#relative

Now I'm starting, relatively, to think straight again. I live one day at a time, one hour at a time. What makes it all worthwhile is my children. ↗

— Paula Yates

#children #day #hour #i #live

Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I sat that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be...well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#language #perfection #relatives #death

In the beginning of the human race there was no genetic load which would cause undesirable traits such as appear in offspring of marriages between relatives today. ↗

— Walter Lang

#beginning #between #cause #genetic #human

The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. ↗

— Herbert Marcuse

#choice #criterion #entirely #free #free choice

For those of us who have lost loved ones in their prime - as I did when my father and other relatives succumbed - even one of those years would have been a precious gift. ↗

— Michael Milken

#did #even #father #gift #i

It is relatively easy to design for the perfect cases, when everything goes right, or when all the information required is available in proper format. ↗

— Donald Norman

#cases #design #easy #everything #format

This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen. ↗

— Albert Claude

#been #brutality #cell #constituents #destroyed

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours. ↗

— Grover Cleveland

#ago #assigned #assumed #civilization #higher

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser. ↗

— Eric Allin Cornell

#days #experiments #few #involve #laser

Where there's a will - there's a relative! ↗

— Ricky Gervais

#where #will