Approximate Quotes

1. "Are you twins?""Yes. Very good." Jayden nodded. "But not identical. Fraternal. We developed from two distinct eggs. Identical twins develop from the splitting of one egg and-""I know," I said. "I've got a pair.""Of eggs?" Jayden said.Ayden closed his eyes. I would've needed the Heimlich maneuver if I'd been eating."No." I shook my head. "No, I-""Because you've got far more than two," Jayden said in a lecturing tone. "In fact, girls are born with approximately two million eggs patiently awaiting puberty to-""Ooookay." Ayden slung an arm around Jayden and gave him a rough squeeze. "Why don't you leave something for Sex Ed class, huh?" He raised one finger and plastered on a smile. "Excuse us a minute." He dragged Jayden down the hallway where they spoke in harsh whispers."
Author: AandE Kirk

2. "[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings --- the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [...] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically."
Author: Amitav Ghosh

3. "VASTY (As differentiated from "vast") Has approximately the same meaning as "biggy," "hugey," and "giganticky." Do not let anyone tell you these words are not words; all words are words."
Author: Amy Leach

4. "The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm."
Author: Anaïs Nin

5. "The actual history of interracial rape - according to FBI statistics - is that, since the 70's, approximately 15,000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by black men." (The Department of Justice uses "0" to denote fewer than ten victims."
Author: Ann Coulter

6. "But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind."
Author: Anne Lamott

7. "Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment."
Author: Anne Michaels

8. "There is no sharp boundary line separating the reactions of the immune bodies from chemical processes between crystalloids, just as in nature there exists every stage between crystalloid and colloid. The nearer the colloid particle approximates to the normal electrolyte, the nearer its compounds must obviously come to conforming to the law of simple stoichiometric proportions, and the compounds themselves to simple chemical compounds. At this point, it should be recalled that Arrhenius has shown that the quantitative relationship between toxin and antitoxin is very similar to that between acid and base."
Author: Arrhenius

9. "In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved integrity. Do not lose your knowledge that our proper estate is an upright posture,an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it's yours."
Author: Ayn Rand

10. "The human heart will clock approximately 3 billionbeats over an average lifetime. Not Johnny here, though. Just sevenhundred and nineteen million, eight hundred and ninety-eightthousand, six hundred and five, and a half."
Author: Beck Sherman

11. "Almost the only persons who may be said to comprehend even approximately the significance, principles, and purposes of Socialism are the chief leaders of the extreme wings of the Socialistic forces, and perhaps a few of the money kings themselves."
Author: Benjamin Tucker

12. "Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach."
Author: Bertrand Russell

13. "In Arkansas alone, approximately three quarters of a million people are at risk of going hungry, and one in four children does not get enough to eat, so my goal is to bring awareness to this tragic issue."
Author: Blanche Lincoln

14. "If I may discuss the idea of explosion. The number of regulations issued in the last two years is approximately the same as the number issued in the last two years of the Bush administration."
Author: Cass Sunstein

15. "Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire."
Author: Christian Nestell Bovee

16. "He looked calm and completely at ease. No trace remained of the wild man who had fucked me in the La Perla dressing room approximately eighteen hours and thirty-six minutes ago. Not that I was counting."
Author: Christina Lauren

17. "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worthwhile? At best, surely, it would be like the brief visit of an observer from another country who is permitted to peep in for a moment from the vast outdoors of his freedom and see, at a distance, through glass, this figure who sits solitary at the small table in the narrow room, eating his poached eggs humbly and dully, a prisoner for life."
Author: Christopher Isherwood

18. "Able Danger consisted of approximately 20 direct individuals working for Special Forces in Tampa, Florida. The total amount of people working for Able Danger was 20."
Author: Curt Weldon

19. "Federal program and services outlay in Puerto Rico is approximately $10 billion per year."
Author: Dick Thornburgh

20. "Consider that in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 percent but actually held approximately 35 percent of the earth's surface, and that by 1874 the proportion was 67 percent, a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year. By 1914, the annual rate had risen to an astonishing 240,000 square miles [per year], and Europe held a grand total of roughly 85 percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths. No other associated set of colonies in history was as large, none so totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis." Culture and Imperialism, pg. 8"
Author: Edward W. Said

21. "I'm serious. I'm tired of thinking about sex all the time and not getting any. Me and my right hand need to part ways. It's pathetic. Best years of my life, and I'm wasting them.""You're sixteen!""I know! And I'll be sixteen for approximately six more months and then never again! I want to enjoy it while it lasts."(Jordan)"
Author: Eli Easton

22. "The claim of fine tuning is subjective. As I stated before, no measurement in physics is perfect. The amount of precision we demand can be increased or decreased at our whim. We could have an approximate measurement that has a huge margin of error and call it finely-tuned if we so desire. Theists, in particular, have a lot of such desire. They so badly want God to be an indispensable part of our universe's creation, so they see finely-tuned constants.They also tend to sweep under the rug the following fact: the vast majority of our universe is hostile to life, and they fail to consider that another hand in the proverbial deck might yield a better universe than ours, one teaming with life on every planet throughout the cosmos."
Author: G.M. Jackson

23. "Although approximately 80% of osteoporosis sufferers are women, as the longevity of the male population increases, the disease will assume increasing importance in men."
Author: Gro Harlem Brundtland

24. "On Fiction:(Martin) had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. Both god and clod schools erred, in Martin's estimation, and erred though too great singleness of sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, "Adventure," which had dragged Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, "God and Clod," that he had expressed his views on the whole subject."
Author: Jack London

25. "Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone."
Author: John Clayton

26. "Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."
Author: John Tukey

27. "I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

28. "As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000."
Author: Julian Assange

29. "Translation can never do more than the approximate,so we shall, at least, be gloriously inaccurate."
Author: Karen Healey

30. "No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel."
Author: Kate Morton

31. "In the year Ten Million, according to Koradubian, there would be a tremendous house-cleaning. All records relating to the period between the death of Christ and the year One Million A.D. would be hauled to the dumps and burned. This would be done, said Koradubian, because museums and archives would be crowding the living right off the Earth. The million-year period to which the burned junk related would be summed up in history books in one sentence, according to Koradubian: Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

32. "It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can't you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We've gone urban because we're all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection."
Author: Lauren Groff

33. "What we have, in fact, is not a theory at all but a large collection of approximate calculations, together with a web of conjectures that, if true, point to the existence of a theory."
Author: Lee Smolin

34. "Consider, for example, the following puzzle. I give you a large piece of paper, and I ask you to fold it over once, and then take that folded paper and fold it over again, and then again, and again, until you have refolded the original paper 50 times. How tall do you think the final stack is going to be? In answer to that question, most people will fold the sheet in their mind's eye, and guess that the pile would be as thick as a phone book or, if they're really courageous, they'll say that it would be as tall as a refrigerator. But the real answer is that the height of the stack would approximate the distance to the sun. And if you folded it over one more time, the stack would be as high as the distance to the sun and back."
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

35. "The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan."
Author: Mary Roach

36. "Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute." Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, "What a sight to behold!"
Author: Mary Roach

37. "Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking."
Author: Max Bill

38. "Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education."
Author: Max Scheler

39. "I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years."
Author: Michael Cunningham

40. "A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea."
Author: Milan Kundera

41. "The probabilitation of possibilities is the mother of many unrealistic ideas,uninformative decisions,inappropriate measures and unfair actions because most of the times we were approximate where we needth to be exact."
Author: Mpho Leteng

42. "Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another "useful fiction," and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I'm saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close."
Author: Philip Roth

43. "Get ready the greatest new educational facility at the approximate dynamic population center of the North American continent"
Author: Richard Buckminster Fuller

44. "One day I discovered that one could get the barrier to internal rotation in ethane approximately right using this method. This was the beginning of my work on organic molecules."
Author: Roald Hoffmann

45. "Mr. Speaker, Delaware River's regional ports handle approximately 58 million tons of cargo yearly."
Author: Robert Brady

46. "All of us have access to a higher form of intelligence, one that can allow us to see more of the world, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy to any circumstance. This intelligence is cultivated by deply immersing ourselves in a field of study and staying true to our inclinations, no matter how unconventional our approach might seem to other. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel with the rational processes, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself. We then come to have powers that approximate the instinctive force and speed of animals, but with the added reach that our human consciousness brings us. This power is what our brains are designed to attain, and we will naturally led to this type of intelligence if we follow our inclinations to their ultimate ends."
Author: Robert Greene

47. "The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules."
Author: Temple Grandin

48. "Holmes and Watson are on a camping trip. In the middle of the night Holmes wakes up and gives Dr. Watson a nudge. "Watson" he says, "look up in the sky and tell me what you see.""I see millions of stars, Holmes," says Watson."And what do you conclude from that, Watson?"Watson thinks for a moment. "Well," he says, "astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meterologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I see that God is all-powerful, and we are small and insignficant. Uh, what does it tell you, Holmes?""Watson, you idiot! Someone has stolen our tent!"
Author: Thomas Cathcart

49. "You've read half the books in this house? This whole house?" "Well, approximately half." Sticky said. "To be more accurate, I suppose I've read more like" - his eyes went up as he calculated - "three sevenths? Yes, three sevenths." "Only three sevenths?" said Kate, pretending to look disappointed. "And here I was prepared to be impressed."
Author: Trenton Lee Stewart

50. "I've done approximately 15 films, and most of the things I've done have either been stunt or costume work."
Author: Verne Troyer

Approximate Quotes Pictures