“
I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (Fire: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937)
“
You rented the apartment with a dead guy in the corner?” I shrugged. “I wanted the apartment, and I figured I could cover him up with a bookcase or something.
”
”
Darynda Jones (First Grave on the Right (Charley Davidson, #1))
“
It touched me so deeply that my soul felt as if it were being torn open, rent apart by this storm of feelings.
”
”
Kailin Gow (Forever Frost (Frost, #2))
“
In these dangerous times, where it seems that the world is ripping apart at the seams, we all can learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day and [we] should reach out to each other and bond as a community, rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium.
”
”
Jonathan Larson (Rent)
“
Taxis are expensive for moderately employed dwarfs who rent extra apartments, swim at private clubs, and fancy themselves as righteous assassins.
”
”
Katherine Dunn (Geek Love)
“
Life does not belong to you. It is the apartment you rent. Love without fear, for love is an airplane that carries you to new lands. There is a universe in silence. A tunnel to peace in a scream. Get a good night's sleep. Laugh when you can. You are more magical than you know. Take your advice from the elderly and children. None of it as crucial as you think, but that makes it no less vital. Our lives go on, and on. Look for the breadcrumbs.
”
”
Marisha Pessl (Neverworld Wake)
“
I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely.
”
”
Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman)
“
In no state today does a full-time job paying minimum wage allow a family to afford a one- or two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.
”
”
Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
“
I was so happy renting in New York City for so long because renting—or at least the way I rented, which involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings—allows you to let things literally fall apart all around you. Then, when it gets to be too much, you just move on.
”
”
Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts)
“
Whenever you give up an apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a vistor, the city seems to turn against you. It's much more expensive (because you need to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, your experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the down. You've turned your back from only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you rad that Manhattan rents are going up, they're climbing higher, they're reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again.
”
”
Nora Ephron (I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman)
“
And it shall come to pass that what man made shall be shattered, and the Shadow shall lie across the Pattern of Age, and the Dark One shall once more lay his hand upon the world of man. Women shall weep and men quail as the nations of the earth are rent like rotting cloth. Neither shall anything stand nor abide...
Yet one shall be born to face the Shadow, born once more as he was born before and shall be born again, time without end. The Dragon shall be Reborn, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth at his rebirth. In sackcloth and ashes shall he clothe the people, and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind. Like the unfettered dawn shall he blind us, and burns us, yet shall the Dragon Reborn confront the Shadow at the Last battle, and his blood shall give us the Light. Let tears flow, O ye people of the world. Weep for your salvation.
-from The Karaethon Cycle: The Prophecies of the Dragon, as translated by Ellaine Marise'idin Alshinn, Chief Librarian at the Court of Arafel, in the Year of Grace 231 of the New Era, the Third Age
”
”
Robert Jordan (The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time, #2))
“
Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.
”
”
Halle Butler (The New Me)
“
The only dream I ever had was the dream of New York itself, and for me, from the minute I touched down in this city, that was enough. It became the best teacher I ever had. If your mother is anything like mine, after all, there are a lot of important things she probably didn't teach you: how to use a vibrator; how to go to a loan shark and pull a loan at 17 percent that's due in thirty days; how to hire your first divorce attorney; what to look for in a doula (a birth coach) should you find yourself alone and pregnant. My mother never taught me how to date three people at the same time or how to interview a nanny or what to wear in an ashram in India or how to meditate. She also failed to mention crotchless underwear, how to make my first down payment on an apartment, the benefits of renting verses owning, and the difference between a slant-6 engine and a V-8 (in case I wanted to get a muscle car), not to mention how to employ a team of people to help me with my life, from trainers to hair colorists to nutritionists to shrinks. (Luckily, New York became one of many other moms I am to have in my lifetime.) So many mothers say they want their daughters to be independent, but what they really hope is that they'll find a well-compensated banker or lawyer and settle down between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-eight in Greenwich, Darien, or That Town, USA, to raise babies, do the grocery shopping, and work out in relative comfort for the rest of their lives. I know this because I employ their daughters. They raise us to think they want us to have careers, and they send us to college, but even they don't really believe women can be autonomous and take care of themselves.
”
”
Kelly Cutrone (If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You)
“
THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ITINERANTS, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like: Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute? For many the answer seemed radical at first. You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick-and-brick domicile for life on wheels?
”
”
Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
“
It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life's passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.
”
”
Michelle Tea (Black Wave)
“
She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Wilderness Tips)
“
I think it's a worthy undertaking--to provide a decent apartment for a man who earns fifteen dollars a week. But not at the expense of other men. Not if it raises the taxes, raises all the other rents and makes the man who earns forty live in a rat hole.
”
”
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
“
I wonder if my father, given the chance, would have wished to go back to the time before he made all that money, when he just had one store and we rented a tiny apartment in Queens. He worked hard and had worries but he had a joy then that he never seemed to regain once the money started coming in. He might turn on the radio and dance cheek to cheek with my mother. He worked on his car himself, a used green Impala with carburetor trouble. They had lots of Korean friends that they met in church and then even in the street, and when they talked in public there was a shared sense of how lucky they were, to be in America but still have countrymen near.
”
”
Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker)
“
It’s amazing to think where adventure can lead when you trust your crazy ideas, when you’re bold enough to look at only what lies ahead of you. I don’t want the normal life. I don’t want to go to college because it’s the next practical step, just to join the pack, just to follow a leader. I don’t want to sit inside a room under fluorescent lights and study and read and memorize other people’s ideas about the world. I want to form my own ideas. I want to experience the world with my own eyes.
I’m not going to follow my old friends to avoid the effort of making new ones. I don’t want to settle for any job just to get a paycheck, just to pay rent, just to need furniture and cable and more bills and be tied down with routine and monotony. I don’t want to own things because they’ll eventually start to own me.
Most importantly, I don’t want to be told who I am or who I should be. I want to find myself—the bits and pieces that are scattered in places and in people waiting to meet me. If I fall down, I’ll learn how to pick myself up again. You need to fall apart once in a while before you understand how you best fit together.
”
”
Katie Kacvinsky (Second Chance (First Comes Love, #2))
“
He had learned Lesson One: Let French women tell you what they want.
”
”
Peggy Kopman-Owens (PARIS, Apartment for Rent)
“
The cost to rent an apartment in some major cities can climb to more than $4,000 per month, and we don’t seem to blink. The price of gas rises 15 cents, and it can swing a national election.
”
”
Dan Ariely (Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter)
“
Probably, Adam had made the connection between his rent change and the tuition raise. It wasn’t a complicated assumption, and he was clever. It was easy, too, to hang it on Gansey. If Adam had been thinking straight, though, he would’ve considered how it was Ronan who had infinite connections to St. Agnes. And how whoever was behind the rent change would have had to enter a church office with both a wad of cash and a burning intention to persuade a church lady to lie about a fake tax assessment. Taken apart that way, it seemed to have Ronan written all over it. But one of the marvelous things about being Ronan Lynch was that no one ever expected him to do anything nice for anyone.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2))
“
Wages and housing costs have diverged so dramatically that, for a growing number of Americans, the dream of a middle-class life has gone from difficult to impossible. As I write this, there are only a dozen counties and one metro area in America where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. You’d have to make at least $16.35 an hour—more than twice the federal minimum wage—to rent such an apartment without spending more than the recommended 30 percent of income on housing. The consequences are dire, especially for the one in six American households that have been putting more than half of what they make into shelter. For many low-income families, that means little or nothing left over to buy food, medication, and other essentials.
”
”
Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
“
I want to make it clear that as I move up in the world, my triumph comes not from being able to afford rent on an apartment with a dishwasher, but in being able to give back to the women who need it most.
”
”
Jessica Knoll (The Favorite Sister)
“
My kink is the annihilation of my core sense of self. On Tinder, I swipe right on post-structuralists and no one else. I’m looking for someone with whom to rent an apartment at the intersection of fissured systems of meaning. Queer as in my attraction to you is an attraction to concepts for which you are a practical substitute.
”
”
Billy-Ray Belcourt (A History of My Brief Body)
“
We’ve all encountered those people who out of the corner of our eye, from across the street, at magic hour appear astoundingly attractive, even god or goddess like: the way they move, the way the light hits them, invokes reverence and all, the impression. And then we got a closer look. Damn it. Let down. Good from afar, but far from good. Some people will never be more attractive than in that first impression, from a distance, in that light, at that time, in that way we saw them, when our hopes became highest and our wish fulfillment was fully let it. They will never look better than in that initial fuzzy edge clingups, impressions. The white shot. Some relationships are better in a white shot. More impressive in the impressions. Like in-laws, best to only see an hour a day, like neighbors, its while we have walls and fences, like that long distance romance that fell apart when you moved in together, like that summer fling that only lasted through August, that friend that became a lover that you now miss as a friend, like ourselves when we are a fraud. They are better from a distance, with less frequency, with less intimacy. Sometimes we need more space, it’s romance, it’s imagination. Distance is the flirt in a wing, it is frivolous, its mysterious, a fantasy, a constant honeymoon because we can’t quite see it, we aren’t quite sure about it, we don’t quite know it. It’s a fuck, it’s detachment, it’s separate, it’s public, it’s carefree, it’s painless, it’s for rent. And we like it that way, because sometimes it is better with the lights dimmed.
”
”
Matthew McConaughey (Greenlights)
“
Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehorses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
violently back and forth? The truth was she couldn’t remember a time . . . but she was dismally afraid she would before much longer. “He rented the ground-floor apartment before me. We saw each other, me coming and him going, over a space of a few days. He moved down to Roward Lane. Do you know it?
”
”
Stephen King (It)
“
As one takes leave of a friend, a place, How the loss of all one has loved rises up, And regret for what one has destroyed… Ah, now I know all the agony of living, So this is what it means to be mortal— — — One misses even what one has not valued, One regrets even misdeeds never done… One yearns to go, and yet one longs to stay… So the heart’s two halves are rent asunder, As if wild horses were pulling it apart, torn to pieces By contradiction, indecision, disharmony… —
”
”
August Strindberg (Miss Julie and Other Plays)
“
The end result was that people stopped investing in apartment buildings, and a huge shortage in rentals and housing forced many Egyptians to live in horrible conditions with several families sharing one small apartment. The effects of the harsh rent control is still felt today in Egypt. Mistakes like that can last for generations.2
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Economic Facts and Fallacies)
“
Bit by bit, he has pared down his desires to what is now approaching a bare minimum. He has cut out smoking and drinking, he no longer eats in restaurants, he does not own a television, a radio, or a computer. He would like to trade his car in for a bicycle, but he can’t get rid of the car, since the distances he must travel for work are too great. The same applies to the cell phone he carries around in his pocket, which he would dearly love to toss in the garbage, but he needs it for work as well and therefore can’t do without it. The digital camera was an indulgence, perhaps, but given the drear and slog of the endless trash-out rut, he feels it is saving his life. His rent is low, since he lives in a small apartment in a poor neighborhood, and beyond spending money on bedrock necessities, the only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.
”
”
Paul Auster
“
spreading apart my soft cheeks to find that tight little hole.
”
”
Austin Dixon (Rent Boy)
“
You rented an apartment with its own escape route?” “I did,” Z says. “It’s not so paranoid when you use it to do just that.
”
”
Nathan Englander (Dinner at the Center of the Earth)
“
All I wanted from life was a normal job, enough for food and rent, and a couple of normal friends. I was happy in my hovel of an apartment.
”
”
C.N. Crawford (Infernal Magic (Shadows & Flame, #1))
“
I packed up the office files, then swung by the apartment to pay up my rent and let the sour-faced old bat who collected it know I was moving out. She didn’t seem heartbroken.
”
”
Bobby Underwood (Nightside (Nostalgia Crime, #3))
“
You are seeing too many signs "Shop for rent"? Turn around you. You will be surprised how many of the people you know have a sign in their eyes : "Life for rent
”
”
Ljupka Cvetanova (The New Land)
“
Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was out in the open. Their lives were dirty and squalid, but they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Here, things seemed so normal, so perfect, but it was all a deception.
”
”
Jennifer McMahon (Don't Breathe a Word)
“
At Abraham's burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of a century earlier. The text reports their union nearly without comment. "His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, in the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites."
But the meaning of this moment cannot be diminished. Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, scions, warriors, adversaries, children, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. They are brothers. They are mourners.
In a sense they are us, forever weeping for the loss of our common father, shuffling through our bitter memories, reclaiming our childlike expectations, laughing, sobbing, furious and full of dreams, wondering about our orphaned future, and demanding the answers we all crave to hear: What did you want from me, Father? What did you leave me with, Father?
And what do I do now?
”
”
Bruce Feiler (Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths)
“
Sometimes I'm ashamed of how I've clung to them with bloody, torn-apart hands, trying to make it work even after they show me again and again it's not worth it. But I'm somehow also ashamed of choosing myself now.
”
”
Gloria Chao (Rent a Boyfriend)
“
From then on, my computer monitored my vital signs and kept track of exactly how many calories I burned during the course of each day. If I didn’t meet my daily exercise requirements, the system prevented me from logging into my OASIS account. This meant that I couldn’t go to work, continue my quest, or, in effect, live my life. Once the lockout was engaged, you couldn’t disable it for two months. And the software was bound to my OASIS account, so I couldn’t just buy a new computer or go rent a booth in some public OASIS café. If I wanted to log in, I had no choice but to exercise first. This proved to be the only motivation I needed. The lockout software also monitored my dietary intake. Each day I was allowed to select meals from a preset menu of healthy, low-calorie foods. The software would order the food for me online and it would be delivered to my door. Since I never left my apartment, it was easy for the program to keep track of everything I ate. If I ordered additional food on my own, it would increase the amount of exercise I had to do each day, to offset my additional calorie intake. This was some sadistic software. But it worked. The pounds began to melt off, and after a few months, I was in near-perfect health. For the first time in my life I had a flat stomach, and muscles. I also had twice the energy, and I got sick a lot less frequently. When the two months ended and I was finally given the option to disable the fitness lockout, I decided to keep it in place. Now, exercising was a part of my daily ritual.
”
”
Ernest Cline (Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1))
“
Therefore the Way that is sagely within and kingly without has fallen into darkness and is no longer clearly perceived, has become shrouded and no longer shines forth. The men of the world all follow their own desires and make these their “doctrine.” How sad!—the hundred schools going on and on instead of turning back, fated never to join again. The scholars of later ages have unfortunately never perceived the purity of Heaven and earth, the great body of the ancients, and “the art of the Way” in time comes to be rent and torn apart by the world.
”
”
Zhuangzi
“
The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
Time can lessen the hurt; the empty place we have can seem smaller as other things and experiences fill our life; we can forget for periods and feel as if our loved one didn't die; we can find sense in the death and understand that perhaps this death does fit into a bigger design in the world; we can learn to remember the good and hold on to that.
But we cannot 'get over it,' because to get over it would mean we were not changed by the experience. It would mean we did not grow by the experience. It would mean that our loved one's death made no difference in our life.
There is an interesting discussion in the Talmud, an ancient Jewish writing. Those Jews had the custom of rending their garments - literally tearing their clothes —to symbolize the ripping apart that death brings. But the question was raised, after the period of mourning, could you sew the garment up and use it again? The teachers answered yes, but when you mended it, you should not tuck the edges under so it would look as if it had never been torn. This symbolized the fact that life after grief is not the same as before. The rent will show.
”
”
Deborah Spungen (And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder)
“
We pass the apartment we rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads of tourists clog the city as if it's a Renaissance theme park. Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garbage strike persisted for over a week and I began to have thoughts of plague when I passed heaps of rot spilling out of bins. I was amazed that long July when waiters and shopkeepers remained as nice as they did, given what they had to put up with. Everywhere I stepped I was in the way. Humanity seemed ugly—the international young in torn T-shirts and backpacks lounging on steps, bewildered bus tourists dropping ice cream napkins in the street and asking, “How much is that in dollars?” Germans in too-short shorts letting their children terrorize restaurants. The English mother and daughter ordering lasagne verdi and Coke, then complaining because the spinach pasta was green. My own reflection in the window, carrying home all my shoe purchases, the sundress not so flattering. Bad wonderland. Henry James in Florence referred to “one's detested fellow-pilgrim.” Yes, indeed, and it's definitely time to leave when one's own reflection is included. Sad that our century has added no glory to Florence—only mobs and lead hanging in the air.
”
”
Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun)
“
My parents first rented a tiny apartment on Chapel Street with their black standard poodle, Turbo. When I arrived, they had to move out because the landlord allowed dogs but not babies. They found a place on Edwards Street, where the owner allowed babies but not dogs. Fortunately, I made the cut and Turbo went to live at Grove Lane.
”
”
George W. Bush (41: A Portrait of My Father)
“
The passenger liner Ossifar Distana was one of the most luxurious of its kind in space anywhere. It ferried the cream of society across the void in opulence and style. Only the wealthiest could afford an apartment on this ship for a trip of any duration, even a short one around the proverbial block. Even the crew was obliged to pay rent.
”
”
Christina Engela (Dead Man's Hammer)
“
The farmers, who rent out their house so they can stay afloat, and sleep all together in a studio, but spend their days off outside on a picnic blanket, living the lives they want to live. Drew and Melanie, with their two homes and their horses and their love story. And Rene, traveling across the world, painting temporary masterpieces. Even my uncle Pete has something good worked out with Melinda and his day trips and his best friend, my dad, who has a small nice house in San Francisco and a dozen neighborhood vendors who know him by name.
All of these different ways of living. Even Sophie, with her baby in that apartment, with her record store job and her record collection. I imagine her twirling with her baby across her red carpet with Diana Ross crooning, the baby laughing, the two of them getting older in that apartment, eating meals on red vinyl chairs. Walt, too, as pathetic as his situation is, seems happy in his basement, providing entertainment to Fort Bragg's inner circle. All of them, in their own ways, manage to make their lives work.
”
”
Nina LaCour (The Disenchantments)
“
Ultimately, the salon, Steffens noted, helped change the public perception of Greenwich Village, although hardly in the manner Dodge had hoped. What had been a neighborhood better known for cheap rents and no shortage of decrepit apartments was becoming almost chic, a kind of Latin Quarter in Manhattan. Small theaters and art galleries sprang up, and midtown shoppers and tourists took the time to cruise through the Village for a look at the new trendsetters. Steffens did not recall it as being exceptionally fashionable back in 1911, judging his own lifestyle to be “Bohemian, but not the fake sort.” If it was not fake, it was hardly genuine, either. Steffens was not about to starve in Greenwich Village.
”
”
Peter Hartshorn (I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens)
“
I picked through buckets of cut flowers, longing for the days when I could afford a bundle of daisies for the kitchen, calla lilies for the nightstand in the bedroom. Of course, that had been back when Jacques and I were sharing an apartment. When you were renting in New York by yourself, there wasn’t much money for things that smelled good for a week, then died in front of you.
”
”
Emily Henry (Beach Read)
“
Far from being a national crisis of affordable housing, outrageous rents and astronomical home prices are largely confined to a relatively few places along the east and west coasts. Rent per square foot of apartment space in San Francisco is more than double what it is in Denver, Dallas, or Kansas City, and nearly three times as high as in Memphis. Home prices show even greater disparities.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays)
“
And yet that performance has a method. Trump's artlessness, like Mark Antony's, is only apparent. Listen, for example, as he performs one of his favorite riffs. He begins by saying something critical of Mexicans and Chinese. Then he turns around and says, 'I love the Mexican and Chinese people, especially the rich ones who buy my apartments or stay at my hotels or play on my golf courses.' It's their leaders I criticize, he explains, but then in a millisecond he pulls the sting from the criticism: 'they are smarter and stronger than our leaders; they're beating us.' And then the payoff all this has been leading up to, the making explicit of what has been implied all along. 'If I can sell them condominiums, rent space to them in my building at my price, and outfox them in deals, I could certainly outmaneuver them when it came to trade negotiations and immigration.' (And besides, they love me.)
Here is the real message, the message that makes sense of the disparate pieces of what looks like mere disjointed fumbling: I am Donald Trump; nobody owns me. I don't pander to you. I don't pretend to be nice and polite; I am rich and that's what you would like to be; I'm a winner; I beat people at their own game, and if you vote for me I will beat our adversaries; if you want wonky policy details, go with those losers who offer you ten-point plans; if you want to feel good about yourselves and your country, stick with me.
So despite the lack of a formal center or an orderly presentation, Trump was always on point because the point was always the same. He couldn't get off message because the one message was all he had.
”
”
Stanley Fish
“
Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!
”
”
Sana Krasikov
“
It was at that moment that Markisha decided to apply for CalWORKs. She’d rented a room in an apartment she shared with a barber in her neighborhood, and she needed some help paying for it. CalWORKs meant three hundred dollars a month, plus food stamps. So she went to the local welfare office—a “Family Resource Center,” known as an FRC—and walked inside. She was barely sober, emotionally a wreck, literally penniless, and her entire ambition in life was to keep and maintain a room and a half in a rundown section of west San Diego without having to sell her body to pay the rent. This is the kind of person at whom the weight of the state’s financial fraud prosecution apparatus tends to be trained in America. Markisha entered the financial fraud patrol zone when she walked through those doors at the FRC. For three hundred dollars a month, she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together. The amounts of money spent in these kinds of welfare programs are very small, but the levels of political capital involved are mountainous. You can always score political points banging on black welfare moms on meth. And the bureaucracy she was about to enter reflects that intense, bitterly contemptuous interest.
”
”
Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap)
“
There is a weird passivity that accompanies gentrification. I find that in my own building, the “old” tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways. We put up signs in the lobby asking the new neighbors to phone the landlord and complain about mice, but the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest, even if they are paying $2,800 a month for a tenement walk-up apartment with no closets. It's like a hypnotic identification with authority. Or maybe they think they are only passing through. Or maybe they think they're slumming. But they do not want to ask authority to be accountable. It's not only the city that has changed, but the way its inhabitants conceptualize themselves.
”
”
Sarah Schulman (The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination)
“
Climb down, sir!” Gerrit shouted. The driver shook his head. He had a pistol beside him on the bench. Gerrit suspected it was loaded. “The patroon will evict me if I give up his coach.” Gerrit had almost forgotten. This was Harenwyck, and on the estate, the tenants tithed to the patroon. “Then join us and become a free man with no lease, no rent, no tithe.” The coachman snorted. “It’s all fine and good for you to play these games with your brother, my lord, but I have a family to feed. And a brother and a cousin who have their own leaseholds to protect. Apart from Van Harens, there are no ‘free men’ at Harenwyck.” He cast a jaundiced eye over the bandits emerging from the woods to surround the carriage. “Not honest ones, anyway.”
Thorland, Donna (2016-03-01). The Dutch Girl: Renegades of the American Revolution (p. 61). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
”
”
Donna Thorland (The Dutch Girl (Renegades of the American Revolution))
“
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) deems a family that is spending more than 30 percent of its income on housing to be “cost burdened,” at risk of having too little money for food, clothing, and other essential expenses. Today there is no state in the Union in which a family that is supported by a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened, according to HUD.
”
”
Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
“
The hijackers had rented apartments, bought airplane tickets, purchased box cutters, received emails and wire transfers. All of this could have been looked at as it was happening, Poindexter said. Terrorists give out signals. Genoa could find them. It would take enormous sums of time and treasure, but it was worth it. The 9/11 attacks were but the opening salvo, the White House had said. The time was right because the climate was right. People were terrified.
”
”
Annie Jacobsen (The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency)
“
He had envisioned a river of rent payments from apartments and businesses that would eventually pay off his financiers and yield millions of dollars in net revenues even as inflation drove up the value of the property. This formula—investment + time = revenue and higher value—was the magic of real estate. By following it, Fred Trump had amassed assets that allowed him to develop ever bigger projects while simultaneously reducing the risk to his personal fortune.
”
”
Michael D'Antonio (Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success)
“
No matter how awful it is to be sitting in this
Terrible magazine office, and talking to this
Circular-saw-voiced West side girl in a dirt-
Stiff Marimekko and lavender glasses, and this
Cake-bearded boy in short-rise Levi’s, and hearing
The drip and rasp of their tones on the softening
Stone of my brain, and losing
The thread of their circular words, and looking
Out through their faces and soot on the window to
Winter in University Place, where a blue-
Faced man, made of rags and old newspapers, faces
A horrible grill, looking in at the food and the faces
It disappears into, and feeling,
Perhaps, for the first time in days, a hunger instead
Of a thirst; where two young girls in peacoats and hair
As long as your arm and snow-sanded sandals
Proceed to their hideout, a festering cold-water flat
Animated by roaches, where their lovers, loafing in wait
To warm and be warmed by brainless caresses,
Stake out a state
Of suspension; and where a black Cadillac 75
Stands by the curb to collect a collector of rents,
Its owner, the owner of numberless tenement flats;
And swivelling back
To the editorial pad
Of Chaos, a quarter-old quarterly of the arts,
And its brotherly, sisterly staff, told hardly apart
In their listlessly colored sackcloth, their ash-colored skins,
Their resisterly sullenness, I suddenly think
That no matter how awful it is, it’s better than it
Would be to be dead. But who can be sure about that?
”
”
L.E. Sissman
“
There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store.
”
”
Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America)
“
What are you so angry about?" my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit.
Why aren't you more angry, I had wanted to ask her. But I couldn't talk to my mother that way. She understood that I did not want to live her life, to work as a waitress, until my toes curled in and my feet hurt all the time, to marry a man who would beat my children and treat me as if I had no right to object to object to anything he chose to do. She didn't want that life for me either. She wanted me happy and successful, to live unafraid among people who loved me, and to do things she had never been able to do and tell her all about them.
So I told her, about the shelter, the magazine, readings and discussion groups. I told her about trying to write stories, though I hesitated to send send her all that I wrote. And there were far too many times when I would sit down to write my mama and stare at the paper unable to puzzle out how to explain how urgent and unimportant it was to change how women's lives were shaped. Not only that we should be paid equal money for equally difficult work, but that we should genuinely begin to think about what word we might choose to undertake, how we might live our daily lives. Why should I have to marry at all? Or explain myself if I chose to love a woman? Why could I not spend my hours writing stories instead of raising children or keeping house or working some deadly boring job just to cover the rent of an apartments where I was not safe anyway.
”
”
Dorothy Allison (The Women's Room)
“
I managed to have such a mediocre time at a place that is pretty much custom designed for delivering the best years of your life. I’d like to say that I wasn’t the same person back then that I later became and now am. But the truth is that I was the exact same person. I was more myself then than at any other time in my life. I was an extreme version of myself. Everything I’ve always felt I felt more intensely. Everything I’ve always wanted, I wanted more. Everything I currently dislike, I downright hated back then. People who think I’m judgmental, impatient, and obsessed with real estate now should have seen me in college. I was bored by many of my classmates and irked by the contrived mischief and floundering sexual intrigues of dormitory life. I couldn’t wait to get out and rent my own apartment, preferably one in a grand Edwardian building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In that sense, I guess my college experience was just as intense as my husband’s. I just view that intensity negatively rather than nostalgically, which perhaps is its own form of nostalgia.
”
”
Meghan Daum
“
Oh my God. You're going to Julie Morelli's wedding! It's true about you and Joe."
"What about me and Joe?"
"I heard you were living with him."
"I had a fire in my apartment, and I rented a room from him for a short time."
Sandy's face scrunched up in disappointment. "You mean you weren't sleeping with him?"
"Well, yeah, I guess I was sleeping with him."
"Oh my God. I knew it! I just knew it! What's he like? Is he excellent? Is he ... you know, big? He doesn't have a little twinkie, does he? Oh, God, don't tell me if he has a little twinkie.
”
”
Janet Evanovich (High Five (Stephanie Plum, #5))
“
Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men awaiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC—the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved—and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab—except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds’s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso ‘Losses Through Theft of Service’ and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver—a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns’ very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated—wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds’s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwest bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylvanshine could expect
”
”
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
“
There’s a workaround for encroaching phone stupidity. The first thing I did when I got to my place in Austin – an apartment rented for three days over the internet – was connect the thing to wifi. Just like that, my secondary brain got all its little grey cells back. The next few days were all about scurrying from wifi field to field, trying to keep the thing on life support. It’s a workaround. We live in a workaround culture. You have to jiggle the key in the ignition just right to start the car. You have to hold the TV remote at a certain angle. You know how it goes.
”
”
Warren Ellis (CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis)
“
In the early 1970s, racial and gender discrimination was still prevalent. The easy camaraderie prevailing in the operating room evaporated at the completion of surgical procedures. There was an unspoken pecking order of seating arrangements at lunch among my fellow physicians. At the top were the white male 'primary producers' in prestigious surgical specialties. They were followed by the internists. Next came the general practitioners. Last on the list were the hospital-based physicians: the radiologists, pathologists and anaesthesiologists - especially non-white, female ones like me. Apart from colour, we were shunned because we did not bring in patients ourselves but, like vultures, lived off the patients generated by other doctors. We were also resented because being hospital-based and not having to rent office space or hire nursing staff, we had low overheads. Since a physician's number of admissions to the hospital and referral pattern determined the degree of attention and regard accorded by colleagues, it was safe for our peers to ignore us and target those in position to send over income-producing referrals. This attitude was mirrored from the board of directors all the way down to the orderlies.
”
”
Adeline Yen Mah (Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter)
“
To understand hardware and software (as applied to the human brain) perform the following meditation. Sit in a room where you will not be disturbed for a half hour and begin thinking, “I am sitting in this room doing this exercize because . . .“ and list as many of the “causes” as you can think of. For instance, you are doing this exercize because, obviously, you read about it in this book. Why did you buy this book? Did somebody recommend it? How did that person come into your life? If you just picked the book up in a store, why did you happen to be in just that store on just that day? Why do you read books of this sort — on psychology, consciousness, evolution etc.? How did you get interested in those fields? Who turned you on, and how long ago? What factors in your childhood inclined you to be interested in these subjects later? Why are you doing this exercize in this room and not elsewhere? Why did you buy or rent this house or apartment? Why are you in this city and not another? Why on this continent and not another? Why are you here at all — that is, how did your parents meet? Did they consciously decide to have a child, do you happen to know, or were you an accident? What cities were they born in? If in different cities, why did they move in space-time so that their paths would intersect? Why is this planet capable of supporting life, and why did it produce the kind of life that would dream up an exercize of this sort? Repeat this exercize a few days later, trying to ask and answer fifty questions you didn’t think of the first time. (Note that you cannot ever ask all possible questions.) Avoid all metaphysical speculations (e.g., karma, reincarnation, “destiny” etc.). The point of the exercize will be mind-blowing enough without introducing “occult” theories, and it will be more startling if you carefully avoid such overtly “mystical” speculations.
”
”
Robert Anton Wilson (Prometheus Rising)
“
Fending means being responsible and accountable. It means you seek the thing—the job opportunity, the apartment to rent, the medication refill, the groceries to make a meal, the jack for the flat tire, the info on how to pay your taxes—and you find it and make something of it, rather than waiting around to have the thing handed to you or handled for you by someone else. Fending is also about assessing options. It’s asking yourself, Well, what should I do, and what am I capable of, and what resources and tools are around me? And you assemble some solution out of that. It’s usually not a perfect solution, but at least it’s a way forward.
”
”
Julie Lythcott-Haims (Your Turn: How to Be an Adult)
“
Returning home to the postwar housing shortage, Weinstein took out a $600,000 loan, built an apartment complex in Atlanta, and offered the 140 family units to veterans at rents averaging less than $50 per month. “Priorities: 1) Ex-POWs; 2) Purple Heart Vets; 3) Overseas Vets; 4) Vets; 5) Civilians,” read his ad. “… We prefer Ex-GI’s, and Marines and enlisted personnel of the Navy. Ex–Air Corps men may apply if they quit telling us how they won the war.” His rule banning KKK members drew threatening phone calls. “I gave them my office and my home address,” Weinstein said, “and told them I still had the .45 I used to shoot carabau [water buffalo] with.
”
”
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption)
“
Don’t do it. Just do something normal with your life. Go work first, go to a studio that’s already there, that’s already nice and produced. Don’t make your own studio. My second suggestion would be that if you absolutely, totally feel like you’re going to be a bum, that you’re not going to pay your rent and you’re going to lose your apartment and you have to do something, and then your friends happen to want to make a video game – as it was in my case – if it feels like an existential must and you will die if you don’t make it… then definitely do it, because it’s very much possible, I think. You have to be really… it has to be scary how much you want to do it, because it’s very hard.
”
”
Robert Kurvitz
“
Even he knew he had more in common with Asian Henry Young, with Malcolm, with Willem, or even with Jude, than he had with them. Just look at him: at Court Square he disembarked and walked the three blocks to the former bottle factory where he now shared studio space with three other people. Did real Haitians have studio space? Would it even occur to real Haitians to leave their large rent-free apartment, where they could have theoretically carved out their own corner to paint and doodle, only to get on a subway and travel half an hour (think how much work could be accomplished in those thirty minutes!) to a sunny dirty space? No, of course not. To conceive of such a luxury, you needed an American mind.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
Climb down, sir!” Gerrit shouted.
The driver shook his head. He had a pistol beside him on the bench. Gerrit suspected it was loaded.
“The patroon will evict me if I give up his coach.” Gerrit had almost forgotten. This was Harenwyck, and on the estate, the tenants tithed to the patroon.
“Then join us and become a free man with no lease, no rent, no tithe.”
The coachman snorted. “It’s all fine and good for you to play these games with your brother, my lord, but I have a family to feed. And a brother and a cousin who have their own leaseholds to protect. Apart from Van Harens, there are no ‘free men’ at Harenwyck.” He cast a jaundiced eye over the bandits emerging from the woods to surround the carriage. “Not honest ones, anyway.”
Thorland, Donna (2016-03-01). The Dutch Girl: Renegades of the American Revolution (p. 61). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
”
”
Donna Thorland (The Dutch Girl (Renegades of the American Revolution))
“
And it shall come to pass that what men made shall be shattered, and the Shadow shall lie across the Pattern of the Age, and the Dark One shall once more lay his hand upon the world of man. Women shall weep and men quail as the nations of the earth are rent like rotting cloth. Neither shall anything stand nor abide . . . Yet one shall be born to face the Shadow, born once more as he was born before and shall be born again, time without end. The Dragon shall be Reborn, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth at his rebirth. In sackcloth and ashes shall he clothe the people, and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind. Like the unfettered dawn shall he blind us, and burn us, yet shall the Dragon Reborn confront the Shadow at the Last Battle, and his blood shall give us the Light. Let tears flow, O ye people of the world. Weep for your salvation.
”
”
Robert Jordan (The Great Hunt (Wheel of Time, #2))
“
Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most—the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant—they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born—they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again. Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check. Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it.
”
”
Ronald Reagan (An American Life: The Autobiography)
“
Julie Seagle stared straight ahead and promised herself one thing: She would never again rent an apartment via Craigslist. The strap of her overstuffed suitcase dug into her shoulder, and she let it drop onto the two suitcases that sat on the sidewalk. It wasn’t as if she had anywhere to carry them now. Julie squinted in disbelief at the flashing neon sign that touted the best burritos in Boston. Rereading the printout of the email again did nothing to change things. Yup, this was the correct address. While she did love a good burrito, and the small restaurant had a certain charm about it, it seemed pretty clear that the one-story building did not include a three-bedroom apartment that could house college students. She sighed and pulled her cell phone from her purse. “Hi, Mom.” “Honey! I gather you made it to Boston? Ohio is missing you already. I can’t believe you’re already off at college. How is the apartment? Have you met your roommates yet?” Julie cleared her throat and looked at the flat roof of the restaurant. “The apartment is…airy. It has a very
”
”
Jessica Park (Flat-Out Love (Flat-Out Love, #1))
“
I was sitting there by the fire,
Looking at the coldness of New York,
She came out and sat beside me,
We both were anxious and in pain,
As we had no job, no money,
Just this apartment, empty with no single food grain,
But the most of all we have no rent to pay,
And thus were obliged to live in the streets tomorrow,
We didn’t mind, but the fear,
Was only that we were full of character and esteem,
Which can’t survive the city of apple?
The door knocked as the owner came for payment,
The door burst out and in the meantime,
My wife fell on the ground crying,
With her hands on her chest,
The owner stunned as I also fell down the same way,
He yelled for the ambulance as we faint,
She and I opened our eyes in a hospital,
Sharing the same bed,
We took each other hands smiling,
The owner said we had a heart attack,
The owner started leaving as per the doctor’s suggestion,
Of course the problem of rent was solved,
He turned back saying he didn’t understand,
How two people can get attack together?
The fool still didn’t understand that,
We were two bodies but one heart!
”
”
Mahiraj Jadeja (A Lover's Will)
“
And the sound of my own washer and dryer interfered with my sleep. So I just threw away my dirty underpants. All the old pairs reminded me of Trevor, anyway. For a while, tacky lingerie from Victoria’s Secret kept showing up in the mail—frilly fuchsia and lime green thongs and teddies and baby-doll nightgowns, each sealed in a clear plastic Baggie. I stuffed the little Baggies into the closet and went commando. An occasional package from Barneys or Saks provided me with men’s pajamas and other things I couldn’t remember ordering—cashmere socks, graphic T-shirts, designer jeans. I took a shower once a week at most. I stopped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently. I had all my bills on automatic payment plans. I’d already paid a year of property taxes on my apartment and on my dead parents’ old house upstate. Rent money from the tenants in that house showed up in my checking account by direct deposit every month. Unemployment was rolling in as long as I made the weekly call into the automated service and pressed “1” for “yes” when the robot asked if I’d made a sincere effort to find a job.
”
”
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
“
The photographer was taking pictures with a small pocket camera but the sergeant sent him back to the car for his big Bertillon camera. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the cellar to look around. The apartment was only one room wide but four storeys high. The front was flush with the sidewalk, and the front entrance elevated by two recessed steps. The alleyway at the side slanted down from the sidewalk sufficiently to drop the level of the door six feet below the ground-floor level. The cellar, which could only be entered by the door at the side, was directly below the ground-floor rooms. There were no apartments. Each of the four floors had three bedrooms opening on to the public hall, and to the rear was a kitchen and a bath and a separate toilet to serve each floor. There were three tenants on each floor, their doors secured by hasps and staples to be padlocked when they were absent, bolts and chains and floor locks and angle bars to protect them from intruders when they were present. The doors were pitted and scarred either because of lost keys or attempted burglary, indicating a continuous warfare between the residents and enemies from without, rapists, robbers, homicidal husbands and lovers, or the landlord after his rent. The walls were covered with obscene graffiti, mammoth sexual organs, vulgar limericks, opened legs, telephone numbers, outright boasting, insidious suggestions, and impertinent or pertinent comments about various tenants’ love habits, their mothers and fathers, the legitimacy of their children. “And people live here,” Grave Digger said, his eyes sad. “That’s what it was made for.” “Like maggots in rotten meat.” “It’s rotten enough.” Twelve mailboxes were nailed to the wall in the front hall. Narrow stairs climbed to the top floor. The ground-floor hallway ran through a small back courtyard where four overflowing garbage cans leaned against the wall. “Anybody can come in here day or night,” Grave Digger said. “Good for the whores but hard on the children.” “I wouldn’t want to live here if I had any enemies,” Coffin Ed said. “I’d be scared to go to the john.” “Yeah, but you’d have central heating.” “Personally, I’d rather live in the cellar. It’s private with its own private entrance and I could control the heat.” “But you’d have to put out the garbage cans,” Grave Digger said. “Whoever occupied that whore’s crib ain’t been putting out any garbage cans.” “Well, let’s wake up the brothers on the ground floor.” “If they ain’t already awake.
”
”
Chester Himes (Blind Man with a Pistol (Harlem Cycle, #8))
“
Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.
-LUKE 12:15
One of our universal problems is the overcrowding of our homes. Whether we have an apartment or a six bedroom home, every closet, cupboard, refrigerator, and garage are all crammed with abundance. Some of us have so much that we go out and rent additional storage spaces for our possessions.
Bob and I are no different than you. We buy new clothes and cram them into our wardrobes. A new antique goes in the corner, a new quilt hangs over the bed, a new potted plant gathers sunlight by the window. On and on it goes. Pretty soon we feel as though we are closed in with no room to breathe. We continually struggle to keep a balance in our attitudes regarding possessions.
It is simpler to manage if you are single and
live alone-it's just you. Life becomes more complicated with a spouse and children. You soon get that "bunched in" feeling. This creates more stress, and you can lose your cool and blow relationships when your calm is broken.
We have made a rule in our home about abundance. Simply stated, it says, "One comes in and one goes out." After every purchase we give away or sell a like item. (We have an annual garage sale.) With a new blouse, out goes an older blouse; with a new table, out goes a table; and so on. Naturally if you're a newlywed this rule is not for you because you probably don't have an abundance of possessions.
There's another strategy that's very effective. We have informed our loved ones that we don't want any more gifts that take up space or that have to be dusted; we prefer receiving consumable items. Remember-your life is not based on your possessions. Share with others what you aren't using.
”
”
Emilie Barnes
“
a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.
”
”
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
“
Over the next few days we spent every waking moment together. We made up silly dances, did puzzles in the evening, and she stood smiling on the beach waiting for me as I took my customary New Year’s dip in the freezing cold North Atlantic.
I just had a sense that we were meant to be.
I even found out she lived in the next-door road along from where I was renting a room from a friend in London. What were the chances of that?
As the week drew to a close we both got ready to head back south to London. She was flying. I was driving.
“I’ll beat you to London,” I challenged her.
She smiled knowingly. “No, you won’t.” (But I love your spirit.)
She, of course, won. It took me ten hours to drive. But at 10:00 P.M. that same night I turned up at her door and knocked.
She answered in her pajamas.
“Damn, you were right,” I said, laughing. “Shall we go for some supper together?”
“I’m in my pajamas, Bear.”
“I know, and you look amazing. Put a coat on. Come on.”
And so she did.
Our first date, and Shara in her pajamas. Now here was a cool girl.
From then on we were rarely apart. I delivered love letters to her office by day and persuaded her to take endless afternoons off.
We roller-skated in the parks, and I took her down to the Isle of Wight for the weekends.
Mum and Dad had since moved to my grandfather’s old house in Dorset, and had rented out our cottage on the island. But we still had an old caravan parked down the side of the house, hidden under a load of bushes, so any of the family could sneak into it when they wanted.
The floors were rotten and the bath full of bugs, but neither Shara nor I cared.
It was heaven just to be together.
Within a week I knew she was the one for me and within a fortnight we had told each other that we loved each other, heart and soul.
Deep down I knew that this was going to make having to go away to Everest for three and a half months very hard.
But if I survived, I promised myself that I would marry this girl.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
It’s so weird that it’s Christmas Eve,” I said, clinking my glass to his. It was the first time I’d spent the occasion apart from my parents.
“I know,” he said. “I was just thinking that.” We both dug into our steaks. I wished I’d made myself two. The meat was tender and flavorful, and perfectly medium-rare. I felt like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, when she barely seared a steak in the middle of the afternoon and devoured it like a wolf. Except I didn’t have a pixie cut. And I wasn’t harboring Satan’s spawn.
“Hey,” I began, looking into his eyes. “I’m sorry I’ve been so…so pathetic since, like, the day we got married.”
He smiled and took a swig of Dr Pepper. “You haven’t been pathetic,” he said. He was a terrible liar.
“I haven’t?” I asked, incredulous, savoring the scrumptious red meat.
“No,” he answered, taking another bite of steak and looking me squarely in the eye. “You haven’t.”
I was feeling argumentative. “Have you forgotten about my inner ear disturbance, which caused me to vomit all across Australia?”
He paused, then countered, “Have you forgotten about the car I rented us?”
I laughed, then struck back. “Have you forgotten about the poisonous lobster I ordered us?”
Then he pulled out all the stops. “Have you forgotten all the money we lost?”
I refused to be thwarted.
“Have you forgotten that I found out I was pregnant after we got back from our honeymoon and I called my parents to tell them and I didn’t get a chance because my mom left my dad and I went on to have a nervous breakdown and had morning sickness for six weeks and now my jeans don’t fit?” I was the clear winner here.
“Have you forgotten that I got you pregnant?” he said, grinning.
I smiled and took the last bite of my steak.
Marlboro Man looked down at my plate. “Want some of mine?” he asked. He’d only eaten half of his.
“Sure,” I said, ravenously and unabashedly sticking my fork into a big chuck of his rib eye. I was so grateful for so many things: Marlboro Man, his outward displays of love, the new life we shared together, the child growing inside my body. But at that moment, at that meal, I was so grateful to be a carnivore again.
”
”
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
“
The Biggest Property Rental In Amsterdam
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Well-known places to rent in Amsterdam
Your Jordaan. An old employees quarter popularised amang other things with the sentimental tunes of a quantity of local vocalists. These music painted an attractive image of the location. Local cafes continue to attribute live vocalists like Arthur Jordaan and Tante Leeni. The Jordaan is a network of alleyways and narrow canals. The section was proven in the Seventeenth century, while Amsterdam desperately needed to expand. The region was created along the design of the routes and ditches which already existed. The Jordaan is known for the weekly biological Nordermaarkt on Saturdays.
Amsterdam is famous for that open air market segments. In Oud-zuid there is a ranging Jordan Cuypmarkt open year long. This part of town is a very popular spot for expats to find Expat Amsterdam flats due in part to vicinity of the Vondelpark. Among the largest community areas A hundred and twenty acres) inside Amsterdam, Netherlands. It can be located in the stadsdeel Amsterdam Oud-Zuid, western side from the Leidseplein as well as the Museumplein. The playground was exposed in 1865 as well as originally named the "Nieuwe Park", but later re-named to "Vondelpark", after the 17th one hundred year author Joost lorrie den Vondel. Every year, the recreation area has around 10 million guests. In the park can be a film art gallery, an open air flow theatre, any playground, and different cafe's and restaurants.
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A box sat on top of Jade’s pillows, wrapped in green paper with a white bow. He frowned slightly. Who would’ve left a gift on Jade’s bed?
“You have a present.”
“What?” Jade turned her head when he gestured toward the box. Confusion filled her eyes. She sat up and reached for the box. “I don’t understand.”
Zach sat by her again and wrapped his arm around her waist. “Maybe there’s a card.”
After searching beneath the large white bow, Jade pulled out a small envelope. Zach looked over her shoulder as she withdrew the card and read it aloud.
“‘To Mom and Zach. Have fun tonight. Bre.’”
Zach chuckled, both at Breanna’s card and at Jade’s blush. “Your daughter has quite a sense of humor.”
“My daughter deserves to be spanked.” She lifted the box onto her lap. “I’m afraid to open it.”
“Would you like me to? It’s addressed to both of us.”
“I’m even more afraid for you to open it.”
“Go ahead. It can’t be that bad.”
“You don’t know my daughter.”
Untying the bow, Jade raised the lid and pulled apart the bright green tissue paper. Several sex toys lay in the box. She gasped.
“Oh, my God. I can’t believe she did this!”
She started to push the tissue paper back over the contents, but Zach held her hand to stop her. “Wait. Let’s see what she bought.”
“I am going to kill her, after I beat her.”
Chuckling, Zach dug through the box, lifting the different items as he came to them. “Cock ring. Chocolate body paint. Stay-hard gel.” He looked into Jade’s eyes. “I don’t think I’ll need that tonight.”
Her cheeks turned a deep pink. He dropped a kiss on her lips before beginning to explore again. “Anal beads. Ben-Wa balls. Fur-lined handcuffs. Nipple clamps. Lemon-flavored nipple cream.” His gaze dipped to her breasts. “Interesting.”
She huffed out a breath. “Can we close the box now?”
“Not yet. I like it when you blush.”
Zach grinned when Jade scowled at him. “This is completely spoiling the mood.”
“I won’t have any problem getting hard again.”
“Zach!”
Ignoring her outraged tone, he continued to sift through the items. “Lifelike dildo.” He held it up to eye level. “Close, but not quite as big as I am.”
Jade covered her eyes with one hand. “I don’t believe this,” she muttered.
“Butt plug. Wait, I’m wrong. It’s a vibrating butt plug. Very interesting. I hope you have batteries. Never mind. Breanna included several packages.”
“Okay, that’s enough.”
Jade tried to jerk the box out of his reach, but Zach held on to the side. “There’re only a couple more items. We might as well see what they are.”
“I don’t care what they are.”
“You might care about one of them.” Zach held up a large box of condoms.
“Oh.”
He turned the box in his hand. “I’m flattered, but I don’t think I’ll be able to use one hundred of these tonight.”
“One hundred?”
“All different types, sizes, and colors.”
Jade laughed. “Oh, Bre.” She pushed her hair behind one ear. “What’s the last thing?”
“Cherry-flavored lubricant. It looks like she thought of everything.”
“You must think my daughter is crazy.”
“I think your daughter loves you very much and wants you to be happy.”
“That’s true. But we won’t use all this…stuff.”
“Who says we won’t?
”
”
Lynn LaFleur (Rent-A-Stud (Coopers' Companions, #1))
“
To see how we separate, we first have to examine how we get together.
Friendships begin with interest. We talk to someone. They say something interesting and we have a conversation about it. However, common interests don’t create lasting bonds. Otherwise, we would become friends with everyone with whom we had a good conversation. Similar interests as a basis for friendship doesn’t explain why we become friends with people who have completely different interests than we do.
In time, we discover common values and ideals. However, friendship through common values and ideals doesn’t explain why atheists and those devout in their faith become friends. Vegans wouldn’t have non-vegan friends. In the real world, we see examples of friendships between people with diametrically opposed views. At the same time, we see cliques form in churches and small organizations dedicated to a particular cause, and it’s not uncommon to have cliques inside a particular belief system dislike each other.
So how do people bond if common interests and common values don’t seem to be the catalyst for lasting friendships?
I find that people build lasting connections through common problems and people grow apart when their problems no longer coincide. This is why couples especially those with children tend to lose their single friends. Their primary problems have become vastly different. The married person’s problems revolve around family and children. The single person’s problem revolves around relationships with others and themselves.
When the single person talks about their latest dating disaster, the married person is thinking I’ve already solved this problem. When the married person talks about finding good daycare, the single person is thinking how boring the problems of married life can be. Eventually marrieds and singles lose their connection because they don’t have common problems.
I look back at friends I had in junior high and high school. We didn’t become friends because of long nights playing D&D. That came later. We were all loners and outcasts in our own way. We had one shared problem that bound us together: how to make friends and relate to others while feeling so “different”. That was the problem that made us friends. Over the years as we found our own answers and went to different problems, we grew apart.
Stick two people with completely different values and belief systems on a deserted island where they have to cooperate to survive. Then stick two people with the same values and interests together at a party. Which pair do you think will form the stronger bond?
When I was 20, I was living on my own. I didn’t have many friends who were in college because I couldn’t relate to them. I was worrying about how to pay rent and trying to stretch my last few dollars for food at the end of the month. They were worried about term papers.
In my life now, the people I spend the most time with have kids, have careers, are thinking about retirement and are figuring out their changing roles and values as they get older. These are problems that I relate to. We solve them in different ways because our values though compatible aren’t similar. I feel connected hearing about how they’ve chosen to solve those issues in a way that works for them.
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Corin
“
Tattoos in particular bewildered her. Nearly every person she tutored had them. They were impediments, she saw, and not just to renting apartments or finding work (who, after all, would hire anyone with REVENGE on his neck?); it also mired them in street life. The outside world viewed the markings as a modern leprosy. Often, her charges reacted to that by further embracing their dysfunction. Tattoos allowed them to reject the outside world they repelled.
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Sam Quinones (The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)
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Again I heard the cry, and I approached, circling the tree until I was looking at it from the opposite side. From gnarled roots to blasted top, the large trunk was split open, a dark wound where a bolt of lightning had rent it apart and fire had burned its center out, leaving it hollow. A mesh of thick vines grew upward from the base, crawling along the withered trunk, sutures trying to close the gaping wound where the sides lay back like flaps of charred flesh. The wind streamed through the gap, tugging the cuffs of my wet pants, brushing at the grass, tearing at the leaves of the new growth around the tree. Then I heard the cry again, and once more I froze, for I discovered the thing that voiced it, almost hidden behind the moving greenery.
I was looking at a human skull, and it was from behind the parted jaws that the screams came.
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Thomas Tryon (Harvest Home)
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And it shall come to pass that what men made shall be shattered, and the Shadow shall lie across the Pattern of the Age, and the Dark One shall once more lay his hand upon the world of man. Women shall weep and men quail as the nations of the earth are rent like rotting cloth. Neither shall anything stand nor abide . . .
Yet one shall be born to face the Shadow, born once more as he was born before and shall be born again, time without end. The Dragon shall be Reborn, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth at his rebirth. In sackcloth and ashes shall he clothe the people, and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind. Like the unfettered dawn shall he blind us, and burn us, yet shall the Dragon Reborn confront the Shadow at the Last Battle, and his blood shall give us the Light. Let tears flow, O ye people of the world. Weep for your salvation.
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Robert Jordan (The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time #2))
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spent a hundred bucks a month renting a little apartment in the hood, spent another hundred bucks on food, and had fifty dollars left over to hustle with.
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Ice-T (Split Decision: Life Stories)
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payment and money that should have gone to my apartment, and rented the 14th Street Playhouse in downtown Atlanta. I hired actors, built scenery, and rented props. I did the whole nine yards on my own, spending all I had to my name.
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Tyler Perry (Higher Is Waiting)
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Before moving away, she’d sold the mare to her riding instructor, who she knew would treat Willow like family. But the first thing she’d done after coming home was buy her back, all cash, so she’d never have to worry about being parted from her horse again. It took a hefty chunk out of her savings and meant renting a studio apartment above the restaurant with finicky plumbing, heated by a radiator, but she didn’t regret it for a second.
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Chandra Blumberg (Stirring Up Love (Taste of Love, #2))
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I’d always fantasized about indulging in a nervous breakdown. I watched Girl, Interrupted with a twisted, jealous fervor, felt envy when I saw celebrities enter rehab. What entitlement. What privilege, to just let life fall to the wayside, to stop working and pretending and just fall apart. To let my grief-swollen brain split at the seams and spend my days crying and sitting in therapy and drinking lemonade in meditative silence on a manicured lawn. And what impossibility. Because rent. I didn’t have the money to enter some elite facility with groomed grounds and full-time therapists. But after ten years of constant work, buying the least expensive entrées, and thrift-store shopping, I had finally saved enough money to not work for several months. At last, a burnout of my very own.
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Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
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He wrote the definitive book on How to Achieve Orgasm in a Rent-Controlled Apartment.
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Woody Allen (Zero Gravity)
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You couldn't even rent your own apartment in Tokyo, and you make good money. It's fucking 1989!
Book 3, p444
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Min Jin Lee (Pachinko)
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Everything in my apartment has taken time to get. It took real effort to build myself a home, and I love it because of all the effort it took. Relationships are like that, too. Well, they’re supposed to be. Something two people work on to develop.
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Meraki P. Lyhne (Ledgers and Rent Boys (Ore 5 #2))
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There Are Many of Us Alike in Form
There are many of us
Alike in form, upright
In constant motion,
Profoundly self-absorbed
And without notion
Of the universe and love.
Furtive eyes on sleek cement,
Harassed mind on stocks and rent,
Ears attuned to blaring horn,
No part seeking why we’re born
Being often less than kind
To each other, brutal, blind In performance miles apart
From potential of the heart.
Words we hear and hear unhearing
Sights we also see unseeing.
It is madness that we don’t, unfearing
Learn the art of human being.
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Patricia L. Salter (Lean on the Wind: A Collection of Poems Celebrating Life)
“
Of course I will. I even wrapped it up all cute-like, with pink wrapping paper and a ribbon and everything. Even put a message card with a kiss mark on it that says, ‘To my darling Theobald’… Left it in the mailbox of the apartment he’s renting with his mistress.” It took Lena a while to decide whether she should feel bad for him or not.
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Asato Asato (86—EIGHTY-SIX, Vol. 1 [Light Novel] (86 [Light Novel], #1))
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We drove for miles, past half-constructed houses, block after block after block, forty-storey towers standing on the ruins of old Beijing neighbourhoods. The driver told us the flats were empty. People invested in them, but did not want to rent them out: rental rates weren’t high enough and a brand-new flat was easier to resell than a ‘used’ apartment. These were hundred-square-metre bank accounts. By 2018, around fifty million flats stood empty in China, according to estimates. Enough to accommodate the entire population of Germany – and France, too.
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Andri Snær Magnason (On Time and Water)
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The original specifications of the building called for “Suits [sic] of Apartments for fourty [sic] two families besides Janitors.” Hardenbergh had originally designed the interior space so that each of the seven main floors would contain six apartments, described in the building records as “French flats,” roughly the same in size and layout. But Edward Clark had begun renting apartments in his building-to-be to friends, acquaintances and other interested tenants long before the building was completed, thus giving future tenants the opportunity to select the size, variety and the number of rooms they needed.
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Stephen Birmingham (Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address)
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turning the second floor into hotel-style guest rooms that could be rented to tenants to put up out-of-town friends. And in each of the four corners of the eighth floor he designed four smaller apartments. When Hardenbergh finally finished juggling rooms and spaces, there were sixty-five apartments in the Dakota, ranging in size from four to twenty rooms.
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Stephen Birmingham (Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address)
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Airbnb employed a similar strategy during major local events, as Jonathan Golden, an early product leader, noted: We also latched onto local events that were bigger than us whenever possible. Online campaigns such as “Make $1,000 in one weekend renting your apartment to Oktoberfest attendees” instead of more generic campaigns like “Rent your apartment to strangers” dramatically improved supply-side conversion metrics. And because one of the most powerful ways to bootstrap supply is to guarantee demand, we encouraged employee travel to unreviewed listings.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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Around this time, I moved out of my ancestral home in Chagrin and rented a studio apartment in Cleveland. Thus, I was able to celebrate my twenty-fifth birthday in my very own place. I decided to make it a surprise party. I sent out invitations informing the guests that someone was going to take me bowling and that I wouldn’t be home until 8:00. Then I gave instructions: The guests were to come to my apartment around 7:00 and set up the food and drinks, which they were assigned to bring. The key would be left on the sill over the door so people could let themselves in. I also suggested that everyone bring a small gift that didn’t exceed ten dollars. The fifteenth of December came and everything went smoothly. Nobody had trouble finding the place because I included a map in the invitation. So everyone was there waiting for the birthday boy to make his appearance. Eight o’clock came and went, as did nine o’clock, but the birthday boy never showed up. Finally, at around 10 P.M., the guests left, convinced that I’d given the wrong date. I hadn’t, and when they called the next day to see what had happened, I told them quite simply, “I never got an invitation.
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Tim Conway (What's So Funny?: My Hilarious Life)
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Old apartment buildings. Every shitty town has a few, the kind where people live because the day-to-day is cheaper and the empty rooms are rented by the hour.
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Amy Lane (Racing for the Sun)
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The “For Rent” signs were appearing in larger number in Harlem than at any time in twenty-five years. Landlords looked on helplessly as apartment after apartment emptied and was not filled. Even the refusal to return deposits did not prevent the tenants from moving out. What, indeed, was fifty, sixty or seventy dollars when one was leaving behind insult, ostracism, segregation and discrimination? Moreover, the whitened Negroes were saving a great deal of money by being able to change localities. The mechanics of race prejudice had forced them into the congested Harlem area where, at the mercy of white and black real estate sharks, they had been compelled to pay exorbitant rentals because the demand for housing far exceeded the supply. As a general rule the Negroes were paying one hundred per cent more than white tenants in other parts of the city for a smaller number of rooms and
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George S. Schuyler (Black No More)
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As a result, platforms that offer these commoditized services should focus on matching consumers with available producers as seamlessly as possible. And the best ones do exactly that. For example, Uber’s automatic matching and even its controversial surge pricing are all about facilitating the most transactions. Compare Uber’s commoditized services to a noncommoditized service, such as renting an apartment on Airbnb. In this example, many additional characteristics matter to consumers, such as where the apartment is located, how large it is, what different amenities it offers,
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Alex Moazed (Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy)
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He was finally where he wanted to be. Curled around her, he listened to the waves out the window of the crappy little apartment he’d rented in Venice. It was only one room and the carpet smelled like shit, but after last night, Alex decided that one room wasn’t so bad. After they’d tumbled through the door of the apartment the night before, lips never parting, devouring each other as they ripped off clothing, the bed had only been a few steps away. A few steps to put him exactly where he’d wanted to be. Next to her, for the rest of his life.
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Elizabeth Hunter (Five Mornings (Cambio Springs, #1.5))
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Following is a sample list of some points you will want to include in your business plan. These can all be organized in a very professional manner in a notebook that includes tabs. • Executive summary. Include a one- or two-page summary of your plan. • Mission statement. Include one or two paragraphs that succinctly state your purpose. • Background. Present information about yourself and your experience. • Financial statement. List your assets, liabilities, and net worth. • Site location. Include a list of benefits, maps, and proximity to shopping and schools. • Demographics. Present information about the people living in the area (income, education, etc.). • Competitor analysis. Determine who your competitors are and present average rents and sales comparisons. • Marketing strategy. Define your target market (tenants, buyers, etc.). • Financial analysis. Include historical and pro forma operating statements. • Improvements. Define capital improvements to be made to the property. • Purchase agreement. Include your sales contract with the seller. • Exhibits. Include photographs of the property, tax returns, sample floor plans, and the like.
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Steve Berges (The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings)
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Paul Mousis had rented his lover a studio, next door to Erik Satie’s apartment. One such
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Catherine Hewitt (Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon)
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The house and all its problems had taken its toll on your mother and me. We could feel ourselves drifting apart a little more each day. The spark had gone out of our marriage, and we desperately needed to get it back. To do this, we decided to have a "date night", which is a polite way of saying we rented a room at the Two Pines with the intention of fucking like teenagers.
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Riley Sager (Home Before Dark)
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was mostly still doing rentals at the time, so I decided I would create relationships with some landlords. I cold-called them to introduce myself as someone who would do a great job renting out their apartments. Fueled by my new role as the Finder, I also cold-called some For Sale by Owner ads, even though it was as terrifying as that time I asked Liz Jose to the prom.
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Ryan Serhant (Sell It Like Serhant: How to Sell More, Earn More, and Become the Ultimate Sales Machine)
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Responsa in a Moment: Volume 5, Issue No. 2, December 2010 by Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin 10/12/2010
On December 7, 2010, The Jerusalem Post reported (Jpost.com) that a group of forty municipal rabbis in Israel published a letter which said that it is forbidden to sell or rent an apartment to a non-Jew (nokhrim) in Israel.
Amongst the reasons given for the prohibition are the danger of intermarriage and the lowering of real estate prices in areas where non-Jews live. Gentiles’ “different lifestyle from Jews” can endanger lives, they wrote.
If a Jew sells or rents property to a gentile, his neighbors must warn him, and if he does not change his ways, the neighbors must avoid the person, and may not conduct business with him, according to the petition. A person who rents or sells to non-Jews also may not get aliyahs in synagogue.
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David Golinkin
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Monday, November 29 Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. —Psalm 119:105 (ESV) Here you go!” my twenty-two-year-old son, John, said cheerfully, handing me a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Since he began working he has also begun paying me rent. He prefers to pay in cash, I think because it is concrete evidence he is contributing to the family. We both enjoy the monthly ritual. This has been a long, long time coming. There were the years in which John’s anxiety triggered rages, then the years when he was depressed and didn’t leave the house except to walk the dog or go to therapy. There were long stretches of time when there seemed to be no path forward. Through those I learned that my inability to see how life could improve meant only one thing: that I couldn’t see the way through. Oddly, in retrospect, I can’t see the path we took, either. I think that’s because John’s progress was so incremental, each step forward so infinitely small as to be almost unnoticeable. It may also have something to do with the fact that the “lamp to my feet” that lit my path was much like the handheld oil lamps of biblical times, casting only enough light to illuminate my next stumbling step. Yet now my son is gainfully employed, a taxpaying citizen. He does not earn a lot, but he works hard and his boss likes him. Someday, I think, he will probably be able to afford his own apartment. I’m not worried about when that happens. There are those who might argue John “should” be doing X or Y or Z. For me, those “shoulds” don’t matter: I’ve learned we can’t move forward from where we wish we were. We can only move forward from where we are now. Lord, let Your word illuminate my next step. And then the one after. And the one after that. —Julia Attaway Digging Deeper: Psalm 44:18
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Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2021: A Spirit-Lifting Devotional)
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The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle increased by 67 percent between the years of 2013 and 2017, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Traffic on the I-5 freeway into the city, and over the bridges to West Seattle and to the eastern suburbs, crawled to a standstill during rush hour. With restrictive land use regulations and neighborhood opposition limiting the construction of new housing, low-income families were displaced and homelessness on Seattle streets became sickeningly ubiquitous.
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Brad Stone (Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire)
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These rules remain today, an invisible layer of exclusion laid across 75 percent of the residential map in most American cities, effectively banning working-class and many middle-income people from renting or buying there. Exclusionary zoning rules limit the number of units constructed per acre; they can outright ban apartment buildings; they can even deem that a single-family house has to be big enough to preserve a neighborhood’s “aesthetic uniformity.” The effect is that they keep land supply short, house prices high, and multifamily apartment buildings out. In 1977, the Supreme Court failed to recognize that these rules were racial bans recast in class terms, and the impact on integration—not to mention housing affordability for millions of struggling white families—has been devastating.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
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My friend is considering renting an apartment. Do you like it here? Any issues she should know about?
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Stephanie Brother (Four Real (Four, #3))
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I started telling him about how when we first got to America, we had to live in Old Man Jimmy’s garage. Old Man Jimmy was an out-of-work truck driver who rented half his garage to us for $200 a month. I would go to sleep curled up next to his Dodge Charger, Shelby, and wake up every morning to the jingle of his keys. Even when we moved out, my parents’ jobs were barely enough to pay for a small one-bedroom apartment. That’s when we applied for a job working and living at the Calivista Motel. But of course the owner, Jason’s dad, turned out to be a real miser.
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Kelly Yang (Room to Dream (Front Desk #3))
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Wood gave up, left, and never forgave Stan as long as he lived. “He despised Stan,” recalls Wood’s former assistant Ralph Reese. “He was always on, he was always being Stan Lee. He was just a relentless self-promoter. He was kind of a phony, in Wood’s opinion.” Years later, according to Reese, Wood and Ditko would spend time together and kvetch about Stan. “They said that Stan’s a blowhard and took credit for a lot of stuff he didn’t really create,” Reese recalls. “Even more than that, they resented the fact that Stan was making millions of dollars and they were still struggling, living in rented apartments.
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Abraham Riesman (True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee)
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Word of exactly what the L.A. authorities had on the Stalker quickly passed up the chain of command in San Francisco to Mayor Dianne Feinstein (now Senator Feinstein). She ordered a news conference at City Hall, boldly took the podium, and, tight-lipped and stern-faced, told the press about the evidence they had linking the Night Stalker to San Francisco, focusing on the Avia sneakers and ballistics. She assured the public that everything possible was being done to capture him and described the large task force which she had ordered put together. She added $10,000 to the reward money being offered, saying, “Somewhere in the Bay Area, someone is renting a room, an apartment, or a home to this vicious killer. If you know who he is or have seen him, if you know anything, please contact the task force. We’ll have him, and we’ll have him soon.
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Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
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When Julian’s citizenship papers were approved, for the good of his sons, for their education, and to give Mercedes what she wanted, he quit the Juarez police department. The Ramirezes moved back to El Paso in the spring of 1954. They rented a small apartment in the Second Ward, at Seventh and Canal. El Paso was a much cleaner, safer place than Juarez, and Julian knew he’d made the right decision to leave Mexico. Julian found a job with the Santa Fe railroad, laying track. The wages and benefits were good, but it meant he had to be away from his family, and it would be backbreaking work. Julian loved the outdoors and would make the best of the situation. His sons would be raised in the Land of the Free.
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Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
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Poor collection of rents may provide you with an opportunity to create value, but remember: the price you pay for the apartment complex should reflect the value of the property as it is currently operating, not what it would be if all of the rents were being collected. The value is created only after you have acquired the property and made the necessary changes to improve collections.
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Steve Berges (The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings)
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Five ratios are required in multifamily property analysis: • The capitalization rate • The cash return on investment • The total return on investment • The debt service coverage ratio • The gross rent multiplier
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Steve Berges (The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings)
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The 10 Ways to Create Value 1. Increase rents. 2. Convert a master-metered property to a submetered property. 3. Add vending services including laundry, pay phones, and soft drinks. 4. Offer exclusive rights to cable TV service with revenue sharing. 5. Offer exclusive rights to satellite service with revenue sharing. 6. Provide access to building rooftops for cellular companies. 7. Consolidate two or more apartment complexes to achieve synergies. 8. Convert excess storage space into rentable living area. 9. Install water-saving devices in showers and bathrooms. 10. Protest assessed tax valuations to have them lowered.
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Steve Berges (The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings)
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Although 118 rioters were arrested, a Cook County grand jury did not indict a single one. The grand jury, however, did indict Harvey Clark, his real estate agent, his NAACP attorney, and the white landlady who rented the apartment to him as well as her attorney on charges of inciting a riot
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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The apartment was on the sixteenth floor. It was old-fashioned, which meant that the rooms were large and light-filled, the ceilings high enough to permit a constant circulation of air, and the walls thick enough for a man and his loving wife to have a stimulating argument at the top of their lungs without invading the nervous systems of surrounding neighbors. Raymond had rented the apartment furnished and nothing in the place beyond the books, the records, and the phonograph was his.
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Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate)
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The seedy single-room-occupancy hotels and low-rent apartment buildings in that neighborhood were like vending machines filled with victims.
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Christa Faust (The Zodiac Paradox (Fringe, #1))
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The only clear result is the absolute and total deterioration of our architectural landscape: from the landmarks and way people live to maintenance and appreciation. Would you want to spend money on maintaining a building if you have an up-market villa that will bring in less than $100 a month in rent—the ceiling that was set in the 1950s and 1960s and is still enforced today? Take the Sidki building here in Zamalek, which has about forty apartments. Because of the rent controls, it brings in less than $200 a month. Can you seriously expect the owners to take proper care of it?
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John R. Bradley (Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution)
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Sometimes the reduction in housing units on the market occurs because people who had been renting rooms or apartments in their own homes, or bungalows in their back yards, decide that it is no longer worth the bother, when rents are kept artificially low under rent control laws.
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Anonymous
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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company) - Clip This Article on Location 970 | Added on Sunday, September 21, 2014 10:35:40 AM Many Veterans Adapt to a Strange World, One With Walls By DAVE PHILIPPS LOS ANGELES — For 30 years after Vietnam, Art Harmon’s address was a dry wash under the 210 freeway, where he tried to forget his tour as a 19-year-old helicopter gunner. “I couldn’t be around human beings anymore,” he said. “I didn’t feel at home anywhere.” Today Mr. Harmon has a one-bedroom apartment in nearby Sun Valley, thanks to what is being described as the largest campaign in history to stamp out homelessness among military veterans, who have constituted as much as a quarter of the nation’s homeless population. Since 2010, the Obama administration has spent $4 billion hiring thousands of staff workers, expanding social services and medical programs, and renting thousands of apartments, seeking to fulfill a pledge by Eric Shinseki, the former secretary of Veterans Affairs, to end veterans’ homelessness by the end
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Anonymous
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Merle took off to hide his front end under a dining room chair, ass in the air like always, as I scooped up the shoe he’d been gnawing on like a damn rawhide bone. “Just a shoe?” I asked in a deadly-quiet voice. “Just a shoe? This is a goddamned Manolo Blahnik! It cost four hundred and seventeen dollars!” I stared down at the ravaged shoe in my hand and felt a whimper bubble up from my chest. I swear to God, I was this close to crying as I looked down at my poor, ruined baby. “Holy shit! You paid four hundred and seventeen dollars for a pair of friggin’ shoes?” Trevor asked in astonishment. “Are you insane!” “Nooo, I said this shoe cost four hundred and seventeen dollars. As a pair, they cost eight thirty-five!” I shouted like the math made the situation more understandable. “Fuck me, cher. It’s a shoe. You walk around with it on your foot; you don’t live in the damn thing! You’re telling me that ugly-ass thing cost more than I paid in rent for a month at my apartment?” I sucked in an audible gasp. How dare he call my precious ugly. “Take it back,” I whispered. “What?” Trevor looked at me like I was a crazy person. “Take it back. This shoe is not ugly. It’s stunning,” I said, holding it to my chest and giving it a loving stroke. He let out a sarcastic grunt and eyeballed the pump like it was garbage. “Not so stunning covered in dog slobber,” he laughed. And I was a second away from stabbing him with the chewed-up stiletto heel. Those shoes deserved to be praised. They deserved to be worn to the most expensive restaurants and balls and red carpet premiers! And they deserved to be buried with dignity in the backyard under my pretty oak tree. And I didn’t think I was being ridiculous at all!
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Anonymous
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They were children of parents who’d acted grotesquely, some might say violently, toward them, even when they were fairly little, and when, in their early thirties, they met and began sharing confidences, their discovery of this common ground—for that was how she thought of it—seemed to her a great, welcome solace. At last! she thought more than once during the weeks and months after they’d started going to bed together—always at friends’ places, because they were both in transitional periods and didn’t have anywhere comfortably private; she was saving money by sleeping on a foldout sofa in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment in the East Twenties that she shared with her friend Susan, while he, also recently forced to cut expenses, was installed uptown in a rented room in the apartment of an older, intimidating former co-worker, also named Susan. At last! Jennifer said to herself many times before falling asleep after sex in some friend’s or friend of a friend’s freshly changed bed. Then she would squeeze his hand.
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Donald Antrim (The Emerald Light in the Air)
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The family’s rented villa was, moreover, in Praia da Luz, where all six other ‘orphanage’ incidents had been reported – one of them, the week before Madeleine went missing, at the Ocean Club’s Apartment 5A, where the McCanns were to stay.
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Anthony Summers (Looking For Madeleine: Updated 2019 Edition)
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That generation of folks has seen people really get hurt by homeownership,” said Mr. Solomon, president of the company, which is based in Waltham, Mass. “The petal has really fallen off the rose as it pertains to homeownership. People don’t want to be tied down to a mortgage they can’t get out of quickly.” That is true of Cabell Dickinson, 30, who had rented an apartment in Arlington, Va., for eight years when she and her boyfriend decided in May to get more serious about their relationship. Instead of marrying and buying a home, however, they followed friends to Mr. Solomon’s complex, known as Halstead Square, moving into a $2,000-a-month apartment.
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Anonymous
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By the late 1930s, the official ideal of 'people's housing' was a large family apartment of at least 74 square metres, fully electrified, with three bedrooms, one each for parents, male and female children. At the same time it was estimated that an apartment built to the DAF specification would cost in the order of 14,000 Reichsmarks, 40 per cent more even than those constructed by the Weimar Republic. The limitations of German family budgets, however, demanded that these generous apartments were to be provided to the Volksgenossen at monthly rents of no more than 30 Reichsmarks. In part, the costs would simply have to be borne by the Reich.
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Anonymous
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We, tenants of the Kasota apartments who are not Sound Mental Health clients, hereby notify you that we cannot accept the cruel and unjust way in which we are now being forced from our homes. You have presented us with a rent increase which is so extreme, you must be aware that we could not possibly afford to pay it. It appears that the intent is simply to drive us out. If we are to be forced out of our homes, then we respectfully insist that you provide each of us with relocation assistance, so that we can find other places to live and not join the ranks of the homeless. We hereby pledge: Unless and until each and every one of us has received adequate relocation assistance, none of us will pay the increased rent or voluntarily vacate the building.
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Anonymous
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I would return to my world, to my own city and my work. I would go back to being a doctor, an expensive New York doctor, the doctor into which I had been so expensively made. Wasn’t that what New York meant, expense? When I returned, everything would be expensive. Rent for my private office would be expensive. My hourly rate would be high. And however dizzying, the fee for my patients was only the beginning of the cost, the analytic undertaking promising neither comfort nor relief. It is instead a severe curriculum, Freud’s school of suffering: the universal conviction of shame, the pain of disclosure and of the resistance to disclosure, the awful vertigo of free association, the torment of encountering one’s hungers, hatreds, lusts, avowing them, claiming them as one’s own. I would become, anew, the minister of that suffering. In my costliness I would be a temple prostitute set apart and ceremonially dressed (in cardigan, gray flannels, polished cap- toe oxfords). My patients would pay me, not for something that they received from me, but instead for me to neutralize the account of whatever they had inserted or discharged into my person.
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DeSales Harrison (The Waters & The Wild)
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Compare today to the 1950s. At that time, a typical apartment in New York City rented for about $60 a month, or, adjusting for inflation, about $530 a month. Today you can’t find a broom closet in the East Village for that amount. Even
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Tyler Cowen (The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream)
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It’s my turn. The only one I’m likely to get. I’ve got a month, Starfish.”
Her eyebrows narrowed a bit at his use of her nickname, and he relaxed further as they eased into a far more familiar back and forth. Lord, but he’d missed her.
“Like I said, let’s take the time we have now and find out what we find out. Then, when it’s your turn, we’ll already be that much closer to knowing what we know.”
Her eyes remained narrowed, his feisty Kerry fully back at the fore. “Why is it that I feel like I just got played?”
His grin got bigger. “Oh, we haven’t begun to play, love. There was nothing playful about that kiss. But next time?” He let that statement linger with no immediate follow-up. Instead, he dug the keys to his rental from the pocket of his Daks and unlocked the door to the sleek black roadster. At least he’d walked to the correct side this time. Took some getting used to, the whole wrong side of the road thing. Still, the little two-door BMW was a beauty. And about as far away from anything he’d ever driven on the station as it was possible to get. Which was exactly why he’d rented it.
He looked back over to where she stood, arms folded now, defenses fully back up and battle ready. Good, he thought. Do what you need to do. Be sure of yourself, of me. Of us. Just remember, I know how to get you to lower those defenses. And he was looking forward to finding out how she’d come apart for him when he melted them completely.
“Thirty days,” he said, opening the door. He tugged at the sunglasses that had been hanging down his back on a pair of Croakies and slid them around, putting them on before popping his hat back on his head. He rested folded forearms on the top of the open door, his grin still in place. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m really liking how Day One has worked out.” He tucked his long, rangy frame into the low-slung car and lowered the window as the sport engine purred to life. “Can’t wait to see what Day Two holds in store. G’day, Starfish.
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Donna Kauffman (Starfish Moon (Brides of Blueberry Cove, #3))
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The driver, who had lived in East Berlin until the wall fell in 1989, was happy to report that Berlin was currently the most popular tourist destination in Germany and one of the top three in Europe. During the previous year, nearly thirty million people had visited Berlin, which had only three and a half million permanent residents. The influx of tourists had put a strain on the city’s housing market, making it tough for Berliners to find a decent apartment to rent. Many estate agents and other enterprising individuals were now signing annual leases on apartments simply to sublet them to tourists on sites like Airbnb.
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A.G. Riddle (Pandemic (The Extinction Files, #1))
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Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem.14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems—as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.15
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
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The Internet of Things First of all, what is the Internet of Things? The Internet of Things is the link between the internet and everyday objects that allows them to send and receive digital information and data. Its potential is huge and some say it could become a multi-trillion-dollar market. One start-up called Slock.it is attempting to tap into this potential by developing an app on the Ethereum blockchain that links physical assets, such as apartments, bikes, or vans, to a smart contract that allows users to rent the item out. The application is called Ethereum Computer and could potentially eliminate fees to rent the assets of others. It is a kind of blockchain version of Airbnb and creates a much cheaper option for both affiliates and users.
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Ikuya Takashima (Ethereum: The Ultimate Guide to the World of Ethereum, Ethereum Mining, Ethereum Investing, Smart Contracts, Dapps and DAOs, Ether, Blockchain Technology)
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Sinclair said, “There’s an apartment in Hamburg, Germany. A fashionable neighborhood, reasonably central, pretty expensive, but maybe a little transitory and corporate. For the last year the apartment has been rented to four men in their twenties. Not Germans. Three are Saudis, and the fourth is an Iranian. All four appear very secular. Clean-shaven, short hair, well dressed. They favor polo shirts in pastel colors with alligator badges. They wear gold Rolex watches and Italian shoes. They drive BMWs and go out to nightclubs. But they don’t go out to work.” Reacher
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Lee Child (Night School (Jack Reacher, #21))
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Actually, folks on the station don’t have it so bad. Our apartments are a whole lot bigger than most of the affordable ones in Manhattan.” “But we can’t own them,” Barrel said. “We don’t have to pay rent either. Or pay for food. We even get a clothing allowance, free schools, free health care, free Internet and entertainment programing. Free admission to concerts and sporting events. Free art and music lessons. There’s no traffic and clean air. On
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Patrick Thomas (Startenders (Startenders (Murphy's Lore) Book 1))
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The first time Halley set eyes on Howard was at a showing of The Towering Inferno. When she heard about him, her sister had wondered aloud how much of a future you could have with someone you’d met at a disaster movie. But at that point Halley wasn’t feeling picky. She had been in Dublin just over three weeks – not so long that she didn’t still get lost all the time on the infuriating streets that kept changing their names, but enough to disabuse her of most of her illusions about the place; enough too, with the deposit and first month’s rent for her new apartment, to separate her from most of the money she’d brought, and cut the time available for soul-searching and self-finding quite drastically. That afternoon she’d spent in an Internet café, reluctantly updating her résumé; she hadn’t had a conversation since the night before, a stilted exchange with the Chinese pizza delivery boy about his native Yunan province. When she spotted the poster for The Towering Inferno, which she and Zephyr must have watched twenty times together, it was like catching sight of an old friend. She went in and for three hours warmed herself in the familiar blaze of collapsing architecture and suffocating hotel guests; she stayed in her seat until the ushers started sweeping round her feet.
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Paul Murray (Skippy Dies)
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When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: “If I give you a break, you give me a break.” Tenants could trade their dignity and children’s health for a roof over their head. 13 Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. 14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems—as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not.
Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative.
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
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God, how I love you, Rose.” He tasted the salt of her tears, but he wouldn’t let her go. “Does this mean you’re going to marry me?” he murmured. “Yes.” She kissed him again, and he wished he had a ring to give her. “And whether you’re the Earl of Ashton or Lord of the Ashes doesn’t matter. You’re the man who stood by me and taught me to walk again. I love you.” He reached below her hips and lifted her up, smiling at her. “I will find a way to give you the life you’ve dreamed of, Rose. Even if it means we have to live apart for a while.” Her expression turned wary. “We are not living apart, Iain.” “You’re daft if you think I’m taking you back to a place where there is no food.” Slowly, he lowered her back to stand before him. He couldn’t stop touching her, and he rubbed the small of her back. “We will argue about it later. But I do have news that may affect my dowry. Evangeline said that her father will help us sort through our finances and set them straight. We don’t know how much money my mother gave away, but—” At that, Iain’s smile broadened. “Actually, I did learn what she did with the rents.” He’d spent the morning with Cain Sinclair, and it was then that he’d discovered the truth. “Apparently, she didn’t give the money to an Irishman. It was a Scotsman. She gave the rents over to Sinclair a month ago, so he could invest them for her. They made a fine profit for you and your family.” Rose shook her head and a laugh escaped her. “So I do have a dowry, after all. Not that it matters anymore.” He leaned to kiss her again, and added, “You could be penniless, and I wouldn’t care, Rose. I’m marrying you because I love you. Because you make me want to become a better man. And because I cannot be living without you.” She leaned in and rested her nose against his. “I love you, Iain. Earl or not.” “I’ll be the earl in name,” he agreed. “There will be a great deal of work before I can restore Ashton. But with you at my side, I think we can manage it.” He stroked his thumb against her palm, and she let out a soft sigh. Then he came up behind her and drew both arms around her waist. Her body nestled against his, in the most natural feeling in the world. “You are the bride I’m meant to have. Ever since you threatened me with a rake.” She let out a soft laugh. “You’re fortunate that I didn’t use it against you.” He
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Michelle Willingham (Good Earls Don't Lie (The Earls Next Door Book 1))
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Wiley was waking up, in his bedroom, the same place he had woken up for the last three months. In his rented apartment on the waterfront. The new development. A village within the city. But not really. It was actually a giant dormitory, full of incurious people who rushed in and out in the dark, and slept the few hours between. He had never seen his neighbors, and as far as he knew they had never seen him. Perfect. He
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Lee Child (Night School (Jack Reacher, #21))
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Rooms For Rent Atlanta That Cater To Your Personal Growth
Are you looking for just the right room to rent? Maybe you have the resources you need to find it yourself. After all, this is the age of the search engine, and plenty of information is available to anyone who seriously looks for it. There is a wide variety of choice, so you can concentrate only on those homes that might potentially be for you.
There are plenty of advantages to occupying rooms for rent atlanta. You save a lot of money paying only part of the expenses you would normally pay for when you have a house of your own. This is because you only have to pay your share of the rent, water, electricity and heat bills. But there are disadvantages to house share too. Conflicts can arise when you live in house that is not yours, especially if you rent a room in a house where the other residents are from a different background than yours.
Having a nice place to stay can even help your physical health, and it surely affects your mental health. You may find a place also that comes with furniture already in it. This would allow you to get by with spending less on not only the furniture but the transportation too.
Sometimes you can actually save money finding rooms for rent atlanta in the country. This depends on how often you plan to visit the city. If you have a job you can do from home, or if you are retired and collecting benefits, then there is no real reason for you to pay the extra money to live in the city. Of course there are many choices you need to make while you are searching for a room.
Some people just do not enjoy living alone. Renting an entire apartment to oneself can, indeed, be a lonely experience. For those who want an easy opportunity to socialize, then, renting a room is a great option. It is little wonder that so many houses on campuses around the country are full of young students renting rooms - its partly for convenience, and definitely partly for the chance to be among others their own age. Renting a room provides the chance to be among one’s peers.
There are many more benefits, but perhaps the biggest and best is the advantage of not being locked into something for life. Room rentals can be very appealing, and they can complement the kind of lifestyle you want and deserve.
If you want to find the spirit or soul of a city, move right in with its inhabitants. You may benefit socially by taking a couple of classes at the local college. You might try looking for rooms for rent atlanta where there are games, indoor or outdoor. This is a great way to meet people and get started in your new life. Depending on the weather, you might want a pool or access to a gym or tennis courts. Maybe you are attracted to the kind of community that has stunning architecture and green trees and plants. There may be a certain type of street design that appeals to you.
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Ration
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with tuk-tuks and rickshaws. While some of the districts were modern and clean, others were colourful and ramshackle. Kiosks selling cigarettes, phonecards, sweets and general supplies lined the streets and traders piled fruit and vegetables on sheets to sell. The highway to the south took us through the main commercial district, Galle Road, which was clean and modern. We headed out down the coast and soon the offices, apartments and shops melted away and were replaced by lush forest on one side and blue white-tipped ocean on the other. An hour away from the city we found a quiet little village on a bay of golden sand. We’d read about some beach houses there which were available for rent and we asked the driver to stop so Mum and Dad could have a look. We were all tired and looking forward to relaxing and having a meal. The place was ideal. Like many of the tourist areas in Sri Lanka, the accommodation was right on the beach, where land was more valuable. There was a house big enough for us all and nearby restaurants and bars, but in a family-friendly location. We booked in for a night. Our parents never initially paid for more than one night’s accommodation when we went somewhere new in case there was a nightclub or building site next door that the guides had failed to mention.
”
”
Paul Forkan (Tsunami Kids: Our Journey from Survival to Success)
“
First, the conventional approach to discovering God’s will focuses almost all of our attention on nonmoral decisions. Scripture does not tell us whether we should live in Minnesota or Maine. It does not tell us whether we should go to Michigan State University or Wheaton College. It does not tell us whether we should buy a house or rent an apartment. It does not tell us whether we should marry a wonderful Christian named Tim or some other wonderful Christian guy. Scripture does not tell us what to do this summer or what job to take or where to go to grad school.
Once, while preaching on this topic, I said in a bold declarative statement, “God doesn’t care where you go to school or where you live or what job you take.” A thoughtful young woman talked to me afterward and was discouraged to hear that God didn’t care about the most important decisions in her life. I explained to her that I probably wasn’t very clear. God certainly cares about these decisions insofar as He cares for us and every detail of our lives. But in another sense, and this was the point I was trying to make, these are not the most important issues in God’s book. The most important issues for God are moral purity, theological fidelity, compassion, joy, our witness, faithfulness, hospitality, love, worship, and faith. These are His big concerns. The problem is that we tend to focus most of our attention on everything else. We obsess over the things God has not mentioned and may never mention, while, by contrast, we spend little time on all the things God has already revealed to us in the Bible.
”
”
Kevin DeYoung (Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will)
“
I mean more. I mean things like the radical notion that everyone deserves basic income, care, and access. Everyone. Including people you don’t like. Including people who are not that likable. I can think of people who have, frankly, acted like assholes and hurt people in my life, or me. Some of them I have still sent twenty dollars, when I had it, to their Indiegogos when they got disabled and needed money for rent, food, housing, or to move to a more accessible apartment or city. Because nobody deserves to die or suffer from lack of access, even if they’ve been an asshole.
”
”
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice)
“
Rasputin’s death is the first rent in the cloak that has shrouded tsarism – and kept it safe – for centuries, and soon that rent will grow, and the cloak will be torn apart.’ ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘Rasputin was known to be under the tsar’s protection, and that should have been enough to ensure that no harm could ever come to him,’ Vladimir explained. ‘But now he is dead, and everyone can see that the tsar’s protection is not as absolute as it was once thought to be. And if he could not keep Rasputin alive, are there not perhaps other things that he cannot do? The magic, you see, is starting to drain away.
”
”
Alan Rustage (Blackstone and the Endgame (Inspector Sam Blackstone, #10))
“
As the nation diversifies, the homogeneous communities that people seem to prefer become increasingly fine grained. When immigrants become landlords, many rent only to people from their own country. Apartment buildings can become entirely Korean, Salvadoran, or Guatemalan, for example. Immigrant landlords are often unaware of non-discrimination laws, and do not hesitate to tell others they are not welcome. A lawyer for Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles noted that some managers rent only to people from a particular state of Mexico, adding, 'Our fair housing laws haven't even anticipated that.
”
”
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
“
I’m staying in a wretched little flat in Bela Vista, the same seaside cluster of buildings where people took their one-way vacations twenty years ago. Rent one of these apartments for the weekend, enjoy one last sunset, drink a few beers, and then burn charcoal in one of the rooms. This form of suicide is one of Asia’s worst clichés, much like jumping from a high window or a slow death from drink. Even the reasons can sound trite if you’re not the one enduring them: a crash in the property market, so much homework you only get three hours of sleep a night, parents unwilling to settle for anything less than Oxbridge and a doctorate.
”
”
Jason Y. Ng (Hong Kong Noir)
“
NYC Underwater Apartments: 2050
I'll betcha' five dollars that
when the polar ice caps melt in 2050
and water levels rise flooding
all the great coastal cities on our planet,
you still won't be able to afford renting
a 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan
sixty feet under the water.
And I will also betcha' another five bucks,
Sephardic Jews will be renting scuba equipment to tourists
and running phony 'Going Out of Business' sales
and harass you in undersea shopping malls
with their bullshit Dead Sea Salts cosmetic line.
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
Once I was lucky enough to rent an apartment just around the way from the Casino, and I pretended I lived there, making my coffee in the caffettiera, drinking it on my terrace overlooking the red roofs.
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”
R.H. Herron (A Life in Stitches)
“
prison. Duke Graham drove to the police station and provided a solid alibi. Debbie’s family was informed that the apartment she’d been renting needed to be vacated. Her mother was still not functioning. Her aunt Glenna Lucas volunteered for the unpleasant task. A policeman unlocked the apartment, and Glenna entered slowly. Nothing had been moved since the murder, and her first reaction was one of raw anger. There had obviously been a brawl. Her niece had fought desperately for her life. How could anyone inflict such violence on such a sweet, pretty girl? The apartment was cold, with an offensive smell, one she could not identify. The words “Jim Smith next will die” were still on the wall. Glenna gawked in disbelief at the killer’s badly scrawled message. It took time, she thought. He was here for a long time. Her niece had finally died after a brutal ordeal. In the bedroom, the mattress was against a wall and nothing was in place. In the closet, not a single dress or blouse was still on a hanger. Why would the killer strip all the clothing from the hangers? The small kitchen was disorganized but showed no signs of a struggle. Debbie’s last meal had included frozen potatoes—Tater Tots—and the leftovers sat untouched on a paper plate with catsup. A saltshaker was next to the plate, which was on the small white table she used for her meals. Near the plate was another crude message—“Don’t look fore us or ealse.” Glenna knew that the killer had used catsup for some of his writings. She was struck by the misspelled words. Glenna managed to block out the terrible thoughts and begin packing. It took two hours to collect and box the clothing and dishes and towels and such. The bloody bedspread had not
”
”
John Grisham (The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town)
“
When I think of overcoming obstacles, I’m reminded of one our West Coast Baptist College graduates, Nathan Kinoshita, missionary to Tokyo, Japan. When Nathan and his wife, Ruth, went to Tokyo to begin church planting, the city was credited as the most expensive city in the world in which to live. It bumps up and down on the list (as of this writing, it is the sixth most expensive city), but it remains high. The expense not only impacted their personal living needs (for $2,500 per month, they rent a five hundred-square-foot apartment for their family of five), but it impacted their ministry needs as well. To rent even a small building in which to hold services for three hours each Sunday costs them $7,000 per month. On top of that, Japan is not known as a mission field that is particularly responsive to the gospel. So the Kinoshitas were looking at months, possibly years, before a self-supporting church would be established. Many people would have said, “It can’t be done. It’s too expensive. There are too many obstacles. The people don’t want to hear anyway.” I’m thankful Nathan Kinoshita didn’t say that. He found an apartment for his family and rolled up his sleeves and went to work sharing the gospel. Today, a mere five and a half years later, the City Baptist Church of Tokyo is strong, healthy, and growing. Obstacles are what we see when we take our eyes off the goal. Passion is what we need to overcome the obstacles.
”
”
Paul Chappell (Out of Commission: Getting Every Christian Back to the Great Commission)
“
I closed my eyes against the sight of him, unable to bear it. In a moment, I was 18 again and he was being chased away by the cops, and then he was refusing to see me, and I was alone and cold in an unheated apartment working three jobs to make rent, and carrying around this hole in my heart just his size.
”
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Meg Jackson (Trigger (Black Smoke Motorcycle Club #3))
“
Bill rents an apartment in Chicago and goes immediately to the lobby to put his name on the group mailbox. While he’s standing there, an attractive young lady comes out of the apartment next to the mailboxes, wearing a robe. Bill smiles at her and they begin to chat. As they talk her robe slips open, and it’s quite obvious that she has nothing on underneath it. Poor Bill breaks into a sweat trying to maintain eye contact. After a few minutes, she places her hand on his arm and says, “Let’s go into my apartment. I hear someone coming.” Bill follows her inside, and once the door is closed she leans against the wall, allowing her robe to fall off completely. As she reveals her beautiful nude body she purrs, “What would you say is my best feature?” Flustered, Bill manages to squeak out, “Oh, your best feature has to be your ears!” She’s astounded! “Why my ears? Looks at these breasts! They’re full, they don’t sag, and they’re one hundred percent natural! My ass is taut and round and completely without cellulite! My waist is slim and inviting. My skin is silky and begs to be touched. Why in the world would you say my EARS are my best feature?” “Be-be-because,” he stammers, “when we were in the hallway you said you heard someone coming... That was me!
”
”
Barry Dougherty (Friars Club Private Joke File: More Than 2,000 Very Naughty Jokes from the Grand Masters of Comedy)
“
At times I came downstairs before going to sleep, to make sure she was sitting upright on the bench, or was safe in her bedroom. On Fridays I made sure to put the rent in her hands. There was nothing I could do for her beyond these simple gestures. I was not her son, and apart from those eight dollars, I owed her nothing.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Even if we came to a nationally shared recognition that government policy has created an unconstitutional, de jure, system of residential segregation, it does not follow that litigation can remedy this situation. Although most African Americans have suffered under this de jure system, they cannot identify, with the specificity a court case requires, the particular point at which they were victimized. For example, many African American World War II veterans did not apply for government-guaranteed mortgages for suburban purchases because they knew that the Veterans Administration would reject them on account of their race, so applications were pointless. Those veterans then did not gain wealth from home equity appreciation as did white veterans, and their descendants could then not inherit that wealth as did white veterans' descendants. With less inherited wealth, African Americans today are generally less able than their white peers to afford to attend good colleges. If one of those African American descendants now learned that the reason his or her grandparents were forced to rent apartments in overcrowded urban areas was that the federal government unconstitutionally and unlawfully prohibited banks from lending to African Americans, the grandchild would not have the standing to file a lawsuit; nor would he or she be able to name a particular party from whom damages could be recovered. There is generally no judicial remedy for a policy that the Supreme Court wrongheadedly approved. But this does not mean that there is no constitutionally required remedy for such violations. It is up to the people, through our elected representatives, to enforce our Constitution by implementing the remedy.
”
”
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
There’s a small apartment on Dauphine that one of my bookies was renting. The idiot went and got himself shot last week. He’s taking a dirt nap and won’t need the place.
”
”
Ruta Sepetys (Out of the Easy)
“
Working out of Marc Benioff’s rented one-bedroom apartment, we knew we wanted to build a new kind of user experience, one that would feel as seamless and intuitive as buying a book on Amazon. But as we got into it, we realized this required us to change our whole way of thinking. We had to reevaluate the whole purpose of a software company, changing the fundamental question from “How many products can I sell?” to “What does my customer want, and how can I deliver that as an intuitive service?
”
”
Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
“
Her womb was not an apartment for rent.
”
”
Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere)
“
Modern science has therefore rent asunder what the classical imagination brought together: the physical world and the semiotic world, the world of nature and the world of culture, have been split apart from each other, such that what was once considered knowledge—indeed the highest form of knowledge, the contemplation of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—is now appropriated as no more than private belief or personal preference.
”
”
Stephen R. Turley (Awakening Wonder: A Classical Guide to Truth, Goodness & Beauty (Classical Education Guide))
“
Besides being driven around Manhattan by a chauffeur whose salary his father’s company paid, in a Cadillac his father’s company leased to “scope out properties,” Donald’s job description seems to have included lying about his “accomplishments” and allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black people
”
”
Mary L. Trump (Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man)
“
Understand that these early Christians did not meet in churches and sit apart from one another in pews, and then when the music ended get in their chariots and go home. No, their churches were small, and they met in homes or house churches. A recent study by a British scholar has concluded that if the apostle Paul’s house churches were composed of about thirty people, this would have been their approximate make-up:1
• a craftworker in whose home they meet, along with his wife, children, a couple of male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative • some tenants, with families and slaves and dependents, also living in the same home in rented rooms • some family members of a householder who himself does not participate in the house church • a couple of slaves whose owners do not attend • some freed slaves who do not participate in the church • a couple homeless people • a few migrant workers renting small rooms in the home
Add to this mix some Jewish folks and a perhaps an enslaved prostitute and we see how many “different tastes” were in a typical house church in Rome: men and women, citizens and freed slaves and slaves (who had no legal rights), Jews and Gentiles, people from all moral walks of life, and perhaps, most notably, people from elite classes all the way down the social scale to homeless people.
”
”
Scot McKnight (A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together)
“
Crack had killed and taken televisions and watches and homes. As Slip Rock drove through Brooklyn, everyone waving and feeling the jealous burn of his ride knew crack had bought it. Crack had filled his pockets with cash and put the heavy gold chain around his neck. Crack had bought him a gun and let him rent the apartment above his mother’s where there was always a woman or two—fine as the ones on Yo! MTV Raps. Crack had paid for his fresh Caesar haircut and the do-rag and the Murray’s Nu Nile Aubrey figured he used at night to make the waves he sported beneath his Kangol.
”
”
Jacqueline Woodson (Red at the Bone)
“
The easiest thing to think was that he was going to die. This was not exactly an intent to commit suicide, though he did consider suicide, it was rather a sense of the impossibility of surviving much longer, whatever he did, whatever he chose. He felt rent apart by an unremitting mental, felt as physical, strain. When he was alone he groaned aloud.
”
”
Iris Murdoch (The Sacred and Profane Love Machine)
“
Finding a property in Cairo made easy through housesolutionegypt.com . if you are searching for apartment or villa for rent in Maadi or New Cairo House Solution Egypt's New Plateform made it faster, easier, and hassle free.
”
”
House Solution Egypt
“
Besides being driven around Manhattan by a chauffeur whose salary his father’s company paid, in a Cadillac his father’s company leased to “scope out properties,” Donald’s job description seems to have included lying about his “accomplishments” and allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black people (which would become the subject of a Justice Department lawsuit accusing my grandfather and Donald of discrimination).
”
”
Mary L. Trump (Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man)
“
And so I wrote this book as a tribute to these most pathetic of creatures, in hopes that I might succeed in two noble pursuits: 1) helping even one person meet the horror movie odds, and 2) avoid being evicted from my apartment for back rent.
”
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Seth Grahame-Smith (How to Survive a Horror Movie: All the Skills to Dodge the Kills (How to Survive))
“
Well, folks, you can see that those superscrapers came through the storm just fine. It’s too bad they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford. They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe a tax write-off. Diversify into real estate, as they say. While also having a place to visit whenever you happen to want to visit New York. A vacation place they might use for only a week or two every year. Depends what they like. They usually own about a dozen of these places around the world. Spread their holdings around. So really these towers are just assets. They’re money. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything except housing....
Now, here below us is Central Park. It’s a refugee camp now, you can see that. It’s likely to be that for weeks and months to come. Maybe a year. People will be sleeping in the park. Lots of tents already, as you see....
So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today....
What I mean by a householders’strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages ... maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated ... So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee? ... That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.
You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!
... What will happen then is that the absence of those payments of ours will cause the banks to crash fast. They take our payments and use them as collateral to borrow tons more, to fund their own gambling, and they are way, way, way overextended. Overleveraged....
At that point they will be asking the government to bail them out. That’s us. We’re the government. At least in theory, but yeah. We are. So we can decide what to do then. We will have to tell our government what to do at that point. If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it’s a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now’s the time. Now’s the time, people!
”
”
Kim Stanley Robinson (New York 2140)
“
Well, folks, you can see that those superscrapers came through the storm just fine. It’s too bad
they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford. They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe a tax write-off. Diversify into real estate, as they say. While also having a place to visit whenever you happen to want to visit New York. A vacation place they might use for only a week or two every year. Depends what they like. They usually own about a dozen of these places around the world. Spread their holdings around. So really these towers are just assets. They’re money. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything except housing....
Now, here below us is Central Park. It’s a refugee camp now, you can see that. It’s likely to be that for weeks and months to come. Maybe a year. People will be sleeping in the park. Lots of tents already, as you see....
So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today....
What I mean by a householders’strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages ... maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated ... So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee? ... That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.
You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!
... What will happen then is that the absence of those payments of ours will cause the banks to
crash fast. They take our payments and use them as collateral to borrow tons more, to fund their own gambling, and they are way, way, way overextended. Overleveraged....
At that point they will be asking the government to bail them out. That’s us. We’re the
government. At least in theory, but yeah. We are. So we can decide what to do then. We will have to tell our government what to do at that point. If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it’s a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now’s the time. Now’s the time, people!
”
”
Kim Stanley Robinson (New York 2140)
“
I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew. Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
Now it was run down, crumbling, beautiful, and inhabited only by Grandpa, entirely alone. But then hope had crept in. A man, Grandpa wrote, had offered to rent Hudson Castle. He had offered to transform it into a school. Grandpa would stay on as a governor; it would give him new purpose, something to do. No paperwork had been signed, but the man was eager to begin renovations. The man’s name was Sorrotore, a New York millionaire. He enclosed a press cutting, showing a man standing outside a vast New York building, smiling at the camera with Hollywood teeth. “Victor Sorrotore outside his home in the Dakota,” read the caption. “Victor Sorrotore,” whispered Vita, and she memorized his face, just in case. Within a week, Sorrotore struck. Grandpa returned from an afternoon walk to find his way back home barred. A strange man with two guard dogs came out of the caretaker’s cottage and pointed a rifle at him. “Hudson Castle belongs to Mr. Sorrotore,” the guard had said. “Scram!” Grandpa had never in his adult life been told to scram. He had tried to push past the guard, and one of the dogs had bitten his ankle; not a snap but a true bite, which drew blood. The gun was leveled at his chest. Bewildered, he took the train to New York, rented the tiny apartment on Seventh Avenue, and found Sorrotore’s lawyer.
”
”
Katherine Rundell (The Good Thieves)
“
A Chicago Department of Public Welfare report in the mid-1920s stated that African Americans were charged about 20 percent more in rent than whites for similar dwellings. It also observed that in neighborhoods undergoing racial change, rents increased by 50 to 225 percent when African Americans occupied apartments that formerly housed whites. The limited supply of housing open to African Americans gave property owners in black neighborhoods the opportunity to make exorbitant profits.
”
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
Ms. Jain, the head of IRI, claimed: They get free rides from the airport when they get here; we bring them to their apartment and help them get settled near an Indian grocery store and a place of worship, so they feel comfortable. And then we pay for their security deposit and their first month’s rent. And we give them meals for the first 3 days, free of charge.
”
”
Alyssa Hadley Dunn (Teachers Without Borders? The Hidden Consequences of International Teachers in U.S. Schools (Multicultural Education))
“
Today there is no state in the Union in which a family that is supported by a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened, according to HUD. When Jennifer moved in with Isabelle, even
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Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
“
I said. I’m a maid. I’m a dancer, she said. She stuck her elbows out and snapped her fingers. Well, I said. I get paid. Well, she said. I get applause. Well, I said. I get paid and with that money I rent an apartment and buy food. And a television. Well, she said. I get applause and with that affirmation of my amazing talent I feel happy and confident and cool. Well, I said. Enjoy your life as a dancer. Well, she said. Enjoy your life as a maid. Thanks, I will, I said. Good, she said. We walked in grim silence towards something else.
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Miriam Toews (Irma Voth)
“
There was no word for what I was—unable to rent a car but able to stand in front of a room of thirteen-year-olds, sweating under industrial-grade fluorescent lights in the lilac-colored button-down my mom had picked and paid for a few months earlier. I could knock back black coffee and tell them how to ask questions, how to sit down, how to look me in the pupils. Throw away your gum. Don’t text at school, at work. Clean your desk, your apartment, your life. Lessons.
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Harris Sockel (The Kids Don't Stand a Chance: Growing Up in Teach For America (Kindle Single))
“
Tenants in eviction court were generally poor, and almost all of them (92 percent) had missed rent payments. The majority spent at least half their household income on rent. One-third devoted at least 80 percent to it.6 Of the tenants who did come to court and were evicted, only 1 in 6 had another place lined up: shelters or the apartments of friends or family. A few resigned themselves to the streets. Most simply did not know where they would go.7
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
“
When at last we arrived in Mannheim, I found that my apartment had been rented to a family whose young son was an amputee. I had conscientiously paid our landlady the entire time we were gone and now that I returned and needed my apartment I couldn’t do anything about it. I felt upset that these people usurped what was ours and I didn’t find much comfort when they offered us one of the bedrooms to live in. Frustrated as I was, there was nobody I could turn to. The rule of law had been suspended, so the only thing I could do was accept their offer. As I moved into what had been my bedroom, they reluctantly agreed that I could share the kitchen and use one of the burners on the stove. Climbing up into the attic, I found a bed that my husband Richard had used when he was a student. Now I had to cram onto it with the children every night and it always became a contest as to who got the pillow. None of us got much rest but the experience did bring us closer together. Frequently I wound up on the floor.
Somehow I found a vicarious joy in seeing that my furniture, which the other family had been using, was becoming warped from moisture damage. It had been in a room where the window was blown out during one of the air raids. Of course this exposed everything to the weather, and so the frequent rains ruined the table and much of the other furniture. I really grew to dislike these people and with each passing day things became worse. One day while trying to balance three pots on one burner, I got an idea as to what I would do next….
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Hank Bracker
“
Shauna and Linda rent a three-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive and 116 Street, not far from Columbia University. I’d managed to find a spot within a block, an act that usually accompanies a parting sea or stone tablet. Shauna
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Harlan Coben (Tell No One)
“
If I am not the legal resident of the apartment you cannot evict me. You cannot evict Mrs. Tuttle, who is the legal resident of the apartment, because she is not living here. Unless you accept my check you are not going to receive any rent for the apartment at all because you cannot rent it to anyone else while I am living here because you cannot evict me so they could move in. Mrs. Tuttle will not pay the rent because she is not living here. Sincerely, Marian Griswold
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Shirley Jackson (Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories)
“
Every February, my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
It was already there,” he said. “Someone left it behind. They didn’t want it. The super said they couldn’t even rent the apartment for a few weeks because it takes up the whole bedroom and nobody wanted to pay to take it out. Can you believe it? A Steinway.” “Lucky that you play,” she said. She
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Alice McDermott (After This)
“
Ask away,” Furi said, realizing they were almost to his exit.
“Are you in trouble?”
Furi turned; looking sharply at Syn. Furi probably wasn’t expecting that to be his first question, but that was the most important issue as far as Syn was concerned. He knew Furi wasn't involved in Starman’s murder, so he didn’t need to ask about that.
“Before I left the pub tonight, you asked me if someone had sent me and if I was working for him. Were you talking about your husband?”
“Yes,” Furi said roughly. “He hasn’t seen or heard from me in almost a year. He might’ve thought I was dead.” He shrugged. “I finally had him served with divorce papers, which means he now knows my address. He and his brother will come for me, guaranteed. Even if it’s only to serve up one more ass whipping before he signs the papers.”
Syn heard the squeaking sound his steering wheel was making as he tightened his fists and squeezed the leather. He was getting angry, angrier than he’d been in a long time. The thought of someone harming the man beside him; touching even one lock of gorgeous hair on his head made Syn want to shoot something. He took a deep breath and tried to follow the directions Furi was giving him. He pulled up to a small house on the corner in a quiet neighborhood.
“This is your house?” Syn asked.
“Um. No, I rent the small basement apartment. It’s clean and safe,” Furi said quietly.
Syn discreetly looked around the street. He didn’t want to scare Furi, but Syn was at defcon 3 now that he knew some bastard might want to hurt his man. My man. Putting the cart before the horse again. He didn’t want to push Furi, didn’t want to make him feel inferior or weak, but the urge to protect was there, and it was powerful. Furi was strong, he’d experienced the man’s force a couple times, but everyone needed help sometimes. Syn was just the man to help. That’s what he was good at, damn good at.
”
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A.E. Via
“
Major - de Coverley was a splendid, awe-inspiring, grave old man with a massive leonine head and an angry shock of wild white hair that raged like a blizzard around his stern, patriarchal face. His duties as squadron executive officer did consist entirely, as both Doc Daneeka and Major Major had conjectured, of pitching horseshoes, kidnaping Italian laborers, and renting apartments for the enlisted men and officers to use on rest leaves, and he excelled at all three....He also iked to arrive in a city just before the occupying Allied force so that he could ride in a jeep at the front of the conquering army.
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Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
Do not let the focus on bakers and florists obscure this point: It is currently legal in most states to fire people for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender; to refuse to rent them apartments or hotel rooms; even to refuse to tow their cars or repair their furnaces. Should this change? Anderson and Girgis argue that it should not. 4.3.5
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John Corvino (Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination)
“
There was nowhere they could go; nowhere that the truth of who they were, the forbiddenness of their love, wouldn’t come chasing them.
Maybe love wasn’t enough after all. Not when every last obstacle was arrayed against you, all the odds stacked to make you fail. When the entire world was keeping you apart.
“Okay,” Avery said, as the universe quietly rent itself in two.
”
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Katharine McGee (The Dazzling Heights (The Thousandth Floor, #2))
“
Mental Accounting Alarm clocks and Christmas clubs are external devices people use to solve their self-control problems. Another way to approach these problems is to adopt internal control systems, otherwise known as mental accounting. Mental accounting is the system (sometimes implicit) that households use to evaluate, regulate, and process their home budget. Almost all of us use mental accounts, even if we’re not aware that we’re doing so. The concept is beautifully illustrated by an exchange between the actors Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman in one of those extra features offered on DVDs. Hackman and Hoffman were friends back in their starving artist days, and Hackman tells the story of visiting Hoffman’s apartment and having his host ask him for a loan. Hackman agreed to the loan, but then they went into Hoffman’s kitchen, where several mason jars were lined up on the counter, each containing money. One jar was labeled “rent,” another “utilities,” and so forth. Hackman asked why, if Hoffman had so much money in jars, he could possibly need a loan, whereupon Hoffman pointed to the food jar, which was empty. According to economic theory (and simple logic), money is “fungible,” meaning that it doesn’t come with labels. Twenty dollars in the rent jar can buy just as much food as the same amount in the food jar. But households adopt mental accounting schemes that violate fungibility for the same reasons that organizations do: to control spending. Most organizations have budgets for various activities, and anyone who has ever worked in such an organization has experienced the frustration of not being able to make an important purchase because the relevant account is already depleted. The fact that there is unspent money in another account is considered no more relevant than the money sitting in the rent jar on Dustin Hoffman’s kitchen counter.
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Richard H. Thaler (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness)
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What happens to a city when artists, teachers, lawyers, and anyone else making less than $100,000 cannot afford to live in it? Where will the people making coffee for the tech workers in the Mission live if only 4 percent of one-bedrooms in the neighborhood cost below $2,500 a month, making the area essentially off-limits to working-class people? Rebecca Solnit calculated that back in the 1950s and 1960s artists had to work about sixty-five hours a month at minimum wage to afford an apartment. San Francisco's minimum wage today is high for the United States, at $12.25, but a $2,500 apartment (which is on the very cheap end these days), would account for about 200 hours of minimum-wage work. That's more than a full-time job, just to pay the rent.
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P.E. Moskowitz (How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood)
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Martha Ridgley had been a single, working-class woman with no children or close family. Her killer had never been caught, and her case was eventually forgotten.
But not by everyone—not by whoever had been paying the rent on Apartment #37 for over two decades until, for one reason or another, the lease was finally up.
The Woman in Apartment #37
by
John Mead
from
Book of the Dead
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”
John Mead
“
The lack of affordable housing regulation allows rents to rise with little restriction, and Oregon law prohibits local governments from enacting almost all rent-control policies outside of special subsidized units. But regulation, like Portland’s famous urban growth boundary, has also enhanced the number of multi-unit buildings being constructed inside a limited zone to avoid suburban-like sprawl. Although Portland’s rental rates are not skyrocketing at the speed of San Francisco or even Seattle, the U.S. Census ranks Portland as having one of the tightest markets in the nation. Despite tax-abatement programs for luxury neighbors like the Pearl District and the South Waterfront supposedly tied to affordable-housing units, the city Housing Bureau says they won’t even meet 2003 goals, much less expand and continue programs. Meanwhile, the average condo price rose 41 percent last year and the average apartment rental has climbed at a steady pace of six percent in 2012 and again in 2013.
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Anonymous
“
The Kronenfelds did not mind me sleeping in their crowded apartment, one more did not matter. They started looking for accommodation for me somewhere near them. A Romanian woman, who owned a beautiful private home, rented me a corridor, between one part of the house and the other. There was just a bed, a tiny table, a chair and an entrance door, no window. She warned me right then that no guests were permitted into my "room". If anybody would want to get in touch with me, the person would have to wait in the street, but not call my name either. Even if I could find students to tutor, nobody was allowed inside. Since I had no alternative, I took that "room".
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Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
“
In America, my father began working as a clerk for a government agency. He rented an apartment in a place called Queens, New York. A year after he left us, he sent airplane tickets.
The Delhi of the seventies is hard to imagine: the quietness, the streets empty of traffic, children playing cricket in the middle of the street and rarely having to move out of the way to let cars by, the vegetable vendors who came pushing their carts down the streets in the late afternoon, crying out their wares in tight, high-pitched voices. There weren't VCRs back then, let alone cable channels. A movie would play for twenty-five or fifty weeks in huge auditorium theaters, and then once the movie was gone, it was gone forever. I remembered feeling grief when the enormous billboards for Sholay at the end of our street were taken down. It was like somebody had died.
It is also hard to remember how frugal we were. We saved the cotton that comes inside pill bottles. Our mothers used it to make wicks. This frugality meant that we were sensitive to the physical reality of the world in a way most people no longer are. When my mother bought a box of matches, she had my brother sit at a table and use a razor to split the matches in half. When we had to light several things, we would use the match to set a twist of paper on fire and then walk around the apartment lighting the stove, the incense stick, the mosquito coil. This close engagement with things meant that we were conscious that the wood of a match is soft, that a bit of spit on paper split on paper slows down how it burns.
By the time our airplane tickets arrived, not every family hired a band to play outside their house on the day of the departure to a foreign country. Still, many families did.
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Akhil Sharma
“
Harlem’s rents were twelve to thirty dollars a month higher than in other areas of the city, although black New Yorkers earned lower salaries than their white counterparts. In the mid-1920s, thirty dollars was a significant chunk of money, equal to about $300 today. Still, a 1924 Urban League study found that Negroes paid from 40 percent to 60 percent higher rents than white people for the same class of apartments—and segregated housing practices did not give black folks the option to just move out of Harlem and into more affordable New York neighborhoods.
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Valerie Boyd (Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston)
“
After paying Lisen what Alice owed her, I was cash poor. And the full rent for the apartment sat on my shoulders like a lead weight. I had to find a reliable roommate who would share expenses and accept that an infant lived in the place, too. I started by posting a notice on the bulletin board at the hospital. Soon after, a nurse who was interested contacted me and we met over lunch. Dot and I sat in the green-walled hospital cafeteria on slatted chairs and opened our sack lunches. A saucy brunette who wore cat-eye glasses and red lipstick along with her fashionably bobbed hair and tweezed, blackened eyebrows, Dot had been sharing an apartment with four other women and wanted more space to herself. I
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Ann Howard Creel (While You Were Mine)