Norberto Negroni > Norberto's Quotes

“Running out the anchor line, the pirates babbled to one another, and in the tangle of their barbaric language, Aspasia listened for one word—Athens. It lit up the darkness in her mind, like the single glint her eyes fixed on above the distant gray-green hills.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Mom, please don't use 'the happy voice.' It reminds me of the day Tinkles died."
"Who was Tinkles?" Sue asked around a mouthful of pancake.
"My cat. When I was five, Tinkles died choking on a mouse that was a bit ambitious for a kitten to eat."
"It was terribly traumatic for Aurelia because it was the first time she'd experienced loss." 
"What did you do to help her get through it?" 
Rosalind smiled at Mother Guardian. "Well, after a good cry, we performed an autopsy."
Aurelia reached for her mother's hand. "I never thanked you for that.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“The issue of reimbursement by payers is an important factor that should be discussed. Is it possible that if radiologists use AI to read scans, they’ll receive less reimbursement? Or to approach this from the other angle, if payers are reimbursing for the use of AI, will they pay radiologists less as a result? My discussions with insurance executives have shown that they don’t think this is likely. If the use of these technologies will improve patient outcomes and lead to fewer errors, there are benefits to them that will motivate executives to pay for them in addition to radiologists’ reading fees.”
― Ronald M. Razmi, AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors

“Did you know? There are three major milestones in human evolution. One, the discovery of fire; two, the invention of the wheel; three, the creation of budget airlines.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“You can’t escape me, I’m coming for you soon,” shrieked his hellish voice. Whether the beast was a man in a mask or a demon of his imagination, made little difference to Adam, He was petrified.”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“How was he murdered?”
“Asphyxiated.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“I can, but it’s rather gruesome.”
“I’m a private investigator, Mr. Kingsley. I’ve seen plenty of gruesome.”
― Behcet Kaya, Uncanny Alliance

“A bad year and a bad month to all the backbiting bitches in the world!...”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Sam shakes his head, still marveling at the hulking warship. "So they have a secret weakness right? Like how you can shoot that one spot on the Death Star and the whole thing blows up?"

Adam's brow furrows. "What's a Death Star?"

Sam throws up his hands. "We're screwed.”
― Pittacus Lore, The Revenge of Seven

“Books were so dependable—so orderly. Then he thought, And so totally unlike real life.”
― Andrew Clements, The Losers Club

“Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“It's sad,” said Lucile, thinking of all the girls whose youth was passing them by in vain: the men were gone, prisoners or dead. The enemy took their place. It was deplorable, but no one would even know in the future. It would be one of those things posterity would never find out, or would refuse to see out of a sense of shame.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“Eid happens twice a year—Eid ul-Fitr or “Small Eid” marks the end of the Ramadan fasting month, and Eid ul-Azha or “Big Eid” commemorates the Prophet Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son Ismail to God.”
― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

“Meg, when people don't know who they are, they are open either to being Xed, or Named”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab. When I was young no one would think to bring a bottle of water into a classroom. I don’t think they even sold bottled water. We survived shopping trips without it, and funerals. Now, though, you see people with those barrels that Saint Bernards carry around their necks in cartoons, lugging them into the mall and the movie theater, then hogging the fountains in order to refill them. Is that really necessary?”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“You should try not to talk so much, friend. You'll sound far less stupid that way.

- Breeze”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

“The first step in the development of taste is to be willing to to credit your own opinion.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man’s slavery.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Even a broken watch is correct twice a day.”
― Brian Selznick, The Marvels

“Her aunt is a pompous and proud and fat old lady. She is a type even to the point of a double chin and lorgnettes. She is dressed pretentiously, as if afraid her face alone would never indicate her position in life. MILDRED is dressed all in white.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Plays by Eugene O'Neill

“And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention”
― Bret Easton Ellis

“I'm Losing Faith in My Favorite Country

Throughout my life, the United States has been my favorite country, save and except for Canada, where I was born, raised, educated, and still live for six months each year. As a child growing up in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, I aggressively bought and saved baseball cards of American and National League players, spent hours watching snowy images of American baseball and football games on black and white television and longed for the day when I could travel to that great country. Every Saturday afternoon, me and the boys would pay twelve cents to go the show and watch U.S. made movies, and particularly, the Superman serial. Then I got my chance. My father, who worked for B.F. Goodrich, took my brother and me to watch the Cleveland Indians play baseball in the Mistake on the Lake in Cleveland. At last I had made it to the big time. I thought it was an amazing stadium and it was certainly not a mistake. Amazingly, the Americans thought we were Americans.

I loved the United States, and everything about the country: its people, its movies, its comic books, its sports, and a great deal more. The country was alive and growing. No, exploding. It was the golden age of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American dream was alive and well, but demanded hard work, honesty, and frugality. Everyone understood that. Even the politicians.

Then everything changed.”
― Stephen Douglass

“The ultimate reason behind that conservative outlook of the Greenlanders may have been the same as the reason to which my Icelandic friends attribute their own society’s conservatism. That is, even more than the Icelanders, the Greenlanders found themselves in a very difficult environment. While they succeeded in developing an economy that let them survive there for many generations, they found that variations on that economy were much more likely to prove disastrous than advantageous. That was good reason to be conservative.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“One morning last week He gave me an assignment: for one day I was to go on a "fast" from criticism. I was not to criticize anybody about anything. Into my mind crowded all the usual objections, "But then what happens to value judgments? You yourself, Lord, spoke of 'righteous judgment.' How could society operate without standards and limits?" All such resistance was brushed aside, "Just obey Me without questioning: an absolute fast on any critical judgments for this day." ...Barbed comments about certain world leaders were suppressed. In our talkative family no one seemed to notice. Bemused, I noticed that my comments were not missed. The federal government, the judicial system, and the institutional church could somehow get along without my penetrating observations. ...That afternoon, a specific, positive vision for this life was dropped into my mind with God's unmistakable hallmark on it-joy. Ideas began to flow in a way I had not experienced in years. My critical nature had not corrected a single one of the multitudinous things I found fault with. What it had done was stifle my creativity-in prayer, in relationships, perhaps even in writing-ideas that He wanted to give me.”
― Catherine Marshall, A Closer Walk

“You're not a Quaker, Jeremy. I happen to know you put beer on your cornflakes.”
― Kyle Keyes, Matching Configurations

“But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units -- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Smart isn’t enough. The kind of people I want on my research team are those who will help everyone else feel happy to be here.” p118”
― Randy Pausch

“I passed out from stress? That’s it?”
“I believe the princess term is fainted,” said Thorne.”
― Marissa Meyer, Winter

“...ideas are definitely unstable, they not only CAN be misused, they invite misuse--and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless.

The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which, for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.

That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to "protect the revolution." That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression).”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker