Quotes & Sayings About Things Being Fixed

This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? — Susanna Kaysen

This formal philosophy of learning treats knowledge like a fixed asset: learn, then you have it forever! But as a modern professional, you can't acquire knowledge this way, because the knowledge you need isn't static - it's always changing. Stockpiling facts won't get you anywhere. What will get you somewhere is being able to access the information you need, when you need it. — Reid Hoffman

The Principle of Uncertainty fixed once for all the realisation that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty. — Jacob Bronowski

I think - I think it's a big deal. Bigger for him and Eve than for most people.' Shane kept his eyes down, fixed on the sidewalk and the steps they were taking. 'Look, ask him, okay? This is girl talk. I don't do girl talk.'
She punched him in the shoulder. 'Ass.'
'That's better. I was starting to feel like we should go shoe shopping or something.'
'Being a girl is not a bad thing!'
'No.' He took his hand out of his pocket and put his arm around her shoulders, hugging her close. 'If I could be half the girl you are, I'd be - wow, I have no idea where I was going with that, and it just turned out uncomfortable, all of a sudden.'
'Jackass.'
'You like being a girl - that's good. I like being a guy - that's also good.'
'Next you'll be all Me, Tarzan, you, Jane! — Rachel Caine

Here everything is planned for killing. The ground is ready to receive us, the bullets are ready to hit us, the spots where the shells will explode are fixed in time and space, just like the paths of our destiny which will inevitably lead us to them. And yet we want to stay alive and we use all our mental strength to silence the voice of reason. We are well aware that death does not immortalise a human being in the memories of the living, it simply cancels him out. — Gabriel Chevallier

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven. — Charles Dickens

If Aristotle, Livy, and Harrington knew what a republic was, the British constitution is much more like a republic than an empire. They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. If this definition is just, the British constitution is nothing more or less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate. This office being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government's being a republic, as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend. — John Adams

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. — Charles Darwin

It is far more than the discovery of life without a self. The immediate, inevitable result is an emergence into a new dimension of knowing and being that entails a difficult and prolonged readjustment. the reflexive mechanism of the mind -or whatever it is that allows us to be self-conscious - is cut off or permanently suspended so the mind is ever after held in a fixed now moment out of which it cannot move in its uninterrupted gaze upon the Unknown — Bernadette Roberts

We pored over the equipment and fixed what was broken, and my father taught me how to preemptively take things apart and study how they work, so that as they inevitably failed I'd be able to restore them. He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it. At — Hope Jahren

Can a literary character be said to live a life from birth to death or otherwise to undergo a development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of a book, trapped forever in the same few words and actions-the very opposite of a living, developing human being? — Jack Miles

You want to hear it? Fine. It's a simple story really, about a pretty girl who was pretty stupid. She let a man touch her because she was scared to say no, and then she told her parents because she was scared to say nothing. Then they were scared to do anything that might ruin their pretty little lives, so they told the girl that it was nothing. That just being touched wasn't enough to fight for. Too scared to prove them wrong, she kept going like it was nothing, and she let more people touch her, never knowing that she was handing out pieces of herself. Or, hell, maybe she knew deep down, and she just hated herself so much that she was glad to be rid of them. And life wasn't pretty, but it also wasn't scary until she met a man with two names who touched her without taking and made her miss the pieces she had lost. And now things aren't just scary, they're fucking terrifying, and I can't do it. I can't live like this, knowing all that I've ruined and that it can't be fixed. — Cora Carmack

Things can be fixed.
Relationship CANNOT.
Its like standing on a cracked glass plane, you might just adjust yourself for the time being but there will always be a fear of increasing the cracks, fear of falling through, fear of being destroyed. — Hanif Hassan Barbhuiya

Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God's being present in the mess of our unfixedness. (Messy Spirituality) — Mike Yaconelli

Most, I loved James Baldwin's essays. There was to a Baldwin essay a metropolitan elegance I envied, a refusal of the livid. In Baldwin I found a readiness to rise to prophetic wrath, something like those ministers, and yet, once more, to bend down in tenderness, to call grown men and women "baby" (a whiff of the theater). Watching Baldwin on television - I will always consider the fifties to have been a sophisticated time - fixed for me what being a writer must mean. Arching eyebrows intercepted ironies, parenthetically declared fouls; mouthfuls of cigarette smoke shot forth ribbons of exactitude. — Richard Rodriguez

I like my small camper. I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving. — Sly Stone

I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home. — Marcel Proust

The nights you fight best
are
when all the weapons are pointed
at you,
when all the voices
hurl their insults
while the dream is being
strangled.
the nights you fight best
are
when the game is
fixed,
when the crowd screams
for your
blood. — Charles Bukowski

She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly takes part, if not in deeds, then in words, in all the problems of life, and everything else is allowed in only in so far as love leaves room for it. The thing this woman esteemed most was the art of living, of being able to control oneself, of keeping a balance between thought and intention, intention and realization. You could never take her unawares, by surprise, but she was like a watchful enemy whose expectant gaze would always be fixed on you, however hard you tried to lie in wait for him. High society was her element, and therefore tact and caution prompted her every thought, word, and movement. — Ivan Goncharov

Providence has fixed the limits of human enjoyment by immovable boundaries, and has set different gratifications at such a distance from each other, that no art or power can bring them together. This great law it is the business of every rational being to understand, that life may not pass away in an attempt to make contradictions consistent, to combine opposite qualities, and to unite things which the nature of their being must always keep asunder. — Samuel Johnson

IMPALE, v.t. In popular usage, to pierce with any weapon which remains fixed in the wound ... properly, to put to death by thrusting an upright sharp stake into the body, the victim being left in a sitting position. — Ambrose Bierce

Romanticism is not just about being in a fixed state of endless beauty, because you can't live like that or live on that, that's what I've learnt. — Elizabeth Peyton

Eleven reasons you want to become a robot:

1. Robots are logical and know their purpose.
2. Robots have programming they understand.
3. Robots are not held to unattainable standards and then criticized when they fail.
4. Robots are not crippled by emotions they don't know how to process.
5. Robots are not judged based on what sex organs they were born with.
6. Robots have mechanical bodies that are strong and durable. They are not required to have sex.
7. Robots do not feel guilt (about existing, about failing, about being something other than expected).
8. Robots can multitask.
9. Robots do not feel unsafe all the time.
10. Robots are perfect machines that are capable and functional and can be fixed if something breaks.
11. Robots are happy. — A. Merc Rustad

This is the real drama for me; the belief that we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it's not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do. But it's not true! It's not true! We find this out for ourselves very clearly when by some terrible chance we're suddenly stopped in the middle of doing something and we're left dangling there, suspended. We realize then, that every part of us was not involved in what we'd been doing and that it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one's personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action. — Luigi Pirandello

Remember the Law of Power: You only have the power to change yourself. You can't change another person. You must see yourself as the problem, not the other person. To see another person as the problem to be fixed is to give that person power over you and your well-being. — Henry Cloud

THE NEXT DAY Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty were out on the Anarchists' golf course, during a round of Anarchists' Golf, a craze currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed sequence - in fact, no fixed number - of holes, with distances flexible as well, some holes being only putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate. Many players had been known to come there at night and dig new ones. Parties were likely to ask, "Do you mind if we don't play through?" then just go and whack balls at any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. "This is kind of fun," Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his ear. — Thomas Pynchon

Observe that for the novelist who has remained Christian, like myself, man is someone creating himself or destroying himself. He is not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mold once and for all. This is what makes the traditional psychological novel so different from what I did or thought I was doing. The human being as I conceive him in the novel is a being caught up in the drama of human salvation, even if he doesn't know it. — Francois Mauriac

We ought to step out of our old, hard casing. We think that we are one kind of people, when in fact we are always creating ourselves. We are not fixed. We are constantly becoming, constantly coming into being. — Ben Okri

Every day that we can open our eyes and take a look at the world around us, is another day to be thankful for. It's a chance to remember how far we've come, and to remember how we did it -- by being honest with ourselves about who we are and what we've done. By letting hope back into our lives, and learning to lean on those who care when we're too weak to stand on our own two feet.

It hasn't been easy, and it never will be. After all, every day is also a chance to slide back into the darkness. To live in ourselves and our regrets, instead of this moment. To run away from those that would help us and let self-hatred drive us back into isolation, despair, and destruction.

So let's make a promise this morning -- that we will spend today with our eyes fixed forward.

Step by step, we will do things that help make life better, for ourselves and those around us. Because just as they have forgiven us -- we must also forgive ourselves. — Nick Spencer

The path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, — Marcel Proust

Look," Grace said. "How strange! In spite of the rain, you can still see the stars. How bright they are tonight." She pointed, but Lorcan didn't look. His eyes remained fixed intently on her.
"I can't think of a finer sight in the whole world than the one I'm looking at right now," he said.
In spite of being drenched, Grace flushed at his words.
Lorcan's eyes sparkled at her, brighter than ever before.
It was as if the rare blue gems of his iriseshad been washed by the rain amd buffed by the moonlight to a new intensity. "Grace, there's been something I've wanted to do for a very long time now, but things have kept getting in the way." He reached forward, bringing a hand to the side of her face. Then he gently but firmly drew her wet face toward his. He gazed at her, as if seeing her for the first time. Then he brought his soft lips down to hers and kissed her. — Justin Somper

Crowds have one expression, cruel and fixed. You let yourself be trapped by a look. You let yourself be carried off and shut away in a place of silence. There your eyes may be ripped out, your tongue cut off, and your fingers hammered until the little bones splinter. The walls are splashed with thick clots of blood. Words are the worst kind of dog, they drag us along despite ourselves to somewhere we didn't want to go, they obsess us, they don't let us have a moment's rest, a moment's rest.

But before that? Before that is another place altogether. Memory blanks things out methodically. It has several floors, sealed off from one another and there is no passage joining them. One of them is hell. When you fall in, at the very instant you lose your footing, you forget everything, even what light is like. But once you are back in the world you retain only a faint memory of being shut up. It resonates like the dull echo of pain. — Marie Desplechin

Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer, like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground. — Marcel Proust

The Bible is full of evidence that God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us
loves us so much that we the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is "renewed in the morning" or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, "our inner nature is being renewed everyday". Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous details in Leviticus involving God in the minuitae of daily life might be revisioned as the very love of God. — Kathleen Norris

I believe that our ability to worship God, to reaffirm our covenants and receive the healing power of the Holy Ghost, to receive the instruction we need in order to make personal progress - all of these things are greatly affected by how secure and safe we feel in our Church environment during the three-hour block of time on Sundays. If we have to spend our energy dealing with feelings that we are not accepted, being concerned about our appearance, or worrying that what we do or say will be judged harshly, in other words that the fellowship of our ward members is anything but "fixed, immovable, and unchangeable", we certainly won't be able to make the kind of progress we could make otherwise. — Virginia H. Pearce

I did not mean to break that planet it was just in the way when I came into being and I fixed it and I said I was sorry and the planet said OK so since I'm supposed to learn from stuff like that I will tell you don't break planets, especially the ones with living things on them, or at least fix them if you do break them. Also, don't go in black holes, no matter how much they look like cute little Nahas. They are not cute! They are actually very bitey and kind of mean. Also just OK I do not want to talk about any of this anymore. — N.K. Jemisin

You can't run away. The past will be only too happy to chase you - - in absolute, complete, and total earnest. Do you know why? Because they're lonely. The past and memories are very lonely things. I don't believe in God. Because he doesn't have a fixed form. The past certainly does exist, even in a world where the future doesn't have a fixed form. Even if it's being colored by misunderstandings and delusions, a person's past can't be anything but the truth as long as he believes in it. If that's what you base your actions or your way of life on, isn't that like being god? — Ryohgo Narita

Joy is not the same as pleasure or happiness. A wicked and evil man may have pleasure, while any ordinary mortal is capable of being happy. Pleasure generally comes from things, and always through the senses; happiness comes from humans through fellowship. Joy comes from loving God and neighbor. Pleasure is quick and violent, like a flash of lightning. Joy is steady and abiding, like a fixed star. Pleasure depends on external circumstances, such as money, food, travel, etc. Joy is independent of them, for it comes from a good conscience and love of God. — Fulton J. Sheen

I don't know what I need, or even what I want, from her or from anybody. There's no way to tell her the truth, because the truth is that my heart is broken, and I don't think there's any chance of it being sewn back together. This is permanent. It can't be fixed. — Hannah Harrington

Miss Brobity's Being, young man, was deeply imbued with homage to Mind. She revered Mind, when launched, or, as I say, precipitated, on an extensive knowledge of the world. When I made my proposal, she did me the honour to be so overshadowed with a species of Awe, as to be able to articulate only the two words, "O Thou!" meaning myself. Her limpid blue eyes were fixed upon me, her semi-transparent hands were clasped together, pallor overspread her aquiline features, and, though encouraged to proceed, she never did proceed a word further. I disposed of the parallel establishment by private contract, and we became as nearly one as could be expected under the circumstances. But she never could, and she never did, find a phrase satisfactory to her perhaps-too-favourable estimate of my intellect. To the very last (feeble action of liver), she addressed me in the same unfinished terms. — Charles Dickens

There can be no relation more strange, more critical, than that between two beings who know each other only with their eyes, who meet daily, yes, even hourly, eye each other with a fixed regard, and yet by some whim or freak of convention feel constrained to act like strangers. Uneasiness rules between them, unslaked curiosity, a hysterical desire to give rein to their suppressed impulse to recognize and address each other; even, actually, a sort of strained but mutual regard. For one human being instinctively feels respect and love for another human being so long as he does not know him well enough to judge him; and that he does not, the craving he feels is evidence. — Thomas Mann

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them ... You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted ... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules. — Joseph Campbell

Every ego so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though is was a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion. — Hermann Hesse

he and a good part of the Deaf community are against cochlear implants because they don't believe that being deaf is a disability or that they need to be fixed. He says it would be like white people trying to paint African American people white. Some deaf people also view the use of cochlear implants as a loss of their Deaf Culture. — Brandi Rarus

Her fingers flew, her fiddle was an entire orchestra, and every note beautifully brought into being struck a chord of satisfaction within her. She wondered at the unfamiliar lightness in her chest and realised she was laughing.
So great was her focus, it took her a while to register the strange expression that crept to Brocker's face as he listened, finger tapping the armrest of his chair. His eyes were fixed behind Fire and to the right, in the direction of Archer's back doorway. Fire comprehended that someone must be standing in Archer's entrance, someone Brocker watched with startled eyes.
And then everything happened at once. Fire recognised the mind in the doorway; she spun around, fiddle and bow screeching apart; she stared at Prince Brigan leaning against the door frame. — Kristin Cashore

In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very center of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law. — Horace Bushnell

Halt eyed them balefully. They were all being so obvious about not mentioning his sudden reappearance that it was even worse than if they had commented on it ...
'Oh, go on!' he said. 'Somebody say something! I know what you're thinking!'
'It's good to see you up and about, Halt,' Selethen said gravely ...
Halt glared at the others and they quickly chorused their pleasure at seeing him back to his normal self. But he could see the grins they didn't quite manage to hide. He fixed a glare on Alyss.
'I'm surprised at you Alyss,' he said. 'I expected no better of Will and Evanlyn, of course. Heartless beasts, the pair of them. But you! I thought you had been better trained!' ...
'Halt, I'm sorry! It's not funny, you're right ... Shut up, Will.' This last was directed at Will as he tried, unsuccessfully, to smother a snigger. — John Flanagan

This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall. — Karen Thompson Walker

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities have to be defined: what skews the issues so much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have been realized: but the fact is also that when one considers a being who is transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the books. — Simone De Beauvoir

The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end. — Robert Musil

In a broader sense, the value of heirlooms is always, as I have said, an historical value, derived from acts of production, use, or appropriation that have involved the object in the past. The value of an heirloom is really that of actions: actions whose significance has been, as it were, absorbed into the object's current identity - whether the emphasis is placed on the inspired labors of the artist who created it, the lengths to which some people have been known to go to acquire it, or the fact that it was once used to cut off a mythical giant's head. Since the value of the actions has already been fixed in the physical being of the object, it is perhaps a short leap to begin attributing the agency behind such actions to the object as well, and speak, as Mauss does, of valuables that transfer themselves from owner to owner or actively influence their owners' fates. The — David Graeber

Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of bedroom, they vanish the moment they're over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again — Michel Faber

The importance of cultivating assumption of the best intentions in others cannot be over-estimated. Fostering this principal of, "goodness of intent," and committing to seeing others and the world through this lens makes for a successful, happy field of vision. This enables us to put our focus and energy to positive, productive outcomes. It lends to a spirit of cooperation and encouragement which is highly effective and satisfying for most people most of the time. That being said, these "rose colored glasses," as vibrant and pleasing as they are, must not become an excuse to look the other way when something needs a different focus, or fixed. We must not let them become blinders which are obviously ineffective, often negative, and occasionally dangerous. — Connie Kerbs

BASE jumping is skydiving from fixed objects, like buildings, antennae, bridges and earth - meaning mountains, cliffs. It's for sure - for me - it's the ultimate feeling of being in free fall, with all the visual references. — Ueli Gegenschatz

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process. — John Powell

The two revolutions, I mean the annual revolutions of the declination and of the centre of the Earth, are not completely equal; that is the return of the declination to its original value is slightly ahead of the period of the centre. Hence it necessarily follows that the equinoxes and solstices seem to anticipate their timing, not because the sphere of the fixed stars moves to the east, but rather the equatorial circle moves to the west, being at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic in proportion to the declination of the axis of the terrestrial globe. — Nicolaus Copernicus

But when I tried to meet her eye now, she pointedly looked away, and fixed her red and swollen eyes on the big stained-glass window above the slate. Since (a) it was dark outside and (b) the window depicted Saunt Grod and his research assistants being beaten with rubber hoses in the dungeons of some Praxic Age spy bureau and (c) Tulia had already spent something like a quarter of her life in this room, I reckoned that inspecting the window wasn't really the point. — Neal Stephenson

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world. — Nick Harkaway

Um ... I'm not afraid of hard work. I'm good at dealing with all sorts of people and ... and I make a mean cup of tea." I began to blather into the silence. The thought of it being her son had thrown me. "I mean, my dad seems to think that's not the greatest reference. But in my experience there's not much that can't be fixed by a decent cup of tea ... " There — Jojo Moyes

Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing. — H.G.Wells

There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated. — Dave Eggers