Irrawaddy Burmese Quotes & Sayings

Designers shouldn't design for museums any more than mummies should die for them. — Ralph Caplan

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity. — Edmund Morris

People have good and bad days. — Anna Chlumsky

Watched the close-cropped, long-legged policeman with the bad back stride quickly out of the canteen. — Jo Nesbo

One of the comforts of firing a big gun during a siege must be the satisfaction of watching the results at long range. Inside a tank or behind an M107, a smudge of smoke against a building can be marked off against a map coordinate. The blood and shattered bones at the other end of the trajectory have no physical contact with the gun. But Randal and I were driving towards the other end of the trajectory, back to west Beirut, where the casualty statistics marked the other side of the concave mirror through which armies fight their wars. — Robert Fisk

I'm a parent, and I regulate what my kids listen to. I don't need the government to be the parent. If I'm a crappy parent, then I need the government involved. — Howard Stern

Her words reminded him of a comforting truth: Joan Flynn was a bright woman, and nowhere near as self-absorbed as others of her station could be. — Grace Burrowes

Damn it, when I'm bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic-take it or leave it. — Dave Brubeck

There are many people talking about access to space and, 'How can we make that cheaper? How can we turn that into a Southwest Airlines versus the big airlines?' — Buzz Aldrin

That night I lie out under the stars again. The Pleiades are there winking at me. I am no longer on my way from one place to another. I have changed lives. My life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce struggle under the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky. I feel as though I am floating on a raft far, far away from any world I ever knew. — Ted Simon

The formation of society serves not only for defensive purposes, but is also very useful, and, indeed, absolutely necessary, as rendering possible the division of labor. If men did not render mutual assistance to each other, no one would have either the skill or the time to provide for his own sustenance and preservation: for all men are not equally apt for all work, and no one would be capable of preparing all that he individually stood in need of. Strength and time, I repeat, would fail, if every one had in person to plow, to sow, to reap, to grind corn, to cook, to weave, to stitch and perform the other numerous functions required to keep life going; to say nothing of the arts and sciences which are also entirely necessary to the perfection and blessedness of human nature. — Baruch Spinoza

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate. — Yasunari Kawabata

The White House announced plans to begin normalizing relations with Cuba - this as we're awkwardizing relations with Russia. — Craig Ferguson