Suanne Vigna > Suanne's Quotes

“One cannot measure a manager’s knowledge and performance in a vacuum. It involves their participation in business activities while bringing all of themselves to the process of development, including their spiritual, personal, and skill & ability development.”
― Raymond Wheeler, Lift: Five Practices Great Managers Do Consistently: Raise Performance and Morale - See Your Employees Thrive

“Each time she glanced in his direction, she was struck with the fact that this measly slip of a man had had the power to destroy her husband’s career. Every bit of loathing she had for him was there on display for Willum to take in.”
― Kathleen Lopez, Thirteen for Dinner

“Happiness from long ago that hasn’t carried into today turns into a sadness that’s too much to bear.”
― J.S. Latshaw, A Gallery of Mothers

“When you had the dream, it looked big. So why quit when it's still small?”
― Emem Uko

“So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There”
― Alexander Drake, The Invention of Christianity

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, but some, to dream.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Just as a wet match, when struck, does not produce fire, so a mind saturated with restlessness cannot produce the fire of concentration even when one makes great efforts to strike the cosmic spark.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Whispers from Eternity: A Book of Answered Prayers

“Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted.”
― Sophocles

“On the strength of these successes, Alcibiades at last returned to Athens in 408. The Athenian people had short memories:”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable “to the birth of a first child or death of a parent.” Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five “most spiritually significant experiences” of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“Sometimes the monotony of bingo and sing alongs, ancient dusty people parked in the hallway in wheelchairs makes me long for death, particularly when -- remember that I'm one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless chotski. ”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“I began to think about God. I mean, the notion of a Supreme Being existing somewhere began to creep into my private thoughts. Not because I wanted to strike Him on the face, to punch Him out for what He was about to do to me - to Jenny, that is. No, the kind of religious thoughts I had were just the opposite. Like, when I woke up in the morning and Jenny was there. Still there. I'm sorry, embarrassed even, but I hoped there was a God I could say thank you to.”
― Erich Segal, Love Story

“Sink me! Your taylors have betrayed you! T'wood serve you better to send THEM to Madam Guillotine”
― Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, theywere everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.

These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.

The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves -- the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, out-distance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I am me, a unique individual who aspires to be happier than she already is.”
― L.C. Conn

“I'm me," she whispered. "Me"
Nel didn't know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant.
"I'm me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me."
Every time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear. Back in bed with her discovery, she stared out the window at the dark leaves of the horse chestnut.
"Me," she murmured. And then, sinking deeper into the quilts, "I want... I want to be... wonderful. Oh, Jesus, make me wonderful.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Sometimes I get tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can’t realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you,' she said. With our garbage bag taped window, our tied down hood, and art supplies strapped to the roof, we'd out-Okied the Okies.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“I understand my parents quite well. They think of a wife as a man’s luxury, which he can afford only when he is making a comfortable living. I have a low opinion of this view of the relationship between man and wife, because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a lifelong contract from the man because of her more favourable social rank . . . Which”
― Robyn Arianrhod, Young Einstein: And the story of E=mc²

“they might refuse the evidence of their own eyes and continue blindly on over the ridge, driven by optimism and hope that finally they would find somewhere to call home.”
― Garth Nix, Abhorsen

“Prawdziwie elegancka dama dłubie w nosie tylko gdy jest całkiem sama.”
― Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Goes on Board

“لا ينبغي أن نخشى من الشكّ بل يجب أن نرحّب به ونناقشه”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” ― Les miserables”
― Victor Hugo

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“What are counting words?” “They are … names for the marks on your sticks, for one thing, for other things too. They are used to say the number of … anything. They can say how many deer a scout has seen, or how many days away they are. If it is a large herd, such as bison in the fall, then a zelandoni must scout the herd, one who knows the special ways to use counting words.” An undercurrent of anticipation stirred through the woman; she could almost understand what he meant. She felt on the edge of resolving questions whose answers had eluded her.”
― Jean M. Auel, The Valley of Horses

“You should have heard the old men cry
You should have heard the biddies
When that sad stranger rasied his flute
And piped away the kiddies.
Katy, Tommy, Meg, and Bob
Followed skipping gailey
Red-haired Ruth, my brother Ron,
And little crippled Bailey
Jon and Nils and Cousin Claire
Dancin', spinnin', turnin'
'Cross the hills to god knows where-
They never came returnin'.
'Cross the hills to god know where
The piper pranced a leadin'.
Each child in Hamlin town but me
And I stayed home unheedin'.
My papa says that I was blest
For if that music fond me
I'd be witch-cast like all the rest.
This town grows old around me.
I cannot say I did not hear
That sound so hauntin' hollow.
I heard, I heard, I heard it clear...
I was afraid to follow.”
― Shel Silverstein

“There is a wisdom of the head, and... there is a wisdom of the heart.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black and fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah