Preordained Works Quotes & Sayings

The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one's thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren't expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind's eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane. As — Ted Chiang

What does it matter?" she asks, and though his answer likely should take a thousand years to come, he gets it out quicker than a snap of the fingers.
"Because I love you!" he says. "Because I'm in love with you, God help me. — Charlotte Stein

Each position, each metre of the Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end! — Joseph Stalin

Yeah, well my name is Bai Ling. That means white spirit, and I really feel like sometimes I'm not existing. — Bai Ling

But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I mean, there are some amazing storytelling being done on the small screen right now. That's what so cool about being in television right now. Studios, networks are starting to throw more resources, better writers, more production values ... and to be part of that is awesome. — Ian Somerhalder

The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive. — Robert Silverberg

For recreation, Lincoln took up bowling with his fellow boarders. Though a clumsy bowler, according to Dr. Busey, Lincoln "played the game with great zest and spirit" and "accepted success and defeat with like good nature and humor. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. — Larry Wall