Datum Line Quotes & Sayings

When dawn spread its cool clear flush over the meadows and fields and thorny pastures to the north and east, Duane pulled an old lawn chair out of the cabin and sat down to watch, cradling a cup of coffee in his hands. It was chilly enough that he threw an old poncho over his lap. — Larry McMurtry

Microsoft's philosophy is to get it out there and fix it later. Steve [Jobs] would never do that. He doesn't get anything out there until it is perfected. — John Sculley

I hated meeting people at bars when I was single because it's all about the looks and the funny line. — Sam Yagan

You can spend your life judging people or, you can spend it making friends. Take your pick. — Carroll Bryant

The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language. — Alain De Botton

Libraries make strange bedfellows — Phyllis Rose

The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area but leave him intact ...
He is an isolated, definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-poised in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears down on him, whereupon he follows he line of the resultant — Thorstein Veblen

Are two eyes, four appendages and an upright posture really essential for any creature that can ace the galactic SAT's? Maybe not. In fact, I'd venture that any aliens we ever detect or (less likely) encounter will look quite different than this self-referential stereotype. — Seth Shostak

Me and Biggie share a storytelling ability
he was an actor on wax, too. His stories were so vivid and torrid, he made you feel them. And we both have the hardness. When I come out on the mic, you know it's me. — Black Rob

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life. — Richard Hell