“In the act of writing he experiences, today, an exceptional sensual pleasure -- in the feel of the pen, snug in the crook of his thumb, but even more in the feel of his hand being tugged back lightly from its course across the page by the strict, unvarying shape of the letters, the discipline of the alphabet.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from The Master of Petersburg
“Ese es el gran secreto de las mujeres, eso es lo que les da ventaja sobre los hombres como nosotros. Saben cuándo ceder, cuándo echarse a llorar. Nosotros, tú y yo, no lo sabemos. Aguantamos, embotellamos la pena dentro de nosotros, la encerramos y cal y canto, hasta que se convierte en el mismísimo demonio. Y entonces nos da por cometer alguna estupidez, sólo con tal de librarnos de la pena, aunque no sea más que un par de horas. Sí, cometemos alguna estupidez que luego habremos de lamentar durante toda la vida. Las mujeres no son así, porque conocen el secreto de las lágrimas.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from The Master of Petersburg
“Stiff shoulders humped over the writing-table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from The Master of Petersburg
“He sits with the pen in his hand, holding himself back from a descent into representations that have no place in the world, on the point of toppling, enclosed within a moment in which all creations lies open at his feet, the moment before he loosens his grip and begins to fall.”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from The Master of Petersburg
J.M. Coetzee
Born place: in Cape Town, South Africa
Born date February 9, 1940
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“Two long years without a woman’s touch. I’d be mad with lust for any woman.”
― Annika Martin, quote from Prisoner
“Every seven years our bodies change, every cell. Every seven years, we disappear.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from Now is Good
“it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, quote from The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
“So the owner of a monster head wants to meet on a path named Nut,” I said. “That’s appropriate.”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from The Grendel Affair
“The shushing of the waves was the heartbeat of the world, ever present, seldom noticed, and linking every moment together from before there was life to now.”
― Kim Harrison, quote from The Witch With No Name
This Side of Paradis...
Son of the Shadows
Martin Eden
By the River Piedra...
Deity
Wives and DaughtersBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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