Stuff About Things #17

"It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man – the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one. I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears or fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history."
     — from Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

"You know family is always going to be there for you, no matter what. My dad gave me a freakin' kidney!"
     — Sarah Hyland, actress in Modern Family

"I have a great relationship with my dad."
     — Justin Bieber 

"We're always talking to each other. We're close."
     — Niall Horan of One Direction, about his dad

"Everything takes time, Will, and that's something that your generation find a lot harder to adjust to. You have all grown up expecting things to go your way almost instantaneously. You all expect to live the lives you chose. Especially a successful young man like yourself. But it takes time."
     — from Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

"The world is all gates, all opportunities."
     — Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I have half-sisters, who are much younger than I am. I've always been fascinated by their relationship and the relationships some of my friends have with their sisters. What I'm most captivated by is that ability to be at each other's throats one moment and yet totally bonded and presenting a united front the next. If you are an only child, as I was for nineteen years, that kind of relationship is pretty mesmerizing."
     — Jojo Moyes

"Simple questions can be anything but simple to answer. Or, to put it simply, if you want to understand something complex, ask a simple question."
     — Alan Duffy, astronomer

"I admired everything about my dad, to the extent that I was absorbing lessons from him without knowing it.... It's very interesting, my dad never really gave me hell (when I got in trouble) but he said, you know, "You can do better than this.' And just saying that, I mean, I felt like I was letting him down basically. So, in all ways, he was teaching me, he never taught by telling me things, he just taught by example. He had unlimited confidence in me, even when I screwed up, and that takes you a long, long way.... The best gift I was ever given was to have the father that I had when I was born."
     — Warren Buffet, business magnate, investor, philanthropist, at last count worth about 90 billion

"If the studies are to be believed, the more digitally connected we are, the more isolation and doom we seem to feel."
     — Michael Paterniti, GQ magazine

"Love isn’t a perfect state of caring. It’s an active noun like ‘struggle.’ To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now."
     — Mr. Rogers

"Hard work works."
     — Denzel Washington

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
     — Gustave Flaubert

"The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing."
     — Marcus Aurelius

"When Miss G. made up her mind about somethin', there was no stoppin' her man, for real."
      — the movie Freedom Writers

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life."
     — Socrates

"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
     — Socrates

"When the debate is over, slander becomes the tool of the loser."
     — Socrates

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
     — Carl Sagan

"Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."
     — Michael Crichton

"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world."
     — Michael Crichton

"Grief is the price we pay for love."
     — Queen Elizabeth

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory."
     — Albert Schweitzer

"It was the settlement of Port Jackson in 1788 that finally brought a few ships to Kiribati. Port Jackson, which was to become Sydney, was where England sent its unlucky people. I am not exactly sure why they did this. It seems to me a lot of bother to ship thousands of petty criminals from one side of the planet to the other. And it's not as if they were just dropped off there and told to fend for themselves. No, they were placed in dank, wretched prisons that were similar to the dank, wretched prisons back in merry old England. What was the point? Plus, as the medal tallies at subsequent Olympics suggest, England managed to ship out its entire gene pool of athletes."
     — J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

"Sylvia, who is ravishingly beautiful, possesses a formidable intellect, and whose very existence illuminates my life, sings like a distressed cow. Entire villages scatter into the bush when we sing together. I try to explain this to Tawita, but she is having none of it. 'You must sing. Do not be shy.'"
     — J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific