Figuring Quotes (page 40)
That’s what I always wanted to know. Why would some fella be willing to do something generous for a kid he doesn’t even know?” Rodney asked. “Have to say I’m surprised, Mr. Burton. Of all the people on the face of the earth,” he said, his voice softening, “I figured if anyone knew the answer to that one, it’d be you.
Kenny Rogers
Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.
If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what...
Jeanette Winterson
They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.
Neil Gaiman
It's a beautiful morning, Sire," the guard said"Yes, it is."The Duke nodded, thinking: Perhaps this planet could grow on one. Perhaps it could ba a good home for my son. Then he saw the human figures moving into the flower fields, sweeping with them strange scythe-like devices--dew gatherers. Water so precious here that even the dew must be collected. And it could be a hideous place, the Duke thought.
Frank Herbert
Fictions are useful so long as they are taken as fictions. They are thensimply ways of "figuring" the world which we agree to follow so thatwe can act in cooperation, as we agree about inches and hours, numbersand words, mathematical systems and languages. If we have noagreement about measures of time and space, I would have no way ofmaking a date with you at the corner of Forty-second Street and FifthAvenue at 3 P.M. on Sunday, April 4.
Alan Watts
Find out who you are and figure out what you believe in. Even if it's different from what your neighbors believe in and different from what your parents believe in. Stay true to yourself. Have your own opinion. Don't worry about what people say about you or think about you. Let the naysayers nay. They will eventually grow tired of naying.
Ellen DeGeneres
These Cambodian women and men of all ages, including many children, photographed from a few feet away, usually in half figure, are - as in Titans's The Flaying of Marsyas, where Apollo's knife is eternally about to descend - forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged.
Susan Sontag
They made figures of brass, and tried to induce souls to indwell them. In some accounts we read that they succeeded; Friar Bacon was credited with one such Homunculus; so was Albertus Magnus, and, I think, Paracelsus. "He had, at least, a devil in his long sword 'which taught him all the cunning pranks of past and future mountebanks,
Aleister Crowley