Categories Quotes

“It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“There are three categories of people exist in the world; “the wanters”, “the wishers” and “the makers.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, 101 Keys To Everyday Passion

“A lot of people call you a feminist painter."
"What indeed," I say. "I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all?”
― Margaret Atwood

“...the following parable may be useful. Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for an explicit isomorphism. In other words, they would line up both herds and try to match each sheep in one herd with a sheep in the other. But one day, along came a shepherd who invented decategorification. She realized one could take each herd and ‘count’ it, setting up an isomorphism between it and some set of ‘numbers’, which were nonsense words like ‘one, two, three,... ’ specially designed for this purpose. By comparing the resulting numbers, she could show that two herds were isomorphic without explicitly establishing an isomorphism! In short, by decategorifying the category of finite sets, the set of natural numbers was invented. According to this parable, decategorification started out as a stroke of mathematical genius. Only later did it become a matter of dumb habit, which we are now struggling to overcome by means of categorification.”
― John C. Baez

“the fact that maybe men think if they just name everything, everything’ll be okay, the fact that it’s like dogs marking their territory”
― Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport

“In life, the categories we belong to can change very easily and can change so very easily that we in fact belong to every single category! We are hunter, we are victim; we are master, we are slave; we are rich, we are poor; we are lock, we are key! We belong to every category!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.”
― Ben Marcus, Notable American Women

“I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.”
― Ben Marcus, Notable American Women

“Before 1802, cirrus, cumulus, and altostratus clouds hadn’t been given names. Untitled before 1802, the shapes were present in the sky, ethereal or ephemeral, presumably since the big bang, but un-designated, until they needed to be. Why then?
The world hasn’t been fully seen, until it is named.”
― Lynne Tillman, Men and Apparitions

“...a name is almost always a sort of cowardice---an attempt to confine a thing to being only what it is, rather than what it may be.”
― Jesse Ball, Census

“..the following parable may be useful. Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for an explicit isomorphism. In other words, they would line up both herds and try to match each sheep in one herd with a sheep in the other. But one day, along came a shepherd who invented decategorification. She realized one could take each herd and ‘count’ it, setting up an isomorphism between it and some set of ‘numbers’, which were nonsense words like ‘one, two, three,... ’ specially designed for this purpose. By comparing the resulting numbers, she could show that two herds were isomorphic without explicitly establishing an isomorphism! In short, by decategorifying the category of finite sets, the set of natural numbers was invented. According to this parable, decategorification started out as a stroke of mathematical genius. Only later did it become a matter of dumb habit, which we are now struggling to overcome by means of categorification.”
― John Baez, Categorification

“Classification may very well not be useless, but it is never analysis, no matter how baroquely detailed and comprehensive-seeming its categories. At best, it begs questions. At worst it is presumptuous and totalitarian, replacing understanding with filing. We have all heard papers where categories are the driving force, according to which the way we understand literature (or whatever) is to work out what title fits where, as if literary theory was a giant card-catalog. Even when the last book has been slotted neatly into the last of the holes that were cut to be filled with books, what we have are books in neat piles. Which is not nothing, but neither is it that much.”
― China Miéville

“One can see the world leaders, in two categories; to dictate others or to be dictated by others.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Nutmeg." Claudia grabbed the bottle and screwed the cap back on. The story was still filtering through me when a new scent exploded forth.
"Orris root," Claudia said, tapping the new bottle on the table. "Am I going too fast for you?"
"No," I lied.
"Good."
Linden blossom. Tonka bean. Benzoin.The smells came at me, little glass missiles fired across the table in rapid succession.
"The point is speed and precision," Claudia said. She pushed a stack of papers toward me, the pages divided into rows and columns. "Put each scent in a category. Fresh, floral, woody, spicy, animal, marine, fruity. You need to recognize them instantly, without thinking."
The bottles started again, and the world turned into charts and rows, filled with an onslaught of strange names.Litsea cubeba. Frangipani. Neroli. Tagette. Orangebroke into pieces, becamepettigrain, bergamot, tangerine, mandarin, bitter, sweet,andblood. Pepperwasblack, green,orpink. Mintwaswinter, spear,orpepper.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The Scent Keeper

“By the end of the day, I'd reached the point where I could sense the category of a scent almost before the bottle was open.Freshwas quick and cool, never warm.Floralwas soft and seductive, the kind that kept its clothes on, showing only an ankle or a shoulder.Spicybit your nose, woke you up.Woodysent me to the island so fast I couldn't stop the tears from filling my eyes. I couldn't wait to start combining them, creating something new.
Victoria was right- this was a language, my language, and I wanted to write.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The Scent Keeper

“When we see beings as belonging to a particular group, for instance, we start to believe there's something fundamental and biological that unites all the creatures in that group, that there's some invisible essence that makes a dog a dog and a cat a cat. We do the same thing with humans: if we are told that a category is important, we infer that the people in the people in that category share a fundamental essence. We essentially them. And the more a category is emphasized, the more we think its members have a unifying thread.”
― Jessica Nordell, The End of Bias: A Beginning: How We Eliminate Unconscious Bias and Create a More Just World

“…for to name a thing is to give it order and purpose...”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“Ambition: Aspiring to be the first person in history to win all Nobel Prize categories.”
― Steven Magee

“I expect I will win one Nobel prize and I may end up eventually winning all categories.”
― Steven Magee

“Not every person fits neatly into categories. Life doesn't always stick to a planned itinerary.”
― A.J. Sass, Ellen Outside the Lines

“And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“No one likes 'labels' until they are handed a menu. Suddenly clarity matters.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Without reduction and categorization we simply could not survive. And so, when considered in the strictest sense, the point is not to live without categories, rather to first liquify established and malignant categories on order to then to helpful sense categories and interpretations that will open up the cognitive space of putting for interpretation and action.”
― Jürgen Kriz, Self-Actualization

“It’s always the other guy’s religion that’s a sect, isn’t it?”
― Yuri Herrera, The Transmigration of Bodies