Pooja Dhami > Recent Status Updates

“The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.”

“While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future —and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”

"A language which is not logical can be leanred by a child because a child doesn't think. But it cannot be learned by an adult. That's why as far as I am concerned, German isn't a world language."

Why didn't I read this sooner ..

“Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit— ( of Venus) just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship."

“Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel;

I pause here to recall the ordeal of reading Little Women.

*Shudders*

“Disclaimer About Midgets :
OUR RELIGION DOES NOT WISH to discriminate or cause hurt feelings among any group—and this is especially true of the very short, who, if provoked, could easily appear out of nowhere and attack. As a solution, we offer the following:
To prevent angering the little people community, we suggest that this book be placed on the very highest shelf possible.”

Imagine yourself in her place: it isn't easy to burn intimate documents that are dear to you; it would be like admitting to yourself that you won't be here much longer, that tomorrow you may die; and so you put off the act of destruction from day to day, and then one day it's too late.

In 1809, Bettina wrote to him (Geothe): 'I have a strong will to love you for eternity'. Read carefully this apparently banal sentence. More important than the word 'love' are the words 'eternity' and 'will'.

The question is no longer simply: ‘Has the act been established and is it punishable?’ But also: ‘What is this act?Is it a phantasy, a psychotic reaction, a delusional episode, a perverse action?’ It is no longer simply: ‘Who committed it?’ But: ‘How can we assign the causal process that produced it? Where did it originate in the author himself? Instinct, unconscious, environment, heredity?’

“The doctor opened the baby’s skull with cobbler’s tools, puncturing the scalp, as he would later report, “with the point of a crooked awl.”
That doctor, James Marion Sims, would later be heralded as the founding father of gynecology. He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death."

Asimov took a minimalist approach, taking out an ad that said, “Quick, send a dollar to this post office box.” No explanation, and yet the dollars flowed in. Ellery and Lester del Rey advertised service to have a baby’s first dirty diapers bronzed. The diaper itself, once it was skillfully prepared by a baby, went to a different address, which turned out to belong to the American Nazi Party.

Do the Gods choose what is good because it is good or is the good good because the Gods choose it? If the first option is true, that shows that the good is independent of the Gods. But if the second option is true, then that makes the very idea of what is good arbitrary.

Ill-humour arises from an inward consciousness of our own want of merit, from a discontent which ever accompanies that envy which foolish vanity engenders. We see people happy, whom we have not made so, and cannot endure the sight.

In mid book, Lyovin and Kitty lag behind Vronski and Anna by a whole year. When, on a Sunday evening in May 1876, Anna throws herself .. (spoiler), she has existed more than 4 years since the beginning of the novel, but in the case of the Lyovins, hardly 3 years have elapsed. It is the best example of relativity in literature that is known to me.

Don't read Anna Karenina on your phone, at the age of 18.

"Of course," she said. "After all, letters belong to the person who writes them. Don't you agree?" He made a bold move. "I do," he said. "That is why they are the first things returned when an affair is ended."

Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family had conceived of death as a misfortune that fell on others, other people's fathers and mothers, other people's brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs.

I thought she loved me well enough to wait for me, and even to remain faithful to my memory. When I returned, she was married. This is the history of most men who have passed their twenty years of age. Perhaps my heart was weaker than most men, and I suffered more than they would have done in my place; that is all.

Ma foi!

Nature subdued must yield in combat, the dream must succeed to reality, and then the dream reigns supreme, then the dream becomes life and life becomes the dream. It is only by comparing the pains of actual being with the joys of the assumed existence, that you would desire to live no longer, but to dream thus forever. Taste this hashish, guest of mine. - Taste this hashish.

100 wons were to be worth 1 new won. Individuals were allowed to come forward to exchange their old currency for the newly printed currency, though this had to be done in one week.Then came the catch: the government announced that no one could convert more than 100,000 won, though it later relaxed this to 500,000.In one stroke, the government had wiped out a huge fraction of North Korean citizens’ private wealth.