Coded Quotes & Sayings

The real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded. — Mark Zuckerberg

We all want to believe that every day is different, that every day we change, but really, it seems that certain things are coded into us from the very beginning. — Jasmine Warga

Phonetics, you know speech, all this kind of stuff, phonograph, simple, but when you unpack the meaning it actually kind of expands out and that is what I was going for in my book "Sound Unbound" was to try and get people to figure out how do we unpack some of the meanings that go into these kinds of sonically coded landscapes. — DJ Spooky

Nature attunes children to receive the coded messages that parents issue how to live a joyful and virtuous life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I read somewhere that dedications are like coded love letters,
but I always seem to lay us out bare.

Sorry for the poems. — Unknown

Children weren't color-coded at all until the early twentieth century: in the era before Maytag, all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What's more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy, and faithfulness, symbolized femininity. — Peggy Orenstein

It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and that would merely be the prologue. Every time I submit myself to the snubs and indignities of that swaggering city and set myself adrift among the prodigious crowds, a feeling of displacement, profound and enervating, takes me over, killing all the coded cells of my hard-won singularity. The city marks my soul with a most profane, indelible graffiti. There is too much of too much there. — Pat Conroy

F.B.I and C.I.A use coded words.... Don't be stupid, remove everything which shows the location. Good Luck Killer ! — Deyth Banger

I suppose I'm qualified to some degree to speak about the nature of contemporary media, as that's where I currently work. People, I think have been beyond trained - coded to not anticipate change; to think that change is implausible. Almost weaned off. It had to be a revolution bred out of us. — Russell Brand

Shame is so painful for children because it is inextricably linked to the fear of being unlovable. For young children who are still dependent on their parents for survival - for food, shelter, and safety - feeling unlovable is a threat to survival. It's trauma. I'm convinced that the reason most of us revert back to feeling childlike and small when we're in shame is because our brain stores our early shame experiences as trauma, and when it's triggered we return to that place. We don't have the neurobiological research yet to confirm this, but I've coded hundreds of interviews that follow this same pattern: — Brene Brown

Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed. — Richard Dawkins

A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording. — Charles Petzold

Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action. — Albert Bandura

We can't help identifying with the protagonist. It's coded in our movie-going DNA. — Roger Ebert

It's not funny, Joan. My bras are all in the first row, color-coded alphabetically from left to right, and then a row of panties, all folded in little squares, and then slips. And socks along the back row. Everything's so neat it makes me want to throw up. — Virginia Smith

The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them ... — Christina Baldwin

Fine-art photography is a very small world associated with galleries, museums, and university art programs. It's not like rock music; the products of this world have never been widely seen because the artists are often exploring things that are not already coded in general consciousness. It's not that photographers don't want to be famous, it's just that very few of the views from the edges of culture make the mainstream. Ansel Adams was an exception. — Mark Klett

I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything. I buried everything under layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there, for me. I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience. — William Gibson

The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many. — Mark Z. Danielewski

It is Davy's job to decipher and transmit information into code. Sexual language is like that, Freddie thinks. Everything coded. Everything stripped down to elementary dots and dashes. — Glenn Haybittle

Strong privacy advocates - especially those promoting encryption and anonymity - may deny that this phenomenon is a direct physical corollary of their message, so I will let the reader decide whether a philosophy that relies on cybernetic gates, walls, and coded locks is any different in its underlying basis - fear. — David Brin

[The militia experts] accuse antigoverment agitants of paranoia, yet they spin around and claim that militias speak in coded phrases, have underground bunkers, and are secretly conspiring to take over the world and enslave minorities. They say it's lunacy that men at the pentagon can conspire, yet they're certain that farmers out on the plain are plotting as we speak.

They depict the United Nations as weak und ineffectual, yet they portray raggedy-ass backwoodsmen as the world's biggest organized military threat. — Jim Goad

Ty laughed, a carefree, boyish sound, and glanced to his side, distracted by what he saw. "You moved the rug."
"I kitty-cornered it."
"Why would you do that?" Ty asked, aghast.
"To see you lose your shit when you got home." Zane leaned closer, grinning evilly. "There are other things out of order too. Books not alphabetized. Coffee mug handles facing different directions." He lowered his voice to a whisper as Ty's eyes widened in horror. "The closet isn't color coded."
"You're just watching the world burn, huh?"
Zane laughed.
"God I missed you." Ty said in a rush of breath. — Abigail Roux

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend. — Claudia Rankine

From my chair I had a clear view of Hobie's Noah's Ark: paired elephants, zebras, carven beasts marching two by two, clear down to tiny hen and rooster and the bunnies and mice bringing up the rear. And the memory was located there, beyond words, a coded message from that first afternoon: rain streaming down the skylights, the homely file of creatures lined on the kitchen counter waiting to be saved. Noah: the great conservator, the great caretaker. "And - " he'd gotten up to make some coffee - "I — Donna Tartt

When Julia was twenty-nine, her hair was already bar-coded. Now, at sixty-two, it was a solid helmet of bright pewter, level with her lean, brown jawbone. — Craig Raine

Remember that codes are more than a filing system. Every project needs a systematic way to store coded field data and a way to retrieve them easily during analysis. — Matthew B. Miles

We are beginning to shift into life code. And in the process of shifting into life code, every life form on this planet is coded in a double helix with a sugar phosphate backbone. And that codes whether you become a bacteria, an orange, a lemon, a Lemur, a Cow, a sheep, a human being, a politician, any one of these things is all coded in this four-letter code. — Juan Enriquez

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity. — John Le Carre

Even before I had an assistant, my calendar was color-coded and I had all these different e-mail rules for how to prioritize e-mails, so I made it a point years ago to figure all that stuff out because my life was a mess. — Chris Hardwick

In a way, you might say that David Duke is the son of Willie Horton. Duke is more overt, of course, but he's really just pushing the same buttons and sending the same coded messages that the Horton ads did so effectively for the Bush campaign last year. — Judd Rose

Human experience is not nest and orderly, ready to be coded into predetermined categories. Real life is messy — Jennifer Gold

Computer are incredible coded, they fascinating me... as for sex... I don't need it, there is pornography so much that I won't finish watching... so far I won't...live so much on this planet to check out everything. — Deyth Banger

The idea of "post-racism," just like that of "reverse racism," is really just a coded way of denying the existence of actual racism. And denying the existence of actual racism is really just another form of (you guessed it) racism. — Justin Simien

St John had always been a fan of the RS Turbo, mainly due to the colour coded rear spoiler and air vents in the bonnet, which distinguished it from the more common and less powerful XR3i. — St John Morris

Everything. A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library. Others believe that the world can be decoded by reading a newspaper. In my case, the only thing that made sense of the world was you, and without you the world will seem as garbled and tragic as a malfunctioning typewrit9. — Lemony Snicket

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female ... In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness — Laura Mulvey

... It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed. But even now there was something rather than nothing. The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth ... — Stephen Baxter

Careful listening to current country and western and rock music with the help of an interpreter for coded phrases shows that young people are hearing a constant stream of messages about getting high, feeling good, going on trips, and using drugs of all kinds with all methods. — Virgil Miller Newton

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages. — Umberto Eco

Every woman I'd ever known had two sets of memories: the one they wanted to remember and the one their heart wouldn't let them forget. The first kind were chosen, mostly positive and personality building, but the second would live on forever, despite age and fatigue and life-stealing diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's. Coded on the heart like a hard drive, the feelings never vanished. — Max Monroe

Haven't you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed?
All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that's everywhere and nowhere? — Don DeLillo

After we map out all the main characters' individual arcs, using color-coded index cards, we arrange them by episode and get a rough idea of the scene order. — Bryan Cogman

A mother needs to be in the home even when the kids aren't. A messy house sends a coded message to children: I'm not loveable. Otherwise Mother would dust. — Stephen Colbert

How careless of me!" By which she meant that she had deduced that he had found [them] in his pocket and pitied him for needing to be forever in the right. — Tom Holt

The ascetic planet he sights is the planet of the practising as a whole, the planet of advanced-civilized humans, the planet of those who have begun to give their existence forms and contents under vertical tensions in countless programmes of effort, some more and some less strictly coded. When Nietzsche speaks of the ascetic planet, it is not because he would rather have been born on a more relaxed star. His antiquity-instinct tells him that every heavenly body worth inhabiting must - correctly understood - be an ascetic planet inhabited by the practising, the aspiring and the virtuosos. What is antiquity for him but the code word for the age in which humans had to become strong enough for a sacred-imperial image of the whole? Inherent in the great worldviews of antiquity was the intention of showing mortals how they could live in harmony with the 'universe', even and especially when that whole showed them its baffling side, its lack of consideration for individuals. — Peter Sloterdijk

In addition to pumping the blood of life within our bodies, we may think of the heart as a belief-to-matter translator. It converts the perceptions of our experiences, beliefs, and imagination into the coded language of waves that communicate with the world beyond our bodies. Perhaps this is what philosopher and poet John Mackenzie meant when he stated, "The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finely maintained ... all existing thing are ... imaginary." — Gregg Braden

Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street. — William Shockley

I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we've funded ever since by putting ads on the side. — Mark Zuckerberg

I hear you're a conspiracy nut. Well, this is the conspiracy, kid. It ain't ancient gods an' aliens an' coded shit on the dollar bill. It ain't even a secret, it's somthin' ordinary folks do for a livin' every day of the week. It's business. — Garth Ennis

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology. — Richard Dawkins

It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air ... spreading DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds ... It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs. — Richard Dawkins

The simple, stupefying truth that, as a woman, I am a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all, moved me deeply. — Diane Ackerman

Until she went with him to India the first time after they were married. Then it all made sense, and she realized that the hospitality he displayed to all guests was larger than he was - it was cultural, hereditary, something coded into his DNA. — Thrity Umrigar

Our own dimension was coded ID-11 and was the only League member with diphtheria, David Hasselhoff and the French, which amused the rest of the multiverse no end. — Jasper Fforde

With Bitcoin hard-coded to be limited, it's like a collectible. — Bobby Lee

Morals: They're nothing but a coded survival instinct! — Theodore Sturgeon

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine
to dream about things that have not happened
is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten. — Milan Kundera

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas. — Shane Carruth

He had written this book only in the hope that she might get in touch with him. Writing a book, for him, was also a way of beaming a searchlight or sending out coded signals to certain people with whom he had lost touch. It was enough to scatter their names at random through the pages and wait until they finally produced news of themselves. — Patrick Modiano

Tom Ridge announced a new color-coded alarm system ... Green means everything's okay. Red means we're in extreme danger. And champagne-fuschia means we're being attacked by Martha Stewart. — Conan O'Brien

The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not) ... — Roland Barthes

We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try. — Lewis Thomas

Republican strategist Kevin Phillips is often credited for offering the most influential argument in favor of a race-based strategy for Republican political dominance in the South. He argued in The Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1969, that Nixon's successful presidential election campaign could point the way toward long-term political realignment and the building of a new Republican majority, if Republicans continued to campaign primarily on the basis of racial issues, using coded antiblack rhetoric.54 He argued that Southern white Democrats had become so angered and alienated by the Democratic Party's support for civil rights reforms, such as desegregation and busing, that those voters could be easily persuaded to switch parties if those racial resentments could be maintained. — Michelle Alexander

The happiness is a simple algorithm coded by the crowd or by one or two people! — Deyth Banger

Writing is a particular kind of frustration, which is why when I was making the structure for the novel I visualized it for myself with a color-coded board so I could see it. — Rebecca Miller

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think. — Vanessa Redgrave

It may come as a surprise to many that there are ciphers (coded messages indicated by a letter or group of letters) in the Bible. Some are hidden; some, when revealed, are a key part of the narrative itself — Chuck Missler

Nature had obviously color-coded people for a reason. Otherwise, what the hell were all these different colors for? — Kurt Vonnegut

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. Joel Salatin — Michael Pollan

All the great people say it was their destiny to be great. Know thyself-you have a destiny to be great. It's coded in your DNA/RNA. Meet thy greater self. Express thy higher self. Fulfill your real self. — Mark Victor Hansen

I'm a lawyer. Pessimists see a glass half-empty; optimists see a glass half-full. Lawyers see a glass containing possible carcinogenic materials without a warning label. Skepticism is coded in our DNA. — Naima Simone

The human brain runs first-class simulation software. Our eyes don't present to our brains a faithful photograph of what is out there, or an accurate movie of what is going on through time. Our brains construct a continuously updated model: updated by coded pulses chattering along the optic nerve, but constructed nevertheless. Optical illusions are vivid reminders of this.47 A major class of illusions, of which the Necker Cube is an example, arise because the sense data that the brain receives are compatible with two alternative models of reality. The brain, having no basis for choosing between them, alternates, and we experience a series of flips from one internal model to the other. The picture we are looking at appears, almost literally, to flip over and become something else. — Richard Dawkins

Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play. — Nick Hornby

Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure, the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother. — Joshua Ferris

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor's credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint. — Joe Haldeman

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released. — Jean Houston

Circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell - the strange inverse sense of apartheid. — Chris Abani

Whomever it is you were born to be, whatever your soul was coded to accomplish, whatever lessons you were born to learn, now is the time to get serious and get going. — Marianne Williamson

The eight-acre underground was so sprawling that for months after the park first opened, guides had to be stationed in the tunnels to redirect lost employees. Soon after, the tunnel walls were color-coded by land and maps were posted at each intersection to help newcomers find their way. — David Koenig

We are built to make mistakes, coded for error. — Lewis Thomas

the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience - the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people - is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface. This new law of physics, known as the Holographic Principle, asserts that everything inside a region of space can be described by bits of information restricted to the boundary. — Leonard Susskind

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held. — William Gibson

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day. — Rita Dove

Religion is just coded spirituality. — Ken Wilber

I'd let the words run over my brain and out my ears, like a terrified cancer patient hearing all that coded jargon and understanding nothing, except that it was very bad news. — Gillian Flynn

There a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result? — Catherynne M Valente

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world. — Russell Baker

As if, within their high-pitched cries and songs, there are coded threats. 'Sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you get what you need and sometimes you get what you get.' Extract — Marian Keyes

She thought of the hawk, which must have winged its way to her father by now. SHe imagined it slewing aruond trees, dropping down. Talons closing around his upraised fist. Her father unrolling the coded message. The trap she'd set for him.

Walk into it , she willed.

You have a mind for strategy , he'd said once.

Come see, then.

See what I can do to you. See what you have done to me. — Marie Rutkoski

The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. — J.G. Ballard

I have studied your lips
every line, dip and bend
and
have come to realize
one truth:
the way you move
is in perfect
unison with
the perk
and pout
of your mouth
orating coded syllables
only I can make out. — Adrian Michael

After three years of English at Cambridge, being force-fed literary theory, I was almost convinced that literature was all coded messages about Marxism and the death of the self. I crawled out of the post-structuralist desert thirsty for heroines I could cry and laugh with. I was jaded. I craved trash. — Samantha Ellis

The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things. — Ben Okri

Claiming our birthright means living in beauty inwardly regardless of our outer circumstances. It means cultivating the qualities coded in our hearts. — Lori Cash Richards

Culture is coded wisdom — Wangari Maathai

A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams. — Miles Harvey

Our visual field, the entire view of what we can see when we look out into the world, is divided into billions of tiny spots or pixels. Each pixel is filled with atoms and molecules that are in vibration. The retinal cells in the back of our eyes detect the movement of those atomic particles. Atoms vibrating at different frequencies emit different wavelengths of energy, and this information is eventually coded as different colors by the visual cortex in the occipital region of our brain. A visual image is built by our brain's ability to package groups of pixels together in the form of edges. Different edges with different orientations - vertical, horizontal and oblique, combine to form complex images. Different groups of cells in our brain add depth, color and motion to what we see. — Jill Bolte Taylor

One of the biggest problems of mathematics is to explain to everyone else what it is all about. The technical trappings of the subject, its symbolism and formality, its baffling terminology, its apparent delight in lengthy calculations: these tend to obscure its real nature. A musician would be horrified if his art were to be summed up as "a lot of tadpoles drawn on a row of lines"; but that"s all that the untrained eye can see in a page of sheet music ... In the same way, the symbolism of mathematics is merely its coded form, not its substance. — Ian Stewart

On the plantations the slave owners would take their slaves' drums away because they didn't want them communicating with other slaves. They were afraid that the drum was some kind of magic signal system, a primal, coded language, which it was. And is. When the drums were taken away, other instruments were taken up - fifes and fiddles and the rest, and they were used for celebration and lamentation both, and a new kind of song sprung up, a work song, to document the labor in the fields, to pass the time, to pass on the content of the time, so that people would know what had happened. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson