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His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.
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Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1))
“
We’ll start a whole new human race,” Hoop quipped.
“With respect, Hoop, I believe Ripley would eat you alive.
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Tim Lebbon (Alien: Out of the Shadows (Canonical Alien Trilogy, #1))
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I’d been looking around the world for clues as to what other countries were doing right, but the important distinctions were not about spending or local control or curriculum; none of that mattered very much. Policies mostly worked in the margins. The fundamental difference was a psychological one. The education superpowers believed in rigor. People in these countries agreed on the purpose of school: School existed to help students master complex academic material. Other things mattered, too, but nothing mattered as much.
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
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Understanding people doesn’t change them. It’s not nearly enough. But almost no one changes until they feel heard. That’s the third paradox of conflict. People need to believe you understand them, even as they realize you disagree, before they will hear you.
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Amanda Ripley (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out)
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Why do we procrastinate leaving? The denial phase is a humbling one. It takes a while to come to terms with our miserable luck. Rowley puts it this way: 'Fires only happen to other people.' We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before.
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Amanda Ripley (The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why)
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We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect.
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
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This explains the running, at least, but how on earth did it happen? Am I some kind of freak? No wonder my parents didn't want me on a cross-country team; I'd end up on Ripley's Believe It or Not.
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Mark Frost (The Paladin Prophecy (The Paladin Prophecy, #1))
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You must carry along with you a lively imagination and plenty of romance in your soul. Some of the most wonderful things in the world will seem dull and drab unless you view them in the proper light.
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Neal Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley)
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What profiteth it a man— Jonathan could have laughed. He hadn’t gained the whole world, nor had he lost his soul. Anyway, Jonathan didn’t believe in a soul. Self-respect was more like it. He hadn’t lost his self-respect, only Simone. Simone was morale, however, and wasn’t morale self-respect?
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Patricia Highsmith (Ripley's Game (Ripley, #3))
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Not for reasons unknown!” Ripley said, again. One more time, she thought. The more she told her story, the less they seemed to believe it, and the more terrible it became to her. “I told you, we set down there on company orders to get this thing which destroyed my crew. And your expensive ship.
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Christopher Golden (Alien: River of Pain (Canonical Alien trilogy, #3))
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Parents who view themselves as educational coaches tend to read to their children every day when they are small; when their children get older, they talk with them about their days and about the news around the world. They let their children make mistakes and then get right back to work. They teach them good habits and give them autonomy. They are teachers, too, in other words, and they believe in rigor. They want their children to fail while they are still children. They know that those lessons—about hard work, persistence, integrity, and consequences—will serve a child for decades to come.
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
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Tom was vaguely ashamed of himself, in fact, for having got Jonathan into it, and so coming to Jonathan’s aid relieved a bit of Tom’s guilt. Yes, if all went well, Trevanny would be a lucky and much happier man, Tom was thinking, and Tom believed in positive thinking. Don’t hope, think the best, and things would work out for the best,
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Patricia Highsmith (Ripley's Game (Ripley, #3))
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The white men on the Brinkley set were trying not to grin, like cheap lawyers at a ten-car pileup: Uh, did that mean Senator Dole didn’t think all the facts were out? Didn’t he believe the White House, that North and Poindexter were the only ones who knew? The Bobster dropped an eyebrow and rasped: “Aghh, don’t think Ripley’d believe that.
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Richard Ben Cramer (What It Takes: The Way to the White House)
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This is the second lesson from Colombia. If you want to help people out of high conflict, don’t ask them to betray their remaining identities, the ones that transcend the conflict. These are the identities they will need to stay out of the conflict. “When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in,” Nelson Mandela wrote, “he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
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Amanda Ripley (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out)
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High conflicts tend to erupt in places with low trust. When there is low trust, it is very hard to create a consensus about the facts. People become so suspicious of one another that they can believe anything. This makes it easy for conflict entrepreneurs to inflame the conflict further. And every attempt to end the conflict, by, for example, prosecuting people who shoot wolves, fuels more distrust. This is the trap of high conflict.
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Amanda Ripley (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out)
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Why any one place should forever hold enchantment for the reason you are born there is a mystery. But like cats and birds we are pussy-footed and pigeon-toed and our footsteps lead toward home.… The Eskimo longs for his northern bleakness and his ice hut, the cowboy dreams of the wide open towns and prairies of the west, the old salt is looking out to sea … and down in the hold of many ships are dead Chinamen’s bones going home to China.
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Neal Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley)
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Galveston?” he asked in that amazing voice, still surprising me by keeping our conversation going.
“Yeah. Staying at a beach house and everything. Totally slumming it and having a miserable time, you know?” I gave him a real smile that time.
Rip just raised his brows.
“I promised her I would go visit, and she promised she would come up too... What’s that face for?” I surprised myself by laughing. “I don’t believe it either. I’ll get lucky if she comes once. I’m not that delusional.”
I didn’t imagine the way his cheek twitched again, just a little, just enough to keep the smile on my face.
“I’m stuck making my own lunches from now on. I have nobody to watch scary movies with who’s more dramatic than I am screaming at the scary parts. And my house is empty,” I told him, going on a roll.
“Your lunches?” was what he picked up on.
I wasn’t sure how much he’d had to drink that he was asking me so many questions, but I wasn’t going to complain. “I can’t cook to save my life, boss. I thought everyone knew. Baking is the only thing I can handle.”
“You serious?” he asked in a surprised tone.
I nodded.
“For real?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I can’t even make rice in an Instant Pot. It’s either way too dry or it’s mush.” Oh. “An Instant Pot is—”
“I know what it is,” he cut me off.
It was my turn to make a face, but mine was an impressed one. He knew what an Instant Pot was but not a rom-com. Okay. “Sorry.”
He didn’t react to me trying to tease him, instead he asked, “You can’t even make rice in that?”
“Nope.”
“You know there’s instructions online.”
Was he messing with me now? I couldn’t help but watch him a little. How much had he drunk already? “Yeah, I know.”
“And you still screw it up?”
I blinked, soaking up Chatty Cathy over here like a plant that hadn’t seen the sun in too long. “I wouldn’t say I screw it up. It’s more like… you either need to chew a little more or a little less.”
It was his turn to blink.
“It’s a surprise. I like to keep people on their toes.”
If I hadn’t been guessing that he’d had a couple drinks before, what he did next would have confirmed it.
His left cheek twitched. Then his right one did too, and in the single blink of an eye, Lucas Ripley was smiling at me.
Straight white teeth. That not-thin but not-full mouth dark pink and pulled up at the edges. He even had a dimple.
Rip had a freaking dimple.
And I wanted to touch it to make sure it was real.
I couldn’t help but think it was just about the cutest thing I had ever seen, even though I had zero business thinking anything along those lines. But I was smart enough to know that I couldn’t say a single word to mention it; otherwise, it might never come out again.
What I did trust myself to do was gulp down half of my Sprite before saying, “You can make rice, I’m guessing?” If he wanted to talk, we could talk. I was good at talking.
“Uh-huh,” he replied, sounding almost cocky about it.
All I could get myself to do in response was grin at him, and for another five seconds, his dimple—and his smile—responded to me.
”
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Mariana Zapata (Luna and the Lie)
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Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoon is the longest-running cartoon strip in the world, read in 42 countries and 17 languages every day.
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Kay Wilkins (A Scaly Tale (Ripley's RBI, #1))
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We might still believe a negative story about our opponent, and we will continue to disagree about many things. But usually, relationships make it harder to dismiss and dehumanize other people.
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Amanda Ripley (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out)
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Harvard Professor William Z. Ripley began warning as early as 1924 that, although the stock market kept going up, trouble was brewing. He first focused on the sharp rise in real estate prices and the surge in mortgage lending. While the price of land increased, the profits from land fell, particularly for farms (then the predominant use of land). Even during the prosperity of the mid-1920s, many farms were defaulting on their debts, and these defaults were creating a minor crisis at some regional banks. In seven states, nearly half of the banks doing business as of 1920 failed before 1929. Ripley believed these regional difficulties in the mortgage markets would soon spill over to the stock markets.
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Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
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What the world needs most is one God and one square meal!
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Neal Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley)
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Finland had required a matriculation test for 160 years; it was a way to motivate kids and teachers toward a clear, common goal, and it made a high school diploma mean something. Korea rerouted air traffic for their graduation test. Polish kids studied for their tests on nights and weekends, and they arrived for the exam wearing suits, ties, and dresses. In America, however, many people still believed in a different standard, one that explained a great deal about the country’s enduring mediocrity in education: According to this logic, students who passed the required classes and came to school the required number of days should receive their diplomas, regardless of what they had learned or what would happen to them when they tried to get a job at the Bama Companies. Those kids deserved a chance to fail later, not now. It was a perverse sort of compassion designed for a different century.
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
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most Americans said teaching was a hard and important job, but many of them, including teachers and teaching professors, didn’t seem to believe it required serious intellectual heft.
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
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BELIEVE IT! Millions of gallons of wine, stored in casks in warehouses, ruptured and spilled, turning Santa Rosa’s streets into red rivers of wine, whose bouquet attracted the discerning noses of farm animals. Residents soon found drunken pigs and dogs staggering in the streets.
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Neal Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley)
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Faith is something that you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe. Archie Bunker
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Bob Ripley (Life Beyond Belief: A Preacher's Deconversion)
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It’s a pretty good little old place after all, and I have little time for the gloomers who are eternally shrieking that this old mud ball is rolling to the bow wows. I am satisfied to take my chances with this one, thank you, and not worry about the next…
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Neal Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley)
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An overnight train ride delivered him to Persia, his 153rd country, where he drank beer for breakfast and began mapping a route home.
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Neal Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley)
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By celebrating weirdness, he made it mainstream, becoming one of the most widely read and influential syndicated cartoonists of his day—and among the best-traveled men in history. More
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Neal Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley)
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Early each morning Pearlroth rode the subway into Manhattan. Most days he’d go straight to the New York Public Library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue, and he’d be one of the first to ascend the front steps between the twin lion statues. He’d grab a card catalogue tray, sift through it and select ten or more books, then find a spot in the cavernous third-floor reading room. He always turned off the reading lamps, preferring the natural light beneath the towering carved-wood ceiling. Skipping
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Neal Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley)
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Bruce, what’s going on?” Larry asked when he picked up. “You need to come here,” Bruce said. “You need to come over to Deer Stag. You’re not going to believe this.” “Is it bad?” Larry asked, concern filling his voice. Bruce shook his head as he answered, “Larry, I don’t know. Just get over here.” “Okay.
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Ron Ripley (The Academy (Moving In, #6))
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Pliny assured his readers that wonders never ceased in the natural world; the result of his labors was a Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not catalog tinged with the classics. “That women have changed into men is not a myth,” he wrote. “We find in historical records that . . . a girl at Casinum became a boy before her parents’ very eyes.” To emphasize his point, Pliny claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon: “In Africa, I myself saw someone who became a man on his wedding-day.” There was more; he claimed that people in Eastern Europe had two sets of eyes, backward-facing heads, or no heads at all. In Africa, Pliny wrote, lived people who combined both sexes in one body, yet managed to reproduce; people who survived without eating; people with ears large enough to blanket their entire bodies; and people with equine feet. In India, he said, there were people with six hands. These marvelous accounts were subsequently retold by various respected chroniclers and widely credited up through Magellan’s time.
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Laurence Bergreen (Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe)
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As you might expect, Gurney’s prose style leans toward the hyperbolic; the key literary influence here would appear to be Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and exclamation points sprout from the page like weeds after a rain.
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Michael Pollan (Second Nature: A Gardener's Education)
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More and more people were sorting into partisan camps and demonizing the other side. The categories of good and evil, red and blue, racist and not racist were getting really clear, too clear. People were starting to believe that they could know one another’s moral core without actually knowing one another at all.
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Amanda Ripley (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out)
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The main idea of the Bahá’í faith is that we are all connected. There is no us or them. Bahá’í teachings revere Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad, believing that all major religions come from one spiritual source. The community started in the mid-1800s in Iran, and it has spread just about everywhere. There are 150,000 adherents in the United States. The largest community is in India. But there are no ministers, no clerical leaders to run things. So how do they make decisions?
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Amanda Ripley (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out)
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In late March, 90 percent of Americans said they believed that “we’re all in it together,” up from 63 percent in the fall of 2018.
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Amanda Ripley (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out)
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The education superpowers believed in rigor. People in these countries agreed on the purpose of school: School existed to help students master complex academic material.
”
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)