Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For more than a decade, I led an organization that put on an elaborate Christmas program each December. It was a big production, with over 250 people participating in more than 20 performances. By the end of the season, everyone who participated was exhausted.
I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.
You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.
I used to just go up to strangers and tell them really elaborate stories about who I was and where I was from and try to spice my story, which I didn't think was very exciting at all. That gave me a sense of life, a sense of excitement - but I don't do that anymore.
Advances in technology - hugely beneficial though they are - render us vulnerable in new ways. For instance, our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth.
While sophisticated plays can work in poker, if attempted by an inexperienced player, they'll usually backfire. Elaborate bluffs and check-raises are best left to experienced players. It's just like golf: don't try to hit a tricky flop shot with that 25-handicap of yours!
A notorious network of violent Islamist hoodlums, concentrated in the rough-and-tumble district of Molenbeek in Brussels, has been operating in plain sight since the 1990s, planning, plotting and carrying out dozens of elaborate jihadi missions from Afghanistan to Algeria.
I want to clear my mind a little bit and give my mind a little bit of time to breathe so I can pinpoint or at least nail down feelings I'm having and that I've had for the last however long. I need to nail them down long enough to actually write about and elaborate on them.
An elaborate system of etiquette and social standards flowered around the home phone: how long a child might be allowed to stay on the phone, how late one could call without being impolite, and of course, the dread implications of a late night call which violated that norm.
The best seat in the house often depends on the ballet. For instance, much of the first act of 'The Nutcracker' is domestic and small scale, so it's great to sit up close. But the second act features elaborate scenery and choreography, which are better to observe from a distance.
'PhotoCard' has 20 times as much code as the sum of 'QuickDraw,' 'MacPaint,' and 'HyperCard.' It is more elaborate and complicated, with all the client and server stuff. It took a lot more of me to do this than other projects, requiring an almost Mother Teresa dedication to do it.
The nations of Europe constitute a federative league, a commonwealth of nations which, though it has no central head, is so intimate and elaborate as to subject the action, and sometimes even the internal affairs, of each to surveillance and intervention on the part of all the others.
'Game of Thrones' has kind of got the Midas touch, certainly for the lead actors and those recurring guest stars. It's the show that can do no wrong because it's so well produced. My contribution is short, but I think, in my mind, it was sweet because it involved such elaborate scenes.
For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.
Wherever you find 'men together' - writing the rules, as at exclusive golf or other men's clubs, businesses, and lodges where they wear elaborate robes and funny hats - women are kept completely outside if possible and, when grudgingly admitted, to highly restricted areas or token status.
I learned that the hardest party to pull off successfully is Saturday night dinner. This meal is expected to be elaborate: appetizers, first course, dinner, dessert, and coffee. People arrive at 7:30 or 8 p.m. and stay for hours - definitely past my bedtime - and they all go home exhausted.
The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways.
Governments want to control information. To do this, they have elaborate systems for promoting themselves via propaganda departments and for ensuring confidentiality with official-secrets laws. There are good reasons for these: people need information, and national security deserves secrecy.
Ah, the power of two. There's nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons?
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they cook for other people is to think that it has to be fancy and elaborate. This results in enormous expense and nine days of labor, plus you end up trying to assemble a croquembouche in front of your guests and everyone's experiencing flop sweat.
As we get older, we tend to grow quite fond of the planets of belief we have constructed for ourselves. We build elaborate defense mechanisms to ward off attacks from competing ideas or new data. The system makes us comfortable but resistant to change, no matter how much change might be called for.
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
I was Obi-Wan multiple years in a row. Alec Guinness' Obi-Wan. I was a Dalmatian once because I loved '101 Dalmatians,' and I think I was a Care Bear once and maybe a Spartan cheerleader from the 'SNL' skit. I'm terrible with Halloween, because I come up with these elaborate costumes and never follow through.
When I finally came to the United States, I was forced to get a job right away. I spoke no English - none. I started working as an aesthetician in this beautiful boutique salon in Beverly Hills. Being an aesthetician didn't require an elaborate vocabulary in English. My first client was Cindy Crawford! I swear.
I think it's also safe to say genre TV and movies were a big influence - the first stories I ever tried to write were Godzilla fan fiction when I was in elementary school, complete with elaborate maps of Monster Island made with multiple sheets of typing paper and nearly six feet wide. I kind of wish I still had those.
Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend.
I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.
My mother had found this album of all these old slides from the '50s of me as a kid and I said, 'We should have these made into pictures because the color's so beautiful.' There were pictures of me from 1955 as a little baby wearing all these elaborate outfits, and in these pictures was this amazing story of a gay man and his mother.
Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I biked through the neighborhood, the wind in my hair and a fleet of evildoers on my heels.
I don't understand computers. I've been unable to construct a working mental model of how they do what they do. I can break software by looking at it. I can blow anything up. Without trying. It's sort of like being a dowser. And this extreme elaborate clumsiness on my part is actually something people will pay me for. It's quite wonderful.
I always point out to my Passover guests that the Hebrews were not living in isolation. They were at the crossroads of several great, elaborate cultures with their own mythology and religion and art and architecture and cultural belief. In fact, so many of the mythologies of the world describe the same events, just from different points of view.