B Scott Quotes

L.G.B.T.Q.I.P.O.Z.A.A.C.V………….” 

I want to be a society vampire, you see.

I’m so damn glad I love you – I wouldn’t love any other man on earth – I b’lieve if I had deliberately decided on a sweetheart, he’d have been you.

By doing one wrong thing, I thought I could make everything right.

Things to worry about: Worry about courage Worry about cleanliness Worry about efficiency Worry about horsemanship Things not to worry about: Don’t worry about popular opinion Don’t worry about dolls Don’t worry about the past Don’t worry about the future Don’t worry about growing up Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you Don’t worry about triumph Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault Don’t worry about mosquitoes Don’t worry about flies Don’t worry about insects in general Don’t worry about parents Don’t worry about boys Don’t worry about disappointments Don’t worry about pleasures Don’t worry about satisfactions Things to think about: What am I really aiming at? How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to: (a) Scholarship (b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them? (c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it? With dearest love, Daddy

Research had given him the basics, Tab A into Slot B using Product C after ensuring Product D is firmly in place. The mechanics of it were simple. The prospect, however, of having an A that big anywhere near his B was mildly worrying

I didn't feel evil. I felt nervous, scared, nothing more.

The whole universe is one bright pearl, and there is no need to understand it.

The past should remain firmly behind one. The present holds enough obstacles.

I do not know why I shot the bird. At the moment I squeezed the trigger it seemed that the only two things in the world were the crow and myself. And now there is just me.

Maybe there isn’t a way,” he said. “Maybe all we can do is wait and hope and endure for as long as we’re able. The food will run out. Our bodies will fail. And the vine will do whatever it’s going to do.

Option A: Spend your life trying to get others to accept you. Option B: Accept yourself, and spend your life with others who recognize what a beauty you are.

I do not believe there is any such thing as a “B-player” or a mediocre human being. Everyone can be excellent at something.

Stacy wasn't certain; she'd never bothered to pay attention to details like that, and was always regretting it, the half knowing, which felt worse than not knowing at all, the constant sense that she had things partly right, but not right enough to make a difference.

The ultimate downfall of the computerized holographic receptionist was that there was no amount of flattery, flirtation or chocolate that could convince one to lie for you.

To believe you know where you are headed is not to understand where one is at the moment.

All I know is that I do not believe in anything anymore and that I must find something to believe in or I will cease to be.

I wish I was older. And that I knew more than I do.

It waits till we’re weak before it reveals its strength.

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scott-free; The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

F***ing triffids.

I do not believe in goodness in the world anymore. What is good either dies or is killed.

The only way love ever affected death was in making it more painful.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." –F. Scott Fitzgerald

My experience of the past several years does not lend itself to the belief that good can or will defeat evil. This is not a pessimistic view, but simply an observation of facts as I have experienced them.

By the standards of a tourist strolling past looking for a quick lunch, the place was a dive. The sign on the window was small and easy to miss, and the antique feel of the place wasn't the prepackaged, old-shit-on-the-wall nostalgia that came with so many chain restaurants. The cafe was just old, and everything about it said old. But Jon liked it that way, if only because it kept the tourists away and spared him from hearing imported ignorance when there was plenty of local ignorance to go around.

You know you're in a bureaucracy when a hundred people who think 'A' get together and compromise on 'B.

She was a tornado in a skirt.

Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge.

You’re the first bangin’ *ss hot b*tch I ever met that’s got her sh*t together. Most hot b*tches are dumb as fuck.

Life maybe better after death, but don't count on it!

Trying to remember things.” It was what people did, Amy had decided, as they waited for death; they lay there struggling to remember the details of their lives, all the events that had seemed so impossible to forget while they were being suffered through, the things tasted and smelled and heard, the thoughts that had felt like revelations, and now Jeff was doing this, too. He’d given up. They weren’t going to survive this place; they were going to end just like Henrich, shot full of arrows, the vines coiling and flowering around their bones.

That was what they were so clearly doing here: they were waiting. And not in any suspense, either, not in any anxiety as to the outcome of their vigil. They were waiting with no apparent emotion at all, as one might sit over the course of an evening, watching a candle methodically burn itself into darkness, never less than certain of the outcome, confident that the only thing standing between now and the end of waiting was time itself.

In 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney handed down the Dred Scott decision upholding and extending slavery. Taney’s opinion was, it is generally agreed, “the worst constitutional decision of the 19th century” (the words are Robert Bork’s). Yet there is a curious and little known fact about Judge Taney. More than 30 years earlier he had freed his own slaves. Today, therefore, we would say that while he was “personally” opposed to slavery he did not want to “impose” his views on others.

Playlist 1. Wild Honey - U2 2. Like Real People Do - Hozier 3. Colorblind - Counting Crows 4. Oh Darling - Gossling 5. Breathing Underwater - Metric 6. Let It Die - Foo Fighters 7. I’m Sorry - Imagine Dragons 8. Fools - Troye Sivan 9. Don’t Mess Me Around - Clare Maguire 10. Heal - Tom Odell 11. Unbreakable - Jamie Scott 12. I’m The Man Who Loves You - Wilco 13. Creep - Radiohead

all the lies people utter around death in order to comfort themselves, to bury their grief with the body, but here, suddenly, they were true. Die, Eric said in his head. Do it now, just die. And all the while—yes, implacably, inexorably—the Greek’s breathing continued its ragged course.

Stacy waited till she was certain he’d fallen asleep, then slipped free of his grasp, edging backward, leaving his hand lying open on the tent’s floor, palm up, slightly cupped, like a beggar’s. She imagined dropping a coin into it, late at night on some dark city street; she pictured herself hurrying off, never to see him again.

Nothing helps your partner keep his mind on Jesus more than having a sign of His love tanned on your primary erogenous zones.

liar’s smile

Everything life throws at you can only make you stronger...

Wanting something to be different will not make it so.

Are Cops Now America’s Most Dangerous Domestic Terrorists?

I am sure of nothing except that to believe you know where you are headed is not to understand where one is at the moment.

Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.

He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight.

You gotta weather a few storms if you want to drop anchor in paradise.

Hippocrates, the ancient Greek doctor, concluded in the fourth century B.C. that pathological anxiety was a straightforward biological and medical problem. “If you cut open the head [of a mentally ill individual],” Hippocrates wrote, “you will find the brain humid, full of sweat and smelling badly.” For Hippocrates, “body juices” were the cause of madness; a sudden flood of bile to the brain would produce anxiety.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”; Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery; All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith; bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens are all like scripture to me. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was my first introduction (on the page) to a Black feminist heroine as well as to the African American southern vernacular that my mother’s family spoke.

The mansion stood proudly at the end of the new driveway, on the other side of the iron gates that the woman had come to know so well. A house once much loved, it had been abandoned and cursed, as a corpse buried in unholy ground.

All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Big Nate series by Lincoln Peirce The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak Brian’s Hunt by Gary Paulsen Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis The Call of the Wild by Jack London The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Giver by Lois Lowry Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Hatchet by Gary Paulsen The High King (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Holes by Louis Sachar The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I Am LeBron James by Grace Norwich I Am Stephen Curry by Jon Fishman Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson LeBron’s Dream Team: How Five Friends Made History by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle Number the Stars by Lois Lowry The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton The River by Gary Paulsen The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (written by many authors) Star Wars series (written by many authors) The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renée Russell Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

To improve chances of success, you want to build a project or product where you think you’re filling a hole. Part of the trick is showing people things that they either a) haven’t seen in a long time or b) things they haven’t seen before.

I haven’t killed anyone. We took a risk. We did our job. We found a way to cure one of the deadliest diseases of our species. There are always side effects. How the hell could we see this coming? Who could’ve predicted this outcome? Stephen King?

he’d believed that he was smarter and more disciplined than the others, and that these traits alone might save them. He was a fool, though; he could see that now. He’d been a fool to cut off Pablo’s legs. All he’d managed to do was prolong the Greek’s suffering. And he’d been a fool—worse than a fool, so much worse—to sit there pouting while, fifteen feet away from him, Amy had choked to death. Even if, through some miracle, he managed to leave this place alive, he couldn’t see how he’d ever be able to survive that memory.

(...) if a person, as one theory goes, is chosen to live in a particular time for one specific reason, then why am I here now? What moment in history is my life destined to intersect with? Or has it already happened, and I just didn't understand that that was my moment?

The most famous long-distance race with a Greek origin is the marathon, which celebrates the arduous journey of the messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens, a distance of 26.2 miles, to announce Greece’s victory over the Persians in 490 B.C.; he then dropped dead from exhaustion.

But time, rather impatiently, waits for no one. As I waited for her to return, the seasons had faded in and out in a cycle of rebirth. Flowers and grass now shyly decorated the forsaken grounds and earthen graves, much like in cemeteries; as a reminder, lest we forget, of life or some form of existence after death.

I watched the woman in her mortal sleep, my nightmares now becoming hers. And as I watched, from my distant prison of stone, in the midnight silence, I heard the undying screams. I would continue to hear them every night; a reminder that pain does indeed continue eternally. Contrary to what we had hoped, death did not bring a sweet release from life’s torture, but an endless torment.

Loftus Hall was yet again empty and abandoned as many years before. But echoes of sadness, hopes, and memories lingered in the deafening silence. The woman closed her eyes and silently prayed for those who remained within its walls. She felt deeply for them; their unfinished stories and words unsaid. Unable to say goodbye and now in the realm of the dead, she could feel their heartbeats as strongly as her own.

There were countless fugitive slaves, but only one - Dred Scott - had the patience to endure the vicissitudes of America's legal system. But it was all worth it when he made it to the highest court in the land and was told by the chief justice that he was a) wrong and b) not a man, but a piece of property. His true reward, however, would come years later, after he was dead and it was of no use to him. For his case was a precedent, and today it is discussed by historians, memorized by high-school students, and joked about by assholes like myself.

False dichotomies are undisciplined thought. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Builders of greatness are comfortable with paradox. They don’t oppress themselves with what we call the “Tyranny of the OR,” which pushes people to believe that things must be either A OR B, but not both. Instead, they liberate themselves with the “Genius of the AND.” Undisciplined thinkers force debates into stark “Tyranny of the OR” choices; disciplined thinkers expand the conversation to create Genius of the AND solutions.

The bacteria don't physically reshape the gut themselves. Instead, they work via their hosts. They are more management than labour. Lora Hooper demonstrated this by infusing into germ-free mice a common gut bacterium called Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron-or B-theta to its friends. She found that the microbe actovated a wide range of mouse genes that are involved in absorbing nutrients, building an impermeable barrier, breaking down toxins, creating blood vessels, and creating mature cells. In other words, the microbe told the mice how to use their own genes to make a healthy gut. Scott Gilbert, a developmental biologist, calls this idea co-devolopment. It's as far as you can get from the still-lingering idea that microbes are just threats. Instead, they actually help us become who we are.

You haven't seen the proof of that either? Alright, alright. Let's say you have an infinite set A. We'll show how to produce another infinite set, B, which is even bigger than A. This B will simply be the set of all subsets of A, which is guaranteed to exist by the power set axiom. How do we know B is bigger than A? Well, suppose we could pair off every element a A with an element f(a) B, in such a way that no elements of B were left over. Then, we could define a new subset S A, consisting of every a that's not contained in f(a). Then S is also an element of B. But notice that S can't have been paired off with any a A – since otherwise, a would be contained in f(a) if and only if it wasn't contained in f(a), contradiction. Therefore, B is larger than A, and we've ended up with a bigger infinity than the one we started with.

Pedigree was the centerpiece of Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Though this case assessed whether a slave taken into a free state or federal territory should be set free, its conclusions were far more expansive. Addressing slavery in the territories, the proslavery Marylander dismissed Jefferson’s prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance as having no constitutional standing. He constructed his own version of the original social contract at the time of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention: only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.” Taney’s opinion mattered because it literally made pedigree into a constitutional principle. In this controversial decision, Taney demonstrably rejected any notion of democracy and based the right of citizenship on bloodlines and racial stock. The chief justice ruled that the founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of recognizable breeds.

If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.

pessimist and fatalist (so R. B. Y. Scott, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes [Garden City, 1965], p. 192), who questions the benefits of wisdom and the meaningfulness of life. Divergent,

pessimist and fatalist (so R. B. Y. Scott, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes [Garden City, 1965], p. 192), who questions the benefits of wisdom and the meaningfulness of life.

Dancing had sculpted my body into an 80-pound solid mass of muscle, and the endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin fueled my permanent state of genuine happiness. Truth is, I was so relieved to be away from Scott that I couldn’t help but smile. It became my habit, my MO, I simply fell in love with smiling and laughter, and once I had reason enough to be happy, I couldn’t stop.

A person is not defined by their choices when the world is right, but by their choices when the world goes wrong. ... I think this is what Richard taught me. Shaun taught me to fight. Piss-ant taught me standards. Joe taught me endurance. Scott taught me to persevere and keep a cool head. Richard taught me to own my choices, good or bad.

Let us not look at the talents we wish we had or pine away for the gifts that are not ours, but instead do the best we can with what we have.” – B.J. Richardson

AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.

He was shier than she would’ve guessed; even that evening, standing so near, the rain spattering against the taut fabric only inches above their heads, he hadn’t dared to kiss her good night. This was still to come, another week or so in the future, and it was nice that way; it gave weight to the other things, the smaller gestures, his arm hooking hers as they stepped out from beneath the brightly lighted marquee onto the rain-slick streets. She almost spoke of it now, but then stopped herself, worried he might not have any memory of the moment, that what had felt so touching to her, so joyous, had been an idle gesture on his part, a response to the inclement weather rather than a timid advance toward her heart.

Bach—Prelude in C, No. 1 in The Well-Tempered Clavichord Beethoven—Minuet in G Chopin—Prelude in A, Op. 28, No. 7 Grieg—Nocturne in C, Op. 54, No. 4 MacDowell—To a Wild Rose Bach—Two-Part Invention No. 1 Chopin—Mazurka in A minor, Op. 68? No. 2 Chopin—Prelude in E minor, Op. 28, No. 3 Navarro—Spanish Dance (often played as an encore by Jose Iturbi) Cyril Scott—Lento Bach—Two-Part Invention No. 13 Beethoven—Album Leaf, “For Elise” Godowsky—Alt Wien Granados-—Play era Mendelssohn—Consolation (Song Without Words No. 9) Chopin—Etude in A flat (posthumous) Chopin—Prelude in B minor, Op. 28, No. 6 Chopin—Prelude in D flat, Op. 28, No. 15 Mendelssohn—Confidence (Song Without Words No. 9) Schumann—Warum? Chopin—Nocturne in E minor, Op. 72, No. 1 Debussy—La Fille aux cheveux de lin Liszt—Consolation No. 3 Palmgren—May Night Schumann—The Prophet Bird

Albeniz—Malagneña 2. Bach—Gavotte and Musette in G minor 3. Bach—Gigue from the B-flat Partita 4. Bach—Two-Part Invention No. 8 5. Brahms—Intermezzo in C, Op. 119, No. 3 6. Brahms—Rhapsody in G minor 7. Chopin—Etude in C minor, Op. 25 8. Chopin—Mazurka in A minor, Op. 68, No. 2 9. Chopin—Waltz in E minor 10. Debussy—Clair de lune 11. Debussy—La Fille aux cneveux de lin 12. Debussy—Minstrels 13. Grieg—Nocturne in C, Op, 54, No. 4 14. Ibert—The Little White Donkey 15. Liszt—Consolation No.3 16. Mendelssohn—Scherzo in E minor 17. Navarro—Spanish Dance 18. Palmgren—May Night 19. Poulenc—Perpetual Motion 20. Schumann—Arabeshe 21. Schumann—Des Abends 22. Schumann—The Prophet Bird 23. Schumann—Warumf 24. Cyril Scott—Lotus, Land 25. Cyril Scott—False Caprice

Level 7 Selling Our Souls for a Video Game, Part One

Fear is not a bad thing, soldier. We all have fears. Fear only becomes bad when you become so afraid of that fear that you freeze, and you let that fear take control of you so much that you cannot fight.

I have to wonder now…while the government’s off making money with its so-called “business,” who governs the country? And I, for one, am just a little frightened of the thought that the future of our country depends on the gaming habits of our children. Will the President propose tomorrow that I let my son or daughter play video games because it supports the country? Will video games replace textbooks in school?!

As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousandyard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes.”3

The bacteria don’t physically reshape the gut themselves. Instead, they work via their hosts. They are more management than labour. Lora Hooper demonstrated this by infusing into germ-free mice a common gut bacterium called Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron – or B-theta to its friends.7 She found that the microbe activated a wide range of mouse genes that are involved in absorbing nutrients, building an impermeable barrier, breaking down toxins, creating blood vessels, and creating mature cells. In other words, the microbe told the mice how to use their own genes to make a healthy gut.8 Scott Gilbert, a developmental biologist, calls this idea co-development. It’s as far as you can get from the still-lingering idea that microbes are just threats. Instead, they actually help us become who we are.9

We are to stand in love, yet we are to always exhibit the confidence and bravery to stand up for what we know is right instead of backing down in order to avoid conflict or seek acceptance.

Anne’s home then was already centuries old and though beautiful as it was, I cannot say I had ever felt at ease in the great Hall. Shadows, creaks, and groans as well as whispers and growls have forever lived within its walls. Evil was part of its foundations and even then, the rambling mansion harboured many souls and secrets. This is something inevitable in a place as old as Loftus Hall.

Having lost the will to live, we somehow survived from one encounter to the next. Absences in between were filled with sighs that became a melancholy melody. And when we did meet, we fed voraciously as revenants on the only thing that sustained our existence: our love for each other. Love is madness, if it is at all lived as it should it be. It is the fever of an incurable disease. Addictive and lethal, love…love is the most potent poison known to man. And the more we loved, the more alive we felt. But love’s bitter-sweet aftertaste was an illusion. Each moment shared only brought us closer to our end as we fell from grace.

Southerners could no sooner free their slaves voluntarily than contemporary Americans could donate their mortgaged homes to charity. Debt limited action. It took a person without debts, without heirs, and with high principles to voluntarily give up a valuable personal asset. And even here, principles could be subverted by political considerations. Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who ruled that Dred Scott and all African descendants could never be considered American citizens, had freed his own slaves as a young man decades earlier.

As they crossed the assembly yard, all three men suddenly heard the start up of construction noise, coming from the nearby thick forest, on the far side of the wire. A distant whistle, some shouts, and the rat-a-tat of hammers and the ripping sound of handsaws. "They start those poor bastards early, don't they?" Scott asked rhetorically. "And then they work them late. Makes you glad you weren't born a Russian," he said. Then he smiled wryly. "You know, there's probably a joke in that some- where. Do you suppose right now one of those poor s.o.b.'s is saying he's glad he wasn't born black in America? After all, the damn Germans are just working them to death. Me? I've got to worry about my own country- men shooting me.

It was even worse for kids now, because they were used to passing the time with video games and other electronic forms of entertainment

Was I a person or had I just exploded into a million joyful pieces of glass, sparkling in the summer sunshine? Laurie compared everyone to me?

Aunt B didn’t have a degree,” Ascanio volunteered. “Yes, she did,” Curran said. “She went to Agnes Scott and majored in psychology.” Ascanio stared out the window. “What’s the plan?” Curran asked. “You’re sixteen; you have to have a plan. Or are you going to let your mother pay your bills for the rest of your life?” “No.” Ascanio bit off the word. “Then I suggest you rethink algebra,” Curran said.

I’m most sad about leaving you, Meg. I think you’re the part of the Morrisey I’ll miss the most.” He leaned down and placed a kiss on my forehead.

On the other hand, several boaters who were considering a run on the Tsangpo, such as Ammons and Scott Lindgren, did have big-water descents, including the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, a sixty-mile gorge in B.C. considered by many to be a must-do qualifier for a river like the Tsangpo.

Reducing morality to matters of opinion or feeling is at the heart of Hume’s project. The reason his theory is important is that it is widely followed today. Morality is becoming increasingly subjective and is losing its propositional nature as people in our culture insist that judgments of right and wrong are merely individual subjective feelings or opinion.

Emotivism maintains that the only statements capable of having meaning are those that are empirically verifiable, but this underlying principle is itself not empirically verifiable.

The wild card was William Fox, a misanthropic lone wolf who, his niece said, “invited enemies. He would boast that if he died, all the executives of his company put together couldn’t run the business.” He was probably right. Allied with no one, fighting everyone, plagued by rampaging paranoia, Fox

With so many people lulled into believing everything they found on the Web, he expected computer shrines to pop up in homes soon. Worship the new Oracle of Dell-phi.

The blight of office cubes housing lawyers and lobbyists had popped up like chokeweeds in the manicured lawn of the family homestead.

The M.E. dissected pieces of a corpse to tell a story, while Drayco tried to bring them back from the dead, jagged piece by jagged piece.

He was one of the few men who didn’t aspire to be alpha as long as he was in on the hunt.

grief

Some people have suggested that the “theory of variable rewards” explains our obsession with the digital world. This theory, created by American psychologist and behaviorist B.F. Skinner in the 1950s, resulted from his study of lab mice that responded more aggressively to random rewards than predictable ones. When mice pressed a lever, they sometimes got a small treat, other times a large treat, and other times nothing at all. Unlike mice that received the same treat with each lever press, the mice that received variable rewards pressed the lever more often and compulsively.

He launched into the color-tsunami of Prokofiev’s fourth piano sonata. It soon carried him onto a distant shore where the only thing broken was the silence.

The smell of beer surrounded him in a cloud as if he’d been doused in Eau de Frat Boy cologne.

For the subjectivist, moral judgments are reports or statements of fact about the attitude of the person who says them. For the emotivist, moral judgments are not facts at all, but emotional expressions about an action or person. The subjectivist will say, “Homosexuality is wrong!” This means, “I disapprove of homosexuality.” For the emotivist, the same statement means, “Homosexuality, yuck! Boo!” Emotivism is thus a more sophisticated theory than subjectivism. Both share the idea that moral judgments are not normative statements and that objective moral facts are nonexistent.