Margaret Heffernan Quotes
A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.
Quotes to Explore
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It is absolutely impossible to settle the debts to pensioners, teachers, and others. The country hasn't got enough money to do so.
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The Supreme Court is not elected, and it is therefore not a proper arbiter of social policy.
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Never regret yesterday. Life is in you today and you make your tomorrow.
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I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves.
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As a mom, you do what you have to do without even thinking about it.
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I'm getting married because I'm in love with a girl and want to spend my life with her. You can't live your life doing what other people want you to or you'll be miserable. At some point you just have to be yourself.
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When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.
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I feel like God gave me the ability to play a game. I try to take it very seriously. I realize it's just a game.
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All of a sudden I discovered that I'm allergic to caviar. It was the perfect metaphor for my life. When I was only able to afford bad caviar, I could certainly eat my fill of it.
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In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.
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I am a big music nerd.
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Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section.
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The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.
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The most important thing as a leader is your relationship with God.
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The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
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The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
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I proved to myself that if I believe in something and set my mind to it I could actually accomplish it.
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When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.
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I pretty much just focus on making the records - unless I'm self-releasing them; then I do my own thing. But at some point, you have to stop worrying about chains of distribution, or it takes out of your time to write.
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Sometimes you have to shove all the surface stuff to the side in order to see what's underneath.
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P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements of what free people chose to do. Pretty much everything else is in service of one of or more of these goals. That's the human dashboard.
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George W. Bush bought the election - period. End of story. There is no argument. You can try to come up with any argument you can, but there is none.
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A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.
