Paraphrasing Quotes

“I am not a wishing well with legs. (Paraphrasing Babylon 5's Londo Mollari, repeately, when asked to perform hacking functions for strangers.)”

“Agent Smith, a lady is never late, everyone is simply early.” I said back, paraphrasing something I saw on a 20/20 special. “Well, a lady isn’t exactly what they are expecting.”

“Paraphrasing Yeats: It was as the Irish poet had written, a waste of breath, the years that had gone past, the years to come. There was only the present moment to live and die in. [ref. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death ...The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. W.B. Yeats”

“The self is constituted within a variety of arenas and in relation to multiple traditions. Self-hood, on this understanding, is both provisional and open-ended, and critically depends on the configuration of relationships between one’s own groups and those cultures and values that are deemed ‘other’. The regulation of alterity becomes a defining attribute of self-hood, as my sense of who I am is crucially mediated by an understanding of that which I am not (paraphrasing William Connolly).”

“The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.”

“One of the better definitions of insanity - doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.”

“Your lack of commitment to being different is what kills you. It is the insanity of doing the same thing every time and expecting a different result that wastes your time.”

“Unfortunately, Susan didn't remember what Jane Fulton once said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

“What kills leadership growth isn't ignorance, but rather the illusion of knowledge.”