Functioning Quotes

“Function? Why function? Who needs more functioning human beings? It's really quite astounding, if you ask me, the sheer quantity of normal in the world today. I think that's the real horror of modern life.”

“When our mental functioning is whittling away and our mind becomes a lame duck, perception does not form the context anymore and all connections on the social chessboard are conked out. Only patience and endurance may draw us out of the quagmire of numbness and allow us to tear open the cloudy screen that is hiding our points of ‘interest’ and ‘attention’, so long as we focus on the ‘singular moments’ and the ‘appealing details’ in our life. Awareness can help us shape a comprehensive picture for a functional future. ("Lost the global story.")”

“It has been said that love is a function of communication. I believe that to be true. I believe, by extension, that human understanding is a function of communication. And the better human beings understand one another, the higher the level of functioning.”

“Shoes need feet to walk! Everything needs something to function!”

“Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.”

“It would seem that the author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the “author-function”, while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer_ it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor_ it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer_ but not an author. The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.”

“In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.”

“Immobilization: A state, however mild or serious, in which you are not functioning at the level that you would like to. If feelings lead to such a state, you need to look no further for a reason to get rid of them.”

“I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that's clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That's what they should do. It shouldn't be a government function.”

“There are things that, when they break, they keep on functioning, just in some other, lesser way. Like an elevator: it breaks, and it's a room. An escalator: it breaks, and it's stairsThe heart is the same.It breaks, and you might not even notice, because you still feel things, you still have emotions.”