Home > Topic > department
1 " Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys... "
― Terry Pratchett , Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
2 " Charlotte: " It’s too bad they don’t give out diplomas for what you learn at the mall, because I could graduate with honors in that subject. No really. Since I’ve worked there, I’ve become an expert on all things shopping-related. For example, I can tell you right off who to distrust at the mall:1) Skinny people who work at Cinnabon. I mean, if they’re not eating the stuff they sell, how good can it be?2) The salesladies at department store makeup counters. No matter what they tell you, buying all that lip gloss will not make you look like the pouty models in the store posters.3) And most importantly—my best friend’s boyfriend, Bryant, who showed up at the food court with a mysterious blonde draped on his arm. "
3 " religion, the most powerful of the elements which have entered into the formation of moral feeling, having almost always been governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy, seeking control over every department of human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism. "
― John Stuart Mill
4 " Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores. "
― David Mitchell , Number9Dream
5 " I think I’m getting a notion of how to do this. O.K., a carnival works because people pay to feel amazed and scared. They can nibble around a midway getting amazed here and scared there, or both. And do you know what else? Hope. Hope they’ll win a prize, break the jackpot, meet a girl, hit a bull’s-eye in front of their buddies. In a carnival you call it luck or chance, but it’s the same as hope. Now hope is a good feeling that needs risk to work. How good it is depends on how big the risk is if what you hope doesn’t happen. You hope your old auntie croaks and leaves you a carload of shekels, but she might leave them to her cat. You might not hit the target or win the stuffed dog, you might lose your money and look like a fool. You don’t get the surge without the risk. Well. Religion works the same way. The only difference is that it’s more amazing than even Chick or the twins. And it’s a whole lot scarier than the Roll-a-plane or the Screamer, or any simp twister. This scare stuff laps over into the hope department too. The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous. Bad! Well, I’m working on it. I’ve got the amazing part down. And the scary bits are a snap. But I’ve got to come up with a hope. "
― Katherine Dunn , Geek Love
6 " So, Shannon,” she said as she put on her seat belt. “Tell me all about yourself.” I hated to hear that question. Just once, I wished I had the girlballs to say, I work for the federal government in a department that I cannot disclose, but I can tell you that I’m trained to kill using nothing more than a toothpick. So when you say you’ll call, you damn well better do it... "
― Robin Alexander , Pitifully Ugly
7 " We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don'tgrow on trees, like in the old days. So wheredoes one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit cardin a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.The sloppy kiss. The peck.The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The weshouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lipstaste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.The I accept your apology, but you make me really madsometimes kiss. The I knowyour tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you getolder, kisses become scarce. You'll be drivinghome and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If youwere younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth'sred door just to see how it fits. Oh wheredoes one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now what? Don't invite the kiss overand answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspiciousand stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey. It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out ofyour body without saying good-bye, and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it lefton the inside of your mouth. You mustnurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how itilluminates the room. Hold it to your chestand wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from aspecial beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow, then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneatha Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.But one kiss levitates above all the others. Theintersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones. "
― Jeffrey McDaniel
8 " I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity. "
― Stephen King , On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
9 " The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development. "
― Flannery O'Connor
10 " Men, discouraged by their failure to accomplish exactly what they desire, often speak of their lives as purposeless, but it is idle talk, for, in fact, no intelligent life which concerns itself vigorously and properly with the things about it can be said to be purposeless. Such a life adheres, automatically, to the law of progression, and therefore moves toward a great destiny of supreme power and accompanying joys. The only purposeless life is the one that does not use its faculties. It matters little what tasks men perform in life, if only they do them well and will all their strength. In the eternal plan they are given progressive value. In an infinite universe, one cannot possibly learn all or do all, at once. A beginning must be made somewhere and corner by corner, department by department, space by space, all will be known and conquered. In the end, all must be explored, and whether one begins in the east or the west cannot matter much. The big concern is the extent to which a man offers himself, mind and body, to his worthwhile work. Upon that will growth depend. "
― , Rational Theology
11 " I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody.They may be teaching that still.Another thing they taught was that no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war. "
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Slaughterhouse-Five
12 " Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or or the police department "
― Diane Ravitch
13 " I had a dream about you. I was a ventriloquist trying to share your fashion secrets, but you wouldn’t talk. So we put on a strip show for the department store sale, and I was arrested for theft – I took away your dignity as a mannequin "
― Dark Jar Tin Zoo , I Had a Dream About You
14 " Where does love reveal itself? In beds, sofas, bathtubs – each section of a department store has its advantages. "
― Bauvard , Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
15 " The music department is going to do a musical next year," he tells me, rolling his eyes like I would.Justine is running toward me, and I can tell by the look on her face that she's found out about the musical, too.I sigh, shaking my head. " I have to give Justine a lesson in holding back," I tell him. " She's just way too enthusiastic" .She grabs my arms in excitement. " We're doing Les Mis." I scream hysterically, clutching her as we jump up and down. "
16 " Caroline's lips thinned, her face flushed. " My husband, sir, has more secrets in his tiny, insignificant mind than the entire British War Department has had on file since its inception." She huffed with pure, disgusted outrage, lowering her gaze to the floor to murmur, " I'll kill him. "
17 " His accelerated path to yogihood hit a dead end when his kundalini exploded in a crowded department store. No one else was injured, but Swami caught an inflection which left him with a permanent East Indian accent. "
18 " In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics. "
― Immanuel Kant
19 " After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. "
― H.G. Wells , The Time Machine
20 " Good books are rare, and to have a really good library, a few shelves are all we need. When I was still on my campus in India, I was convinced, like many professors, that if the Lord was to be found anywhere, it was in the lower stacks of the library. But now - just as when I go into a big department store, I can say, " How many things I don't need! How many expensive suits I don't want!" - when I enter a big library I say, " What tomes I don't have to read again! What folios I will never open!" This feeling of freedom will come to all of us when we realise, in the depths of our meditation, that all wisdom lies within. "