Amazon Quotes

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

I had just heard tales that the Valkyrie were large warriors, akin to Amazons.” “If you’re the sole survivor of an army attacked by us, are you going to say we had our asses handed to us by petite, nubile females, or by she-monsters who can bench Buicks?

...One of the reasons so many women say "I'm not a feminist but..." (and then put forward a feminist position), is that in addition to being stereotyped as man-hating Amazons, feminists have also been cast as antifamily and antimotherhood.

The second Amazon they met wasn't so friendly. She was dressed in full armor, blocking the throne-room entrance. She spun her spear with lightning speed, but this time Percy was ready. He drew Riptide and stepped into battle. As the Amazon jabbed at him, he sidestepped, cut her spear shaft in half, and slammed the hilt of his sword against her helmet. The guard crumpled. "Mars Almighty," Frank said. "How did you - that wasn't any Roman technique!" Percy grinned. "The graecus has some moves, my friend.

You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Tink?" "No." He grinned. "You have Amazon Prime.

Otrera stayed dead the second time," Kinzie said, batting her eyes. "We have to thank you for that. If you ever need a new girlfriend...well, I think you'd look great in an iron collar and an orange jumpsuit." Percy couldn't tell if she was kidding or not. He politely thanked her and changed seats.

IF YOU DON'T GO AFTER WHAT YOU WANT; YOU COULD SPEND YOUR ENTIRE LIFE SETTLING FOR WHAT YOU CAN GET

(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?) Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

when you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you’re happy and it’s easy.

No one had ever told her this basic fact: not everyone got to be loved.

As long as we have Netfix, Turner Classic Movies, Amazon, YouTube, and bookstores, there is no excuse ever to lack inspiration.

I had to wait for someone special. Someone who would make my heart feel as if it's been trampled by elephants, thrown into the amazon, and eaten by piranhas.

You sure you're not a Roman, Annabeth? Or an Amazon?

Water seeks its own level. Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The world's great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.

We got latched together and I was hoping you could separate us? (Amanda) They were made by your stepfather. Any chance you have a key lying around? (Kyrian) I guess I shouldn't be surprised. At least this time she's not an Amazon princess with an irate mother demanding parts of your body be removed. Two thousand years later, and you're still getting into unbelievable messes. (Julian)

HAZEL: "THERE," she said.The official building on their left had a single word etched on the glass doors: AMAZON. "oh," Frank said."Uh, no, Hazel. That's a modern thing. They're a company, Right? they sell stuff on the internet. They're not actually Amazons." "Unless..." Percy walked through the doors.

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN

Kinzie smiled smugly. “You admire our base of operations? Yes, our distribution system is worldwide. It took many years and most of our fortune to build. Now, finally, we’re turning a profit. The mortals don’t realize they are funding the Amazon kingdom. Soon, we’ll be richer than any mortal nation. Then—when the weak mortals depend on us for everything—the revolution will begin!” “What are you going to do?” Frank grumbled. “Cancel free shipping?

Eeek,” Shane said. Nothing. Right, Amazon princess, I got the point.

He looked as if he'd stepped straight off the cover of one of those romance novels she ordered from Amazon.com so she didn't have to be embarassed by some supercilious male clerk in the bookstore.

At your next book club meeting, picture me sitting quietly in the corner, taking notes on your preferences. Imagine the next day you get an email from me trying to sell you a new grill — or a book — or accessories for your Glock. That's the Amazon/Goodreads deal. It's appalling. But everywhere in the press, you'll read about the genius of Amazon." (Michael Herrmann and the booksellers of Gibson's)

If your product is bringing a bigger cultural change, it will take time but when that period of resistance is over, you will be able to reach the heights you’ve never even thought existed as Amazon did.

Some people are just sad when there aren't talking squirrels.” —Lily Winter

During the shopping process, Amazon’s AI offers suggestions of items that it predicts you will want to buy. The AI does a reasonable job. However, it is far from perfect. In our case, the AI accurately predicts what we want to buy about 5 percent of the time. We actually purchase about one of every twenty items it recommends. Considering the millions of items on offer, that’s not bad!

Many people have been protesting against what they describe as censorship on Goodreads. I disagree. In fact, I would like to say that I welcome the efforts that Goodreads management is making to improve the deplorably low quality of reviewing on this site. Please, though, just give me clearer guidelines. I want to know how to use my writing to optimize Amazon sales, especially those of sensitive self-published authors. This is a matter of vital importance to me, and outweighs any possible considerations of making my reviews interesting, truthful, creative or entertaining.

Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent.

Tink appeared in the open door again, his wings rapidly moving, and in his hands he held a... slingshot? Oh sweet baby Jesus take the wheel. Where did he get a slingshot? Off of Amazon? That didn't matter. The brownie had taken the time to paint his face. One half was red, the other blue. He looked like he wandered off the set of Braveheart. I mouthed the word no at him.

It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.

Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon

Work Hard, have fun, make history

No one should be allowed to be happy when you were so miserable – especially not your best friends. It should be a law.

Tavin cupped his hands to his mouth. “Here, dragon-dragon-dragon!” he yelled. Lily stared in amazement. Well, that was bold, she thought, and stupid.

At the end of the warehouse was a dais constructed from pallets of books: stack of vampire novels, walls of James Patterson thrillers, and a throne from about a thousand copies of something called The Five Habits of Highly Aggressive Women.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.

I do so love my witches and wicked queens. I find myself drawn to feminine archetypes that previous generations have found threatening or dangerous: crones, oracles, madwomen, Amazons, virgins who aren’t helpless, bad mothers. I love to give the vagina dentata voice. It so rarely gets to speak for itself.

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing.

I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go​, don't-look-at-my-Amazon-bill. I choose purses based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack into a suitcase. I am the person who family and friends call when they need a book recommendation or cannot remember who wrote Heidi. My identity as a person is so entwined with my love of reading and books that I cannot separate the two.

I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

Fang let out a low whistle. "Anyone know that Amazons could ride a giant bird?" Ethon gave him a duh stare. "Those of us who fought them, yeah, we know. How you think they keep kicking our asses?" "Cause you're pansies. Everyone knows that.

The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it." -Amazon.com interview

Human courage was different from Amazon bravery. She saw that now. For all the suspicion and derision she'd heard from her mother and her sisters about the mortal world, Diana couldn't help but admire the people with whom she traveled. Their lives were violent, precarious, fragile, but they fought for them anyway, and held to the hope that their brief stay on this earth might count for something. That faith was worth preserving.

An intelligent woman is a goldmine! She has the ability to learn, reason and understand things better and faster than her contemporaries. She is competent, alert and can reason out stuffs easily.

Only a woman who had killed a man in battle was allowed to give up her virginity.

I mean, my idea of exciting is getting an Amazon gift card and buying a whole bunch of books.

She was plump, with dyed red hair and a face so caked with cosmetics that the floor of the Amazon jungle probably saw more natural light...

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind.

If being smart can improve the quality of lives, then choose to be and be smart.” - Auntabelle, Amazon Lee and the Ancient Undead of Rome by Kira G. and Kailin Gow

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.

Me, I like the theory that Amazon comes from the Persian term ha-mazan, which means warriors. I like that theory because Annabeth likes that theory, and if I don’t like what she likes she gets all ha-mazan on me.

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers. Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso. Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?

I enjoy self-publishing & sending publishers rejection letters. They're like, 'Who is this guy?' And I'm like, 'the end of your industry.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010

Sure we do," said Theo, swatting at a branch. "We get to the spring, Alia gets cured. We argue over the best choice for our We Saved The World victory dance." "I do enjoy your optimism," said Diana. "And I admire your ability to lift a car over your head without breaking a sweat and look fine as hell doing it," said Theo with a bow.

You don’t trust any man, Ephani. (Danger) And neither should you, little sister. Take a bit of Amazon advice. Ride him into the ground all night long, then slide a blade between his ribs come morning. (Ephani) That's harsh. (Alexion) So is life. (Ephani)

Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.

Some people fight fire with fire. I've found water to be more effective.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species and every whale and dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground. I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledge-hammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.

...much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success--on tactical errors and pipe dreams.

People who received a great deal of attention for their looks at a young age are more likely to opt for cosmetic procedures when older. It’s the same in business.

They would never know what she'd done, the quest she'd completed. There would be no songs sung about it, no stories of glory shared. It didn't matter. She knew who she was and the ordeal she'd faced. She was an Amazon. The knowledge burned like a secret flame inside her, a light no one could extinguish, no matter what names they called her.

Patience is a virtue not a vice.

I'd rather have a heart of gold Than all the treasure of the world.

What does a man live for but to have a girl, use his mind, practice his trade, drink a drink, read a book, and watch the martins wing it for the Amazon and the three-fingered sassafras turn red in October? Art Immelmann is right. Man is not made for suffering, night sweats, and morning terrors.

Those who think of the Amazon as a Green Hell,” she read in an old book with a tattered spine, “bring only their own fears and prejudices to this amazing land. For whether a place is a hell or a heaven rests in yourself, and those who go with courage and an open mind may find themselves in Paradise.

Nine had heard whisperings that the secretive Bilderberg Group was effectively the World Government, undermining democracy by influencing everything from nations' political leaders to the venue for the next war. He recalled persistent rumors and confirmed media reports that the Bilderberg Group had such luminaries as Barack Obama, Prince Charles, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Tony Blair, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush. Other Bilderberg members sprung forth from Nine’s memory bank. They included the founders and CEOs of various multinational corporations like Facebook, BP, Google, Shell and Amazon, as well as almost every major financial institution on the planet.

Schecter turned to MacRieve. “And what is your field, Dr…?” Despite the fact that he was a prince, he answered, “Mr. MacRieve. I’m here in a security capacity for my wife. She’s the beauty and brains—I’m the brawn.” She stiffened again at his calling her his wife. MacRieve had no idea how much that word bothered her. Schecter asked, “Why exactly would anyone need security?” “Are you jesting?” MacRieve asked. “You doona know?” He flashed an aggravated look at Travis, then said simply, “Because we’re in the bluidy Amazon.

she might be dying. The idea pleased her.

She was now drowning in that pool of desires without having any idea about the depth of it.

I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.

The island had come to seem one of those places seen from the train that belong to a life in which we shall never take part.

Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.

Do you want to live, Sander?

Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown.

Odd names: Winter, Autumn—they almost sound as if someone just made them up.” —Dubb

They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home.

She knew, now, that there was always light – beyond the dark, and the fear, out of the depths; there was sun to reach for, and air and space and freedom.

Some say,” Auntabelle said, “that it was because of the Roman’s brutality and the Roman Emperors’ cruelty, especially to the Christians, who were slaughtered in masses at this very place for the entertainment of the Roman citizens, that Rome fell.” - Auntabelle, Amazon Lee and the Ancient Undead of Rome by Kira G. and Kailin Gow

I finally grasped the machinations and subtext of that phrase the year I turned twenty-five. When you begin to wonder if life is really just waiting for buses on Tottenham Court Road and ordering books you'll never read off Amazon; in short, you are having an existential crisis. You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy 'when I grow up' and adjusting to the reality that you're there; it's happening. And it wasn't what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you'd be. Once you starting digging a hole of those questions, it's very difficult to take the day-to-day functionalities of life seriously.

When the first chakra is disconnected from the feminine Earth, we can feel orphaned and motherless. The masculine principle predominates, and we look for security from material things.  Individuality prevails over relationship, and selfish drives triumph over family, social and global responsibility. The more separated we become from the Earth, the more hostile we become to the feminine.  We disown our passion, our creativity, and our sexuality. Eventually the Earth itself becomes a baneful place. I remember being told by a medicine woman in the Amazon, "Do you know why they are really cutting down the rain forest? Because it is wet and dark and tangled and feminine.

Years later, another member [of the Royal Geographical Society] conceded, "Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.

On the whole she fares better with the men, if they can work their way past the awkward preliminaries; if they can avoid calling her "little lady," or saying they weren't expecting her to be so feminine, by which they mean short. Though only the most doddering ones do that any more. If she weren't so tiny, though, she'd never get away with it. If she were six feet tall and built like a blockhouse; if she had hips. Then she'd be threatening, then she'd be an Amazon. It's the incongruity that grants her permission. A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown.

Many accidents happen to white people because they don't believe their dreams.

She was a virgin and a warrior, disdainful of the male, which was what eventually convinced people that she really must be off her head.

You won't find the tales I bear in any books . . . My tales are from the Moon Realm.” —Ebb Autumn

What Tyler says about the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground

In one of their last email exchanges, he recommended two management self help books to her, 'The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't' and 'Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work', and included their links on Amazon.com. He quit two days later. His resignation email read in part: 'good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you

You're not just fighting me," he said, his breathing even. "You're fighting the warriors who defeated the Amazons. Achilles, who bested Penthesilea. Telamon, who brought low Melanippe. Hercules, who defeated Hippolytus." She hated hearing her sisters' names, her mother's name, on his lips. Diana raised a brow. "A wise warrior learns from her mistakes." She adjusted her stance. "And you're forgetting who taught me to fight.

What freaking year were you born in? You can’t be much younger than me. They had all of those shows about Amazon chicks and Greek gods, gladiators. . .” “You watched shows about Amazons and Greek gods.” It was more of a flat statement than a question. “Screw you. Them bitches were fierce.” “You’re a bizarre person.” “Says the guy in the bodysuit.” Mr. Greek’s mouth sunk at the sides. “It’s protective armor.” “Like I fucking said.

teach 120 kids on Tuesday nights in my Brand Strategy course. That’s $720,000, or $60,000 per class, in tuition payments, a lot of it financed with debt. I’m good at what I do, but walking in each night, I remind myself we (NYU) are charging kids $500/minute for me and a projector. This. Is. Fucking. Ridiculous.

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

Sometimes Coraline would forget who she was while she was daydreaming that she was exploring the Arctic, or the Amazon rainforest, or darkest Africa, and it was not until someone tapped her on the shoulder or said her name that Coraline would come back from a million miles away with a start, and all in a fraction of a second have to remember who she was, and what her name was, and that she was even there at all.

Assurance" You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or in the silence after lightning before it says its names-and then the clouds' wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles-you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head- that's what the silence meant: you're not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

You see, even after decades of therapy and workshops and retreats and twelve-steps and meditation and even experiencing a very weird session of rebirthings, even after rappeling down mountains and walking over hot coals and jumping out of airplanes and watching elephant races and climbing the Great Wall of China, and even after floating down the Amazon and taking ayahuasca with an ex-husband and a witch doctor and speaking in tongues and fasting (both nutritional and verbal), I remained pelted and plagued by feelings of uncertainty and despair. Yes, even after sleeping with a senator, and waking up next to a dead friend, and celebrating Michael Jackson’s last Christmas with him and his kids, I still did not feel—how shall I put this?—mentally sound.

I would let her...have adventures. I would let her...choose her path. It would be hard...it was hard...but I would do it. Oh, not completely, of course. Some things have to go on. Cleaning one's teeth, arithmetic. But Maia fell in love with the Amazon. It happens. THe place was for her - and the people. Of course there was some danger, but there is danger everywhere. Two years ago, in this school, there was an outbreak of typhus, and three girls died. CHildren are knocked down and killed by horses every week, here in these streets--" She broke off, gathering her thoughts. "When she was traveling and exploring...and finding her songs, Maia wasn't just happy, she was...herself. I think something broke in Maia when her parents died, and out there it healed. Perhaps I'm mad--and the professor too-- but I think children must lead big lives...if it is in them to do so.

I have faced bullying before. Not in high school. Not in any school but when I published my now bestselling book series as an indie author back in 2010 through 2012 and became a target for indie publishing, especially in YA because I stood by Amazon self-publishing versus the traditional publishers. How I dealt with it? I kept doing what I love - writing and publishing, and giving my readers what they love. Indie publishing took off soon afterwards and now it is a valid and more desirable way to publish books. So the lesson learned is...don't let bullies stop you from doing what you love and from keeping you from giving your readers the books they love to read from you." - Kailin Gow in a National Radio Interview.

There is a saturation of books on Amazon due to a sudden get-rich-quick surge in "everyone can be authors" seminars similar to the house flipping ones in the early 2000s which led to the housing bubble and an economic slowdown in the U.S. To distinguish quality books from those get-rich-quick ones, look at the author's track record - worldwide recognition as books that garnered credible awards, authors who speak at book industry events, authors who speak at schools, authors whose books are reference materials and reading sources at school and libraries. Get-rich books have a system to get over 500 reviews quickly, manipulates the Kindle Unlimited algorithm, and encourage collusion in the marketplace to knock out rivals. Be wary of trolls who are utilized to knock down the rankings of rival's books too. Once people have heard there is money to be made as a self-published author, just like house flipping, a cottage industry has risen to take advantage of it and turn book publishing into a get rich scheme, which is a shame for all the book publishers and authors, like me, who had published for the love of books, to write to help society, and for the love of literature. Kailin Gow, Parents and Books

The Lover Reconsiders Wait... You. Come hither come closer come here, shrug and wriggle your way out of those clothes, shed them like baby teeth, like snakeskin, like feathers from the molt of a phoenix come here let me hold you let my arms draw you closer come hither let me be suffused with your scent come here now. I want to kiss you, I want to kiss you, I want to kiss my way down your body and back up again give me your guided tour, teach me of your landmarks those hips of yours are strangers to my touch but I mean to make their acquaintance so yes there here I want to kiss you I want to learn what you whisper when you kiss with your heart’s shutters open I want to nip at your lower lip I want the rush of blood to make that mouth tingle I want to talk in quiet tones to all of you come hither come closer come here Now, bolt the door, now, unplug the phone, now warn the neighbors to ignore the racket I do not want fifteen minutes of your time I want the whole fucking night. Now let me see the smile you save for special occasions Now don’t pick a favorite position pick five Now I want to bathe myself in you Now now now like the Ganges, like the Red Sea, like the Amazon I want to follow you down to your ocean Now I want to savor you, lover, come to me make time and I will make you breakfast I want to become overfamiliar with your tastes come hither come closer come here come now you.

The hills below crouched on all fours under the weight of the rainforest where liana grew and soldier ants marched in formation. Straight ahead they marched, shamelessly single-minded, for soldier ants have no time for dreaming. Almost all of them are women and there is so much to do - the work is literally endless. So many to be born and fed, then found and buried. There is no time for dreaming. The life of their world requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males and they are seldom produced. When they are needed, it is deliberately done by the queen who surmises, by some four-million-year-old magic she is heiress to, that it is time. So she urges a sperm from the private womb where they were placed when she had her one, first and last copulation. Once in life, this little Amazon trembled in the air waiting for a male to mount her. And when he did, when he joined a cloud of others one evening just before a summer storm, joined colonies from all over the world gathered fro the marriage flight, he knew at last what his wings were for. Frenzied, he flied into the humming cloud to fight gravity and time in order to do, just once, the single thing he was born for. Then he drops dead, having emptied his sperm into his lady-love. Sperm which she keeps in a special place to use at her own discretion when there is need for another dark and singing cloud of ant folk mating in the air. Once the lady has collected the sperm, she too falls to the ground, but unless she breaks her back or neck or is eaten by one of a thousand things, she staggers to her legs and looks for a stone to rub on, cracking and shedding the wings she will never need again. Then she begins her journey searching for a suitable place to build her kingdom. She crawls into the hollow of a tree, examines its walls and corners. She seals herself off from all society and eats her own wing muscles until she bears her eggs. When the first larvae appear, there is nothing to feed them, so she gives them their unhatched sisters until they are old enough and strong enough to hunt and bring their prey back to the kingdom. That is all. Bearing, hunting, eating, fighting, burying. No time for dreaming, although sometimes, late in life, somewhere between the thirtieth and fortieth generation she might get wind of a summer storm one day. The scent of it will invade her palace and she will recall the rush of wind on her belly - the stretch of fresh wings, the blinding anticipation and herself, there, airborne, suspended, open, trusting, frightened, determined, vulnerable - girlish, even, for and entire second and then another and another. She may lift her head then, and point her wands toward the place where the summer storm is entering her palace and in the weariness that ruling queens alone know, she may wonder whether his death was sudden. Or did he languish? And if so, if there was a bit of time left, did he think how mean the world was, or did he fill that space of time thinking of her? But soldier ants do not have time for dreaming. They are women and have much to do. Still it would be hard. So very hard to forget the man who fucked like a star.