Morris Schmiege > Morris's Quotes

“Let’s get to know each other. My name’s William, William More, but you can call me Willy. I’m an engineer-chemist who graduated from MIT. So . . . but you’re all alike to me . . . of course, you would be . . . you’re robots. And all your names are that sort of, um . . . codes, technical numbers . . . I need some marker where I can pick you out. Well, well, to you I’ll call . . .,” and Willy pondered for a moment, “Gumball, yes, Gumball! Do you mind?” “No, sir, actually no,” CSE-TR-03 said, agreeing with its new given name. “Ah, that’s wonderful. And then you’re Darwin,” Willy said, accosting the second robot. “Look what a nice name—Darwin! What do you say, eh?” “What can I say, sir? I like it,” CSE-TR-02 agreed too. “Yes, a human name with a past . . . You and Gumball . . . are from the same family, the Methanesons!” “It turns out thus, sir,” Darwin confirmed its family belonging. “And you’re like Larry. You’re Larry. Do you know that?” More addressed the next robot in line. “Yes, sir, just now I learned that,” the third robot said, accepted its name as well.”
― Todor Bombov, Homo Cosmicus 2: Titan: A Science Fiction Novel

“Mary’s hands clenched. She’d been through fire, what with a murder, and white supremacists. And what about Caroline, who had gone undercover to rescue the Scroll’s Key Keeper? Where were the College’s thanks for that?”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“He wanted a stiff drink to get through the evening, for he knew they’d be wailing, and her family coming unglued.”
― Carolyn M. Bowen, Legacy of Shadows: An International Crime Thriller

“My Aspasia. With her, he’d discovered the sweetness in life . . . and she might like to know that. He’d tell her sometime. But he knew he’d given this lovely woman what she’d wanted most, their son’s name. He leaned over to the child. “So, you’re Little Pericles.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Stand in the machine there, let’s see what state your internal organs are in. The images
will be projected on screen, and I can go through the diagnosis with you, step by step.”
Brown did as he was told and soon images of his vital organs appeared on the screen.
 As you can see, your heart is slightly enlarged and your lungs and kidneys are not in
good shape either. Have you been experiencing any pain lately?”
“Not that I can think of. What can you do to help?”
“Difficult to say, you see you are dying” said the Doctor. You can see the
discolouration in your kidneys.” Brown strained his eyes.”
― Max Nowaz, The Arbitrator

“Stomach full of jitters, little beasts that were second cousins to guacamolians—little green monsters that wreaked havoc in your stomach.”
― William Kely McClung, Super Ninja: The Sword of Heaven

“Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store? ”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail
among sacred islands of the mad till death
shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

--from "Tale of A Tub", written 1956”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“I, personally, have resolved never to display weakness, to be always strong and firm and forthright, to show neither fear nor uncertainty-- no matter how fearful and uncertain I may be inside; I see no other way to survive this ordeal.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“Would you like me to put you out of your misery, before I put you out of your misery?”
― Paul Cude, Bentwhistle the Dragon in a Threat from the Past

“I suppose knowing where you are is better than having you skulk around, popping out of dark alleys and doorways. It eliminates the possibility of shooting you by accident. If I know where you are, I can shoot you on purpose.”
― Lotchie Burton, Gabriel's Fire

“Callan stared at the door. Raw and razed and present. A crucial moment—when he wasn’t the one with his finger on the trigger.”
― J. Rose Black, Losing My Breath

“This world would be a pleasant place if people didn’t inhabit it.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Cindy Divine and her parents paused by their boat to take in the natural beauty. Lake Barkley could have been a top-paid model for a glossy postcard company that morning. It lay between little hills all dressed up in new green, and its mirror-like water reflected a cloudless sky everywhere except along the shoreline where the hills were upside down. Clusters of blossoms, dogwood and redbud, were scattered here and there on the hillsides, and a brightening red was coloring the sky along the eastern hilltops.”
― Shafter Bailey, Cindy Divine: The Little Girl Who Frightened Kings

“The Scottish scout called Hamish Plenderlief spoke to his superior saying, “Sir, I have just returned from a patrol around Tynemouth Priory. My second scout and myself observed that the English King Edward II has been joined in his illegal invasion of Scotland by his queen, Isabella!”
― Michael G. Kramer, Isabella Warrior Queen

“My belief is that we have an opportunity, each and every day, to make choices that can have a positive impact, or not. Each day we awake is like a reset. Decide each day to make impactful choices.”
― C. Toni Graham

“When pain and talent mix together, that’s when you’re able to persevere in your goals in life; the pain gives your talent something to feed into.”
― Vernon Davis

“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

“She then continued. “All of the iron work was destroyed. Melted lumps of iron lay all round the smithies but there was one fragment that remained whole, a motif from one of the cannons, a dragon’s head. Below the fiery mouth, words were embossed in the metal, ‘Lex Talionis’.”
Robert Reid – The Son”
― Robert Reid, The Son

“It is working for God, not a boss. Maybe you will get a raise in consciousness.”
― Tom Hillman, Digging for God

“Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

“Total parcial: te quiero. Total general: te amo”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

“use the Lord’s name in vain!”
― Jon Scieszka, Funny Business

“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There”
― Alexander Drake, The Invention of Christianity

“For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“The sun rises every day. What is to love? Lock the sun in a box. Force the sun to overcome adversity in order to rise. Then we will cheer! I will often admire beautiful sunrise, but I will never consider the sun a champion for having risen.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain