Mind Quotes - Page 656

Exactly as we might ask God, and do ask God, to change our fate. The difference is that in the story the writer actually replies and in the end even changes his mind.

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.

It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.

Never mind what my name is,” the man said. “No one can pronounce it anyway. Just call me Sir.

For Beatrice - you will always be in my mind, in my heart and in your grave.

We are all expressions of our own minds, projected onto the world.

Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.

In economic terms, we've always thought of work as a disutility - as something you do to get something else. Now it's increasingly a utility - something that's valuable and worthy in its own right.

Large companies are not going to disappear. Multinational companies with tens of thousands of employees are not going to disappear. In fact, many of them are getting larger because they can benefit from economies of scale.

While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.

But the rational mind usually doesn't decide what emotions we "should" have !

Russia could be, in fact, it would have to be a different Russia, but it could be a splendid ally. I will say this for the Russians: on their - in their favor, they have the intellectual capacity and the habits of mind to act in the world on a strategic scale, and were they do to so in service of a better cause than their current set of grievances, they would be a natural partner.

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.

I don't mind what the role is at all; I just want to play cool characters.

A secret is a secret in my mind.

I try to employ a different strategy for each story. Often, I'll have a specific look in mind before I even have the story to go with it. I'm not so much interested in forcing the issue of reader identification through various graphic tricks. I'm more interested in creating specific characters that resonate with my own particular inner struggles.

When I near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.

I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

You've gotta share what's going on in your mind.

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

What a terrible thing it is to lose one's mind.