Notion Quotes - Page 35

• Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counsellor for neurotic elevators.

  Douglas Adams

  Stars, Decision, Frustrated

  "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe". Book by Douglas Adams, Chapter 6, 1980.

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• Mom. I have something to tell you. I’m undead. Now, I know you may have some preconceived notions about the undead. I know you may not be comfortable with the idea of me being undead. But I’m here to tell you that undead are just like you and me … well, okay. Possibly more like me than you.

  Cassandra Clare

  Mom, Humor, Ideas

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.664, Simon and Schuster

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• Though a woman tempted man to eat, my dear Longfellow," said Holmes, "you never hear of Eve having to do with his drinking, for he took to that of his own notion.

  Matthew Pearl

  Drinking, Men, Holmes

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• There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen - despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Heart, Fate, Boys

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the F”, p.289, Simon and Schuster

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• She just wanted to be comfortable in her own skin...But she would not stop to seek others' approval. The notion that she should never seemed to enter her head. Her right to live as she pleased was not up for negotiation, even if it ran against the grain of the milieu at Huntingdon.

  Charles J. Shields

  Skins, Approval, Negotiation

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• Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.

  Neil Postman

  Simple, Ideas, Whales

  Neil Postman (2011). “Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education”, p.113, Vintage

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• A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking, Practice, Criticism

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• If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.

  Karen Armstrong

  Love, Sympathy, God

  Karen Armstrong (2007). “The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness”, p.212, Anchor

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• It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.

  Toni Morrison

  Suicide, Years, Dying

  Toni Morrison (1987). “Sula”

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• For the record? I have never been her baby. In fact, I reject the notion of coming out of her body. I prefer to believe I was hatched, or perhaps purchased.

  Jen Lancaster

  Baby, Believe, Records

  Jen Lancaster (2009). “Pretty in Plaid: A Life, A Witch, and a Wardrobe, or, the Wonder Years Before the Condescending,Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smart-Ass Phase”, p.167, Penguin

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• All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

  Anne Carson

  Liars, Lying, Mean

  Anne Carson (2009). “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”, p.31, Vintage

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• This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

  Milan Kundera

  Fashion, Reading, May

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• The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Community, Forever

  J. G. Ballard (2010). “Super-Cannes: A Novel”, p.269, Macmillan

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• For my own part,' said Captain Aubrey, 'I have no notion of disliking a man for his beliefs, above all if he was born with them. I find I can get along very well with Jews or even...' The P of Papists was already formed, and the word was obliged to come out as Pindoos.

  Patrick O'Brian

  Men, Captains, Belief

  Patrick O'Brian (2011). “The Wine-Dark Sea (Vol. Book 16) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)”, p.54, W. W. Norton & Company

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• At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.

  Isabel Allende

  Doors, Comfort, Apricots

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• I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.

  Peter Cameron

  Childhood, Adults, World

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• There's a notion I'd like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.

  Alan Moore

  Ordinary, Ridiculous, Buried

  Alan Moore, John Higgins (2005). “Watchmen”, Dc Comics

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• It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Knowing Who You Are, Starting Over, Forever

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “No Country for Old Men”, p.227, Vintage

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• At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.

  Terry Pratchett

  Fun, Past, Color

  Terry Pratchett (2012). “The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld”, p.24, Harper Collins

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• My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.

  Michael J. Fox

  Different, Spirituality, Things To Do

  Michael J. Fox (2011). “Lucky Man: A Memoir”, p.179, Random House

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• Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, towards beauty. Vogon ships did not nod towards beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley They spat in the eye of beauty and bludgeoned their wait through the notions of aesthetics and aerodynamics. Vogon cruisers did not so much travel through space as defile it and toss it aside.

  Eoin Colfer

  Eye, Dark, Aerodynamics

  Eoin Colfer (2009). “And Another Thing...”, Hyperion

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• I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind, Am urged by your propinquity to find Your person fair, and feel a certain zest To bear your body's weight upon my breast; So subtly is the fume of life designed, To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind, And leave me once again undone, possessed. Think not for this, however, the poor treason Of my stout blood against my staggering brain, I shall remember you with love, or season My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain: I find this frenzy insufficient reason For conversation when we meet again.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Thinking, Clouds, Remember You

  Edna St. Vincent Millay (2003). “Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems”, p.79, Library of America

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• Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

  Richard Wright

  Heart, Men, Civilization

  Richard Wright (1953). “The Outsider”, New York : Harper

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• The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate.

  Ann Druyan

  Wise, Thinking, Decision

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• Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Greek, Despair, Lines

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.118, A&C Black

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