn it, let me try again, because if you don't, it'll be the biggest regret of my life. ~ Kristen Proby

It was a lot to carry out of a childhood
all those textured layers of thwarted dreams rumbling under the fifties patina
but a lot of us did it. In those manicured lives and choreographed marriages there was an often-pronounced loneliness, an emptiness that we would try to fill with our own accomplishments. And our role, the one we would have so much trouble trying to shed later, was simply to be the best little girls in the world, the high- achieving, make-no-waves, properly behaved little kittens. ~ Anne Taylor Fleming

The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors. ~ Neil Postman

I think that Billie (Jean King) and Zina (Garrison), they have a whole lot of experience. Even if I don't quite agree with something or have a different way of doing it this week, whatever they said, I did it right away and I found out that it was correct. I think that's helped a lot ... I'm having fun. I had a lot of fun out there. Sometimes I was ready to smile
but I knew I'd lose focus
because I was doing things that I'd done in practice and we talked about. I was ready to laugh and give someone a high-five, but it wasn't time for that. ~ Venus Williams

But then again, impossible never became rumour, did it? ~ Todd Strasser

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn't hit you, the slumlord you hadn't offended, the malaria you hadn't caught. ~ Katherine Boo