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1 " Never mind that. What's going on with you and Heath?" Annabelle pulled a little wide-eyed innocence out of her rusty bag of college acting skills." What do you mean? Business." " Don't give me that. We've been friends too long." She switched to a furrowed brow. " He's my most important client. You know how much this means to me." Molly wasn't buying it. " I've seen the way you look at him. Like he was a slot machine with triple sevens tattooed on his forehead. If you fall in love with him, I swear I'll never speak toyou again." Annabelle nearly choked. She'd known Molly would be suspicious, but she hadn't expected an outright confrontation. " Are you nuts? Setting aside the fact that he treats me like a flunky, I'd never fall for a workaholic after what I've had to go through with my family." Falling in lust, however, was an entirely different matter." He has a calculator for a heart," Molly said. " I thought you liked him. "
2 " No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. "
― Stephen Jay Gould , An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas
3 " People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they’ve woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I’ll be talking, and will be interested in what I’m saying, but then someone—I’m convinced this what happens—someone—and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person—for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head. "
4 " When things don’t add up, either you don’t have a calculator or you forgot to use commonsense by simply asking. "
― Shannon L. Alder
