Numbers Quotes - Page 12

• Son, if you really want something in life, you have to work for it. Now quiet, they're about to announce the lottery numbers.

  Matt Groening

  Funny, Life, Humor

  "Fictional character: Homer Simpson". "The Simpsons". Season 4, Episode 1: "Kamp Krusty", www.imdb.com. September 24, 1992.

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• I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.

  Russell Kirk

  Loyalty, Organization, Perfect

  Russell Kirk (2014). “The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays”, p.213, Open Road Media

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• Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you'd start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.

  Jodi Picoult

  Phones, Differences, Triumph

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “Handle with Care: A Novel”, p.331, Simon and Schuster

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• I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.

  Mary Karr

  Moving, Hands, Left Hand

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• There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Lying, Telling The Truth, Infinite

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.189, Penguin

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• FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes -- do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Horse, Stars, Fall

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Ernest Flemming (1986). “Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems”, p.210, Psychology Press

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• If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

  David Hume

  School, Math, Flames

  An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding sec. 12, pt. 3 (1748)

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• Many wise words are spoken in jest, but they don't compare with the number of stupid words spoken in earnest.

  Sam Levenson

  Funny, Wise, Stupid

  Sam Levenson (2016). “You Don't Have to Be in Who's Who to Know What's What: The Choice Wit and Wisdom of Sam Levenson”, p.86, Open Road Media

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• Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

  Paul Bowles

  Life, Death, Time

  "The Sheltering Sky". Book by Paul Bowles, 1949.

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• Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

  Neal Stephenson

  Badass, Self, Long

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• Mrs. Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground.

  Dorothy Parker

  Accepted, Inches, Vivacity

  Dorothy Parker (2002). “Complete Stories”, p.302, Penguin

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• You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Dream, Lying, Sleep

  Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley (2004). “Aleph and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it's giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water.

  Aimee Bender

  Wise, Wine, Eye

  Aimee Bender (2009). “Willful Creatures”, p.31, Anchor

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• First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

  Douglas Adams

  Technology, Typewriters, Discovery

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• So scared of getting older I'm only good at being young So I play the numbers game to find a way to say that life has just begun.

  John Mayer

  Games, Play, Getting Older

  Song: Stop This Train, Album: Continuum, 2006

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• She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . .

  Jean Genet

  Sweet, Princess, Dolls

  Jean Genet (1994). “Querelle”, p.84, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

  Don DeLillo

  Death, Thinking, Years

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.115, Pan Macmillan

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• Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.

  Nick Hornby

  Thinking, Phones, Asking

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• A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number.

  Jane Austen

  Children, Legs, Arms

  Jane Austen (1833). “Northanger abbey [followed by] Persuasion”, p.1

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• The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.

  Norman Maclean

  Montana, World

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• Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

  Haven Kimmel

  Mom, Drinking, Book

  Haven Kimmel (2002). “A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana”, p.163, Broadway Books

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• It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Life, Book, Small Numbers

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated)”, p.8373, Delphi Classics

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• It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

  Douglas Adams

  Love, Life, Relationship

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, p.93, Pan Macmillan

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• We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Life, Positive, Leadership

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.55, Beacon Press

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• And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won't come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.

  Amiri Baraka

  Stars, Night, Holes

  Amiri Baraka, “Preface to a Twenty Volume SuICIDe Note”

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