“Because the exponential distribution is so mathematically convenient, it is tempting to use it even when it is not appropriate.”
Source: Operating Systems: Principles and Practice
“The word "Formal" in this context is a euphemism for "useless”
Source: Div, Grad, Curl, and All That: An Informal Text on Vector Calculus
“Challenge your self to read what your children are forced to endure, and then ask why we expect that textbooks - written and negotiated line by line to placate politically active interest groups in Texas and California - are up to the task of supplying a first-rate curriculum.”
Source: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
“Dr Abdul Rahim Wong, PhD”
“In the end, reading had taught her an even more important lesson – one in kindness and empathy.”
Source: The Booklover's Library
“Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers- who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how "minds are threaded together- how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides... It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." This capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the 'Essays' a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds together.”
Source: How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
“Excerpt from the endnote on the audiobook read by the author: "There have been so many interpretations of the story that I am not going to choose between them. Make your own choice. They contradict each other, the various choices. the only choice that really matters, the only interpretation of the story, if you want one, is your own. Not your teacher's, not your professor's, not mine, not a critic's, not some authority's. The only thing that matters is first, the experience of being in the story, moving through it. Then, any interpretation you like, if it is yours, that's the right one. Because what's in a book is not what an author thought he put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.”
Source: Lord of the Flies
“Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own.”
Source: Time regained
“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One... I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.”
“Sometimes, authors' descriptions of unique fictional characters are like mirrors that reflect the readers image back.”