Luke's Commonplace Book

“This was not the most brutal or cold-blooded case I had ever prosecuted,” she told me. “But when you took all the different factors and put them together—how young and seemingly normal the perpetrators were; how ruthless they were; how stupid they were; how cavalier they were; how utterly undeserving this family was—it was, without question, the most disturbing case I’d ever dealt with.”

“… in order to solve the problem of the polluted river which runs through Bucharest, he wanted to dig beneath the existing river bed another wide channel beneath the earth in which all the dirt will be directed, so that there would have been two rivers, the deep one with all the pollution, and the surface one for the happy citizens to enjoy it…”

“If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.”

“High test scores are not the same thing as intelligence; getting good grades is not the same as learning; and the American system of higher education is far from egalitarian, despite its reigning pretense of diversity. I don’t know of an educated person who would disagree with these statements. But nor at this point in time is academic achievement entirely divorced from intellectual merit. From what I have observed, academic opportunism, the ability to con the system and the openness of the system to cons, has never outgunned a passion for, say, literature, history, mathematics, science, or complexity itself.”

“I explained that “pathetic” was a term used in rhetoric, the ancient art of argument. I had happened across the subject one rainy day in a library and become instantly obsessed. As a result Dorothy had learned almost from birth that a good persuader doesn’t merely express her own emotions; she manipulates her audience. Me, in other words.”

“Excuse me,” he said, worriedly eyeing the dark ice-covered plains of his new American home. ”Can you tell me, please, is it now night or day?”

“Open this,” I said. He looked at me blankly, and it dawned on me that in a lifetime of cooking maize and beans over a fire pit, he had never before opened a box.”

“

So what does this blsht metric tell you about your appeal, compared with the appeal of the baby Jesus?

It tells you this: he was special.

And—here’s another thing—you are not.

“The Body of Christ has an enormous head atop a weak, flabby body.”

“In Paris, enthusiasm is considered a mild form of retardation. If you are happy, you must be stupid. On the other hand, if you complain, you must be smart.”

“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy…. My font nerdiness makes me have bad reactions to things that spoil otherwise pleasant moments.”

“We like lists because we don’t want to die.”