Okivana Quotes & Sayings

The greatest miracle of the Bible is that the prophets of Israel could keep a religion as clean as a hounds tooth amid all the corruption and idolatry of the nations surrounding them. — Billy Graham

I blinked. I had just had another thought, something very significant; I was quite sure of it. I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was there. I rewound my thoughts, marching them by again at a slower speed. I sat up even straighter in my chair as I scanned - and there it was. I don't know if I found it because I had such excellent posture, but just in case, I sent a little mental thank-you card back through time to Mrs. Parker. — Jeff Lindsay

What are you doing? he gasped. He looked slightly ridiculous. It was not as if he was a defenseless damsel in distress. He could have stopped me, if he wanted to. But he didn't want to. Besides, I've always considered this to be the most idiotic question in the world. I'm pulling off your pants to have a good look at your dick and your ass, is the obvious answer. Looking being only the first step, by the way. — Boris Brannigan

I told you this one's not right in the head. I just show her my killer weapons and all she wants to do is jump my bones. — Stefanie J. Pristavu

For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world. Often the argument is that in countries like Bangladesh, Trinidad, or Cameroon, which hover between the stifling legacy of colonial domination and their own magical traditions, official credentials are seen as a kind of material fetish - magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience, or training they're supposed to represent. But since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most "advanced" economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. — David Graeber

It's television, after all. No one is dead, even when they die. — Chris Campanioni

Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big. You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled. The problem with publishers, of course, is that they regularly pay up for books, thus making their upside rather limited and their downside monstrous. (If you pay $10 million for a book, your Black Swan is it not being a bestseller.) Likewise, while technology can carry a great payoff, paying for the hyped-up story, as people did with the dot-com bubble, can make any upside limited and any downside huge. It is the venture capitalist who invested in a speculative company and sold his stake to unimaginative investors who is the beneficiary of the Black Swan, not the "me, too" investors. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages. — Lisa Unger

The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality. — Alfred North Whitehead

I wouldn't bother to describe me. I'm Eartha Kitt. — Eartha Kitt

You realize you're going to have to quit doing that? Can't exactly convince the other ladies of the court that my husband's committed to knocking me up when you can see him starring in Ass Commando 7 for thirty-nine ninety-five. — Vaughn R. Demont

A few moments later Mom opened my door and peered in at me. "Logan Hansen is here to see you."
If it had been anyone else in the world, I would have told my mother to send him away. Santa Claus himself could have shown up to explain his whereabouts since my childhood, and I would have turned him out. — Janette Rallison

I think it would be very interesting to see that many people would probably be okay with paying more for services and goods that they felt were more holistically [generated]. Which means the death of the old system which rewarded people for taking advantage of one another. — Billy Corgan

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined. — Alan Hollinghurst