Parabola Quotes

• She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.

  Woody Allen

  Maturity, Sweaters, Causes

  Woody Allen (2007). “The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose”, Random House Incorporated

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• The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose... Like a projectile flying to its goal, life ends in death. Even its ascent and its zenith are only steps and means to this goal... For, enlightenment or no enlightenment, consciousness or no consciousness, nature prepares itself for death.

  Carl Jung

  Death, Mean, Curves

  38 Copy quote

• I heave the basketball; I know it sails in a parabola, exhibiting perfect symmetry, which is interrupted by the basket. It's funny, but it is always interrupted by the basket.

  Michael Jordan

  Basketball, Learning, Science

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• As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.

  Michael Nesmith

  Artist, Thinking, Kind

  31 Copy quote

• Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

  Edward Bellamy

  Race, Illustration, Civilization

  Edward Bellamy (2016). “Looking Backward 2000-1887”, p.27, Edward Bellamy

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• All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

  Paul Theroux

  Home, Men, Hemisphere

  Paul Theroux (2006). “The Great Railway Bazaar”, p.350, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
  Where light pushes through;
  A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
  A dip to the water.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Air, Bridges, Circles

  D.H. Lawrence (2016). “Snake and Other Poems”, p.50, Courier Dover Publications

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• It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children...

  Thomas Pynchon

  Children, Believe, Moving

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.165, Penguin

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• When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Pain, Book

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1937). “Essays, First and Second Series”, p.109, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical.

  Ian Fleming

  Kissing, Hands, Boredom

  Ian Fleming (1953). “Casino Royale”

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• We are eternal. All this pain is an illusion.

  Maynard James Keenan

  Pain, Illusion, Eternal

  "Song: 'Parabola'". 2002.

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• I am a Prince," he replied, being rather dense. "It is the function of a Prince—value A—to kill monsters—value B—for the purpose of establishing order—value C—and maintaining a steady supply of maidens—value D. If one inserts the derivative of value A (Prince) into the equation y equals BC plus CD squared, and sets it equal to zero, giving the apex of the parabola, namely, the point of intersection between A (Prince) and B (Monster), one determines value E—a stable kingdom. It is all very complicated, and if you have a chart handy I can graph it for you.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Zero, Order, Cds

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• Cassidy's heart tried to leap out through his taught skin and hop into his wet hands. But outwardly it was all very calm, very serene, just as always, and it seemed to last a tiny forever, just like that, a snapshot of them all on the curved parabola of a starting line, eight giant hearts attached to eight pairs of bellows-like lungs mounted on eight pairs of supercharged stilts. They were poised on the edge of some howling vortex they had run 10,000 miles to get to. Now they had to run one more

  John L. Parker Jr.

  Running, Heart, Eight

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• It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest.

  Jan Morris

  Curves, Lines, Facts

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