Vellichor Book Club I. — Favorite quotes from my recent-ish reads
A year ago I noticed that there was a “My Clippings.txt” in my Kindle’s Documents folder where all the quotes I highlighted were residing. (yeah, took me a while to notice… so many I must’ve deleted before I realized :( ) Since the discovery I usually move these to OneNote for safekeeping. The following quotes are my favorite ones since I started gathering.
The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
Bill Bryson / The Short History of Nearly Everything
You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 1018 joules of potential energy — enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.
Bill Bryson / The Short History of Nearly Everything
As with most of life’s problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation.
Andy Weir / The Martian
Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.
Andy Weir / The Martian
…made him look like an angry barista at an indie coffee shop whose dreams of becoming a successful screenwriter were dwindling by the hour.”
Ernest Cline / Ready Player One
Reality is stunningly elegant. Our understanding of it is not.
Scott Meyer / Off to Be The Wizard
Most people forget that they are part of everyone. You say everyone, and everyone hears everyone else.
Scott Meyer / Off to Be The Wizard
…protecting himself from the intense heat via the time-honored method of squinting, panting, and saying “hot hot hot hot hot” as quickly as he could.
Scott Meyer / Off to Be The Wizard
An astronaut is someone who’s able to make good decisions quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter.
Chris Hadfield / An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
searching for ways to lighten the mood is never a waste of time
Chris Hadfield / An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
“Boldface” is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that “boldface is written in blood” because often it’s created in response to an accident investigation.
Chris Hadfield / An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
Our little gamma-ray altimeter waits for an echo from the ground, and then, two seconds before impact, sends a command to fire our optimistically named Soft Landing Rockets
Chris Hadfield / An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are.
Jordan Ellenberg / How Not to Be Wrong
That’s how the Law of Large Numbers works: not by balancing out what’s already happened, but by diluting what’s already happened with new data, until the past is so proportionally negligible that it can safely be forgotten.
Jordan Ellenberg / How Not to Be Wrong
Most mathematicians would say that, in the end, the disasters and atrocities of history form what we call a partially ordered set. That’s a fancy way of saying that some pairs of disasters can be meaningfully compared, and others cannot.
Jordan Ellenberg / How Not to Be Wrong
As the old saying goes, if you’re down a million bucks, it’s your problem; but if you’re down five billion bucks, it’s the government’s problem.
Jordan Ellenberg / How Not to Be Wrong
Nobel Prize−winning economist Paul Krugman: “People want spending cut, but are opposed to cuts in anything except foreign aid. . . . The conclusion is inescapable: Republicans have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic.”
Jordan Ellenberg / How Not to Be Wrong
Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.
Neal Stephenson / Cryptonomicon
“Shit!” he says. “What’s wrong, Sarge?” “I just always say that when I wake up,” Shaftoe says.
Neal Stephenson / Cryptonomicon
The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway with a couple of barrels of genuine U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure certified Shit.
Neal Stephenson / Cryptonomicon
“That time in Seattle–during the lawsuit–was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX.” “Well, that’s something,” Avi says. “Normally those two are mutually exclusive.”
Neal Stephenson / Cryptonomicon
The planes used by Asian airlines must have special chutes in the tail where flight attendants are ejected into the stratosphere on their twenty-eighth birthdays.
Neal Stephenson / Cryptonomicon
