Vanessa Tritch > Vanessa's Quotes

“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

“The money we spend to help you is really to help ourselves. We invest in you because you will do great things, and we want to be part of it.”
― Steven Decker, Projector for Sale

“There has been a recent rash of authors and individuals fudging evidence in an attempt to argue that women have a higher sex drive than men. We find it bizarre that someone would want to misrepresent data merely to assert that women are hornier than men. Do those concerned with this difference equate low sex drives with disempowerment? Are their missions to somehow prove that women are super frisky carried out in an effort to empower women? This would be odd, as the belief that women’s sex drives were higher than men’s sex drives used to be a mainstream opinion in Western society—during the Victorian period, an age in which women were clearly disempowered. At this time, women were seen as dominated by their sexuality as they were supposedly more irrational and sensitive—this was such a mainstream opinion that when Freud suggested a core drive behind female self-identity, he settled on a desire to have a penis, and that somehow seemed reasonable to people. (See Sex and Suffrage in Britain by Susan Kent for more information on this.)

If the data doesn’t suggest that women have a higher sex drive, and if arguing that women have a higher sex drive doesn’t serve an ideological agenda, why are people so dead set on this idea that women are just as keen on sex—if not more—as male counterparts?

In the abovementioned study, female variability in sex drive was found to be much greater than male variability. Hidden by the claim, “men have higher sex drives in general” is the fun reality that, in general, those with the very highest sex drives are women.

To put it simply, some studies show that while the average woman has a much lower sex drive than the average man, a woman with a high sex drive has a much higher sex drive than a man with a high sex drive. Perhaps women who exist in the outlier group on this spectrum become so incensed by the normalization of the idea that women have low sex drives they feel driven to twist the facts to argue that all women have higher sex drives than men. “If I feel this high sex drive,” we imagine them reasoning, “it must mean most women secretly feel this high sex drive as well, but are socialized to hide it—I just need the data to show this to the world so they don’t have to be ashamed anymore.”

We suppose we can understand this sentiment. It would be very hard to live in a world in which few people believe that someone like you exists and people always prefer to assume that everyone is secretly like them rather than think that they are atypical.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality

“When it comes to meditation, one minute is better than zero. Something is an improvement from nothing.”
― Milan Kordestani, I'm Just Saying: A Guide to Maintaining Civil Discourse in an Increasingly Divided World

“It strikes me that the power or capability of a man in getting rich is in inverse proportion to his reflective powers and in direct proportion to his impudence.”
― Paul Sochaczewski, An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles: Campfire Conversations with Alfred Russell Wallace

“Find people who are fighting the same illness that you are.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“Well, this I know: our best years are when we're working hardest and going right ahead when we can hardly see our way out.”
― Willa Cather, Five Stories

“Life is too short to worry about what other people think,”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?

I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.

It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Three years after he came to power, in a speech to the “old fighters” at the Buergerbraü on the anniversary evening of November 9, 1936, he explained one of the objectives he had had in building the party up into such a formidable and all-embracing organization. “We recognized,” he said, in recalling the days when the party was being reformed after the putsch, “that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be practically ready to one’s hand…. In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a state by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that there remained to do was to destroy the last remnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asyluum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday! . . .”
― H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly

“Choose joy.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“I marveled at the beauty of all life and savored the power and possibilities of my imagination. In these rare moments, I prayed, I danced, and I analyzed. I saw that life was good and bad, beautiful and ugly. I understood that I had to dwell on the good and beautiful in order to keep my imagination, sensitivity, and gratitude intact. I knew it would not be easy to maintain this perspective. I knew I would often twist and turn, bend and crack a little, but I also knew that…I would never completely break.”
― Maria Nhambu, Africa's Child

“The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.



I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.”
― Michael Chabon

“Jag talar inte om din bok nu, men se hur många böcker som redan skrivits om Förintelsen. Till vilken nytta? Folk har inte blivit annorlunda...

Dom kanske behöver en ny Förintelse, en ännu värre...”
― Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus

“Here all of nature was captured, labeled, arranged according to a logic that seemed as timeless as if ordered by God, perhaps a God who had mislaid the original paperwork on the Creation and had requested the Field Museum staff to help him out and keep track of it all.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“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

“Excuse me, Mr. Ludefance. Just so you are aware, we are a tightknit group here. We all had knowledge of what happened prior to midnight. You can speak to all of us if you want, but you’ll be hearing the same story. It’s what happened between midnight and eight AM that’s very much in question. Not one officer on that shift saw or heard anything unusual. But if you wish to speak to any of the officers from that shift, we can arrange for you to do so. Now, I suppose you can start with Officer Harrington here. When you finish with her, I’ll call Rhodes. He doesn’t live that far away. The other officers are here on campus.”
― Behcet Kaya, Uncanny Alliance

“An algorithm that expedites care to a stroke patient in a chaotic emergency room (ER) has a good chance of adoption. An algorithm that reads a routine scan and provides some quantification of what the physicians can already estimate won’t be in as much demand. There are good reasons for algorithms to parse patient records to look for signs of rare diseases, but there are fewer good reasons for using them to evaluate clinical symptoms. It’s cool that AI tools can make diagnoses from scratch, but for most clinical encounters doctors are already pretty good at it.”
― Ronald M. Razmi, AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors

“Tomorrows needn’t be bad. Maybe they hold the brightest of our days – the compensation for what we had never had.”
― Merlin Franco, A Dowryless Wedding

“Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself, "Why was I born?" Then I answer myself, "You were born to be successful." If you can learn to define your own success and not let others dictate it, you can find      fulfilment.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“Being a hearer and a doer of the written Word (James 1:22) makes us able to handle more of the spoken word of God.”
― Ami Loper, Constant Companion: Your Practical Path to Real Interaction with God

“Victor's tortured eyes blazed down at her, and for a moment she was afraid.  Then he leaned down and dissolved into tears in the arms of Celena who was only six.”
― Barbara Sontheimer, Victor's Blessing

“If I were a scientist watching her, what would I write down as the results? Woman who had neglectful/scary childhood finds comfort in fictional representations of families?”
― Sara Pascoe, Weirdo

“It's cruel to give hope where none should be. It only turns into disappointment, resentment, rage -- all the things that make this life more difficult than it already is.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“Well, life isn't always what one likes.”
― Dalton Trumbo

“Para algunos, encontrar Queso equivalía a tener cosas materiales. Para otros, significaba disfrutar de buena salud o desarrollar un sentido espiritual del bienestar.”
― Spencer Johnson, ¿Quién se ha llevado mi queso?

“Often we fail to consider the fact that our social, spiritual, and intellectual interests are miles apart. Our value systems and goals are contradictory, but we are in love.”
― Gary Chapman, Things I Wish I'd Known Before We Got Married

“Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland