Douglas R. Hofstadter · 880 pages
Rating: (3.2K votes)
“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, quote from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
“I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, quote from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
“This computer-generated pangram contains six a's, one b, three c's, three d's, thirty-seven e's, six f's, three g's, nine h's, twelve i's, one j, one k, two l's, three m's, twenty-two n's, thirteen o's, three p's, one q, fourteen r's, twenty-nine s's, twenty-four t's, five u's, six v's, seven w's, four x's, five y's, and one z.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, quote from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
“Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, quote from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
“Supperational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, quote from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
“The dark organ music filled the Department of Post-Mortem Communications. Moist assumed it was all part of the ambience, although the mood would have been more precisely obtained if the tune it was playing did not appear to be Cantate and Fugue for someone Who Has Trouble with the Pedals.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Making Money
“¿Cómo no iban a apodersarse los deliriros de grandeza de un campesino del Banato si de pronto, a los veintiún años, con sólo mover unas figuritas sobre un tablero de madera, ganaba más en una semana que su pueblo entero en todo un año de talar bosques y realizar las tareas más duras?”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Chess Story
“He kissed her once more, gently and deliberately, reassuring her without words that he had no intentions of letting her go.”
― Stephanie Garber, quote from Caraval
“When you spoke to her there wasn’t any mystery. In herself she was all the explanation I felt she needed. And that is rare, isn’t it? To be explained by yourself, by what you are and what you do, and not by what you’ve done, or were, or by what people think you might be or might become.”
― Paul Scott, quote from The Jewel in the Crown
“For without knowing the white man at close hand, without having submitted to his wanton and arrogant kindnesses, without having smelled the smell of his bedsheets and his dirty underdrawers and the inside of his privy, and felt the casual yet insolent touch of his women’s fingers upon his own black arm, without seeing him at sport and at ease and at his hypocrite’s worship and at his drunken vileness and at his lustful and adulterous couplings in the hayfield—without having known all these cozy and familial truths, I say, a Negro can only pretend hatred.”
― William Styron, quote from The Confessions of Nat Turner
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