Elna Strassel > Elna's Quotes

“Although enemy forces had overrun the mortar and some gun positions, they did not have everything their own way.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“Imagine your worst day, multiply it by a hundred, and pray to your God
that you never experience what some of the people in this war zone go
through, everyday, without any hope of it getting better. Ever. Compared
to these people, every day, no matter how bad, is the best day ever. I
know nothing about pain, nothing about suffering and hopefully never will.”
― Hendri Coetzee, Living the Best Day Ever

“     Illicit flight Alfa Bravo Charlie quickly reached a predetermined altitude and stopped dead. The passengers on board screamed the way people do on fairground rides. The shuttle hesitated momentarily and then shot forward accelerating rapidly to reach a blistering 145,222 miles per hour. They were in a Mach 22 situation. The cries from on-board could not be heard from the ground. Neither did anyone in the great metropolis of Llar witness the bright blue vapour trail the craft left behind in its wake. It was after all overcast and raining heavily.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“They remained imprisoned in the CICU, kept alive in physicality by mechanical devices and medicinal support, inexorably suffering. I revered their resiliency, though I struggled to understand whether they were truly resilient or if this was a descriptive term I used to assure myself that what we were doing was just. Could they merely represent physical beings at this point, molecular derivatives of carbon and water, void of souls that had moved on months prior once the universe had delivered their inevitable fate, simply kept alive by us physicians, who ourselves clutched desperately to the most favored of our prehistoric binary measures of success: life?”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“In her usual manner, Merkel spoke in German. It is worth pointing out, however, that before the translator had an opportunity to convert her statements to English, Obama gave the chancellor and the press a big smile, saying, ‘I think what she said was good. I’m teasing.’ The laughter in the room drowned out the sounds of the cameras clicking and flashing, with Merkel’s giggle and smile among the loudest.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“Before machine learning, multivariate regression provided an efficient way to condition on multiple things, without the need to calculate dozens, hundreds, or thousands of conditional averages. Regression takes the data and tries to find the result that minimizes prediction mistakes, maximizing what is called “goodness of fit.”
― Ajay Agrawal, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

“I struggled so hard for a goal, without realizing that the goal is the struggle. It’s what makes me stronger, smarter, and better. Growth doesn’t come from a comfort zone, but from leaving it.”
― Max Brooks, Minecraft: The Island

“one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File

“When I was four I was watching ants walking up Stove and she ran and splatted them all so they wouldn’t eat our food. One minute they were alive and the next minute they were dirt. I cried so my eyes nearly melted off.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room

“Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.”
― Dave Pelzer, A Child Called "It"

“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,
of things unknown, but longed for still,
and his tune is heard on the distant hill,
for the caged bird sings of freedom.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“He says that there can be no high civilization without enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and confined to an animal nature; and a higher one thereby acquires leisure and wealth for a more expanded intelligence and improvement, and becomes the directing soul of the lower. So he reasons, because, as I said, he is born an aristocrat;—so I don't believe, because I was born a democrat.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin