Treelike Crossword Quotes

The human mind is stimulated by change, motivated by meeting the challenge of novelty or threat or pleasure, rewarded with the sensations of being instrumental in altering environments, and will persevere in this as long as there is some degree of perceivable progress. People turn to knitting baby booties, doing crossword puzzles, collecting rare coins; they may even make an effort to understand E=mc2 or to study the genetic adaptations of cacti, but in all cases, they need to see some fruit of their labors. ~ Michael D. O'Brien

Looking at the sky, he suddenly saw that it had become black. Then white again, but with great rippling circles. The circles were vultures wheeling around the sun. The vultures disappeared, to be replaced by checkers squares ready to be played on. On the board, the pieces moved around incredibly rapidly, winning dozens of games every minute. They were scarcely lined up before they started rushing at each other again, banging into each other, forming fighting combinations, wiping the other side out in the wink of an eye. Then the squares scattered, giving way to the grille of a crossword puzzle, and here, too, words flashed, drove each other away, clustered, were erased. They were all very long words, like Catalepsy, Thunderbird, Superrequeteriquísímo and Anticonstitutionally. The grille faded away, and suddenly the whole sky was covered with linked words, long sentences full of semicolons and inverted commas. For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering u ~ J M G Le Clezio

I like doing the crossword puzzle in the New York Times, not watching E! on TV. ~ Paula Cole

I became an actor because I love solving problems. I'm a big crossword puzzle person. I love doing research. One of the reasons I became Jewish is because I love text study. ~ Anthony Heald

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles. ~ Nora Ephron

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. BACK ~ Nicholas Carr

Thank you for your attempt at trying to be thoughtful while stealing shit from me." He picked up a crossword booklet from a chair and tossed it into the trash. "And for filling out my fucking crossword puzzles without me having to ask. I'm not sure how I've ever survived this long without you. ~ Whitney G.

Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword and realizing there's no right answer ~ Taylor Swift

Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, ~ Stanisław Lem

Turn your obstacles to your advantage. If you can find a plus out of a negative, then it cannot weigh you down. I like to think I have a superpower called dyslexia. I am creative, intuitive, and empathetic. I am great with problem-solving, and I can think outside the box. Just the other day, I was helping my daughter with a crossword puzzle, and she said, "Dad, how do you find the answers so fast? And I said, "I have dyslexia, and it helps me see things differently. To which she replied, "Aw, I want that." If we can see our differences or unique qualities as gifts, we can bypass the stigmas that come with them and impress upon ourselves and society we can do anything any other person can do, just differently, and sometimes better. ~ Lorin Morgan-Richards

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that. ~ Paul Muldoon

The great god Ra, whose shrine once covered acres, is filler now for crossword puzzle makers. ~ Keith Preston

Karma," he said once, "is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she choses."
Love. Murder. A broken heart. The professor in the drawing room with candlestick. The detective in the bar with the gun. The guitar player backstage with the pick.
Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song. ~ Sara Gran

Change the setting, change the mood ... She'd taught him to make himself go outside if he was in, or inside if he was out, to interrupt the plummet with something as simple as making a cup of tea or spending a few minutes working on crossword puzzles. ~ Jennifer Weiner

He was an arsehole, but, God, she looked at Richard sometimes, the racing bike, the way he did the crossword in pencil first. There were evenings when she wanted Dad to ride in off the plains, all dust and sweat and tumbleweed, kick open the saloon doors and stick some bullet holes in those fucking art books. ~ Mark Haddon

Digger stood and ambled toward the balcony. "This explains so much. I feel like I've just finished a crossword puzzle."
"How do you know what that feels like?" Kelly asked ~ Abigail Roux

Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books. ~ Betty Smith

She became a question mark. An unfinished puzzle. An intricate crossword. An impervious shooting star yet to determine her course. ~ Neetha Joseph

I think that, at the end of the day, I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it. ~ Damon Lindelof

Some people like doing crossword puzzles or Sudoku. I love auditioning. On camera, I hated auditioning. But voiceovers I like trying to figure it out, then getting in there and seeing how close you can get. ~ Tom Kenny

I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles ~ Norman Mailer

But I'm really enjoying my retirement. I get to sleep in every day. I do crossword puzzles and eat cake. ~ Derek Landy

A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand, Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler, philosopher, gardener, fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York Times crossword puzzle - to which he was hopelessly addicted. ~ Anthony Bourdain

To test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved "slowly and insecurely" and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an "ovoid cupola." Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects" - a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased - von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X's inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force ~ Mary Roach

I looked at my sister, so tired and yet so happy, and I admit I felt a little envious. And the whole thing still seemed unreal and incomplete to me, and I couldn't really believe it had happened without me. It was as if I had put only one word in a crossword puzzle and someone else finished it when I turned my back. Even more embarrassing, I actually felt a little bit guilty that I hadn't been there, even though I wasn't invited. Debs had been in danger without me, and that felt wrong. Completely stupid and irrational, not at all like me, but there it was. ~ Jeff Lindsay

Whatever wisdom I have has been hard-earned – each meaning carefully culled out of the dictionary of human experiences and emotions and put in its precise place in the matrix. Meaning doesn't come easy. The Great Crossword Setter in the Sky is capricious and wilful, demanding absolute obedience. You can waste the better part of a lifetime arguing about the randomness of the clues, the setting of the squares, why a certain square is black and not white as you need it to be, question the whole point of doing the crossword – what, after all, is to be gained by solving it. Only after all the chattering is over and you give your complete attention to it, does the perfection of the pattern reveal itself. As is, where is, everything fits. And at the end, when it's all done, there is no reward to be had – the joy of doing it right is all the reward there ever is. (A Deepavali Gift) ~ Manjul Bajaj

Inside a wool jacket the man had made a pocket for the treasure and from time to time he would jiggle the pocket, just to make sure that it was still there. And when on the train he rode to work he would jiggle it there also, but he would disguise his jiggling of the treasure on the train by devising a distraction. For example, the man would pretend to be profoundly interested in something outside the train, such as the little girl who seemed to be jumping high up on a trampoline, just high enough so that she could spy the man on the train, and in this way he really did become quite interested in what occurred outside the train, although he would still jiggle the treasure, if only out of habit. Also on the train he'd do a crossword puzzle and check his watch by rolling up his sleeve; when he did so he almost fell asleep. Antoine often felt his life to be more tedious with this treasure, because in order not to be overly noticed he had deemed it wise to fall into as much a routine as possible and do everything as casually as possible, and so, as a consequence, despite the fact that he hated his wife and daughter, he didn't leave them, he came home to them every night and he ate the creamed chicken that his wife would prepare for him, he would accept the large, fleshy hand that would push him around while he sat around in his house in an attempt to read or watch the weather, he took out the trash, he got up on time every morning and took a quick, cold shower, he shaved, he acce ~ Justin Dobbs

The discovery of eternal inflation has radically transformed our understanding of what's out there in space on the largest scales. Now I can't help but feel that our old story sounds like a fairy tale, with its single narrative in a simple sequence: "Once upon a time, there was inflation. Inflation made our Big Bang. Our Big Bang made galaxies." Figure 5.7 illustrates why this story is too naive: it yet again repeats our human mistake of assuming that all we know of so far is all that exists. We see that even our Big Bang is just a small part of something much grander, a treelike structure that's still growing. In other words, what we've called our Big Bang wasn't the ultimate beginning, but rather the end-of inflation in our part of space. ~ Max Tegmark

A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree. ~ Gretel Ehrlich

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I won a helicopter in a crossword puzzle competition? There is not much hope though I am afraid, as they never give such practical prizes. ~ Leonora Carrington

Jesus is not directing the angelic choir, taking long naps, or doing crossword puzzles. He is completely focused on building his church, the hope of the world. ~ Bill Hybels

I've been working on 'The New York Times' crossword puzzle on the subway. I can make it until about Wednesday. ~ Eddie Kaye Thomas