Top 63 Shetterly Quotes
#1. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one things encounters something else: the unexpected.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#2. There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.
Will Shetterly
#3. Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#4. There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#6. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did. My
Margot Lee Shetterly
#7. Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.
Will Shetterly
#8. Many elitists hate rap as much as they hate country, though they don't like to admit it for fear of appearing racially insensitive.
Will Shetterly
#9. But having the independence of mind and the strength of personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds --- that is what got you noticed.... That's what marked you as someone who should move ahead.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#10. Because of the overwhelmingly white public face of the space program, the black engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who were deeply involved with the space race nevertheless lived in its shadows, even within the black community. Katherine
Margot Lee Shetterly
#11. Is art influential? It can be - 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' rallied abolitionists, and 'The Jungle' provoked the demand for a safer food industry.
Will Shetterly
#12. It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#14. Most of all, she went out of her way to provide them with the kinds of experiences that would expand their understanding of what was possible in their lives.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#15. Of course, while Katherine took the accolades in stride, she never took the work for granted. Not a morning dawned that she didn't wake up eager to get to the office. The passion that she had for her job was a gift, one that few people ever experienced.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#16. Their goal wasn't to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talents. Like the men they worked for, and the men they sent hurtling off into the atmosphere, they were just doing their jobs.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#17. No longer just "a dull bunch of grey buildings with grey people who worked with slide rules and wrote long equations on blackboards," NASA, the public now believed, was all that stood between them and a Red sky.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#18. She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#20. Many times, when children enter school they shun mathematics and science during the years when they should be learning the basics.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#21. Moving around is good for creativity: the next line of dialogue that you desperately need may well be waiting in the back of the refrigerator or half a mile along your favorite walk.
Will Shetterly
#22. That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother's age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine. My
Margot Lee Shetterly
#23. It's always good to hear that people you like are happy.
Will Shetterly
#24. So many ways to screw the pooch, and just one staggeringly complex, scrupulously modeled, endlessly rehearsed, indefatigably tested way to succeed.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#25. Eastman Jacob's legendary attempt to launch a car attached to a glider plane using Hampton's Tony Chesapeake Avenue as a runway only confirmed the Hamptonian's feelings that the Good Lord didn't always see fit to give book sense and common sense to the same individual.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#26. Unless you're writing for a humorous effect, elves or space aliens and all creatures who aren't human should at least be as strange as, oh, the French.
Will Shetterly
#28. She seemed to absorb the short-term oscillations of life without being dislodged by them, as though she were actually standing back observing that both travail and elation were merely part of a much larger, much smoother curve.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#29. the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center. I rode shotgun in our 1970s Pontiac,
Margot Lee Shetterly
#30. At fifty years old and many years into her second career, she reinvented herself as a computer programmer.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#32. Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#34. Or maybe it was her father's pragmatic dictum -- "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you"-- that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#35. Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#36. she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions. It
Margot Lee Shetterly
#37. black people frequently disqualified themselves even without the WHITES ONLY sign in view
Margot Lee Shetterly
#38. Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#39. For twelve school years, every morning, she had turned left out the front door to get to work. Now the taxi turned right, spiriting her off in the opposite direction.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#41. War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first. The NACA's work - more intense and
Margot Lee Shetterly
#42. ...internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#43. They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#44. Not even Pearl Young, the NACA's first female engineer and the founder of the agency's rigorous editorial review process, left behind research with her name on it. From
Margot Lee Shetterly
#45. Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#46. Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#47. There've always been people in the borderland between childhood and adulthood. That state is not a matter of chronological age. It's a matter of understanding that you can accept a future that has been defined by the previous generation, or you can reject it and make something new.
Will Shetterly
#48. Now, at just thirty-eight years old, she found herself a widow and a mother, but also a professional still in the early days of realizing her long-held dream.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#49. Like craftsmen in a medieval guild, NASA engineers hoped that one day their children would decide to take up the mantle of the profession they held so dear.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#50. each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us. The
Margot Lee Shetterly
#51. There were those within NASA who believed, and would continue to believe for decades into the future, that the government's decision to put all its chips on a short-term strategy to beat the Soviets came at the cost of the opportunity to turn humans into a truly spacefaring species.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#52. The Byrd cronies retaliated by diverting taxpayer money to fund whites-only "segregation academies," private schools founded to circumvent integrated public schools.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#53. These are the gifts that last. Small, as easy as breathing in and out, as plain as bread, they sink beneath what we think we remember, what we think we know, but they remain.
Susan Hand Shetterly
#54. In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.
Will Shetterly
#55. Politics is a dirty business, but if you do not do politics, politics will be done to you.
Will Shetterly
#56. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them? The
Margot Lee Shetterly
#58. It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.
Will Shetterly
#59. In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one's job.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#60. She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. But
Margot Lee Shetterly
#61. Sometimes, she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#62. At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#63. The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant.
Will Shetterly
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