Author Unknown Quotes

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries

This is the beginning of a new day You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important Because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever. In its place is something that you have left behind . . . Let it be something good. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Grief never ends … But it changes. It’s a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. It is the price of love. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Candy is natures way of making up for Mondays." ~Unknown Author

The problem is not people being educated. The problem is that they are educated just enough to believe what they've been taught, but not educated enough to question what they've been taught. ~ Author Unknown

this heart yearns... for the salt of unsmelt air unswept thunderstorms... unknown adventures.

At one point, all authors are unknown until the day they are not.

Sometimes two people have to fall apart to realize how much they need to fall back together. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

They whispered to her: you cannot withstand the storm. She whispered back: I am the storm.

This is the beginning of a new day You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important Because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever. In its place is something that you have left behind... Let it be something good. -Author Unknown

Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown. —Author Unknown

This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn't want the fearful unknown of a 'pristine wilderness.' They didn't want a soulless artificial life, either.

A mom’s hug lasts long after she lets go. ~Author Unknown

There is no telling how many miles you will have to run while chasing a dream. -- Author unknown

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.

Love, when it came and knocked on my door, was going to be enough. And that unknown author who'd written that if you had fame, it was not enough, and if you had wealth as well, it was still not enough, and if you had fame, wealth, and also love ... still it was not enough - boy, did I feel sorry for him.

He who travels far will often see things far removed from what he believed was truth. When he talks about it in the fields at home, he is often accused of lying for the obdurate people will not believe what they do not see and distinctly feel. Inexperience, I believe, will give little credence to my song." (author unknown)

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.

People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped" Author unknown

Hearts are wild creatures. That’s why our ribs are cages. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Sometimes the strongest among us are the ones who smile through silent pain, cry behind closed doors, and fight battles nobody knows about. —Unknown Author

With thoughtless and impatient hands We tangle up the plans The Lord hath wrought. And when we cry in pain He saith, “Be quiet, man, while I untie the knot.” (Author unknown, in Jack M. Lyon et al., Best-Loved Poems of the LDS People [1996], 304)

He who would speak of unknown authors, buried beneath the rubble of centuries, inevitably lays himself open, at least to begin with, to the suspicion of being a crotchety sort with very queer tastes.

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

Sometimes life gives you a second chance because just maybe the first time you weren’t ready.” – Unknown Author

No one is perfect . . . that’s why pencils have erasers.    —author unknown

Now that science has helped us to overcome the awe of the unknown in nature, we are the slaves of social pressures of our own making. When called upon to act independently, we cry for patterns, systems, and authorities. If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate--in short, the emancipation from fear--then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.

A comfort zone is a beautiful place but nothing ever grows there.

Never be Ashamed of a scar It simply means you were stronger than whatever Tries to hurt you

Without knowing how to calculate the odds on such matters, it seems improbably to me that God would have whispered the meaning of my life into the ear of some guru or authority.

Sometimes you must do crazy things to discover the life beyond your life, to enter the unknown zone beyond your known zone!

She needed a hero, so that’s what she became.

If in life you stumble make it part of you dance." -author unknown

Never ignore a person who loves you, cares for you, and misses you. Because one day, you might wake up from your sleep and realize that you lost the moon while counting the stars. – Author Unknown

  'This is, you understand Mr Goode, exceptional for an unknown author and on account of the South Sea Bubble bursting, well, I am no longer given to advancing large copyrights but since you are blessed by good timing - great fortune bestowing you with a cold spell that has made London so terribly sick - I make an exception.' 

Quote for the day from an unknown author: "Don't ever question the value of volunteers: Noah's Ark was built by volunteers; the Titanic was built by porfessionals".

Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don’t understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... The one test of the really weird is simply this - whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.

In contrast to the notion that any publicity is good publicity, negative reviews hurt sales for some books. But for books by new or relatively unknown authors, negative reviews increased sales by 45%.... Even a bad review or negative word of mouth can increase sales if it informs or reminds people that the product or idea exists.

And it came to pass in those days, as it had come before and would come again, that the Dark lay heavy on the land adn weighed down the hearts of men, and the green things failed, and hope died. And men cried out to the Creator, saying, O Light of the Heavens, Light of the World, let the Promised One be born of the mountian, according to the prophecies, as he was in ages past and will be in ages to come. Let the Prince of the Morning sing to the land that green things will grow and the valleys give forth lams. Let the arm of the Lord of the Dawn shelter us from the Dark, and the great sword of justice defend us. Let the Dragon die again on the winds of time. -from Charal Drianaan te Calamon, The Cycle of the Dragon. Author unknown, the Fourth Age.

where oh where, in what cemetery of the heavens do the tender words of lovers rest when they love no more? (Searching for author)

Of course I'm out of my mind. It's dark and scary in there.

It is easier to believe a lie one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact one has never heard before.”                                                                                                                                               —author unknown

Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.” ~ Author Unknown

In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” ~ Author unknown

The person who really wants to do something finds a way; the other person finds an excuse. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Lose an hour in the morning, chase it all day.”—a Yiddish saying, author unknown

friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow. AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it fine?’ And not, ‘Look at the home so-and-so has built.’ Thus we shouldn’t cry, ‘Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!’ But rather, ‘Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?

There is a space on everyone's bookshelves for books you have outgrown but can't throw away. They hold your youth between their pages,like flowers pressed on a half-forgotten Summer's day.

The walls of her room are screaming out loud all of the secrets that she’s held onto for all these years, every tear that broke her heart and slashed her wrist, and every memory that rips apart her soul. And to this day, she still cant breathe.

What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

[Author's Notes] As I write this, September 2002, much about the humpback song is still unknown. (Although scientists do know that it tends to be found in the New Age music section, as well as in tropical waters...)

Book sense makes sense because someone has gone through it before and able to share it with you. Your job is to listen and discern.

Suicide does not mean there was no killer.

CONCLUSION THE ESSENCE OF A NEW DAY This is the beginning of a new day You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important Because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever. In its place is something that you have left behind... Let it be something good. -Author Unknown

Lovecraft said that the oldest and strongest type of fear is the fear of the unknown. And he was an authority on such matters. But that's not exactly it, is it? We like the unknown. We're hunky dory with the unknown. We are, in fact, perfectly thrilled with the unknown -- as long as it remains unknown and we never have to think about it. What we're really afraid of is that the unknown will stand up and demand to be recognized. That it won't get out of the way quickly enough and we'll step in it, all squishy and moist. We're terrified at night in the dark that the rough, slouching unknown will crawl into bed and give us a hot wet kiss on the neck. We're not afraid of the unknown. We're afraid of the unknown becoming known.

The best thing about existence is that any moment in time can be a point of beginning to anything! In other words, every moment of our life holds a key for the unknown or the closed doors of new paths!

much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.90 This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living.

1. Success is a choice. -Rick Pitino 2. Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well. -Warren Lester 3. I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment; it takes place every day. -Albert Camus 4. If you're not fired up with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm. -Vince Lombardi 5. There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity. -Douglas MacArthur 6. Yesterday's the past and tomorrow's the future. Today is a gift, which is why they call it the present. -Bill Keane 7. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure. -Thomas Edison 8. When you get to the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on. -Franklin D. Roosevelt 9. The best way to predict your future is to create it. -Author unknown 10. I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says, "Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest." I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have. -Harry S Truman 11. Triumph? Try Umph! -Author unknown 12. You hit home runs not by chance but by preparation. -Roger Maris 13. If you don't have enough pride, you're going to get your butt beat every play. -Gale Sayers 14. My mother taught me very early to believe I could achieve any accomplishment I wanted to. The first was to walk without braces. -Wilma Rudolph 15. You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. -Margaret Thatcher

The Mask Always a mask Held in the slim hand whitely Always she had a mask before her face— Truly the wrist Holding it lightly Fitted the task: Sometimes however Was there a shiver, Fingertip quiver, Ever so slightly— Holding the mask? For years and years and years I wondered But dared not ask And then— I blundered, Looked behind the mask, To find Nothing— She had no face. She had become Merely a hand Holding a mask With grace. —Author unknown

i dreamt that i died. for an instant, all the voices in my head stood calm, and for a moment, my heart stopped panicking, and for once in my whole life, my cheeks dried from all the tears that were falling every night ... i thought to my self: how nice it is to be finally dead, i wish i did it sooner. my brother once told me that people who commit suicide are mostly doing it for attention. that's so wrong. i'm not asking for attention, nor sympathy. when i put that blade on my shaking skin alone in my room at 3 am, you should be sure that i'm not thinking of anyone and i'm not asking for anyone's attention. all i'm doing is pushing my self to stop the pain. you see, i don't want to die too, all i want is for the pain to stop and for me to smile like everyone else. yasuko amaya - the day i decided to be God -

What we should do, I suggest, is to give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach. We may admit that our groping is often inspired, but we must be on our guard against the belief, however deeply felt, that our inspiration carries any authority, divine or otherwise. If we thus admit that there is no authority beyond the reach of criticism to be found within the whole province of our knowledge, however far it may have penetrated into the unknown, then we can retain, without danger, the idea that truth is beyond human authority. And we must retain it. For without this idea there can be no objective standards of inquiry; no criticism of our conjectures; no groping for the unknown; no quest for knowledge.

... You tricked me,” cried the Little Blue Wolf. “You tricked me and now you have stolen my tail! Without it I can never go home.” The Monster in the Mountain laughed. “Silly little wolf. Did you really think you could sleep in the mouth of a monster and not get bit?” —Excerpt from a North American werewolf fable. Date and author unknown.

NINA Your life is beautiful. TRIGORIN I see nothing especially lovely about it. [He looks at his watch] Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry. [He laughs] You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. [After a few moments' thought] Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth--I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!

To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.

I'm a bookaholic on the road to recovery. Ha, not really. I'm on the road to the bookstore.

If you want something different in your life...You must do something different with your life. unknown author

Fear spread through the house.

Every bestselling author was once completely unknown. A good book will eventually find its place in the world.

Whoever remains for long here in this earthly life will enjoy and endure more than enough.

The uncertainty of the future is a great blessing for us humans! Let the road ahead of us be completely unknown for us so that we can have the marvellous joy of discovering it!

The unhappy people of the known paths must certainly try the unknown paths in their search of happiness!

Control thought of the theories as “slow death by,” given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: “Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake?

In many chapels, reddened by the setting sun, the saints rest silently, waiting for someone to love them." These words, penned by an unknown priest, long dead,were the inspiration for my new series on the lives of saints who have fallen deep into the shadows of obscurity. My hope is that, in reading their heroic stories, you will make the acquaintance of some of God's Forgotten Friends. (From the Preface of "Saint Magnus The Last Viking")

The Mystery of Amergin; I am the wind which breathes upon the sea, I am the wave of the ocean, I am the murmur of the billows, I am the ox of the seven combats, I am the vulture upon the rocks, I am a beam of the sun, I am the fairest of plants, I am a wild boar in valour, I am a salmon in the water, I am a lake in the plain, I am a word of science, I am the point of the lance of battle, I am the God who creates in the head [i.e. of man] the fire [i.e. the thought]. Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain? Who announces the ages of the moon [If not I]? Who teaches the place where couches the sun [If not I]? Ancient Author Unknown for certain: an ancient Druidic incantation

The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth—the relationship of one people and their God.

I write romance stories and although I want it to be a beautiful work of art, I am afraid that I will live in the story I created in my mind. It's all in my mind I know, but sometimes, the romance becomes too ideal and realistic for me that I soon fall for the hero that was just a product of my imagination. I think that is both an fearful obstacle and a proof that somehow, you are succeeding to touch a reader's heart - even if it is yours.

A Strange Prayer: Dear Lord, I, the self searching illusion, has seen and experienced the outer world: relationships, success and failure, true friends, strangers and backbiters. I lived the different emotions during different seasons; I witnessed ups & downs, enjoyed love & hate, was good & bad, faced beauty & ugliness. There were times when I was brave, there were times when I was a coward. There were times when I was proactive, there were times when I was indecisive. After, flying high in the skies, and yet being a loser... After, being nothing & no one, and yet feeling content.. I have understood the difference between lust and love, happiness and sadness, selfishness and selflessness. One often leads to another; another secretly carries the one! Yet I am lost between being and becoming. An inner voice admits that my heart is an unexplored realm, my mind is a prisoner to my wishful thinking, and the soul is unknown to me. Setting that unknown free... now, this is my heartiest wish. As Saurabh Sharma, the human being, I always pray to thee, " O lord, set me free. I don't want love, I don't want to be loved; I want myself to be love itself now. That beautiful, silent and divine existence...! I want to get merged into that. Please give me wisdom and courage; Merge me into your supreme kingdom by setting my soul free.

Writing is mental exercise and the preeminent method to train the mind to achieve a desirable state of mental quietude. Meditative writing, a single pointed concentration of mental activity, induces an altered state of consciousness. Writing is studious rumination, a means to converse with our personal muse. Writing entails a period of forced solitude that enables us to meet and conduct a searching conversation with our authentic self. This contemplative dialogue with our true self is transformational. Writing is not a mere act but a journey of the mind into heretofore-unknown frontiers of the self.

I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.

First, it is largely unknown just how the Holy Spirit interacted with the author of an original Biblical manuscript- 'passive' vs. 'active' (I contend that it was both/and). Secondly, it is also widely unknown just what the 'process' involved in 'canonization' was. Additionally, I see little evidence of the injection of personal bias if any by the Biblical authors.

I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings- Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada- which my heirs discover and publish.

Tales of ordinary characters would appeal to a larger class , but I have no wish to make such an appeal . The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me , for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author's perspective . There are probably seven persons in all , who really like my work and they are enough . I should write even if I were the only patient reader , for my aim is merely self expression . I could not write about ' ordinary people ' because I am not in the least interested in them . Without interest there can be no art . Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy . It is man's relations to the cosmos - to the unknown - which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination .

Someone once elaborated on each line of the well-known and much-loved Psalm 23: The Lord is my Shepherd — that’s relationship! I shall not be in want — that’s supply! He makes me lie down in green pastures — that’s rest! He leads me beside quiet waters — that’s refreshment! He restores my soul — that’s healing! He guides me in the paths of righteousness — that’s guidance! For His name’s sake — that’s purpose! Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death —that’s testing! I will fear no evil — that’s protection! For you are with me — that’s faithfulness! Your rod and the staff, they comfort me — that’s discipline! You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies —that’s hope! You anoint my head with oil — that’s consecration! My cup overflows — that’s abundance! Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life —that’s blessing! And I will dwell in the house of the Lord — that’s security! Forever — that’s eternity! AUTHOR OF ELABORATED MATERIAL UNKNOWN

I compared what was really known about the stars with the account of creation as told in Genesis. I found that the writer of the inspired book had no knowledge of astronomy -- that he was as ignorant as a Choctaw chief -- as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does any one imagine that the author of Genesis knew anything about the sun -- its size? that he was acquainted with Sirius, the North Star, with Capella, or that he knew anything of the clusters of stars so far away that their light, now visiting our eyes, has been traveling for two million years? If he had known these facts would he have said that Jehovah worked nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the afternoon of the fourth day to make the sun and moon and all the stars? Yet millions of people insist that the writer of Genesis was inspired by the Creator of all worlds. Now, intelligent men, who are not frightened, whose brains have not been paralyzed by fear, know that the sacred story of creation was written by an ignorant savage. The story is inconsistent with all known facts, and every star shining in the heavens testifies that its author was an uninspired barbarian. I admit that this unknown writer was sincere, that he wrote what he believed to be true -- that he did the best he could. He did not claim to be inspired -- did not pretend that the story had been told to him by Jehovah. He simply stated the "facts" as he understood them. After I had learned a little about the stars I concluded that this writer, this "inspired" scribe, had been misled by myth and legend, and that he knew no more about creation than the average theologian of my day. In other words, that he knew absolutely nothing. And here, allow me to say that the ministers who are answering me are turning their guns in the wrong direction. These reverend gentlemen should attack the astronomers. They should malign and vilify Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Herschel and Laplace. These men were the real destroyers of the sacred story. Then, after having disposed of them, they can wage a war against the stars, and against Jehovah himself for having furnished evidence against the truthfulness of his book.

While they were thus embarrassed, a large chest was brought and deposited in the presbytery for the Bishop, by two unknown horsemen, who departed on the instant. The chest was opened; it contained a cope of cloth of gold, a mitre ornamented with diamonds, an archbishop's cross, a magnificent crosier,—all the pontifical vestments which had been stolen a month previously from the treasury of Notre Dame d'Embrun. In the chest was a paper, on which these words were written, "From Cravatte to Monseigneur Bienvenu." "Did not I say that things would come right of themselves?" said the Bishop. Then he added, with a smile, "To him who contents himself with the surplice of a curate, God sends the cope of an archbishop." "Monseigneur," murmured the cure, throwing back his head with a smile. "God—-or the Devil." The Bishop looked steadily at the cure, and repeated with authority, "God!

She fell in love with freedom. In the Sommers' home she had lived shut up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through distorted windowpanes. She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear. Fear had been her companion: fear of God and his unpredictable justice, of authority, of her adoptive parents, of illness and evil tongues, of anything unknown or different; fear of leaving the protection of her home and facing the dangers outside; fear of her own fragility as a woman, of dishonor and truth. Hers had been a sugar-coated reality built on the unspoken, on courteous silences, well-guarded secrets, order, and discipline. She had aspired to virtue but now she questioned the meaning of the word.

Rosalind Porter: As a writer, how important do you feel it is to engage with the digital revolution? Margaret Atwood: I don’t think it’s important. If I do it, it’s because of my insatiable curiosity. But people are trying to pile stuff onto authors, like you have to have a blog, you have to have this, you have to have that. Various party tricks. You actually don’t. I would say that having done it, the blogging and Tweeting and so forth reaches possibly a different kind of reader than the kind you may have been used to hearing from. But an author’s job is to concentrate on the writing, and once the writing is finished what you essentially do is throw it into a bottle and heave it into the sea, and that’s the same for any method of dissemination. There’s still a voyage between the text and the unknown reader; the book will still arrive at the door of some readers who don’t understand it – who don’t like it. It will still find some readers who hopefully do, and the process is still a scattergun approach.

On a spring day in 1988…a Massachusetts man who collected books about local history was rummaging through a bin in a New Hampshire antiques barn when something caught his eye. Beneath texts on fertilizers and farm machines lay a slim, worn pamphlet with tea-colored paper covers, titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, by an unnamed author identified simply as “a Bostonian.” He was fairly certain he had found something exceptional, paid the $15 price, and headed home, where Tamerlane would spend only one night. The next day, he contacted Sotheby’s, and they confirmed his suspicion that he had just made one of the most exciting book discoveries in years. The pamphlet was a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s first text, written when he was only fourteen years old, a find that fortune-seeking collectors have imagined happening upon probably more than they’d like to admit. The humble-looking, forty-page pamphlet was published in 1827 by Calvin F.S. Thomas, a relatively unknown Boston printer who specialized in apothecary labels, and its original price was about twelve cents. But this copy, looking good for its 161 years, most of which were probably spent languishing in one dusty attic box after another, would soon be auctioned for a staggering $198,000.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor — whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" — although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation — sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion — the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

Each of you have experienced numerous transformations during your life. From the moment you took your first step you began a lifelong movement toward the new and unknown. You expanded the limits of your world. You pushed your boundaries larger, and then larger still. And not only physically, but cognitively, emotionally, morally, socially, and spiritually as well. Concerning your spiritual growth, the concepts of God that you had at age five may not be adequate for you at age twenty, and the concepts of God you had at age twenty may not be adequate again when you reach your forties and later, your elder years. Across the span of your life you may travel through a variety of views about who and what ultimate authority is or isn’t, what the purpose of life is, what your values and taboos are, and the importance (or not) of ritual, myth, and symbols.

Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too-conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on a cripple’s face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face. He turned the portrait over to look for a caption. On the back was printed: Richard the Third. From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Artist Unknown.

In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.

While all of us dread being blamed, we all would wish to be more responsible—that is, to have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting. We want to be the authoritative person in our own lives: in charge, able to make the authentic decisions that affect us. There is no true responsibility without awareness. One of the weaknesses of the Western medical approach is that we have made the physician the only authority, with the patient too often a mere recipient of the treatment or cure. People are deprived of the opportunity to become truly responsible. None of us are to be blamed if we succumb to illness and death. Any one of us might succumb at any time, but the more we can learn about ourselves, the less prone we are to become passive victims. Mind and body links have to be seen not only for our understanding of illness but also for our understanding of health. Dr. Robert Maunder, on the psychiatric faculty of the University of Toronto, has written about the mindbody interface in disease. “Trying to identify and to answer the question of stress,” he said to me in an interview, “is more likely to lead to health than ignoring the question.” In healing, every bit of information, every piece of the truth, may be crucial. If a link exists between emotions and physiology, not to inform people of it will deprive them of a powerful tool. And here we confront the inadequacy of language. Even to speak about links between mind and body is to imply that two discrete entities are somehow connected to each other. Yet in life there is no such separation; there is no body that is not mind, no mind that is not body. The word mindbody has been suggested to convey the real state of things. Not even in the West is mind-body thinking completely new. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates quotes a Thracian doctor’s criticism of his Greek colleagues: “This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas; they are ignorant of the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body.” You cannot split mind from body, said Socrates—nearly two and a half millennia before the advent of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology!

When I was a kid, growing up during the 1970s, I used to read a lot of horror and science fiction. I graduated from comic books to paperbacks around the time I first entered my teens. And I want to say that what 99% of that stuff tells you about supposed encounters with the unknown is a formulaic convention. No one faints like a chicken-shit or else reaches for their weapon like Arnie Schwarzenegger in the face of something so utterly terrifying there isn’t even a name for it. What those writers don’t know is what happens in an encounter with the outside is this: that the moment slows down to such an extent that time itself simply stands still in your head. I suppose that fact doesn’t make for good characterisation. It’s incommunicable. I think they call it the numinous. I once did a semester in creative writing back after graduating, around the decade King was outselling every other author on the planet, but could never make the grade. Still, I read a lot of the best attempts. Maybe that’s why someone like Lovecraft, or Machen, or one of the old-school writers of that stuff I used to read had almost pulled it off. They were no good at characterisation and tended to use ciphers, presenting the phenomenon itself as the main protagonist, because it was the way things are when you encounter it. The thing empties you, draining out any semblance of normalcy, no matter what your history is, or what you think you’re all about. Real horror consists not of the worst thing in the world you can imagine happening, but in encountering some abomination you cannot possibly imagine, something even worse than fear: a shard of absolute outsideness. Human characters become shadows, just shadows.

(Pericles Funeral Oration) But before I praise the dead, I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose to power, and under what institutions and through what manner of life our empire became great. Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors', but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own. Then, again, our military training is in many respects superior to that of our adversaries; Our enemies have never yet felt our united strength, the care of a navy divides our attention, and on land we are obliged to send our own citizens everywhere. But they, if they meet and defeat a part of our army, are as proud as if they had routed us all, and when defeated they pretend to have been vanquished by us all. None of these men were enervated by wealth or hesitated to resign the pleasures of life; none of them put off the evil day in the hope, natural to poverty, that a man, though poor, may one day become rich. But, deeming that the punishment of their enemies was sweeter than any of these things, and that they could fall in no nobler cause, they determined at the hazard of their lives to be honorably avenged, and to leave the rest. They resigned to hope their unknown chance of happiness; but in the face of death they resolved to rely upon themselves alone. And when the moment came they were minded to resist and suffer, rather than to fly and save their lives; they ran away from the word of dishonor, but on the battlefield their feet stood fast, and in an instant, at the height of their fortune, they passed away from the scene, not of their fear, but of their glory. I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men.

Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.