Reyna Melvin > Reyna's Quotes

“I convinced myself I was fully justified in destroying the world by destroying the Mind Upload Community before it got started, and when that seemed impossible, I conceived the idea of infecting the world’s OIM and going to this Utopia Annette was building in 2585.”
― Steven Decker, Addicted to Time

“The Profumo Affair in 1963 profoundly altered British society. It gave lie to the belief that those born into the ruling class were inherently superior and destined to lead.”
― Anne Michaud, Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Nine Political Wives

“Perhaps the most chaotic of Divisions Ke Hui Feng 第一 Ψ
visited was Recycling. First, it was mammoth, so big most of
her tour was spent aboard a drone. Thousands of Dazhong
used the 401 thoroughfares from both east and west, the 427
from the south and the 400 from the north to bring their loads of
recyclables from the MASS to the enormous MEG Recycling Centre.
The roadways might be in ruins outside the MEG boundaries, jagged
fragments of pavement between cavernous potholes and trails made by
traders, but within the MEG the wide lanes had been cleared and
covered with recycled rubber. They were smooth and divided, one lane
in—one lane out, between hundred-metre high foamstone walls on
either side. No one from the MASS would ever get into the MEG illegally;
at least, that was how it seemed.
Only those with proper credentials could enter the massive gates:
MASS traders, or trading companies, who specialized as middlemen
between the gatherers and the Recycling Centre. Not far outside the
gates the MASS traders had rebuilt ancient warehouses in which they
received goods, stored, and sorted them, then brought them, usually
by land freighters, down the ingress roads to meet MEG approved Di
sān overseers and, of course, decontaminated Dazhong who further
sorted the goods.”
― Brian Van Norman, Against the Machine: Evolution

“Pretty isn’t permanent.”
― J.K. Franko, Killing Johnny Miracle

“He had always been so careful, never revealed his true identity. But somehow, they’d fingered him, and his life had changed forever—for the worst. He couldn’t help but think that some­one in the Central Intelligence Agency had turned on him. One of his own.”
― Chad Boudreaux, Scavenger Hunt

“Thickly forested regions of Phuoc Tuy including the Rung Sat swamps and farms considered to be controlled by the Vietcong, were regularly sprayed by defoliants including “Agent Orange” using aircraft. This was both an inhumane and unsuccessful strategy which only destroyed enough food to feed 245,000 Vietnamese people for a year resulting in a propaganda gift to the Vietcong. (Ham, 2007). Given that defoliation did not uncover the enemy, who kept on fighting from jungle, caves and tunnels, the whole defoliation programme must be considered a failure. Given also, that birth defects and other health problems associated with defoliants can be directly blamed upon “Agent Orange”, it stands to reason that the allies in the Second Indochina War who sprayed it upon villages and farms can in fact be said to be, “Guilty of War Crimes!”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“Throughout the process, you must show gratitude to those who have helped you get to where you are.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“I’m not convinced we can take them out from a distance, Nathan. That’s always been the American solution, by the way. Bigger guns. Nukes. Drone strikes.”
― Barry Kirwan, When the children come

“You can’t escape me, I’m coming for you soon,” shrieked his hellish voice. Whether the beast was a man in a mask or a demon of his imagination, made little difference to Adam, He was petrified.”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“The reality is that the lives of the smallest patients are in our hands, and their clinical condition can change in an instant. No matter how many times you are involved in situations such as this, the physical stress and anxiety as well as the emotional and psychological effects of being immersed in that environment are dramatic and lasting on the human body, mind, and central nervous system. These effects are severe, and I firmly believe that they are cumulative over your lifetime.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“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

“Attest:”
― Founding Fathers, The United States Constitution

“We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses--one foot is on the horse called "fate," the other on the horse called "free will." And the question you have to ask every day is--which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it's not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“He hooks a thumb in one of his belt loops and says, “How are you, Beatrice?” “Did you just call me Beatrice?” “Thought I would give it a try.” He smiles. “Not good?” “Maybe on special occasions only. Initiation days, Choosing Days …”
― Veronica Roth, Insurgent

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs Ape.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“It was for the purpose of restoring intimate fellowship with mankind that Jesus came.”
― Ami Loper, Constant Companion: Your Practical Path to Real Interaction with God

“Bhagwan says that running after money will never bring happiness, and finding true happiness is to touch the center of one’s soul. I can have all the money in this world and still be unhappy. Likewise, I can have no money and still be happy. Happiness is just a state of mind. I choose to be happy.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“Do you want to live, Sander?”
― Edward Williams

“You can use all the hundred dollar words you want,” said Vic, “women like that are like TNT. You go after their man, they’d sooner kill you than look at you.”
― A.G. Russo, The Cases Nobody Wanted

“In response to be asked about Boris Johnson becoming UK Prime Minister...

"I'm delighted. As the UK continues to plunge ever faster into a future akin to a dystopian novel I'll never run out of material to write more books. Although now that reality is more bizarre than fiction maybe plot-lines will need to be more ambitious. Perhaps a book where Boris Johnson is really an accidental sentient snafu of Trump's scrotum lint. Kind of a sequel to the Bush-Blair story. I see musical rights being drawn up as we speak.”
― R.D. Ronald

“At seventeen the young woman had worked out how to improve her future prospects; she would seduce the Prince.”
― Robert Reid, The Emperor

“On the end of my bed. He’s short, round and bald, with a tartan loin cloth, and what looks like a spout on the top of his head,’ Bryony said. ‘You flatter me,’ came the snide male voice. ‘But it’s a valve.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“His blazing red filly switched leads and spurted forward, flattening out and making up ground. Francine left the other horses behind and lunged after Miss Smith. Was there enough track left for her to catch the leader?”
― Paul A. Barra, Strangers and Sojourners: A Big Percy Pletcher thriller

“...to be paid for one's joy is to steal.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“I wondered irritably why married women so often adopted that tone, almost, of superior satisfaction in the things they had to suffer.”
― Mary Stewart, Wildfire at Midnight

“Shame ain’t black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“He was my husband, my apartment mate, my soul mate, the father of the little plant in my confused soil, the lover who had made me adore his body without inhibition after my years of relative solitude, the person for whom I'd given up my old self.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“many red devils ran from my heart and out upon the page, they were so tiny the pen could mash them. And many struggled in the ink. It was strange to write in this red much of things from my heart.”
― Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines

“Ed Sanders chuckled. “The ivy-covered walls at Columbia University have limited the depth of your insight, Professor Gilmore. The rehearsal flight is a ploy cooked up in the White House to take advantage of Cindy Divine’s immense popularity.”
― Shafter Bailey, Cindy Divine: The Little Girl Who Frightened Kings