Luke > Luke's Quotes

“     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

“If you didn't pay attention to the buoys and markers, you'd hit something.  Not enough people paid attention.  Our marinas were swamped with repairs.”
― Albert Waitt, The Ruins of Woodman's Village

“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

“She's cute, but she's cuckoo. She wouldn't be his daughter if she wasn't. You can't tell how much of what she says is what she thinks. And you can't tell how much of what she thinks ever really happened.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“Much of [John Hanning] Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of Nile is devoted to descriptions of the physical and moral ugliness of Africa's "primitive races," in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." For his text, Speke took the story in Genesis 9, which tells how Noah, when he was just six hundred years old and had safely skippered his ark over the flood to dry land, got drunk and passed out naked in his tent. On emerging from his oblivion, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked; that Ham had told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, of the spectacle; and that Shem and Japheth had, with their backs chastely turned, covered the old man with a garment. Noah responded by cursing the progeny of Ham's son, Canaan, saying, "A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers." Amid the perplexities of Genesis, this is one of the most enigmatic stories, and it has been subjected to many bewildering interpretations--most notably that Ham was the original black man. To the gentry of the American South, the weird tale of Noah's curse justified slavery, and to Spake and his colonial contemporaries it spelled the history of Africa's peoples. On "contemplating these sons of Noah," he marveled that "as they were then, so they appear to be now.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“I knew I rode a rugged crest of turmoil that might crash on the rocky shore of irrational behavior.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Death Leaves a Shadow

“[O]nce you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." - The Skin Horse from The Velveteen Rabbit”
― Margery Williams

“It's just a crazy damned life, that's all ...”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose