Slower Is Faster Quotes

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Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
George Carlin
People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.
Richard Powers (The Overstory)
Faster!" Shane yelled. Eve hit the gas hard, and whipped around a slower-moving van. The firing ceased, at least for now. "You see why I didn't want you to stop?" "Okay, your father is officially off my Christmas list!" Eve yelled. "Oh my God, look at my car!
Rachel Caine (Lord of Misrule (The Morganville Vampires, #5))
Every day was like a day out of someone else's life. Nothing had ever happened to me, and now everything was happening to me -- and by everything, I really meant Lena. An hour was both faster and slower. I felt like I had sucked the air out of a giant balloon, like my brain wasn't getting enough oxygen. Clouds were more interesting, the lunchroom less disgusting, music sounded better, the same old jokes were funnier, and Jackson went from being a clump of grayish-green industrial buildings to a map of times and places where I might run into her. I found myself smiling for no reason, keeping my earphones in and replaying our conversations in my head, just so I could listen to them again. I had seen this kind of thing before. I had just never felt it.
Kami Garcia (Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles, #1))
The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.
Richard Peck (A Long Way from Chicago (A Long Way from Chicago, #1))
Walk neither faster nor slower than your own soul. Because it is your soul that will teach you the usefulness of each step you take.
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
Simply put: time is fluid. The faster your world spins out of control, the slower timer crawls. The more time you need, the less you're sure to get. It's all relative
Shannon Lee Alexander (Love and Other Unknown Variables)
Life is like a foot race, Marcus: There will always be people who are faster than you, and there will always be those who are slower than you. What matters, in the end, is how you ran your race.
Joël Dicker (The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair)
Time goes by at the speed of life Slower than a slow dance on a hot summer night Faster than the skin breaks on the edge of a knife And we just go on at the speed of life
Jude Cole
A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice.
Tan Twan Eng (The Garden of Evening Mists)
Who did you pass on the road?" the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay. "Nobody," said the Messenger. "Quite right," said the King; "this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you." "I do my best," the Messenger said in a sullen tone. "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!" "He can't do that," said the King, "or else he'd have been here first.
Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, #2))
Why am I doing this, Brynne?” he demanded. “I don’t know, Ethan.” I could barely speak." “Yes you do. Say it, Brynne!” I tensed as an orgasm started to rule me but he immediately reduced the pace, taking it down a notch with slow pulls in and out of my spread sex. “Say what?” I cried, frustrated. “Say the words I have to hear. Say the truth and I’ll let you come.” He speared into me slower and nipped at my bare shoulder with his teeth. “What is the truth?” I was starting to sob now, completely at his mercy. “The truth is,” he grunted the rest on three, hard, punctuating thrusts, “You. Are. Mine!” I inhaled on a cry at the final thrust. He sped up again, fucking faster. “Say it!” he growled. “I’m yours, Ethan!
Raine Miller (Naked (The Blackstone Affair, #1))
To live in the Great Way is neither easy nor difficult, but those with limited views are fearful and irresolute: the faster they hurry, the slower they go, and clinging cannot be limited: even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment is to go astray. Just let things be in their own way and there will be neither coming nor going. Obey the nature of things (your own nature), and you will walk freely and undisturbed.
Sengcan (Hsin Hsin Ming)
Faster is fatal, slower is safe.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
If you move faster than the music, it will look strange; if you move slower than the music, it will look strange! Be like autumn leaves which follow exactly the rhythm of the wind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you think you are boring your audience, go slower not faster.
Gustav Mahler
The older I get, the slower I do things and the faster they get done.
Michael J Racich
He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back? Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would? Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal. Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
The slower frequencies are dropping away to be replaced by the faster, higher, more refined frequencies that are part of the Energetic Evolution.
Elaine Seiler (Your Multi-Dimensional Workbook: Exercises for Energetic Awakening)
There will always be people better, stronger, faster, as well as people who are weaker and slower. It doesn’t make you better or worse. You are who you are
C.L. Stone (The Other Side of Envy (The Ghost Bird, #8))
A person has all sorts of lags built into him Kesey is saying. Once the most basic is the sensory lag the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes if you are the most alert person alive and most people are a lot slower than that.... You can't go any faster than that... We are all doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movies of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1 30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present but we aren't. The present we know is only a movies of the past and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Women have less direct relationship to anger...When a woman "bites" her tongue to avoid expressing anger, its not at all socialization. A lot of it is brain circuitry. Even if a woman wanted to express her anger right away, often her brain circuits would attempt to hijack this response, to reflect on it first out of fear and anticipation of retaliation. Also, the female brain has a tremendous aversion to conflict, which is set up by fear of angering the other person and losing the relationship. Instead of triggering a quick action response in the brain, as it does in males, anger in girls and women moves through the brain's gut feeling, conflict-pain anticipation, and verbal circuits. Scientists speculate that though a woman is slower to act out of anger, once her faster verbal circuits get going, they can cause her to unleash a barrage of angry words that a man cant match. Typical men speak fewer words and have less verbal fluency than women, so they may be handicapped in angry exchanges with women. Often when I see a couple who are not communicating well, the problem I see is that the man's brain's circuits push him frequently and quickly to an angry, aggressive reaction, and the woman feels frightened and shuts down.
Louann Brizendine (The Female Brain)
The slower your brain is at processing sensory information, the faster time seems to run, and vice versa’ How
Jean Paul Zogby (The Power of Time Perception)
Low-intensity, high-volume training develops the sort of suffering tolerance that enhances fatigue resistance more effectively than does speed-based training. Fast runs may hurt more, but long runs hurt longer. The slow-burn type of suffering that runners experience in longer, less intense workouts is more specific to racing.
Matt Fitzgerald (80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower)
I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it. I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.
Kiese Laymon (How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America)
A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
The world will not spin slower or faster when we have passed through the gate together. What remains is light on water, or a shifting shadow.
Emmi Itäranta (Memory of Water)
My whole life I've run either three times faster than everyone else or three times slower.
Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)
Walk neither faster nor slower than your own soul, because it is your soul that will teach you the usefulness of each step you take.
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
It is not that the turret clocks are running faster. What is happening is that our brains are running slower.
Ted Chiang (Exhalation)
Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more. Law 7: If you can’t win, change the rules. Law 8: If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. Law 11: “No” simply means begin again at one level higher. Law 13: When in doubt: THINK. Law 16: The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. Law 17: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. (adopted from Alan Kay) Law 19: You get what you incentivize. Law 22: The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. Law 26: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
As you come into this world, something else is also born. You begin your life, and it begins a journey towards you. It moves slowly, but it never stops. Wherever you go, whatever path you take, it will follow - never faster, never slower, always coming. You will run; it will walk. You will rest; it will not. One day, you will linger in the same place too long; you will sit too still or sleep too deep. And when, too late, you rise to go, you will notice a second shadow next to yours. Your life will then be over.
Steven Moffat
With you, it seems to be merely a question of time. The legality of self-destruction—the “rightness” or “wrongness” of it—seems to have much to do with how quickly the deed is done, as well as who is doing it. The faster the death, the more “wrong” it seems to be. The slower the death, the more it slips into “okayness.
Neale Donald Walsch (The Complete Conversations with God)
Schindler shook his head, and she thought it was too glib an encouragement to her to hope. Suddenly, the good cloth and the pampered flesh of Herr Schindler were a provocation. "For God's sake, Herr Direktor, I see things. We were up on the roof on Monday, chipping off the ice, me and young Lisiek. And we saw the Herr Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps by the patio, right below us. And, there on the steps, he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing. A woman carrying a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way somewhere. You know. She didn't seem fatter or thinner or slower or faster than anyone else. I couldn't guess what she'd done. The more you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see that there's no set of rules you can keep to. You can't say to yourself, If I allow these rules, I'll be safe. . . .
Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s List)
Say what?” I cried, frustrated. “Say the words I have to hear. Say the truth and I’ll let you come.” He speared into me slower and nipped at my bare shoulder with his teeth. “What is the truth?” I was starting to sob now, completely at his mercy. “The truth is,” he grunted the rest on three, hard, punctuating thrusts, “You. Are. Mine!” I inhaled on a cry at the final thrust. He sped up again, fucking faster. “Say it!” he growled. “I’m yours!
Raine Miller (Naked (The Blackstone Affair, #1))
Boys, men, old toothless women had run along beside the car when the train was again in motion, calling, offering bananas, guavas, mangoes, paper cones of flavored ice, Jello shimmering on the palm of a hand, lifting something up to him and fumbling his money, running faster to give him his change, or slower, grinning, shrugging, as the train pulled away. Somewhere he had bought half a roasted cow's head and eaten it held by the horn with a newspaper on his lap. What had caused the diarrhea he did not know.
Leonard Gardner (Fat City)
Just look down the road and tell me if you can see either of them." "I see nobody on the road." said Alice. "I only wish I had such eyes,"the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! And at such a distance too!” === “Who did you pass on the road?" the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay. "Nobody," said the Messenger. "Quite right," said the King; "this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you." "I do my best," the Messenger said in a sullen tone. "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!" "He can't do that," said the King, "or else he'd have been here first.
Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass)
Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that you killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise even although I am not wise when they want to reproach you. If you had waited a little while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the course of nature. For I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive, and not far from death. I am speaking now only to those of you who have condemned me to death. And I have another thing to say to them: You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words - I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words - certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. I am old and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me, and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is unrighteousness, has overtaken them. And now I depart hence condemned by you to suffer the penalty of death, and they, too, go their ways condemned by the truth to suffer the penalty of villainy and wrong; and I must abide by my award - let them abide by theirs. I suppose that these things may be regarded as fated, - and I think that they are well.
Plato (Apology)
The slower your brain is in processing sensory information, the faster time seems to run. This seemingly inverse relationship is important to understand why we sometimes experience time as speeding up or slowing down. So how fast are we actually processing reality?
Jean Paul Zogby (The Power of Time Perception)
Almost every software development organization has at least one developer who takes tactical programming to the extreme: a tactical tornado. The tactical tornado is a prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.
John Ousterhout (A Philosophy of Software Design)
Life is like a foot race, Marcus: There will always be people who are faster than you, and there will always be those who are slower than you. What matters, in the end, is how you ran your race.” Excerpt From: Joël Dicker. “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.” iBooks.
Joël Dicker (La Vérité sur l'Affaire Harry Quebert (Marcus Goldman, #1))
When a baby gets hungry and cries his levels of stress hormones will move upward. But if Mom or Dad regularly comes to feed him, they go back down, and over time, they become patterned and repetitive thanks to the daily routine. At times, nonetheless, the baby will feel distress and cry: not hungry, not wet, not in discernible physical pain, she will appear inconsolable. When this happens most parents hug and rock their children, almost instinctively using rhythmic motion and affectionate touch to calm the child. Interestingly, the rate at which people rock their babies is about eighty beats per minute, the same as a normal resting adult heart rate. Faster and the baby will find the motion stimulating; slower and the child will tend to keep crying. To soothe our children we reattune them physically to the beat of the master timekeeper of life.
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
Cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning - the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one - the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower - those choices cause all sorts if things to happen. That doesn't make you responsible.
Tamsyn Muir (Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1))
Cut. Take gazillion and one. This time with a little less weepy-weepy, please. A little less improvisation. A little less lip. A little more faith. A little more higher power. A little more prayer, a little less wine. Cut the crap. Cut the line. Tuck the chin. Look left, right, faster, slower. Pick seven dandelions on the first day of spring. Hate less or more. Work harder. Chew slower. Be better. Look to god, God, GOD. Watch your language. Watch your back. Collect rocks. Lick 'em clean. Count the pigeons in the backyard and multiply times forever. Give it up, let it go, take it back, take control. Say yes, say no. Say no, no, no. Stick to the script. Steps One through Twelve. One through Twelve. Keep coming back. It works if you work it.
Jessica Hendry Nelson
I stand perfectly still. Every inch of my skin is taut with tension, fraught with feeling and the pressure is building in my chest, pounding louder and faster and harder, overcompensating for my stillness. I do not tremble when I’m frozen in time. I train my breaths to come slower, I count things that do not exist, I make up numbers I do not have, I pretend time is a broken hourglass bleeding seconds through sand. I dare to believe. I dare to hope....
Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
Space is like liquid/water, but space has no friction. Water has a density. The planets have a density. The galaxies are like different vortexes and the gravitational pull is caused by the pull of the vortex. The vortex spins faster in the center and slower on the top/outside. So that's why gravitational pull is different on other planets/moons Density dictates where you fall in the galaxy/vortex and there are many vortexes throughout the universe. Theory.
Eric John Mancini
Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. It is a phenomenon with roots deeper than our money system, for it depends on the prior quantification of time. An animal or a child has “all the time in the world.” The same was apparently true for Stone Age peoples, who usually had very loose concepts of time and rarely were in a hurry. Primitive languages often lacked tenses, and sometimes lacked even words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” The comparative nonchalance primitive people had toward time is still apparent today in rural, more traditional parts of the world. Life moves faster in the big city, where we are always in a hurry because time is scarce. But in the past, we experienced time as abundant. The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: “She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone—all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we barely have time to talk.” For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. “Clocks,” writes John Zerzan, “make time scarce and life short.” Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. “Time is money,” the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor “I can’t afford the time.” If the material world
Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition)
Those with limited views are fearful and irresolute: the faster they hurry, the slower they go.
Chris Prentiss (Zen and the Art of Happiness)
In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.
Liu Cixin (Remembrance of Earth's Past: The Three-Body Trilogy (Remembrance of Earth's Past, #1-3))
The world is getting faster just as I’m getting slower. I can’t keep up so I’ve stopped trying.
Michael Robotham (When She Was Good (Cyrus Haven, #2))
Tolerance for suffering is also trainable. Once a runner has discovered that she can suffer more than she thought she could, her perception of effort changes in a lasting way.
Matt Fitzgerald (80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower)
The Creed for the Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive (Peter's Laws) 1. If anything can go wrong, Fix it!!! (To hell with Murphy!!) 2. When given a choice - Take Both!! 3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. 4. Start at the top, then work your way up. 5. Do it by the book... but be the author! 6. When forced to compromise, ask for more. 7. If you can't beat them, join them, then beat them. 8. If it's worth doing, it's got to be done right now. 9. If you can't win, change the rules. 10. If you can't change the rules, then ignore them. 11. Perfection is not optional. 12. When faced without a challenge, make one. 13. "No" simply means begin again at one level higher. 14. Don't walk when you can run. 15. Bureaucracy is a challenge to be conquered with a righteous attitude, a tolerance for stupidity, and a bulldozer when necessary. 16. When in doubt: THINK! 17. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing. 18. The squeaky wheel gets replaced. 19. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. 20. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!!
Peter Safar
In the olden days, people thought time was a constant. It could not be slowed or sped up. Time was time, and no man could move it. Then Einstein said, Bullshit. Okay, he didn’t say that. What he said was E = mc2. Simply put: time is fluid. The faster your world spins out of control, the slower time crawls. The more time you need, the less you’re sure to get. It’s all relative.
Shannon Lee Alexander (Love and Other Unknown Variables)
Life is like a foot race, Marcus: There will always be people who are faster than you, and there will always be those who are slower than you. What matters, in the end, is how you ran the race.
Joël Dicker (La Vérité sur l'Affaire Harry Quebert (Marcus Goldman, #1))
Anger travels faster, conscience is slower! Angers goes ahead to destroy long before conscience lately arrives to regret! Don't try to keep anger just for a while... It destroys before negotiations!
Israelmore Ayivor (Daily Drive 365)
The world is getting noisier. We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.
Jacqueline Woodson
Modern life is filled with new speeds for which we have no expressions. Remarkably, speeds are described using the most conservative expressions that exist. Despite the train, the airplane, revolutions per minute, slow motion, the outermost limitation of speed expressions is the same today as it was in the Stone Age; nothing in language has gotten any faster than a thought or lightning or any slower than a snail. That is a devilish situation for a time period that has no time and that believes itself called to give the world a new speediness; the apples of quickness are dangling in front of us, but we cannot seem to open our mouths.
Robert Musil (Thought Flights)
Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others. When walking it’s essential to find your own basic rhythm, and maintain it. The right basic rhythm is the one that suits you, so well that you don’t tire and can keep it up for ten hours. But it is highly specific and exact. So that when you are forced to adjust to someone else’s pace, to walk faster or slower than usual, the body follows badly.
Frédéric Gros (A Philosophy of Walking)
It is important to understand that the duration of exercise matters far more than does the intensity of exercise with respect to the goal of enhancing fatigue resistance in the brain. What counts is not how hard the muscles are working but rather how long the brain is required to stay focused on the task at hand. In fact, research has shown that the brain can be fatigued at rest in a way that increases fatigue resistance and physical endurance.
Matt Fitzgerald (80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower)
The vast majority of runners, however, seldom train at a truly comfortable intensity. Instead, they push themselves a little day after day, often without realizing it. If the typical elite runner does four easy runs for every hard run, the average recreationally competitive runner—and odds are, you’re one of them—does just one easy run for every hard run. Simply put: Running too hard too often is the single most common and detrimental mistake in the sport.
Matt Fitzgerald (80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower)
He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is. He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road. But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin. The world he claims, claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down… All day long, the next day, the city is quiet. The air above the city lacks the usual thousand little trails of smoke from cookfires. Hymns rise from the temple. Families are indoors. The soldiers are back in barracks. The Chief Priest grows hoarse with singing. The governor plays chess with his secretary and dictates letters. The free bread the temple distributed to the poor has gone stale by midday, but tastes all right dipped in water or broth. Death has interrupted life only as much as it ever does. We die one at a time and disappear, but the life of the living continues. The earth turns. The sun makes its way towards the western horizon no slower or faster than it usually does. Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She’s braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen’s been thrown into the corner and the body is gone. Evidently anonymous burial isn’t quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won’t last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision. That’s enough now, she thinks. That’s more than enough. Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know. She is weeping. The executee helps her to stand up.
Francis Spufford (Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense)
Different types of thinking provide strengths in one area and deficits in another. My thinking is slower but it may be more accurate. Faster thinking would be helpful in social situations, but slower, careful thought would enhance production of art or building mechanical devices. Rapidly delivered verbal information is even more challenging for object-visual thinkers like me. Standup comedians often move too quickly through their routines for me to process. By the time I have visualized the first joke, the comedian has already launched two more. I get lost when verbal information is presented too fast. Imagine how a student who is a visual thinker feels in a classroom where a teacher is talking fast to get through a lesson.
Temple Grandin (Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions)
I learned about the propulsion system the discs use. They have a particle emitter that first shoots out a particle going three-quarters the speed of light. Then a trillionth of a second later, it shoots out another particle at light speed. The faster particle bounces off the slower particle like a billiard ball and shoots back to the ship, striking it on the side of the disc. This happens trillions of times per second, and each time the light-speed particles hit the ship, they create thrust. When you get trillions of those particle hits per second, it allows the ship to quickly accelerate to near light speed. The emitter can shoot particles from any part of the disc’s round edge, so it is a great design because it can very easily make turns and travel in any direction.
David Wilcock (The Ascension Mysteries: Revealing the Cosmic Battle Between Good and Evil)
Evolution is an inherently competitive process: The faster lion catches more prey than other lions, produces more offspring than other lions, and thus raises the proportion of fast lions in the next generation. This couldn’t happen if there were no competition for resources. If lion food existed in unlimited supply, the faster lions would have no advantage over the slower ones, and the next generation of lions would be, on average, no faster than the last generation. No competition, no evolution by natural selection.
Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them)
And time is something we made up. Digital clocks, quartz watches, atomic clocks don’t measure ‘time’ they are just devices that exhibit change. Clocks are navigational devices that we morphed into devices that somehow allow us to control time. However no matter how you ‘change’ a clock or a watch - you can make a clock slower or faster, put it ahead or back – it doesn’t affect the sunrise, or the galaxy speed, or death (or taxes). It’s just a game. Change is a constant. Whatever you do – change happens. Time Control
Martin Gover (Time Control - Taking Control and Achieving Goals)
Cyberhuman minds will process information thousands of times faster, so if you have extended yourself in cyberspace so much so that you can be rightfully called a cyberhuman, your thinking has now accelerated to such an extent that one calendar day may last decades or even centuries of 'subjective time.' Imagine how this new generation of cyberhumans would perceive the unenhanced part of human population - the slower thinking creatures of the physical world would look almost static to them, perhaps like houseplants to us.
Alex M. Vikoulov (The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence (The Science and Philosophy of Information))
nothing may travel faster than the speed of light. Because of the equivalence of energy and mass, the energy which an object has due to its motion will add to its mass. In other words, it will make it harder to increase its speed. This effect is only really significant for objects moving at speeds close to the speed of light. For example, at 10 percent of the speed of light an object’s mass is only 0.5 percent more than normal, while at 90 percent of the speed of light it would be more than twice its normal mass. As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there. For this reason, any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light. Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light.
Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time)
Walk neither faster nor slower than your own soul, because it is your soul that will teach you the usefulness of each step you take. Sometimes taking part in a great battle will be the thing that will help to change the course of history. But sometimes you can do that simply by smiling, for no reason, at someone you happen to pass on the street. Without intending to, you might have saved the life of a complete stranger, who also thought he was useless and might have been ready to kill himself until a smile gave him new hope and confidence.
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
But things like Christmas or holidays, any kind of religious ritual or shared experience, like performing together, or a play—those take place in sacred time. It’s like this—” He grabbed a pen and drew on the inside cover of the paperback. A little Venn diagram: two intersecting circles. “—a circle within a circle. Do you see? This big circle is profane time. This one’s sacred time. The two coexist, but we only step into sacred time when we intentionally make space for it—like at Christmas, or the Jewish High Holy Days—or if something extraordinary happens. You know that feeling you get, that time is passing faster or slower? Well, it really is moving differently. When you step into sacred time, you’re actually moving sideways into a different space that’s inside the normal world. It’s folded in. Do you see?
Elizabeth Hand (Wylding Hall)
Driving with a mobile phone makes you hit the brakes 0.5 seconds slower. If you are travelling at 112km per hour, in 0.5seconds you travel 15.5 meters... a lot can happen over that distance. If you are distracted in your car, you have a 9 times higher chance of having an accident.
Kevin Horsley (Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive (Mental Mastery, #1))
By the way, when a woman does move slower, the guy’s inclination will be to move faster. He’ll wonder why she’s just going with the flow and not pushing him toward commitment. The perceived challenge increases as he wonders what he needs to do to make her want only him. Her perceived value increases as he sees that she’s more discerning than to just rush into commitment with someone who hasn’t really gone out of his way for her yet. He now begins to work for her. As we know, everyone values what they work for, and this valuing continues once they get what they want.
Matthew Hussey (Get the Guy: Learn Secrets of the Male Mind to Find the Man You Want and the Love You Deserve)
But the mind, or the heart, she didn’t know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn’t get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it.
Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1))
The lower chakras have slower and denser vibrations, while the higher chakras spin at faster speeds with higher vibrations. The chakras’ energy patterns emit colors corresponding to their light-wave frequencies. Thus, the root chakra is red, which is the slowest light-wave frequency, and the sacral is the slightly faster frequency of orange. As you go further up the body, the light-wave colors reflect their increasing vibratory rate. So, the solar plexus is yellow, the heart is green, the throat is light blue, the third eye is dark blue, and the crown is the fastest light-wave frequency, violet.
Doreen Virtue (The Lightworker's Way: Awakening Your Spiritual Power to Know and Heal)
I could recognize the look in the lead officer's eyes. It reminded me of the cop on Lester Street in White Cloud. I was his target. I didn't know why, but he was focused on me, just as I was honing in on him. The other officer was his accompanist. He marched to the cadence of a non-rhythmic drum. he moved closer slower, while my heart beat faster.
Razel Jones (Wounds)
provided I may look upon the sun and the moon and gaze at the other planets; provided I may trace their risings and settings, their periods and the causes of their travelling faster or slower; provided I may behold all the stars that shine at night – some fixed, others not travelling far afield but circling within the same area; some suddenly shooting forth, and others dazzling the eye with scattered fire, as if they are falling, or gliding past with a long trail of blazing light; provided I can commune with these and, so far as humans may, associate with the divine, and provided I can keep my mind always directed upwards, striving for a vision of kindred things – what does it matter what ground I stand on?
Seneca (On the Shortness of Life)
Such critics are generally smarter than the novelists whose works they analyze, which means their brains move at a more rapid speed. They may not be able to adjust to the slower vehicle that is the novel. As a result, they “translate” the pace of the text into the faster pace that is natural to them and then construct their critique in line with their version.
Haruki Murakami (Novelist as a Vocation)
So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will’s along, Will breaking one window instead of none, because Jim’s watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.
Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes: The Authorized Adaptation)
For now, there are only a few words I want to hear." He pressed gently on her lower lip. "You can tell me faster, slower, harder, and ---" He leaned closer till his mouth only a breath away from hers. He pressed his lips lightly against hers, then pulled back to look at her. "Softer." "Then there's my favorite ---" He cradled her head with his hands. "---don't stop.
Kerrelyn Sparks (How to Tame a Beast in Seven Days (The Embraced, #1))
Beyond a critical speed, no one can save time without forcing another to lose it. The man who claims a seat in a faster vehicle insists that his time is worth more than that of the passenger in a slower one. Beyond a certain velocity, passengers become consumers of other people’s time, and accelerating vehicles become the means for effecting a net transfer of life-time.
Ivan Illich (Energy and Equity)
The amazing flexibility of our minds seems nearly irreconcilable with the notion that our brains must be made out of fixed-rule hardware, which cannot be reprogrammed. We cannot make our neurons fire faster or slower, we cannot rewire our brains, we cannot redesign the interior of a neuron, we cannot make [any] choices about the hardware—and yet, we can control how we think.
Douglas R. Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid)
when I feel an incredible desire for where I want my life to go, I know that if I were to pursue it aggressively, this would only cause me to fight against universal energy. The more effort I have to put into trying to attain it, the more I know that I am doing something wrong. Allowing, on the other hand, doesn’t require effort. It feels more like a release, because it means realizing that since everything is One, that which I intend to get is already mine. The process of allowing happens by first trusting, and then by always being true to who I am. In this way, I will only attract that which is truly mine, and it all happens at the rate I’m comfortable with. I can keep focusing on what worries me or what I think I need or find lacking, and my life won’t move toward what I’d like to experience. It will just stay the way it is now, because I’m paying attention to my fears and what upsets me or leaves me feeling unfulfilled, instead of expanding my awareness by trusting and allowing new experiences. So I can let the picture materialize slower or faster, depending on how quickly I want to let go of my worries and relax into the process.
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country’s philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.) Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn’t take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodies like tiny human beings dressed in flower petals. (Fish, which flew through that most dangerous element, water, were believed not to exist. Fishy-looking beings in pools and streams were either hallucinations or other things under some kind of spell, and interfering with, catching, or—most especially—eating fish was strictly forbidden. All swimming was considered magical. Animals seen doing it were assumed to be favourites of a local water-sprite or dangerously insane; humans never tried.)
Robin McKinley (Spindle's End)
The Matterhorn has two different tracks and which one you ride is determined by which of the two lines you choose ti wait in. Seasoned park-goers know that the right line (next to Alice in Wonderland in Fantasyland) puts you on the slower track, where the ride lasts 30 seconds longer, while the left line (towards Tomorrowland) feeds into the faster track, which has one unexpected drop and tighter turns.
David Hoffman
I think of my grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I’m so sad and I can’t really see a way out of what I’m feeling but I’m leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I’m already hurting. I’m not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.
Kiese Laymon (How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America)
The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. It also greatly increased the lethality of the bacteria. This is an evolutionary principle that has long been observed in populations of disease-spreading microbes. Bacteria and viruses evolve at much faster rates than humans do, for several reasons. For one, bacterial life cycles are incredibly fast: a single bacterium can produce a million offspring in a matter of hours. Each new generation opens up new possibilities for genetic innovation, either by new combinations of existing genes or by random mutations. Human genetic change is several orders of magnitude slower; we have to go through a whole fifteen-year process of maturation before we can even think about passing our genes to a new generation.
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair—unless you happen to dislike the elderly, in which case research suggests that you might have been slightly faster than usual!
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Our body is like a machine. If we constantly run the machinery at high speed, it will wear out faster. Since animals with slower metabolic rates live longer, eating more calories, which drives up our metabolic rate, will cause us only to age faster. Contrary to what you may have heard and read in the past, our goal should be the opposite: to eat less, only as much as we need to maintain a slim and muscular weight, and no more, so as to keep our metabolic rate relatively slow.
Joel Fuhrman (Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss)
The week of slow is the running equivalent of a juice fast. Some people use short-term juice fasts to hit the reset button on their diet. The fast is not an end in itself. The goal is to make permanent changes to their diet, replacing bad habits with good ones. But instead of just making these changes from one day to the next, they first take a few days to break their attachments to the old habits by consuming nothing but healthy fruit and vegetable juices. Then, once they are no longer craving potato chips or whatever else, they return to a normal but improved diet.
Matt Fitzgerald (80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower)
Climate Change is caused by human emissions; it moves faster or slower partly in response to our rate of emissions, but also because of natural "tipping points" that make the planet take things in its own hands. So, for example, during one of the last great climactic shifts, the planet may have gone from being fairly warm to an ice age in less than ten years; and then the ice age may have ended in a single season! These things are very hard to model, but projections for the future that imagine Climate Change will occur in a gradual and orderly fashion are probably wrong.
Sharon Astyk (Depletion & Abundance: Life on the New Home Front)
The Mass is a mystery," said Lady Mary slowly. "That means that the more you look into it the more you can find in it, and what you find in it is always love, the love of God. When Christ died for all mankind on the Cross of Calvary all men were not present; they were far away, some in space and some in time, some dead long since, some not yet born, and yet the sacrifice was made for all. When He rose again He drew all men up into the life of God, and yet all men were not there with Him at that time. So He gave us Himself again, in a way that could reach all men everywhere. At the beginning of His Passion, on the night of His betrayal, He offered His own flesh and blood to God the Father under the form of bread and wine. And after His resurrection He gave power to His apostles to present Him in this way to God and to each other. Priests receive the power of the apostles to consecrate this sacrifice so that the bread and wine become the most glorious Body and Blood of Our Lord, and we poor sinners, separated from Him though we seem to be, may be made one Body with Him, and live with His eternal life, which is the love in the very being of the most blessed Trinity.
Meriol Trevor (Sun Slower, Sun Faster)
Throughout these lectures I have delighted in showing you that the price of gaining such an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense. We must accept some very bizarre behavior: the amplification and suppression of probabilities, light reflecting from all parts of a mirror, light travelling in paths other than a straight line, photons going faster or slower than the conventional speed of light, electrons going backwards in time, photons suddenly disintegrating into a positron-electron pair, and so on. That we must do, in order to appreciate what Nature is really doing underneath nearly all the phenomena we see in the world.
Richard P. Feynman (QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton Science Library))
Employment of this concept of surfaces and gaps, then, gives us many advantages over what could be called slower moving forms of combat, where strength is thrown against strength. Attacking through gaps, avoiding surfaces, gives us an advantage of economy of force. If we are pitting strength against strength, assaulting enemy strong points, we are consuming our manpower as well as ammunition and supplies as we go along. If we go through the gaps, we are practicing economy of force. We are reaching our objective without using up our men. We are leaving the enemy behind. Because we are moving faster, we have the advantage of rapid exploitation.
William S. Lind (Maneuver Warfare Handbook)
Peter’s Laws™ The Creed of the Persistent and Passionate Mind 1. If anything can go wrong, fix it! (To hell with Murphy!) 2. When given a choice—take both! 3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. 4. Start at the top, then work your way up. 5. Do it by the book . . . but be the author! 6. When forced to compromise, ask for more. 7. If you can’t win, change the rules. 8. If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. 9. Perfection is not optional. 10. When faced without a challenge—make one. 11. No simply means begin one level higher. 12. Don’t walk when you can run. 13. When in doubt: THINK! 14. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing. 15. The squeaky wheel gets replaced. 16. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. 17. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself! 18. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite. 19. You get what you incentivize. 20. If you think it is impossible, then it is for you. 21. An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how something can’t be done. 22. The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. 23. If it was easy, it would have been done already. 24. Without a target you’ll miss it every time. 25. Fail early, fail often, fail forward! 26. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. 27. The world’s most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind. 28. Bureaucracy is an obstacle to be conquered with persistence, confidence, and a bulldozer when necessary.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
To Einstein, this insight was monumental. Either Newton or Maxwell was correct. The other had to be wrong. But how could it be that you could never catch up to light? At the patent office, he had plenty of time to ponder this question. One day, in the spring of 1905, it struck him while riding the train in Bern. "A storm broke loose in my mind," he would recall. His brilliant insight was that since the speed of light is measured by clocks and metersticks, and since the speed of light is constant no matter how fast you move, space and time must be distorted in order to keep the speed of light constant! It meant that if you are on fast-moving spaceship, then clocks inside the ship beat slower than clocks on the Earth. Time slows down the faster you move--this phenomenon is described by Einstein's special relativity.
Michio Kaku (The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything)
In the past,” Sam Slater said carefully, “this fear of authority was only the negative side of a positive moral code of ‘Honor, Patriotism, and Service.’ In the past, men sought to achieve the positives of the code, rather than simply to avoid its negatives.” He was obviously choosing his words gingerly, as if worried that they would not be understood. And as he talked, he grew still more charming than before as his enthusiasm increased. Sam Slater’s enthusiasm, Holmes noticed, affected the man strangely. He did not get excited. Instead of leaning forward and talking faster, he seemed to relax and talk slower and slower, growing calmer and more cold than ever. And yet he was more charming. “But the advent of materialism and the machine age changed all that, see? We have seen the world change,” he said, “in our time. The machine has destroyed the meaning of the old positive code. Obviously, you cannot make a man voluntarily chain himself to a machine because its ‘Honorable.’ The man knows better.” Holmes nodded his agreement. It was an original idea. “All that is left, then,” Sam Slater went on, “is the standardized negative side of the code as expressed in Law. The fear of authority which was once only a side issue but today is the main issue, because its the only issue left. “You cant make a man believe it is ‘Honorable,’ so you have no choice but to make him afraid of not chaining himself to his machine. You can do it by making him afraid of his friends’ disapproval. You can shame him because he is a social drone. You can make him afraid of starving unless he works for his machine. You can threaten him with imprisonment. Or, in the highest efficiency, you can make him afraid of death by execution. “But you cant tell him it is ‘Honorable’ any more. You have to make him afraid.
James Jones (From Here to Eternity)
The phrase “slow reading” goes back at least as far as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who in 1887 described himself as a “teacher of slow reading.” The way he phrased it, you know he thought he was bucking the tide. That makes sense, because the modern world, i.e., a world built upon the concept that fast is good and faster is better, was just getting up a full head of steam. In the century and a quarter since he wrote, we have seen the world fall in love with speed in all its guises, including reading—part of President John F. Kennedy’s legend was his ability to speed read through four or five newspapers every morning. And this was all long before computers became household gadgets and our BFFs. Now and then the Nietzsches of the world have fought back. Exponents of New Criticism captured the flag in the halls of academe around the middle of the last century and made “close reading” all the rage. Then came Slow Food, then Slow Travel, then Slow Money. And now there is Slow Reading. In all these initiatives, people have fought against the velocity of modern life by doing … less and doing it slower.
Malcolm Jones
Conflict can be seen as time-competitive observation-orientation-decision-action cycles. Each party to a conflict begins by observing. He observes himself, his physical surroundings and his enemy. On the basis of his observation, he orients, that is to say, he makes a mental image or “snapshot” of his situation. On the basis of this orientation, he makes a decision. He puts the decision into effect, i.e., he acts. Then, because he assumes his action has changed the situation, he observes again, and starts the process anew. His actions follow this cycle, sometimes called the “Boyd Cycle” or “00DA Loop.” If one side in a conflict can consistently go through the Boyd Cycle faster than the other, it gains a tremendous advantage. By the time the slower side acts, the faster side is doing something different from what he observed, and his action is inappropriate. With each cycle, the slower party’s action is inappropriate by a larger time margin. Even though he desperately strives to do something that will work, each action is less useful than its predecessor; he falls farther and farther behind. Ultimately, he ceases to be effective.
William S. Lind (Maneuver Warfare Handbook)
A good metric is a ratio or a rate. Accountants and financial analysts have several ratios they look at to understand, at a glance, the fundamental health of a company. You need some, too. There are several reasons ratios tend to be the best metrics: • Ratios are easier to act on. Think about driving a car. Distance traveled is informational. But speed—distance per hour—is something you can act on, because it tells you about your current state, and whether you need to go faster or slower to get to your destination on time. • Ratios are inherently comparative. If you compare a daily metric to the same metric over a month, you’ll see whether you’re looking at a sudden spike or a long-term trend. In a car, speed is one metric, but speed right now over average speed this hour shows you a lot about whether you’re accelerating or slowing down. • Ratios are also good for comparing factors that are somehow opposed, or for which there’s an inherent tension. In a car, this might be distance covered divided by traffic tickets. The faster you drive, the more distance you cover—but the more tickets you get. This ratio might suggest whether or not you should be breaking the speed limit.
Alistair Croll (Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster)
Mr. Sulu,” Jim said, “I can’t avoid the impression that you’re counting all the asteroids in this neighborhood.” “Not counting them as such, Captain. We’re building a recognition database, tagging the asteroids with nominal IDs, and noting their masses for future reference. If you know an asteroid’s mass within a couple of significant figures, you can very quickly calculate what kind of forces would need to be applied to it to make it move. Once Khiy and I get them all tagged, or all the ones in this area, we can get the ship’s computer to alert us when an enemy vessel is getting close enough for one of the asteroids to be a threat. Then either Bloodwing or Enterprise gives the necessary rock a pull with a tractor or a push with a pressor …” Jim grinned. In slower-than-light combat, the lightspeedor-faster weapons came into their own, as long as you kept away from the higher, near-relativistic impulse speeds. “You’re concentrating on the asteroids nearer to the processing facility, I see.” “Yes, sir—a sphere about a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, including almost the entire breadth of the belt in this area. Any ship outside that diameter isn’t going to be a threat to us at subwarp speeds. If they want to engage with us, they’ve got to drop their speed and come inside the sphere.” “‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…’” Jim said. “Get on with it, Mr. Sulu. In a situation like this, every little bit helps. Are you going to be able to have this ready by the time the ‘flies’ arrive?” “We’ll do our best, Captain. There are some inconsistencies between the ways Bloodwing’s computer handles large amounts of data like this, and the way ours does. We’ve got to solve them on the fly.” And Sulu chuckled.
Diane Duane (The Empty Chair)
When I start to feel him slide in, I gasp. I knew he was going to feel big---because he is big. I didn't know he'd feel this good, this quickly, though. I close my eyes and savor the way he stretches me, the immediate intensity I feel. When he starts that slow slide, my mouth falls open. Soon I'm clawing at the bedsheets like I'm crazed. I'm certain I'll go hoarse at the end of this, but I don't care. I could lose my voice for a year and it would be worth it, this feels so freaking incredible. Max eases to a slower pace, then leans over me and kisses my shoulder. "Damn it, Joelle. You are...god, you're..." My eyes roll to the back of my head as I smile to myself. His inability to finish a sentence while inside me is the highest compliment. My vision focuses, and I take in just how gorgeous he is in this moment: eyes glazed over with arousal, jaw clenched, brow dotted with sweat, lips swollen from kissing me. Seeing Max so turned on combined with just how good he feels has me tingling between my thighs once more. He digs his fingers into my hips and picks up the pace. "Do you have any idea how long I've wanted to do this with you?" he growls. I moan. "No" and push my hips up higher. "A long fucking time." "Same," I rasp. "Same, same, same." He goes harder and faster until my vision begins to go starry. And then he slips a hand between my legs and works the most sensitive part of me with the pads of his fingers. The intensity deepens until my legs start to shake. I reach around and grip a handful of his delectably rock-hard ass. "I'm gonna need to get a good look at this up close very, very soon," I say. He chuckles between pants. I babble that I'm close. "Thank fuck." And then Max puts it into some high gear I didn't know he was capable of. He goes harder and faster than I thought was humanly possible. It's enough, though. Because moments later I'm bursting once again. He isn't far behind. He tenses against me before shuddering, then grunting. He lightly bites the spot where my neck meets my shoulder. The soft scrape, so sweet and carnal at once, has me grinning in ecstasy. We collapse on the bed, him on top of me, and stay that way for nearly a minute. I close my eyes and breathe in the mint-spice scent on his bedsheets, relishing the weight of his body on top of mine.
Sarah Echavarre Smith (The Boy With the Bookstore)