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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“In a novella, a whole lot of crap can happen, and you can build momentum and suspense and leave room for a surprise or three. Stories are cut down to the most essential elements, and novels (this might be an unfair generalization on my part) are big fat clumsy efforts where the reader can snooze for a couple chapters and miss nothing of consequence. Hence my love for the middle way.”

“In a now-familiar paradox of punishment it was explained again and again that all these physical attacks were a kindness. The Church persecutes, Augustine said, in the spirit of love. Jerome, the biblical scholar and saint, concurred: it was not cruel to defend God’s honour – in the Bible sinners suffer punishments up to and including death. Chrysostom agreed: if he were to punish your earthly body, he reassured his listeners, it was only to protect your eternal one so that ‘you may be saved, and we may rejoice, and God may be glorified now and always, for ever and ever without end. Amen.’ Those receiving such salvation might, not unreasonably, have felt otherwise. One monk in Shenoute’s care was saved with beatings so savage that he died of his injuries. And what if people, disinclined to rejoice, became frightened by the fact that their neighbours were spying on them, reporting on them, hounding them in their homes? Well, fear too had its benefits. Better to be scared than to sin. ‘Where there is terror,’ said Augustine, ‘there is salvation . . . Oh, merciful savagery!’ The intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid.”

“In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)”

“In a now-famous Rogers dictum, delivered in speeches and in his books, he advises adults: “Please, think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day care, their health, their education – please listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them.”

“In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.”

“In a nuclear war there would be no victors, only victims. The truth of peace require that all-whether those governments which openly or secretly possess nuclear arms, or those planning to acquire them- agree to change their course by clear and firm decision and strive for a progressive and concerted nuclear disarmament. The resources which would be saved could then be employed in projects of development capable of benefiting all their people, especially the poor.”

“In a nutshell, men and women who have wealth and power are human beings, as are women and men who have nothing more than their dignified rage. And up above they demand and insist: "We must say not to violence, wherever it comes from"... making sure to emphasize it if the violence comes from below. According to them, everyone must bring themselves into harmony for their differences and contradictions to be resolved and must chant, "armed people are also exploited," making reference to soldiers and police officers. Our position as Zapatistas is clear. We do not support pacifist flags that are raised fro someone else to turn the other cheek, nor violence that is encouraged when others provide the dead. We are who we are, with all the good and all the bad that we carry and is our responsibility. But it would be naive to think that all the good things we have accomplished - including the privilege of listing to and learning from you - would have been possible without preparing a full decade for the sun to rise as it rose on January 1, fifteen years ago.”

“In a nutshell, the process they [abusers in a ritual abuse group] use on survivors is designed to: break the will and personality of the person until they become as nothing... with no will of their own...no identity...then they... rebuild the person & shape their will in order to...try and make the person one of them...thus gaining power If abusers hold all the power, becoming one of them can, for some, be the only means of survival. However, this doesn't always work, instead survivors often find ways of regaining their own power and fighting back.”

“In a nutshell, the ability of American companies to compete in world markets depends on creating conditions in which workers can add sufficient value to justify their higher wages and benefits, much the Japanese auto manufacturers have done in this country. Until unions and mangers understand the necessity of effectively employing the nation's most important resource, the American worker, we are destined to have more Detroits.”

“In a nutshell, this United Nations non-profit organization [World Food Programme] feeds millions of starving children at schools in third world countries as an incentive for them to attend school, which in turn might better their futures. They do so much more but I was so struck by this story.”

“In a painting no one complains that the subject is posed, but everybody complains about what looks posed in a photograph. Except, I've found that if I go very close in to the face, then the posed expression no longer exists. The face becomes a landscape of the lakes of the eyes and the hills of the nose and the valley of the cleft of the chin.”

“In a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world and widely considered the world’s most prestigious, D. C. Walsh and his co-researchers “randomly assigned a series of 227 workers newly identified as abusing alcohol to one of three rehabilitation regimens: compulsory inpatient treatment, compulsory attendance at AA meetings, and a choice of options. The findings were notable: On seven measures of drinking and drug use . . . we found significant differences at several follow-up assessments. The hospital group fared best and that assigned to AA the least well; those allowed to choose a program had intermediate outcomes. Additional inpatient treatment was required significantly more often . . . by the AA group (63 percent) and the choice group (38 percent) than by subjects assigned to initial treatment in the hospital (23 percent). These results led the researchers to issue a warning in their final recommendations: “An initial referral to AA alone or a choice of programs, although less costly than inpatient care, involves more risk than compulsory inpatient treatment and should be accompanied by close monitoring for signs of incipient relapse.”

“In a parent support group “...This is the miracle. We belong together because we are engaged in the same quest as we search for answers to our most anguished questions. In that journey, we reflect back to each other the meaning of our own experience. In telling the truth about myself, I discover the truth about myself. I have come to know myself in the honest, unashamed, unedited telling of my story. Like the others in the room, I let go of that vision of myself as someone who is holding it all together, who is in control. I let go, though not without some initial concern that I will be found out, that people will hide from me or laugh at me or feel superior to me. But my self-consciousness quickly fades away, because I am no longer lost. I am found. I am found within the circle of others through this community of fellow human beings who are hurting and afraid but fearless when it comes to admitting our need for help and support. This is where we belong, where we “fit” We share our stories, and as we join our stories with others who are on the same journey, we discovered a story that is shared.. We are not alone.”