Thrived Quotes

I also had to detach myself from my thoughts through turning my desire away from them. And at once, I noticed that my self became a desert, where only the sun of unquiet desire burned. I was overwhelmed by the endless infertility of this desert. Even if something could have thrived there, the creative power of desire was still absent. Wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil's own seed. But do not forget to wait. Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and hour your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit. ~ C. G. Jung

The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition. ~ Elaine Pagels

From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we'd be out of business. If it weren't protected, there'd be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there's a simpler reason: It's wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character. ~ Walter Isaacson

She gazed toward the marsh that grew thicker, deeper, greener with approaching summer. Mosquitoes whined in there, breeding in the dark water. Alligators slid through it, silent death. It was a place where snakes could slither and bogs could suck the shoe right off your foot.
And it was a place, she thought, that went bright and beautiful with the twinkling of fireflies, where wildflowers thrived in the shade and the stingy light. Where an eagle could soar like a king.
There was no beauty without risk. No life without it. ~ Nora Roberts

The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations? ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat? ~ Peter Watts

They were the only people in all the universe who were not conscious. Although every creature could think and reason, it could not know itself as every other intelligent creature could know itself. The creatures lacked awareness of who they were as individuals, even as they lived and thrived and grew on the face of the moon of the planet. ~ John Scalzi

In a house, as in a garden, there is a point when over-mingling can occur. At first, when the new plants are dug in, there is too much space between them. They seem artificial, temporary. Then, as they grow, the bed finds a point of balance, the taller trees occupying the upper layers, the sprawling shrubs - the hydrangeas, buddleia, pittosporum - filling out the middle, and the smaller bulbs and ground covers punctuating the under-spaces. Then, without warning, equilibrium is lost. A rampant jasmine covers an adolescent tree; a hydrangea thrives, forcing out a lilly pilly that struggles for light beneath a spreading magnolia. The spaces are subsumed. In the house, there was a period when everyone thrived. Even Heloise had been noticed by Jerome, who was sitting down with her on most days and doing sums and geography, and reading poetry. 'She has real talent,' he said to Helena, over the kitchen bench. She raised an eyebrow ambiguously but didn't comment. Then, slowly, the balance began to slip. ~ Emily Bitto

I feel like I have a Ph.D. in life, I'm a survivor. I've not only survived, I've thrived. ~ Gennifer Flowers

We're all Poseidon's children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not."

"Poseidon's children," he repeated. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"We came through. That's all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it's time to start doing something useful with our lives. ~ Alastair Reynolds

He also despised the school system, although
he thrived in it. He became a teacher because he also dreamed of
changing the system, but instead the system crushed him. He took
his passion, tried to change the system, and ran into a brick wall. It
was a system that too many people were making money in, and no
one wanted it changed, although there was a lot of talk about the
need for change. ~ Robert T. Kiyosaki

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds. ~ John Brunner

On the one hand, our entire species survived because we stuck together and cooperated, but on the other hand we developed because the strongest individuals always thrived at the expense of the weak. So we always end up arguing about where the boundaries should be drawn. How selfish are we allowed to be? How much are we obliged to care about each other? ~ Fredrik Backman

The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform. ~ Earl Browder

You are not your past. You are the warrior that rose above it to become the example of someone who didn't survive, but thrived in creating the most beautiful last chapter of their life. ~ Shannon L. Alder

There are a few clear themes that emerge when we synthesize all the findings we've looked at so far, and those are jewels you should pluck out of this book, place in your pocket, and carry with you for as long as they serve you. Here are the biggies. Eliminate or drastically reduce your intake of refined grains, refined sugar, and high-omega-6 vegetable oils. No healthy human population has thrived on these items, and the bulk of the evidence points toward their harm. Secure a source of those precious fat-soluble vitamins - whether from shellfish, fish eggs, high-quality dairy, bone marrow, organ meats like liver, or cod liver oil. ~ Denise Minger

God has equipped us with his Holy Spirit simply to tell our own story---the good, the bad, and the real. The best part is no one can argue with us. It's our story. And when others realize you don't need a degree in evangelism, they become empowered to tell their own God-story. It's not that complicated. Maybe the early church thrived because they didn't pay people to be the professional 'church people'---they all were 'it. ~ Thom Schultz

The flowers themselves were strong and hardy. They filled the green with color and thrived on Camp Lakeview's land. Together. They spent the summer, and every summer thereafter, swaying lazily in the breeze, frozen in time. ~ Melissa J. Morgan

Most of the time I liked being in charge of my life, thrived on it, in fact. But occasionally, when I was tired or unhappy. I'd find myself thinking how nice it would be to let someone else run the show, at least for a while. ~ Alice Steinbach

The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived. But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens' arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty. The sabre-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents and the mammoths. Thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds and even insects and parasites also became extinct (when the mammoths died out, all species of mammoth ticks followed them to oblivion). ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Generally, after three dates one of three things took place: 1) he'd express his lack of interest with a silent fade-out that made me go insane with anxiety; 2) I'd express my lack of interest with an overlong and tortured "it's not you, it's me" e-mail; 3) we'd devolve into a sexual entanglement that either was or wasn't physically satisfying but invariably thrived on noncommunication. After a while it seemed that everyone I knew was tangled in several entanglements at a time, as if we were all becoming intertwined, like a giant rat king, our tails a knotted mass, our mouths gasping for air. ~ Kate Bolick

It made sense, Amanda decided. People thrived on the misfortunes of others: her mother was the perfect example of that. Can't see a car accident, she thought, for wanting to climb inside and join in. ~ Danika Stone

I believe in logic, the sequence of cause and effect, and in science its only begotten son our law, which was conceived by the ancient Greeks, thrived under Isaac Newton, suffered under Albert Einstein ...
That fragment of a 'creed for materialism' which a friend in college had once shown him rose through Donald's confused mind. ~ John The Apostle

I was familiar with humans at this point only from afar, but even from there, I found them a pitiable species: scaleless, fangless, clawless, nearly furless, wingless, venomless, witless.
I honestly didn't understand how they had thrived so. ~ Patrick Jennings

Scrubby evergreen bushes released a strong scent of resin and honey; forests of pine gave way to gentle south-facing vineyards disturbed only by the ululation of early summer cicadas. Sitting up tall on the seat, she craned around eagerly to see what plants thrived naturally.
It was a wild and romantic place, Laurent de Fayols had written, the whole island once bought as a wedding gift to his wife by a man who had made his fortune in the silver mines of Mexico. One of three small specks in the Mediterranean known as the Golden Isles, after the oranges, lemons, and grapefruit that glowed like lamps in their citrus groves.
There were few reference works in English that offered information beyond superficial facts about the island, and those she had managed to find were old. The best had been published in 1880, by a journalist called Adolphe Smith. Ellie had been struck by the loveliness of his "description of the most Southern Point of the French Riviera":


'The island is divided into seven ranges of small hills, and in the numerous valleys thus created are walks sheltered from every wind, where the umbrella pines throw their deep shade over the path and mingle their balsamic odor with the scent of the thyme, myrtle and the tamarisk. ~ Deborah Lawrenson

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway--the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada--the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you'd run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hopes of a blessing. The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of family tokens: a baby sock, a pair of broken reading glasses, the window envelope of a pension check. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye ~ Toni Morrison

In my stories, I controlled what happened in a way I couldn't in real life. My characters lived through the horror and degradation of the cruelty of others and they not only survived, they thrived. They gave me hope and laughter, and they kept me going in spite of everything else. They were my heroes. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

There was nothing normal or typical about our love. We should've been one hot mess of madness for all that we'd suffered, but just as a flower grows from the sky's tears, our love grew from pain. It blossomed in darkness and thrived with time. ~ Keri Lake

Innocence is doomed to die a senseless death at our own hands, a casualty of the mistakes we can never undo. So we lay to rest the wide-eyed wonder we once thrived upon, replacing it with the scars of which we never speak, too knotted for any amount of technology to repair. ~ Neal Shusterman

I found that I enjoyed work and thrived on challenges. ~ Sophia Amoruso

Listen, listen, listen well. There was an age before the Seasons, when life and Earth, its father, thrived alike. (Life had a mother, too. Something terrible happened to Her.) ~ N.K. Jemisin

Making her happy was his vocation. Sure, he loved making money, thrived on it sometimes. The chase was his adrenalin. Being top dog, another high. Even when it brought headache after another. But his girl's being happy with everything they both could possibly need? Rider had no ceiling on what he wouldn't do for Zara and Harper. ~ V. Theia

What I did not realize was that I also hoped to have an epiphany, to discover a cause to devote my life to, a location where I thrived, a man to love, a life that would give me more fulfillment than the meager amount I had been living on for years. ~ Kristine K. Stevens

Walt, at about eleven, had a routine of looking at Seymour's wrists and telling him to take off his sweater. "Take off your sweater, hey, Seymour. Go ahead, hey. It's warm in here." S. would beam back at him, shine back at him. He loved that kind of horseplay from any of the kids. I did, too, but only off and on. He did invariably. He thrived, too, waxed strong, on all tactless or underconsidered remarks directed at him by family minors. In 1959, in fact, when on occasion I hear rather nettling news of the doings of my youngest brother and sister, I think on the quantities of joy they brought S. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him, and saying, with immense admiration, "Seymour, your teeth are so nice and yellow!" He literally staggered over to me to ask if I'd heard what she said. ~ J.D. Salinger

Between the inner and outer beaches, a strand of woods thrived: palms, palmettos, mahogany, figs, and calabash. Coconut palms and fig trees dropped enough fruit to feed the wildlife that swooped by in droves. It was so easy to catch a fish with your bare hands, Tristan and I had made a game of it during our weeks of lovemaking on the warm, supple sand. It truly was paradise. ~ A. Violet End

School was hard for me. If there had been a school for the creative arts, I might have thrived, but ... I needed that creative outlet so much. Also, I'm just bad with numbers. ~ Amy Adams

the most significant contributing factor to Heydrich's radicalization was his immersion in a political milieu of young and often highly educated men who thrived on violent notions of cleansing Germany from its supposed internal enemies while simultaneously rejecting bourgeois norms of morality as weak, outdated and inappropriate for securing Germany's national rebirth. ~ Robert Gerwarth

Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification----denying real class differences whenever possible. The relative few who escape their lower class roots are held up as models, as though everyone at the bottom has the same chance of succeeding through cleverness and hard work, scrimping and saving. Personal connections, favoritism, and trading on class-based knowledge still grease the wheels that power social mobility in today's business and professional worlds. ~ Nancy Isenberg

I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface - but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch. ~ Peter Watts

In this neighborhood of unreliable cars and steady, hopeful hearts. In this city known for its winters, in the middle of the plains, in the heart of the country. In this gentle summer soon to slip into the crisp cool of fall. Here in some kind of broken down glory, they had taken root, and thrived. Mostly. ~ Caitlin Hamilton Summie

For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world. ~ John Berendt

Sometimes, war being the unjust and drastic creature it is, those in whom he invested hopes took an arrow in the chest, the useless, by chance, thrived to irritate him another day. ~ Paul Hoffman

Our earliest ancestors were descended from primates who thrived for millions of years in a treetop environment, and who in the process had evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems in nature. To move quickly and efficiently in such a world, they developed extremely sophisticated eye and muscle coordination. Their eyes slowly evolved into a full-frontal position on the face, giving them binocular, stereoscopic vision. This system provides the brain a highly accurate three-dimensional and detailed perspective, but is rather narrow. Animals that possess such vision - as opposed to eyes on the side or half side - are generally efficient predators like owls or cats. They use this powerful sight to home in on prey in the distance. Tree-living primates evolved this vision for a different purpose - to navigate branches, and to spot fruits, berries, and insects with greater effectiveness. They also evolved elaborate color vision. ~ Robert Greene

In the age of facebookerism and tweeterism, people have been manipulated to behave foolishly. " Look at me, i am here" culture has thrived. ~ Kamil Toume

Because you came into life
Because I liked to get your sight
Because we were awake on the hill that night
Because we roamed sitting side by side
Because you slept on shoulder for a while
Because you talked like a child
Because you made me smile
Because of your coffee bites
Because your aroma made me fly
Because we shared in nights
Because I read you line by line
Because we sang old times
Because we became crazy minds
Because we cried
Because we poured our heart out – couldn't hide.
Because we drank and got high
Because you looked me that way that night
Because you caressed my hair – love thrived
Because we walked hand in hand for miles
Because you hold me tight before sunrise
Because you gave me reason to live life

Because you left me to survive
Because I am just alive
~Emptiness~ ~ Ravikant Mahto

The highly decentralized nature of the medieval world of Indian Ocean trade produced a bubbling stew of Darwinian economic competition, in which those states whose political "mutations" were best suited to trade and commerce thrived, and those whose institutions were not withered. ~ William J. Bernstein

No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce. ~ Thomas Sowell

America has thrived on capitalism, and America will thrive again on capitalism. ~ Kenneth Langone

I graduated in June 1948 and then went in the fall to the art school. I stayed with my cousins on Seventeenth Street in the beginning, and later had my own apartment very near there and was able to walk to the Art Institute on Elmwood Avenue. The school had a faculty of local artists - Jeanette and Robert Blair, James Vullo who were well known in the area. It was a school that I think thrived on returning GIs, as many schools did at that time. It was a very informal program - but it was professional. ~ Paul Smith

Rays of sunlight danced across the motionless silverware. Solitude. Beautiful solitude. So beautiful he couldn't stand it anymore, not when his existence was so fast approaching its end. The intricate silences he'd thrived upon would no longer suffice to console him in the face of this consuming oblivion. Anything to distract him from it was worth the price of a thousand lives... ~ Zita Steele

A boy who'd thrived in the shadows.
Now he had to live in the light.
To live . . . fiercely.
To fight for every breath. ~ Renee Ahdieh

I've overcome a lot - sexual abuse, death of a loved one, bad parents and experienced life. My nature is such I not only survived all this but I have thrived. I've always been psychologically ambitious in that I've never been willing to settle emotionally for anything less then what's needed. I've wanted more then that from life. ~ Augusten Burroughs

I grew up a clumsy kid with bad hand-eye coordination. Yet here on El Cap, I felt as though I had stumbled into a world where I thrived. Being up on those steep walls demanded the right amount of climbing skill, pain tolerance, and sheer bull-headedness that came naturally to me. ~ Tommy Caldwell

I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today. ~ Craig Venter

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

It's said that sport is the civilised society's substitute for war, and also that the games we play as children are designed to prepare us for the realities of adult life. Certainly it's true that my brother thrived in the capitalist kindergarten of the Monopoly board, developing a set of ruthless strategies whose success is reflected in his bank balance even to this day. I, on the other hand, can still be undone by the kind of ridiculous sentimentality that would see me sacrifice anything, anything, in order to have the three matching red-headed cards of Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square and The Strand sitting tidily together on my side of the board. ~ Danielle Wood

Your problems are not by any means unique, which is a good thing. This means whatever hardships you are currently facing, you can get a glimpse of the future by going back in time and read how other people survived and thrived during similar difficulties. ~ Chris Erzfeld

I had thrived in Miss Popham's class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best way to organize a literature class in high school if the goal is to encourage wide reading and the love of books. My own best teaching in high school reflected my attempts to replicate the spirit of that 1943 class ~ James Gray

Yet he never gave up. Bitterness never staked its claim. Anger never metastasized into hatred. His heart never hardened; his resolve never vanished. He not only survived; he thrived. ~ Max Lucado

Although Christianity has never been the guarantee of a democratic state anywhere in the world, no democracy has ever thrived successfully for any period of time outside of Christian influence. ~ Theodore White

He opened his eyes then, white fire flaring hotly within them.
"Send me home, Legna," he commanded her, his voice hoarse with suppressed emotion.
She moved her head in affirmation even as she leaned toward him to catch his mouth once more in a brief, territorial kiss, her teeth scoring his bottom lip as she broke away. It was an incidental wound, one he could heal in the blink of an eye. But he wouldn't erase her mark on him, and they both knew it.
Finally, she stepped back, closed her eyes, and concentrated on picturing his home in her thoughts. She had been in his parlor dozens of times as a guest, always accompanied by Noah. His library, his kitchen, even the grounds of the isolated estate were well known to her. She could have sent him to any of those locations.
But as she began to focus, her mind's eye was filled with the image of a dark, elegant room she had never seen before. Hand-carved ebony-paneled walls soared up into a vast ceiling, enormous windows of intricate stained glass spilled colored light over the entire room as if a multitude of rainbows had taken up residence. It all centered around an enormous bed, the coverlet's color indistinguishable under the blanket of colorful dawn sunlight that streamed into the room. She could feel the sun's warmth, ready and waiting to cocoon any weary occupant who thrived on sleeping in the heat of the muted daylight sun. It was a beautiful room, and she knew without a doubt that it was Gideon's bedroom an ~ Jacquelyn Frank

I needed control, thrived on it, but around Valentina I often lost it completely. ~ Cora Reilly

It is enough for me to know that I left something of beauty behind and that it has thrived. I am content. ~ Alan Brennert

At the edge of his consciousness, just outside the comprehensible grasp, he could sense the maelstrom of his repressed emotions; the humanity that was forced from him long ago. What was left was pure emotionless logic. Gone was the pre-tense of bumbling simpleton; gone was the outward show of social mediocrity; there was no reason to play human now. This was where Kato thrived, what he was crafted for, and as panic settled on the mortals below, Kato slowly unfurled the phenomenon that lay within. ~ James Hockley

Thanksgiving is a holiday that brought together two different cultures. The pilgrims came here with the best intentions. They decided to flee an oppressive people and move to a new land. Where they thrived. And became an oppressive people. You get certain people on the same continent, there's going to be a problem. Pilgrims and Indians. Protestants, Catholics. My family, anybody else's family. ~ Christopher Titus

I would like to do my own daily talk show. Wisdom is the gift of ageing; no young person can have or buy it. My success was and is self-evident. I'm alive. I've lived. I've thrived and have grown as a person. I'm now healthier than ever. Who can argue with that? ~ Suzanne Somers

At Harvard, the strong and savvy and confident thrived, while the nice or shy or quaintly moral were just bit players. In Ysleta, you believed in God because you were poor and needed something to hold on to. At Harvard, you believed in your good luck or bad luck, in all-nighters, in your political savvy. ~ Sergio Troncoso

They believed their friendships thrived because they had raised some expectations and lowered others. They had come to expect loyalty and good wishes from each other, but not constant attention. If a friend didn't return an email or phone call, they realized, it didn't mean she was angry or backing away from the friendship; she was likely just exhausted from her day. ~ Jeffrey Zaslow

Burlesque thrived during the Great Depression, and by extension, so, too, did Gypsy [Rose Lee]. Men could no longer afford to pay $5.50 to see a show on Broadway, but they could scrape together $1.00 for a matinee at a burlesque house. ~ Karen Abbott

If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Once I could imagine my soul
I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died. This
I remember clearly.
My body persisted.
Not thrived, but persisted.
Why I do not know. ~ Louise Gluck

For Rachel, it might have even been worse, because she had known the rules for a long time, had thrived on them, and had maybe now - if her equally unprecedented lunch outburst was anything to go by - found them empty. ~ Patrick Ness

We had felt like a force of nature. Unstoppable. Destined. We thrived on the passion and confidence of youth that left no room for doubt. We loved each other. And in the ugly world we had inhabited, it was a light we had clung to. ~ A. Meredith Walters

These people were content with their environment, and felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and organizations, and if anything welcoming these intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of 20th century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later. ~ J.G. Ballard

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years. ~ Russell Baker

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal. ~ Richard E. Leakey

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf's below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows' legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by. The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo's sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies. ~ China Mieville

If indeed the universe posessed a mind, it was a cluttered one. And if corners such as these thrived in that mind, then the custodian was asleep, or, perhaps, drunk. ~ Steven Erikson

It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness. ~ Bessie Head

Insects, birds, and small game all chattered, yet for a while, they sat in peace. In an odd way, connection and understanding thrived on the non-words. The forest spoke like God's voice, alive and real, leaving healing and hope in the wake of silence. ~ Michelle Griep

What the Dalai Lama and I are offering," the Archbishop added, "is a way of handling your worries: thinking about others. You can think about others who are in a similar situation or perhaps even in a worse situation, but who have survived, even thrived. It does help quite a lot to see yourself as part of a greater whole." Once again, the path of joy was connection and the path of sorrow was separation. When we see others as separate, they become a threat. When we see others as part of us, as connected, as interdependent, then there is no challenge we cannot face - together. ~ Desmond Tutu

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another
physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. ~ Toni Morrison

Neither light nor heat could withstand it; to gaze into that nullity and to comprehend its scope was to have one's humanity snuffed. Only the inhuman thrived in out there in deep black. ~ Laird Barron

My encounter with desperation while witnessing the death of a precious child changed me, teaching me that although we will have sad times, we can move on, chastened and changed but resilient and hopeful. Laurel showed me one way to live with hope as well as cancer as she thrived even when tumors grew within her small body. She exhibited how a child can push aside despair and appreciate as many moments as possible, to believe in the power of resurrection, both the human spirit and in a Biblical sense. ~ Brent Green

With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

Bohemians.

These Bohemians, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Williams, and their seven children, Biff, Tina, Sparky, Louise, Tuffy, Mickey, and Biff Number Two, lived in a notorious artist's colony and planned community.

Naturally, the bohemian's existence thrived on creativity. Early in the morning, Mrs. Williams would rise and create breakfast. Then, Mr. Williams, inspired by his wife's limitless energy, would rush off to a special room and create tiny hairs in a sink. The children would create things, too. But being temperamental artists, they would often flush them away without a second thought.

But the bohemians' creativity didn't stop there. Mr. Williams would then rush off downtown and create reams and reams of papers with numbers on them and send them out to other Bohemians who would create special checks to send to him with figures like $7.27written on them.

At home, the children would be creating unusual music, using only their voices to combine in avant-garde, atonal melodies.

Yes, these were the bohemians. A seething hot-bed of rebellion-the artists, the creators of all things that lie between good and bad. ~ Steve Martin

The Doxology ... that testimonial to the Platonic Trinity, which divided the Roman Empire into at least eighteen quarreling sects, none of whom knew what they were fighting about, and which schisms contributed to the decline and fall of this greatest of states. Rome had thrived for one thousand years with pagan gods at the helm and expired after only one hundred and fifty years under the Christian banner. ~ Ruth Hurmence Green

Tissue gas was an embalmer's worst nightmare - a highly infectious form of bacteria that thrived on dead tissue and released a noxious gas inside the body. Smell was usually the easiest way to detect it, but sometimes, as with this body, the smell was buried under other chemicals, and the only way to identify it was the 'skin-slip' Mom had found on the back, where interior gas bubbles separated the skin from the muscle. The gas itself was bad enough, because the stink would soon become so foul it would be all but impossible to cover up; that didn't reflect well on us when people showed up for the viewing. Even worse than the gas though, were the bacteria that made it. Once they got into your workspace, you might never get them out again. If we didn't put a stop to this right now, every body we embalmed would catch the same bacteria from our tools and table. It could destroy the entire business. ~ Dan Wells

It [government] was a cancerous mass of bureaucracy that thrived just below the surface of stately marble buildings. ~ Steven W. Horn

Along with romantic love, she was introduced to another–physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover, and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way. ~ Toni Morrison

They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed. ~ J.G. Ballard

Feel no regret for roses, autumn too has its delights...How could she say that? Didn't she see that for us there could never be autumn, that we could never sit, as anyone else could sit, beside the fire all day on Sundays in November; that September's leaves, that fall for man and beast alike, were not our leaves to walk in; that October storms would never find us sharing an umbrella? The love of spring had thrived on wine and candles; now in the August of our lives, we needed newspapers and comfortable chairs. But it was impossible. No autumn--only a cold wind that blew through our summer, freezing the leaves in their places before they could motley and fall. ~ Raphael Carter

Where I'm fortunate and why I think I've thrived and survived, through the not having albums out every year-and-a-half, is not taking the songs lightly and trying to make sure I've got consistency. ~ Rodney Atkins