Ambience Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Ambience. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Let's get loose With Compassion, Let's drown in the delicious Ambience of Love.
The Gift
As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones. There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside. The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.
Bruce Chatwin (The Songlines)
Hygge is humble and slow. It is choosing rustic over new, simple over posh and ambience over excitement. In many ways, hygge might be the Danish cousin to slow and simple living.
Meik Wiking (The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living)
Bucolic peace is not my ambience,
Elizabeth Peters (The Curse of the Pharaohs (Amelia Peabody, #2))
Silence is the background music that you can play anywhere and make any ambience your own.
Shunya
The dark organ music filled the Department of Post-Mortem Communications. Moist assumed it was all part of the ambience, although the mood would have been more precisely obtained if the tune it was playing did not appear to be Cantate and Fugue for someone Who Has Trouble with the Pedals.
Terry Pratchett (Making Money (Discworld, #36; Moist Von Lipwig, #2))
With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoating, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer. The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.
Dean Koontz
Crazy people can add character to a place. If the ambience in your bar is off, or your lobby has gone inexplicably stale, consider picking up a lunatic. They're not hard to come by, and the often work for free. A lot of tattoo shops have one. Larger places might find it handy to keep two or three around.
Jeff Johnson
There is much that I could say about the happy and tender incidents in my childhood days, the sense of security which I enjoyed with my parents, my childish affections and carefree, irresponsible existence in a gentle and affectionate ambience. But my interest is reserved for the steps that I took in my life towards self-realization. All the pleasant points of repose, islands of happiness, paradises whose magic was not unknown to me can remain, as far as I am concerned, in the enchanted distance; for it is not a world that I have any particular desire to re-enter.
Hermann Hesse (Demian)
Capitaine Etienne Relais was known to be incorruptible in an ambience in which vice was the norm, honor for sale, and laws made to be broken, and men operated on the assumption that he who did not abuse power did not deserve to have it.
Isabel Allende (Island Beneath the Sea)
Humanity is a thin overlay, which can be maintained in a suitable ambience, but easily peeled off under straining or stressful conditions.
Nik Krasno
Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt’s houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
Exquisitely embroidered tapestries lined the walls of Medb’s bedroom, but their impact was somewhat reduced by the room’s ambience. A musky odor with pungent accents of stale piss.
David H. Millar (Conall: The Place of Blood - Rinn-Iru (Conall, #1))
In love and mating, ambience is central.
Norman Rush (Mating)
What I especially love about Kmart is the ambience. I always feel like I’ve entered a store that was just attacked by a flash mob. Everything always looks and feels a little disheveled.
Jim Gaffigan (Food: A Love Story)
We crave rich variegations of light. Too much time in one ambience, and we long for something new. Perhaps this explains the sensory ennui of those who live under unchanging skies. The monotony of blank sunny skies or of an endless cloud ceiling deprives us of the visual diversity we desire.
David George Haskell (The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature)
He believed that a burger joint ought to look like a join, not like a surgery, not like a nursery with pictures of clowns and funny animals on walls, not like a bamboo pavilion on a tropical island, not like a glossy plastic replica of a 1950s diner that never actually existed. If you were going to eat charred cow smothered in cheese, with a side order of potato strips made as crisp as ancient papyrus by immersion in boiling oil, and if you were going to wash it all down with either satisfying quantities of icy beer or a milkshake containing the caloric equivalent of an entire roasted pig, then this fabulous consumption ought to occur in an ambience that virtually screamed guilty pleasure, if not sin.
Dean Koontz (By the Light of the Moon)
I tutored myself in the art of solemnity, kept my euphoria private, and adopted a serious demeanour in keeping with everyone else and the general ambience of the house. I continued my solitary daily walks about the estate, carefully choreographing scenes and conversations yet to happen. I returned to those places of our clandestine moments together, replaying them in my head, languishing in his treasured words . . . and sometimes adding more. I stood under frosty sunsets, my warm breath mingling with the cold evening air as I watched the silent flight of birds across the sky. And even in those twilit autumnal days I felt a light shine down upon my path. For though he was no longer at Deyning, no longer in England, the fact that he lived and breathed had already altered my vision; and nothing, not even a war, could quell my faith in the inevitability of his presence in my life.
Judith Kinghorn (The Last Summer)
Aside from the, let's say, elegant decor and ambience you've created in that monstrosity you call a gathering place inside, you and your men haven't been much more impressive to me than fucking Corny. I thought combining forces with some likeminded souls would be an enterprising partnership, but ultimately I'm feeling a bit disappointed.
Jim Goforth (Plebs)
Please take responsibility for the sensuality you bring into this space.
Lebo Grand
No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind the later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug
Jack London (The Call of the Wild)
No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug
Jack London (The Call of the Wild)
For a bird cool ambience is liberty and for a bookworm, it a library
Adrika Mondal
A wife sets the ambience of a man’s life.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
Isn't the ambience growing on you?" "If it does, I'll scrape it off.
Simon R. Green (Deathstalker (Deathstalker, #1))
Candles have a sensual ambience about them. They get you in a relaxed mood; they set the mood for intimate pleasure.” Herbalist Tracie
Herbalist Tracie
It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambience was what I’d miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I’m sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.
Banana Yoshimoto (The Lake)
The result of this is a kind of "ambience of intoxication." Like fish in water, people in a culture swim in the virtually invisible medium of culturally sanctioned yet artificial states of mind.
Anonymous
The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them. The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.
Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget)
Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
Of course, thinks Stan. It’s the age of tolerance. Stupid fucking me. Anything goes, out there in the so-called real world; though not inside Consilience, where the surface ambience is wholesomely, relentlessly hetero. Have they been eliminating gays all this time, or just not letting them in?
Margaret Atwood (The Heart Goes Last)
The way that we hygger and offer reassurance is unique to each of us according to the things to which we attach most meaning. Some of us nourish others by cooking. Some offer comfort in conversation or good-natured humour. Others are adept at creating an easy ambience through which hygge flows.
Louisa Thomsen Brits (The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well)
Here I was with the guy I maybe-loved, relaxing by the ocean with salty crisp breezes and blue-gray sea curving into a for-ever horizon. We even had background music to add to the romantic ambience. And except for the "can't kiss because he's my brother" thing, this was the perfect romantic moment.
Linda Joy Singleton (Dead Girl Dancing (Dead Girl, #2))
The Cutting Board was a dimly lit wood-paneled steak house with booths upholstered in red leather. The air in the restaurant was stagnant and heavy with the smell of cigars, garlic, butter, and burning beef. The ambience was so masculine that infertile men could increase their sperm count just by walking in the door.
Lee Goldberg (Killer Thriller (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #2))
Being in love changes a person…a modest touch changes one’s mind, a lone thought one’s reasoning, but a kiss my friend, well that changes one’s existences.
Christina Marie Morales (Ambience (The Ghost of Saint Augustine Trilogy #1))
at Dunkin’ Donuts, how did we move our anchor to Starbucks? This is where it gets really interesting. When Howard Shultz created Starbucks, he was as intuitive a businessman as Salvador Assael. He worked diligently to separate Starbucks from other coffee shops, not through price but through ambience. Accordingly, he designed Starbucks from the very beginning to feel like a continental coffeehouse. The early shops were fragrant with the smell of roasted beans (and better-quality roasted beans than those at Dunkin’ Donuts). They sold fancy French coffee presses. The showcases presented alluring snacks—almond croissants, biscotti, raspberry custard pastries, and others. Whereas Dunkin’ Donuts had small, medium, and large coffees, Starbucks offered Short, Tall, Grande, and Venti, as well as drinks with high-pedigree names like Caffè Americano, Caffè Misto, Macchiato, and Frappuccino. Starbucks did everything in its power, in other words, to make the experience feel different—so different that we would not use the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead would be open to the new anchor that Starbucks was preparing for us. And that, to a great extent, is how Starbucks succeeded. GEORGE, DRAZEN, AND I were so excited with the experiments on coherent arbitrariness that we decided to push the idea one step farther. This time, we had a different twist to explore. Do you remember the famous episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the one in which Tom turned the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into an exercise in manipulating his friends? As I’m sure you recall, Tom applied the paint with gusto, pretending to enjoy the job. “Do you call this work?” Tom told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Armed with this new “information,” his friends discovered the joys of whitewashing a fence. Before long, Tom’s friends were not only paying him for the privilege, but deriving real pleasure from the task—a win-win outcome if there ever was one. From our perspective, Tom transformed a negative experience to a positive one—he transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people (Tom’s friends) would pay to get in on the fun. Could we do the same? We
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
A few months into our relationship, we had a campout down at my dad’s place. There were a lot of people from church, and we played games and fished into the night. We all gathered around a huge campfire, ate dinner, and sang songs together. Missy was clinging all over me, mainly because she was scared of everything flying in the air or crawling on the ground. It was one of those nights when you feel closer to God and everyone else because of the setting and the ambience--despite the bug activity. That was the first time we said “I love you” to each other. Now, there is still an ongoing debate as to who said it first. I remember clearly that she whispered, “I love you,” and then I responded. She is convinced that I said it first, but she was under the influence of bug paranoia. I believe her condition affected her memory.
Jase Robertson (Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl)
All the little Indians in a half circle around Aunt Emily are getting an imprinting that will last for life. The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world. It will become part of the loved ambience of Battell Pond, a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood. These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.
Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics))
Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast.
Hunter Murphy (Imogene in New Orleans (Imogene and the Boys #1))
Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer’s voice. The swampy Deep South ambience of “Green River” by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son”; the oboes in Beethoven’s Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the atmosphere of a large wood-and-stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience.
Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession)
Joy is not some elusive spiritual goal. It is simply the background milieu that is needed for any aspect of your life to unfold magically and wonderfully. If joy is not the ambience of your life, even life’s most pleasurable activities become burdensome. The issues of life around you can be addressed to the best of your capabilities. But once joy is your constant companion, you are no more an issue in your life. After that, life is a journey of endlessly unfolding celebration and discovery.
Sadhguru (Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy)
We’ll make a wellness altar, I think … have some incense burn¬ing, fresh flowers every day and string some lights around it …’ Poppy rolled her head to the side. ‘Still think it’s a good idea?’ Julia blanched at the tackiness of a wellness altar with fairy lights and a water feature, but what the hell, she already had a three-metre girly snake ruining the ambience. ‘Sure,’ she said. If it made Scarlett happy. Poppy laughed. ‘I’m going to remind you of this conversation when your apartment looks like a Chinese brothel.
Amy Andrews
...the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representor. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven, with a great many other things besides the "truth" which is itself a representation.
Edward W. Said (Orientalism)
Half-way into the stuck substance of sky clay-white dome of the day-moon pokes... Unkempt and in rags as I am my girl's dressed all in dots: in skirts and flowery blouses I spin her round and tie bows in little doll shoes to match her tails asking even dogs how she looks— stupidly, doting on her…. By amber candlelit warmth, I played cards in your sisters’ ambience: it was like you said: the warmth of their smiles charmed me, their enfolding talk, and eyes that wink…. A field of grass lay half-way between boughs and the sky I contemplate the clouds… solid and amassed, clouds topple on top of clouds clouds up into peaks culminate and yet are only clouds dissolving to a shroud and shadow in the sky…. Shh!— past sapling fleets and swift trunks she sprints quickly on feet and calves and finds me where I lounge, painting clouds— in her glass head radiant eyes like blue-glass shine blushing color bleeds lustrous through her cheeks to hover and float, floating just beneath the skin…. On my second helping of leek- and-potato stew, ladled like melting goo in my bowl— I watched you, bobbing, in the solving resolve of their womb-like steadiness, cooing and aspiring…. Insulating sun lushens in the grass— already afternoon shadows long out…. Root-grip to root-grip ahead I mark twists in the trail by way of the young-girl bulbs of her legs the deep churning spread of her waist swimming in my head and in my head quietly drowning…. Harvest-time’s swelling our baskets— spring in the fruiting grove… with her mouth stained red in seeded-berries and those cheeks just-flushed in blood, I'll pounce high on that raised bounce of her waist….
Mark Kaplon
he gave an account of the Spenserian world that championed its ethical attitudes as well as their fairy-tale terms, with a rich joy in the defeat of dragons, giants, sorcerers, and sorceresses by the forces of virtue; it was a world he could inhabit and believe in as one inhabits and believes a dream of one's own; its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him...he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions, and Spenser transcended sensuality by making use of it
Jocelyn Gibb (Light on C. S. Lewis (Harvest Book; Hb 341))
There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambience which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends. And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated. The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
They were all there for the food, the drink, and the ambience, even as everyone devoured plates as disparate as Korean bibimbap and French vichyssoise. "I'm going over there." Ana pointed to a midnight-blue food truck that was known for having the best bao, steamed Vietnamese buns, in Denver. Which, given the popularity of the southeast Asian cuisine in the city lately, was more of an accomplishment than it might have seemed. "What about you?" Rachel asked Melody. "I'm having what you're having. You never steer me wrong." "Then A Parisian in Denver is the way to go. Come on. I want to say hello to Lilia." They found their way to the end of the line in front of a food truck painted in red, blue, and white, and Rachel craned her neck to feet a better look at the chalkboard that proclaimed the day's specials. There was French street food like crepes and merguez sausages alongside trendy favorites like duck confit pommes frites.
Carla Laureano (The Saturday Night Supper Club (The Supper Club, #1))
TWO hundred and thirty nautical miles southeast of Gibraltar, Oran perched above the sea, a splinter of Europe cast onto the African shore. Of the 200,000 residents, three-quarters were European, and the town was believed to have been founded in the tenth century by Moorish merchants from southern Spain. Sacked, rebuilt, and sacked again, Oran eventually found enduring prosperity in piracy; ransom paid for Christian slaves had built the Grand Mosque. Even with its corsairs long gone, the seaport remained, after Algiers, the greatest on the old Pirate Coast. Immense barrels of red wine and tangerine crates by the thousands awaited export on the docks, where white letters painted on a jetty proclaimed Marshal Pétain’s inane slogan: “Travail, Famille, Patrie.” A greasy, swashbuckling ambience pervaded the port’s many grogshops. Quays and breakwaters shaped the busy harbor into a narrow rectangle 1½ miles long, overwatched by forts and shore batteries that swept the sea to the horizon and made Oran among the most ferociously defended ports in the Mediterranean. Here
Rick Atkinson (An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943)
If we went to Les Agarves, which is twice the cost, but about as gourmet as we can get without actually being in France, that would qualify as a special evening out. Ronnie will do it on an anniversary or on a birthday, but I know his true opinion of it is that it’s not worth it. I’ve come to believe his taste buds can’t reach gourmet level so he can’t appreciate the difference. For him, then, it makes little sense. But it’s not only the food that is exquisite; it’s the ambience and the service. You feel you’re special, even if only for one night, one dinner. Ronnie likes to make it seem that only women want this. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not true. It’s certainly true when it comes to his friends or most of the husbands of my girlfriends. It’s almost as if there’s something unmanly about elegance. They’d rather associate themselves with Clint Eastwood than Cary Grant or George Clooney. Eastwood can be tough, virile and dangerous, and be grimy at the same time, except, of course, in a movie like The Bridges of Madison County, but men don’t talk about that film.
Andrew Neiderman (Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense)
Flattery was a prime department store strategy for cultivating customers, and men got a heavy dose. Males could expect to be treated like busy executives and discriminating men of the world. Men’s sections, floors, and entire stores were designed to resemble opulent clubs, often outfitted with wood-paneled grills that women customers were not permitted to enter. Vandervoort’s and Filene’s went to somewhat unusual lengths in furnishing a men’s lounge and smoking room, oddly working against the prevailing assumption that men had no time to spare. In Halle’s new men’s store of the late 1920s, dark mahogany paneling and carved marble detailing created the ambience of a priestly inner sanctum. Filene’s furnished an indoor putting green in its men’s store of 1928. Wanamaker’s outdid itself in 1932, the unlucky Depression year it opened its luxurious six-story men’s store in the Lincoln-Liberty building, with stocks of British imports and an equestrian shop too. Both Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field sold airplanes. Lord & Taylor reserved its tenth floor in New York City for men, with heman departments for cutlery, the home bar, and barbecue equipment. Gimbels, Macy’s, and Hearn’s stuck to more basic appeals, using their large liquor departments to attract men.
Jan Whitaker (Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class)
It is often said that the separation of the present reality from transcendence, so commonplace today, is pernicious in that it undermines the universe of fixed values. Because life on Earth is the only thing that exists, because it is only in this life that we can seek fulfillment, the only kind of happiness that can be offered to us is purely carnal. Heavens have not revealed anything to us; there are no signs that would indicate the need to devote ourselves to some higher, nonmaterial goals. We furnish our lives ever more comfortably; we build ever more beautiful buildings; we invent ever more ephemeral trends, dances, one-season stars; we enjoy ourselves. Entertainment derived from a nineteenth-century funfair is today becoming an industry underpinned by an ever more perfect technology. We are celebrating a cult of machines—which are replacing us at work, in the kitchen, in the field—as if we were pursuing the idealized ambience of the royal court (with its bustling yet idle courtiers) and wished to extend it across the whole world. In fifty years, or at most a hundred, four to five billion people will become such courtiers. At the same time, a feeling of emptiness, superficiality, and sham sets in, one that is particularly dominant in civilizations that have left the majority of primitive troubles, such as hunger and poverty, behind them. Surrounded by underwater-lit swimming pools and chrome and plastic surfaces, we are suddenly struck by the thought that the last remaining beggar, having accepted his fate willingly, thus turning it into an ascetic act, was incomparably richer than man is today, with his mind fed TV nonsense and his stomach feasting on delicatessen from exotic lands. The beggar believed in eternal happiness, the arrival of which he awaited during his short-term dwelling in this vale of tears, looking as he did into the vast transcendence ahead of him. Free time is now becoming a space that needs to be filled in, but it is actually a vacuum, because dreams can be divided into those that can be realized immediately—which is when they stop being dreams—and those that cannot be realized by any means. Our own body, with its youth, is the last remaining god on the ever-emptying altars; no one else needs to be obeyed and served. Unless something changes, our numerous Western intellectuals say, man is going to drown in the hedonism of consumption. If only it was accompanied by some deep pleasure! Yet there is none: submerged into this slavish comfort, man is more and more bored and empty. Through inertia, the obsession with the accumulation of money and shiny objects is still with us, yet even those wonders of civilization turn out to be of no use. Nothing shows him what to do, what to aim for, what to dream about, what hope to have. What is man left with then? The fear of old age and illness and the pills that restore mental balance—which he is losing, inbeing irrevocably separated from transcendence.
Stanisław Lem (Summa technologiae)
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The centre of the conception of wisdom in the Bible is the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author, or rather, chief editor, is sometimes called Koheleth, the teacher or preacher. Koheleth transforms the conservatism of popular wisdom into a program of continuous mental energy. Those who have unconsciously identified a religious attitude either with illusion or with mental indolence are not safe guides to this book, although their tradition is a long one. Some editor with a “you’d better watch out” attitude seems to have tacked a few verses on the end suggesting that God trusts only the anti-intellectual, but the main author’s courage and honesty are not to be defused in this way. He is “disillusioned” only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind. Being tired of life is in fact the only mental handicap for which he has no remedy to suggest. Like other wise men, he is a collector of proverbs, but he applies to all of them his touchstone and key word, translated in the AV [the Authorized Version] as “vanity.” This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapour, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It this acquires a derived sense of “emptiness,” the root meaning of the Vulgate’s vanitas. To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness. We should not apply a ready-made disapproving moral ambience to this word “vanity,” much less associate it with conceit. It is a conception more like the shunyata or “void” of Buddhist though: the world as everything within nothingness. As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them. We may feel that saint is a “better” man than a sinner, and that all of our religious and moral standards would crumble into dust if we did not think so; but the saint himself is most unlikely to take such a view. Similarly Koheleth went through a stage in which he saw that wisdom was “better” than folly, then a stage in which he saw that there was really no difference between them as death lies in wait for both and finally realized that both views were equally “vanity”. As soon as we renounce the expectation of reward, in however, refined a guise, for virtue or wisdom, we relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul. Even the great elegy at the end over the failing bodily powers of old age ceases to become “pessimistic” when we see it as part of the detachment with which the wise man sees his life in the context of vanity. We take what comes: there is no choice in the matter, hence no point in saying “we should take what comes.” We soon realize by doing so that there is a cyclical rhythm in nature. But, like other wheels, this is a machine to be understood and used by man. If it is true that the sun, the seasons, the waters, and human life itself go in cycles, the inference is that “there is a time for all things,” something different to be done at each stage of the cycle. The statement “There is nothing new under the sun” applies to wisdom but not to experience , to theory but not to practice. Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new.
Northrop Frye (The Great Code: The Bible and Literature)
When the Juggernaut, within ambience, singly imports the entire Earth into its bioclassifiers, it feels nonillions of deep bonds with live and ostensibly dead Juggernauts, and the human becomes telepathic.
Council of Human Hybrid-Attractors (Incessance: Incesancia)
Ambience is panoramic perception.
Council of Human Hybrid-Attractors (Incessance: Incesancia)
Hygge was the best thing that could happen for introverts. It was a way of being social without being draining for them. When we are close to nature, we are not engulfed in entertaining electronics or juggling a broad spectrum of options. There are no luxuries or extravagance, just good company and good conversation. Simple, slow, rustic elements are a fast track to hygge. A cabin forces you to live more simply and slowly. To get out. To get together. To enjoy the moment. Hygge is humble and slow. It is choosing rustic over new, simple over posh and ambience over excitement. The more it counteracts consumption, the more hyggeligt it is. The more money and prestige is associated with it, the less hyggeligt it becomes. The simpler and more primitive an activity is, the more hyggeligt it is. One common element of all the smells of hygge is that they remind us of safety and the sense of being cared for. Old, homemade stuff that has taken a lot of time to make is always more hyggeligt than manufactured new stuff. And small things are always more hyggeligt than big things. Hygge is about making the most of what we have in abundance: the everyday.
Meik Wiking (The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well)
All people have a certain taste, a certain smell, an ambience. Cal’s presence was lodged within me in the ghost of his scent. Perhaps I feared the scent of someone else would exorcise it and then I would have nothing.
Storm Constantine (Wraeththu (Wraeththu #1-3))
When people stopped to stare at him, his flesh shrank, because he thought they found him objectionable. He did not realise how striking he was, how the mark of his people set him apart, surrounded him with an ambience of otherworldiness, something bewitching. This lack of self-awareness contributed greatly to his allure.
Storm Constantine (Calenture)
Fredi had always focused on getting kids excited to learn. He cared less about covering the required curriculum and more about finding hands-on projects. To many students, school felt sterile and bureaucratic. Fredi’s music was just one way he tried to change the ambience. It didn’t necessarily matter if they liked it. It was enough to be different. He also fought for unstructured time in the school day. When he arrived at Carl Hayden in 1987, he started a class called Science Seminar. There was no curriculum. Fredi just told students to find something fun to build or an idea to test. Over the years, students had embarked on a variety of unusual projects. One student tried to teach color-blind rats the differences among colors. Another student constructed a 1:60 clay model of downtown Phoenix, placed it in a wind tunnel, and blew carbon dioxide across it. The goal: determine how architecture could be used to increase air circulation and help dissipate trapped air pollution. Fredi’s room became the refuge of tinkerers, inventors, and frustrated dreamers.
Joshua Davis (Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream)
Ferelithia; the concubine of Wraeththu cities. Its ambience was that of lazy sensuality and its inhabitants were a reflection of that trait.
Storm Constantine (Wraeththu (Wraeththu #1-3))
The truth is that I got into punk rock because I have always had a predisposition to tell people to fuck off in an amplified ambience
Ian Glasper (Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984)
I think what music can do in a film is to create any emotional ambience. This is its greatest use and its most valid use.
Jeanine Basinger (Hollywood: The Oral History)
They ate in companionable silence, the soft chatter of the other diners fogged by a recording of water burbling on stone. Ito's restaurant was always soothing.
Frances Wren (Earthflown (The Anatomy of Water, #1))
When you require inner introception, quietism, and the content of divine restoration, this is the bliss of the mausoleum with thoughts and soundness of health and well-being. Unreservedly, it is the trance of relief and meditation of yoga, which is the longest conservancy for every cell of the corporal salubrity. Outright energy showers inlyingness with spiritual longings, and it deletes unrelative materiality. Afterward, you charge with freshness, both physically and mentally, when you pick it up with a clean heart and stillness in your soul. Yoga awakens a sense of purpose that is holding our parts of compassion back in all the postures with contentment and calmness, and we can patch up all the Godic conceptions so far the inside and outside barriers break in dissegments as well as gain of sabbath. Yoga is reserved and an act of silence that relieves you with ease, an ambience of serenity, and openness in comiltibity of peace.
Viraaj Sisodiya
I have argued against the idea of animal rights elsewhere.5 My argument stems, not from a disrespect for animals, but from a respect for moral reasoning, and for the concepts – right, duty, obligation, virtue – which it employs and which depend at every point on the distinctive features of self-consciousness. But perhaps the greatest damage done by the idea of animal rights is the damage to animals themselves. Elevated in this way to the plane of moral consciousness, they find themselves unable to respond to the distinctions that morality requires. They do not distinguish right from wrong; they cannot recognise the call of duty or the binding obligations of the moral law. And because of this we judge them purely in terms of their ability to share our domestic ambience, to profit from our affection, and from time to time to reciprocate it in their own mute and dependent way. And it is precisely this that engenders our unscrupulous favouritism – the favouritism that has made it a crime in my country to shoot a cat, however destructive its behaviour, but a praiseworthy action to poison a mouse, and thereby to infect the food-chain on which so many animals depend.
Roger Scruton (Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition)
You have a new dog and you wish the dog to treat you (rather than another member of your family) as "Master." The first rule is to feed the dog regularly, and, if possible, in early months, make sure no other member of the family ever feeds the dog. In ethological jargon, the dog will imprint you as the equivalent of Top Dog in a wild dog pack, or the closest analog to that Top Dog in a domesticated canine-primate ambience. Similarly, all brainwashers use this principle — usually unconsciously — by feeding their victims. This is necessary to keep the victims alive until their minds have been re-conditioned, of course, but it may also be a re-imprinting technique. We are mammals, too, and we tend to imprint as Top Dog those who feed us when we are helpless. The "paradoxical" sympathy for terrorists often reported by those who are held captive may also grow out of this neurological tendency to make a Top Dog out of whoever feeds us. It is shocking, to some, to think that this may also be the origin of the infant's love for its mother. One cannot help wondering how much of the reality-tunnel of the Military-Industrial Empire gets imprinted or conditioned upon the Scientific Citadel which is fed by it.
Robert Anton Wilson (The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science)
The quiet ambience of block meetings in Roxbury were a far cry from those in Irish Charlestown, where BRA planners were met with catcalls and even flying objects.
Lawrence Harmon (The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions)
Elections became an occasion to wage war, an opportunity for both groups and individuals to settle scores. Anyone could change his party at will. Anyone could desert any party at any time and re-enter it later, at his convenience. Candidates in some northern states captured polling booths like enemy military posts in war. The true spirit of democracy became a tattered illusion and a pathetic shadow of autocratic ambience that had existed in the country for centuries.
P.V. Narasimha Rao (The insider)
*CZARNECKI, JOSEPH P.* Art was not a cultural frivolity to the inmates of Auschwitz; it literally kept their spirits alive. It was self-expression in the teeth of the annihilation of the self. It was an expresison of the the need to retain psychological coherance in a malebolent ambience whose essential purpose was the destruction of the psyche of its inahabitants. The words 'I am' written on a wall are the epitaph of someone about to die....Picasso said that 'painting is an instrument of war to be waged against brutality and darkness.
Joseph p. Czarnecki
[M]ahalaga ang ambience para ma-appreciate ang binabasa. Unfair naman sa libro kung babasahin mo ito sa maling pagkakataon at huhusgahan mo nang wala ka sa tamang mood.
Bob Ong (56)
Amidst the poetic ambience, I held my dear Leica M6, a trusted companion. With a fluttering attention, I meticulously made precise adjustments—permitting only a refinement in the depth of field by adjusting the lens’s aperture and finely tuning the focus. I captured the ephemeral moments as the enchanting duo transformed before my lens.
Leilac Leamas (Devil's Puzzle: Love, Sex & Espionage)
The wild and woolly climate of deregulation created an ambience in which normal, well-run savings banks were surpassed by fast-track banks which catered to dubious monies with no questions asked. Banks laundered funds for covert operations of the CIA, as well as covert operations of the Bonano or other organized crime families. The son of the Vice President, Neil Bush, was a director of the Silverado Savings and Loan in Colorado, later indicted by the government for illegal practices. Son Neil had the good taste to “resign” the week his father received the Republican nomination for president in 1988.9
F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
The groups of beings are in natural selection, and it is an exclusive modification but not an arbitrary method; they dawn in organic creation and composition with descending and ascending degrees to resemble classification. Energy is founded and classed in constellations of earthy protocols; evidently, it is a material matter of fact within all the ambiencic particles and atoms.
Viraaj Sisodiya
The Bay of Calvi twinkled under a cloudless sky. It was mid-summer on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, and the weather couldn’t have been more perfect. A collection of multi-million dollar pleasure yachts — all polished and smoothed until they gleamed — rested in a spacious marina built into one side of the bay. The turquoise water had a clarity that seemed to be the trademark for these kind of exotic locations. It lapped gently at the sandy shore, adding soft background noise to the serene ambience of the bay.  The
Matt Rogers (Reloaded (Jason King, #3))
The effluvium of smoke from self-rolled cigarettes and burnt out cigars add to the gloomy ambience. Perhaps, this dinginess is one of the reasons I frequent the place as I do, though I doubt it. I am much too sinister for such simple reasoning.
Ilse V. Rensburg (Blood Sipper)
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1 It was early December. The streets of Milan glistened with Christmas decorations, with people coming and going carefree, carrying elegant shopping bags. It was past eight, and several minutes earlier I had closed behind me the door of Passerella, the modelling agency I ran. I had let my assistant, Giovanni, file the photos of the new faces we had initially chosen for Dante’s summer collection. He was an up-and-coming designer. The minute I walked down Monte Napoleone, one of the city’s most commercial streets, the chilly air forced me to wrap up well in my brand new light green coat. An original piece of cashmere, the five letters embossed on its lapel making it even more precious in that cold weather. My fingers contentedly groped for the word “Prada” before I stuck my hand into its warm pocket, while clutching my favourite handbag tight. A huge red ostrich Hermes where you could find cosmetics, scarves, and accessories, which I could use throughout the day, giving a different twist to my appearance. I wanted to walk a little bit to let off steam. My job may have been pleasant as it had to do with the world’s most beautiful creatures, men and women, but it wasn’t without its tensions. Models went to and fro, trade representatives looking for new faces, endless castings, phone calls, text messages, tailors, photographers, reports from my secretary and assistants—a rowdy disorder! I had already left the building where my job was, and I was going past another two entrances of nearby premises, when my leg caught on something. I instantly thought of my brand new Manolo Blahnik shoes. I’d only put them on for the second time, and they were now falling victim to the rough surface of a cardboard box, where a homeless man slept, at the entrance of a building. My eyes sparked as I checked if my high heels were damaged. On the face of it, they were intact. But that wasn’t enough for me. I found a lighter, and tried to check their red leather in the dim light. Why should the same thing happen over and over again every time I buy new shoes? I wondered and walked on, cursing. Why had that bloke chosen that specific spot to sleep, and why had I headed for his damn cardboard box! As I held my lighter, my angry gaze fell on the man who was covered with an impermeable piece of nylon, and carried on sleeping. He looked so vulnerable out in the cold that I didn’t dare rouse him from his sleep. After all, how could I hold him responsible in this state? I quickened my gait. Bella was waiting for me to start our night out with a drink and supper at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the imposing arcade with a dome made of glass, its ambience warm and romantic. Bella’s office was nearby, and that meeting place was convenient for both of us. That’s where we made up our minds about how to spend the night.I walked several metres down the road, but something made me stop short. I wanted to have a second look at that man. I retraced my steps. He was a young man who, despite his state, seemed so out of place. His unkempt hair and unshaven face didn’t let me see anything else but his profile, which reminded of an ancient Greek statue, with pronounced cheekbones and a chiselled nose. This second time, he must have sensed me over him. The man’s body budged, and he eyed me without making me out, dazzled by the lighter flame. As soon as I realised what I had done, I took to my heels. What had made me go back? Maybe, the sense of guilt I felt inside my warm Prada coat, maybe, the compassion I had to show as Christmas was just around the corner. All I knew was that a small bell jingled within, and I obeyed it. I walked faster, as if to escape from every thought. As I left, I stuck my hand in my bag, and got hold of my mobile. My secretary’s voice on the other end of the line sounded heavy and imposing. Giovanni wasn’t the embodiment of “macho” man, but he had all it takes to be the perfect male. Having chosen to quit modelling, he still looked gorgeous at the age of
Charlotte Bee (SLAVE AT MY FEET)
I sat down on the end of the bed and breathed a relaxed sigh, soaking up the room’s ambience. There was a slight, sweet scent in the air, as though flowers bloomed in the shadows unseen. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but there was a small black box sitting on a nearby table top. I climbed up off the bed and walked over to where it waited. It was a black cardboard gift box about two hand-spans across with a black satin ribbon tied around it. Whoever had left it obviously liked the colour black; possibly Prince Eldran.
Cailee Francis (A Masquerade in Time (The Fae Souls #1))
The literal meaning of ‘doctrine’ is “what is taught within a group as its corporate beliefs, principles or faith”52 – although “what is learnt . . .” would be more useful to us, since (6) Military cultures impart doctrine by corporate ambience as much as by explicit teaching
Andrew Gordon (Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command)
Gimme Good food, Good drinks, Good music, Good friends, Good ambience, Good conversation and guess what? I'm Good.
Sotero M Lopez II
How to maintain the proper mood and not bore the congregation to sleep? Art was the answer. But not just pretty pictures that required only a short glance. It had to be art that would serve as an ever-unfolding, mesmerizing element of the religious ambience. That is another reason that the art in Michelangelo’s day was so complex—it had to bear hundreds of repeated viewings of long duration. The audience had to believe that it was always possible to discover in it new meanings and insights.
Benjamin Blech (The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican)
The seagull doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “It’s just a seagull. It’s there for beach ambience.
Benjamin Percy (Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction)
I have some books if you need something to read,” I tell him, hesitation I have never before felt obvious in my tone. It's uncomfortable and I loathe it. “And if you get super bored, you can even alphabetize them. I know you like doing that.” He glances up at me and away. “I have plenty to do.” Blake's eyes narrow on me before he turns to his brother. “We'll be sure to bring you back some cotton candy.” “Don't bother.” “Graham doesn't like cotton candy,” I say. Blake's eyes twinkle as they meet mine. “More for me then. Ready?” Graham straightens as his brother walks toward me. “The cotton candy isn't yours to have. Just remember that.” What the heck is going on? They're arguing over cotton candy now? I mean, really? Do their competitive natures know no end? They're dragging spun sugar into their war now? Briefly pausing, Blake replies, “It is if no one else wants it.” With gritted teeth, Graham replies, “Maybe it isn't that no one wants it. Maybe they just don't want to pressure anyone into thinking they just want cotton candy and nothing else. Maybe they want to make sure everyone knows how much they really enjoy cotton candy, not just for now, but for always.” “But you don't like cotton candy,” I point out to Graham, since I guess he forgot. Rolling his eyes, Blake puts a hand on my arm and gently pushes. “Let's go, Einstein.” “Maybe I really actually love cotton candy!” he hollers as the door closes. I look at Blake as we loiter inside the apartment building. “What just happened? He so doesn't like cotton candy.” He sweeps a hand over the top of my head without touching it. “Never mind. Some things are beyond you.” “That sounded like an insult.” “Did it?” His facial expression is all innocent. “Apparently that wasn't beyond me,” I mutter as we head out into the scorching heat of a summer evening, Wisconsin style. A mosquito immediately attacks my arm, making the ambience complete
Lindy Zart (Roomies)
The doorman code of conduct?” I ask Gabriel. What did I do wrong this time? Or is Gabriel one of those Madonna/whore guys who can’t deal with a girl who makes the first move? “No, the gentleman’s code of conduct,” he says. “And, I don’t know, maybe needing better ambience? Like, not in a closet. Maybe dinner and a movie first?” I really don’t know how to do this. When the stakes count. I am an idiot. I turn around to leave, embarrassed, but he presses his hand against the door to keep it from opening. (He really is a bad doorman.) Then he places the softest, sweetest kiss ever on the back of my neck. “We’ll get there,” he whispers in my ear. I got my kiss, I got my k—i-S-s.
Rachel Cohn (Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List)
Easily he had turned studying my least favorite subject in history into my now most memorable one. Then there was his want to make our relationship more real than superficial, something very new to me. Though I was one relationship more knowledgeable than he was, it always felt like he knew more than I did of how relationships where built for the long run. Then again, he could have just learned that from watching his parents or maybe the innocence of our relationship just made him want to keep it pure and real. Like digging deep and wanting to get to know me, not just make out sessions every time we were together. Augusto knew more of the real me, the girl who wants to be a history teacher, enjoys her fries with garlic and cheese, and appreciates when a boy doesn’t complain when plans are made with my friends and he isn’t a part of them.
Christina Marie Morales (Ambience (The Ghost of Saint Augustine Trilogy #1))
I work on the wine. It tastes somewhat tart, but that could be because I normally drink white. However, today is a different kind of day. Sitting in the most pleasurable of settings, I may as well drink red and piss white; at least I’ll know that some of this land remained inside me. I look to my right, my eyes unfocused, absorbing the city as a whole. Show me your magic; I am ready. With a cigarette between my lips, I whisper my thoughts, my soul open to the maximum. Then I see it...clearly, without being able to visualize it in my eyes...my soul acting as the receiver—no past, no future, no nightmares, no struggle, a world without isms and schisms, a moment of pure joy, a split second when everything makes sense, a flash of life when one is ready to die. From Antibes emanates an ambience so wonderful that I wish to drink from Lethe and know no more than the present. If only for a brief moment, I desire this one luxury. While I press my lips together, ready to receive the kiss of Thanatos, I wonder if I can afford it. I wait for an answer...waiting, waiting, but it doesn’t arrive. The time is not yet mine; it seems fortune will pass me by today.
Henry Martin (Eluding Reality (Mad Days of Me #3))
The poor are so common they're invisible, just part of the ambience of this place. I tuck a few soles under them as they sleep and walk off, feeling like a guilty tourist here for thrillseeking in a culture that's trying desperately to survive. Can shamanism help them? I wonder, as I make my way back to the hostel by moonlight.
Rak Razam (Aya: a shamanic odyssey)
Not only for science, but for any kind of research work and studies--isolation, pure ambience, and peace of mind is a must. Urban ambience is full of destructions and everyday’s cacophony further hampers the research aptitude of a student.
Bhaskar Sharma (The Second Promise)
Bucolic peace is not my ambience, and the giving of tea parties is by no means my favorite amusement. In fact, I would prefer to be pursued across the desert by a band of savage Dervishes brandishing spears and howling for my blood. I would rather be chased up a tree by a mad dog, or face a mummy risen from its grave. I would rather be threatened by knives, pistols, poisonous snakes, and the curse of a long-dead king. Lest I be accused of exaggeration,.... Emerson once remarked that if I should encounter a band of Dervishes, five minutes of my nagging would unquestionably inspire even the mildest of them to massacre me....
Elizabeth Peters
With every stop, the happy drunks from the Capitol hopped off and were replaced with the dark travelers of the night. The new passengers were those worn-out workers coming home from their dead end jobs or the nightcrawlers of the evening industries who were just heading out to do business. They all exuded this heavy ambience, like a collected and withheld sigh. I felt so out of place. It was a complete buzzkill.
Mara Joaquin (Lost in the Sky)
ant to spruce up your bathroom? Don't hesitate to hang pictures in there. Plaques, posters, framed magazine covers-whatever strikes your fancy. Mirrors and clocks are naturals too. Flowers are always a plus. Seashells are also at home in the bathroom. Put them in a bowl, hang them, or glue them to a frame. Add favorite bathroom accessories such as lamps and scented candles. Potpourri gives everything a special ambience. Put in a few unexpected touches to make your bathroom unique. A guaranteed hope-producer is spending time with children. Get down on the floor and talk to them. And listen to them. Let their youth and enthusiasm rub off on you. And here's the best tip of all, taken from Psalm 39:7: "But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you." May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him. ey, if little things can drag you down, then little things can also pick you up! Here are a few ideas. • Always keep something green in a little vase or pot by your kitchen sink. And I'm not talking about cash-I'm talking plants.
Emilie Barnes (365 Things Every Woman Should Know)
I found that disturbing the night's calm ambience was almost as gratifying as the ambience itself.
S.A. Tawks (Misadventurous)
Parity of esteem,” in the parlance of negotiation experts, is a simple concept but requires a fundamental reorientation of behavior on both sides. Each says to the other: “I know your narrative and I reject it in its entirety, yet I accept your right to define your own narrative as you wish, and I will respect that right and its aspirations.” The important component is respect; respect is more embracive than trust. Until each side reaches a level of understanding of the other’s narrative that facilitates a willingness to accord parity of esteem, peace agreements will likely falter, perhaps not immediately but in a corrosive ambience that slowly emerges and is conducive to disregarding some of their provisions. Peace agreements are pieces of paper. The task of translating them into sustainable reconciliation is a long and difficult process; former protagonists are in “recovery.” Unless they nurture that recovery, their peace agreement will fall apart or lapse into “frozen” pacts. In Israel and Palestine there is no parity of esteem for the respective narratives and therefore no trust. This is why the onset of any negotiation is often not welcomed by either the leadership or the constituencies of either side. Instead, the prospect brings latent fears to the foreground, and the leaderships play to these fears, feeding their constituencies the same stale and divisive pronouncements about “the other” that have been repeated ad nauseam over decades. They engage in debilitating tit-for-tat exchanges, talk only about what the other side has to do, what the other side needs to tell its people, never about what they themselves have to do, what their own people need to understand. All this prepares the way, should the talks collapse, for one more repetition of the blame game and violence, which becomes self-fulfilling and self-motivating.
Padraig O'Malley (The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine--A Tale of Two Narratives)
But it was not just Freemasonry in itself — not just the rites, rituals, traditions, opportunities and benefits of Freemasonry. It was also an ambience, a mentality, a hierarchy of attitudes and values for which Freemasonry provided a particularly effacious conduit. The Freemasonry of the age was a repository for an imaginatively stirring and potent idealism, which it was able, in a fashion uniquely its own, to disseminate. Most colonists did not actually read Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot or Rousseau, any more than most British soldiers did. Through the lodges, however, the currents of thought associated with such philosophies became universally accessible. It was largely through the lodges that 'ordinary' colonists learned of that lofty premise called 'the rights of man'. It was through the lodges that they learned the concept of the perfectibility of society. And the New World seemed to offer a species of blank slate, a species of laboratory in which social experiment was possible and the principles enshrined by Freemasonry could be applied in practice.
Michael Baigent (The Temple and the Lodge)
a machine cannot be understood aside from its end-user and the cultural ambience in which it works. The role of the end-user is to insert that part of the iceberg of cultural knowledge that cannot be programmed. Progress
Wiebe E. Bijker (The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology)
You were there in a former life,” Doc theorized. “I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that way, too. Maybe it’s all this rain, but we’re starting to have the same dreams. We can’t find a way to return to Lemuria, so it’s returning to us. Rising up out of the ocean–’hi Leej, hi Spike, long time ain’t it. . . .’” “It talked to you guys?” “I don’t know. It isn’t just a place.
Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice)
We followed him to a covered veranda. In America, we would call that a lemonade porch, however, in South Africa, they call it a stoep. A meeting place located outside the front of the home where friends and family can gather, and one can watch the rising or the setting of the sun in the cozy spot simply called a stoep. The stoep projected a natural ambience of peace and harmony, as a light breeze filled the space with its woodsy fragrance of pine and other natural fragrances inspired by the area’s shrubbery. It almost felt like it was hypnotizing one into a deeper state of tranquility, a state of existence that celebrated the quiet pockets of solitude where a richer from of living is housed. It made one slouch a little more meaningfully and relax the muscles of your body a little more conscientiously, as you let go of one’s innate need to think – to think to the point of hyper focusing on the meaningless details of life, for example, the incessant need to make every moment in life count… Yet, the stoep’s lesson of deeper living is simply the gift of becoming reacquainted with the joy of just being – open yet connected to now, without a higher purpose beyond that. Sometimes, the greatest gift that we can give ourselves is just to sit in the rawness of the moment without any outcome or intention in mind – except, to breathe in the life of the area around us. That is where my afternoon’s lesson ended, knowing that a stoep is a space where quality of human connection is made with or without the presence of any audience because it’s that space that celebrates the stillness of nothing and yet everything simultaneously, or in the words of Rumi: “In order to understand the dance, one must be still. And in order to truly understand the stillness, one must dance.” In South Africa that concept is lovingly called…Die Stoep, a space of possibility.
hlbalcomb
Baudrillard’s positioning of the first stage of simulation during the Renaissance: by reproducing appearances accurately, not only does the perspective window initiate the indefinite manipulation of the environment, but also the predominance of vision in the West. Now understood as a geometrical calculus of distances and proportions, space is born, a theatrical ambience where life unfolds according, and thanks to, the distance separating the viewer from the stage. ... On the other hand, no understanding of reality is possible in the absence of a gap distancing the subject from a world within which s/he used to feel completely merged and subjugated (Descartes, [1637] 2006); just as no understanding of the self is to the same extent possible in the absence of a gap distancing the subject from its own image in the looking glass (Lacan, [1936] 2006). An effect of representation, the perception of reality and individuality both owe to the perspective window their initiation and realization.
Francesco Proto (Baudrillard for Architects (Thinkers for Architects))
When the coffee ambience looked upscale, in other words, the coffee tasted upscale as well.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
It's everywhere and yet nowhere In the eyes of a child In your smile, even if it's mild It's in the imperceptible dew of the dawn It's in the ambience of a freshly cut lawn. Yet how selfish I would be if I would be talking about it only in the sight sense Voice...my second love Voices in which I can dove Forever and never come out It's not only what beauty is about And yet a shame on all of us We still chose that face As the only place to admire beauty
Mallika Chawla