Quotefarm:
Larry Gelbart:1
When asked what he considered the secret to happiness, Tennessee Williams replied: “Insensitivity, l guess.”
By that standard, this White House has to be happiest administration ever.
Scott Adams:2
Granted, things aren’t perfect, but when you hear our leaders talk, you have to wonder why our energy policy doesn’t involve burning asbestos on playgrounds. There must be some competent people pulling the strings behind the curtain, adjusting the money supply, twiddling with interest rates, choosing the winners for American Idol, and that sort of thing.
Alan Moore:
I’d recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography together. I think they’ll find it works wonders.
Kevin Guilfoile:3
Nevertheless, as a writer you will always know lots of cool stuff that you can’t fit elegantly into your novel and it takes discipline not to force it all on the reader.
Franny Howes:4
The metaphor epitomizes many of the recurring tropes in superhero comics: good and light versus evil and darkness, the blindness of justice as well as fate, and the blindness of ordinary people to the crime and evil superheroes battle daily. These characters are mythically blind. They are these metaphors personified, and they carry the visual tropes of blindness, dark glasses and canes, for added emphasis. However, they are not portrayed as experiencing the world as people with disabilities. Their superpowers and gadgets act as super-adaptive devices that let them live an existence that is not substantially different from sighted heroes. Their disability can thus be exploited for metaphoric value without making the character, and thus the reader, grapple with the idea life in an inaccessible world.
K.C. Cole:5
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks.
Siobhan Roberts:6
Yet at a public lecture at the Strings05 conference in Toronto, an audience member politely berated physicists for their bewildering smorgasbord of analogies, asking why the scientists couldn’t reach consensus on a few key analogies so as to convey a more coherent and unified message to the public.
The answer came as a disappointment. Robbert Dijkgraaf, a mathematical physicist at the University of Amsterdam, bluntly stated that the plethora of analogies is an indication that string theorists themselves are grappling with the mysteries of their work; they are groping in the dark and thus need every glimmering of analogical input they can get.
1 Via Mark Evanier
2Via Boing Boing (who liked it) and Making Light (which didn’t)
3Via Edward Champion
4 Via Backwards City
5-6 Via Arts & Letters Daily