quotes about Oddities
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Arithmetic starts with the integers and proceeds by successively enlarging the number system by rational and negative numbers, irrational numbers, etc... But the next quite logical step after the reals, namely the introduction of infinitesimals, has simply been omitted. I think, in coming centuries it will be considered a great oddity in the history of mathematics that the first exact theory of infinitesimals was developed 300 years after the invention of the differential calculus.
-- Abraham Robinson -
It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.
-- Alan Watts -
It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.
-- Amor TowlesSource : Amor Towles (2011). “Rules of Civility: A Novel”, p.79, Penguin
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Speechless, castaway, and wry, a spellbound oddity am I. My feet are planted in the clay, my gaze is locked upon the sky.
-- Cecilia Dart-ThorntonSource : Cecilia Dart-Thornton (2011). “Ill-Made Mute”, p.1, Pan Macmillan
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It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
-- Clifford GeertzSource : Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.43, Basic Books
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Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.
-- Dean YoungSource : Dean Young (2010). “The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction”, Graywolf Press
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Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. ... It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.
-- Enid Bagnold -
Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.
-- George Eliot -
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Fine things in wood are important, not only aesthetically, as oddities or rarities, but because we are becoming aware of the fact that much of our life is spent buying and discarding, and buying again, things that are not good. Some of us long to have at least something, somewhere, which will give us harmony and a sense of durability—I won’t say permanence, but durability—things that, through the years, become more and more beautiful, things we can leave to our children.
-- James Krenov -
Germany is an anatomical oddity: it writes with its left hand and acts with its right.
-- Kurt TucholskySource : "Schnipsel". Die Weltbühne, p. 185, February 3, 1931.
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I'm an oddity of one, my strangeness too complicated to explain or share.
-- Libba Bray -
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For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That's really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I felt like such a freaking anomaly - an oddity.
-- Lynn SheltonSource : "Sundance Interview with Lynn Shelton - Director of Touchy Feely". Interview with Melissa Silverstein, womenandhollywood.com.
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The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
-- Marilyn Hacker -
I feel comfortable in the presence of oddity. Probably because I'm a little bit odd.
-- Martha Plimpton -
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
-- Michel de CerteauSource : Michel de Certeau, Pierre Mayol (1998). “The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and cooking. Volume 2”, p.134, U of Minnesota Press
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The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to. Nor is it at all a way of showing that there is indeed a heaven awaiting us after death. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.
-- N. T. Wright -
Music critics are, for the most part, bitter people who are intent at dragging people down for being successful at what they want to do, which is probably music. The oddity of being a critic is: You don't get a diploma, you just decide you're a critic. If someone listens to your opinion rather than their own, it's their mistake. Any critic's top 10, any year, it's something controversial or something that will make them look hipper-than-thou. The whole critic game, we've never played.
-- Paul StanleySource : "Kiss: Miley Cyrus is 'being treated unfairly'". Interview with Daniel D'Addario, www.salon.com. September 12, 2013.
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Theatres, actors, critics and public are interlocked in a machine that creaks but never stops. There is always a new season in hand and we are to busy to ask the only vital question which measures the whole structure. Why theatre at all? What for? Is it an anachronism, a superannuated oddity? Surviving like an old monument or a quaint custom? Why do we applaud and what? Has the stage a real place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it serve? What could it explore? What are its special properties?
-- Peter Brook -
The things that stand out are often the oddities.
-- Pierre Salinger -
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I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.
-- Rex Stout -
The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 percent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity, while seeing themselves as stepping stones to the Almighty.
-- Robert Trivers -
I'm interested in things when I don't know what they are. Like "Hey, Ray, what the hell is this?" Oh, that's lipstick from the 1700s, that's dog food from the turn of the century, that's a hat from World War II. I'm interested in the minutiae of things. Oddities.
-- Tom Waits -
Visionaries and dreamers have always been dusted with a little oddity.
-- Trevor Baylis -
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Las Vegas, Nevada: A city where oddities don't make you lame, But instead bring you riches and fortune and fame.
-- Walter Wykes -
Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science.
-- William Poundstone -
I do have quite a lot of sympathy for Fodor's picture of concepts as information-free atomic entities which get locked onto their referents causally, and to that extent they needn't involve anything much in the way of learning. But even so it seems perverse to call them 'innate'. Here we see again the oddity of treating 'not learned' as sufficient for innate.
-- David PapineauSource : "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.
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One day, digital will be it. Analog will just be another oddity, and that's fine, too. I have no great misgivings about it, but there will always be something to analog. It's the smell of the tape and all that visceral, physical stuff.
-- John VandersliceSource : Source: therumpus.net
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Making all of those words work together is difficult. It took a lot of cleaning up, a lot of rewriting scenes in order to make them more vivid. I used everything - every oddity I've ever seen on the side of the road, every interesting memory I could make relevant.
-- Mary J. Miller -
One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
-- Louis MenandSource : Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.