Discrete Quotes - Page 3

• Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.

  Tom Chatfield

  Book, Mean, Cutting

  "Do writers need paper?" by Tom Chatfield, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk. October 20, 2010.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child's life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.

  Selma Fraiberg

  Memories, Children, Believe

  Selma H. Fraiberg (2015). “The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood”, p.120, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Music, Order, Play

  7 Copy quote

• Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is "continuous", and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.

  Doron Zeilberger

  Real, Evil, Intuition

  ""Real" Analysis is a Degenerate Case of Discrete Analysis". Ruthgers School of Arts and Sciences Website, sites.math.rutgers.edu. November 26, 2001.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

  Stanley Fish

  Writing, Practice, Forever

  "How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One". Book by Stanley Fish, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.

  Anton Chekhov

  Integrity, Believe, Russia

  Letter to I.I. Orlov, February 22, 1899.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source