Stretching Yourself Too Thin Quotes & Sayings

What's a space elevator? Simply described, it's a thin ribbon, about 3 feet wide and 60 thousand miles long, stretching upwards from the surface of the Earth. The lower end is bolted to a heavy anchor (think of an oil drilling platform), and the top is capped with a counterweight. — Seth Shostak

If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you call it?" "Hmmm," Waterhouse says. "Well, its basic job is to perform mathematical calculations - like a computer." Comstock snorts. "A computer is a human being." "Well . . . this machine uses binary digits to do its computing. I suppose you could call it a digital computer." Comstock writes it out in block letters on his legal pad: DIGITAL COMPUTER. — Neal Stephenson

Our politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism, — Carl Sagan

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to just stop caring. — Jon Mead

Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense. — Milan Kundera

The problem is, most folks these days don't have enough faith to see the magic that's all around them. These days, normal means confused, fallen, lost. — J. Gabriel Gates

... It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed. But even now there was something rather than nothing. The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth ... — Stephen Baxter

I'm known clean around the Earth. — Minnesota Fats

Adversity is opportunity inside out. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Maira Kalman says, Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind. — Austin Kleon

She tugged the sleeves down over her hands, stretching the fabric until the seams reached her fingernails. Then she locked her fingers around them to ensure they stayed down.
Veda fought the urge to rip those sleeves from Coco's grip and force her to wear them appropriately, or at the very least roll them up so she wouldn't be tempted to yank at them. She could remember a time when she'd had the same habit, back in middle school. As if hiding her hands behind a thin piece of fabric would protect her from the world. — Trevion Burns

I like to thin the woman who ran the clinic would have done that for anyone - that there's a quiet web of women like her (like us, I flatter myself), stretching from pole to pole, ready to give other women a hand. She helped me even though she didn't have to, and I am forever grateful. But I also wonder what made me sound, to her ears, like someone worth trusting, someone it was safe to take a chance on. I certainly wasn't the neediest person calling her clinic. The fact is, I was getting that abortion no matter what. All I had to do was wait two weeks, or have an awkward conversation I did not want to have with my supportive, liberal, well-to-do mother. Privilege means that it's easy for white women to do each other favors. Privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help. — Lindy West

Trees down south have a difference to them, a subtle, slinking movement, mile by mile- a gracefulness, a swagger. Lanky trees stretching out their wiry thin, Spanish moss-covered branches, moss that sways and beckons ... come here, come here, it says. — Suzanne Palmieri

I was never at my best when I was at my worst. When I did do good stuff in the past, it was because I was able to transcend the parts of my being that weren't healthy. — Jeff Tweedy

In some ways, I feel like I've been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking up instruments and stretching myself so thin. — Zach Condon

Lebanon was under Israeli occupation, up to its capital, but we did not consider that a disaster. Why? Because it was very clear that there are ways to resist. — Bashar Al-Assad

Shun artificial rocks like the plague. — Henry Sherman Adams

Instead, he reached out and grabbed her hand. If it's all right right you, I think i'll keep ahold of you anyway. I don't want to be responsible for letting you fall again. — Kimberly Derting

She'd been taught that pants were inappropriate for girls because they were immodest [ ... ] If women's pants were suggestive, men's were equally so, and they revealed a great deal more of what was underneath them. There was almost always a bulge
you couldn't help but notice it
and if the pants were tight, you could see practically everything. And the way men were always drawing attention to it! Touching and scratching themselves with total unselfconsciousness, as if they were alone and not in public. She'd even seen Aidan do it a few times, absent-mindedly. And yet no one accused men of being improper or of encouraging sin by reminding women of what hung between their legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, irritated suddenly by the double standard. This was how her body was made. The fact that it was well made and encased in a pair of blue jeans didn't mean she was inviting anything. — Hillary Jordan

It was a kind of circular thing: to be the kind of person who would have taken Faith in, he had to be the kind of person who would take her back. — Anna Quindlen

And just then the thin boy yawned. I had labelled him as an ineffectual sort of lad but he certainly could yawn; it was a stretching, groaning, voluptuous paroxysm which drowned my words and it went on and on till he finally lay back, bleary and exhausted by the effort. — James Herriot

I can't help feeling humiliated for Ithal. He stands at the wall and watches us go, and when we reach the turnoff for the school, he's still there with the mangled flower in his hands, far behind us a small, dying star fading out of our constellation. — Libba Bray

She pivoted right, and sensed the vast, open space of the wasteland stretching before her under the opaque sky, a darkness as thin and final as the velvet lining of a shroud (360-361). — Caragh M. O'Brien