People From North Carolina

"What is faith? Faith is trusting God for your problems and for your life."

"Open your heart and your sad feelings to Him and the safe people He brings to you."

"We want to know that life is good. Not perfect but good. Not problem free, but good. Good in some way that we did not anticipate. Good in some way that connects us to God, others, and our purposes in life."

"I would not feel a lot of trust or hope in God if He was simply in touch with me without any impetus, power, or force to accomplish things. You may not always know the end game, but He is working for you."

"Where do you go when hard times hit? Most of the time, our tendency is to enter our internal cave…we naturally shut down, withdraw from it all, and try to figure things out on our own, reemerging from life when we have some sense of centeredness."

"Trust in and value the benefit of God’s compassion and identification."

"The message of Scripture is that God wants us to connect both with Him and also with each other."

"I can’t keep count of the times when I have seen how hard times make people much more relationally accessible than they were before their difficulty."

"God wants to help us and will bear our burdens."

"It is a comfort to us that Jesus didn’t suffer in silence or with a smile."

"I have noticed in this economic downturn that more of my friends talk about God…"

"…there is something beyond our circumstances, and that is an emotional, from-the-heart connection to God, no matter what is going on in our lives."

"Our tendency is to be strong, self-sufficient, and dependent on our own willpower, but rather than try harder, we should reach out to the God who is all-powerful…"

"“Where are You?” can be both a protest against a problem and a search for understanding and perspective."

"It is easy to think that we should put up a brave front and stay positive about all our struggles. But that is not the biblical model."

"David, the man after God’s own heart, got right to it and spilled out his guts about his experience: “How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever?”"

"Our image of God, whom we can’t see, is deeply affected by people, whom we can see."

"…the central message of the Bible is about God redeeming a humanity that is in trouble and suffering."

"Whatever our situation, we feel some sense of confusion, anxiety, and helplessness. At the same time, we think about God and wonder where He is."

"Though your experience may indicate that God has forgotten you or has left you alone, He is on your side. He is the God of grace, and He is actively working on your behalf."

"The essence of grace is that God is for you."

"God has made Himself knowable through the Bible."

"Connecting with others during difficult times makes the trials more bearable."

"Wanda Sykes: Now come on, that sounds like something from a Harrison Ford movie. That just shows you how much money they are being paid by insurance lobbies. Nobody says crazy stuff like that for real. That's made up! You get paid to play a role like that. When they say stuff like that, you know what I hear? 'Enough is enough! I have had it with these [blanketyblanking] snakes on this [blanketyblanking] plane!' That's what I hear. It's crazy. They're movie lines."

"I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country."

"(The Republican plan would) make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."

"This bill reminds me of the tactics of the former Soviet Union — and we know how successful that was."

"(The bill) is emblematic of the attempt by the majority party to control every aspect of our lives."

""I'll sue you and the Sheriff's Department," he said, sounding more sulky than anything else. "Questioning me like a common criminal! And with an FBI agent standing over me in a threatening manner!" Since Bishop was across the room leaning rather negligently against the filing cabinet, that was such an obvious exaggeration that Miranda could only admire it for a moment in silence."

"Gather leaves and grasses, Love, to-day; For the Autumn passes Soon away. Chilling winds are blowing. It will soon be snowing."

"Ah, we fondly cherish Faded things That had better perish. Memory clings To each leaf it saves. Chilly winds are blowing. It will soon be snowing On our graves."

"I love you because You're a sweet little fool!"

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."

"Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose."

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. […] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be."

"Some people have called the book the "bible of software engineering". I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it."

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."

"The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture,"

"The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures."

"Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

"…well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think."

"The "Second System Effect": An architect’s first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint. As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used “next time.” Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system. This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile.""

"A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers."

"Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity he must master is arbitrary complexity […] because they were designed by different people, rather than by God."

"Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. […] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification."

"Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude."

"How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time."

"…the organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one […] as one learns, he changes the design […]. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes…"

"The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. […] Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow."

"The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: […] I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation."