Arcadia Time Quotes

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Then I realize from the hollow sound of her gun's click that her gun isn't loaded. Apparently she just wants to slap me around with it. The Girl doesn't move her gun away. "How old are you?" "Fifteen." "That's better." The Girl lowers her gun a little. "Time for a few confessions.Were you responsible for the break-in at the Arcadia bank?" The ten-second place. "Yes." "Then you must be responsible for stealing sixteen thousand five hundred Notes from there as well." "You got that right." "Were you responsible for vandalizing the Department of Intra-Defense two years ago, and destroying the engines of two warfront airships?" "Yes." "Did you set fire to a series of ten F-472 fighter jets parked at the Burbank air force base right before they were to head out to the warfront?" "I'm kinda proud of that one." "Did assault a cadet standing guard at the edge of the Alta sector's quarantine zone?" "I tied him up and delivered food to some quarantined families.Bite me.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or bomb. It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won't, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won't let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It's a miracle that it exists at all.

THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief? SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

It wasn’t the first time I’d run across sex spells: they were just as common as electricity-kindled spells. They just aren’t convenient for your average on-the-go magical needs. “Do all the memory spells require that?” I asked. “I don’t think so. I just noticed it on the last couple of retrieval ones.” “Uh, maybe I could just get myself, you know, privately …?” I suggested. I regretted it immediately, and felt my face flush with warmth. What the hell was I going to do? Ask Lon if he had any porn I could borrow and hole up in his library’s washroom?

We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.

I love people randomly and suddenly, and it’s a curse most of the time.

HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

Even if what you said was true, that only makes it worse. Truth should be left in wrapped boxes for people to open when they’re ready. When it’s used as a blade, they vacuum-seal the pain somewhere deep inside, sealing the truth in with it, until it’s time to turn it inside out and cut someone else. I

This time they picked up their hand luggage and moved away from their son, following Lieges towards the air-van. But instead of changing his stance, Alain Pen just dug in hull-down. “They won’t go without me,” he told Morley confidently. “So what are you really up to, eh? I know we’re not going to Bull Crater on holiday.” “You’ve got a vivid imagination, kid.” “Stop calling me kid,” Alain objected. “I know something’s going on and I’ve reported it to my section leader.

Clearly we have all the time in the world,” she said crossly. “Feel free to start way back with the dinosaurs—just as long as you get to the Carnevares and Alcantaras sometime.

His heart...responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.

Together, we travel the living river. We turn our faces to the sunlight and fly time and time again home to Kingdom Arcadia.

Generally speaking, our minds impose an entirely artificial order on the world. It is the only way that such an inadequate instrument as our brain can function. It cannot deal with the complexity of reality, so simplifies everything until it can, putting events into an artificial order so they can be dealt with one at a time, rather than all at once as they should be. Such a way of interpreting existence is learnt, rather in the way that our brain has to turn the images which hit our retinas upside down in order to make sense of them. Children

No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination.

After changing shape several times, the ball eventually turned into a huge face. It floated alongside the air-car. This time, time instead of sending him a mental message, the face spoke out aloud and the whole air-car vibrated with its intensity. “If you are foolish enough to renege on your contract, you will be severely punished. For your sake, I hope you wouldn’t do such a thing.” When Tarmy made no attempt to respond, the face turned and pressed itself against the millipede-free window. A moment later, Tarmy felt the fat slug entering his mind, the sign that the face was attempting to use its powers to obtain his response by other means. But as the slug dug deeper, Samantha’s cover stories began springing out of the corners of his mind. Instead of obtaining Tarmy’s agreement, all that the face saw was a burning army transporter surrounded by bodies. Undeterred, the face continued its assault. Samantha had anticipated that Tarmy might come up against an adept, so the mental images of death and destruction flowed unchecked. After failing to break Tarmy’s defences, the face removed the slug and tried reason. “You can’t win, Mr Tarleton, so why don’t you do yourself a favour and cooperate? It will be better for you in the long run. Now, where is the miniature pulse drive engine?” Tarmy realised why the millipedes hadn’t been allowed to attack. It was obvious that the Great Ones were hoping to retrieve the engine. When Tarmy didn’t respond, the face said, “I am prepared to overlook your desertion if you agree to tell us where the engine is and also honour your contract by showing us how to convert the engine into a bomb.

Coming back, he took the tracker out of Morley’s hand, slid back into the car and flipped a switch. An internal Mannheim, a force shield, flared into life, dividing the front of the car from the rear. Once he was satisfied the Mannheim would prevent the sound of their voices being picked up by any undiscovered bugs he spoke. “I have a plan, a way to turn the tables on them.” “How?” Instead of explaining, Lieges waved his hand at the stray dog. Thinking it was going to be fed, the mutt came over. Lieges grabbed it, removed some of the gum he was chewing, fixed the bug to it and stuck the gum under the dog’s collar. Picking the dog up, he placed it in the front of the air-car. Morley hissed. “What the hell are you doing?” “Thinking laterally,” Lieges replied. “We’ll fly a few kilometres from here and push the dog out. The BlackClads will then lock onto the dog and not us. No doubt they’ll realise something is wrong after they’ve been tracking it for a while, but it will probably buy us some time.

Playing Cupid, I should have you know, isn’t just a matter of flying around Arcadia and feeling your tiny winkle throb when the lovers finally kiss. It’s to do with timetables and street maps, cinema times and menus, money and organisation. You have to be both jaunty cheerleader and lithe psychiatrist. You require the binary skill of being absent when present, and present when absent.

Life doesn't fit the Hollywood formula; there are no act breaks to orient you, no running times printed helpfully on the back of the box. So you do your best to line up each shot, each frame. You make sure that if this shot ends up being the last, it's damn well going to be bold or bittersweet or beautiful enough to go out on.

It brushes him, the good feeling that he is sitting in a fold of time.

Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.

...she says, Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it. He doesn't say anything. Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been where you are.

Even when you think you can’t bear it, you can bear it. He doesn’t say anything. Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been where you are. This is something I do know. In

The steam whistle will not affright him nor the flutes of Arcadia weary him: for him there is but one time, the artistic moment; but one law, the law of form; but one land, the land of Beauty - a land removed indeed from the real world and yet more sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm which dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which comes not from the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm which despair and sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only. And so it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of what is accidental and transitory, stripped it of that ‘mist of familiarity which makes life obscure to us.

Don’t let Bernard get to you. It’s only performance art, you know. Rhetoric. They used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It’s not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard’s indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

It is easy to imagine a world where not only can few people read, few need to or want to. Serious reading can become the preserve of a s mall group of specialists, just as shoe-making or farming is for us. Think how much time would be saved. We send children to school and they spend most of their time learning to read and then, when they leave, they never pick up another book for the rest of their lives. Reading is only important if there is something worthwhile to read. Most of it is ephemeral. That means an oral culture of tales told and remembered. People can be immensely sophisticated in thought and understanding without much writing.

Oh, you’re going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I’ll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don’t confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars—big bangs, black holes—who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?

The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath. He takes photo after photo with his ruined film, to hold them there. This is what, long ago, made him fall in love with photography: the paying of attention, the capturing of time. He’d forgotten exactly this.

You just have to look hard. Then you’ll find what you’re after.” It sounded almost as if he were trying to help her in her search for the unique, awkward magic of the place. And she realized he must have thought the same, the first time he ever drove along this road to nowhere, maybe every time he returned. Even today. Maybe everyone, in the face of this void, was searching for something to cling to. Alessandro perhaps even a little more than other people. In the last few minutes she’d discovered more thoughtfulness in him than she’d have thought possible, more desire for answers. Thinking this, it was difficult to look away from him and turn her eyes on what lay ahead of them again.

The Renaissance did not break completely with mediaeval history and values. Sir Philip Sidney is often considered the model of the perfect Renaissance gentleman. He embodied the mediaeval virtues of the knight (the noble warrior), the lover (the man of passion), and the scholar (the man of learning). His death in 1586, after the Battle of Zutphen, sacrificing the last of his water supply to a wounded soldier, made him a hero. His great sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella is one of the key texts of the time, distilling the author's virtues and beliefs into the first of the Renaissance love masterpieces. His other great work, Arcadia, is a prose romance interspersed with many poems and songs.

He finds the smallest story. His finger runs under each word as he puzzles it out. It is about a mother with many children in a time of famine, something Bit knows: the terror in the belly, winterberry and soybeans all they have left in the mason jars. The mother wants to eat her children. They are angelic and choose to die for her. But she is so ashamed with their sacrifice that she doesn’t eat them. Instead, she runs away.

The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion. The history of the garden says it all, beautifully. There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760 everything had gone – the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes – the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date. By the time he’d finished it looked like this (the sketch book). The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.

They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or a bomb. It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won’t, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won’t let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.

The malicious erasure of women’s names from the historical record began two or three thousand years ago and continues into our own period. Women take as great a risk of anonymity when they merge their names with men in literary collaboration as when they merge in matrimony. The Lynds, for example, devoted equal time, thought, and effort to the writing of Middletown, but today it is Robert Lynd’s book. Dr. Mary Leakey made the important paleontological discoveries in Africa, but Dr. Louis Leakey gets all the credit. Mary Beard did a large part of the work on America in Midpassage, yet Charles Beard is the great social historian. The insidious process is now at work on Eve Curie. A recent book written for young people states that radium was discovered by Pierre Curie with the help of his assistant, Eve, who later became his wife. Aspasia wrote the famous oration to the Athenians, as Socrates knew, but in all the history books it is Pericles’ oration. Corinna taught Pindar and polished his poems for posterity; but who ever heard of Corinna? Peter Abelard got his best ideas from Heloise, his acknowledged intellectual superior, yet Abelard is the great medieval scholar and philosopher. Mary Sidney probably wrote Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; Nausicaa wrote the Odyssey, as Samuel Butler proves in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, at least to the satisfaction of this writer and of Robert Graves, who comment, “no other alternative makes much sense.

The baby girl who lifted the flaps of Rod Campbell's Dear Zoo becomes the toddler charmed by Ludwig Behmelman's Madeline who turns into the sixth grader listening open-mouthed to Mark Halperin's A Kingdom Far and Clear who grows up to be the young woman swept away by Leo Tolstoy and the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of Anna Karenina. Each book makes straight the path for the next, opening out into sunlit literary meadows where, over time, young people will encounter beautiful writing and characters and scenes that may have been known, loved, and remembered by generations long since past. For the child, or teenager, or anyone else for that matter, getting these tickets to arcadia is a matter of simplicity. All they have to do is listen.

At all times and in all places, in season and out of season, time is now and England, place is now and England; past and present inter-penetrate. The best days an angler spends upon his river – the river which is Heraclitus’ river, which is never the same as the angler is never the same, yet is the same always – are those he recollects in tranquillity, as wintry weather lashes the land without, and he, snug and warm, ties new patterns of dry-fly, and remembers the leaf-dapple upon clear water and the play of light and the eternal dance of ranunculus in the chalk-stream. A cricket match between two riotously inexpert village Second XIs is no less an instance of timeless, of time caught in ritual within an emerald Arcadia, than is a Test at Lord’s, and we who love the greatest of games know that we do indeed catch a fleeting glimpse of a spectral twelfth man on every pitch, for in each re-enactment of the mystery there is the cumulation of all that has gone before and shall come after. Et ego in Arcadia.

This popular ideology contends that the religious experience is tranquil and neatly ordered, tender and delicate; it is an enchanted stream for embittered souls and still waters for troubled spirits. The person “who comes in from the field, weary” (Gen. 25:29), from the battlefield and campaigns of life, from the secular domain which is filled with doubts and fears, contradictions and refutations, clings to religion as does a baby to its mother and finds in her lap “a shelter for his head, the nest of his forsaken prayers” and there is comforted for his disappointments and tribulations. This Rousseauian ideology left its stamp on the entire Romantic movement from the beginning of its growth until its final (tragic!) manifestations in the consciousness of contemporary man. Therefore, the representatives of religious communities are inclined to portray religion, in a wealth of colors that dazzle the eye, as a poetic Arcadia, a realm of simplicity, wholeness, and tranquillity. This ideology is intrinsically false and deceptive. That religious consciousness in man’s experience, which is most profound and most elevated, which penetrates to the very depths and ascends to the very heights, is not that simple and comfortable. On the contrary, it is exceptionally complex, rigorous, and tortuous. Where you find its complexity, there you find its greatness. The consciousness of homo religiosis flings bitter accusations against itself and immediately is filled with regret, judges its desires and yearnings with excessive severity, and at the same time steeps itself in them, casts derogatory aspersions on its own attributes, flails away at them, but also subjugates itself to them. It is in a condition of spiritual crisis, of psychic ascent and descent, of contradiction arising from affirmation and negation, self-abnegation and self-appreciation. Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs, and torments.

Aunt Gertie could not tell the difference between 1928 and now. Uncle Joseph was dead and alive. In other words, she grasped the essential non-existence of time. Generally speaking, our minds impose an entirely artificial order on the world. It is the only way that such an inadequate instrument as our brain can function. It cannot deal with the complexity of reality, so simplifies everything until it can, putting events into an artificial order so they can be dealt with one at a time, rather than all at once as they should be. Such a way of interpreting existence is learnt, rather in the way that our brain has to turn the images which hit our retinas upside down in order to make sense of them. Children have little sense of time; nor do the very old. They live in an ever-present now, which stretches into the past and off into the future. Effect triggers cause, and both happen at the same moment, be that yesterday or tomorrow. Aunt Gertie sensed this because all the acquired mental discipline of the years was falling away from her. Once you realised this, her conversation was perfectly comprehensible, even if it did make me a little dizzy.

Our story begins on a sweltering August night, in a sterile white room where a single fateful decision is made amid the mindless ravages of grief. But our story does not end there. It has not ended yet. Would I change the course of our lives if I could? Would I have spent my years plucking out tunes on a showboat, or turning the soil as a farmer’s wife, or waiting for a riverman to come home from work and settle in beside me at a cozy little fire? Would I trade the son I bore for a different son, for more children, for a daughter to comfort me in my old age? Would I give up the husbands I loved and buried, the music, the symphonies, the lights of Hollywood, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live far distant but have my eyes? I ponder this as I sit on the wooden bench, Judy’s hand in mine, the two of us quietly sharing yet another Sisters’ Day. Here in the gardens at Magnolia Manor, we’re able to have Sisters’ Day anytime we like. It is as easy as leaving my room, and walking to the next hall, and telling the attendant, “I believe I’ll take my dear friend Judy out for a little stroll. Oh yes, of course, I’ll be certain she’s delivered safely back to the Memory Care Unit. You know I always do.” Sometimes, my sister and I laugh over our clever ruse. “We’re really sisters, not friends,” I remind her. “But don’t tell them. It’s our secret.” “I won’t tell.” She smiles in her sweet way. “But sisters are friends as well. Sisters are special friends.” We recall our many Sisters’ Day adventures from years past, and she begs me to share what I remember of Queenie and Briny and our life on the river. I tell her of days and seasons with Camellia, and Lark, and Fern, and Gabion, and Silas, and Old Zede. I speak of quiet backwaters and rushing currents, the midsummer ballet of dragonflies and winter ice floes that allowed men to walk over water. Together, we travel the living river. We turn our faces to the sunlight and fly time and time again home to Kingdom Arcadia. Other days, my sister knows me not at all other than as a neighbor here in this old manor house. But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse. “Aren’t they so very sweet?

Even Blood Shades are unsure just where these come from. In less enlightened times, they were thought to be the voices of the devil, in his many forms. Or at least a conspiracy of powerful demons. A cacophany of screams, moans, and laughs, the laughter of a Blood Shade, unfiltered by mortal form or the manners of human society. A concerto of horrors for my target’s eyes and ears alone.

I started adjusting to a daily three-hour sleep schedule when I was in middle school,” McTeague says, “and sometimes I have trouble figuring out how everyone else makes do with less than a twenty-hour day. How do they find time in their lives for, you know, living?

For the sake of objectivity, the programme analysed both histories - real and alternative - without being informed which was which. It concluded that the second, actual sequence of events was statistically so improbable that it could not possibly happen. ... We are required to believe a) that a drug-addled, womanising inexperienced Catholic with strong links to criminal organisations could defeat the most experienced politician in the country, and that his dire medical condition and dubious character could be kept secret. And also that he could conduct exceptionally successful diplomacy in 1962 while being high as a kite on a coctail of painkillers and stimulants; b) that a president, his brother and several others could all be murdered in a short space of time, by insane gunman, each acting alone, for no discernible reason. Also that Kennedy could be shot by someone with known links to the Soviet Union without there being any consequences; c) that Nixon in office would sanction a pointless burglary, during an election campaign he was bound to win anyway, and that a man with such experience would fail to control the minor political scandal that resulted; d) that 1980 the United States would elect as president an ageing actor with little experience and dyed orange hair.

The Desoto Solar Farm was known to be dangerous by the time President Obama opened it.

I often wonder if President Obama privately jokes about the time he launched the dangerous Desoto Solar Farm to the world’s media as a great achievement!

President Obama launched the dangerous Desoto Solar Farm to the world at a time we knew there were major technical problems with it!

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

You may love Arcadias. But he doesn’t love you. If Arcadias truly loved you he would not lead you into harm’s way, he would lead you away from harm. An honorable man should defend and protect his woman at all times, even to the point of laying down his life for her. Arcadias isn’t doing that for you,” Annie said. “I’m sorry to have to say that, Iris, but everyone in this room can see Arcadias is thinking only of himself.” Iris wiped at her eyes as she digested Annie’s statement. “Okay, but I can’t do anything about your hands and the plastic cuffs. I can only untie your feet.” Iris moved toward Rafter and squatted down near his feet. “No, Iris, untie Mr. Jepson first, and then Annie. Save me for last,

Mama, did you see the angel place his wing in front of Jon Rafter right before Arcadias shot his gun? The angel’s wing slowed the bullets’ velocity.” “I did, son. The angel also used his wing to deflect the bullets into the Bible in Jon’s shirt pocket. We just watched a miracle take place.” Josiah stood up and clapped his hands. “Now I can rest easy knowing the Rafters are okay.” “Seeing a miracle like that makes you wonder how often miracles occur on Earth without people even realizing they’re taking place.” “I’m sure they happen all the time, Mama. Although they might not always be as dramatic a miracle as mine was, and the one we just witnessed.

It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. —Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993

I did very much hope that he wasn't frittering away his time on nonsense when he had a fantasy to dream about.

Aunt Gertie could not tell the difference between 1928 and now. Uncle Joseph was dead and alive. In other words, she grasped the essential non-existence of time. Generally speaking, our minds impose an entirely artificial order on the world. It is the only way that such an inadequate instrument as our brain can function. It cannot deal with the complexity of reality, so simplifies everything until it can, putting events into an artificial order so they can be dealt with one at a time, rather than all at once as they should be. Such a way of interpreting existence is learnt, rather in the way that our brain has to turn the images which hit our retinas upside down in order to make sense of them. Children have little sense of time; nor do the very old. They live in an ever-present now, which stretches into the past and off into the future. Effect triggers cause, and both happen at the same moment, be that yesterday or tomorrow.

day with the douche brothers, he was mostly jealous of the man’s intoxication. Not to mention that if his gift was walking around in other people’s twisted brains, he’d be half drunk all the time as well. But the man working door duty was obstinate bordering on downright rude. “I’m not asking to see the Master, I am telling you to bring us to her. Not giving you an option here, spacebrain. We are on official Arcadia business by order of the Governor and the Chancellor.” He could feel the mystic push against his brain. The man wasn’t strong enough to get through Stellan’s defenses, but he had to remember to keep the wall in place. Anger had a way of weakening one’s capacity to keep a mystic out. “Yes, yes, yes. The Governor and Chancellor… I heard that. I just can’t, not tonight. She isn’t to be disturbed. Would not be prudent to go against what she desires.” The man’s bloodshot eyes dashed back and forth from Stellan to the other two guards. He was suddenly nervous, and it struck Stellan

as much as anyone could get used to the grim shadow of death dropping over you all the damn time.

We’re all entitled to reinvent ourselves from time to time, aren’t we?

I spent a lot of time in Arcadia when I worked there in 2009.

O time, become the chariot of my joys; As thou draw'st on, let my bliss draw near. Each moment lost, part of my hap destroys.

I joy in grief, and do detest all joys; Despise delight, am tired with thoughts of ease. I turn my mind to all forms of annoys, And with the change of them my fancy please. I study that which most may me displease, And in despite of that most my soul destroys; Blinded with beams, fell darkness is my sight; Dwell in my ruins, feed with sucking smart, I think from me, not from my woes, to part. I think from me, not from my woes, to part, And loathe this time called life, nay think that life Nature to me for torment did impart; Think my hard haps have blunted death's sharp knife, Not sparing me in whom his works be rife; And thinking this, think nature, life, and death Place sorrow's triumph on my conquered heart. Whereto I yield, and seek no other breath But from the scent of some infectious grave; Nor of my fortune aught but mischief crave.

Breaking down in tears won’t help her and we don’t have time to cycle through the stages of grief. Or, if it will make you feel better, I can do so quickly: This can’t be — it’s not fair! Why don’t you take me instead, God? I’m so sad. But I have to get on with my life.

Though it's often considered insulting to note, women in the aggregate have different preferences: we tend to put "people jobs" over "things jobs", as someone once put it to me. This has caused feminists a great deal of consternation. Pricked by the embarassment of natural differences between men and women, they blame society and insist women need to be taught to adopt different preferences. But behind this insistence lies the idea that women's preferences are inferior. Young girls are left to conclude that they must strive to be more like men- they must close the novel they were enjoying and take up coding. They must want things men want because men want them. The talking point about the dearth of women CEOs is a classic. The fact of this disparity might just as easily be understood differently: CEOs lead fairly unbalanced lives. They make a lot of money and have very little time. Their relationships suffer. They have high rates of divorce. Women might recognize this difference and assume that men are the ones to be pitied. We might just as easily say: Women are so much better adjusted, so much wiser for preferring relationships to dollars. We might as easily say: Of course women prefer literature to software engineering! It's far more interesting. It has the power to transport, to move hearts and minds. Literature is the story one generaton tells to the next. So many women study, teach and produce great literature. Who is the wiser sex? Instead we presume that if men dominate the STEM departments, they must be occupying the university's Arcadia. If CEOs are overwhelmingly male, then women are being unfairly excluded- by men who outfox them, a system that diminishes them, preferences that lead them astray. We want to have it both ways: acknowledging sotto voce that Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, and Jeff Bezos have not enjoyed enviable personal lives, while insisting every woman should or would stand in their shoes, given half a chance. [...] We must stop. It's a dumb habit, thoughtless and base. It reflects an unflattering insecurity we shouldn't indulge. The jealousy at its heart suggests that either we believe women aren't truly capable, or they have somehow be duped, made victims by a "system" that, generation after generation, locks us out and shuts us in with so many glass ceilings and walls. It's an exhausting set of untruths. Worst of all, girls are listening.

By Pan of Arcadia, your lyre's melody is so sweet, Zenophilia, and oh so very sweet your touch. How can I escape you? Love's agents surround me, allow no time to breathe: Beauty rouses my passion, or maybe my Muse or Grace, or—what can I say?— all of these. I burn, I flame.

He had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another, at the expence not only of likelihood, but of possibility. These faults Pope has endeavoured, with more zeal than judgment, to transfer to his imagined in interpolators. We need not wonder to find Hector quoting Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies. Shakespeare, indeed, was not the only violator of chronology, for in the same age Sidney, who wanted not the advantages of learning, has, in his “Arcadia”, confounded the pastoral with the feudal times, the days of innocence, quiet and security, with those of turbulence, violence and adventure.

One of the first things you learn as a Borderline is that the only way to keep any friends is to act as though you’re not feeling what you’re feeling at least 30 percent of the time. I

My body jostled again, this time in gentler arms with a familiar scent. One I’d almost forgotten, bringing another onset of tears to my eyes. “Slate?” My voice broke as I cracked open my eyes. “Nice to see you again, Princess,” he said, his tone soft as he scanned my abused body with a grimace.

I just made you indestructible. Should’ve done it a long time ago…” I tipped my head, feeling clearer than I had in weeks. “What do you mean?” Valik tilted his chin upward, biting his bottom lip as if debating what to tell me. “I just made it really fucking hard for you to die.

Get her back to the Hollow. Guard her with your life. Then, you’re gonna be there for her.” Slate pierced me with a saddened gaze, knowing what I’d done and the fate I was doomed to. And I trusted him to follow through no matter what it cost him. “I will not be in a relationship with her this time. It would be too cruel after everything she’s been through.” I shook my head in a nod. “Good because she’s mine.

I took them all, except for the day on the playground. I let that one remain so she had a thread guiding her back to me one day. Gods, it flayed me to do this again. I had only been ten years old last time, forced by the king to take away her memory of awakening her abilities down in the interrogation room on the day we’d met on the