320 pages
Rating: (2.2K votes)
“If you don't have anything nice to say- say it anyway”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“God created me exactly how he wanted me to be and who he wanted me to be.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“Never stunt your own growth by dismissing something just because it doesn’t feel familiar.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“If you want to see a person’s true character, watch how they treat people who seemingly can’t help them.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“Everything good that happens to you is because of God; everything bad that happens to you is on you because you made the choice not to recognize the power of God in you. It was your choice. That’s why I hate when people say they “found God.” Man, God was never lost. You were. There was never a missing person’s report out for our creator.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“When you are completely honest about yourself, there is very little people can say about you that’s going to have a negative impact.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“Honesty is such a rare commodity these days that when you do tell someone the truth when they were expecting a lie, you’ll catch them off guard. They might even be willing to look past transgressions that might have otherwise seemed unforgivable. People are thirsty for the truth. Sate that thirst, and they should always appreciate you.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“Because when I pray to God to take negativity out of my life, he’s not swinging at spirits. He’s swinging at people who are the living embodiment of negativity in my life.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“My boy probably got confused because he thought he was communicating with God when he was really chopping it up with the devil. That’s an easy mistake to make because the DEVIL is the one who makes the most noise. God doesn’t make a big fuss—if anything, he damn near whispers. You either listen or you don’t.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“I’m always shocked when I run into people who don’t believe in God. I’ll even ask them, “How can you not believe that there’s a power greater than you who’s engineering this whole system of things?” Usually they’ll tell me something like, “Man, God is just some mythical fairy tale. God is no different than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.” I disagree wholeheartedly, but that mind-set is honestly one of the reasons I don’t sell that junk about holiday headliners to my daughters. Maybe it’s the Witness influence on me, but to this day I’m not a fan of holidays. I think it’s a mistake to hype your kids on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy on one hand, and then try to sell them on God with the other. When they get older and realize Santa and the Easter Bunny aren’t real, it becomes too easy for them to dismiss God as well. “So you were lying to me about everybody else, but this God character is real?” they’ll say. “Yeah, right.” And then they’ll miss out on the affirmation, confidence, and faith that religion can provide when they’re older and really need it.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“That’s why I hate when people say they “found God.” Man, God was never lost. You were. There was never a missing person’s report out for our creator.”
― quote from Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
“People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain
“It won't make you feel any better, he told me, it might even make things worse for a while. But you mustn't let the sadness die inside you. You have to give it some life.”
― Kevin Brooks, quote from Lucas
“He paused by the window, looking up into a lavender sky, fingers pressed against the icy glass. No stars tonight; the snowflakes came down out of the dark, rushing towards him, endless, uncountable. Silent, too, but not like the stars. Falling snow whispered secrets to itself.
“And you are a fanciful idiot,” he said outloud.”
― Diana Gabaldon, quote from Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
“El destino del hombre es equivocarse, afanarse inútilmente y sufrir, pero lo que no puede es quedar estancado; sacrifica su vida en aras de lo que considera su deber.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, quote from Gora
“It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually—
‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
‘What is?’
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like—
‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’
Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores.
‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’
We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind.
‘But we were the first.’
Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.”
― Stephen Baxter, quote from Manifold: Time
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