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
“How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?”
― Jandy Nelson, quote from The Sky Is Everywhere
“She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from The Mayor of Casterbridge
“Old stories would tell how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act--to Weave--was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.”
― China Miéville, quote from Perdido Street Station
“The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead…”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, quote from Memoirs of Hadrian
“You’ve got blood on your hands, and you smell of coitus.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Imajica
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