Valerie > Valerie's Quotes

“To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I believe there is a great deal too much mutual confession going on today, as if sharing one’s problems somehow makes them go away. All it really does, of course, is increase the number of people who have to worry about a particular issue.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“You are not the first man to miss a woman's more subtle communication . . . They think they are waving when we see only the calm sea, and pretty soon everybody drowns.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“Unlike you, who must do a cost-benefit analysis of every human interaction," he said, "I have no idea what I hope to accomplish. I only know that I must try to see her. That's what love is about, Roger. It's when a woman drives all lucid thought from your head; when you are unable to contrive romantic stratagems, and the usual manipulations fail you; when all your carefully laid plans have no meaning and all you can do is stand mute in her presence. You hope she takes pity on you and drops a few words of kindness into the vacuum of your mind.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“...as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought--some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“I am to be converted to the joys of knitting,' said Mrs. Ali, smiling at the Major.
'My condolences,' he said.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“The human race is all the same when it comes to romantic relations,' said the Major. 'A startling absence of impulse control combined with complete myopia.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old," he said. "You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood." It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him. "I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major," she said. "I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering. I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“We discovered that safety and security are commodities you can sell in return for excitement but you can never buy them back.”
― Louise Doughty, Apple Tree Yard

“A game at which the liberals have become masters is that of deliberate evasiveness. The question often comes up `what can you do?`. If you ask him to do something like stopping to use segregated facilities or dropping out of varsity to work at menial jobs like all blacks or defying and denouncing all provisions that make him privileged, you always get the answer - `but that's unrealistic!' While this may be true, it only serves to illustrate the fact that no matter what a white man does, the colour of his skin - his passport to privilege- will always put him miles ahead of the black men. Thus in the ultimate analysis, no white person can escape being part of the oppressor camp.”
― Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings

“I would like to remind the black ministry, and indeed all black people, that God is not in the habit of coming down from heaven to solve people’s problems on earth.”
― Steve Biko, I Write What I Like

“What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce real black people who do not regard themselves as appendages to white society. We do not need to apologise for this because it is true that the white systems have produced through the world a number of people who are not aware that they too are people.”
― Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings

“The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”
― Steve Biko

“Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression.”
― Steve Biko

“The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
― Steve Biko

“The amazing thing about being a bike rider is that you always know from the first turn of the pedals what sort of a day you are going to have.”
― Paul Kimmage, A Rough Ride: An Insight into Pro Cycling

“There is a saying about surgeons, meant as a reproof: "Sometimes wrong; never in doubt." But this seemed to me their strength. Each day surgeons are faced with uncertainties. Information is inadequate; the science is ambiguous; one's knowledge and abilities are never perfect. Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off - or even alive. Standing at the table my first time, I wondered how the surgeon knew that he would do this patient good, that all the steps would go as planned, that the bleeding would be controlled and infection would not take hold and organs would not be injured. He didn't, of course. But still he cut.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“Pain is a symphony - a complex response that includes not just a distinct sensation but also motor activity, a change in emotion, a focusing of attention, a brand-new memory.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“There have now been many studies of elite performers—international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth—and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the cumulative amount of deliberate practice they’ve had. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.

We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own. We”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“Failure is rich in learning opportunities for a simple reason: in many of its guises, it represents a violation of expectation.6 It is showing us that the world is in some sense different from the way we imagined it to be.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do