Faried Nawaz

“One day when Nasruddin was left in charge of the local tea-house, the king and some retainers, who had been hunting nearby, stopped in for breakfast. “Do you have quail eggs?” asked the king. “I’m sure I can find some,” answered Nasruddin. The king ordered an omelet of a dozen quail eggs, and Nasruddin hurried out to look for them. After the king and his party had eaten, he charged them a hundred gold pieces. The king was puzzled. “Are quail eggs really that rare in this part of the country?” “It’s not so much quail eggs that are rare around here,” Nasruddin replied. “It’s more visits from kings.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years

“You just can’t expect business to start immediately, not until you’d drunk at least three cups of coffee. If you declined sooner, you risked insulting your host. All the while the coffee- and tea-drinking was going on, Hassan and I asked after the health of the other’s family and friends, and called on Allah to bless this one and that one and protect all of us and the whole Muslim world from the depredations of the infidel.”
― George Alec Effinger, The Budayeen Cycle: When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss

“The programmer at wit's end for lack of space can often do best by disentangling himself from his code, rearing back, and contemplating his data. Representation is the essence of programming.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Most men were simple. They were looking for security, or power, or a feeling of usefulness or of certainty or competence. A cause to fight for, a problem to solve, a place to fit in. There were many possibilities but once you grasped what a man was looking for, you had the beginnings of understanding.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow