A Quote by Walter Isaacson

Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book." (Steven Levy) — © Walter Isaacson
Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book." (Steven Levy)
The iPod was once so important to Apple that the estimable journalist Steven Levy wrote an entire book about it. And then, poof! The iPod was nearly gone.
The people who can step up my experience are those who have a common set of experiences with people I know. Think about it. How often did a total stranger come into your life to make your evening better? Not very often. But the friend of your friend? That happens all the time.
Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.
And I certainly like being on a plane, next to a stranger, having conversations that you'd never otherwise have. You're unplugged, your phone doesn't work, you're not online.
Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.
Award ceremonies are strange because you're sitting next to someone you've never met; you're celebrating with a total stranger.
C’mon, friend. It’s two on one. You sure don’t look like you’re up to those odds. (Stranger) You can’t be talking to me. I don’t have prokas for friends. And I assure you I could gut you both before your stench had time to catch up to your fall. (Syn)
You want to know what it's like to be on a plane for 22 hours? Sit in a chair, squeeze your head as hard as you can, don't stop, then take a paper bag and put it over your mouth and nose and breath your own air over and over and over.
Everyone's lives are sort of a succession, almost like handing the baton of your life off from one person to the next to the next to the next. And hopefully, that goes on for a long time, and the changes are healthy and interesting and not, like, spiraling into darkness.
What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
Personal branding is about managing your name - even if you don't own a business - in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Google records. Going on a date? Chances are that your "blind" date has Googled your name. Going to a job interview? Ditto.
In order to date, you need to make up your mind to date, meet many people, and have blind dates offered to you, but that's not easy. It's more difficult as you get older. I don't think it's possible to do something by force, either.
The value of science is not simply what the next model of the iPod you will buy next week, but its real value comes about when it's time to distinguish reality from everything else. And to be scientifically literate is to be trained in what it is, to recognize your own frailty as a data-taking device.
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
Even in half demon hunter clothes, Clary thought, he looked like the kind of boy who'd come over your house to pick you up for a date and be polite to your parents and nice to your pets. Jace on the other hand, looked like the kind of boy who'd come over your house and burn it down just for kicks.
Sometimes I'll say, "I wrote that book," and the person will look at you as if you're really strange. One time that happened to my daughter on a plane. She was sitting next to a girl who was reading one of my books and my daughter said, "My mother wrote that book." And the girl started to quiz my daughter, asking her all sorts of questions, like what are the names of Judy's children and where did she grow up. My daughter thought it was so funny.
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