Angela > Recent Status Updates

"For he was nothing: a creature of solitary intellect, unaware of the fact that, humanly speaking, he was a kind of vacuum for all that there was genius in his skull. He thought of nothing but his factory."

"Every step you take is the goal you seek."

"There's a difference between being in sanctuary and being in hiding."

"Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?"
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor."
"Okay, I'll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string."

"They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right."

"It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is."

"It is at times like this that the mind finds the oddest jobs to do in order to avoid its primary purpose, i.e. thinking about things."

"Amos changed. [...] When I gave him an idea he would look for what was good in it. For what was right with it. That, for me, was the happiness in the collaboration. He understood me better than I understood myself. He stopped doing that."

"Their opponents might never admit defeat - intellectuals seldom did - but they might at least decide to change the subject. "Winning by embarrassment", Amos called it."

"It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place."

"We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert - because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job." - Henry Ford

"Nell discovered that a smoothly functioning system was much harder to puzzle out than one that was broken."

"Hackworth's initial surge of terror had worn off. He had now entered into morbid fascination with the incredible dreadfulness of his situation"

"But then he bridled his emotions, remembering the words of the philosopher Tsang to Yang Fu upon the latter's appointment to chief criminal judge: "The rulers have been disorganized for a long time. When you have found out the truth of any accusation, be grieved for and pity them, and do not feel joy at your own ability."

(cont...) "incense burning; putting folded-up pieces of paper beneath table legs; drinking tea and sulking; invoking unseen powers; sending runners to other rooms, buildings, or precincts with exquisitely calligraphed notes and waiting for them to come back carrying spare parts in dusty, yellowed cardboard boxes; and a similarly diverse suite of troubleshooting techniques in the realm of software."

On troubleshooting equipment failure: "Therapies administered included but were not limited to: turning things off, then on again; picking them up a couple of inches and then dropping them; turning off nonessential appliances in this or other rooms; removing lids and wiggling circuit boards; extracting small contaminants, such as insects and their egg cases, with nonconducting chopsticks; cable-wiggling; (cont...)

"She'll be your slave, she'll never dare say no to you, she'll wait on you hand and foot. Either that or she'll put rodent poison in your coffee."

"People's inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is."

"And it is a glorious thing to watch, the cold and beautiful precision of the autopsy, Fenton in motion, a master moving meticulously through the steps of her craft. The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right."

Hmm, we'll see if I make it through this one. So far it's cringe-inducing, but comes highly recommended.

"His psyche must have looked like a diver after a moderately bad shark attack. He had survived, but you could see the bones. His brain was limping and his ego hurt like hell."

"Grandmother Wu's voice, in my head, suggests that this is a very special hell for intellectual, caring men. You can get your ashes hauled, get fed grapes and eat pastry all you like, for ever, but the whole thing will eventually drive you into a coma of self-loathing and ennui which will destroy your mind and turn your self-respect into a razor in the soul."

"That's probably why she has added the two severed heads to the uprights of the throne. They lend her an undeniable air of not screwing around."

"not everything which is not simple is actually hard; even hard things can be done fast; even things which seem impossible turn out to be doable. We will survive."

A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetoricocircumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don't want to and aren't allowed to, so what we're doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die.

"The Evangelist [highschool principal], driven by a wretched fear of hormonal wrongdoing in the Season of the Lord's Birth, pronounces that dating is forbidden by scripture. This is so remarkable that there is a queue at the library to read the Bible for anything we may have missed. A theological debate is set in motion which lasts into February and beyond."

"But satisfying as mayhem and (short) combat might be, these are not solutions. They are just reactions - as idiotic as Donnie himself. Thus I am paralysed, and upset. I want to unleash my anger. I do not believe that I should. [...] it is a terrible thing to be hog-tied by conscience."

"There were many great masters then, and some of them were very great and some of them were only a little bit great and some perhaps were only great as a courtesy."

"Step off the path, and maybe you'd get back and maybe you wouldn't, but you would be changed. Which sounds like strange and awful until you realize that that's actually pretty much how it's always been, and if you think any different, it's because you've never left that little stretch of comfort and gone someplace where what you know gets a bit think on the ground."

"[She] mentally urged the process on - if not straight toward the target (since she had no idea what that was), then at least outward, blindly, into the space of all possible mistakes."