“
Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.
”
”
Ross Macdonald
“
There's a drinking game in Heaven, where angels do a shot every time humans invest 'for the long term.
”
”
Johnny B. Truant (The Universe Doesn't Give a Flying Fuck About You)
“
All but a prophetic few must go about God's work in very quiet, very unspectacular ways. And as you labor to know Him, and to know that He knows you; as you invest your time--and your convenience--in quiet, unassuming service, you will indeed find that "He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up" (Matthew 4:6).
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Jeffrey R. Holland (Created for Greater Things)
“
other motion-picture stars, many of whom had promised to invest in his new corporation, Sebring International. While keeping his original salon at 725 North Fairfax in Los Angeles, he planned to open a series of franchised shops and to market a line of men’s toiletries bearing his name. The first shop had been opened in San Francisco in May 1969, Abigail Folger and Colonel and Mrs. Paul Tate being among those at the grand opening.
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Vincent Bugliosi (Helter Skelter)
“
God is raising up individuals who will carry the full manifestation of his desire. These people will take a leap of faith, in the hope that everything they invest into will prosper and with the goal of delivering to Jesus his great reward.
”
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Shawn Bolz (Keys to Heaven's Economy: An Angelic Visitation from the Minister of Finance)
“
Your time, energy and resources will get used no matter how well you focus them. By choosing to focus properly, you get the highest return for the efforts you invest in your life. Most people spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important. Productivity is not just about getting things done, it’s about getting the right things done.
”
”
John Geiger
“
Even the women were upset. They did not shout like the men but each had made a certain sacrifice in marrying a man who could afford a home in the most expensive new subdivision in Los Angeles County and she expected a return on that investment.
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”
Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half)
“
Don't take advice from people unless they are writing you a check.
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Manny Fernandez, Founder, DreamFunded.com
“
I already have a doctorate in conflict investment. I don’t really need the gifted-amateur reading list.
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Richard K. Morgan (Broken Angels (Takeshi Kovacs, #2))
“
However, angel investors by definition are not philanthropists or do-gooders in this area of their lives.
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David S. Rose (Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups)
“
it is not an exaggeration to state that any company designed for success in the twentieth century is doomed to failure in the twenty-first.
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”
David S. Rose (Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups)
“
There was no ‘linkage’, in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget.
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Mike Davis (City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Essential Mike Davis))
“
As VCs invest more and more money in each company, they have to wait longer and longer before they can exit.
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Basil Peters (Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists))
“
Every company needs an exit strategy and an exit plan. Ideally, the exit strategy should be agreed upon by the founders before the first dollar of investment goes into the company.
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Basil Peters (Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists))
“
Exits are the best part of being an entrepreneur or investor. It’s when we get financially rewarded for all of the creativity, hard work, investment and risk we put into our companies.
”
”
Basil Peters (Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists))
“
It isn’t really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn’t want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be, in our society—more important, even, than honest or decent—is identifiable. Even when Libby’s evil—perhaps most of all when she’s evil—she’s easy to categorize, to stick to a board with a pin like some scientific specimen. Those men in Stillwater are terrified of her because being terrified lets them know who she is—it keeps them safe. Imagine how much harder it would be to say, yes, she’s a woman capable of terrible anger and violence, but she’s also someone who’s tried desperately to be a nurturer, to be a good and constructive human being. If you accept all that, if you allow that inside she’s not just one or the other, but both, what does that say about all the other women in town? How will you ever be able to tell what’s actually going on in their hearts—and heads? Life in the simple village would suddenly become immensely complicated. And so, to keep that from happening, they separate things. The normal, ordinary woman is defined as nurturing and loving, docile and compliant. Any female who defies that categorization must be so completely evil that she’s got to be feared, feared even more than the average criminal—she’s got to be invested with the powers of the Devil himself. A witch, they probably would have called her in the old days. Because she’s not just breaking the law, she’s defying the order of things.
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Caleb Carr (The Angel of Darkness (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, #2))
“
You’re going to be my wife soon. Even if you weren’t, I would still have invested in you. I believe in you, angel, you’re talented, and I’m proud to be the man who gets to place his bets on you.
”
”
Sian Ceinwen (The Wedding (Cruise Control, #2))
“
Exits are the least understood part of investing—as often by the investors themselves as by the entrepreneurs. This book is about the large number of other exits—the ones that are not driven by the VCs.
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”
Basil Peters (Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists))
“
Mark Pincus smelled the social-game opportunity first. He was the guy who, with Reid Hoffman, had been part of the angel investment that, in his words, was like winning lotto. In late 2006, Matt Cohler tipped him off that Facebook was going to launch a platform and was looking for entrepreneurs to come up with apps. We don’t want any money from you, he told Pincus. Just build cool stuff and we’ll expose you to our traffic.
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”
Steven Levy (Facebook: The Inside Story)
“
shout like the men but each had made a certain sacrifice in marrying a man who could afford a home in the most expensive new subdivision in Los Angeles County and she expected a return on that investment. Cath Johansen
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”
Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half)
“
Accept every day as a beautiful mystery. Don’t try to control everything or worry about the things you can’t control. If you do, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of frustration and misery. You must simply accept that some forces are out of your control. However, you can always control the manner in which you react to situations. Everyone’s life has positive and negative aspects. Whether you are happy or not depends greatly on which aspects you focus on. The best thing you can do is let go of what you can’t control and invest your energy in the things you can. Powerful, positive change will occur in your life when you decide to take control of yourself instead of craving control over everyone and everything else.
”
”
Anonymous . (The Angel Affect: The World Wide Mission)
“
As a psychologist, he understood how much easier it is to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled: that it is possible to sell an enduring lie because once people invest enough of themselves in it, they will continue to believe, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.
”
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Chris Brookmyre (Fallen Angel)
“
The rise of monotheism gives religion a more transcendent aspect, investing power in a single God beyond the world. However, the emphasis on angels and demons in Israel and angels, demons and saints in Medieval Europe softens such transcendent powers. Greek and Roman gods can be approached and bargained with, but are capricious and hard for mortals to understand.
”
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Chris Gosden (Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present)
“
Did you know about this?” Grayson said, his voice low, his silver eyes targeting Nash. “Which ‘this’ might we be talkin’ about, little brother?” “How about buying patents from a grieving widow for one one-hundredth of what they were worth?” Grayson threw down the file, then picked up another one. “Or posing as an angel investor when what he really wanted was to incrementally acquire enough of the company to be able to shut it down to clear the way for another of his investments?
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”
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3))
“
The violence of men, though, is modulated by a slider: they can allocate their energy along a continuum from competing with other men for access to women to wooing the women themselves and investing in their children, a continuum that biologists sometimes call “cads versus dads.”103 In a social ecosystem populated mainly by men, the optimal allocation for an individual man is at the “cad” end, because attaining alpha status is necessary to beat away the competition and a prerequisite to getting within wooing distance of the scarce women.
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Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
“
In judging the importance of moral concerns, recall, social liberals place little weight on In-group Loyalty and Purity/Sanctity (which Fiske lumps under Communal Sharing), and they place little weight on Authority/Respect. Instead they invest all their moral concern in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. Social conservatives spread their moral portfolio over all five.197 The trend toward social liberalism, then, is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights.
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”
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
“
There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as in molok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: “It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!” These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical “moloch,” the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses. CHAPTER 5
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Simon Sebag Montefiore (Jerusalem: The Biography)
“
Diseases haunt our frail humanity,
Through noon, through night, on casual wing they glide,
Silent,—a voice the power all-wise denied.[1]
Once man was a favourite of the Creator, as the royal psalmist sang, "God had made him a little lower than the angels, and had crowned him with glory and honour. God made him to have dominion over the works of his hands, and put all things under his feet." Once it was so; now is man lord of the creation? Look at him—ha! I see plague! She has invested his form, is incarnate in his flesh, has entwined herself with his being, and blinds his heaven-seeking eyes.
”
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (The Last Man)
“
If the body is no longer a site of otherness but of identification, then we have urgently to become reconciled with it, repair it, perfect it, turn it into an ideal object. Everyone treats their bodies the way men treat women in projective identification: they invest them as a fetish, making an autistic cult of them, subjecting them to a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is the body's resemblance to its model which becomes a source of eroticism and 'white' seduction -- in the sense that it effects a kind of white magic of identity, as opposed to the black magic of otherness.
This is how it is with body-building: you get into your body as you would into a suit of nerve and muscle. The body is not muscular, but muscled. It is the same with the brain and with social relations or exchanges: body-building, brainstorming, word-processing. Madonna is the ideal specimen of this, our muscled Immaculate Conception, our muscular angel who delivers us from the weaknesses of the body (pity the poor shade of Marilyn!).
The sheath of muscles is the equivalent of character armour. In the past, women merely wrapped themselves in their image and their finery -- Freud speaks of those people who live with a kind of inner mirror, in a fleshly, happy self-reference. That narcissistic ideal is past and gone; body-building has wiped it out and replaced it with a gymnastic Ego-Ideal -- cold, hard, stressed, artificial self-reference. The construction of a double, of a physical and mental identity shell. Thus, in `body simulation', where you can animate your body remotely at any moment, the phantasy of being present in more than one body becomes an operational reality. An extension of the human being. And not a metaphorical or poetic extension, as in Pessoa's heteronyms, but quite simply a technical one.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
“
FOR A WOMAN WHO FEARS SHE IS TOO DAMAGED TO LOVE AGAIN
A Prayer adapted from the Heart and Soul of Sex by Gina Ogden, PhD.
Holy Spirits of Fire befriend and warm me.
Earth and Water wrap me in bounty.
Spirits of Air guide me to walk the paths of my heart.
Sun smile on me. Stones accept me. Stars remind me.
Ocean storms burnish my terrors to translucent pearls.
Creatures of hills and hollows, beings beneath the ground watch over me, comfort and nourish me.
Snakes and rivers, ancient dragons, dance sinuously with me.
Swirling spirit of volcano invest me with power.
Eagle and sparrow give me wings and sight.
Snails of Buddha, saints of God, Great Spirit, Yahweh, Magus, Shiva, Isis, Astarte of the flowing heart, Goddess of Grain, Angel of Sweetness, Higher Power, protect me, fearful, angry, and armored; as I am the giver, healer, striver, survivor and lover.
Cherish me—waif and victim, elf and Amazon.
See me a holy woman now. Touch me.
Brush me with the breath of love.
Ganesh, sacred elephant who cries human tears and oversees new ventures, help me begin again.
”
”
Gina Ogden
“
If you’re in this conversation, and you’re not in this conversation with an intention towards love—with an intention towards building and finding relationship—then it’s not the place for you to have the conversation. I hate saying that. I want to have this fierce conversation with you because I believe in connection as love, because I want to be liberated from this space in which I have to disappear because you’re inhabiting that body like the pain, the guilt, the suffering, the generations of pain and suffering, the generations of shame and guilt. Like the [realization that] “Oh, my God. This has all been going on and I’m grown up and haven’t even seen this.” That must just be devastating. I feel for white folks when I reach that place where I think, “Wow, I can’t feel as you.” But I feel for you. So we’re suffering. LAMA ROD: Mm-hm. REV. ANGEL: And the only reason you should be in community spaces having the conversation is because you are invested in the community; you’re invested in love. You’re not just trying to teach somebody or fix someplace or something. If you’re not coming to this from your open heart of love and desire to connect, even if it’s funky and awkward and you can’t get the words right and you mess it up, then you should go someplace else where you can actually feel safe enough and invested enough to have those conversations from a place of—a place of love towards love. From love towards love. LAMA ROD: Mm-hm. Yeah, I think both of us get the label of being angry. That’s why I have to keep saying “love.” Traditionally for us, that’s the way that people have shut us down. [They] put that wall up and go, “Oh, you’re angry. You don’t make any sense.” That’s why we’ve integrated love. But we have to practice through these labels of being angry. REV.
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Angel Kyodo Williams (Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation)
“
Life is pretty short yet magnanimous if we know just how to live right. It isn't that easy, it takes a lot of our soul, sometimes too many broken pieces to finally come together in binding a masterpiece that smiles like a solitary star forever gazing around at the music of an eternal cosmos.
The most brutal yet beautiful truth about Life is that It is marked, marked with Time where every moment takes us closer to death, it doesn't have to sound or feel bad or scary because death is the most inevitable truth in this mortal world. While the knowledge of death jolts our mind with the uncertainty of Life, clutches us in the emotion of fear to think of pain or the loss of bonds, when we acknowledge that as a part of our souls' journey and take every moment as our precious gift, a blessing to experience this Life with its beautiful garden of emotions blossoming with wonderful smiles that we can paint on others, then we make our Life magnanimous, then we make even the very face of death as that of an angel coming to take us to a different voyage, soaked in a lot of memories and experiences beautifully binding our soul.
I have realised that when we live each day as if it's the last day of our life, we become more loving and gentle to everyone around and especially to our own selves. We forgive and love more openly, we grace and embrace every opportunity we get to be kind, to stay in touch with everything that truly matters. I have realised that when we rise every morning with gratitude knowing that the breath of air still passes through our body, just in the mere understanding that we have one more day to experience Life once again, we stay more compassionate towards everything and everyone around and invest more of our selves into everything and everyone that truly connect and resonate with our soul. I have realised that when we consciously try to be good and kind, no matter however bad or suffocating a situation is we always end up taking everything at its best holding on to the firm grip of goodness, accepting everything as a part of our souls' lesson or just a turn of Time or Fate and that shapes into our strength and roots our core with the truest understanding of Life, the simple act of going on and letting go. Letting go of anything and everything that chains our Soul while going on with a Heart open to Love and a Soul ready to absorb all that falls along the pathway of this adventure called Life. I have realised that when we are kind and do anything good for another person, that gives us the most special happiness, something so pure that even our hearts don't know how deep that joy permeates inside our soul. I have realised that at the end of the day we do good not because of others but because of our own selves, for if tomorrow death comes to grace me I hope to smile and say I have Lived, loved unconditionally and embraced forgiveness, kindness and goodness and all the other colours of Love with every breath I caught, I have lived a Life magnanimous.
So each time someone's unkind towards you, hold back and smile, and try to give your warmth to that person. Because Kindness is not a declaration of who deserves it, it's a statement of who you are. So each time some pieces of your heart lay scattered, hold them up and embrace everyone of them with Love. Because Love is not a magic potion that is spilled from a hollow space, it's a breath of eternity that flows through the tunnel of your soul. So each time Life puts up a question of your Happiness, answer back with a Smile of Peace. Because Happiness is not what you look for in others, it's what you create in every passing moment, with the power of Life, that is pretty short when we see how counted it stands in days but actually turns out absolutely incredibly magnanimous when loved and lived in moments.
”
”
Debatrayee Banerjee
“
In a typical VC portfolio, all the returns are from 20% of the investments. These are the two out of ten investments that are winners. A minimum respectable return for a VC fund is a 20% compound return. For a ten-year VC fund, the fund needs to pay investors 6x their investment to generate a 20% compound return. So those two winners each have to make a 30x return on average to provide investors with the 20% compound return—and that’s just to generate a minimum respectable return.
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”
Basil Peters (Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists))
“
In Robert Noyce’s office there hung a black-and-white photo that showed a jovial crew of young scientists offering a champagne toast to the smiling William Shockley. The picture was taken on November 1, 1956, a few hours after the news of Shockley’s Nobel Prize had reached Palo Alto. By the time that happy picture was taken, however, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories was a chaotic and thoroughly unhappy place. For all his technical expertise, Shockley had proven to be an inexpert manager. He was continually shifting his researchers from one job to another; he couldn’t seem to make up his mind what, if anything, the company was trying to produce. “There was a group that worked for Shockley that was pretty unhappy,” Noyce recalled many years later. “And that group went to Beckman and said, hey, this isn’t working. . . . About that time, Shockley got his Nobel Prize. And Beckman was sort of between the devil and the deep blue sea. He couldn’t fire Shockley, who had just gotten this great international honor, but he had to change the management or else everyone else would leave.” In the end, Beckman stuck with Shockley—and paid a huge price. Confused and frustrated, eight of the young scientists, including Noyce, Moore, and Hoerni, decided to look for another place to work. That first group—Shockley called them “the traitorous eight”—turned out to be pioneers, for they established a pattern that has been followed time and again in Silicon Valley ever since. They decided to offer themselves as a team to whichever employer made the best offer. Word of this unusual proposal reached an investment banker in New York, who offered a counterproposal: Instead of working for somebody else, the eight scientists should start their own firm. The banker knew of an investor who would provide the backing—the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, which had been looking hard for an entrée to the transistor business. A deal was struck. Each of the eight young scientists put up $500 in earnest money, the corporate angel put up all the rest, and early in 1957 the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation opened for business, a mile or so down the road from Shockley’s operation.
”
”
T.R. Reid (The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution)
“
You've become a bystander, and this article you wrote is no more than lodging a complaint. Where's your interview with migrant families who lost someone?... Where's your investment?... [Bill Mulholland whose career ended after St. Francis Dam collapse ] Without his work, his vision and inventiveness, Los Angeles couldn't have grown the way it has... self-taught immigrant ditch digger who became one of the richest and most powerful men in L.A. That's America... "Even if it is not the whole truth?" "Because it is the truth too.
”
”
Natashia Deón (The Perishing)
“
You limit angel investment funds to 10 to 15% or less of your liquid assets. I subscribe to the Nassim Taleb “barbell” school of investment, which I implement as 90% in conservative asset classes like cash-like equivalents and the remaining 10% in speculative investments that can capitalize on positive “black swans.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
- Only invest funds that you can afford to lose. - Invest only in projects that you understand. - Don’t chase hype. - Invest in teams with which you feel comfortable working. - Always write proper legal documents. - Don’t be a “backseat driver.” - Think from the very beginning about building up a portfolio of projects, and then gradually begin the process. - Remember that you won’t get your money until you exit the project. - Know how to conduct a competent financial analysis. - Don’t forget about co-investment.
”
”
Igor Ryabenkiy (Adventures in Venture Capital: A Practical Guide for Novice Angels and Future Unicorns)
“
There's a drinking game in Heaven, where angels do a shot every time humans invest "for the long term.
”
”
Johnny B. Truant (The Universe Doesn't Give a Flying Fuck About You)
“
I have a comedy writer friend, Sandy, whose husband left her for another woman the moment his restaurant (which Sandy had invested in and made possible) became successful. It was kind of the worst story anyone had ever heard, a betrayal that, had it happened to me, I would’ve driven slowly around downtown Los Angeles at night in my car with my windows rolled down, trying to solicit a hit man to murder my husband.
”
”
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))