Rusty Merriott > Rusty's Quotes

“We are narrow thinkers, we are noisy thinkers, and it is very easy to improve upon us.”
― ajay agrawal, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

“I’ll be frank, Jerry. Aaron Morris telephoned here a week ago and wanted to know your whereabouts. I told him you were on leave. He said your wife called him about your whereabouts.”
― Karl Braungart, Counter Identity

“The American generals could only think in terms of large armies and huge battles. They believed or hoped that an enemy who chose to hide in jungles and tunnels would quickly be flushed out by American fire-power and then die in open battle.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“I have had the best day ever more times that I can remember. So yes,
I believe I am ready to die if that is what is needed to live as I want to.”
― Hendri Coetzee, Living the Best Day Ever

“With one hand disturbing a colony of parasitic life forms in his uncombed hair, he yawned loudly.
     ‘Morning Steve,’ Thomas said scratching his grubby face. His breath drifted across the space between them making Steve’s nose twitch involuntarily.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“Maybe the flies knew we were leaving. Maybe they were happy for us.”
― Eli Wilde, Orchard of Skeletons

“I wanted Ole Miss to feel special, but mostly I felt that the Ole Miss crowd looked at me like I was just white trash from a town full of trailers.… All was not lost. I saw the movie All The President’s Men, mostly because Robert Redford was the star. The fast-paced world of the Washington Post…captivated me. Sitting in a dark theater that afternoon, I fell in love with the idea of becoming a reporter. That was the movie that clinched my plan to major in journalism and political science…. I'd started Ole Miss as a Lady Rebel but left more rebellious than ladylike.”
― Karen Hinton, Penis Politics: A Memoir of Women, Men and Power

“When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“You see, Armand, there was a new hunger within me, and on some days I can assure you I felt fairly ravenous. The need to read took over me, a delicious and exhilarating hold. The more I read, the hungrier I became. Each book seemed promising, each page I turned offered an escapade, the allure of another world, other destinies, other dreams.”
― Tatiana de Rosnay, The House I Loved

“The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Bedways is rightways now, so best we go homeways.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“elicted”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.”
― Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door

“If Mike convinces a woman to date him because he is dominant, the resulting relationship will be entirely different than if he had inspired this same woman to date him by convincing her that, through dating him, she could improve herself (though such dynamics might be ameliorated through therapy).

One of the core reasons why people either end up in one bad relationship after another—or come to believe that all members of a certain gender have very constrained behavior patterns—is that they do not understand how different lures function (in male communities, this often manifests in the saying “AWALT,” which stands for “all women are like that”). These people do not realize that the lure they are using is creating those relationship dynamics and/or constrained behavior patterns.

Talking with individuals who say guys or girls always act like X or Y feels like talking to a fisherman who insists that all fish have whiskers. When you point out that all the lures in his tackle box are designed specifically to only catch catfish, he just turns and gives you a quizzical look saying, “what's your point?”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships

“Individual Desirability / Aggregate Desirability = Your Desirability Ratio

The higher a relationship’s Desirability Ratio, the more stable a relationship will be. If a relationship’s Desirability Ratio drops below one for either partner, the relationship becomes very likely to dissolve.

To put that in other words: When your partner is much more desirable to you than their “league” would suggest, and when this dynamic is mutual (i.e., each partner values the other more than society on average values that other partner), your relationship will be uniquely stable. However, if either partner values the other less than that person would be valued on an open market, the relationship becomes unstable.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships

“In Esimore, Sulux was returning from tending to the herd as it grazed the summer pastures. The lone traveller was dressed in light blue clothing that shimmered white in the evening sun. The old prophesies had finally been fulfilled.”
― Robert Reid, White Light Red Fire

“The nineteen elements of the astral body are mental, emotional, and lifetronic. The nineteen components are intelligence; ego; feeling; mind (sense-consciousness); five instruments of knowledge, the subtle counterparts of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch; five instruments of action, the mental correspondence for the executive abilities to procreate, excrete, talk, walk, and exercise manual skill; and five instruments of life force, those empowered to perform the crystallizing, assimilating, eliminating, metabolizing, and circulating functions of the body. This subtle astral encasement of nineteen elements survives the death of the physical body, which is made of sixteen gross metallic and nonmetallic elements.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Why this book is disliked by gay readers:

Captain Ernst Roehm, was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional soldier—the upper part of his nose had been shot away in 1914—with a flair for politics and a natural ability as an organizer. Like Hitler he was possessed of a burning hatred for the democratic Republic. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist Germany and he believed with Hitler that this could be done only by a party based on the lower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army officers, had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual—he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the S.A....

(...)

Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes.

(...)

The brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can.

(...)

[Hitler] who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man’s morals. No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven.

(...)

Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and ex-bouncer in a café frequented by homosexuals, whom Roehm had made leader of the Berlin S.A., had alerted the storm troopers...”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

“Nativity sets, trees, lights—what’s your favorite Christmas decoration? Mine is my Nativity set buffet in my home.”
― Larada Horner-Miller, Hair on Fire: A Heartwarming & Humorous Christmas Memoir

“At what point does faith become insanity?”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“If any of them fail me, I will flush them from an airlock into the pit of space, like an unwanted turd. Do I make myself clear?”
― A.R. Merrydew, Inara

“He had done nothing on Christmas day, just wandered around outside in the frozen woods. Hard ground, chill winds and bare branches that looked like they'd been dipped in sugar. None of it seemed real, like walking around in a desolate dream, but one he didn't want to wake up from.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Bring me Mother Julian’s Scroll within two weeks, or I’ll get that guttersnipe Leni prosecuted for attempted murder. She won’t survive long in prison.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“Sometimes, I struggle to keep my tears of love flowing outside. But inside, rivers of divine love and tears pour all the time.”
― Raz Mihal, Just Love Her

“To disbelieve in original sin, does not mean that you must believe in original virtue. It only means that you must not believe that people are utterly wicked.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

“The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophes so that they can exploit them.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“You kill me, Rose," he said melodramatically. "Every day is agony without you. Empty. Alone. I pine for you, wondering if you're even still alive.”
― Richelle Mead, Blood Promise

“Boy, there's nothing worse than an inscrutable omen.”
― Bill Watterson