Collected quotes, 1 of n

A black fountain pen on a journal page
This entry is part 1 of 10 in the series Bits and Pieces

All these clocks, like the whole information industry today, run the risk of no longer communicating anything because they tell too much. But they also possess another characteristic of the information industry: they no longer speak of anything except themselves and their internal functioning.

Eco, Umberto. “How Not to Know the Time.” How to Travel with a Salmon and other essays. Vintage: Random House, pp. 47-50.

You can never know your cat. In fact, you can never know anyone as completely as you want.

But that’s okay, love is better.

Paul, Caroline & MacNaughton, Wendy. Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology. Bloomsbury USA, 2013.
By way of Maria Popova’s Brainpickings post.

Ask good questions. Good questions save time. Bad questions waste time. Bad questions create unnecessary back-and-forth conversations, which create frustration and conflict. People who ask bad questions get frustrated because they can’t get help, and people who are trying to help get frustrated because answering bad questions is so damn frustrating.

Zhu, Gordon. “How to be good at asking coding questions.” Medium,https://medium.com/@gordon_zhu/how-to-be-great-at-asking-questions-e37be04d0603. Accessed 24 January 2019.

Here began his fantastic attachment to his friends, especially the humbler ones. The lonely boy found affection among strangers and, in sheer gratitude, he gave them his pocket money, his toys, even the clothes off his back. His friends became his family: his home became every street, every street corner, every house however humble where he had known kindness, where he had been received as one of the group, where he had been given refuge as a “stowaway.”

Joaquin, Nick. “The Short, Unhappy Life of Boy Vergel.” Reportage on crime:Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 128.

The fatalism of the Filipino is usually passive, expressed in the classic proverb about our fortune coming to us though we seek it not. But the more complex form of that fatalism sees a man as being steered in a certain direction by one circumstance after another until he finally reaches a point when, though he acts voluntarily — or thinks he acts voluntarily — he is actually being pushed by the circumstances that brought him to the point of action. The fatalist, as he looks back before he acts, sees everything as having conspired to make him perform that particular act, and therefore sees it as inevitable, as “fate.” This is the amok mentality. Afterwards, what others regard as an act of will, the fatalist regards quite sincerely as a product of circumstances.

Joaquin, Nick. “Four and ‘Fate.'” Reportage on crime:Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 163.