Half A Brain Quotes & Sayings

But an idea had presented itself to him, knocking at his brain like a nighttime traveler, and instead of shutting the door in its face, Browles built it a fire, he drew a chair for it up to the hearth and spent half a decade trying to decipher and then convey what it struggled to tell him. He was patient and industrious and quietly determined. Buffeted by setbacks and rejection and his own limitations, he persevered. — Julie Schumacher

Shame you also don't date men, because I can think of a half a dozen places in this room alone that I'd like to fuck you and then I want to take you home and christen every room in that damned penthouse. Hell, everywhere you look in this office and everywhere you look at home, I want you to remember how we fucked there. I want those memories burned into your brain. And that ... takes time. — Jocelynn Drake

Hey - with your metal leg and half a brain, and my four leftover senses, we almost make a whole person. — Marie Lu

If you're Natalie Dormer, you can take big fashion risks and shave half your head, and it looks good. If you're a normal person and you try that, you just look like you had recent brain surgery. — Mindy Kaling

Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it ... or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right from wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster. — Stephen L. Carter

Alot can happen in eleven minutes. Decker can run two miles in eleven minutes. I once wrote an English essay in ten. And God knows Carson Levine can talk a girl out of her clothes in less then half that time.
Eleven minutes might as well be eternity underwater. It only takes three minutes without air for loss consciousness. Permanent brain damange begins at four minutes. And then, when the oxygen runs out, full cardiac arrest occurs. Death is possible at five minutes. Probable at seven. Definite at ten.
Decker pulled me out at eleven. — Megan Miranda

Because I finally can," Sebastian said. "You've no idea what it's been like, being around the lot of you these past few days, having to pretend I could stand you. That the sight of you didn't make me sick. You," he said to Jace, "every second you're not panting after your own sister, you're whining on and on about how your daddy didn't love you. Well, who could blame him? And you, you stupid bitch" - he turned to Clary - "giving that priceless book away to a half-breed warlock; have you got a single brain cell in that tiny head of yours? — Cassandra Clare

'Ornithologists concluded that migratory birds take hundreds of naps as they fly; they also practice unilateral eye closure, in which one eye closes, thereby permitting half the brain to sleep.' Is this what happens when photographers close one eye to look through a viewfinder? If so, they might be operating with only half a brain. Perhaps that explains ... — Bill Jay

A new study finds that women use their whole brain when listening and men only use half of their brain. You see, men use the other half of their brain to come up with excuses. I don't think women use their whole brain when listening. I think they use half of it and the other half is used to memorize what men are saying so they can use it against them 10 years later! — Jay Leno

Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for. — Ben Aaronovitch

Then, one glorious day, our principal announced that any student with a passing grade-point average could apply for a transfer to the new OASIS public school system. The real public school system, the one run by the government, had been an underfunded, overcrowded train wreck for decades. And now the conditions at many schools had gotten so terrible that every kid with half a brain was being encouraged to stay at home and attend school online. — Ernest Cline

Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power. Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle, — Gregory Benford

Showers"

The child tells me, put a brick in the tank,
don't wear leather, don't eat brisket,
snapper, or farmed salmon - not tells,
orders - doesn't she know the sluice gates
are wide open and a trillion gallons
wasted just for the dare of it?

Until the staring eye shares that thrill,
witnessing: I am just iris and cornea,
blind spot where brain meets mind,
the place where the image forms itself
from a spark - image of the coming storm.

Still the child waits outside the bathroom
with the watch she got for Best Essay,
muttering, two minutes too long.

Half measures, I say. She says, action.
I: I'm one man. She: Seven billion.

If you choose, the sea goes back. — Dennis Nurkse

Well, every girl with half a brain knows there's only one thing to do when you break up with your man - "
"No, we didn't break up - " Luce said, at the exact same time as Shelby said:
"Change your hair."
"Change my hair?"
"Fresh start," Shelby said. "I've dyed mine orange, chopped it off. Hell, once I even shaved it after this jerk really broke my heart. — Lauren Kate

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life. — Salman Rushdie

Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up? — Richard Russo

What has three heads, six arms, and half a brain?" Three asked. One and Two answered in unison. "Nate Sutter. — Brandon Mull

The results of decades of neurotransmitter-depletion studies point to one inescapable conclusion: low levels or serotonin, norepinephrine or dopamine do not cause depression. here is how the authors of the most complete meta-analysis of serotonin-depletion studies summarized the data: Although previously the monoamine systems were considered to be responsible for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), the available evidence to date does not support a direct causal relationship with MDD. There is no simple direct correlation of serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain and mood.' In other words, after a half-century of research, the chemical-imbalance hypothesis as promulgated by the drug companies that manufacture SSRIs and other antidepressants is not only with clear and consistent support, but has been disproved by experimental evidence. — Irving Kirsch

She read on and on, enraptured. She could not understand half, but it excited her oddly, like words in a foreign language sung to a beautiful air. She followed the poem vaguely as she followed the Latin in her missal, guessing, inventing meanings for herself, intoxicated by the mere rush of words. And yet she felt she did understand, not with her eyes or her brain, but with some faculty she did not even know she possessed. — Antonia White

I looked Mikey right in the eye, and I said, "We gotta let 'em go." It was the stupidest, most southern-fried, lamebrained decision I ever made in my life. I must have been out of my mind. I had actually cast a vote which I knew could sign our death warrant. I'd turned into a fucking liberal, a half-assed, no-logic nitwit, all heart, no brain, and the judgment of a jackrabbit. — Marcus Luttrell

Poorer children grow up with more stress and more disruption, and these disadvantages produce effects on the brain. Researchers often use dull tests to see who can focus attention and stay on task. Children raised in the top income quintile were two-and-a-half times more likely to score well on these tests than students raised in the bottom quintile. — David Brooks

Gabe's brain told him that this was a very, very bad idea.
Aside from the fact that it went against the credo he'd lived by for the past half a decade, getting mixed up with a vamp could get him killed.
His dick told his brain to shut the hell up. It did. — Lou Harper

I half believe him, but I can't risk being wrong based on a gut feeling. [ ... ]
"What do you want me to do?" Jack throws up his hands. "If I could crack open my skull and let you read my brain like a book, I would!"
My breath catches in my throat. Because I ... I could read his brain like a book. — Beth Revis

Certainly the first true humans were unique by virtue of their large brains. It was because the human brain is so large when compared with that of a chimpanzee that paleontologists for years hunted for a half-ape, half-human skeleton that would provide a fossil link between the human and the ape. — Jane Goodall

If Mason had half a brain he would shut up, sit down, and not provoke Caleb any more than possible. But something told him Quinn didn't have half a brain and even less patience — Alex Morgan

I don't care what your nose says! The last time you smelled half-blood, it turned out to be a meatloaf sandwich!"
"Meatloaf sandwiches are good! But this is a half-blood scent, I swear. They are on board!"
"Bah, your brain isn't on board! — Rick Riordan

A fierce and monkish art; a castigation of the flesh. You must cut out your imagination and not fly an airplane but regulate a half-dozen instruments ... At first, the conflicts between animal sense and engineering brain are irresistibly strong. — Wolfgang Langewiesche

Caffeine is safe and effective but not without a downside. Depending on one's sensitivity, it has a half-life of six to eight hours. Even if you have no trouble falling asleep after drinking coffee late in the day, you may wake more easily during the night because your nervous system is still aroused, your brain attuned to sounds and other stimuli that would otherwise go unheeded. The more poorly you sleep, the more caffeine you tend to consume the next day, and the more lightly you sleep the following night. And so on. — Mary Roach

I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion - the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body - is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue. — Tara Brach

Why are you doing this?" Clary said. "Sebastian, why are you saying all these things?"
"Because I finally can," Sebastian said. "You've no idea what it's been like, being around the lot of you these past few days, having to pretend I could stand you. That the sight of you didn't make me sick. You," he said to Jace, "every second you're not panting after your own sister, you're whining on and on about how daddy didn't love you. Well, who could blame him? And you, you stupid bitch"-he turned to Clary-"giving that priceless book away to a half-breed warlock; have you got a single brain cell in that tiny head of yours? And you-" He directed his next sneer at Alec. "I think we all know what's wrong with you. They shouldn't let your kind in the Clave. You're disgusting. — Cassandra Clare

The Dutchman [Brannenburg] was hard ... he was stone. His brain was eroded granite where the few ideas he had carved deep their ruts of opinion. There was no way for another idea to seep in, no place for imagination, no place for dreams, none for compassion or mercy or even fear.
He knew no shadings of emotion, he knew no half-rights or half-wrongs or pity or excuse, nor had he any sense of pardon. The more I thought of him the more I knew he was not evil in himself, and he would have been shocked that anybody thought of him as evil. Shocked for a moment only, then he'd have shut the idea from his mind as nonsense. For the deepest groove worn into that granite brain was the one of his own rightness.
And that scared me. — Louis L'Amour

Do not fear ever to think. A half thought has been buzzing often in my brain, but I fear to let him loose his wings. Here now, with more knowledge, I go back to where that half thought come from and I find that he be no half thought at all. That be a whole thought, though so young that he is not yet strong to use his little wings. — Bram Stoker

The image sears my brain too, and I wonder if I will ever be able to forget it. Although I realize that I am in trouble here, there is still a part of me that wants to giggle. The situation has moved so out of control, I half-expect him to pull out a pair of furry handcuffs. — Julie Buxbaum

He kept trying to come up with words to say, but his brain and mouth were having a disconnect. So he crashed his mouth down over hers. She made a little gasp noise, and he took advantage, deepening the kiss, taking her stolen breath in and letting himself get lost in the feel of her soft lips, the familiar taste of her tongue.
He was half tempted to take her right here in the back of the truck, despite all the people nearby
the horse trailer mostly hid them, after all.
There was a small whispering in the back of his mind that they were gonna make a mess of things, but with her draping her legs across his lap and her nails running over his back, he couldn't help thinking that
Well, actually it was more like he couldn't actually think at all. — Cindi Madsen

In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy half-grin on my face. Worse, my mind wanders and then takes flight while the logic I possess in fair measure under more placid circumstances abandons my brain like an ungrateful urchin. — William Styron

Half the people in our asylums may be suffering from a physical lesion of the brain but the others are unaccountably insane. The real reason is demoniac possession brought about by looking upon terrible things that they were never meant to see. — Dennis Wheatley

The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate. — Robert A. Heinlein

We are going in the direction of artificial intelligence or hybrid intelligence where a part of our brain will get information from the cloud and the other half is from you, so all this stuff will happen in the future. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

He'd gone without for a year and a half. What was one more month? At least that's what his upper brain was thinking. — Terri Osburn

- he couldn't believe how falling love with Martha made things simpler. No, that wasn't the right word, unless 'simpler' also included the sense of richer, denser, more complicated, with focus and echo. Half his brain pulsed with gawping incredulity at his luck; the other half was filled with a sense of long-sought, flaming reality. That was the word: falling in love with Martha made things real. — Julian Barnes

I used to want to be a lawyer, but I didn't want to have half my brain sucked out. — Max Walker

What have we learned so far about the human brain? It messes with memories, it jumps at shadows, it's terrified of harmless things, it screws with our diet, our sleeping, our movement, it convinces us we're brilliant when we're not, it makes up half the stuff we perceive, it gets us to do irrational things when emotional, it causes us to make friends incredibly quickly and turn on them in an instant.
A worrying list. What's even more worrying, it does all of this when it's working properly. — Dean Burnett

If logic and reason, the hard, cold products of the mind, can be relied upon to deliver justice or produce the truth, how is it that these brain-heavy judges rarely agree? Five-to-four decisions are the rule, not the exception. Nearly half of the court must be unjust and wrong nearly half of the time. Each decision, whether the majority or minority, exudes logic and reason like the obfuscating ink from a jellyfish, and in language as opaque. The minority could have as easily become the decision of the court. At once we realize that logic, no matter how pretty and neat, that reason, no matter how seemingly profound and deep, does not necessarily produce truth, much less justice. Logic and reason often become but tools used by those in power to deliver their load of injustice to the people. And ultimate truth, if, indeed, it exists, is rarely recognizable in the endless rows of long words that crowd page after page of most judicial regurgitations. — Gerry Spence

I do have a huge problem, a huge problem. In fact, worse than watching is hearing. I cannot stand to hear my own voice. When it's coming out of my mouth right now it sounds fantastically interesting to me. It's rich in light and shade, it goes up and down. But when I hear it either on TV or even on someone's answering machine, I just sound like I've had half my brain removed. — Hugh Laurie

He probably hadn't written it. I knew that. I certainly hadn't written mine. But after yesterday, his pompous sneer was permanently imprinted on my brain, and I could just picture him sitting at a computer and stringing together sentences like, "His golden tone and tender touch have moved audiences across the continent to tears." I was half-surprised it didn't claim his vibrato could cure cancer. — Jessica Martinez

I'm a private person by nature. I live in my brain half the time, not the world, and I'm not a natural negotiator. But I've learned to negotiate. — Thom Mayne

And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted. — Francesca Martinez

I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brain ... & therefore that when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes. — Charles Darwin

Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. — Virginia Woolf

Abruptly the drumbeat softens into heartbeat. The camera becomes his eye. This was what had summoned him - a human heart beating from within a ripped-off, rolled-up tiny piece of cloth. A discarded newborn. Black. A useless, half-dead, famished, thrown-away boy. The madwoman's? No, she's beyond childbearing years. He approaches, his steps making no sound at all. When he reaches down to turn it over, the thing quivers. Suddenly Milo's brain fills with a soft cascade of men and women's voices from the past in French and English, German and Dutch, Cree and Gaelic. They gurgle and babble and blend as he stares at the unwanted infant. Is it breathing? Yes, — Nancy Huston

Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith of what use they made of half-hours and months and years ... I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere. — James Branch Cabell

After lunch I tried to watch television, but I found that even with two-thirds of my brain focused on fretting about my coming demise, the remaining third of my intellect was a little too smart to put up with the bright and brainless daytime drivel on all the channels. I turned off the set and just sat on the couch, letting one tense and miserable thought chase another, until finally, at half past five, the front door burst open and Astor stormed in, flung her backpack on the floor, and rushed to her room. She was followed by Cody, who actually noticed me and nodded, and then Rita, carrying Lily Anne. — Jeff Lindsay

The human brain comprises 70% water, which means it's a similar consistency to tofu. Picture that for a second - a blob of tofu the size and shape of a brain. Now imagine taking that piece of tofu, and forcing your thumbs into it hard. It would burst wouldn't it?
Okay, now imagine those thumbs weren't thumbs but thumb-shaped pieces of bad news. And there weren't two of them, they were about half a dozen. Imagine you were forcing all six pieces of bad news - a divorce, multiple career snubs, accusations from the family of a dead celebrity, estranged kids, borderline homelessness, that kind of thing - into a piece of tofu.
With me? Good. Now imagine it's not tofu, but a human brain. And they're not pieces of bad news but six human thumbs. That's what happened to me. In 2001, my brain had half a dozen thumbs pushed into it. — Alan Partridge

For anyone with half a brain they can see that this play is about the human condition. — Estelle Parsons

Kissing Red must've killed off some of your brain cells," Ryder decided. "You can tell a woman what to do
if you play it right
and maybe, maybe half the time she'd do it, or something close to it. That's a live woman. A dead one? I figure that's closer to zero. — Nora Roberts

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

A man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man's past deeds foretold his future and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take. — Alice Hoffman

The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of reality. The right side of your brain, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. Your left brain is a scientist,. Your right brain is an artist.
People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into the conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over a flash, just an instant, and gives them access to divine inspiration. A flash inspiration. A moment of insight.
According to German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom all people over all time. — Chuck Palahniuk

In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be "me." (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.) — Christopher Hitchens

It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone
journalist, student, academic
who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths. — David Edelstein

He'd figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors' backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you'd ever be hassled for going too fast. — Christopher McDougall

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird ... but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you.
If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one. — Iain M. Banks

In other circumstances, if Jamie hadn't been so miserable, Ryan would have laughed. Jamie rarely got so pissed that he lost the thread of the conversation. "Yes, you are." Cradling Jamie's face, he brushed his lips against Jamie's forehead. "Everything will be fine, you'll see." He kissed Jamie's temple.

Jamie shuddered. "Don't. Not now. I can't - not now."

Frowning, Ryan pulled back to look at his friend.

Jamie was staring at him oddly, his lips parted and curled in half a grimace, his eyes gleaming with desperation. "I - " he said before suddenly lunging forward and closing the distance between their mouths.

For a moment, Ryan's alcohol-fogged brain couldn't understand what was going on.

Jamie was kissing him.

Jamie was kissing him. Or at least trying to, his lips clumsy and awkward but desperate and needy - so needy it was weirding Ryan out. — Alessandra Hazard

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month. — Michael Shermer

Stop, stop, stop!' he cried; stop talking a minute, for I see half. Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all? Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking ... Will my head split - or will it see? I see half - I only see half. — G.K. Chesterton

The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don't do well on raw food: they can't maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from unprocessed plant matter to power a body with such a big, hungry brain. — Michael Pollan

- I won't be able to think. I won't be able to work.
- Nothing will interfere with your work like suicide.
(Silence)
- I dreamt that I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live. I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room for half an hour.
(A long silence)
- Okay, let's do it, let's do the drugs, let's do the chemical lobotomy, let's shut down the higher functions of my brain and perhaps I'll be a bit more fucking capable of living.
Let's do it. — Sarah Kane

And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin. — Marya Hornbacher

He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in [London]. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. Sherlock Holmes in 'The Final Problem — Anonymous

He was talking. I tried not to think of how he looked and instead of what he was telling me. Once I accomplished that, my brain couldn't get past the 'running' part.
"I don't run." I walked the mile run at school. True story.
I abhorred any kind of physical exercise. I wasn't good at it. I was skinny, but I was soft; had absolutely no muscle mass at all. That's the way I liked it. Who was he to try to change that, change me? I wouldn't let him. No way, no how.
One half of his mouth lifted. He seemed to be enjoying this a little too much. "You do now. You have to be fit, you have to be strong, Taryn, if you're to stand any chance of surviving this. Come on, we'll start with stretching."
He forced me to twist my body into unimaginable positions. I even had to touch my toes. The agony. Luke took pleasure from my pain; even laughing as I moaned and groaned through it all.
Then, the worst came about. He. Made. Me. Run. — Lindy Zart

All the suffering and torment wrought at places of execution, in torture chambers, madhouses, operating theatres, under the arches of bridges in late autumn - all these are stubbornly imperishable, all these persist, are inaccessible but cling on, envious of everything that is, stuck in their own terrible reality. People would like to be allowed to forget much of it, their sleep gliding softly over these furrows in the brain, but dreams come and push sleep aside and fill the picture again. And so they wake up breathless, let the light of a candle dissolve the darkness as they drink the comforting half-light as if it was sugared water. But, alas, the edge on which this security is balancing is a narrow one. Given the slightest little turn and their gaze slips away from the familiar and the friendly, and the contours that had so recently been comforting take the sharp outlines of an abyss of horror. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I read once that you get deja vu when the two halves of your brain process things at different speeds: the right half a few seconds before the left, or vice versa ... that would explain the weird double feeling that it leaves you with, like the world is splitting in half
or you are. — Lauren Oliver

neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain and The Male Brain, which point out that a man has two and a half times as much brain space devoted to sexual pursuit as a woman, while the female brain's empathy system is considerably more active than the male's.3) — Marilyn Yalom

He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. — Arthur Conan Doyle

As everybody knows, being raised Catholic with half a brain means becoming an atheist. — Maria Semple

Despite all that had been spilled, was the cup still half full? Or did a crumb of Wellbutrin just lodge free from between his brain's teeth, offering a morsel of undigested happiness? The cup was half full enough. Despite — Jonathan Safran Foer

He knew on some level he changed the course of his life. And you could do that, couldn't you, he thought as he put the RAZR back in his pocket. you could choose some paths and not others. Not always, of course. At times destiny just drove you to a destination and dropped your ass off and that was that. But on occasion you were able to pick the address. And if you had half a brain, no matter how hard it was or how wierd it felt, you went into the house.
And found yourself. — J.R. Ward

With God's help, I've not had a drink in nine and a half years. That's my whole story right there. And because of that, I'm doing this. I'm making records, I'm touring. I was so involved in just getting brain damaged, I wasn't doing anything. I had great ideas, many notebooks filled with notes, some of them I can read and some of them I just can't read, but I really didn't do anything constructive, it was all just good ideas. Now I'm trying to lead a constructive life a day at a time. — Ringo Starr

My brain was fine, but I did not feel like myself. My body was frail and weak - the person who could run half marathons was a distant memory - and that, too, shapes your identity. Racking back pain can mold an identity; fatigue and nausea can, as well. — Paul Kalanithi

I've only half-admitted I'm a professional. I know I am, I've paid my dues, but one of the things I could do better when I'm acting is to really be rigorous and to think I know how to do it. To use my brain. — Emily Mortimer

Two and a half million years ago, when our distant relative Homo habilis was foraging for food across the Tanzanian savannah, a beam of light left the Andromeda Galaxy and began its journey across the Universe. As that light beam raced across space at the speed of light, generations of pre-humans and humans lived and died; whole species evolved and became extinct, until one member of that unbroken lineage, me, happened to gaze up into the sky below the constellation we call Cassiopeia and focus that beam of light onto his retina. A two-and-a-half-billion-year journey ends by creating an electrical impulse in a nerve fibre, triggering a cascade of wonder in a complex organ called the human brain that didn't exist anywhere in the Universe when the journey began. — Brian Cox

Sadhana It is important not to keep eating through the day. If you are below thirty years of age, three meals every day will fit well into your life. If you are over thirty years of age, it is best to reduce it to two meals per day. Our body and brain work at their best only when the stomach is empty. So be conscious of eating in such a way that within two and a half hours, your food moves out of the stomach, and within twelve to eighteen hours completely out of the system. With this simple awareness you will experience much more energy, agility, and alertness. These are the ingredients of a successful life, irrespective of what you choose to do with it. — Sadhguru

(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time) — Kate Atkinson

And so is another question that Sanderson's experience leads him to discuss: whether the mind is identical with the brain. He mentions a case of a man who died in a New York hospital, and who an autopsy revealed to have no brain, only "half a cupful of dirty water". This sounds, admittedly, like another of those absurd stories that are not worth discussing. But in the early 1980s Professor John Lourber of Sheffield University discovered a student with an IQ of 126 whose head was entirely filled with "water". A brain scan showed that the student's brain was merely an outer layer, only one millimetre thick. How can a person function with virtually no brain? Lourber, who specializes in hydrocephalis ("water on the brain") replies that he has come across many cases of perfectly normal people whose heads are filled with 95 per cent of fluid, and that 70 to 90 per cent is actually quite common. — Colin Wilson

She's fifteen!"
Nash shrugged. "That's just a number. It doesn't say anything about her."
"It says something pretty damn funny about your IQ!" I said, and he opened his mouth to retort, but I spoke over him. "Fifteen is too young to drive, too young to get a legal job, too young to sign a lease, and obviously too young to pick a boyfriend with half a brain. — Rachel Vincent

Once the bomb release was yanked, it was finished. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions, and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies. — Ray Bradbury

I've come to think of my lizard brain as basically a version of Felix. It's totally random and makes no sense and you can't let it run your life. If we let Felix run our lives, we'd all wear superhero costumes all day long and eat nothing but ice-cream. But if you try to fight Felix, all you get is wails and screams and tantrums, and it all gets more and more stressy. So the thing is to listen to him with half an ear and nod your head and then ignore him and do what you want to do. Same with the lizard brain. — Sophie Kinsella

For instance, the scientific article may say, 'The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one- half in a period of two weeks.' Now what does that mean?
It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat - and also in mine, and yours - is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.
So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago - a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out - there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday. — Richard Feynman

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse half-man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human. — David Eagleman

Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain, this is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair because I have talent on loan from ... God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A way of life. — Rush Limbaugh

Half my family was from the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the other half was U.S. Army, and I was raised on Army posts during my childhood, so I pretty much began my life with a split-brain sort of thing. — Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

But, stop and think. What does the word 'witch' truly mean?" "Why - " said Tom, and was stymied. "Wits," said Moundshroud. "Intelligence. That's all it means. Knowledge. So any man, or woman, with half a brain and with inclinations toward learning had his wits about him, eh? And so, anyone too smart, who didn't watch out, was called - " "A witch!" said everyone. "And some of the smart ones, the ones with wits, pretended at magic, or dreamed themselves with ghosts and dead shufflers and ambling mummies. And if enemies dropped dead by coincidence, they took credit for it. They liked to believe they had power, but they had none, boys, none, sad and sorry, 'tis true. But — Ray Bradbury

If critics have problems with my personal life, it's their problem. Anybody with half a brain would realize that it's the charts that count. — Mariah Carey

But the other half of my motivation came from farther back in my brain, in the curious part that I inherited. It came from the spot in my skull that feels the burning need to unravel puzzles, finish crosswords, indulge in Internet games, and read all the mystery books I can get my grubby little paws on. Like it or not, need it or not, and want it or not, I can't leave a good mystery alone. — Cherie Priest

The idea is to help patients more clearly assess the contents of their thought stream, teaching them to note and correct the conceptual errors termed "cognitive distortions" that characterize psychopathological thinking. Somone in the grips of such thinking would, for instance, regard a half-full glass not merely as half-empty but also fatally flawed, forever useless, constitutionally incapable of ever being full, and fit only to be discarded. By the mid-1980s, cognitive therapy was being used more and more in combination with behavioral therapy for OCD, and it seemed naturally compatible with a mindfulness-based perspective. If I could show that a cognitive-behavioral approach, infused with mindful awareness, could be marshaled against the disease, and if successful therapy were accompanied by changes in brain activity, then it would represent a significant step toward demonstrating the causal efficacy of mental activity on neural circuits. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Taylor deserves it. I don't think there is anyone with half a brain that would say otherwise. She has done a lot for us in country music. We are lucky enough in country music to call her one of us. — Blake Shelton

The most uncomplicated thing of all!' he replied. 'For someone well acquainted with the fifth dimension, it costs nothing to expand space to the desired proportions. I'll say more, respected lady - to devil knows what proportions! I, however,' Koroviev went on chattering, 'have known people who had no idea, not only of the fifth dimension, but generally of anything at all, and who nevertheless performed absolute wonders in expanding their space. Thus, for instance, one city-dweller, as I've been told, having obtained a three-room apartment on Zemlyanoy Val, transformed it instantly, without any fifth dimension or other things that addle the brain, into a four-room apartment by dividing one room in half with a partition. — Mikhail Bulgakov

I don't feel very good about myself. People always leave me. Nobody can stand me for very long. I wish I could cut my tongue out, or take out the part of my brain that has opinions. Or cares. I wish I could be simple. Be quiet, introverted, or shy. I'm half way in between a wallflower at a party and Elvis Presley. People love one or the other. In between is no place to be. — Jack White

CLEOPATRA TO THE ASP

The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it
Loved me like my soul, my soul:
Now that I seek myself in a serpent
My smile is fatal.

Nile moves in me; my thighs splay
Into the squalled Mediterranean;
My brain hides in that Abyssinia
Lost armies foundered towards.

Desert and river unwrinkle again.
Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunk
Caesar, Pompey, Antony I drank.
Now let the snake reign.

A half-deity out of Capricorn,
This rigid Augustus mounts
With his sword virginal indeed; and has shorn
Summarily the moon-horned river

From my bed. May the moon
Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole
With coiled Egypt's past; then from my delta
Swim like a fish toward Rome. — Ted Hughes