Risques Bloomington Quotes & Sayings

It's okay to dress up like another person, but never try to be someone else. Just try to be yourself, because that's what makes you special. Oh, and watch out if a dragon ever starts to dance ballet. — Jeff Hutchins

Ceno's brain, soft and pink with blood - and veined with endless whorls and branches of sapphire threaded through every synapse and neuron, inextricable, snarled, intricate, terrible, fragile and new. — Catherynne M Valente

We are a species and a culture that, through our attention habits, carry past wounds that cause anger, fear, longing, and sorrow. These affect our lives far more deeply than we realize. We see the world through an imperfect lens, which deeply colors our perceptions, making us more angry, fearful, sorrowful, and overwhelmed than we need to be. Our attention habits, and the emotions they repress, keep us separate from the world, from feeling part of it; they prevent us from fully sensing what is around us and participating in it. As a result, we are unable to fully engage the here and now. The cruel irony is that because we have no other frame of reference, because we do not pay attention to how we pay attention, we think we are seeing the world as it is. — Les Fehmi

People tend to be exquisitely precise when describing pain. We don't just say it hurts, we say it throbs or aches; it's a burning, wrenching, gnawing sensation; it's sharp or dull; it chafes; it stings. But where pain specifies, joy generalizes. It was great! we say. Terrific! Beautiful! Fantastic! — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

And an old priest said, Speak to us of Religion.
And he said:
Who can separate his faith from his actions?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?" ...
He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked ...
And he to whom worshiping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul ... — Kahlil Gibran

No jot, iota, or tittle of the temple rites is otherwise than uplifting and sanctifying. In every detail the endowment ceremony contributes to covenants of morality of life, consecration of person to high ideals, devotion to truth, patriotism to nation, and allegiance to God. — James E. Talmage

British officers arriving in India were supposed to spend up to three years in a Calcutta college, where they studied Hindu and Muslim law alongside English law; Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian alongside Greek and Latin; and Tamil, Bengali and Hindustani culture alongside mathematics, economics and geography. — Yuval Noah Harari

History is the science of what never happens twice. — Paul Valery

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue.
"Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' queue!"
Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. "I know there's a 'fackin' queue'! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue in it again just because Nina Simone over there won't sell me a ruddy ticket!"
A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. "Wassa bovver?"
"This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," said the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window."
I couldn't believe I was hearing this. — David Mitchell

Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days. — Stephen Fry

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

By the war's end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army - over one fifth of the nation's adult male black population under age forty-five. — Eric Foner