Wordgrove Post & Review

THIS EDITION: puzzle :: riddle

Quoted In The Grove:
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
~Erich Fromm

The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
~Richard Dawkins

EndQuote:
He passed a puzzled hand over his brow and began weeping — but not over spilt wine. He had forgotten such things. He was weeping over the astonishing beauty of the world.
~Jack Lindsay

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Exercise Prompt for 05/24: season

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Editor’s note: Two days of research files for this edition’s given prompt [struggle] disappeared. This unfortunate incident gave the Post & Review the questionable opportunity of changing horses midstream; the new prompt being: puzzle. This editor considers the intended message delivered. The offending material, and this note, will be swapped out when the current misadventure has ended. History will not need this reminder from the Post & Review.

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Well, listen, anger doesn’t get anything done, so you have to find out: How do you make it work? That’s why I was always maniacal about transforming every problem into a puzzle which I can solve. I can solve a puzzle — a problem just stresses me out.
~Quincy Jones

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Each one of us fulfills a piece of a larger puzzle.
~Eric McCormack

We are all important parts of a much larger system, pieces of the universe’s puzzle that would not be complete without us.
~Russell Eric Dobda

There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill, and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.
~Deepak Chopra

Each person is an enigma. You’re a puzzle not only to yourself but also to everyone else, and the great mystery of our time is how we penetrate this puzzle.
~Theodore Zeldin

When you’re staring at your phone to navigate and being led places, you do become less aware of your environment, and the journey becomes kind of automated. There is an aliveness that comes with having to puzzle out directions for yourself. And you have to ask other people for help, which creates opportunity for social connection.
~Franklin Foer

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Strange situation, yet we explain it; we tell all who, like ourselves, are puzzled and perplexed, and content to remain so, that it is the problem of the ages. Are we not wise to use such words? We offer no solution, but give the problem a name… why this abyss between the thought and the deed?
~Bernard G Richard

Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.
~Lewis Carroll

What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.
~Walter de la Mare

We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life. So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle.
~Joko Beck

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Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.
~Kurt Vonnegut

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.
~Jean Paul

And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstacy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity.
~G K Chesterton

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Life’s perhaps the only riddle
That we shrink from giving up.
~W S Gilbert

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Posted From The Grove

The problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life; our whole life is solving puzzles.
~Erno Rubik

The Rubik’s cube is considered as the educational toys which can be used to develop children’s intelligence… Believe it or not, Rubik’s cube is listed as the top 100 inventions of the 20th century.
~Chad Bomberger

Studies of social games, puzzle games, and brain-training games have shown they have little effect on the brain despite often being marketed as improving memory and reaction speeds.
~Daphne Bavelier

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He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.
~Arthur Conan Doyle

As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify…
~Arthur Conan Doyle

When you are studying from a book, lots of people go straight to the end to look for the answers. But that’s not my style. For me, the most enjoyable part is the puzzle, the process of solving, not the solution itself.
~Erno Rubik

The scientist is not much given to talking of the riddle of the universe. ‘Riddle’ is not a scientific term. The conception of a riddle is ‘something which can he solved…’ We don’t know the why of anything. On that matter we are no further advanced than was the cavedweller.
~Charles Proteus Steinmetz

I don’t think there is a hidden purpose to the universe that you have to puzzle out.
~Robert Fulghum

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist.
~Paul Watzlawick

Amazingly when you add life and consciousness to the equation you can actually explain some of the biggest puzzles of science.
~Robert Lanza

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Math, it’s a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
~Maya Lin

Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off.
~Richard P Feynman

Devising a mechanism is a lot like solving a puzzle — and gives you the same kind of kick.
~Eric Maskin

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.
~Jon Postel

I can’t live without my smartphone, but I really geek on coding. It’s not so much technology that I like, but puzzle solving.
~Sylvia Day

The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.
~Paul Allen

We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.
~Richard Leakey

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I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.
~Richard P Feynman

The simplest way out of the puzzle of time travel is to say that it can’t be done. That’s very likely the right answer. However, we don’t know for sure.
~Sean M Carroll

Throughout history there have been many other examples, similar to that of Haeckel, Huxley and the cell, where a key piece of a particular scientific puzzle was beyond the understanding of the age.
~Michael Behe

We perceive the world through the rear window of life, observe all the puzzles and little pieces of our existence and assemble them in a comprehensive pattern. This allows us to reassess and evaluate our world view. (‘Waiting for the pieces to fall into place.’)
~Erik Pevernagie

Science isn’t just about solving this or that puzzle. It’s about understanding how the world works: the whole world from the vastness of the cosmos to the particularity of an individual human life. It’s worth thinking about how all the different ways we have to talk about the world manage to fit together.
~Sean M Carroll

Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.
~Eliezer Yudkowsky

Thinkers aren’t limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they’re limited by what puzzles them, because there’s no way to become curious about something that doesn’t puzzle you.
~Daniel Quinn

Dare to ask questions and seek answers to the puzzles of life.
~Lailah Gifty Akita

The questions we don’t ask become the puzzles we don’t solve.
~A J Darkholme

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~Xiangyu Shi: Puzzle (4:14) goldfish, and growing up a girl in China

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~KATAKLO: Puzzle (3:10) colorful, athletic dance

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~Michele Badinelli: The Puzzle (1:56) putting it together

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~Stav Levi \ croovman: PUZZLE (3:18) late comes the reveal

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Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country — and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
~Charles Krauthammer

Here, there, and everywhere — an opinionated riddle.
~Mary Downing Hahn

Tell the truth so as to puzzle and confound your adversaries.
~Henry Wotton

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.
~Jordan Peterson

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To me, the puzzle of Ronald Reagan is how a comparatively ordinary man, someone with not extraordinary talent, accomplished such extraordinary results. At the age of 50, no one expected that this was going to be the guy who would become, at least in my interpretation, one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century.
~H W Brands

When the smoke of countless factories shall darken the air in districts where the primeval forest yet stands, will the United States be able to solve the great problems of government which have puzzled sages and philosophers, kings and statesmen, students and men of business since the world began?
~Charles Mackay

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One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can’t bring your laptop, or don’t want to. But working on somebody else’s machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails.
~Barton Gellman

I would still describe China as a vast, invigorating puzzle that will never make sense to my western upbringing.
~Abigail Washburn

We can’t just pop off and drop a bomb on North Korea and think everything’s going to be OK. It just doesn’t work like that. It’s a complicated puzzle.
~Lois Frankel

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I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It’s the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, ‘I know who you are. You can’t fool me.’
~Elizabeth Kostova

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There’s a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.
~Nancy Horan

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There are many potential niche markets for puzzle makers, from high-paying corporate gigs to alumni magazines, from educational crosswords to advertisements.
~Ben Tausig

As late as 2007, Facebook was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up. An advertising space seemed to be the obvious answer, but how that would tap into the massive value of the personal data uploaded to the company every day remained a puzzle.
~Kurt Eichenwald

How to teach people to do what hasn’t been done is a great riddle.
~Peter Thiel

I try to figure out the marketing puzzle.
~Nelson Peltz

I have restaurants, bookshops… but it’s not an empire, more… a puzzle. If it were an empire, all my restaurants would be the same.
~Alain Ducasse

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When you work with somebody, either the puzzle piece fits, or it doesn’t.
~Gary Goetzman

My favorite puzzle is trying to work out the parts myself, after all it is a solo effort.
~Adrian Belew

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I think each person, if you’re a CEO, the most important thing is to have — to me, is to pick people around you that aren’t like you, that complement you. Because you want to build a puzzle; you don’t want to stack Chiclets up and have everyone be the same. And so I believe in diversity with a capital D.
~Tim Cook

There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can’t quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we cannot solve it alone.
~Lemony Snicket

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Clarissa: Talbot, it is so delightful to have you back again. I shall now have such charming evenings with you at chess.
Talbot: At what?
Clarissa: Chess — the king of games.
Talbot: Do you call it a game? Ha! ha! No, thankee; life’s too short for chess.
~H J Byron

Whoever called snooker ‘chess with balls’ was rude but right.
~Clive James

The perfect family board game is one that can be played each time with fewer pieces.
~Robert Brault

Men trifle with their business and their politics; but they never trifle with their games.
~Bernard Shaw

Not every puzzle is intended to be solved. Some are in place to test your limits. Others are, in fact, not puzzles at all.
~Vera Nazarian

A good puzzle, it’s a fair thing. Nobody is lying. It’s very clear, and the problem depends just on you.
~Erno Rubik

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It’s easy to think of a role-playing game as an amalgamation of two main components, narrative and gameplay, jammed together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes, they fit together nicely; other times, they’re as awkward and frustrating as that one weirdly-shaped ‘Tetris’ block that always falls into the gap where you need an L.
~Jason Schreier

I think different games have a different chemical release in your brain as far as reward goes. I like making puzzle games, just because I know I’m kinda good at it, and they really are superfun to work on.
~Kim Swift

Unraveling the threads of a good game story is like solving a well-crafted puzzle. After a lengthy, sometimes difficult journey, the pieces click into place, and you’re rewarded with the satisfying payoff of a job well done.
~Jason Schreier

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From Game A to Game B, your whole focus is on improving your team and what is the next challenge. What does the next team present? What are the solutions to the puzzle?
~Frank Vogel

Coaching is very complex: it’s like a puzzle, and many things need to come together to make it work.
~Stan Wawrinka

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Most of the places I’ve been, I’ve been a main piece of the puzzle.
~Eric Davis

I was just one piece of the puzzle, a very small piece at that. I really enjoyed my time with the Knicks, and we had a great run.
~Jason Kidd

We’re pieces of the puzzle. If I fit in a certain algorithm, then it’ll be time for me to go. It’s tough as a baseball player, it really is, not knowing much, but you just have to play.
~Eddy Alvarez

The challenge coaches face is replacing players they were counting on to be major pieces of a puzzle. In a lot of cases, there is just no way to make the necessary adjustments.
~Ron Jaworski

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Sometimes the hardest pieces of a puzzle to assemble, are the ones missing from the box.
~Dixie Waters

I like to be surprised by life; it’s a good thing to search for the puzzle pieces.
~Josh McDermitt

I look at this life as a puzzle without all the pieces in the box.
~Jonathan Anthony Burkett

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Tennis is a big puzzle. It’s not any more physical or mental; you have to have all the pieces first, and then you have to put all the pieces together. For me, it took me time.
~Stan Wawrinka

A well-adjusted person is one who can play golf and bridge as if they were the same games.
~Evan Esar

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§ VIDEO:

You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.
~Steve Martin

But a lot of shows, they pose questions and they give you a puzzle where there’s no solution.
~Aaron Stanford

Movies don’t look hard, but figuring it out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody’s character right and having it be funny, make sense and be romantic, it’s creating a puzzle. Yes, having been a writer for so long, I have an awareness of when things are going awry, but it doesn’t mean I know how to fix them.
~Nancy Meyers

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When you’re making an independent film, it’s like this actor plus this actor equals this funding, this financing. Pull this actor out, this actor is still here but this money’s gone. It’s this frightening puzzle mosaic that is the world of independent film.
~Jill Soloway

The great thing about being a producer on a project is that you get to see the ins and outs of every piece of the puzzle. There are so many elements involved in every aspect of a film’s development that I don’t think the average person is aware of, which is, I guess, why the whole process is referred to as movie magic.
~Roberto Aguire

When you are acting, you are just one piece of the puzzle. You don’t see how everything fits together. It feels like you have less authorship over the entire product. In directing, you take the entire picture into account, so you’re challenged in a different way.
~Misha Collins

I think of each movie as a puzzle. The fun is in solving the puzzle: finding a musical identity for the picture, however that can be summed up.
~Marco Beltrami

I’ve never been a big cinephile, which may be why I could treat ‘The Clock‘ like a puzzle and force the pieces to fit together in odd ways.
~Christian Marclay

Every film is a puzzle really, from an editorial point of view.
~Walter Murch

Hollywood can buy a lot of pieces of the puzzle, but the great thing is they can never buy word of mouth.
~Steve Tisch

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To me acting is like a jigsaw puzzle. The jigsaw puzzle is of the sky and all the pieces are blue. Out of this you have to create a human being and put it together.
~Henry Winkler

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it’s a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.
~Lewis Black

Without writers, none of the entertainment would exist. It starts with writers. Writers are the most important piece of the entire puzzle.
~Hill Harper

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When I was taught Shakespeare in school, it was such an alien, sanitized puzzle, it made no sense.
~Rhys Ifans

As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.
~Michael J Fox

That’s what I love doing – understanding another person’s perspective that’s really different from mine. To me, it’s like an emotional puzzle, trying to figure out the humanity of a character who is very different from myself and why they think the way they do.
~Miriam Shor

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Movies are in a much longer production conversation before an actor is even involved. I always thought of actors as the last piece of the puzzle – so you’re a tool.
~Elizabeth Olsen

It’s very important for actors to feel like a part of the puzzle and not the puzzle itself.
~Vikrant Massey

The wardrobe is always the last piece of the puzzle. When you step into the clothing, that’s the final step to figuring out that character.
~Mia Wasikowska

I wanted to play incredibly challenging, multifaceted characters. Because we are all a puzzle.
~Kate Winslet

I am a puzzle and a conundrum and a thunderstorm.
~Brian Doyle

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~Sensa Productions: The Jigsaw (8:26) quality horror, the don’t-turn-around kind

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~Omeleto: The Study (9:22) zoned: twilight

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~Omeleto: The Ark (14:43) to suffer immortality

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Music is a lot more like solving an intricate puzzle with moments of pure, random creative bliss… whereas painting is much more purely random creative bliss with moments of problem solving.
~Brandon Boyd

Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.
~Hans Hofmann

I feel every painting is a challenging piece of a puzzle for me and others to solve. I feel both humble and exhilarated to see it completed.
~Akiane Kramarik

When I studied graphic design, I learned a valuable lesson: There’s no perfect answer to the puzzle, and creativity is a renewable resource.
~Biz Stone

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§ MUSIC:

Puzzles are like songs. A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.
~Stephen Sondheim

I love words. They’re fun. I don’t think any word can just be filler. There’s no room for it. It’s like a puzzle. Every song can be written a million times. How can you say it differently?
~Kacey Musgraves

Sometimes I’ll have sections that I’m not quite sure how they fit in the puzzle of a tune, they’ll get moved around; what I think was originally a verse ends up becoming the chorus, or what’s an intro gets dropped as a hook, things get shifted around a lot.
~Gotye

We put our music together, piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle.
~Ronnie Van Zant

Pop is like a puzzle: to write a perfect pop song, you never know, and there’s so much that can happen in a second with a song.
~LP

I love when a song is conceived as a jigsaw puzzle in the studio, and then it’s a natural to play live. That’s my gauge of success for a song.
~Jamie Hince

There’s more things that I’d like to do. You know, each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts.
~Beck

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Writing is sort of putting a puzzle together halfway. Then, performing it has always been the completion of it. Once that happens, I’m feeling verbally communal with other people. It’s out there and I feel so much better about it.
~Brandi Carlile

Finding your style is like putting puzzle pieces together.
~Lara Spencer

I worked a lot on our album cover, and I didn’t just want to post it on our website one day and move on. We wound up breaking it into 18 pieces and hiding them on fan sites all over the Internet and then posting clues, so fans could put together the puzzle.
~Zacky Vengeance

Making an album is always a puzzle: you start by seeing a lot of different pieces, and they all need to come together into one picture.
~Floor Jansen

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~Alphaville: Middle of The Riddle (4:51) intriguing question of balance becomes a song

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~Five For Fighting: The Riddle (3:54) mixed media music

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~Puzzle: Comedown (3:35) limited lyrics, stylish video

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~En Vogue: Riddle (4:10) payback is a …

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When broken people try to complete each other it is like forcing unfit puzzle pieces together because they are somewhat similar.
~Lidia Longorio

Love is like a puzzle. When you’re in love, all the pieces fit but when your heart gets broken, it takes a while to get everything back together.
~author unknown

Illness is a puzzle scattered in pieces. Find a way to make whole all the parts, and you can find wellness.
~Terri Guillemets

If the pieces do not fit into your puzzle. Try a different picture.
~Cass van Krah

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To become rich is easy. Much harder is to solve the riddles of the heart.
~Publilius Syrus

The Riddle Master himself lost the key to his own riddles one day,’ he said in his deep, reed-pure voice, ‘and he found it again at the bottom of his heart.’
~Patricia A Mckillip

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We do spend time talking about it and we puzzle through it together. We ride the roller coasters together – the high highs and the low lows.
~Kyra Sedgwick

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I’m not a puzzle piece to someone else’s puzzle, I’m my own puzzle that is still growing. I’m unsure of what it’ll look like when it’s done, but it will be uniquely me.
~Macy Niichel

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I would like a boyfriend. I’m a very happy person and it is the final, final piece of the puzzle. I’m looking for that shout-it-out-from-the-mountaintops, fall-in-love person.
~Andy Cohen

Female clothing seems to be extremely difficult and almost like a puzzle for a man to take off. But I think if you get there, you win. A kilt is the complete opposite. The kilt is so easy to take off.
~Sam Heughan

Every riddle has one perfect answer. For life it is love.
~Syed Arshad

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The greatest puzzle in the world, young man, the greatest challenge a man can face, a solving the riddle of a women’s heart.
~Steve Hamilton

Woman will always continue to be a cute riddle or a beautiful puzzle, in the meantime man believes that he solves it.
~Eyden I.

I am a woman of many talents and they’re all just pieces of the puzzle that make me and make my career.
~Michelle Phillips

It’s like the riddle of the Sphinx… why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men?
~Sarah Jessica Parker

I think being a woman and writing frankly about violence has gotten me some attention, and as someone who wants people to read my books, I can’t complain about that attention, but it does puzzle me that this is something reviewers focus on.
~Karin Slaughter

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Being a parent is the toughest thing I’ve ever done. But I’m not the kind of person to throw my kid in front of a TV. I’m the one to take out a book, puzzle, or flash cards.
~Eric Dane

Sisters have ways of socializing brothers into the mysteries of girls. Brothers have ways of socializing sisters into the puzzle that is boys.
~Jeffrey Kluger

~

I get up and cook for my kids, who really like my scrambled eggs. Or we make pancakes and the requisite bacon. The kids either play or watch cartoons, and Daddy gets to read the ‘New York Times‘ and do his puzzle.
~Jeffrey Tambor

Reviewing good puzzle books is frustrating, because you get to page one of the introduction, find a curious puzzle, become engrossed for 20 minutes, miss your stop and then fail to get home in time to say goodnight to the kids.
~Simon Singh

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Children astound me with their inquisitive minds. The world is wide and mysterious to them, and as they piece together the puzzle of life, they ask ‘Why?’ ceaselessly.
~John C Maxwell

A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt ‘Don’t bother me — I’ve got important work to do.’
~Daniel Goleman

The work of the world are the chores of a family, and interventions are a bloody nose instead of the morgue.
~author unknown

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Never neglect an opportunity to play leap-frog; it is the best of all games, and, unlike the terribly serious and conscientious pastimes of modern youth, will never become professionalized.
~Herbert Beerbohm Tree

Old card players never die, they just shuffle away.
~author unknown

Never play Twister naked unless you have a can of non-stick cooking spray.
~Anthony J D’Angelo

Whoever dreamed up Scrabble had an exaggerated idea of how many seven-letter words have five i’s.
~Robert Brault

At my house, when a missing pawn shows up in the Scrabble tiles, it counts as an extra blank.
~Robert Brault

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…there he was, leaning back in his chair and finishing the Friday New York Times puzzle with a ballpoint pen… The New York Times puzzles grow progressively harder as the week advances, with Monday being the easiest and Saturday requiring the sort of mind that can bend spoons. It took me several days to complete my first Monday puzzle, and after I’d finished, I carried it around in my wallet, hoping that someone might stop me on the street and ask to see it.
~David Sedaris

Egotism, n.: doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.
~author unknown

Do I rue a life wasted doing crosswords? Yes, but I do know the three-letter-word for regret.
~Robert Brault

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There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed.
~Kurt Vonnegut

Any woman who has attempted to slip a credit card into an inch-deep trouser pocket knows about the annoying puzzle of women’s clothing: Pockets rarely work.
~Christina Binkley

I stayed up one night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.
~Steven Wright

POKER, n. A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown.
~Ambrose Bierce

~

It puzzled all our kith and kin,
It reach’d an awful pitch;
For one of us was born a twin
And not a soul knew which was which
~Henry S Leigh

Thirty days hath September,
Every person can remember;
But to know when Easter comes
Puzzles even scholars some
~Boston Transcript

Let school-masters puzzle their brain,
With grammar, and nonsense, and learning;
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives genius a better discerning.
~Oliver Goldsmith

I wanna make a jigsaw puzzle that’s 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says ‘go outside.’
~Demetri Martin

You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers ‘puzzles.’ I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It’s on the box. And even if I don’t, if it’s a 5,000-piece puzzle of the ‘Mona Lisa’, it’s not like I put the last piece in and go, ‘I had no idea it’s the ‘Mona Lisa’!’
~Harlan Coben

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The Diners
© SCFaber

~~

The term jigsaw puzzle really came to prominence from 1880 when the previous name dissected puzzle was changed following the invention of the treadle jigsaw.
~David Platt

~

The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don’t seem to justify the efforts we make each day.
~Robert Adams

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Every day is sort of a jigsaw puzzle. You have to make sure that you’re putting the most important things first.
~Julia Hartz

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Every horse I get on I can adapt to. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.
~Charlotte Dujardin

~

Innovation is like looking for pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. You have to find a lot of pieces that don’t match to find the one or two pieces that match.
~Edward Conard

~

The problem is that we always look for the missing piece of the puzzle instead of finding a place for the one in our hand.
~Alina Radoi

—

Many puzzles that do have themes are not titled as such; rather, one discovers the theme by solving the crossword.
~Abbott Wainwright

In the same way he’s fascinated by crosswords, the puzzle of solving the murder is what drives him on.
~John Thaw

~

People who work crossword puzzles know that if they stop making progress, they should put the puzzle down for a while.
~Marilyn vos Savant

Getting away from a puzzle and doing something else clears the brain so that it is fresh when it returns to a puzzle. A break rids the brain of its prior blind spot accumulated while doing a puzzle.
~Abbott Wainwright

You know that thing where you’re trying to do the crossword puzzle, and you’re trying to fit the word that’s in your head in the puzzle, and then you go ‘Ugh!’ and you walk away, and then it comes to you. I’m interested in that moment. The release of expectation, and the release of pleasing yourself and pleasing anybody. Breaking the mindset.
~Jeffrey Tambor

~ ~

@Writers Platform

I think that, at the end of the day, I’m drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the ‘New York Times‘ crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there’s a real rewarding sense if you feel like you’ve cracked it.
~Damon Lindelof

Much like life, you don’t complete a puzzle by throwing away the pieces.
~Craig D Lounsbrough

~

Understanding a metaphor is like deciphering a code or unraveling a riddle.
~Max Black

Miss Barrett: Sometimes there are passages… I’ve marked one or two in your Sordello which rather puzzled me.
‘All petals, no prickles
No prickles like trickles.’
Robert Browning: Well, Miss Barrett, when that passage was written only God and Robert Browning understood it.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.
~John Cooper Clarke

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
~Karl Kaus

~

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it’s one of the most satisfying parts of writing.
~Karen Thompson Walker

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.
~Uzodinma Iweala

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don’t intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.
~Mohsin Hamid

~

Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.
~Ashwin Sanghi

I think that we’re pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there’s no puzzle pieces left over.
~Noah Hawley

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie — the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn’t decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
~A S Byatt

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues — or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.
~A S Byatt

~

There’s something about Vonnegut’s deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges’ puzzle structure.
~Ruth Ozeki

~

But to this day — I’m very literate now, I love to read, I read constantly — words don’t resonate the way they do to a person with a formal education. They’re like a maze, a puzzle that has to be opened up.
~Lance Henriksen

I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it’s an abstract thing that’s felt differently for all the characters.
~Phil Klay

~

He may find it hard to achieve just the arrangement he wants, but he will find it hardest of all to meet squarely that inevitable inquiry of the puzzled carpenter, as he looks about him, Have you really read all these books?
~Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the ‘Zhuangzi‘ is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It’s a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.
~Patrick Stump

~~

§ The Glass Table:

I Like the Rain

I like the rain to fall soft upon my face
as alone in the night, I gaze into space
marveling as the moon sends silvery beams
and sweet rain drops run, sparkling streams

Deep velvet sky, cloaking shadows that fall
as alone in the night, a haunting whippoorwill’s call
shimmering stars pierce the night sky
the unburdening clouds mask tears that I cry

Enthralled by the darkness, dancing lights fill the sky
as alone in the night, I am shaken… with a deep sigh
caress of a breeze, chilling as it warms me slow
spilling out upon a page, now to you… I show…
~Greenie of There.com

~~

I am very puzzled by the fact that young people are getting infected again. They don’t take precautions despite an enormous amount of information. It’s like riding a race car at 200 kilometers an hour. Some people like the risk.
~Luc Montagnier

I probably wouldn’t do anything differently if I had to do it again. Every little thing that happens to you, good and bad, becomes a little piece of the puzzle of who you become. Every successful person you read about — Warren Buffett, Bill Gates — they all say pretty much the same thing. ‘Do what you love.’ I know I did.
~David Foster

And it is in games that many men discover their paradise.
~Robert Lynd

~

A puzzle doesn’t have to be impossibly difficult to be great… Producing a refreshing and original easy puzzle is one of the biggest challenges a constructor can face
~Ben Tausig

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.
~Douglas Horton

~

‘Gravity Falls‘ is a riddle wrapped in an enigma tucked in a mystery deep-fried in a conundrum slathered in hickory-smoked puzzle sauce.
~Alex Hirsch

There were so many puzzling things after one knew all the organs and innards. You thought with your brain. Why couldn’t you see yourself thinking that you were seeing yourself thinking and so on forever like looking in a mirror seeing yourself looking in the mirror?
~Cid Ricketts Sumner

Unraveling the solution to a mystery story of a puzzle seems to produce a kind of ‘mental catharsis,’ since people typically feel a sense of relief from suspense when they find the answer to the mystery or puzzle… For some truly mysterious reason, human beings seem to need this kind of catharsis on a regular bases — as the popularity of mysteries and puzzles across the world and across time attests.
~Ronald A Knox

Watching Houdini, some were willing for the magic while others were driven to unravel his puzzle. His show was the thing.
~author unknown

~

David Beckham is always seen as the thickest man on the planet, too daft to complete a jigsaw puzzle. But then you watch old footage of him playing and every time he plays a ball across the field, he’s intuitively working out the trajectory of the ball.
~Romesh Ranganathan

I can’t solve a puzzle for the life of me – my brain doesn’t work that way. But I can take a very simple idea and extrapolate from it and spend time with it and pull things out of it.
~David Lowery

~

In every problem, there’s a concealed solution, locking itself underneath, unlock, peruse, find and solve.
~Michael Bassey Johnson

Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.
~Isak Dinesen

Man is a puzzle-solving animal.
~Ronald A Knox

The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.
~Stephen Sondheim

~~

Prewritten Prompt: puzzle

~~

In such cases the imagination is undoubtedly its own doppelgänger, and sees nothing more than the projection of its own deceit. But I am puzzled, I confess, to explain the appearance of the first ghost, especially among men who thought death to be the end-all here below.
~James Russell Lowell

Man’s moral nature is a riddle which only eternity can solve.
~Henry David Thoreau

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
~G K Chesterton

I looked at some of the statues of Jesus; they were just stones with no life. When they said that God is three, I was puzzled even more but could not argue. I believed it, simply because I had to have respect for the faith of my parents.
~Cat Stevens

~~

§ THE EXERCISE

Same Difference

Color me baffled
No!
Color me puzzled
Nigh on the same
letter palette
But too much blue
in baffled

~

on the plus

riddle me with bullets
wound me with your arms
riddle me with wily words
burn me with your charms

dicey puzzle titled Love
triggered new kinds of storm
illusive brands of identity
new winter ways to stay warm

~

des•tiny

companion partners
platonics not meant for love
walls have exits needing resupply
doors disguised as ways to enter
to merge as if intended
fated gratis from above
slip into a common groove

cubbyhole definitions
have more to prove
than late-blooming seeds do
sunset shadows lengthen, loom
near penultimate’s pending moon
sync up, match up, date to mate
fear some, find one ere too late

~

promise

cross words the reality
cross words for the clue
aisle for the I’ll always love you
crossword: the relationship puzzle
cross out the words I will and I do

~

5s ‘n 7s

riddle me what puzzles me
what hereafter death can be
your only proof, you believe
preach me how eternity
sanctified just you and me

~

if love was a lake
white sandy shore, hidden depths
how far the shallows?
wade in or dive, the puzzle
otter in water or stone

~

play shrewd the puzzle
sideline player watching game
both sides wearing out
one rewarded for folly
t’other suggests let ’em vote

~ ~

The Olio and Salmagundi of Quotes

I am a very zone-specific person. For example, if I put all the pieces of a puzzle together, it’s done, so there is nothing to look forward to.
~Nushrat Bharucha

It’s hard to appreciate success in modeling, because it’s not something you feel like you’ve earned, so there is a little bit of bread of shame that comes with that. It’s like somebody giving you a puzzle that’s already put together.
~Ashton Kutcher

~

I try to keep current in what’s going on in the world. I do mental exercises. I don’t have any trouble memorizing lines because of the crossword puzzles I do every day to keep my mind a little limber. I don’t sit and vegetate.
~Betty White

I love words. Sudoku I don’t get into, I’m not into numbers that much, and there are people who are hooked on that. But crossword puzzles, I just can’t — if I get a puppy and I paper train him and I put the — if all of a sudden I’d open the paper and there’s a crossword puzzle — ‘No, no, you can’t go on that, honey. I’ll take it.’
~Betty White

~

Paris is an unsolved puzzle. She inspires me in a way that other places don’t. And she demands more of me. Just try to write about her without bumping into cliche after cliche.
~M J Rose

I love Memphis, I guess you could say, in the way that you love a brother even if he does sometimes puzzle and sadden and frustrate you. Say what you want about it, it’s an authentic place. I was born and raised in Memphis, and no matter where I go, Memphis belongs to me, and I to it.
~Hampton Sides

~

Once I began doing stand-up, I didn’t get a kick out of the applause or being the centre of attention — but I did get a kick out of the jigsaw puzzle aspect of it, searching for the right bit, adding another few pieces each night until the bigger picture appears. That’s the appeal: the challenge of it.
~Stephen Merchant

This idea of, there’s a locked door; how do you open it? You don’t necessarily care what’s behind it; you’re just more excited about opening the lock … It’s not about finding the treasure; it’s more about defeating the puzzle.
~Harper Reed

~

Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved.
~George Arthur Buttrick

The world’s a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it.
~Socrates

~

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can’t take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.
~Chaim Potok

So now it is time to disassemble the parts of the jigsaw puzzle or to piece another one together, for I find that, having come to the end of my story, my life is just beginning.
~Conrad Veidt

~ ~

Riddles Answered

Having been asked, why the tilde
It reminds of a musical instrument
the curves of a woman
waves on the water
The look of it is gentle
a good introduction to words

…and the why of double ::
From personal use, and for purposes here: means not equal, but almost the same, or almost the opposite (this edition’s puzzle :: riddle); used rarely, primarily to open up options

---

The Olio
Quotes harvested from: https://bqotd.com, https://puzzleseek.com, https://www.quotegarden.com, https://wisesayings.com

~

The Salmagundi
Video Harvest: https://vimeo.com, https://youtube.com

~. .~