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It is easier to tell a person what life is not, rather than to tell them what it is. A child understands weeds that grow from lack of attention, in a garden. However, it is hard to explain the wild flowers that one gardener calls weeds, and another considers beautiful ground cover.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Attacking a provincial lord in his manor house, surrounded by guards...Honestly, Kell, I'd nearly forgotten how foolhardy you can be.
"Foolhardy?" Kelsier asked with a laugh. "that wasn't foolhardy - that was just a small diversion. You should see some of the things I'm planning to do!
Dockson stood for a moment then he laughed too. "By the Lord Ruler, it's good to have you back, kell! I'm afraid I've grown rather boring during the last few years"
"We'll fix that" Kelsier promised.
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Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1))
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Time is funny, man. Life is funny. We all on this huge planet tryna figure shit out. What is the planet already got it figured out? What if the whole point is for us to mot figure it out? What is God playing with like...like dolls? Some diverse-ass Barbies
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Angie Thomas (Concrete Rose (The Hate U Give, #0))
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The thing about a diversion is that it has to be diverting.
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Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl (Artemis Fowl, #1))
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The Barbies with their stick legs and rocket breasts were another problem Megan had to endure. She was supposed to spend hours dressing up or playing house with them, including the darker ones she was supposed to find more relatable. In a fit she'd once tried to commit Barbicide, defaced them with colored marker pens, chopped off hair, extracted eyes with scissors and de-limbed a few... The Barbie invasion proliferated on birthdays and at Christmas, relatives talked about incredible collection, as if she'd actually chosen to have them in her life.
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Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
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Here’s what I like about God: Trees are crooked, mountains are lumpy, a lot of his creatures are funny-looking, and he made it all anyway. He didn’t let the aardvark convince him he had no business designing creatures. He didn’t make a puffer fish and get discouraged. No, the maker made things—and still does. European film directors often enjoy creative careers, during which their films mature from the manifestos of angry young men to the rueful wisdom of great works by creative masters. Is an afternoon siesta the secret? Is their vita just a little more dolce? We’ve taken espresso to our American hearts, but we haven’t quite taken to the “break” in our coffee breaks. Worried about playing the fool, we forget how to simply play. We try to make our creativity linear and goal oriented. We want our “work” to lead somewhere. We forget that diversions do more than merely divert us.
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Julia Cameron (Walking in This World (Artist's Way))
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Why was he doing this? So that life could continue in the metro? Right. So that they could grow mushrooms and pigs at VDNKh in the future, and so that his stepfather and Zhenkina’s family lived there in peace, so that people unknown to him could settle at Alekseevskaya and at Rizhskaya, and so that the uneasy bustle of trade at Byelorusskaya didn’t die away. So that the Brahmins could stroll about Polis in their robes and rustle the pages of books, grasping the ancient knowledge and passing it on to subsequent generations. So that the fascists could build their Reich, capturing racial enemies and torturing them to death, and so that the Worm people could spirit away strangers’ children and eat adults, and so that the woman at Mayakovskaya could bargain with her young son in the future, earning herself and him some bread. So that the rat races at Paveletskaya didn’t end, and the fighters of the revolutionary brigade could continue their assaults on fascists and their funny dialectical arguments. And so that thousands of people throughout the whole metro could breathe, eat, love one another, give life to their children, defecate and sleep, dream, fight, kill, be ravished and betrayed, philosophize and hate, and so that each could believe in his own paradise and his own hell . . . So that life in the metro, senseless and useless, exalted and filled with light, dirty and seething, endlessly diverse, so miraculous and fine could continue.
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Dmitry Glukhovsky (Metro 2033)
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I would not hurt you, little man,' he said.
'I think that I got the disorder in Mullingar,' I explained. I knew that I had gained his confidence and that the danger of violence was now passed. He then did something which took me by surprise. He pulled up his own ragged trouser and showed me his own left leg. It was smooth, shapely and fairly fat but it was made of wood also.
'That is a funny coincidence,' I said. I now perceived the reason for his sudden change of attitude.
'You are a sweet man,' he responded, 'and I would not lay a finger on your personality. I am the captain of all the one-legged men in the country. I knew them all up to now except one—your own self—and that one is now also my friend into the same bargain. If any man looks at you sideways, I will rip his belly.'
'That is very friendly talk,' I said.
'Wide open,' he said, making a wide movement with his hands. 'If you are ever troubled, send for me and I will save you from the woman.'
'Women I have no interest in at all,' I said smiling. 'A fiddle is a better thing for diversion.'
'It does not matter. If your perplexity is an army or a dog, I will come with all the one-leggèd men and rip the bellies. My real name is Martin Finnucane.'
'It is a reasonable name,' I assented.
'Martin Finnucane,' he repeated, listening to his own voice as if he were listening to the sweetest music in the world.
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Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)
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Hurry, your imaginary heaven is calling you up, my dear holier-than-thou religious nuts.
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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In the 1992 election, Mr. Clinton raised discrete fortunes from a gorgeous mosaic of diversity and correctness. From David Mixner and the gays he wrung immense sums on the promise of lifting the ban on homosexual service in “the military”—a promise he betrayed with his repellent “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. From a variety of feminist circles he took even larger totals for what was dubbed “The Year of the Woman,” while he and his wife applauded Anita Hill for her bravery in “speaking out” about funny business behind the file cabinets.
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Christopher Hitchens (No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton)
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Despite all their surface diversity, most jokes and funny incidents have the following logical structure: Typically you lead the listener along a garden path of expectation, slowly building up tension. At the very end, you introduce an unexpected twist that entails a complete reinterpretation of all the preceding data, and moreover, it's critical that the new interpretation, though wholly unexpected, makes as much "sense" of the entire set of facts as did the originally "expected" interpretation.
In this regard, jokes have much in common with scientific creativity, with what Thomas Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift" in response to a single "anomaly." (It's probably not coincidence that many of the most creative scientists have a great sense of humor.) Of course, the anomaly in the joke is the traditional punch line and the joke is "funny" only if the listener gets the punch line by seeing in a flash of insight how a completely new interpretation of the same set of facts can incorporate the anomalous ending.
The longer and more tortuous the garden path of expectation, the "funnier" the punch line when finally delivered.
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V.S. Ramachandran
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It's funny that being human means so many things, man made divisions counter our judgements towards being wary of the "other", this is worrying because the thing that unites us is being human that is what we all are and without lament but with joy we should embrace everybody we would then live in utopia of diversity.
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Paul Isaacs
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He was the only male on a staff of twenty-one white women; he was also Latino and gay, a triple hit of diversity. He told me once that he became irritable and moody at certain times of the month, prone to outbursts of unprovoked rage, caught up in the synchronized menstrual cycles of the women in the office and pulled along for the hormonal ride by mistake
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Sarai Walker (Dietland: a wickedly funny, feminist revenge fantasy novel of one fat woman's fight against sexism and the beauty industry)
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But the funny part is, they’re the same way! They’re right, and everybody else is racist or uneducated or is the problem. Only them, and people who think the way they do, have the answer.” He pauses. “They surround themselves with people exactly like them because deep down, they don’t like diversity. It scares them. They talk about ‘breeders,’ and bigots, and homophobes, but they’re just as bad. Stuck in their own way of thinking and trapped by ideas that don’t make sense. They’re not really living. What they have is not real.
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Anisa Ashabi (Finding Chaz)
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Instead the only place I got into was the local community college, where I live in a suite in what's not-so-jokingly referred to as the Virgin Vault, with a practicing witch, a klepto, and a girl whose family's religion doesn't allow her to speak to men outside of their faith.
I keep assuring Mom it's cool. Another one of our suite mates came out last semester as a lesbian (to the surprise of none of us but herself), and a fifth is sleeping with a guy who's in an actual motorcycle gang.
"See, Mom?" I'd told her. "Way better than Harvard. There's so much more diversity!"
Like so much of my jokes, she didn't find that one funny.
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Meg Cabot (Proposal (The Mediator, #6.5))
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What’s funny is that when looking at racially tolerant countries, America ranks among the best, and many European countries rank as much less tolerant. According to the Washington Post, a country like France is among the most racially intolerant countries in the world, with 22.7 percent of people in France claiming they wouldn’t want to live near someone of a different race. The Nordic countries did score very low for racial intolerance, yet these countries are some of the most racially homogenous countries on the planet, like Finland with a native Finnish population of 87.3 percent or Norway with 86.3 percent of its population being ethnic Norwegians. So, the only countries that people on the left would rather live in are countries that are significantly less diverse and more white than America. Seems rather hypocritical, doesn’t it?
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Will Witt (How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies: Taking On Liberal Arguments with Logic and Humor)
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Many experiments show that when people are put into a good mood (e.g., by giving them candy or showing them a funny movie), they are more creative. For example, they are better at inventing diverse and unusual ways for getting a candle to burn without dripping, or at finding more obscure and remote associations between words and ideas.22 People in good moods are “more cognitively flexible —more able to make associations, to see dimensions, and to see potential relationships among stimuli—than are persons in a neutral state.”23 In other words, they generate more varied ideas and combinations of those ideas, which are crucial aspects of creative work.
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Robert I. Sutton (Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation)
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Observing his captors, Kojima was astounded by their racial and ethnic diversity: “Blond, silver, black, brown, red hair. Blue, green, brown, black eyes. White, black, skin colors of every variety. I was stunned. I realized then that we’d fought against all the peoples of the world. At the same time, I thought, what a funny country America is, all those different kinds of people fighting in the same uniform!”61 On
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Ian W. Toll (Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy))
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If a paragraph of writing is a little confusing, you can reread it. If a joke is confusing, the joke fails. Live comedy must be perfectly intelligible to a diverse audience the first time around, which means that the best comics are master communicators, in addition to being funny.
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Evan Puschak (Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions)
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Consider an actual city park in contrast to a faux public space like Universal CityWalk, which one passes through upon leaving the Universal Studios theme park. Because it interfaces between the theme park and the actual city, CityWalk exists somewhere in between, almost like a movie set, where visitors can consume the supposed diversity of an urban environment while enjoying a feeling of safety that results from its actual homogeneity. In an essay about such spaces, Eric Holding and Sarah Chaplin call CityWalk “a ‘scripted space’ par excellence, that is, a space which excludes, directs, supervises, constructs, and orchestrates use.”13 Anyone who has ever tried any funny business in a faux public space knows that such spaces do not just script actions, they police them. In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.
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Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
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I'm going to start a religion in the name of my pal up there, Mr. NOT. I am going to call it nuttism. All nuts are welcome. And by that I mean you all, following every other nutty ism.
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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20. Bob Dylan, “4th Time Around” (1966) Right after Rubber Soul dropped, Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde, where he sang this scorchingly funny parody of “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan unkindly played “4th Time Around” for John in London. As Lennon recalled in 1968, “He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t like it.’ ” Yeah, well—talk about the anxiety of influence. All over Blonde on Blonde, you can hear how hard Dylan was feeling Rubber Soul—especially in songs like “I Want You,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” So he probably wrote “4th Time Around” as a diversion to keep people from noticing how much “Norwegian Wood” there was in “Visions of Johanna.
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Rob Sheffield (Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World)
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In the event that your feminist activities are discovered, quick diversions include bursting into song, asking him how to fix something in the room and fainting.
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Reductress (How to Win at Feminism: The Definitive Guide to Having It All—And Then Some!)