Ricky Schuenemann > Ricky's Quotes

“It is weird that the same two parents can come together and make two such different people.”
― Sara Pascoe, Faber Faber Weirdo Intense, also BRILLIANT, funny and forensically astute. Marian Keyes.

“Wadsworth opened the bottle and handed me the cork. What the heck? What do I do now? Take it? Smell it? Lick it? A slight trickle of sweat ran down the nape of my neck as he, Margeaux and Deloris stared at me.
“Uh, what am I supposed to do with it?”
“Take a sniff, sir. Just to make sure.”
“Of course, of course.”
Smelled just fine to me and I looked up at him with a big silly grin on my face as he poured a small amount of wine into my glass. I stared up at him.
“Aren’t you going to fill my glass?”
“Take a sip, sir. Just to make sure.”
“Make sure of what?”
“That it is to your liking, sir.”
It was all I could do from turning red-faced. But I took that sip and smiled again. He then poured the wine into our glasses, nestled the bottle in the silver wine chiller and left. At that point I burst out laughing and my sweet ladies joined me.”
― Behcet Kaya, Appellate Judge

“It’s estimated that AI could free up to 25% of clinician time across different specialties. This increased amount of time could mean less hurried encounters and more humane interactions, including more empathy from happier doctors. This is important because empathy has been shown to improve outcomes by boosting patient adherence to the prescribed treatments, increasing motivation, and reducing anxiety and stress.”
― Ronald M. Razmi, AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors

“On the Acropolis, he’d thought she’d seen too much sun for a woman but in the courtyard, under the moon, her face, neck, and arms were as pale as the moon goddess. Allowing himself to imagine it was the moon goddess leading him upward was a way of climbing to the second story.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Aurelia was just about to take a sip of a mimosa when Mother Guardian snatched the flute away and promptly downed the drink in one gulp. Burping unashamedly, she said, "We can't have the validity of the marriage contracts jeopardized because the bride got rat-assed on her wedding day.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“Lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, [the general who concocted the attack plan] but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest.” What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.”
― Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. ‘He might tell me how my story ends,’ he murmured.
Meggie looked at him in astonishment. ‘You mean you don’t know?’
Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn’t particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. ‘What’s so unusual about that, princess?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you know how your story ends?’
Meggie had no answer for that.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“So here’s the thing about glitter: once it’s out of the bottle, there’s just no way of putting it back. It’s the same with kindness. Once it pours out of your soul, there’s no way of containing it. It just continues to spread from person to person, a shining, sparkling, wonderful thing.”
― R.J. Palacio, 365 Days of Wonder: Mr. Browne's Precepts

“All of us, at first, had high hopes of helping Jammie - he was so personable, so likable, so quick and intelligent, it was difficult to believe that he might be beyond help. But none of us had ever encountered, even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“I liked you better when you were this timid little kid. What happened?”
“I started living with you guys.”
“Oh, right.”
― Rachel Caine, The Dead Girls' Dance

“She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process.

My mother was Dauntless.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.”
― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills . . . we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.”
― Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain

“The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as...the frog? ”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Sometimes it's better not to look back.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain—the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in the man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives?”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd -- slavery, incest, a suicide -- I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I've learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. I'd readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Hardly anyone realizes that true greatness has no rational basis; I mean to say, everything strong is simple.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“A person never knows what is next -- I don't, anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.”
― Leif Enger, Virgil Wander

“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Imagine your bills are checks you're receiving. Or use gratitude and give thanks to the company who sent you the bill, by thinking about how you've benefited from their service - for electricity or being able to live in a home. You can write across the front of a bill when you pay it, "Thank you - paid." If you don't have the money to pay the bill right away, write across the front of it, "Thank you for the money." The law of attraction doesn't question whether what you imagine and feel is real or not. It responds to what you give, period!”
― Rhonda Byrne, The Power

“Get immersed in the beauty that surrounds you. No filters, edits, or adjustments. Experience the colors, sounds, textures and smells within your reach. Live.”
― C. Toni Graham

“I always think about the tie between emotions and the body. Fierce joy attacks yang; fierce anger damages yin. If I were to write a book, I’d want to include Liver-related conditions that are affected by the different types of anger we women must hide from our husbands, mothers-in-law, and concubines. And then there are the ailments connected to Lung emotions—sadness and worry.”
― Lisa See, Lady Tan's Circle of Women

“What better place to hide than among that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“We humbly beg your kind applause,” murmured Mary Brenham, with a creative frown that reminded Ralph of Betsey Alicia and made him sharply aware there was nothing that moved him like a cloud of intellection on a desired face.”
― Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker

“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger