“
What are you really studying?"
He leans back to look at her. "The statistical probability of love at first sight."
"Very funny," she says. "What is it really?"
"I'm serious."
"I don't believe you."
He laughs, then lowers his mouth so that it's close to her ear. "People who meet in airports are seventy-two percent more likely too fall for each other than people who meet anywhere else.
”
”
Jennifer E. Smith (The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight)
“
What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
“
With stumbling feet, he blindly walked somewhere, anywhere. When he got to the king's study, he looked over his shoulder and checked the carpet over which he'd trodden. No trail of his blood. Which, considering the way his chest was hurting, was a surprise. Sure as shit felt like he'd been shot in the heart.
”
”
J.R. Ward (Lover Mine (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #8))
“
Does this have anything to do with the unit we’re studying? Because I can’t find anything about desired characteristics of a mate anywhere in our text.
”
”
Becca Fitzpatrick (Hush, Hush (Hush, Hush, #1))
“
You are easy to overlook. Slim and pale and so quiet. But now that I’ve studied your soft grey eyes and traced the fine bones of your face, now that I’ve kissed your pale pink mouth, I don’t want to look anywhere else. My gaze is continually drawn back to you.
”
”
Amy Harmon (The Bird and the Sword (The Bird and the Sword Chronicles, #1))
“
All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?
”
”
Tara Westover (Educated)
“
I belonged here, I thought, with her, as surely as anyone belonged anywhere. As weird as here was.
”
”
Brittany Cavallaro (A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1))
“
Never make the negative the object of your study, because the negative is not there. You can go on and you will never arrive anywhere. Try to understand what light is, not darkness. Try to understand what life is, not death. Try to understand what love is, not hate.
If you go into hate you will never understand it, because hate is only the absence of love. So is darkness the absence of light.
”
”
Osho (The Book of Wisdom)
“
Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for. That might mean friends or foster parents, a group or even a charity. What matters far more — so much more than chemistry or ancestry — is that precious bond, that reassurance that they won’t let you down.
”
”
Marina Chapman (The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys)
“
Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
“
I wondered if perhaps I had changed too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?
”
”
Tara Westover (Educated)
“
No one except Sherlock Holmes thought he should be going anywhere, least of all his long-suffering doctor, but the game was afoot.
”
”
Emma Jane Holloway (A Study in Silks (The Baskerville Affair, #1))
“
Walk into a library anywhere in the world and you’ll notice the same thing: It’s quiet and calm. Everyone knows how to behave in a library. In fact, few things transcend cultures like library behavior. It’s a place where people go to read, think, study, focus, and work. And the hushed, respectful environment reflects that. Isn’t that what an office should be?
”
”
Jason Fried (It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work)
“
Vi?" Jag's soft voice called from the other room. I'd been soaking so long, the water in the tub was cold. I stepped out, careful not to get the book wet, and wrapped a towel around myself.
"In here," I whispered. He had switched the lamp on and was rubbing his eyes when I came into the bedroom.
"Hey."
I slipped the book back onto the table next to his bed. "I didn't get it wet."
"Not. That." His eyes raked over my only-towel-covered body with a hungry expression.
"Knock it off." I pulled the towel tighter and returned to the bathroom. He followed me, putting his hand on the door before I could close it. I looked anywhere but at him. Lying fully clothed in bed with him was bad enough.
I couldn't help it when I drank him in, starting at his feet and slowly creeping up to his neck, past his chin, lips, nose to his eyes. When I finally reached them, my heart clutched almost painfully. I swallowed hard and cleared my throat, playing with the end of my towel.
"Vi, babe-"
"Don't talk like that," I said.
He smiled his Jag-winner. I took a shuddering breath and tried to focus. "Don't smile like that either. It's not fair."
"Okay, then. Let's talk about being fair." He carefully wove his fingers through mine. The way he studied the ground was adorable. He took a few slow steps back into the bedroom, pulling me with him.
"Jag-
”
”
Elana Johnson (Possession (Possession, #1))
“
[1965]
To my children
Dear Hildita, Aleidita, Camilo, Celia, And Ernesto,
If you ever have to read this letter, it will be because I am no longer with you. You practically will not remember me, and the smaller ones will not remember me at all.
Your father has been a man who acted on his beliefs and has certainly been loyal to his convictions.
Grow up as good revolutionaries. Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature. Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone is worth nothing.
Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.
Until forever, my children. I still hope to see you.
A great big kiss and a big hug from,
Papa
”
”
Ernesto Che Guevara
“
It has taken me many years of intensive study and practice to be able to recognize and articulate how I am shaped by being white, and this in itself is an example of whiteness (while there are exceptions, most people of color do not find it anywhere near as difficult to articulate how race shapes their lives.)
”
”
Robin DiAngelo (What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy (Counterpoints))
“
Look! I've been in the Pentagon like four times, but I'm not really even sure what the Pentagon does! I'm supposed to fight crime, but I don't even know how laws get passed! I mean... Truth, Justice and the American Way? I stopped taking social studies when I was like fifteen!
I grew up in Westchester, and have never traveled anywhere else without this stupid domino mask on my face! Am I the only one who's scared that people are looking to me for answers because I can lift a car over my head?! This is crazy!
”
”
Brennan Lee Mulligan (Strong Female Protagonist: Book One)
“
Did you ever get fed up?" I said. "I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something? I mean do you like school and all that stuff?"
"It's a terrific bore."
"I mean do you hate it? I know it's a terrific bore, but do you hate it, is what I mean."
"Well, I don't exactly hate it. You always have to--"
"Well, I hate it. Boy, do I hate it," I said. "But it isn't just that. It's everything. I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always--"
"Don't shout, please," old Sally said. Which was very funny, because I wasn't even shouting.
"Take cars," I said. I said it in this very quiet voice. "Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake. A horse you can at least--"
"I don't know what you're even talking about," old Sally said. "You jump from one--"
"You know something?" I said. You're probably the only reason I'm in New York right now, or anywhere. If you weren't around, I'd probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddam place. You're the only reason I'm around, practically."
"You're sweet," she said. But you could tell she wanted me to change the damn subject.
"You ought to go to a boys' school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stuck together, the Catholics stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together. If you try to have a little intelligent--"
"Now, listen," old Sally said. "Lots of boys get more out of school that that."
"I agree! I agree they do, some of them! But that's all I get out of it. See? That's my point. That's exactly my goddamn point," I said. "I don't get hardly anything out of anything. I'm in bad shape. I'm in lousy shape."
"You certainly are.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
“
We are never anywhere but where we are
even when much of that "where" is
moving in some direction or other
towards somewhere else.
We cannot
--right now--
know more than we know,
have prepared or studied or rehearsed
more than we actually did,
be more beautiful or wiser or wittier
or wealthier or healthier
or stronger or better rested than we actually are.
So go out and sing.
Express your love laid bare and open.
Be the fully imperfect glorious creature that you are.
Dance in the rain.
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
The righteousness of the Kingdom is a righteousness which only God Himself can give. Perfect purity, perfect honesty, perfect love, perfect forgiveness: what man is there anywhere in any dispensation who can live such a life?
”
”
George Eldon Ladd (The Gospel of the Kingdom: Scriptural Studies in the Kingdom of God)
“
I began to study trigonometry. There was solace in its strange formulas and equations. I was drawn to the Pythagorean theorem and its promise of a universal—the ability to predict the nature of any three points containing a right angle, anywhere, always. What I knew of physics I had learned in the junkyard, where the physical world often seemed unstable, capricious. But here was a principle through which the dimensions of life could be defined, captured. Perhaps reality was not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted. Perhaps it could be made to make sense.
”
”
Tara Westover (Educated)
“
Pride makes us rest content with ourselves—think we are good enough as we are—keep us from taking advice—refuse the gospel of Christ—turn every one to his own way. But pride never reigns anywhere so powerfully as in the heart of a young man.
”
”
J.C. Ryle (Thoughts for Young Men with Study Guide)
“
longitudinal study of people over age 75, conducted over a period of 21 years by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, looked at whether activities from playing cards to swimming to doing housework affected cognitive ability. Almost none of the physical activities had any effect on dementia rates except for one: partner dancing, which lowered the risk by 76 percent. No other activity came anywhere near being as effective at protecting people from cognitive decline!3
”
”
Christiane Northrup (Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being)
“
… Yelena? Hello?” Leif poked my arm.
“I’m here.”
“What are we going to do?” Leif asked me.
“It’s too late to go anywhere else. Kiki and the horses will watch the outside of the building and alert me if anyone approaches.”
“Ooh, guard horses. How quaint.
”
”
Maria V. Snyder (Fire Study (Study, #3))
“
The distance—physical and mental—that had been traversed in the last decade nearly stopped my breath, and I wondered if perhaps I had changed too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?
”
”
Tara Westover (Educated)
“
Congenital disease can warp the heart with great variety. Valves can be sealed tight, missing parts—or absent altogether. Major vessels can be misplaced, narrowed, or blocked completely. A chamber can be too small or missing, a wall too thick or thin. The heart’s electrical system—its nerves—may go haywire. The muscle can be weak. Holes may occur almost anywhere, in almost any size. Studying heart pathology, one is reminded that the genetic symphony that produces a normal baby is indeed a wondrous and delicate one.
”
”
G. Wayne Miller (King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery)
“
Once, long ago, Francis Crawford had reduced her to terror and, the episode over, she had suffered to find that for Kate, apparently, no reason suggested itself against making that same Francis Crawford her friend. He was not Philippa’s friend. She had made that clear, and, to be fair, he had respected it. He had even, when you thought of it, curtailed his visits to Kate, although Kate’s studied lack of comment on this served only to make Philippa angrier. He had been nasty at Boghall. He had hit her at Liddel Keep. He had stopped her going anywhere for weeks. He had saved her life. That was indisputable. He had been effective over poor Trotty Luckup, while she had been pretty rude, and he hadn’t forced himself on her; and he had made her warm with his cloak. He had gone to Liddel Keep expressly to warn her, and when she had been pig-headed about leaving (Kate was right) he had done the only thing possible to make her. And then he had come to Flaw Valleys for nothing but to make sure of her safety, and he had been so tired that Kate had cried after he had gone. And then it had suddenly struck her, firmly and deeply in her shamefully flat chest, so that her heart thumped and her eyes filled with tears, that maybe she was wrong. Put together everything you knew of Francis Crawford. Put together what you had heard at Boghall and at Midculter, what you had seen at Flaw Valleys, and it all added up to one enormous, soul-crushing entity. She had been wrong. She did not understand him; she had never met anyone like him; she was only beginning to glimpse what Kate, poor maligned Kate, must have seen all these years under the talk. But the fact remained that he had gone out of his way to protect her, and she had put his life in jeopardy in return.
”
”
Dorothy Dunnett (The Disorderly Knights (The Lymond Chronicles, #3))
“
I was too busy studying the shelves to see his expression, but I heard the affection in his tone when he replied, “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, Evie.
”
”
Samantha Young (Much Ado About You)
“
The human race is an elsewhere race and I am an imposter in a street of imposters. I am nothing and no-one: I was never born. I am a graduate imposter, having applied myself from my earliest years to the study of the development of imposture as practiced in myself and in others around me in street, town, city, country, and on earth. The imposture begins with the first germ of disbelief in being, in self, and this allied to the conviction of the ‘unalterable certainty of truth”, produces the truth of disbelief, of deception of being, of self, of times, places, peoples, of all time and space. The existence of anything, of anywhere and anytime produces an instant denial only in graduates of imposture; in most others who remain unaware of such a state, particularly in themselves, there may be little or no knowledge of their reality, their nonentity…Complete imposture, I repeat, leads to nothingness in which one inhabits all worlds except the world of oneself.
”
”
Janet Frame (The Carpathians)
“
He was happy because, after such a long study, experimentation, and struggle, he could at last affirm the ultimate truth: there never were and never would be any madmen in Itaguai or anywhere else.
”
”
Machado de Assis (O Alienista)
“
'You're there, but the books draw you in to whole other worlds. I mean, I know you study more serious things than the silly stories I read, but when you're there, you can be anywhere. It fascinates me.'
”
”
C. Faron (Measure of Devotion (Measure of Devotion, #1))
“
I used to study the night, the stars, while camping next to my car. I learned names from an old star chart that I carried along with my highway maps. Mintaka, in Orion’s Belt, the bright left eye of the Bull. Sirius. Vega. Trying for a direction beyond anywhere possible, I looked at distant points of bright light. I wished that I could find out where I was going by navigating by the light that had traveled forever.
”
”
Steve S. Saroff (Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder)
“
A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six bodies. The pressure it applied to women's bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, 'It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree.... for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die.
”
”
Joshua Zeitz (Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern)
“
On a summers night, I have sat on the balcony drinking Ouzo, watching the ghosts of Greek Heroes sailing past, listening to the rustle of their sail cloths and the gentle lapping of their oars...and lain alongside Pythagoras watching him study the myriad of triangles in the constellations twinkling above us.
Whether it was Crete, the heat, the Ouzo, or a combination, it is unequalled anywhere other than Santorini, in my humble opinion.
”
”
Phil Simpkin
“
Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for.
”
”
Marina Chapman (The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys)
“
One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU’s tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these
”
”
Vasily Grossman (Everything Flows)
“
Ebook readers might cause problems. This has become a controversial topic as more and more people use and love ereaders. A close friend of mine doesn’t go anywhere without her Kindle and will probably be buried with it. A Wolf, she was dismayed when I shared the findings of a new Harvard Medical School study:23 reading an ebook in the hour before bed delayed sleep more than reading a print book under normal lamplight, and it also increased sleep inertia the next day.
”
”
Michael Breus (The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype—and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More)
“
Earlier, I mentioned a related technology called direct air capture. It involves exactly what the name implies: capturing carbon directly from the air. DAC is more flexible than point capture, because you can do it anywhere. And in all likelihood, it’ll be a crucial part of getting to zero; one study by the National Academy of Sciences found that we’ll need to be removing about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by mid-century and about 20 billion by the end of the century.
”
”
Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
“
The American landscape has never been at one with the white man. Never. And white men have probably never felt so bitter anywhere, as here in America, where the very landscape, in its very beauty, seems a bit devilish and grinning, opposed to us.
”
”
D.H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors)
“
This inner journey is the strangest of all. We study and practice everything, to get and realize nothing. It takes a lot of nothing, to be anything. It takes a lot of going no where, to be anywhere. And being anything or anywhere are still essentially nothing.
”
”
Nitya Prakash
“
Maybe.” They were so close now Leia could feel his breath against her cheek. “Do I have somebody like that already?” Kier tilted his head, studying her expression. At least, she thought he was. At the moment it was hard to look anywhere but his lips. “Yeah. You do.
”
”
Claudia Gray (Leia, Princess of Alderaan (Star Wars))
“
Is that it?" he asked.
"is what it?" I replied.
"You and me, done and dusted?"
"Was there ever a you and me?" I asked
"I thought there was a little frisson earlier. Something we could work on."
"Frisson? You mean, you taking the piss out of me and me saying you were rubbish? That was a frisson? I feel really sorry for the women you go out with."
"So this," he moved his forefinger in the space between us, "isn't going anywhere?"
"Where did you think it would go?"
"To dinner or a drink?"
"Jack, I'm sorry to say I don't particularly like you. Your clearly over-inflated sense of entitlement keeps bringing out the not very nice side of me. See? I would never normally say that to someone - and believe me, I meet a lot of odious people on a daily basis so I do know how to keep it in - but with you, I can't help it. So, no, I don't see this going anywhere.'
He studied me silently, his eyebrows knitted slightly together as his moss-green eyes held mine. "At least tell me your full name."
"Why?"
"So I can forever remember the one person who didn't fall for my charm, or lack thereof.
”
”
Dorothy Koomson (The Woman He Loved Before)
“
It happened to me. And I'll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didn't really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there. So I turned to my dad and asked him, "Do you know how many people are here right now"? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, I'd learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population. Up till then, I always thought that I was, I don't know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasn't true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If there's really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasn't ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasn't I that person? So, that's how I felt till I finished elementary school. And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldn't come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. I'd let the world know I wasn't a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And I've done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.
”
”
Nagaru Tanigawa
“
And those who will carefully study the so-called 'Mosaic code' contained in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, will see that, though Jahveh's prohibitions of certain forms of immorality are strict and sweeping, his wrath is quite as strongly kindled against infractions of ritual ordinances. Accidental homicide may go unpunished, and reparation may be made for wilful theft. On the other hand, Nadab and Abihu, who 'offered strange fire before Jahveh, which he had not commanded them,' were swiftly devoured by Jahveh's fire; he who sacrificed anywhere except at the allotted place was to be 'cut off from his people'; so was he who ate blood; and the details of the upholstery of the Tabernacle, of the millinery of the priests' vestments, and of the cabinet work of the ark, can plead direct authority from Jahveh, no less than moral commands.
”
”
Thomas Henry Huxley (The Evolution Of Theology: An Anthropological Study)
“
This continent is littered coast to coast with people who were compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting murals or practicing the fiddle or digging a truck garden, and finally got their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere.
”
”
John Brunner (The Shockwave Rider)
“
In 1970, Women's Lib preached universal sisterhood and resistance to "patriarchy" anywhere and in any form; today, Women's Studies, like contemporary establishment feminism generally, is meekly multicultural, treating non-Western social practices with deference even when they involve the brutal subjection of females.
”
”
Bruce Bawer (The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind)
“
As I have often said later, I was thrown into this little dusty town in Gujarat and into the lives of the dairy farmers of Kaira district by what I consider to be a sheer accident of fate – what turned out to be a strange pre-planned act of destiny. I had always imagined that I was cut out for ‘bigger and better things’ – for a glamorous, fast-paced life in a big city, a job with a prestigious firm and the pleasures of the luxurious lifestyle that go with it. Anand did not figure anywhere in my scheme of things. But I had to honour the contract with the Government of India which had enabled my higher studies in the US and therefore, here I was in Anand, a fish out of water.
”
”
Verghese Kurien (I Too Had a Dream)
“
The Fairy King laughed, a lovely and awful sound. "I am not as cruel a creature as all the stories say, Euphemia. I do not come for girls just because they are beautiful. You were a pretty young child, with your golden hair, but there are many pretty children, safe in their beds, who I cannot touch. I come for the girls who are left out in the cold. They cannot belong anywhere else but with me.
”
”
Ava Reid (A Study in Drowning (A Study in Drowning, #1))
“
It was around the time of the divorce that all traces of decency vanished, and his dream of being the next great Southern writer was replaced by his desire to be the next published writer. So he started writing these novels set in Small Town Georgia about folks with Good American Values who Fall in Love and then contract Life-Threatening Diseases and Die.
I'm serious.
And it totally depresses me, but the ladies eat it up. They love my father's books and they love his cable-knit sweaters and they love his bleachy smile and orangey tan. And they have turned him into a bestseller and a total dick.
Two of his books have been made into movies and three more are in production, which is where his real money comes from. Hollywood. And, somehow, this extra cash and pseudo-prestige have warped his brain into thinking that I should live in France. For a year.Alone.I don't understand why he couldn't send me to Australia or Ireland or anywhere else where English is the native language.The only French word I know is oui, which means "yes," and only recently did I learn it's spelled o-u-i and not w-e-e.
At least the people in my new school speak English.It was founded for pretentious Americans who don't like the company of their own children. I mean, really. Who sends their kid to boarding school? It's so Hogwarts. Only mine doesn't have cute boy wizards or magic candy or flying lessons.
Instead,I'm stuck with ninety-nine other students. There are twenty-five people in my entire senior class, as opposed to the six hundred I had back in Atlanta. And I'm studying the same things I studied at Clairemont High except now I'm registered in beginning French.
Oh,yeah.Beginning French. No doubt with the freshman.I totally rock.
”
”
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
“
God invites us to come directly into His presence by way of His own dear Son. He Himself put it to us so simply when He stated before His death in our stead: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6).
It is upon this beautiful basis that it is possible for people to come freely, gladly, boldly into the supreme presence of our Father as His beloved children. We are
given the joyous privilege to approach Him in childlike confidence anytime, anywhere, without apprehension, all because of the profound provision Christ Himself has made for us to pray in this intimate way.
Added to all of this, His Holy Spirit confirms within us that God is our Father. He assures us that Christ is our Friend, our Intercessor. In our praying, He, God's Spirit, also intercedes on our behalf, making our prayers pleasing and acceptable to God.
”
”
W. Phillip Keller (His Way to Pray: A Devotional Study of Prayer)
“
It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job with Marco Pierre White?
There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating.
It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.
”
”
Karl Wiggins (Self-Publishing In the Eye of the Storm)
“
The Institute had explored the behavior of a great variety of complex systems—corporations in the marketplace, neurons in the human brain, enzyme cascades within a single cell, the group behavior of migratory birds—systems so complex that it had not been possible to study them before the advent of the computer. The research was new, and the findings were surprising. It did not take long before the scientists began to notice that complex systems showed certain common behaviors. They started to think of these behaviors as characteristic of all complex systems. They realized that these behaviors could not be explained by analyzing the components of the systems. The time-honored scientific approach of reductionism—taking the watch apart to see how it worked—didn’t get you anywhere with complex systems, because the interesting behavior seemed to arise from the spontaneous interaction of the components. The behavior wasn’t planned or directed; it just happened. Such behavior was therefore called “self-organizing.
”
”
Michael Crichton (The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2))
“
I learned a valuable lesson that day. And an enduring one, too, because it resonates with me still. Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for. That might mean friends or foster parents, a group or even a charity. What matters far more — so much more than chemistry or ancestry — is that precious bond, that reassurance that they won’t let you down.
”
”
Marina Chapman (The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys)
“
But just in case you don’t want to spend eternity giving yourself high colonics on some sleazy Web site, ogled by millions of men with serious intimacy problems, the other type of work which most people do in Hell is—telemarketing. Yes, this means sitting at a desk, elbow-to-elbow with fellow doomed telemarketing associates who stretch to the horizon in either direction, all of you yakking on headsets. My job is: The dark forces are constantly calculating when it’s dinnertime anywhere on earth, and a computer autodials those phone numbers so I can interrupt everyone’s meal. My goal isn’t actually to sell you anything; I just ask if you have a few seconds to take part in a market research study identifying consumer trends in chewing gum. In mouthwash. In dryer fabric-softener sheets. I get to wear my headset telephone and work from a flowchart of possible responses. Best of all, I get to talk to real-live people—like yourself—who are still living and breathing and have no idea that I’m dead and phoning them from the Afterlife. Trust me, the vast majority of telemarketing people who ring you up, they’re dead. As are pretty much all Internet porn models.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Damned (Damned #1))
“
I’m surprised you didn’t go after him.” And glad.
“I wanted to, but Ari stopped me.”
“Did he sit on you?” I teased. That earned me a smile.
“No. He used logic.”
“Yay for logic.”
“I better go and tell them you’re safe. They’re waiting with the guards.”
“The guards?”
“Yes, I insisted they remain there. It was difficult since Ari and Janco won’t let me go anywhere on my own.”
“That’s good. Stronger together, remember?”
He hesitated for a second, then said, “I need to tell Ari he was right.”
“It could be worse.”
Valek waited.
“It could be Janco who was right.”
“Ah, yes. That would be worse.
”
”
Maria V. Snyder (Night Study (Soulfinders, #2; Study, #5))
“
Do you want to study under the great teachers? Is that it? Well, you can find them anywhere. They live on the shelves of your library; they live on the walls of museums; they live in recordings made decades ago. Your teachers don’t even need to be alive to educate you masterfully. No living writer has ever taught me more about plotting and characterization than Charles Dickens has taught me—and needless to say, I never met with him during office hours to discuss it. All I had to do in order to learn from Dickens was to spend years privately studying his novels like they were holy scripture, and then to practice like the devil on my own.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
“
But what’s worse than that is the slaves who identified with their masters, as if the slaves’ value as human beings depended on what the masters were like. What they were like was evil! They were called “masters” because they owned human beings! And we slaves were ready to fight each other over which of the lowdown filthy dogs who owned us was the best! But it wasn’t the slaves’ fault. Like Douglass wrote, slaves are like other people. When you think about it, it’s a wonder more black folks didn’t fight with one another instead of fighting against the white man the way Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, David Walker, and a whole lot of others did. While you’re busy shaking your head thinking they were stupid, ask yourself this: are we any better today? Black people put on the uniform of the U.S. military, our masters, and go to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and anywhere else Uncle Sam tells us to go, and fight and kill yellow-skinned folks and brown-skinned folks on behalf of the United States, our masters—just like slaves fighting other slaves. Meanwhile, back home, one out of every half-dozen blacks is locked up for committing the same drug crimes as white dudes who walk around free. What’s wrong with that picture? Then you’ve got blacks in police uniforms out there arresting other innocent blacks. Blacks in America really need to study the Jews in Germany. Those Jews never thought they were part of Hitler’s system, most of them never sided with the people oppressing them. We do. We go to war. What kind of abomination is that? How many blacks go to war because we can’t find a job, and are willing to kill or be killed just so we can feed ourselves and our families? But remember, our already-free Maroon ancestors risked all of that just to free others. Getting back to Frederick Douglass, it’s like he said: Slaves are like other people. Too many of us have that slave mentality. It can take a lot to get past that, but a lot of us have, and Frederick Douglass was one.
”
”
Dick Gregory (Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies)
“
Do this and You’ll be Welcome Anywhere Why read this book to find out how to win friends? Why not study the technique of the greatest winner of friends the world has ever known? Who is he? You may meet him tomorrow coming down the street. When you get within ten feet of him, he will begin to wag his tail. If you stop and pat him, he will almost jump out of his skin to show you how much he likes you. And you know that behind this show of affection on his part, there are no ulterior motives: he doesn’t want to sell you any real estate, and he doesn’t want to marry you. Did you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn’t have to work for a living?
”
”
Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People)
“
The most visible effect of global warming in Montana, and perhaps anywhere in the world, is in Glacier National Park. While glaciers all over the world are in retreat—on Mt. Kilimanjaro, in the Andes and Alps, on the mountains of New Guinea, and around Mt. Everest—the phenomenon has been especially well studied in Montana because its glaciers are so accessible to climatologists and tourists. When the area of Glacier National Park was first visited by naturalists in the late 1800s, it contained over 150 glaciers; now, there are only about 35 left, mostly at just a small fraction of their first-reported size. At present rates of melting, Glacier National Park will have no glaciers at all by the year 2030. Such declines in the mountain snowpack are bad for irrigation systems, whose summer water comes from melting of the snow
”
”
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive)
“
I would like to see you cheat,” Elizabeth said impulsively, smiling at him.
His hands stilled, his eyes intent on her face. “I beg your pardon?”
“What I meant,” she hastily explained as he continued to idly shuffle the cards, watching her, “is that night in the card room at Charise’s there was mention of someone being able to deal a card from the bottom of the deck, and I’ve always wondered if you could, if it could…” She trailed off, belatedly realizing she was insulting him and that his narrowed, speculative gaze proved that she’d made it sound as if she believed him to be dishonest at cards. “I beg your pardon,” she said quietly. “That was truly awful of me.”
Ian accepted her apology with a curt nod, and when Alex hastily interjected, “Why don’t we use the chips for a shilling each,” he wordlessly and immediately dealt the cards.
Too embarrassed even to look at him, Elizabeth bit her lip and picked up her hand.
In it there were four kings.
Her gaze flew to Ian, but he was lounging back in his chair, studying his own cards.
She won three shillings and was pleased as could be.
He passed the deck to her, but Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t like to deal. I always drop the cards, which Celton says is very irritating. Would you mind dealing for me?”
“Not at all,” Ian said dispassionately, and Elizabeth realized with a sinking heart that he was still annoyed with her.
“Who is Celton?” Jordan inquired.
“Celton is a groom with whom I play cards,” Elizabeth explained unhappily, picking up her hand.
In it there were four aces.
She knew it then, and laughter and relief trembled on her lips as she lifted her face and stared at her betrothed. There was not a sign, not so much as a hint anywhere on his perfectly composed features that anything unusual had been happening.
Lounging indolently in his chair, he quirked an indifferent brow and said, “Do you want to discard and draw more cards, Elizabeth?”
“Yes,” she replied, swallowing her mirth, “I would like one more ace to go with the ones I have.”
“There are only four,” he explained mildly, and with such convincing blandness that Elizabeth whooped with laughter and dropped her cards. “You are a complete charlatan!” she gasped when she could finally speak, but her face was aglow with admiration.
“Thank you, darling,” he replied tenderly. “I’m happy to know your opinion of me is already improving.”
The laughter froze in Elizabeth’s chest, replaced by warmth that quaked through her from head to foot. Gentlemen did not speak such tender endearments in front of other people, if at all. “I’m a Scot,” he’d whispered huskily to her long ago. “We do.” The Townsendes had launched into swift, laughing conversation after a moment of stunned silence following his words, and it was just as well, because Elizabeth could not tear her gaze from Ian, could not seem to move. And in that endless moment when their gazes held, Elizabeth had an almost overwhelming desire to fling herself into his arms. He saw it, too, and the answering expression in his eyes made her feel she was melting.
“It occurs to me, Ian,” Jordan joked a moment later, gently breaking their spell, “that we are wasting our time with honest pursuits.”
Ian’s gaze shifted reluctantly from Elizabeth’s face, and then he smiled inquisitively at Jordan. “What did you have in mind?” he asked, shoving the deck toward Jordan while Elizabeth put back her unjustly won chips.
“With your skill at dealing whatever hand you want, we could gull half of London. If any of our victims had the temerity to object, Alex could run them through with her rapier, and Elizabeth could shoot him before he hit the ground.”
Ian chuckled. “Not a bad idea. What would your role be?”
“Breaking us out of Newgate!” Elizabeth laughed.
“Exactly.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
And you approve of your future sister-in-law?” Cade asked.
“Sure. Isabelle seems great.” Her sister, on the other hand . . .
Huxley studied him as he slid on his boxer briefs. “What’s the ‘but’?”
“No ‘but,’” Vaughn said. “I like Simon’s fiancée.” And, fortunately for him, she inherited all the good-natured genes in the family.
Cade furrowed his brow. “There it is again—that look. Like you want to say more.”
Vaughn scoffed at that as he pulled on his clothes. “There’s no look.”
Cade pointed. “Huxley just put on his underwear. Not once, in the two years that you two have been partners, have you ever missed an opportunity to smirk at the fact that the man irons his boxer briefs.”
“Hey. They fold neater that way. It saves space in the drawer,” Huxley said.
Cade gave Vaughn a look. I rest my case. “So? What gives?”
Vaughn took in the tenacious expression on his friend’s face and knew that any further denials would only bring on more questions. He sighed. “Fine.” He thought about where to begin. “Isabelle has a sister.”
Huxley rolled his eyes. “Here we go.”
“No, no. Not here we go. She and I are not going anywhere,” Vaughn said emphatically. “The woman’s a . . .” He paused, trying to think of the right word. He caught sight of another agent, Sam Wilkins, passing by their row of lockers. The man was a walking dictionary. “Hey, Wilkins—what’s that word you used the other day, to describe the female witness who kept arguing with you?”
“Termagant,” Wilkins called over. “Means ‘quarrelsome woman.’”
Vaughn nodded at Cade and Huxley in satisfaction, thinking that definition perfectly captured Sidney Sinclair. “There. She’s a termagant.”
“It can also mean ‘vixen,’” Wilkins shouted from the next aisle over.
“Thank you, Merriam-Webster,” Vaughn called back, with a half growl. “I think we’ve got it.”
Cade raised an eyebrow teasingly. “So. Does the vixen have a name?”
Yep, Vaughn had walked right into that one. “Sidney
”
”
Julie James (It Happened One Wedding (FBI/US Attorney, #5))
“
You’re all bloody,” Caldris said, reaching up to touch my chin. He paused, staring down at the mottled, still healing flesh as his skin knitted itself back together and slowly pushed the iron from his body. “Sorry, I don’t see a bath anywhere. Do you?” I asked, scoffing as I looked at him. The male was covered in gore from head to toe, but Gods forbid I be, too. “Did I say I wanted you to wash it off?” he asked, tilting his head to the side as he studied me. “Because that was not my intent, I assure you. I want to fuck you while you’re covered in the blood and death of our enemies who thought they could take you from me.” I swallowed, the intensity of his dark stare making my throat ache with sudden dryness. “That’s not—” “Normal? You are my mate. I could spend an eternity buried inside of you and still want more, Little One. There will never come a day when I do not enjoy watching you bring men to their knees and cut their throats when they underestimate you. You would do well to remember that,
”
”
Harper L. Woods (What Hunts Inside the Shadows (Of Flesh & Bone, #2))
“
Few women desire the kind of “equality” that Engels, Foster, and Zinn offer. Marxists may present monogamy as a capitalist trick for enslaving women, but the fact is that most women desire lifelong, monogamous marriages—which redound to their benefit, compared to any other arrangement in which men can use women and then discard them. Few women in the United States wanted to trade places with women in the Soviet Union or would want to live the life of an Indian woman. American women today have more freedom than women have ever enjoyed anywhere in the globe at any time in world history. And even in early America, women’s rights here were greater than in England, and certainly than in most places in the world.79 Women in colonial America enjoyed the benefits of chivalry and security and respect in the family. Some women were tavern-keepers, merchants, dress-makers, midwives, teachers, writers, and landed proprietors, as the 1924 study Colonial Women of Affairs: A Study of Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776 tells us.
”
”
Mary Grabar (Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America)
“
I wondered what was going on in neuroscience that might bear upon the subject. This quickly led me to neuroscience’s most extraordinary figure, Edward O. Wilson. Wilson’s own life is a good argument for his thesis, which is that among humans, no less than among racehorses, inbred traits will trump upbringing and environment every time. In its bare outlines his childhood biography reads like a case history for the sort of boy who today winds up as the subject of a tabloid headline: DISSED DORK SNIPERS JOCKS. He was born in Alabama to a farmer’s daughter and a railroad engineer’s son who became an accountant and an alcoholic. His parents separated when Wilson was seven years old, and he was sent off to the Gulf Coast Military Academy. A chaotic childhood was to follow. His father worked for the federal Rural Electrification Administration, which kept reassigning him to different locations, from the Deep South to Washington, D.C., and back again, so that in eleven years Wilson attended fourteen different public schools. He grew up shy and introverted and liked the company only of other loners, preferably those who shared his enthusiasm for collecting insects. For years he was a skinny runt, and then for years after that he was a beanpole. But no matter what ectomorphic shape he took and no matter what school he went to, his life had one great center of gravity: He could be stuck anywhere on God’s green earth and he would always be the smartest person in his class. That remained true after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in biology from the University of Alabama and became a doctoral candidate and then a teacher of biology at Harvard for the next half century. He remained the best in his class every inch of the way. Seething Harvard savant after seething Harvard savant, including one Nobel laureate, has seen his reputation eclipsed by this terribly reserved, terribly polite Alabamian, Edward O. Wilson. Wilson’s field within the discipline of biology was zoology; and within zoology, entomology, the study of insects; and within entomology, myrmecology, the study of ants. Year after year he studied
”
”
Tom Wolfe (Hooking Up (Ceramic Transactions Book 104))
“
Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work: like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works)
“
Oh, my son loves Japan!" she says, her voice soaring. "He's been studying Japanese, all by himself, and he went there recently actually for the first time, and he said he just felt immediately at home there, you know really comfortable. I mean with him it's mostly the, the, the-"
My brain silently fills in the next word: anime.
"The animation and so on, you know he's really into technology. I mean he's only seventeen, you know so who knows what is going to happen. But it does seem like, you know, a real thing for him."
"Right," I say, and I nod. "That's great."
Sometimes at times like these, what fills my head is the things I do not and could not ever say. For example: "You have no idea how many stories I've heard exactly like that one!" Or: "You know, even though I'm generally reluctant to admit the existence of 'types' among people, I'm often shocked by the parallels that exist between the kind of young men who like anime and all things Japanese, to the extent that I sometimes struggle to believe that a group of people with such intensely similar interests are in fact individuals." Certainly I do not say: "And what would you like to bet that he ends up marrying a Japanese woman and becomes an academic teaching the world about Japanese culture while she gives up her job to bring up his children?" But even if these things flicker through my mind, I'm not anywhere near as rageful as any of that makes me sound.
In fact, if anything, what I feel in this particular moment is something like envy, for this son of hers that I've never met, I understand that taking refuge in Japan and being shielded from the demands of full adulthood is a privilege offered to predominantly white, educated, Anglophone men, because they are deemed the most desirable that the world has to offer; that it feeds off power relations that date back to the American occupation and beyond, and which hew closely to the colonial paradigm even if there are important differences (and even if Japan also has a history of colonialism of its own to reckon with); and that even leaving all of this aside, this Peter Pan status is not something I am interested in. And yet I can't help but look at the sort of person who feels "immediately" comfortable in Japan and wish that I had felt like that, only because it might validate the way I've dedicated a lot of my life to the country, but because the security of that sensation in itself feels like something I would love to experience.
”
”
Polly Barton (Fifty Sounds)
“
Well, I hate it. Boy, do I hate it,” I said. “But it isn’t just that. It’s everything. I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always—” “Don’t shout, please,” old Sally said. Which was very funny, because I wasn’t even shouting. “Take cars,” I said. I said it in this very quiet voice. “Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they’re always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that’s even newer. I don’t even like old cars. I mean they don’t even interest me. I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake. A horse you can at least—” “I don’t know what you’re even talking about,” old Sally said. “You jump from one—” “You know something?” I said. “You’re probably the only reason I’m in New York right now, or anywhere. If you weren’t around, I’d probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddam place. You’re the only reason I’m around, practically.” “You’re sweet,” she said. But you could tell she wanted me to change the damn subject. “You ought to go to a boys’ school sometime. Try it sometime,” I said. “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together. If you try to have a little intelligent—” “Now, listen,” old Sally said. “Lots of boys get more out of school than that.” “I agree! I agree they do, some of them! But that’s all I get out of it. See? That’s my point. That’s exactly my goddam point,” I said. “I don’t get hardly anything out of anything. I’m in bad shape. I’m in lousy shape.” “You certainly are.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
“
Do you know, I was rather excited about this whole weekend, and now I can't wait to get home. Feed the cats, write school papers. That sort of thing."
Tabitha said nothing. She had no home to return to.
"Don't you want to go home? That's right, though, you said you would be leaving the country."
"Just my parents are leaving. I'm orphanage bound," Tabitha told him, studying the kitchen tiles. "I'm to be a washer girl at Augustus Home."
"A washer girl?" Oliver blinked, incredulous. "You can't mean it."
Tabitha kept her eyes focused on the red squares, observing how they fit neatly together to form a single unit of floor. Her parents had taken away her ability to fit in anywhere. She felt the boiling sensation in her belly again, and she finally recognized it. It wasn't sadness or fear or guilt. It was anger, and it wanted very badly to be released.
"No, I don't believe you." Oliver shook his head. "Nobody is that horrible."
"They are," Tabitha affirmed quietly. "They are horrible, horrible people and even worse parents." She stared at him in wonder, letting a hot rush course through her. "Do you know that's the first time I've said that aloud?" Her heartbeat quickened. "And I think perhaps they deserve my disfavor. They've earned it, the same way I tried for years to earn their love.
”
”
Jessica Lawson (Nooks & Crannies)
“
Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.
”
”
Stefan Zweig (The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig)
“
If a Jewess from the East – her family comes from Cairo, I gather – were to find herself in need of help in Paris, where would she go?’ ‘To her family,’ replied ben-Gideon promptly. ‘I’m not sure she has one in Paris.’ ‘Benjamin, my mother spends eleven and a half hours out of twenty-four going from sister to sister, from aunt to aunt, from the houses of her sisters-in-law and second-cousins to the grandparents of my father’s old business-partners, lugging my sisters along with her, and what do you think they all talk about? Family.’ Ben-Gideon ticked off subjects with his fingers. ‘Who’s marrying whom. Who shouldn’t have married whom and why not. Who’s expecting a child and who isn’t bringing their children up properly. Oh, was she the one who married Avram ben-Hurri ben-Moishe ben-Yakov and is now operating that import business in Prague? . . . No, no, that was the OTHER Cousin Rachel who married Avram ben-Hurri ben-Moishe ben-CHAIM and THEY’RE in Warsaw, where THEIR son is a rabbi . . . Every rabbi from Portugal to Persia will tell you that women’s minds are incapable of the concentration required for study of the Torah, yet I guarantee you that not a single word of this lore is forgotten. You can drop any Jew over the age of seven naked in the dark out of a balloon anywhere in Europe, and he or she will locate family in time for breakfast.
”
”
Barbara Hambly (Ran Away (Benjamin January #11))
“
No surprise, pharmaceutical interests launched their multinational preemptive crusade to restrict and discredit HCQ starting way back in January 2020, months before the WHO declared a pandemic and even longer before President Trump’s controversial March 19 endorsement. On January 13, when rumors of Wuhan flu COVID-19 began to circulate, the French government took the bizarre, inexplicable, unprecedented, and highly suspicious step of reassigning HCQ from an over-the-counter to a prescription medicine. Without citing any studies, French health officials quietly changed the status of HCQ to “List II poisonous substance” and banned its over-the-counter sales. This absolutely remarkable coincidence repeated itself a few weeks later when Canadian health officials did the exact same thing, quietly removing the drug from pharmacy shelves. A physician from Zambia reported to Dr. Harvey Risch that in some villages and cities, organized groups of buyers emptied drugstores of HCQ and then burned the medication in bonfires outside the towns. South Africa destroyed two tons of life-saving hydroxychloroquine in late 2020, supposedly due to violation of an import regulation. The US government in 2021 ordered the destruction of more than a thousand pounds of HCQ, because it was improperly imported. “The Feds are insisting that all of it be destroyed, and not be used to save a single life anywhere in the world,” said a lawyer seeking to resist the senseless order.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
She didn’t know what to do. There was no good answer. She was smart enough to know that. And dumb enough to be in this situation. “Leni?” She heard her mother’s voice, recognized the concerned tone, but it didn’t matter. Leni felt distance spreading between them. That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged. “How was Matthew?” Mama asked. She walked over to Leni, peeled off her parka, hung it up, and led her to the sofa, but neither of them sat down. “He’s not even him,” Leni said. “He can’t think or talk or walk. He didn’t look at me, just screamed.” “He’s not paralyzed, though. That’s good, right?” That was what Leni had thought, too. Before. But what good was being able to move if you couldn’t think or see or talk? It might have been better if he’d died down there. Kinder. But the world was never kind, especially not to kids. “I know you think it’s the end of the world, but you’re young. You’ll fall in love again and … What’s that in your hand?” Leni held out her fist, uncurled her fingers to reveal the thin vial in her hand. Mama took it, studied it. “What is this?” “It’s a pregnancy test,” Leni said. “Blue means positive.” She thought about the chain of choices that had led her here. A ten-degree shift anywhere along the way and everything would be different. “It must have happened the night we ran away. Or before? How do you know a thing like that?” “Oh, Leni,” Mama said. What Leni needed now was Matthew. She needed him to be him, whole. Then they would be in this together. If Matthew were Matthew, they’d get married and have a baby. It was 1978, for God’s sake; maybe they didn’t even have to get married. The point was, they
”
”
Kristin Hannah (The Great Alone)
“
The more that injustice, exploitation, inequality, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and misery prevail in human society, the more Che's stature will grow.
The more that the power of imperialism, hegemonism, domination, and interventionism grow, to the detriment of the most sacred rights of the peoples-especially the weak, backward, and poor peoples who for centuries were colonies of the West and sources of slave labor-the more the values Che defended will be upheld.
The more that abuses, selfishness, and alienation exist; the more that Indians, ethnic minorities, women, and immigrants suffer dis crimination; the more that children are bought and sold for sex or forced into the workforce in their hundreds of millions; the more that ignorance, unsanitary conditions, insecurity, and homelessness prevail-the more Che's deeply humanistic message will stand out.
The more that corrupt, demagogic, and hypocritical politicians exist anywhere, the more Che's example of a pure, revolutionary, and consistent human being will come through.
The more cowards, opportunists, and traitors there are on the face of the earth, the more Che's personal courage and revolutionary integrity will be admired.
The more that others lack the ability to fulfill their duty, the more Che's iron willpower will be admired.
The more that some individuals lack the most basic self-respect, the more Che's sense of honor and dignity will be admired.
The more that skeptics abound, the more Che's faith in man will be admired.
The more pessimists there are, the more Che's optimism will be admired.
The more vacillators there are, the more Che's audacity will be admired.
The more that loafers squander the product of the labor of others, the more Che's austerity, his spirit of study and work, will be admired.
”
”
Fidel Castro
“
I once saw a striking contrast in the use made of material in Florence. I saw first in the Boboli gardens the two wonderful figures of the barbarians-you remember perhaps those antique stone statues. They are made of stone, consist of stone, represent the spirit of stone: you feel that stone has had the word! Then I went to the tombs of the Medici and saw what Michelangelo did to stone; there the stone has been brought to a super-life. It makes gestures which stone never would make; it is hysterical and exaggerated. The difference was amazing. Or go further to a man like Houdon and you see that the stone becomes absolutely acrobatic. There is the same difference between the Norman and Gothic styles. In the Gothic frame of mind stone behaves like a plant, not like a normal stone, while the Norman style is completely suggested by the stone. The stone speaks. Also an antique Egyptian temple is a most marvelous example of what stone can say; the Greek temple already plays tricks with stone, but the Egyptian temple is made of stone. It grows out of stone — the temple of Abu Simbel, for example, is amazing in that respect. Then in those cave temples in India one sees again the thing man brings into stone. He takes it into his hands and makes it jump, fills it with an uncanny sort of life which destroys the peculiar spirit of the stone. And in my opinion it is always to the detriment of art when matter has no say in the game of the artist. The quality of the matter is exceedingly important — it is all-important. For instance, I think it makes a tremendous difference whether one paints with chemical colors or with so-called natural colors. All that fuss medieval painters made about the preparation of their backgrounds or the making and mixing of their colors had a great advantage. No modern artist has ever brought out anything like the colors which those old masters produced. If one studies an old picture, one feels directly that the color speaks, the color has its own life, but with a modern artist it is most questionable whether the color has a life of its own. It is all made by man, made in Germany or anywhere else, and one feels it. So the projection into matter is not only a very important but an indispensable quality of art.
Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 948-949)
”
”
C.G. Jung (Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung)
“
The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. The notion that a vast gulf exists between “criminals” and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about “them.” The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
Then, decades later, in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “hurt, pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster. In a sense, it was Buteyko’s Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater. Counsilman used it to train the U.S. Men’s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history. Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in the 1980s and 1990s argued that it had little to no impact on performance and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers reported, must have been based on a strong placebo effect. In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. Woorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer. Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were the same: a profound boost in performance.* Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone. Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.
”
”
James Nestor (Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art)
“
No, she couldn’t blame this one on him. This one was entirely hers. She’d sent him running away.
Everyone knew it, too, which was nowhere more apparent than in the carriage once they were all settled in and headed off.
Lisette was unusually silent. The duke’s wooden expression said that he wished he could be anywhere else but here. And Tristan was studying her with a cold gaze.
He did that for a mile or so before he spoke. “You’re a cruel woman, Jane Vernon.”
“Tristan!” Lisette chided. “Don’t be rude.”
“I’ll be as rude as I please to her,” he told his sister, with a jerk of his head toward Jane. “That man is mad for her, and she just keeps toying with him.”
Guilt swamped Jane. And she’d thought that spending half a day trapped with Dom would be bad? She must have been dreaming.
“It’s none of our concern,” Lisette murmured.
“The hell it isn’t.” Tristan stared hard at Jane. “Is this about Nancy? About the fact that if she has a child, Dom will lose the title and the estate?”
“No, of course not!” How dared he!
“Tristan, please--” Lisette began.
“That’s why you jilted him years ago, isn’t it?” Tristan persisted. “Because he no longer had any money, and you’d lose your fortune if you married him?”
“I did not jilt him!” Jane shouted.
An unnatural silence fell in the carriage, and she cursed her quick tongue. But really, this was all Dom’s fault for never telling his family the truth. She was tired of being made to look the villainess when she’d done nothing wrong.
“What do you mean?” Lisette asked.
Jane released an exasperated breath. “I mean, I did jilt him. But only because he tricked me into it.” When that brought a smug smile to Tristan’s face, she narrowed her eyes on him. “You knew.”
“Not the details. I just knew something wasn’t right. But since it was clear that neither you nor my idiot brother were going to say anything without being prodded into it, I…er…did a bit of prodding.” He smirked at her. “You do tend to speak your mind when you get angry.”
Jane scowled at him. “You’re just like him, manipulative and arrogant and--”
“I beg to differ,” Tristan said jovially. “He’s just like me. I taught him everything he knows.”
“Yes, indeed,” Lisette said with a snort. “You taught him to be as much an idiot as you.” She glanced from Tristan to Jane. “So, is one of you going to tell me what is going on? About the jilting, I mean?”
Tristan cocked an eyebrow at Jane. “Well?”
She sighed. The cat was out of the bag now. Might as well reveal the rest.
So she related the whole tale, from Dom’s plotting with Nancy at the ball to George’s involvement to how she’d finally discovered the truth.
When she finished, Tristan let out a low whistle. “Hell and thunder. My big brother has a better talent for deception than I realized.”
“Not as good as you’d think,” Jane muttered. “If I hadn’t been so wounded and angry at the time, I would have noticed how…manufactured the whole thing felt.”
Lisette patted her hand. “You were young. We were all more volatile then.” Her voice hardened. “And he hit you just where it hurt, the curst devil. No wonder you want to strangle him half the time. I would have strung him up by his toes if he’d done such a thing to me!
”
”
Sabrina Jeffries (If the Viscount Falls (The Duke's Men, #4))
“
Are you interested in medical marijuana but have no idea what it is? In recent years, there is a growing cry for the legalization of cannabis because of its proven health benefits. Read on as we try to look into the basics of the drug, what it really does to the human body, and how it can benefit you. Keep in mind that medical marijuana is not for everyone, so it’s important that you know how you’re going to be using it before you actually use it.
What is Marijuana?
Most likely, everyone has heard of marijuana and know what it is. However, many people hold misconceptions of marijuana because of inaccurate news and reporting, which has led to the drug being demonized—even when numerous studies have proven the health benefits of medical marijuana when it is used in moderation. (Even though yes, weed is also used as a recreational drug.)
First and foremost, medical marijuana is a plant. The drug that we know of is made of its shredded leaves and flowers of the cannabis sativa or indica plant. Whatever its strain or form, all types of cannabis alter the mind and have some degree of psychoactivity. The plant is made of chemicals, with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) being the most powerful and causing the biggest impact on the brain.
How is Medical Marijuana Used?
There are several ways medical weed is used, depending on the user’s need, convenience and preference. The most common ways are in joint form, and also using bongs and vaporizers. But with its growing legalization, we’re seeing numerous forms of cannabis consumption methods being introduced (like oils, edibles, drinks and many more).
● Joint – Loose marijuana leaves are rolled into a cigarette. Sometimes, it’s mixed with tobacco to cut the intensity of the cannabis.
● Bong – This is a large water pipe that heats weed into smoke, which the user then inhales.
● Vaporizer – Working like small bongs, this is a small gadget that makes it easier to bring and use weed practically anywhere.
What’s Some Common Medical Marijuana Lingo?
We hear numerous terms from people when it comes to describing medical marijuana, and this list continually grows. An example of this is the growing number of marijuana nicknames which include pot, grass, reefer, Mary Jane, dope, skunk, ganja, boom, chronic and herb among many others. Below are some common marijuana terms and what they really mean.
● Bong – Water pipe that allows for weed to be inhaled
● Blunt – Hollowed-out cigar with the tobacco replaced with weed
● Hash – Mix of medical weed and tobacco
● Joint – Rolled cigarette-like way to consume medical cannabis
How Does It Feel to be High?
When consumed in moderation, weed’s common effects include a heightened sense of euphoria and well-being. You’ll most likely talk and laugh more. At its height, the high creates a feeling of pensive dreaminess that wears off and becomes sleepiness. In a group setting, there are commonly feelings of exaggerated physical and emotional sensitivity as well as strong feelings of camaraderie.
Medical marijuana also has a direct impact on a person’s speech patterns, which will get slower. There will be an impairment in your ability to carry out conversations. Cannabis also affects short-term memory. The usual high that one gets from cannabis can last for about two hours; when you overindulge, it can last for up to 12 hours.
Is Using Medical Marijuana Safe?
Medical cannabis is scientifically proven to be safer compared to alcohol or nicotine. Marijuana is slowly being legalized around the world because of its numerous health benefits, particularly among people suffering from mental illness like depression, anxiety and stress. It also has physical benefits, like helping in managing pain and the treatment of glaucoma and cancer.
”
”
Kurt
“
Books can be sources of inspiration for anyone, anywhere. In 2011, I went to Madurai to inaugurate the Paediatric Oncology unit of the Meenakshi Mission Hospital. After the programme, a person who looked very familiar approached me. When he came closer, I realized that he has been my driver when I was working with DRDL in Hyderabad. His name is V. Kathiresan, and he worked with me day and night for nine years. During that time, I had noticed that he was always reading in his spare time, be it a book, magazine or a newspaper. That dedication attracted me. One day, I asked him what made him read so much during his leisure time. He replied that he had a son and daughter and both asked him lots of questions. In order to give them correct answers, he read and studied whenever he got the time. The spirit of learning in him impressed me and I told him to study formally through a distance education course. I also gave him some free time to attend the course and complete his +2 and then to apply for higher education. He took that as a challenge and kept on studying. He did B.A. (History), then M.A. (History) and then he did M.A. (Political Science). He also completed his B.Ed and then M.Ed. Then he registered for his Ph.D in Manonmaniam Sundaranar University and got his Ph.D in 2001. He joined the education department of Tamil Nadu government and served for a number of years. In 2011, when I met him, he was an assistant professor in the Government Arts College at Mellur near Madurai. What extraordinary commitment and dedication had helped him to acquire the right skills in his leisure time and changed the course of his life.
”
”
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
“
Mormonism emerged in the nineteenth century as one of the few religious expressions in American culture with no antecedents anywhere else. It quickly spread to Europe and elsewhere, but the new faith owed little to those churches and confessions that were originally brought to North America from other continents. Yet, like all religious expressions, Mormonism reflected the historical conditions in which it arose and took distinctive shape. Alongside their restorationist hopes, perfectionist aspirations, and millennialist dreams, faithful Mormons embodied social attitudes common to the culture that nurtured them. One of these subsidiary viewpoints was prejudice toward black people, and this volume provides detailed analysis of that attitude over the course of approximately 150 years. Professor Bringhurst provides us with a case study of how cultural influences are often absorbed by religious groups and then become perpetuated as part of the sacred tradition. Using Mormon racial discrimination as a specific example, he shows how an early social attitude can be codified as part of religious behavior itself and then survive long after the demise of conditions that initially generated it. Bringhurst carefully elucidates how early Mormon doctrine correlated ideas of sin, depravity, and dark-skinned peoples. He shows why men saw ordination to the priesthood and women saw marriage to men ordained to the priesthood as crucial elements in the salvation process. Then with
”
”
Newell G. Bringhurst (Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.)
“
That the spectrum is linear couldn’t be further from the truth. To get a more accurate perspective, I met Dr. Judith Gould at the Lorna Wing Centre for Autism. Judith is a chartered consultant clinical psychologist with more than forty years’ experience. She specializes in autism-spectrum disorders and learning disabilities. In the 1970s, with the late Dr. Lorna Wing, Judith came up with the term autism spectrum. Judith believes the key point to understand is that autism is a spectrum not because it is linear but because any factor can be present at any point. She said, “[In our study] we saw the classic autistic aloof person with repetitive rituals and elaborate routines. But we also saw children with aspects of social difficulties, communication difficulties, and imagination difficulties who didn’t fit in with [earlier] precise criteria. “These traits tended to be seen together, but you could have anything on the dimension: anything on the communication dimension, anything on the imagination dimension, and so on. At first we called it the autism continuum. Continuum implied severity from high to low, but that’s not what we meant. The spectrum would look like a rainbow because anything can happen at any point. The colors merge. “In terms of communication, people can come anywhere on the spectrum. There are those who only communicate their needs, and there are those who don’t realize the person they are with may be getting bored when they talk about special interests. Then you’ve got those with a highly intellectual, formal, little-professor communication style.
”
”
Laura James (Odd Girl Out: An Autistic Woman in a Neurotypical World)
“
If we consider just those worlds similar in size to the Earth—let’s say, in a range from half its diameter to about four times its diameter—it is obvious that there must be anywhere from a few billion to a few tens of billions of these planets in the Milky Way. In fact, if we consider only those orbiting their stars at the right distances to allow for moderate surface temperatures and liquid water, some studies suggest a galaxy-wide population of more than 20 billion and even as many as 40 billion.
”
”
Caleb Scharf (The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities)
“
I know the value of details. But where shirts are concerned…” He hesitated. “I’ve made a point of wearing the kind that I sell, so that customers know they have the same quality as the store’s owner.”
“That sounds like a clever sales strategy.”
“It is. I sell more shirts than any other store in London. But it didn’t occur to me that the upper class pays close attention to buttonholes.”
It had chafed his pride, she thought, to realize that he had put himself at a disadvantage when mingling with social superiors.
“I’m sure they shouldn’t,” Helen said apologetically. “There are far more important things for them to worry about.”
His gaze turned quizzical. “You speak as if you’re not one of them.”
She smiled slightly. “I’ve lived away from the world for so much of my life, Mr. Winterborne, that I sometimes wonder who I am, or if I belong anywhere.”
Winterborne studied her. “Trenear plans to take you and your sisters to London when you’ve finished mourning.”
Helen nodded. “I haven’t been to town since I was a child. I remember it as a very large and exciting place.” She paused, vaguely surprised that she was confiding in him. “Now I think I might find it…intimidating.”
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “What happens when you’re intimidated? Run to the nearest corner and hide, do you?”
“I should say not,” she said primly, wondering if she were being teased. “I do what has to be done, no matter what the situation.”
Winterborne’s smile widened until she saw the flash of white teeth against that deep bronze complexion. “I suppose I know that better than most,” he said softly.
Understanding that he was referring to how she had helped him through the fever…and remembering how she had held that black head in the crook of her arm, and bathed his face and neck…Helen felt a blush start. Not the ordinary kind of blush that faded soon after it started. This one kept heating and heating, spreading all through her until she was so uncomfortable that she could scarcely breathe. She made the mistake of glancing into his simmering coffee-black eyes, and she felt positively immolated.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
suggested to the entire workforce that they read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important things I ever read. Inspired in part by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, King’s letter is about seeking justice in a deeply flawed world. I have reread it several times since first encountering it in college. Because I knew that the FBI’s interaction with the civil rights movement, and Dr. King in particular, was a dark chapter in the Bureau’s history, I wanted to do something more. I ordered the creation of a curriculum at the FBI’s Quantico training academy. I wanted all agent and analyst trainees to learn the history of the FBI’s interaction with King, how the legitimate counterintelligence mission against Communist infiltration of our government had morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack on the civil rights leader and others. I wanted them to remember that well-meaning people lost their way. I wanted them to know that the FBI sent King a letter blackmailing him and suggesting he commit suicide. I wanted them to stare at that history, visit the inspiring King Memorial in Washington, D.C., with its long arcs of stone bearing King’s words, and reflect on the FBI’s values and our responsibility to always do better. The FBI Training Division created a curriculum that does just that. All FBI trainees study that painful history and complete the course by visiting the memorial. There, they choose one of Dr. King’s quotations from the wall—maybe “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” or “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”—and then write an essay about the intersection of that quotation and the FBI’s values. The course doesn’t tell the trainees what to think. It only tells them they must think, about history and institutional values. Last I checked, the course remains one of the highest-rated portions of their many weeks at Quantico.
”
”
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
“
You want to test our apples?" Carter asked.
"I want to find out what makes them taste so special so that we can share that with other people, maybe lots of them." Grace saw Carter's perplexed expression. "You ever had a fruit-flavored soft drink?"
"Like an orange soda?"
"Exactly. Well, somebody found the perfect orange somewhere, studied it carefully, and then made a formula based on its special flavor so that anyone anywhere in the world could taste it."
"In a can of soda."
"Right."
"Very cool."
"Do you like peach ice cream?"
"Yes!"
"Well, a lot of the 'all-natural peach flavoring' that you taste in that ice cream is really Gamma-Aldehyde C-14, a molecule created by Nanjing Yuance Trade Company, which I'm sure is based on a perfect peach they found somewhere."
"So you're like a scientist-cook," Carter said excitedly.
"Something like that." Grace smiled.
”
”
Jeffrey Stepakoff (The Orchard)
“
To the Cedar Falls legalists, if God’s word could come that way 10,000 years ago, there was no reason to believe it couldn’t come that way now. So when Vicki decided her family would follow Old Testament law and stop eating unclean meat like pork and oysters (“The Lord says, ‘Don’t eat it’—He knows it’s got trichonomas and isn’t good for your body,” Vicki wrote to a friend), no one in the group thought she’d come about the decision from anywhere but Scripture and His divine will. There would be anywhere from four to ten people at the Weavers’ house, sometimes as often as four nights a week. Randy led the Bible study most of the time, but everyone read chapters and commented on what they might mean. Vicki was clearly the scripturalist and scholar of the group. It was as if she had memorized the whole thing, from Genesis to Revelation, Acts to Zechariah. They read only the King James Version of the Bible, because Vicki said other translations weren’t divinely inspired and were pagan-influenced. By 1981, the Old Testament books were opening up for Randy and Vicki, not as outdated stories, but as the never-ending law of the Maker. He was opening their eyes to what was happening now, in the United States, just as Hal Lindsey had foretold. The forces of evil (the Soviet Union, the U.S. government, Jewish bankers) were ready to strike at any time against American people. From Ezekiel, they read: “Son of man [Christian Americans], set thy face against Gog [the grand conspiracy] … “Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company [their Bible study group] that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them. After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword [somewhere in the American West], and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains [the Rockies] of Israel [the United States], which have been always waste [the desolate mountains of Montana? Colorado?
”
”
Jess Walter (Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family)
“
The fatality study wasn’t an intellectual exercise. It was intended to be a wake-up call for the nation. Tornadoes are dangerous and deadly, and they can happen anywhere. And tornado fatalities are likely to be higher outside Tornado Alley. In the twister-prone states, people are better educated about storms and shelters.
”
”
Nancy Mathis (Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado)
“
We couldn’t stop following the news. Every ten seconds we refreshed our browsers and gawked at the headlines. Dully we read blogs of friends of friends of friends who had started an organic farm out on the Wichita River. They were out there pickling and canning and brewing things in the goodness of nature. And soon we’d worry it was time for us to leave the city and go. Go! To Uruguay or Morocco or Connecticut? To the Plains or the Mountains or the Bay? But we’d bide our time and after some months or years, our farmer friends would give up the farm and begin studying for the LSATs. We felt lousy about this, and wonderful.
We missed getting mail. We wondered why we even kept those tiny keys on our crowded rings. Sometimes we would send ourselves things from the office. Sometimes we would handwrite long letters to old loved ones and not send them. We never knew their new address. We never knew anyone’s address, just their cross streets and what their doors looked like. Which button to buzz, and if the buzzers even worked. How many flights to climb, and which way to turn off the stairs. Sometimes we missed those who hadn’t come to the city with us— or those who had gone to other, different cities. Sometimes we journeyed to see them, and sometimes they ventured to see us. Those were the best of times, for we were all at home and not at once. Those were the worst of times, for we inevitably longed to all move here or there, yet no one ever came— somehow everyone only left. Soon we were practically all alone.
Soon we began to hate the forever cramping of our lives. Sleeping on top of strangers and sipping coffee with people we knew we knew but couldn’t remember where from. Living out of boxes we had no space to unpack. Soon we named the pigeons roosting in our windowsills; we worried they looked mangier than the week before. We heard bellowing in the apartments below us and bedsprings creaking in the ones above. Everywhere we saw people with dogs and wodnered how they managed it. Did they work form home?Did they not work? Had they gone to the right schools? Did they have connections? We had no connections. Our parents were our guarantors in name only; they called us from their jobs in distant, colorless, suburban office parks and told us we could come home anytime, and this terrified us always.
But then came those nights, creeping up on us while we worked busily in dark offices, like submariners lost at sea, sailing through the dark stratosphere in our cement towers. We’d call each other to report: a good thing happened, a compliment had been paid, a favor had been appreciated, an inch of ground had been gained. We wouldn’t trade those nights for anything or anywhere. Those nights, we remembered why we came to the city. Because if we were really living, then we wanted to hear the cracking in our throats and feel the trembling in our extremities. And if our apartments were coffins and our desks headstones and our dreams infections— if we were all slowly dying — then at least we were going about that great and terrible business together.
”
”
Kristopher Jansma (Why We Came to the City)
“
Scott Eastman told me that he “never completely fit in one world.” He grew up in Oregon and competed in math and science contests, but in college he studied English literature and fine arts. He has been a bicycle mechanic, a housepainter, founder of a housepainting company, manager of a multimillion-dollar trust, a photographer, a photography teacher, a lecturer at a Romanian university—in subjects ranging from cultural anthropology to civil rights—and, most unusually, chief adviser to the mayor of Avrig, a small town in the middle of Romania. In that role, he did everything from helping integrate new technologies into the local economy to dealing with the press and participating in negotiations with Chinese business leaders. Eastman narrates his life like a book of fables; each experience comes with a lesson. “I think that housepainting was probably one of the greatest helps,” he told me. It afforded him the chance to interact with a diverse palette of colleagues and clients, from refugees seeking asylum to Silicon Valley billionaires whom he would chat with if he had a long project working on their homes. He described it as fertile ground for collecting perspectives. But housepainting is probably not a singular education for geopolitical prediction. Eastman, like his teammates, is constantly collecting perspectives anywhere he can, always adding to his intellectual range, so any ground is fertile for him.
”
”
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
Ganapathy gets Perfection in Carol of the Bells by Karolina Protsenko, all karolina protsenko and barvina songs I love But Carol of the Bells by karolina protsenko is perfect for me, I am not suitable for anywhere in India or any Indian girls, Yes I do drink alcohol but not in india any more, All Indian songs are Karmic path, all karma ends in carol of the bells by Karolina protsenko, Tom I am leaving to TN and after that I am leaving to abroad for research studies, India no where is suitable for my character and no Indian girls are suitable for me(No means NO). The End.
”
”
Ganapathy K
“
Don’t go anywhere for the first time. Study maps, do in-depth recon online, send scouts, or, best of all, go with someone who’d gone before.
”
”
Marc Cameron (Cold Snap (Arliss Cutter, #4))
“
Over the last few decades there have been some fascinating studies that revealed that people who get a physical reaction from music might have structural differences in their brain. Some people have a physical response while others will just hear the songs, enjoy it, but it doesn’t transport them anywhere. Brain scans have shown that the people who get a more palpable response have a higher volume of fibres that connect their auditory cortex to the areas associated with emotional processing, which means the two areas communicate better. They also tend to have a higher prefrontal cortex, which is involved in certain areas of understanding, like interpreting the world more metaphorically, and that obviously helps them develop not just a natural gift interpreting music, but also creating it.
”
”
Pete Trainor (Electrasy: Calling All The Dreamers)
“
A study at the University of Virginia with over 700 participants placed people alone in a room, where they were asked to sit and do nothing for anywhere from 6 to 15 minutes. They were given a button and told they could press the button like a “safe word,” but if they did press it, then it would deliver a painful electric shock. Let me reiterate: SIX to FIFTEEN fucking minutes of being alone, which is about 2-5 typical rock songs, a couple of YouTube videos, or the time it takes to make and eat a bowl of cereal. Still, 67% of the men in the study and 25% of the women pressed the fucking button, thereby choosing to experience searing physical pain rather than sit and do nothing, which is literally the simplest thing in the world any of us can do while conscious. This study is far from unique, as an increasing number of studies show that the majority of today’s humans would rather experience pain than boredom,
”
”
Josh Misner (Put the F**king Phone Down: Life. Can't Wait.)
“
Together these constitute a huge body of works and the fact that they were transmitted orally for many centuries is unique and unparalleled anywhere else in the world. A lifetime would be required to study these alone. These works are the wellspring from which Indian culture is derived. Vedic cosmogony explains why India has tolerated all forms of worship has given birth to four religions, has provided succour to refugees of two other religions, and has naively invited and accepted expansionist cults that threaten its core philosophy.
”
”
Shiv Sastry (Aryan Invasion: Myth or Fact?: Uncovering the evidence)
“
We intuitively know that the heart is the center of love and empathy, and studies are showing this to be true. In fact, empathy manifests in the electromagnetic field (EMF), which is generated by the heart in amounts greater than anywhere else in the body. The heart’s EMF emits fifty thousand femtoteslas (a measure of EMF), in contrast to the ten generated by the brain.37 Other research shows that when separated from the magnetic field, the heart’s electrical field is sixty times greater in amplitude than the brain’s field.38 Through this field, a person’s nervous system tunes in to and responds to the magnetic fields produced by the hearts of other people.39 The heart’s field is therefore one of the means by which a practitioner affects patients. This effect leads to the question, What do you want to share? To generate positive outcomes for a patient, a practitioner must hold positive feelings in his or her own heart. Not only does good will profit the client, but it also benefits the practitioner as a person. A set of studies by researcher Dr. Rollin McCraty of the HeartMath Institute in California, and described in his e-book, The Energetic Heart, helps explain the importance of positive energy.40 For decades, scientists have known that information is encoded in the nervous system in the time intervals between activities or in the pattern of electrical activity. Recent studies also reveal that information is captured in hormone pulses. Moreover, there is a hormone pulse that coincides with heart rhythms, which means that information is also shared in the interbeat intervals of the pressure and electromagnetic waves produced by the heart. Negative emotions such as anger, frustration, or anxiety disturb the heart rhythm. Positive emotions such as appreciation, love, or compassion produce coherent or functional patterns. Feelings, distributed throughout the body, produce chemical changes within the entire system. Do you want to be a healthy person? Be sincerely positive as often as you can. You thus “increase the probability of maintaining coherence and reducing stress, even during challenging situations.”41 What you as a practitioner believe will be shared—everywhere and with everyone you meet.
”
”
Cyndi Dale (The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy)
“
As the study of plant communication evolves, new information is coming to light seemingly anywhere a researcher decides to look. Colleen Nell, a scientist at the University of California–Irvine, recently discovered that among the blooming desert shrubs commonly called “mule fat,” female plants will listen to the cues sent by both male and female plants, but male plants will only listen to male plants. In other cases, plants appear to prefer to get their intel from family; one of Karban’s studies found that sagebrush plants will listen to their genetic kin, but not genetic strangers.
”
”
Zoë Schlanger (The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth)
“
learn how to obtain a particular skill set, but studying their stories also equips you with great lessons you can’t find anywhere else. Autobiographies
”
”
Vu Tran (Effortless Reading: The Simple Way to Read and Guarantee Remarkable Results)
“
This may be at once the curse and the blessing of the modern age, that the ready availability of printed books—and now, electronic versions easily downloadable from virtually anywhere on earth—has enabled teachings to be preserved and passed down, passed around, and disseminated to anyone with even a glimmer of interest. It's a curse, because this ready availability cheapens the teaching by making it that much easier to obtain without all the psychological preparation of periods of intense study, fasting, purification, and other conditioning techniques. The effect of this is noticeable on social media and websites in which serious studies of various forms of esoteric tradition are airily dismissed by casual readers who have difficulty understanding their specialized terminology due to a lack of years of preparatory instruction or even a basic classical education, but still feel competent enough to pass judgment. Yet books are what we have in lieu of the secret society, the midnight initiations, the training by an experienced guru. Books also have preserved essential information from being lost due to persecution by enemies or opponents, or to execution or death by natural causes of lineage holders in sacred traditions (the Chinese invasion of Tibet comes to mind, and the decimation of various sects in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Taliban, the Islamic State, and others beginning with the oppression of the Kurds under Saddam Hussein). A deeper question than we can address adequately in this place is what happens to a tradition if its human teachers are all dead, unable to pass on the oral instruction or the psycho-spiritual techniques of initiation?
”
”
Peter Levenda (The Tantric Alchemist: Thomas Vaughan and the Indian Tantric Tradition)
“
Are you all right?” he asked, pushing away from the wall and coming towards her.
“I’m fine.”
Lucien frowned and cupped her chin in one hand, turning her to face him.
“I can always tell when you lie,” he said, as if the knowledge of this surprised him.
“Yes. I hate that.” She needed to get away from him. She needed room to breathe.
He dogged her steps as she left and picked a room at random to try and hide from him. She shut the door and slid the lock into place, relaxing when he tried the knob and couldn’t get inside. Leaning back against the door, she listened to him walk away. Her heartbeat slowed in her chest.
Suddenly one of the study bookshelves swung open. Lucien emerged and eased the bookshelf back into its place, grinning. Horatia gaped. Rochester Hall had secret passageways? How had she not known about them? She truly ought to have been nosier as a child.
“Why do you hate that I can read you so easily?” he asked.
Horatia studied the room with a slight frown. This was Lucien’s study. His scent filled the air and a messy pile of letters littered his large desk. She couldn’t have picked a worse room to try and escape from him. He was everywhere. And she would not be able to hide from him anywhere on the estate. There were likely passageways all through the house connecting all the rooms.
“Lucien, could you please just leave me alone? You’ve made your peace with me, and I with you. Can we not leave it at that?” She turned her back to him but he chuckled, coming closer.
“My dear Horatia, I fear you and I are England and France. We quarrel and battle and therein lies the pleasure of our relationship.”
-Lucien & Horatia
”
”
Lauren Smith (His Wicked Seduction (The League of Rogues, #2))
“
In this matter Paul also is a pattern for us. We should learn from his example not to go anywhere or to take any action in a light way. On the contrary, we must be restricted by the Spirit in our spirit. Whenever we go to a certain place, we should move according to revelation.
”
”
Witness Lee (Life-Study of Galatians (Life-Study of the Bible))