When I think of how I see myself, it would have to be at age eleven. I know I’m thirty-two on the outside, but inside I’m eleven. I’m the girl in the picture with skinny arms and a crumpled skirt and crooked hair. I didn’t like school because all they saw was the outside me. School was lots of rules and sitting with your hands folded and being afraid all the time. I liked looking out the window and thinking. I liked staring at the girl across the way writing her name over and over again in red ink, or the boy in front of me who wore the same dim shirt every day. I imagined their lives and the houses they went home to each evening, wondering if their world was happy or sad.
Sandra Cisneros, from “Straw into Gold,” A House of My Own: Stories From My Life (via lifeinpoetry)
We can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist.
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (via shrinemaidens)
We need people who don’t ask us to become different for their own acceptance and terms of approval. We need people, and we need to be the people who give others the permission to sit in their own skins and not be afraid. That’s the best gift you are ever going to give someone— the permission to feel safe in their own skin. To feel worthy. To feel like they are enough.
Hannah Brencher (via shammyb)
This analysis book was published in 1970. At some point in its life before I purchased it last summer (a life which spanned 18 years before I was even born, by the way), it was owned by someone who read every page, and wrote enthusiastic comments in the margins next to particularly thrilling conclusions to proofs. I love this subject, and I share every sentiment with this unknown stranger. I too love the drama of confusion and the triumph of understanding, and I love sharing that experience with this person with whom I have a rare and important commonality. Wherever you are book-commenting analysis enthusiast, I think the world of you. I hope you have a happy life full of abstract mathematics.
Python: What if everything was a dict?
Java: What if everything was an object?
JavaScript: What if everything was a dict *and* an object?
C: What if everything was a pointer?
APL: What if everything was an array?
Tcl: What if everything was a string?
Prolog: What if everything was a term?
LISP: What if everything was a pair?
Scheme: What if everything was a function?
Haskell: What if everything was a monad?
Assembly: What if everything was a register?
Coq: What if everything was a type/proposition?
COBOL: WHAT IF EVERYTHING WAS UPPERCASE?
C#: What if everything was like Java, but different?
Ruby: What if everything was monkey patched?
Pascal: BEGIN What if everything was structured? END
C++: What if we added everything to the language?
C++11: What if we forgot to stop adding stuff?
Rust: What if garbage collection didn't exist?
Go: What if we tried designing C a second time?
Perl: What if shell, sed, and awk were one language?
Perl6: What if we took the joke too far?
PHP: What if we wanted to make SQL injection easier?
VB: What if we wanted to allow anyone to program?
VB.NET: What if we wanted to stop them again?
Forth: What if everything was a stack?
ColorForth: What if the stack was green?
PostScript: What if everything was printed at 600dpi?
XSLT: What if everything was an XML element?
Make: What if everything was a dependency?
m4: What if everything was incomprehensibly quoted?
Scala: What if Haskell ran on the JVM?
Clojure: What if LISP ran on the JVM?
Lua: What if game developers got tired of C++?
Mathematica: What if Stephen Wolfram invented everything?
Malbolge: What if there is no god?
The Princess in the Forest. Gouache on paper. 35.5 x 40 cm.
Art by John Bauer.(1882-1918).
“When you finish a direct proof, you’ll write QED. When you finish a proof by contraposition, you’ll also write QED but you’ll also write Ta da! Because you’ll feel really great about yourself.”
Discrete math professor (via mathprofessorquotes)
"To awaken my spirit through hard work and dedicate my life to knowledge... What do you seek?"
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