Quotes About Challenges

Life gives you lots of chances to screw up which means you have just as many chances to get it right.

As long as you're neurotic and crazy, he's great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem.

he was juggling issues and solving problems, which was why his brain had no space left for memories.

There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, singled, and female in New York. It's a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It's about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong roommate, saying the wrong thing, being ignored, getting fired, not being taken seriously, and generally being treated like shit. But it's necessary.

Rule number one: Why is it that the one time a cute guy talks to you, you have a friend who's in crisis?

His mother had become impossible, as, he supposed, all elderly people were when they refused to accept that their lives had to change.

Damn him. Damn everything. Why is it all so goddamned hard?

You always think life is going to get easier when you get older, but it doesn't.

Everyone assumed that if you were beautiful, things just fell in your lap?

Montana turned out to be better than he had expected, wide-open and friendly, with a few exceptions. A desk clerk at the motel in Missoula shot him a hard look when she saw the name on the credit card. Being a Garcia from Miami wasn't easy these days. Some people automatically assumed you had six kilos in the trunk and a loaded Uzi under the front seat.

This is the worst year of my life, and it's only the seventeenth of January.

Burnout is common because of the long hours, the crummy pay and the depressing nature of so much of what we write. As the saying goes, they never send us to the airport when the plane lands safely.

All because my husband doesn't trust anyone with an Islamic name. Or Jews, or blacks, or Asians, or Hispanics, or Mormons, or whatever. God, it's exhausting to keep track. With my accent, I'm amazed he married me.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.

Much of the difficulty in attempting to restructure American and other societies arises form this resistance by groups with vested interests in the status quo. Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and its resisted.

Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.

That's what this book is about: other worlds, what awaits us on them, what they tell us about ourselves, and - given the urgent problems our species now faces - whether it makes sense to go. Should we solve those problems first? Or are they a reason to go?

Many of the problems facing us may be soluble, but only if we are willing to embrace brilliant, daring and complex solutions. Such solutions require brilliant, daring and complex people. I believe that there are many more of them around—in every nation, ethnic group and degree of affluence—than we realize.

All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.

Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

One of the central issues in the world population crisis is poverty.

In manned Earth orbital flights, still other problems arise. Consider a religious Muslim or Jew circling the Earth once every ninety minutes. Is he obligated to celebrate the Sabbath every seventh orbit? Spaceflight provides access to environments very different from those in which we and our customs have grown up.

When it gets complicated, that's usually because the world is complicated—or because we're complicated. When we shy away from it because it seems too difficult (or because we've been taught so poorly), we surrender the ability to take charge of our future. We are disenfranchised. Our self-confidence erodes.