Penguin (character) Quotes

Penguins don't waste their time trying to fly. They’re unique. They know they were built for the water.

Triviality is annoying, and in a person's character, tedious. To keep coming back to a disagreement is a kind of mania.

May gales and anguish sweep elsewhere The killer of my character But I am hardly some backbitter bent On vengence but; no, my heart is lenient

Killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it… It is merely confessing that it ‘is not worth the trouble.’ Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering. — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. (Penguin Classic November 26, 2013) Originally published 1942.

RECOMMENDED READING Brooks, David. The Road to Character. New York: Random House, 2015. Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. Damon, William. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. New York: Free Press, 2009. Deci, Edward L. with Richard Flaste. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006. Emmons, Robert A. Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Ericsson, Anders and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Heckman, James J., John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz (eds.). The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Kaufman, Scott Barry and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. New York: Perigee, 2015. Lewis, Sarah. The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Matthews, Michael D. Head Strong: How Psychology is Revolutionizing War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. Oettingen, Gabriele. Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Renninger, K. Ann and Suzanne E. Hidi. The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2015. Seligman, Martin E. P. Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Tetlock, Philip E. and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Crown, 2015. Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.

I stop regularly to examine the landscape. A range of porcelain blue mountains rises off to my right. They exhibit a slight dichotomy of character, being smooth as glass in some places and craggy in others. Glittering streams of meltwater ribbon through the rocks. The lower slopes are startlingly colorful. They are lit up with lichens in lime green, yellows, pink and fiery orange.

USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com Copyright © 2013 by Sue Grafton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grafton, Sue. W is for wasted / Sue Grafton. p. cm. — (Kinsey Millhone mystery) ISBN 978-1-101-63645-9 1. Millhone, Kinsey (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Fiction. I. Title. PS3557.R13W17 2013 2013019292 813’.54—dc23 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

A number of collections and adaptations of his lectures have been published, including The Feynman Lectures on Physics, QED (Penguin, 1990), The Character of Physical Law (Penguin, 1992), Six Easy Pieces (Penguin, 1998), The Meaning of It All (Penguin, 1999), Six Not-So-Easy Pieces (Penguin, 1999), The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation (Penguin, 1999), The Feynman Lectures on Computation (Penguin, 1999) and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Penguin, 2001). His memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, were published in 1985.

This streamlining yields a reduction of 12.5 per cent in the average number of strokes for the 2,000 most common characters, but even this simplified system still requires years of practice to master.42 The PRC government attempted a second round of character simplifications in 1977 but these met with strong resistance by the linguistic community as well as the general public. Can the character simplification program be considered a success? The general consensus is that the streamlined graphs represent marginal progress – in the way that flyswatters help to decrease the fly population – but are woefully inadequate for ultimately addressing the real problem, which is literacy. Some

I choose not to believe in writer’s block. There’s always something you can write. If my creative juices are spent by mid-morn, I can ‘change channels’ and rewrite, or freewrite, or write monologues for my minor characters.

The entire field of anthropological value theory since the 1980s has been founded on a single intuition: the fact that we use the same word to describe the benefits and virtues of a commodity for sale on the market (the “value” of a haircut or a curtain rod) and our ideas about what is ultimately important in life (“values” such as truth, beauty, justice), is not a coincidence. There is some hidden level where both come down to the same thing. [...] It’s the role of money as universal equivalent that allows for the division. That which is thus rendered comparable can be considered under the rubric of “value” and this value, like that of money, lies in its equivalence. The value of “values” in contrast lies precisely in their lack of equivalence; they are seen as unique, crystallized forms. They cannot or should not be converted into money. Nor can they be precisely compared with one another. No one will ever be able produce a mathematical formula for how much it is fitting to betray one’s political principles in the name of religion, or to neglect one’s family in the pursuit of art. True, people do make such decisions all the time. But they will always resist formalization—to even suggest doing so is at best odd, and probably offensive. [...] If one cares about the character and whether they achieve their goals, the reality of the rest of the machinery—the nature of the cosmos, the characters, the rules of the game—becomes inconsequential. If one is enjoying the bedtime story, one doesn’t care that penguins can’t really talk. This is innocuous enough. But it becomes much less innocuous when this sort of narrative form is applied to political situations (and, it was part of my argument that the more politically dominant a class of people tends to be, the more their defining modes of activity will tend to be given some kind of easily narrativizable form). Suddenly, we move from willing suspension of disbelief, to something very much like an ideological naturalization effect.

May gales and anguish sweep elsewhere The killer of my character. But I am hardly some backbiter bent On vengeance; no, my heart is lenient.

Peculiarity is not a vice; on the contrary, it sometimes attracts the feminine character.