A lot of fitness is about contractions - you're doing squats, or you're on a bike and your knees are bending but never stretching all the way, so your muscles get strengthened but look short and thick.

Once we're willing to confront our emotional suffering, we begin making choices based on attraction instead of aversion, love instead of fear. Where we used to think about what was 'safe,' we now become interested in doing what seems right or fun or meaningful or ripe with possibilities.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

I love the Queen. I love the whole fairy tale of the Royal Family; the Crown Jewels; Buckingham Palace; the tourist attraction. But really, is that what we've got a monarchy for? It's just for tourism, and then you survive and live off taxpayers' money?

The Taj Mahal can be a tourist attraction, an architectural marvel, but it can never be treated as a monument of faith. After all, there is a difference between tourism and faith.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

The land is ours. It's not European and we have taken it, we have given it to the rightful people... Those of white extraction who happen to be in the country and are farming are welcome to do so, but they must do so on the basis of equality.

Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.

There's a reasonable amount of traction in college education, particularly engineering, because quite a lot of that is privatized, so there is an incentive to set up new colleges of reasonably high quality.

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

Because bisexual people almost have a foot in the gay and the straight world, their friends can misunderstand them too. Like if a bisexual man starts dating another man, people are like 'Ah, he's gay,' but you know, bisexual people remain bisexual, and their attractions can change and flux over time.

I don't have a type. But one thing I can say from my dating experience is that a physical attraction will only take you so far. So you definitely have to have a strong intellectual connection as well.

Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction. We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. One of them is pattern recognition.

Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go?

If the expansion of a global legal regime for communication technologies gains traction, the effects to the global economy as well as our individual liberties will be severe.

Perhaps the people of Twitter are more amenable to your babbling than your immediate family, but that doesn't necessarily make digital communication a beneficial distraction when we have an immediate social environment.

The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

I love New York. I was sad, depressed and incredibly moved by our fellow countrymen and what they've done. I wanted to give people a chance to see something funny, have a distraction.

I got the chance to do things that I dreamed of when I was a kid: I got to travel around the world; I had my own 'Goosebumps' attraction at Disney World; I've been on TV and had three TV series.

Your billion-dollar ideas don't show up in the middle of dramatic distraction. They show up when you have the business and personal discipline to make space for your creative mind to flourish.

The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

I think the attraction of 'American Idol' is about the basic human nature attitude that is, 'We can put you up there. But we can take you down.'