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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother's morals - only of his rights.”

“What changed?" Frustration tightens my grip on the mug. "When exactly did you decide not to ruin me?" "Maybe it was when I saw Oren holding a knife to your throat," he says. "Or maybe it was when I realised the bruises on your neck were fingerprints and wanted to kill them all over again just so I could do it slowly. Maybe it was the first time I recklessly kissed you or when I realised I'm fucked because I can't stop thinking about doing more than just kissing you." My breath catches at his admission, but he just sighs, lets his head fall back against the wall. "Does it even matter when, as long as it changed between us?' Don't do that,'" I whisper, and he lifts his head again to hold my gaze. "Do what? Tell you I can't get you out of my head? Or speak directly into yours?”

“What changed these very ordinary men (who were such cowards that they did not dare stand too near the cross in case they got involved) into heroes who would stop at nothing? A swindle? Hallucination? Spooky nonsense in a darkened room? Or Somebody quietly doing what He said He'd do - walk right through death? What do you think?”

“What changes is the mindset from which he is seeing life. Sometimes, it is higher. Sometimes, it is lower. When it is higher, he is more strongly confident in his attachment to you. When it is lower, he gets pulled by all the offerings of the ego and the people in his life who share those values with him. He doesn’t know that he is constantly gravitating between the two. Otherwise, it would be easy to fix, and it is not. One has to learn to recognise both mindsets and understand the consequences of each.”

“What changes when a woman marries? What does a woman lose and what does she gain? For Abishag, marrying king David gave her instant status. As a wife, impugning Abishag's character meant a swift death. As a wife, she inspired fear. What changes when a woman is widowed? For Abishag, it meant foreign women came to Jerusalem to marry Solomon--and she was relegated to that of a spectator. In Abishag's widowhood, none feared her.”

“What characteristics are most important in creative workers? One quality you need is inventiveness. You need to be able to take whatever product or service you are providing and figure out ways of making it better, faster, cheaper. The other quality is empathy and insight into what people might want, even though they don't even know their wants, probably because there's no product or service to test their wants.”

“What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the 'new system of chemical philosophy'), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it.”

“What chiefly concerns and alarms many of us are the problems arising from religious fanaticism. As long as large numbers of militant enthusiasts are persuaded that they alone have access to the truth, and that the rest of us are infidels, we remain under threat. Lord Acton's famous phrase about power can be used of another danger. Dogma tends to corrupt, and absolute dogma corrupts absolutely.”

“What children and teens need most in stressful situations, especially when they make mistakes, ‘misbehave,’ experience ‘failure,’ or cry for any reason (including what we might call a ‘temper tantrum’), is a hug and being told, “You matter to me, I love you so much. I’m here for you. Let’s figure this out together.”

“What children don't understand, and can't understand until they grow up some, is how much the whole fabric and process of human society depends on everybody agreeing to ignore, most of the time, the fact that all of us are, most of the time, inadequate, incompetent, pitiful, and, in fact, naked to our enemies. None of us really has very much in the way of spiritual, moral clothing. We dress ourselves in rags. And we agree to say nothing about it. To a very large extent, it is human charity that clothes us.”

“What children need and want is not some new pedagogical method, but the world that already exists. They want to play in nature, plant things, be with animals, participate in the upkeep of their environment. They want to assimilate the culture and knowledge acquired by humanity in the countless generations preceding them, and they want to do this in a living way that is not sequentially programmed. They want to learn to speak, count, read, write, to discover geography and the mysteries of the universe, to learn music, mathematical code, biology, history, all about dinosaurs, and so on. And if we take the trouble to present the whole reality to our children in conditions that make sense to them, we will be very surprised at how quickly they leave their toys aside when they distract them from their real task: studying the real world that they were just born into, understanding it, becoming specialists in it.”

“What children need most are the essentials that grandparents provide in abundance. They give unconditional love, kindness, patience, humor, comfort, lessons in life. And, most importantly, cookies.”

“What chilled my blood was a felt marker outline of a woman on the wall. Hands above the head, where there was a hook, then below the shape of the head, a neck strap. Then a waist strap, and two ankle clamps. The silhouette gave me no doubt that Gina had been confined here. But where was she now?”