Forms Themes Quotes & Sayings

Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor described in the first essay in this book, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you're dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having to explain to the librarian why you are so keen to read about homoerotic themes in eighteenth century British verse. — David Graeber

At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis. — Ada Yonath

I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again - not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life. — Maggie Nelson

Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted. — Matthew Scully

Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. — Johannes Brahms

If you can think it, then You Can Do It. Don't underestimate Your Power to change the world. — Jeanette Coron

When you think you are in love, you don't want to know about the things that could end it. — Luke Davies

The forms art takes keep changing, but the themes remain the same. — Marty Rubin

The more I pay attention to what's going on inside, the more I realize that how I feel, and how I react to what I feel, really creates my reality. And the more in touch I can be, the better chance I have to control what's happening in my life. — Ricky Williams

We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision. — Brenda Ueland

It's not every day a guy, or even a Sheer, gets bitten by his own hand. At least I hoped it wasn't. — Kami Garcia

I was always - I was a movie nut. I lived in the movies, really. — Robert Barry

Already at sixteen, my mind was a battlefield: my love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms: one spiritual, the other earthly. — Michelangelo

Temporal experience is neither completely recurrent (in which case it would be wholly knowable) nor completely variable (in which case it would be wholly inscrutable). In effect, it is more like a piece of complex music, a Bach fugue heard for the first time. In one sense, we are excited and surprised by the novel disposition of tones and rhythms and by the uncanny variety of the treatment. In another sense, we realize that recurring ideas and cycles are what give the work its native character, and that the variations, however stunning, have significance only in terms of their relationship to these underlying themes. Conversely, the recurrent themes are realizable in their fullest sense only through the variations upon them. The careful student of time is thus as sure that certain things will recur as he is sure that they will recur in dazzling new forms. — Robert Grudin

The ending has to fit. The ending has to matter, and make sense. I could care less about whether it's happy or sad or atomic. The ending is the place where you go, "Aha. Of course. That's right." — Carrie Jones

There's no Ben & Jerry's in the netherworld. It's a crime. — Anonymous

Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

My mom and dad put my brother and sister through university and they were very keen for us to have an academic background just to give us a chance. — Rob James-Collier