Notion Quotes - Page 36

• Long-haired Chihuahuas have no notion they are bite-sized.

  Rosemary Clement-Moore

  Long, Chihuahua, Bites

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• You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.

  Terence McKenna

  Responsibility, Mind Blowing, Understanding

  Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

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• So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.

  Nicholson Baker

  Kids, Curves, Brain

  Nicholson Baker (2009). “The Anthologist: A Novel”, p.111, Simon and Schuster

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• I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one's life supersedes the actual living of said life.

  Peter Cameron

  Thinking, Self, Said Life

  Peter Cameron (2009). “Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel”, p.49, Macmillan

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• Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Stupid, Animal, Thinking

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, books.google.ru. March 4, 2010.

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• Fire sat unbreathing. A life that was an apology for the life of his father: It was a notion she could understand, beyond words and thought. She understood it the way she understood music.

  Kristin Cashore

  Father, Apology, Fire

  Kristin Cashore (2009). “Fire”, p.56, Penguin

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• but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

  Philip K. Dick

  Weed, Fall, Pride

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• Any black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind.

  Bell Hooks

  Educational, Heart, Thinking

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• No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Thinking, Effort, Comfort

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Stranger in a Strange Land”, p.394, Penguin

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• I suppose nowadays it's all a question of surgery, isn't it? Of course the notion is beautiful, the idea of staying a boy and a child forever, and I think you can. I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old.

  Johnny Depp

  Beautiful, Children, Fun

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.

  Bill Bryson

  Doors, Years, Four

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.319, Lulu Press, Inc

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• What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.

  Paul Di Filippo

  Encouragement, Writing, Ideas

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• Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Vision, Criticism

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• Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.

  Craig Ferguson

  Money, Drinking, Heart

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• I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Believe, Fiction, World

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.73, Macmillan

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• The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Boys, Thinking, Years

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• There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back...

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Country, Men, Law

  "The Past Through Tomorrow" by Robert A. Heinlein, G. P. Putnam Inc., (p. 25), 1967.

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• The notion is that human beings are born, (as my Guru has explained many times,) with equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth - the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of human being's difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Light, Darkness, Balance

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.236, A&C Black

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• God is God. Because he is God, He is worthy of my trust and obedience. I will find rest nowhere but in His holy will that is unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.

  Elisabeth Elliot

  Obedience, Holy, Worthy

  Elisabeth Elliot (1996). “Gates of Splendor”, GuildAmerica Books

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• O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion.

  Robert Burns

  Foolish, Embarrassment, Blunders

  Robert Burns (2004). “The Complete Works of Robert Burns Part Five”, p.438

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• The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Giving Up, Real, Struggle

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• At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

  Ian Mcewan

  Writing, Stronger, Might

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• It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Destiny, Might, Chance

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.16, Penguin

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• You must not imagine that Papa or I have the least notion of compelling you to marry anyone whom you hold in aversion, for I am sure that such a thing would be quite shocking! And Charles would not do so either, would you, dear Charles?”(Elizabeth Ombersley) “No, certainly not. But neither would I consent to her marriage with any such frippery fellow as Augustus Fawnhope!” “Augustus,” announced Cecilia, putting up her chin, “will be remembered long after you have sunk into oblivion!” “By his creditors? I don’t doubt it.

  Georgette Heyer

  Long, Doubt, Papa

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• i realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy -speed of light power- to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr.right will make the world new.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Believe, Winning, Past

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