Little Signals Quotes & Sayings

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done. — John Steinbeck

We get in the car, and someone signals their blinker for my parking spot but I emphatically wave them away like they're after my soul and not just my parking spot. And so we sit there for twelve minutes until the meter runs out. Lily silently crawls from the passenger seat into my lap and curls up into a little ball. She lets out an enormous sigh. — Steven Rowley

A rentier is an investor whose relationship to a company or enterprise is strictly limited to the ownership of financial wealth (such as stocks or bonds) and the receipt of income on that wealth (such as dividends or interest). The financial system performs dismally at its advertised task, that of efficiently directing society's savings towards their optimal investment pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment. — Doug Henwood

Everything is possible to him that dares. — Albert Goodwill Spalding

One of the obvious implications is that a person will have to face the fact that she cannot meet other people's expectations. This signals the end of what might be called the "camel" phase of human development. I believe it was Nietschze who suggested that for the first part of life, we are camels, trudging through the desert, accepting on our backs everybody's "shoulds" and "don'ts." Camels only know how to spit; they don't think for themselves or talk back. As the camel dies, a lion is born in its place. Lions discover both their roar and the art of preening. The lion may be a little shaky at first, so support and encouragement are vital. But once the camel begins to die (e.g., signaled by depression), there is no turning back. Symptoms occupy the space between the death of the camel and the birth of the lion. A therapist can be a good midwife during this liminal phase. — Stephen Gilligan

We all look for the crack of dawn that signals the passage of responsibility to a fresh crew. We all know the system sucks, that the long hours make for fuzzy thinking and that they generate pure blind hate at facing that next ridiculous admission. We all feel the frustration of doing too much for too few, and the insecurity of not knowing how much is too much or if it was really too little. We don't like admitting how little we know, and none of us wants to look like fools. We don't like criticism and yet we need it. We flog and flog, and rarely have the opportunity to see the veritable forest for the trees. We hate the patients for making more work for us. We especially hate the grossly self-destructive ones who don't deserve our sweat and society's money. — Mikkael A. Sekeres

An Incoherent Strategy When a company's value curve looks like a bowl of spaghetti - a zigzag with no rhyme or reason, where the offering can be described as "low-high-low-low-high-low-high" - it signals that the company doesn't have a coherent strategy. Its strategy is likely based on independent substrategies. These may individually make sense and keep the business running and everyone busy, but collectively they do little to distinguish the company from the best competitor or to provide a clear strategic vision. This is often a reflection of an organization with divisional or functional silos. — W.Chan Kim

Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space ... the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilizations receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our tv signals. Even we could detect a strong tv transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.' President: 'You mean everything? You mean to say all that crap on television - the car crashes, wrestling, the porno channels, the evening news? — Carl Sagan

I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals; I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am. — Wallace Shawn

Little Jang Li-Li, eight years old, misting the orchids in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. A bright day, sunlight pouring through transparisteel panels, Li-Li making puffs of water with her mister and shrieking with laughter as every little cloud she made broke a sunbeam into colors, fugitive bars of red and violet and green. Master, Master, I'm making rainbows! Those colors hadn't come to mean military signals, yet, or starship navigating lights, or lightsaber blades. Just a girl making rainbows. — Sean Stewart

Kane raised an eyebrow so I said, "Skull... he was me Mr. Almost, but you? You're what I like to call me Mr. Pain In The Arse and that translates to me Mr. Right. — L.A. Casey

There are little wisps of jelly in a living brain. Deagle knows this well: neurons, transmitting signals - and the soul, so to speak, is somewhere in those flashes. He heard once on a science program that the spindle cell - present in humans, whales, some apes, elephants - may be at the heart of what we call our "selves."
What we recognize in the mirror - that thread we follow through time that we call "me"? It's just a diatom, a paramecium, a bit of ganglia that branches and shudders assertively. A brief brain orgasm, like lightning.
In short, it's all chemicals. You can regiment it easily enough: fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine, escitalopram, citalopram - the brain can be washed clean, and you can reset yourself, Ctrl+Alt+Del. You don't have to be a prisoner of your memories and emotions. — Dan Chaon

I wish we would stop sending signals out into space to find other "intelligent" life. I'd prefer earth remained the Best Kept Little Secret, thank you very much. — Ava Bradley

There is a name for that pebble: passion. It can be used
to describe the beauty of an earth-shaking meeting between two people, but it isn't just that.
It's there in the excitement of the unexpected, in the desire to do something with real
fervour, in the certainty that one is going to realise a dream. Passion sends us signals that
guide us through our lives, and it's up to me to interpret those signs.
I would like to believe that I'm in love. With
someone I don't know and who didn't figure in my plans at
all. All these months of self-control, of denying love, have had exactly the opposite result: I
have let myself be swept away by the first person to treat me a little differently. — Paulo Coelho

There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand. — Bones The Doctor In The Photo

The way you look for songs, you find yourself looking for little signals and clues about life and how things are. — Tom T. Hall

Some bears are sold for amazing sums at auction. An example is a very old stuffed individual named Mabel that had belonged to Elvis Presley (as a child or an adult?) and had been sold at auction several times after the King's death; it was made in the Steiff workshop in 1909. Its end was exceedingly sinister. Lent by its owner for an exhibition of stuffed bears in Wells, England, in which it was to be the star attraction, it provoked a hatred or jealousy of a young Doberman accompanying the night watchman after the first day of the exhibition. The dog seized the precious relic and furiously bit and clawed it to pieces. (252) — Michel Pastoureau

I'm on the Sensa diet. It's a little magic powder based on Dr. Hirsh's clinical trials and studies and it basically signals the brain that you're full through smellology. — Patti Stanger

That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals. — Stephen King

Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that, just as the physician speaks of going around with an illness in the body, he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain. — Soren Kierkegaard

To help me be a better listener and observer, she shared a little proverb that I carry with me whenever I travel. She says, "With two eyes and two ears and one mouth, try to observe and listen four times as much as you speak."
Her advice has paid off. I learn much more by staying quiet. I pick up more cultural signals when I am observing than when I am talking. As another sage observed, "When I's talking, I ain't learning nothin' new." Or again: "Even fools are thought wise when they keep silent" (Prov 17:28). — Paul Borthwick

All life is energy and we are transmitting it at every moment. We are all little beaming little signals like radio frequencies, and the world is responding in kind. — Oprah Winfrey

My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car. — Augusten Burroughs

Once you marry me, none of it is a lie," he pointed out. "It will be exactly as though you've told the truth all these years."
"Except for the part where we love each other."
He shrugged. "That's a minor detail. Love is just a lie people tell themselves. — Tessa Dare

We are invested in being together. In having friends. In joining our lives. And yet these are the people who also fail you. And when they fail you in these ways, it signals a larger understanding about who you are as a black person in the world. It's not just a little failure for me. Its something exposed. — Claudia Rankine

His thought processes imploded when she grabbed his ass, her nails digging in a way that set his body on fire. He loved the way her breath was hot on his cheek, the way her eyes had gone unfocused and fluttered closed, her lashes resting softly on her cheeks. She was here and for tonight, this weekend, she was his. — Leah Braemel

The "losers" in memory competitions, this research suggests, stumble not because they remember too little. They have studied tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words, and often they are familiar with the word they ultimately misspell. In many cases, they stumble because they remember too much. If recollecting is just that - a re-collection of perceptions, facts, and ideas scattered in intertwining neural networks in the dark storm of the brain - then forgetting acts to block the background noise, the static, so that the right signals stand out. The sharpness of the one depends on the strength of the other. — Benedict Carey

Entering the ball is like crashing on a planet where no one cares how you dress or how you dance or who you love. — J.C. Lillis

Communication is like a pressure relief valve for your body. When a little pressure gets cooked up inside and needs to be released, you can gently turn the nozzle and release it slowly and gracefully until you feel better, by way of a productive conversation. But if you choose to ignore the warning signals and leave that pressure inside, it's going to grow and inevitably explode and make a mess, by way of an overreaction and possibly an argument. — L.K. Elliott

It's how we read the face, said Ian. Remember that you're talking to a psychologist. We like to think about things like that. It's a question of numerous little signals that create the overall impression.
But how do internal states who themselves physically?
Very easily, said Ian. Think of anger. The knitted brow. Think of determination. The gritted teeth.
And intelligence?
Liveliness and engagement with the world. — Alexander McCall Smith