Quotes About Challenge

Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith - faith in your U-boat, and your crew - beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing.

You're going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan—then what?

Now this was like trying to comprehend all the activity of an anthill, and read all the words in a book, and feel all the splendor of a cathedral, in one glance. Jack's mind was not equal to the demands that Cairo placed on it, and so for a long while he fixed his attention on small and near matters, as if he were a boy peering through a hollow reed.

If a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time.

Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.

This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure or lean something. But we have been changed. We are standing close the Heraclitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces.

Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.

His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky. He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. In the end, it was probably his general disorientation that did them in.

When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.

The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!

But unbidden and unwanted thoughts are the hardest to expel from one's mind.

Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable.

What's an adventure?" Nell said. The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. I been holed up in this place long enough.

What is a game but a drill that's dressed up in colorful clothing?" Dojo said.

Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport.

I love the scent of a man under pressure.

It's like putting on crampons and trying to walk through a room full of puppies.

The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong:

We are all in trouble.... with a bunch of dead people.

What the hell was I going to do with a rabid animal welded to a tree stump?

Almost as miraculous as life itself was the number of ways it could end, or at least turn into a living hell.

We don't have to satisfy him," Stan said. "We just have to be able to look him in the eye when we're telling him to fuck off.

Il mondo moderno è un disastro per chi si diletta a scrivere haiku: quante sillabe ci sono in «generatore elettrico»? Nove? Non ci starebbe neanche nel secondo verso.