People From North Carolina

"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."

"The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence."

"When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else."

"Because I can understand the English language. It is my mother tongue."

"Jews can't eat pork - surely anal delights are way higher up on the list of taboos."

"Maybe my desire to find meaning in all of this was just a remnant of my obsessive-compulsive behavior, and yet it felt as though a map was being drawn for me, but every landmark was a riddle that needed solving before I could unearth my own lost treasure: myself."

"I thought of the brutal truths so often borne on predawn light. I'd had a few in my time, and they'd all led to this. I was a stranger to myself. I'd gone to law school for my father, married for my father; and for that same man, and for the vile woman who shared my bed, I'd surrendered my dreams of family — my very soul. Now he was dead and all I had was this truth: My life was not my own. It belonged to an empty shell that wore my face, Yet I refused to pity myself."

"Denial was a weapon; it killed truth, numbed the mind, and I was a junkie."

"I drifted for what felt like hours. Neither of us spoke; we knew better. Peace like this came rarely and was as fragile as a child's smile."

"I thought of my own wife's tears and her limp submission the night before — the bleak satisfaction I took from her smallness as I used her shamelessly. She's cried out, and remembering the taste of salted tears, I thought, for that instant, that I knew how the devil felt. Sex and tears, like sun and rain, were never meant to share a moment: but for a fallen soul, an act of wrong could, at times, feel very right, and that scared the hell out of me."

"I used to look at homeless peopleand try to imagine what they had once looked like. It's not easy. Beneath the grime and degradation is a face once adored by someone. It's a truth that tricks the eye; our glances slide away. But something happened to ruin that life, to strip it bare; and it was something small, something that but for the grace of God could take us, too."

"I felt eyes upon me, and they pulled me away. I looked at the gathering of eager cops; some were merely curious, while others, I knew, sought their own secret satisfaction. They all wanted to see it, my face, a defense attorney's face, here in this musty place where murder was more than a case file, where the victim was flesh and blood, the smell that of family gone to dust.I felt their eyes. I knew what they wanted, and so I turned to look again upon the almost empty clothes, the flash of bone so pale and curving. But I would give them nothing, and my body did not betray me, for which I was grateful. For what I felt was the return of a long-quiescent rage, and the certain conviction that this was the most human my father had ever appeared to me."

"I've heard it said that jail stinks of despair. What a load. If jail stinks of any emotion, it's fear: fear of the guards, fear of being beaten or gang-raped, fear of being forgotten by those who once loved you and may or may not anymore. But mostly, I think, it's fear of time and of those dark things that dwell in the unexplored corners of the mind. Doing time, they call it — what a joke. I've been around long enough to know the reality: It's the time that does you."

"I looked at the high walls where once-white paint had grayed and then peeled. Barbara had always said the house had good bones, and she was right about that; but it had no heart, not with us living inside it. In place of laughter, trust, and joy, there was a hollow emptiness, a kind of rot, and I marveled at my blindness. Was it the alcohol, I wondered, that had made it bearable? Or was it something else, some inner failing? Maybe it was neither. They say that if you drop a frog into boiling water, he'll hop right out. But put the same frog into cold water and slowly turn up the heat, and he'll sit quietly until his blood begins to boil. He'll let himself be cooked alive. Maybe that's how it was for me. Maybe I was like that frog."

"There is nothing more profoundly serious than real comedy, which is an affirmation of human communion, redemption and grace."

"I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure."

"As Gloria Steinem said about Ginger Rogers: She was doing everything Fred Astaire was doing, just doing it backwards in high heels. Well, Southern women are doing and enduring what other women have to do and endure, but (at least until recently) they had to do it in heels and hats and white gloves and makeup and a sweet smile, with maybe a glass of bourbon and a cigarette to get them through the magnolia part of being a steel magnolia."

"Notes don't make music until you learn to insert silence between them."

"When you don't care then You've got nothing to lose And I won't hesitate Because every moment life is slipping away It's okay."

"There's never gonna be a moment of truth for you While the world is watching All you need is the thing you forgotten And that's to learn to live with what you are."

"I refuse to rot like my contemporaries I want to explode in a karaoke supernova I don't wanna grow old Won't you let me, won't you let me explode?"

"Why you gotta act like you know, if you don't know? It's okay if you don't know everything."

"You nodded off in my arms watching tv I won’t move you an inch Even though my arm’s asleep."

"So much time and so little to say.."

"All this breathing in Never breathing out."

"Now that I have found someone I'm feeling more alone Than I ever have before."

"Would you look at me I'm crazy But I get the job done Yeah, I'm crazy but I get the job done."

"I feel like a quote out of context, withholding the rest so I can be for you what you want to see."

"Last night I was east with them And west within Trying to be for you what you wanna see."

"I stay focused on details It keeps me from feeling the big things But watch the microscope long enough Things that seem still are still changing"

"Good morning, son In twenty years from now Maybe we'll both sit down and have a few beers And I can tell you 'bout today And how I picked you up and everything changed."

"I don't get Many things right the first time In fact, I am told that a lot Now I know all the wrong turns And stumbles and falls Brought me here."

"This morning I wake to be older than you were Fresh white snow for miles Every footstep will be mine."

"Who knows why some satellites come by and by while others disappear into the sky."

"You have made me smile again In fact, I might be sore from it. It's been a while I know we've been together many times before I'll see you on the other side."

"The tap dancers and the be-bop musicians influenced the pitch and pace of my work. And along with the Chitlin' Circuit women, including women like Jackie "Moms" Mabley, they made me very curious about the national and international black community. You see, these were women who traveled a lot, and they would bring back information from all over the country and all over the world."

"Ain’t nothing an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young one."

"They say you shouldn't say nothin' about the dead unless it's good. He's dead. Good!"

"I'd never seen anything like that ad. Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to the picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield -- it's worse than disgraceful. It's reprehensible."

"You can truly see that there is some melting going on. When you see it, all of a sudden you say, 'Hey, that issue that we've been talking about off and on over the years, there really is something to it.'"

"Chambliss is a senator today by sole virtue of the fact that in 2002 he attacked incumbent Max Cleland -- who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam and earned Silver and Bronze stars -- as soft on defense and lacking in patriotism. Where was ol' Saxby during the war? Home, of course, claiming a "football injury." How you get elected reflects your character, and Chambliss should never be allowed to live down the shame of what he did in 2002. Never."

"What is soul? I don't know! Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes... Soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper."

"Put your troubles behind you and go on to bed"

"It's not very fashionable nowadays to have a philosophy that demands a lot of life. I tend to be drawn to people who are emotional - now they'd be called 'crazy'. Pollock, Jasper Johns, Toulouse-Lautrec. People said, 'They're off their nut!' Was Faulkner off his nut because he stayed in his house for eight months at a time writing books, and then you'd find him drunk up in a tree, making out with some old black woman? I think that's fuckin' great!"

"I want to make sure I'm with a girl that's a good kisser, and that when I wake up, I have coffee and a cigarette. That's all I really want out of life. That, and world domination."

"My lifestyle changed when this wonderful person came into my life. I couldn't sleep for years. All of a sudden, I don't know why or how, but I slept."

"I quit drinking every night, at 1:30 A.M."

"I'm sort of planting Post-It notes all over my psyche. Do not skateboard wasted. Do not buy $10,000 rugs. Be careful what you say to journalists. You don't have to stay up until 7 A.M. - tomorrow is a new day."

"I've got maybe five or ten jean jackets with jeans. I can pack three to four pairs of denim jeans, five T-shirts, ten Western-style shirts, and two ties and just buy socks when I get there. That, a Walkman, two books, and some records, and I'm out the door for a year. Not a problem. Doesn't freak me out at all. Usually, if you're thinking about your clothes too much, you're probably not high enough."

"What happens is, people get a little taste of fame, and they get used to having things go that way, and the ego really kicks in. They'll do whatever it takes to stay there. They get addicted, and they make decisions that don't have anything to do with music. You get big like that, and people will maybe come and see you once. It never lasts. It's not real. I'll tell you this - it's fucking real behind a guitar."