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A Quotes

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All A Quotes

“After readinf some essay on the nature of human fallibility, I was very aware that we are the recipients of a huge amount of discovery over the last century. Medicine exemplifies this. And that has transitioned us from a world in which people's lives were mostly governed by ignorance to one that's constrained by ineptitude. A century ago, we didn't know, for instance, what diseases afflicted us, what their nature really was, or what to do about them. And that has changed.”

“After reading ... accounts ... of minor accidents of light, it is little wonder that the average man would far rather watch someone else fly and read of the narrow escapes from death when some pilot has had a forced landing or a blowout, than to ride himself. Even in the postwar days of now obsolete equipment, nearly all of the serious accidents were caused by inexperienced pilots who where then allowed to fly or attempt to fly-without license or restrictions about anything they could coax into the air.”

“After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.”

“After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.”

“After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.”

“After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.”

“After receiving a diagnosis, the minimal resources that we may be linked to (if we're lucky) are for the benefit of parents, carers and those who are third-party viewers, rather than for neurodivergent people. We're given books that have been created by doctors and psychologists and neurologists who may have studied our brains for a number of years and can spit out information until the cows come home. But, assuming they are neurotypical, they have never and will never experience or understand what it feels like to have our minds. We're given clinical books and clinical videos, and are taught as soon as the new label is attached to us that it's a cold, medical, distant thing, like our brains are no longer ours. And, when we try to rid ourselves of these views and do our own research in an attempt to find things that feel closer to home and less analytical and impersonal, we are led to articles, sob stories, and posts that highlight the disappointment, fear and sorrow that surround all aspects of us, making us feel further invalidated, segregated and alienated.”

“After receiving such a warm welcome, it sounded to me like the Directorate of Intelligence had placed me on the CIA’s “don’t screw with this guy list”. This list was something of an urban legend throughout The Company. Once on it, you had it made. Everyone at the CIA would go out of his or her way to be helpful and red tape would magically vanish for you. It meant that you had a very powerful patron at the top levels of the Agency. I may have been hustled out of Headquarters but I apparently still had a very powerful friend in high places.”

“After referees negated a line change that led to Tampa Bay"s winning goal in the Stanley Cup Playoffs: After all these years in the league, am I that stupid that I would put four forwards and one defenseman in a 3-3 tie, in the third period? I think everybody that knows me here knows I"m not that stupid. I might be halfway stupid, but not that stupid.”

“After removing a debilitating number of jobs and the funding to ensure quality schools, after instituting laws that disrupt families' possibility to thrive, welfare laws beginning in the 1970s meant that women often lost benefits needed to feed their children if they had a man present in the home, even if, between the two of them, they still subsisted on poverty wages. Our mothers and fathers and daughters and sons were criminalized for choices made out of absolute desperation and lack of any other real options.”

“After residents had secured the major markers of wealth - the home, the right schools, the serenity of private aviation - they turned their attention to the real game in town: the refining of advantage, the expansion of the margins, the hedging against trouble, real and imagined. If you knew where to look you could hone every edge of your life - from your life expectancy to your tax avoidance to your child's performance on the SATs. You could, in other words, make sure that the winners keep winning.”

“After returning to the physical, I thought about what happened. I finally understood Robert Monroe’s observation about chunks of the Infinite Sea of Bonded I-There Clusters disappearing from time to time. Those are spiritual beings completing their Ultimate Graduation, and who have decided to leave both the material and the spiritual worlds and return to unity with the Ultimate Creator, by Jozef.”

“After ripping through The Hobbit, I read The Lord of the Rings, and the darkness of that story enveloped me in a way that is impossible to explain. I was THERE, in a very real sense. The fear was palpable in the presence of the black-cloaked Ringwraiths, and I could taste the sulfurous fumes of Mt. Doom. I could smell the sweat of horses and hot leather and hear the clash of battle as I rode with the Rohan on the fields of the Pelennor. I bled and died with the sun-king, Theoden. I rose again with Eowyn’s defiance of the Witch King. I soared with the Eagles as they swept the broken and bloody body of Frodo and his companion Samwise the Brave from the smoking crags of the fiery mountain. There has never been such a story, and I don’t think there ever shall be again.”

“After Rose, I had so much guilt and it simmered for a long time, until after Sarah left, and it started boiling until my head became a pressure cooker, my body vibrating with energy that had no outlet. Until I cross-threaded a screw while I was fixing the bay door at the Firehouse, and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I lost my fucking mind, that way you do when it’s been building for too long, and when you finally snap, it’s at something you can’t realistically blame or punish, like an inopportune papercut, hitting your head on a cupboard door, or trying to put your jacket on, but your sleeve is inside out so your arm gets stuck.”