Aurora James Quotes

There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.”   — James Thurber

He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A succession of sobs broke from his lips -- sobs in which the accumulated emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feelings that had possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind of solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him, and laid her finger-tips gently on his hand. So, for a minute, while his tears flowed and she said nothing, he felt her timid, consoling touch. At the end of the minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said "we" just before, and he asked her whom she meant.

They waited. And waited. And waited some more. Still nothing happened. She turned to Evan and looped her arms round his neck. "I think we might have to kiss. Aurora started them [The Harps] playing with her human boyfriend. I bet hey didn't just hold hands." Suddenly he looked just like the boys at school, impish and foxy. He out his arms tight around her neck. "Or maybe we have to do something more?" She laughed. "You wish." Their faces were inches apart. Little sparks of static were flashing and clicking between them. "I want to kiss you, just in case," he said. So he did, right there beneath the hard in the weird purple light, with their hair standing out like dandelion's. Her first true kiss. Strange. Soft. Sweet. And pretty painful because of the sparks that flew between their lips and zapped of their teeth. And the next moment they were hugging and kissing and almost falling over, until they bumped up against the harp. And this time it didn't ripple beneath them, it gave way." Page 272

1842  Son Waldo (age 5) dies of scarlet fever.  Journalist Walt Whitman (age 23) attends Emerson’s lecture on poetry in New York City. In his report for the New York Aurora, Whitman writes that it was the “richest and most beautiful” lecture he’d ever heard. On the same New York trip, Emerson becomes godfather to newborn William James, son of his friend, Henry James, Sr.

I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34 Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed. The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35 Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt. Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period: Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis… Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36 It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37 Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38

The world recoiled in horror in 2012 when 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. . . . The weapon was a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adapted from its original role as a battlefield weapon. The AR-15, which is designed to inflict maximum casualties with rapid bursts, should never have been available for purchase by civilians (emphasis added).1 —New York Times editorial, March 4, 2016 Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle. . . .(emphasis added)2 —New York Times editorial, December 11, 2015 [James Holmes the Aurora, Colorado Batman Movie Theater Shooter] also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear” (emphasis added).3 —New York Times, July 22, 2012 It is hard to debate guns if you don’t know much about the subject. But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.4 If it really believes that it has a strong case, it wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hype its claims. What distinguishes the New York Times is that it doesn’t bother running corrections for these errors.

My opinions about Holmes’s legal sanity were similar to Dr. Metzner’s: as of July 20, 2012, Holmes did not suffer from a mental disease or defect that prevented him from forming a culpable mental state. Regardless of any mental disorder or psychiatric symptoms he may have had at those relevant times, he knew that his shootings and killings would be, and were, illegal and socially wrong. He knew that others, including law enforcement officers and his psychiatrists, would try to stop him if they were aware of what he was planning to do. He knew the consequences to others, and to himself, of his actions, and he knowingly intended to carry them out in spite of their illegality and those likely consequences. He also understood the moral—as contrasted with legal—wrongfulness of his shootings and killings.

I did not find, and don’t believe today, that Holmes met accepted psychiatric criteria for a diagnosis of schizophrenia or its even more serious cousin, schizoaffective disorder, at the time of the shootings.

The testing instruments Dr. Gray and Dr. Manguso used also had elements to uncover different kinds of malingering, lack of interest in answering, and random answers. “Malingering” is a more complicated concept than simply trying to look sick when one is actually well. Some people try to “fake bad,” to appear sicker or more mentally ill than they are. Others, including some criminal defendants who don’t like the idea of being called crazy, try to “fake good”—that is, to look normal.

There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.” — James Thurber

To those who don’t understand why Fenton or Feinstein didn’t simply put Holmes into a hospital whether he wanted to go or not: it just doesn’t work that way. Protection from unjustified confinement is a very important civil right in the United States.

He maintained later that he stopped seeing Fenton because he lost his insurance when he dropped out of graduate school, implying that if she’d kept seeing him, he wouldn’t have committed the Century 16 murders.

Blaming the shootings on the doctors or lack of money doesn’t wash, of course. It’s a ridiculous rationalization, or just crazy. Holmes admits that Drs. Fenton and Feinstein offered to see him regardless of insurance and that he had plenty of money and additional support from his parents. Bob and Arlene had told him clearly that money was no problem when it came to getting psychiatric help.

Ultimately, the more we can understand one another, the better off we will be.

A man does not buy his wife fur to keep her warm, but to keep her pleasant,

One night, I had too many drinks and called Fresh. He answered. He was apologetic, and kind, and my bar for male behavior was low enough that I felt okay to let his behavior slide.

You can say you want to support goods that are handmade on the continent of Africa. But if you are unable to wait a little bit longer for these goods, or spend a little bit more so the workers can be paid a living wage, then what does your support mean?

You have to ask yourself if the way you live your life is in unison with the implementation of the values you claim to hold. Just