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1 " The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the women stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world. "
― Cormac McCarthy
2 " Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away. "
― Gregory Maguire , Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1)
3 " I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their " own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history. "
4 " All in our lives, we are busy engaged and struggling with the figures and stats of rent, bills and savings when we forget to count the days of our lives. "
― Bhavik Sarkhedi
5 " Jeffers stretched up on his toes to see the back of the mob, “But James, we’re doing all this for you... We need this gold to build a united Alba. We need it to fund an army and to forge decisive leadership.” His voice was almost plaintive. “We want to hand your generation a real empire rather than just a loose collection of competing Families. We want to give you the foundations to achieve glory! What could possibly be wrong with that?”“Rubbish!” cried Tristan, not about to let honey-coated nonsense dissolve the glue that bound his army. “Absolute codswallop!” he let his calm facade slip for the first time that day. “What you’re actually trying to do is to build a legacy that you don’t deserve! You want to swan around as an armchair General for the next twenty years while your precious army strives and dies for hollow victories that do nothing more than feed your ego! And do you know who strives and dies in this picture?” He waved one arm at the figures behind him. “We do! We here in this alley, along with other young men and women just like us!”Tristan watched Jeffers from the corner of his eye, as he shook his fist towards deGroot, “Well we’re not having it! If you want us to fight and die, then we’re going to fight now, and we’re going to fight you! So come on down deGroot and take a swing! "
6 " Fantasy imposes order on the universe. Or, at least, it superimposes order on the universe. And it is a human order. Reality tells us that we exist for a brief, beleaguered span in a cold infinity; fantasy tells us that the figures in the foreground are important. Fantasy peoples the alien Outside, and it doesn’t matter a whole lot if it peoples it with good guys or bad guys. Putting ‘Hy-Brasil’ on the map is a step in the right direction, but if you can’t manage that, then ‘Here Be Dragons is better than nothing. Better than the void. "
― Terry Pratchett
7 " In every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual " taste" ... [is] produce[d by the devil and his angels]. This they do bu working through the small circle of artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus [they] have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females-and there is more in that than you might suppose. As regards the male taste [they] have varied a good deal. At one time [they] have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men's vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, [they] have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present [they] are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and [they] now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, [they] thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many [successful] results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. [They] have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, or course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them to appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being " frank" and " healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result [they] are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. "
8 " If you believe in the eighteenth century view of the mind, you will look and act wimpy. You will think that all you need to do is give people the facts and the figures and they will reach the right conclusion. You will think that all you need to do is point out where their interests lie, and they will act politically to maximize them. You will believe in polling and focus groups: you will believe that if you ask people what their interests are, they will be aware of them and will tell you, and will vote on it. You will not have any need to appeal to emotion---indeed, to do so would be wrong! You will not have to speak of values; facts and figures will suffice. You will not have to change people's brains; their reason should be enough. You will not have to frame the facts; they will speak for themselves. You just have to get the facts to them... "
― George Lakoff , Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives
9 " The new naval treaty permits the United States to spend a billion dollars on warships—a sum greater than has been accumulated by all our endowed institutions of learning in their entire history. Unintelligence could go no further! ... [In Great Britain, the situation is similar.] ... Until the figures are reversed, ... nations deceive themselves as to what they care about most. "
― Abraham Flexner , Universities: American - English - German
10 " He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York. "
― Sherwood Anderson , Winesburg, Ohio
11 " Mister Rob Anybody and sundry others?" said one of the figures in a dreadful voice." There's naebody here o' that name!" shouted Rob Anybody. " We dinna know anythin'!" " We have here a list of criminal and civil charges totaling nineteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty-three separate offenses-" " We wasna there!" yelled Rob Anybody desperately. " Isn't that right, lads?" " -including more than two thousand cases of Making an Affray, Causing a Public Nuisance, Being Found Drunk, Being Found Very Drunk, Using Offensive Language (taking into account ninety-seven cases of Using Language That Was Probably Offensive If Anyone Else Could Understand It), Committing a Breach of the Peace, Malicious Lingering-" " It's mistaken identity!" shouted Rob Anybody. " It's no' oour fault! We wuz only standing there an' someone else did it and ran awa'!" " -Grand Theft, Petty Theft, Burglary, Housebreaking, Loitering with Intent to Commit a Felony-" " We wuz misunderstood when we was wee bairns!" yelled Rob Anybody. " Ye're only picking on us 'cause we're blue! We always get blamed for everythin'! The polis hate us! We wasna even in the country! "
12 " In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness. "
― James David Lewis-Williams , Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
13 " Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp. There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum.One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust.Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated.The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand. "
― Greg Egan , Diaspora
14 " When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again. "
― Russell Hoban , Turtle Diary
15 " When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. "
― Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
16 " protectionI requested the figures on OSHA whistle-blower complaints made and the number actually upheld. OSHA refused to supply them. They also refused to uphold my OSHA complaints and provide whistle-blower protection to me. My independent research leads me to understand that they uphold almost no OSHA whistle-blower complaints. It is very concerning that it seems like the same thing is happening with complaints made to Police Internal Affairs. "
― Steven Magee
17 " The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone. "
18 " There's such a thing, if you're a finance man, as hitting the figures you need to hit. But there's no equivalent in acting. It's a creative field. It's subjective. That's what I love about it. "
19 " Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come. "
20 " The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone. "
