College Quotes for 2003-2004

Quotes Collected by Sara Lapan

“Oh. You’re one of those people.”
~ Everyone’s comment on my interest in studying math

"I have to go eat now - and then I'm on my way to the sex mt. Mtg. not mountain."
~ Sara en route to a Sex Signals orientation meeting

“I want to be Jewish. As in the race, man. Then I can make fun of myself."
~ University of Chicago (and from now on UoC) student

Two actors performing dating scenarios at UoC:
“Would you fuck her?”
“This isn’t the University of Iowa!”

Chicago Airport - Wonderful weather and on-time, as usual

“I understood none of that. This makes perfect sense.”
~ Guys responding to how they are suppose to act.

“Oh well, I suppose it's good that you're able to endure sex meetings.”
~ Geoff

"I'm not judging you, I'm condemning you."
~ Liz

"I'm already remembering it. I just said it."
~ Erik

"I don't actually have conversations with myself. I just talk to myself."
~ Lindsey

Lindsey: "Insanity in a box."
Sara: "Pre-packaged."

Class of 2007

"I know you're not a tree."
~ Lindsey to me after the millionth time she threw the frisbee at the tree instead of at me

Frisbee = "the nail guillotine."
~ Lindsey - she broke her nails when she caught the frisbee

"Ok, I need to get myself in my quote book now."
~ Lindsey

"UEO - Unidentified Edible Object."
~ Sara

"I had no idea this was what this was."
~ Alison

Sara: "I don't know why I feel like skipping now."
Lindsey: "Because you're Sara."

"OK so let me think of something weird about your school. I guess you built the atomic bomb on your football field."
~ Amelia (friend from Ames)

"His outbursts cannot be construed otherwise than a desperate shrill cry of a psychopath on his death bed."
~ The North Korean News agency, describing Donald Rumsfeld

FYI - My roommate is Teresa and my suitemates are Lindsey and Veronica. - Anime drawing of the Suite 210 girls by Lindsey

"Man, I wish I were bored."
~ Teresa

"But once we were drunk enough we understood each other."
~ UoC student

"You know what I think? All professors should be dicks. No, not like that."
~ UoC student

"If you're too lazy to do the quadratic formula I'm not sure you should be taking math."
~ Sara to Teresa

"Hey Lydia, you're a hot guy."
~Alison

"My dad's cell phone sometimes makes weird noises. But that's usually when he sits on it."
~ Lindsey

"I will confuse you with my cuteness."
~ Sara pretending to be a squirrel

"There was that one time when I thought my parents were trying to get me drunk."
~ Lindsey

"Superbowl Champion Jerry Rice will be promoting his new vitamin fortified gummi candies."
~ Advertisement in UoC bookstore

"People with actual knowledge don't actually have to calculate anything."
~ Geoff

"When mathematicians say clearly its usually false."
~ Kenneth, my Honors Calc professor

"Hey, you're a short suite."
~ Alison

"That's why you have to drink in moderation."
~ Sara

"I live for strange looks."
~ Sara

"We're off to reduce our sobriety."
~ UoC student

"My bed is comfy. Everyone likes sleeping in it."
~ Lindsey

Anime version of (and drawn by) Lindsey (suitemate)

"I'll square root you !"
~ Sara

"Let's get passed the shitting."
~Lydia, swearing at Physics/Math

"I'm drunk on calc!" ~Lydia

"I am a fudgesicle!"
~ Liz

Supplied by Jeff

"And for a moment there I wasn't drunk."
~ Lydia

"You're memorizing football plays? I'd rather memorize formulas."
~ Diane (freshman at UoC)

“Oh you’re big now! That’s the way I like you.”
~ Sara to computer window

Teresa: “You just come up with the weirdest things to say, don’t you?”
Sara: “Probably.”

"I don't mean to eavesdrop. I just really want to."
~ Sara

Semisonic's "Closing Time": "I know who I want to take me home now . . . "
Sara: "What?! I want to take myself home."
Lindsey: "That's no fun! [laughter] Why do I have the feeling we both just got quoted?"

USEFUL FRENCH VERBS 50100
Courtesy of Mark and Others
Batonner = to beat with a stick (in French): Je te batonnerai!
Grapiller = to gather the grapes left over after the harvest
Chapeler = to scrape crust off (of bread)

"What are you laughing about? You're not even high."
~ Josh

Ethan: "There's no such thing as an ordinary person at the University of Chicago."
Andrew: "Yeah there is. They're starting to let people in."
Ethan: "WHAT?!!"

Sara and Andrew swing dancing with frisbees on their heads

"In all seriousness, I was kidding."
~ Lindsey

"Death and grief are little things. They are transient. Life must be before death, and joy before grief. Else there are no such things as death or grief. These are only negatives. Life is positive. Death is only the absence of life."
~ Frank Norris (1870-1902)

Alison: "This may be the place where fun comes to die, but, damnit, on the weekends . . . "
Sara: "We do math in the hallway?"

"You think I'm electrostatic? Should I ground myself?"
~ Bruce

Sara: "Wow, that's a hot website."
Lindsey: (runs into the room) "Oh yeah! I totally want to make out with it on the couch."
~ The website contained 2 links and one word

"Wow, my life is complete now that I've been felt up by a mouse (optical digital)."
~ Lindsey

Sara: "I'm a proof now?"
Lydia: "That's right. You are the sum of all natural numbers."

"Wait, you're not the only person who dreams about math?! What kind of school did I come to."
~ Teresa

Sidewalk Chalk Writing (revised): $\int c$_u e^x = DNE

“Hey, this is the first time I said it since last time.”
~ Marco

“I had a dream that I was snoring. Sorry.”
~ Teresa

“We want to think differentially.”
~ Bruce

“Wait, did I just solve it?”
~ Sara (math problem)

Lindsey (suitemate), Sara (me), and Lydia (neighbor)

“I don’t think I’ll get over this hangover for a couple of days.”
~ Sara talking about 8 continuous hours of physics

Teresa: “You should go eat, you can’t survive without eating.”
Sara: “I can go a week without food – I can’t go that long without physics.”

“So is it the culture that attracts you or do Jews have some mystical sex appeal?”
~Sara to Liz – MSA is now an official acronym

“God I hate this school. It makes me giggle about math all the time.”
~ Przemyslaw

Lindsey = Z (the third dimension, although she could be the set of integers)
Geoff = Imaginary Math Man
Jeff = Margin of Error (a.k.a. Bizarro Geoff = Bizzaro Math Man)
Sara = Sum of all natural numbers (“But you diverge!” ~ Geoff)

"So, seriously, I'm carrying pac-man's dead body behind my head."
~ Lydia, carrying a large blue ball in a garbage bag

Supplied by Jeff

"Well maybe you should un-insane yourself."
~ Sara to Lindsey

"I have conversations with myself. NO!! I didn't just say that!" ~ Lindsey

"I'm just lying there, dead as always."
~ Jeff

"See, I'd take real good care of you if you were a basketball."
~ Gordon (after dropping the basketball)

Where did math come from? Was it an invention or a discovery? Mathematicians spend their lives working with numbers - I'll never understand this - but they don't seem to care about the origins of math.
~ Re-phrasing of Professor Lear's comment during a discussion of Plato's "Meno" and "Phaedo"

K+4 Theorem of Calculus: If you take a bottle of ketchup and draw a 4 somewhere, there will be a lot of ketchup somewhere."
~ Andrew

"In their stories, they lead the just to Hades, seat them on couches, provide them with a symposium of pious people, crown them with their wreaths, and make them spend all their time drinking - as if they thought drunkenness was the finest wage of virtue."
~ Plato's The Republic: Book II, 363c

"See, this is why we don't need drugs. We get weird at night."
~ Lindsey about herself and me

"The looters are alive and well and living in Cambridge."
~ Harvey - Cambridge was voting on a rent controls bill (Comparison to Atlas Shrugged 's looters

"As far as I've seen the Greens are good hearted people. They just lack intelligence. Especially economic intelligence - like communists."
~Josh - also in relation to rent controls

"I just thought of a really dirty thing that I would never do but I think you should."
~ Meredith

Lydia: "Why is my life a big fucking soap opera?!"
Alison: "She says as she storms off."

$\int c$_u e^x and

 lim   ∫ ex
u -> c

"I never thought I'd be called an earthquake."
~ Sara after Teresa said she thought there was an earthquake when she was sleeping and Sara fell off the ball

"I've never heard of anyone at this school flirting with someone."
~ Zankhana

Foot - Foosball: Gordon and Jeff

"I'm not so un-godly religious that my life revolves around God."
~ Lindsey

Sara: "People here are making fun of me for being naive - I didn't know that Trojan made condoms, or what BJ means, etc. Yeah."
Josh: "Really? Wow. Well I guess that makes you naive then. I won't make fun of you for it though. But if you just go look at some porn sites you should be able to catch up in a few days."

"Europe is cool, they get to show butts on tv. Damn our puritanical background."
~ Josh

"Everything you say is in this leaf . . . and Sara just broke its neck!"
~ Brandon

"There's no way to describe it without making it sound like a medieval torture device."
~ Elena

"To avoid any lack of confusion."
~ Kenith (math professor)

"Did you un-idle-ify me?"
~ Lindsey

You can't tell if a function is only negative or only positive on an interval (without the thereom - I'm sure I miss understood my professor, but oh well)
My Tired musing: Wow that's like how you can't tell if you are strictly awake or strictly asleep."

Sara: "If I say Q.E.D. will you stop thinking?"
Andrew: 'Perhaps . . . "
Sara: "Q.E.D."
Andrew: " . . . Dear god! You're right!"

"I've been so high I didn't know that I was touching the ground."
~ Sally after drinking 1/4 glass of planter's punch

"It would be absurd for someone to think that political science or practical wisdom is the best science, unless human beings are the best thing in the cosmos."
~ Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics , page 109

"I know this guy who dressed up like a girl for Halloween. Except it wasn't Halloween."
~Sara

Doppler Effect: "the sound most people make when trying to mimic a near miss by a speeding car."
~ An Introduction to Mechanics by Klepper/Kolenkow

"I didn't know what to do so I went into the closet."
~Veronica - talking about when there was a fire in her house

"I swear on a stack of complex analysis books . . . "
~ Kenneth

After finals celebration: Jeff, Sara, Lindsey, Gordon

"I can make a moan sound like an integral."
~ Andrew

"Shopping and Fucking are continuous but not uniformly continuous because, if you put shopping on the x-axis and fucking on the y-axis, the relation is unbounded."
~ Andrew (responding to comments on the house chalk board)

"At the end of this exhausting final, I have come to this one conclusion :

Life is like a telescoping sum. All that really matters is the beginning and the end.
Everything in between . . . will eventually cancel out."

WINTER BREAK QUOTES

"Hi, my name is failure and I can't do anything right."
~ Elena - she likes saying "Hi, my name is ______ and I _____ )

Will: "I know 3 guys in the same dorm who sell drugs."
Elena: "How does the market survive?"

In Elena's textbook there is a picture of a man with his hands on a Vandegraff generator kissing a women so their hair is standing up - Elena really wants to make out with someone like that, doesn't it sound fun? hehehe

Sam, Elena, Sara, and Emilyn

"Huh. He looks different when he's not wearing his hair."
~ Lydia - oops. she meant hat

"Ok. The thing is, I sleep a lot better in other peoples' beds."
~ Lydia

So here is Kate's prediction of what my life will be like in the future:
"She obtains a job as a mathematician at a prestigious university. She marries another mathematician. They have brilliant children whose IQ's when they are two are higher than mine at present. Eventually she has a midlife crisis and opens a very posh and successful restaurant in New Orleans."

"It seems like the logical thing to do, to take off your head and weight it."
~ Andrew - talking about how much the human head weighs

"I had my blood drawn once and I felt fine. Perfectly fine. Well . . . . accept for feeling nauseous . . . . and then fainting."
~ Lydia

"The wandering mind strikes again."
~ Lindsey

Sara: "Nick is Andrew's suitemate."
Eveline: "Suitemate. So is that S-W-E-E-T mate?

"If all else fails, resort to drinking."
~ Sara

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell."
~ St. Augustine

"I want to be a bartender. The people are pretty nice to you. I mean, you're what's standing between them and getting drunk."
~ UoC Student

"You're intellectually hot."
~ Elena (hehehe, thanks)

"Any ordinary projectile, such as a baseball thrown from the surface of the Earth, actually is in orbit about the center of the Earth. The projectile is just unable to complete the orbit because the surface of the Earth gets in the way. You can have some fun with this idea: just wager to your friends that you can launch an Earth satellite with your bare hands. Guarantee them double if you lose the wager. Collect the bets. With the money safely in your pocket, simply toss a rock into the air. That's all there is to it; you have launched a satellite of the Earth. While the rock is in flight, it is a satellite of the Earth; there is no arguing with that fact. But...but...but, your friends will claim. But nothing. You never claimed the satellite would complete an orbit; that is another matter! You simply claimed you could launch it."
~ University Physics by Ronald Lane Reese

"I may appear silly, but I am going to start drinking and strewing flowers about!"
~ Horace, Epist. I, v, 14 - - Quoted in An Apology for Raymond Sebond by Montagne (page 61)

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING 2 QUOTES ARE NOT TO BE READ BY PEOPLE WITH SUICIDAL TENDENCIES

"Philosophy in general agrees that there is an ultimate remedy to be prescribed for every kind of trouble: namely, ending our life if we find it intolerable . . . [All right? Then put up with it. Not all right? Then out you go, any way you like . . . Does it hurt? Is it excruciating? If you are defenseless, get your throat cut; if you are armed with the arms of Vulcan (that is, fortitude) then fight it!}."
~ Rough quote from On the First Book of Ethics of Aristotle. Quoted in An Apology for Raymond Sebond by Montagne (page 62)

"Philosophy lays down the law on this subject in these words: If some great evil should chance upon you - one you cannot remedy - then a haven is always near: swim out of your body as from a leaky boat; only a fool is bound to his body, not by love of life but by fear of death."
~ An Apology for Raymond Sebond by Montagne (page 63)

"If you do not know how to live as you should, give way to those who do. You have played enough in bed; you have eaten enough, drunk enough; it is time to be off, lest you start to drink too much and find that pretty girls rightly laugh at you and push you away."
~Quote from On the First Book of Ethics of Aristotle. Quoted in An Apology for Raymond Sebond by Montagne (page 62-3)

"If you had lasers coming out of your belly buttons, they should be intersecting right here."
~ Lindy instructor explaining a move

"What is it about this place? Everything relates to physics. Even dancing."
~ After laser comment

"God is the coolest person on Earth!"
~ Lydia - intersting, God is a person and on Earth. Everyone should take note of this.

"So if you tried to light a light bulb with a lemon battery, you'd need many lemons."
~ Physics professor Blucher

"I'm really religious & I'm a virgin! I could be the Virgin Mary!"
Sara: "So where's the kid?"
Kate: "God was more active a long time ago."

"As our appeal to the word 'unreasonable' suggests, we are about to cloak our ignorance in terminology."
~ Calculus, Third Edition by Michael Spivak (255)

"The fact that the limit is obtained by changing å to ∫ , f(x_i) to f(x), and Dx_i to dx, delights many people."
~ Calculus, Third Edition by Michael Spivak (261)

Yay swing dancing! Someone looks scared to death . . .

"I shouldn't have played with the current."
~ Sara (working on physics problem set)

"W = Fd = QEd . (Confused silence) Yay! I'm done!"
~ Sara (if only the problem were that simple)

"I think it does the thing it does, right?"
~ Jeff (physics, of course)

"I just remembered that I was awake this morning."
~ Brandon

"Just imagine that she had an affair with your ex-husband's daughter."
~ Andrew to Brandon about Lydia

"Whoa. i did not know you were in the habit of picking up guys."
~ Harvey - I didn't realize at first that he was talking about this picture

"Posthumous marriage is allowed in France under a law introduced by former President Charles de Gaulle. "
~ Newspaper article written byTimothy Heritage

"3/5 + 12/5 + 12/10Ö3 b
Talmer's Expansion. Fore example i."
~ Jeff (it's always a good idea to continue writing a problem set even after you fall asleep, who knows what amazing things you might discover!)

"And here with v less than the speed of a healthy ant, it is causing a quite respectable force!"
~ Electricity and Magnetism by Edward M. Purcell (p213)

"Ma cohabitation passionnee avec les mathematiques m'a laisse un amour fou pour les bonnes definitions, sans lesquelles il n'y a que des a-peu-pres."
~ Stendhal ("My passionate encounter with mathematics left me with a great love for good definitions, without which there are only approximations.")

"Africa is the place to go for misery and disease."
~ Elliot - right after Jeff comment on how all our dinner conversations are so "pleasant"

"Last night I dreamed that I wanted to be an exponential function."
~Sara - SHUT UP! Exponential functions are cool. I bet you wish you were one. Yeah, I thought so.

"When you are dancing with your partner, for that two and a half minutes, you are in love with each other. You're corresponding with each other by the moves that you make. It's a love affair, between you and your partner and the music. You feel the music, you feel your partner, she feels you and she feels the music. So there the three of you are together. You've got a triangle, you know. Which one do you love best?"
~ Frankie Manning

"Sara Lapan is lost in the land of complez numbers. Leave all the necessary data and she'll be sure to analyze it and notify you of the results upon her return to the real world.
~ Sara's voice mail message

"Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call God . . . "
~ Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (Part II, page 14)

"And can you blame me, CLEANTHES, if I here imitate the prudent reserve of SIMONIDES, who, according to the noted story, being asked by HIERO, What God was? desired a day to think of it, and then two days more; and after that manner continually prolonged the term, without ever bringing in his definition or description? Could you even blame me, if I had answered at first, that I did not know, and was sensible that this subject lay vastly beyond the reach of my faculties? You might cry out sceptic and railler, as much as you pleased: but having found, in so many other subjects much more familiar, the imperfections and even contradictions of human reason, I never should expect any success from its feeble conjectures, in a subject so sublime, and so remote from the sphere of our observation."
~ Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (Part II, page 20)

"Empires may rise and fall; liberty and slavery succeed alternately; ignorance and knowledge give place to each other; but the cherry tree will still remain in the woods of Greece, Spain, and Italy, and will never be affected by the revolutions of human society."
~ Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (Part VI, page 42)

"He's the guy who does the thing."
~ Jeff, articulate as always

"With great regret we depart from the land of complez numbers."
~ Kenneth

Jeff: "I did. I've done it! I proved 1=3."
Sara: "I proved 1=0 earlier today."

"That's a strange drink. I mean law."
~ Sara

"That thought was going somewhere. Apparently it left and left me here."
~ Andrew

"Sara's an index you sum from zero to infinity."
~ Jeff (oops, wrong word)

Sara: "I'm really weird and you like me, so by the transitive property you're really weird."
Jeff: "What?! How can the transitive property apply, we don't define a metric space!" (not worded quite right, but better than nothing)

“Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand. It makes sense if you live inside a Rubik cube, but if you don’t . . . ”
~ The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee (page 45)

(Sara's) Thoughts while drifting off to sleep . . .
"I hope I'm a convergent function so I fall asleep quickly."

"I wish there were a school-work caffeine that would make you untired of school work."
~ Geoff

"Well I'm probably going to go now. Haven't quite decided. Won't know until the door shuts behind me . . . or doesn't, in which case I'll be in this state of confusion for awhile."
~ Sara

"You're like quantum mechanics. On a large scale you're easily predictable, but on the smallest microscopic particle scale the most complicated quantum mechanical equations can only at best give probabilities of what you might do."
~ Jeff to Sara (quote remembered with up to a 95% accuracy)

"Time dilation and length contraction, man."
~ Drunk student (what?! wow, so nerdy)

"And what is the corner? A short-term, minimum-security prision."
~ Professor Brudney (punishment for children)

"You better be on guard, Sara. I do all kinds of stuff that doesn't make any sense."
~ Jeff

"Dis quelquefois la verite, afin qu'on te croie quand tu mentiras."
~ Jules Renard (roughly, "Tell the truth sometimes so that you'll be believed when you lie.")

"No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work - no man does - but i like what is in the work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means."
~ Conrad, Heart of Darkness (p97)

"Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets."
~ Conrad, Heart of Darkness (p148)

"That's my point. And you're a stick in the mud."
~ Sara (hmmmm . . . best argument ending ever? maybe not)

"The normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
~ My fortune - wow, I've never heard anything so true. Sorry guys, you know it.

"We live, as we dream - alone . . . "
~ Conrad, Heart of Darkness (p95)

"Look at the guys over there (math barbeque). 75% of them are ten times more sexually frustrated than you could ever imagine."
~ Jeff to Lydia

"I'll help you by yoinking your pickle."
~ Lindsey (and yes, it was a pickle)

Sorry for not putting up new quotes very often, it seems as though either people are getting boring or I'm just too lazy to write down funny things. Let's hope it's the latter, because the former is just depressing.

Anyone who has a quote on this board or wants to have their picture put up on my page, email your picture to me at slapan@uchicago.edu . If I know you and feel like it, you may become one of the few to be so prestigious as to have a picture on this amazing page.

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