What Did We Learn Quotes

“It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn't intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it's a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it's a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it's a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”

— James S.A. Corey

“If our testimonies are strong onthis point and if we feel the absolute assurance that God loves us, we will change our questons. We won't ask, 'Why did this happen?' or 'Why doesn't God care about me?' Instead, our questions will become, 'What can I learn from this experience?' or 'How does the Lord want me to handle this?”

— John Bytheway

“Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.”

— Tom Perrotta

“How far have you walked for men who've never held your feet in their laps?
how often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short?
why do you find the unavailable so alluring?
where did it begin? what went wrong? and who made you feel so worthless?
if they wanted you, wouldn't they have chosen you?
all this time, you were begging for love silently, thinking they couldn't hear you, but they smelt it on you, you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin?
and what about the others that would do anything for you, why did you make them love you until you could not stand it?
how are you both of these women, both flighty and needful?
where did you learn this, to want what does not want you?
where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?”

— Warsan Shire

“Wisdom bought with a tremendous price, Jane. You know what William and I suffered. I suppose the benefit to our tumultuous courtship was the trial-by-fire aspect of it all.We learned our lessons via grievous methods, but we did learn them.”

— Sharon Lathan

“Fight your genes.' The Big Hoom said to us once, to Susan and me. He did not explain. He did not know how to. But we knew what it meant. It meant that we were to march into the hall and take out our school books and reproduce the slipper-shaped animalcule whose psuedopodia power it through a world without feeling; to learn how to inscribe a hexagon into a circle without tearing the paper; to assimilate the causes and consequences of the battle of Panipat without ever identifying your own enemy because that would be mean identifying yourself.
'Fight your genes'. Focus. Be diligent. Concentrate. Do”

— Jerry Pinto

“That night, Sushila went to the puja room when she arrived home. Her house was small, with only a few rooms, but there had always been a puja room as long as she could remember. It was in the northeast corner of the house, and Sushila once asked her mother why they did not have a fancier bigger puja room.
"We are small people and we will be happy with small gods. It is not the size of the space used for worship that matters," said her mother. "It is the size of your heart that matters. You can learn the lessons of Buddha and the Goddess in a prison, you do not need even this humble puja room. There are people in this town who are happy with much less than what we have.”

— Joe Niemczura

“So, what did you learn?
Curiosity asked the Cat, then
poked her carcass with a stick.”

— Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

“Loneliness.
By all the saints, he was mad. He should be filled with hatred and thoughts of revenge. Vaden was his enemy and that time of friendship has gone. When would he learn to give up those memories and realize Vaden meant what he said?
Tonight. From no on he would regard Vaden as any other enemy. To do anything else would endanger Dundragon and Thea. He must close away this sense of loss and behave with sanity.
The entire world was a barren place. To accept that Vaden was his enemy did not make the loneliness more desolate.
It only seemed to make it weigh heavier, much heavier,”

— Iris Johansen

“Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it's a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it's a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it's a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did.”

— James S.A. Corey

“How did I learn empathy? I learned it while suffering. How did I learn about karma? Because it came back to me and I deserved it. I now know when any hurt I experience is due to circumstances outside of my control, karma, or self-imposed consequences for foolish choices. I do feel justice is served if karma humbles someone who needs it, and as anyone who has been wronged can attest, what they seem to want most is for the offending party to experience how it feels and to know in that moment exactly what they did to someone else and to be filled with remorse and hopefully, repentance.”

— Donna Lynn Hope

“It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money. One day, after”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“One regret I have is that I did not learn more about what was happening very early, so that I could have tried to stop people from engaging in illegal activities.”

— Fred F. Fielding

“I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.”

— Robert Krulwich

“What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.”

— Laurie Lee

“I think the first thing is don't give up. If you love the craft. If you love being a detective and discovering who a character is and the detail of how they walk and what kind of shoes they wear and what did they do yesterday and what's important to them. I definitely advise actors to learn about the craft.”

— Lin Shaye

“I'll tell you what I did need to learn was tolerance, and I think I've been actually given a daily opportunity to practice that, and it's - it's - and I know that that sounds almost like a backhanded slap, and it is in a way because I haven't been successful at it every day.”

— Mel Gibson

“You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: the technique.”

— Jacques Pepin

“Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.”

— Neil Gaiman

“What better way to get to know a culture than to go there and learn their sports? And I say to people who tell me they can't travel, 'How much did you spend at the mall this year? How many times did you eat out? Take that money and go.'”

— Dhani Jones

“Are you waiting for the end of my story? It's ended. The day came when I was able to fly up here. I knew by then that I had much more to learn, and that I had to be stronger before I tried Crossing. But I felt I'd come more than halfway, too, and I was right. There was a corroded metal hatch over that window then. I tore it off and let it fall. When I'd explored all the rooms on all the levels, I decided to clean this one out and make it a private place just for myself, my own room in my own tower in the sky. There were bones in here and some other things, but I threw them out that window and swept this floor with my hands. When everything was tidy, I told myself I'd come back and spend hours up here after I'd made the Return Crossing, just thinking about who I was and what I had done for my children. But I never did, till now." "I'll”

— Gene Wolfe

“An adult female orang-utan cannot defeat an adult male spotted hyena. That is the plain empirical truth. Let it become known among zoologists. Had Orange Juice been a male, had she loomed as large on the scales as she did in my heart, it might have been another matter. But portly and overfed though she was from living in the comfort of a zoo, even so she tipped the scales at barely 110 pounds. Female orang-utans are half the size of males. But it is not simply a question of weight and brute strength. Orange Juice was far from defenseless. What it comes down to is attitude and knowledge. What does a fruit eater know about killing? Where would it learn where to bite, how hard, for how long? An orang-utan may be taller, may have very strong and agile arms and long canines, but if it does not know how to use these as weapons, they are of little use. The hyena, with only its jaws, will overcome the ape because it knows what it wants and how to get it.”

— Yann Martel

“But, finally, I had to open my eyes. I had to stop keeping secrets. The truth, thankfully, is insistent. What I saw then made action necessary. I had to see people for who they were. I had to understand why I made the choices I did. Why I had given them my loyalty. I had to make changed. I had to stop allowing love to be dangerous. I had to learn how to protect myself. But first ... I had to look”

— Deb Caletti

“Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.”

— Laurie Anderson

“If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did ... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.”

— Michael Morpurgo

“But do I need to say anything?" Sophie asked. "Do I need to learn any words?"
"Like what?" Saint-Germain said.
"Well, when you lit up the Eiffel tower, you said something that sounded like eggness."
"Ignis," the count said. "Latin for fire. No, you don't need to say anything."
"Then why did you do it, then?" Sophie asked.
Saint-Germain grinned. "I just thought it sounded cool.”

— Michael Scott

“The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did-and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

“She had never believed in fate. She still did not. It would be nonsense of freedom of will and choice, and it was through such freedom that we worked our way through life and learned what we needed to learn. But sometimes, it seemed to her, there was something, some sign, to nudge one along in a certain direction. What one chose to do with that nudge was up to that person.”

— Mary Balogh

“Messi is not really from Barca's ranks. What they did was sign the most talented kid in the whole of Argentina! Messi was already Messi when he arrived at Barcelona - they simply polished him. Cristiano Ronaldo is already too old to learn and change the way he is. When he was 13, someone should have sent him home when he didn't behave properly.”

— Javier Clemente

“If your neighbors did an analysis of your life, what would they learn about the kingdom?”

— Michael Frost

“Then we started looking at story and what was making sense and what wasn't making sense, emotionally and thematically the intention that we had a year earlier when they were working on the script, did all that come across? It's all kind of generic things, but it's fascinating and it's weird - I haven't made that many films, but it's weird that every time you think you learn from your mistakes on your last film you have a slew of new mistakes and things that you learn.”

— Bryan Burk

“The audience might not be the size of Facebook, but how much time can you spend online and think, 'What did I just learn?”

— Chris Hughes

“Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. Theyare loaded with opinion, moral thoughts, quick evaluations, youthful hopes and cares and sorrows. Occasionally, they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy. That is why I have refrained from burning them.”

— E.B. White

“What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?”

— Pablo Neruda

“Occasionally there are parents who say, "I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I'm very disappointed."”

— Daniel Handler