Browse 767 quotes about Nonfiction.
“Loneliness is hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connections. This is far easier said than done, especially for people whose loneliness arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as well as long for the society of others. [...] The lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly the contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it is by no means easy to dislodge.”
Source: The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
“Our mind has a useful capability to focus spontaneously on whatever is odd, different, or unusual.”
Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow
“instead of mourning, instead of a moment of silence or a hateful, islamophobic message, how about today we make the world a little brighter?
be kinder. be a little gentler, with yourself and others. take more pictures. tell more jokes. be a better human.
today is a lot more than a tragedy. today is a birthday. a day of suicide awareness. a wedding. a birth. a new job. today is a kiss and someone on a tarred over warehouse roof whispering about the day the earth stood still and the day it began spinning again.
be kind. just be kind. it's time we took this day back for the wild ones, for the fiery eyes, for the happy and the brave and the new. no more mourning. let it just be a sunday.”
Source: calloused: a field journal
“This is not a conventional “how-to” book. It contains no exercises, and it has few formulas saying “first do this, then do that.”
This is intentional. As we’ll see later, eros doesn’t like to be told what to do. If you set a goal, your sexual mind will be happy to reject it. It’s kind of childish and brilliant that way.
You also won’t find much about sexual biology or neurochemistry on these pages. Sex books these days tend to be full of advice for “boosting your dopamine”—or your oxytocin, or some other such nonsense. In all my 30 years as a sex therapist, I’ve yet to see a dopamine molecule walk into my office. We’ll stick with things you can see and feel yourself, without needing a laboratory.
I’ll also spare you the body diagrams. You already know what a penis and vagina look like, right? And we won’t discuss how many neurons are concentrated in your clitoris. It’s an impressive number, but who really cares?
There are a few great sex books already out there, and I’ll point them out to you as we go along. But reading most of the others is like gnawing on dry bones. As my friend and colleague Paul Joannides, the author of Guide to Getting it On (one of the aforementioned great ones), has accurately noted, “the trouble with most books on sex is they don’t get anyone hard or wet.”
This book is not intended to get you hard or wet. But it’s meant not to get in your way either. The chapters are short, so you can read them even if you get a little distracted. Hey, I hope you get a little distracted.
There are no lists to memorize, and there won’t be a test afterwards. We’re dealing with a part of the human mind that hasn’t gone to school yet, and never will.
Any questions?
OK, let’s get started . . .
Adapted from LOVE WORTH MAKING by Stephen Snyder, M.D. Copyright © 2018 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.”
“If I make a mistake, she raps me over the fingers with her ruler. But she never hurts my spirit, she only hits me to correct my mistake.”
Source: The Only Girl in the World
“It is an act of love to demand accountability for the dead. And it takes rage to prevent the same accidents from happening again.”
Source: There Are No Accidents
“Blame and the punishment that follows may satisfy the thirst for vengeance. But we cannot punish and learn at the same time. Punishment keeps in place the belief that the system is safe and the human error was the aberration. Learning requires recognizing the failures built into the system and changing the system. Punishment has nothing to do with prevention.”
Source: There Are No Accidents
“The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving.”
Source: One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
“You didn't change the world by being cynical.”
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
“She was so laser focused on achieving her goals that she seemed oblivious to the practical implications of her decision.”
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
“We met when we were only 16, at a high school dance. When he died, we were 50. I remember how I didn't want that day to end, terrible as it was. I didn't want to go to sleep because as long as I was awake, it was still a day that I shared with Sean. ~Beverly Eckert”
Source: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11
“I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I just knew I would be ok. I somehow left that tunnel not only different, but stronger.”
“There is no longer a question of who Trump is. We're horrified not just every day, but nearly hourly. The question now is who we are as a people.”
“The cost of electrons and photons is getting cheaper all the time!”
Source: The STREAM TONE: The Future of Personal Computing?
“Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.”
“The feminism that has mattered to the media and made magazine headlines in recent years has been the feminism most useful to heterosexual, high-earning middle- and upper-middle-class white women. Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into 'boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.”
Source: Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution
“You will never experience personal growth, if you fear taking chances. And, you will never become successful, if you operate without integrity.”
Source: Where's My Purse?
“The groundswell of outrage over the invasion of Iraq often cited the preemptive war as a betrayal of American ideals. The subtext of the dissent was: This is not who we are. But not if you were standing where I was. It was hard to see the look in that palace tour guide's eyes when she talked about the American flag flying over the palace and not realize that ever since 1898, from time to time, this is exactly who we are. And what's more, Hawaii is, just as Theodore Roosevelt's circle predicted, crucial to the American empire's military presence in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor is still the headquarters of U.S. Pacific Command, just as it was for all three of America's twentieth-century wars in the Pacific with Japan, North Korea, and North Vietnam.”
Source: Unfamiliar Fishes
“When you’re trying to communicate a big, audacious concept, it’s helpful to remember that where data falls short, a story might close the gap, and where story alone is not persuasive enough, data can make up the difference.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“The best ideas weave in the logical as well as the emotional. Touch the head as well as the heart.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“The majestic whale travels the seven seas piping its unique song in the hopes of finding its tribe. The other whales in the sea can hear the solitary whale. But the song to them is foreign and unfamiliar. They’re not resonating on the same frequencies and so, it seems, there can be no reciprocity. The creature carries on, searching high and low for a sign of recognition and response.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Communicators begin with generous intent and then surrender the work to the audience to do with as they will, including identifying and resonating with the work in their own unique ways.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Our imagination tells us that being as connected as we are—the ease of travel, technological advances and pooled intelligence—should have produced better results for more people than we’re now seeing.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Those who are resonating the most with your work, who recognize themselves in your vision, will naturally crave language that speaks to that you-and-me kind of 'we.' They’ll want to identify with your ideas personally and keep talking about them.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“While someone might attempt a feeble carbon copy of those ideas you’ve spent years developing, they can never match the undeniably distinctive aspect of your work. Especially if it resonates across multiple platforms and in multiple formats.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Because we live in a highly uncertain world, life frequently demands that we adjust to a new normal and a new reality, different from our old normal and the old reality of yesterday. This often involves regaining our balance in the face of a diagnosis, a disability, a death in the family, a divorce or some other drastic change in our circumstances.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“We sing our way forward, on frequencies only we can, depending on the chosen space, the chosen medium, the idea we’re trying to spread and the promises we’re making to the audience we’re seeking to serve.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Our ideas are like living entities, swimming in an ocean of other ideas. Every idea is being broadcast on a different frequency and has varying levels of resonance with those who respond to that frequency.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Irresolution, it might be said, is a hallmark of our lives. That so much of what happens is beyond our direct knowledge or control, and that there is no way of knowing our own story’s ending (or even duration) might explain why we crave the complication-resolution pattern in story.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“An idea packaged up in nonfiction is a completely different animal to an idea packaged up in fiction. And while the lines blur in that hybrid creature called narrative nonfiction, we should be under no illusions that they’re the same animal.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“There are things we can say in nonfiction that cannot be said outright in fiction. And there are truths that can be conveyed in fiction that the constraints of nonfiction would never allow.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“One of the central problems of a time in which there are many competing voices on the airwaves, in the media and online, is finding a way to get in sync, on some semblance of the same wavelength as others who share the same values, questions and goals.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“If the alignment between author, audience, topic and timing is synchronized correctly, the audience will want to imagine themselves in the story.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“If our transmission is too garbled due to an unwittingly arrogant tone, the idea we broadcast isn’t necessarily the idea that will be received in the minds and hearts of the hearers.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“The best ideas expand our possibilities as individuals, communities and global villagers.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“New wisdom is the wisdom that whispers to us to pursue detachment. It is the wisdom that, steady as breath work, releases us from our monkey-mind grip on exactly how life needs to look and sound. We don’t even have to obsess about how long an idea will be relevant, trusting the universe that when the idea’s time has expired an even more useful one will appear to replace it.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Sending resonant signals is also different from merely adding to a cultural echo chamber. That’s because of the unique flavor of your own authority and experience, origins and obstacles. All the why’s you’ve addressed in terms of author, audience, topic and timing. Delineated in these ways, your big, generous idea, located at the edges of the possible, becomes a complementary addition to a rich and harmonic symphony. Complementary yet undeniably distinctive.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Life is hard and we need people who’ve been in the thick of it to tell us a little something of how to survive and, also, thrive.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“The beauty of ideas is that many can co-exist at the same time and propel new leaps in our personal and collective evolution.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“As an audience it seems we’re as good as saying, “I’ll pay attention to your idea if you…
* are already being taken seriously in some way
* have found your place (professionally or personally)
* believe strongly in something relevant to your idea
* are connecting (with ideas, with people) in meaningful ways
* are finding ways to be useful in the world
* are finding ways to achieve more of what you value
* have developed mastery and control
* are participating in interesting things
* and are radiating love and acceptance for self and others.”
Your chosen audience will have three or four things on that list they value most in their own lives. And because they do value those things so highly, they’ll be looking for those signals from you.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“While the initial idea might have been a lone signal in an ocean of noise, through the power of collaboration it can be amplified in a way that resonates far and wide.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“We work together under the assumption that words matter, deeply.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“The best ideas are seeking out the maximum number of amplifiers and that this is the reproductive nature of generous ideas.”
“The biggest challenge for communicators today is found in the story of the loneliest whale in the world. This whale—nicknamed Blue 52 by scientists in the early nineties—was discovered traversing the seas and singing on a unique frequency. Year after year, its migration pathway took it across several thousand miles but, no matter how many signals it sent out, those signals failed to evoke a response from any of its own kind.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“In terms of the lonely whale metaphor, sending signals out into the void without a clear vision for who it is you’re singing to is a sure way for that signal to be lost in the noise.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“The best communicators encode their signals in a way that resonates not with everybody but with certain somebodies.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“Big ideas are often big precisely because they defy categorization. But blame it on our human tendency to want some kind of peg to hang our hat on. So before you blow up the category, what your editors, copywriters and marketing department might want to know is, what’s the niche?”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“We invest our time and attention into the work of those who have taken the trouble to translate their findings into stories and words we can understand—stories and words that speak to our own needs, pain points, longings and desires.”
“There are recurring patterns that show up again and again in big ideas that have spread, to indicate that they require some attention-getting wow factor, some audacious proposition, before we pay attention.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas
“An audacious proposition is designed to interrupt the regularly scheduled broadcast to deliver some new information.”
Source: Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas