“
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
“
I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains, and then find somewhere where I can rest. In peace and quiet, without a lot of relatives prying around, and a string of confounded visitors hanging on the bell. I might find somewhere where I can finish my book. I have thought of a nice ending for it: and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.
”
”
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1))
“
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
”
”
Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)
“
But I can now understand why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality.
”
”
Cecelia Ahern (Flawed (Flawed, #1))
“
Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.
The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to which she had been exposed by her guardian's family, to lead her to unite herself with their son: and she related how, for a long time, his letters had ceased to arrive; how she had written time and again, till she became weary and doubtful; how her health had failed under her anxieties, and how, at last, she had discovered the whole fraud which had been practised on them both. The letter ended with expressions of hope and thankfulness, and professions of undying affection, which were more bitter than death to the unhappy young man. He wrote to her immediately:
I have received yours,—but too late. I believed all I heard. I was desperate. I am married, and all is over. Only forget,—it is all that remains for either of us."
And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,—exceedingly real.
Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.
”
”
Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
“
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark . . . I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.
It will keep the vultures at bay.
”
”
Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death)
“
However self-sufficient we may fancy ourselves, we exist only in relation -- to our friend, family, and life partners; to those we teach and mentor; to our co-workers, neighbors, strangers; and even to forces we cannot fully conceive of, let alone define. In many ways, we are our relationships.
”
”
Derrick A. Bell (Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth)
“
Some people walk through a hallway with covered mirrors– the hallway is lined with mirrors but there are blankets covering each of them. They go through life believing in an image of themselves that isn't real, and an image of themselves standing in the world and relative to the world, that isn't real. If you happen to be in that hallway and pull the blankets off the mirrors, they're going to think that you're hurting them; but they're actually just seeing their reflection for the first time. Sometimes the most horrendous thing a person can see, is all the hidden things inside them, the things they've covered, the things they choose not look at. And you're not hurting them, you're setting them free.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
Many of us choose relationships of affection and care that will never become loving because they feel safer. The demands are not as intense as loving requires. The risk is not as great.
So many of us long for love but lack the courage to take risks. Even tough we are obsessed with the idea of love the truth is that most of us live relatively decent, somewhat satisfying lives even if we often feel that love is lacking.
”
”
bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
“
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passing of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark... I hoard all these letters like treasure.
”
”
Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death)
“
Well I've made up my mind, anyway. I want to see mountains again, Gandalf – mountains; and then find somewhere where I can rest. In peace and quiet, without a lot of relatives prying around, and string of confounded visitors hanging on the bell. I might find somewhere where I can finish my book. I have thought of a nice ending for it: and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.
”
”
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1))
“
Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it…Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves.
”
”
bell hooks (We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity)
“
Investing isn’t a game - It has a substantive impact on the living of life and the development of civilization. It’s not just about stock tickers and opening bells and timing buys and sells to get a quick profit in the gap…. It effects when and where houses are built, the quality of schools, the accessibility of organic food, the price of solar relative to gasoline…. Investments direct the development of civilization.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
I'm also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I'm not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever had for me was horses and horseback riding, but I've also been cooking and going for long walks since I was a kid (yes, the two are related), and I'm getting even more three dimensionally biased as I get older — gardening, bell ringing... piano playing... And the stories I seem to need to write seem to need that kind of nourishment from me — how you feed your story telling varies from writer to writer. My story-telling faculty needs real-world fresh air and experiences that create calluses (and sometimes bruises).
”
”
Robin McKinley
“
Not everything has to be done with herbs and oils. In fact, when it comes to any kind of business-related magic, I much prefer a consecrated metal talisman or paper seal hidden away, rather than a bulky bag that smells like a hippie is hiding in my pocket.
”
”
Jason Miller (Financial Sorcery: Magical Strategies to Create Real and Lasting Wealth)
“
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.
”
”
Sebastian Faulks (Jeeves and the Wedding Bells)
“
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than the rest.
”
”
Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death)
“
Don’t try to change the world; just change yourself. Why? Because the whole world is only relative to the eyes that are looking at it. Your world actually only exists for as long as you exist and with the death of you, includes the death of your world. Therefore, if there is no peace in your heart; you will find no peace in this world, if there is no happiness in your life; you will find no happiness anywhere around you, if you have no love in your heart; you will not find love anywhere and if you do not fly around freely inside your own soul like a bird with perfectly formed wings; then there will never be any freedom for you regardless if you are on a mountaintop removed from all attachments to all of mankind! Even the mountaintop cannot give you freedom if it is not already flying around there inside your own soul! So I say, change yourself. Not the world.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
People usually associate the colour pink with weakness and naiveté; but I associate this colour with the most beautiful parts of the day— dawn and dusk! And in my searching through mystical writings, I have found that pink is actually related to the utmost levels of the Tree of Life. I've also seen it in pictures of the sky surrounding the most magnificent Aurora Borealis! So pink is strong and wonderful.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
People don't believe you love them, because they don't believe they can be loved. The problem is, they won't tell you that. They might not even know that. Don't you ever, ever, think that there's something wrong with you. They accept the love they think they deserve.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
Imagine a nonpatriarchal culture where counseling was available to all men to help them find the work that they are best suited to, that they can do with joy. Imagine work settings that offer timeouts where workers can take classes in relational recovery, where they might fellowship with other workers and build a community of solidarity that, at least if it could not change the arduous, depressing nature of labor itself, could make the workplace more bearable. Imagine a world where men who are unemployed for any reason could learn the way to self-actualization.
”
”
bell hooks (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love)
“
The friendly relations Belle enjoyed with her neighbors when she first came to La Porte were not fated to last. “No one was a friend of hers,” Louisa Diessl
”
”
Harold Schechter (Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men)
“
Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents--'avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality'--we are going to deny men their full humanity. Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.
”
”
bell hooks (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love)
“
I remember a relative of mine who used to pick on me all the time, constantly ridiculing my every move and making me feel inferior. One day she had a pimple on her face and was devastated. I told her "Why would you let a little thing like that bother you in such a way? It's just a pimple!" And she cried and said "You can say that, because you're perfect and even if you have ten pimples on your face, it wouldn't even matter!" And I never forgot how I felt in that moment, that moment taught me some important things! First, I realized that the whole time she was picking on me, she actually was feeling that I was perfect! And secondly, I realized that when people think you're perfect, they try to make you feel bad about yourself! I was so taken aback in those few minutes— I couldn't even say anything! I just looked at her while all my realizations flooded my mind and I decided that just because you think someone is perfect, doesn't give you the ticket to make them feel bad about themselves.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded, and spread out before my eyes in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the mail the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk has masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature?
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark... I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.
It will keep the vultures at bay.
”
”
Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death)
“
Economics is the art of allocating scarce goods among competing demands. The conceit of Marxism was the thought that in Communism, economics would be "abolished"; this was why one did not have to think about the questions of relative privilege and social justice. But the point is that we still have to think about economics, and probably always will. The question, then, is whether we can arrive at a set of normative rules which seek to protect liberty, reward achievement and enhance the social good, within the constraints of "economics".
”
”
Daniel Bell (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism)
“
Theme. It’s something a lot of writers don’t like to think about. It brings up painful memories of high school English class (“Write a 1,000 word essay on the theme of The Great Gatsby, and be sure to relate the green light on Daisy’s dock with the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Due tomorrow.”)
”
”
James Scott Bell (27 Fiction Writing Blunders - And How Not To Make Them! (Bell on Writing))
“
We do know that patriarchal masculinity encourages men to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent on the privileges (however relative) that they receive simply for having been born male.
”
”
bell hooks (Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)
“
Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise power. These powers can be used to advance feminist struggle. Forms of power held by exploited and oppressed groups are described in Elizabeth Janeway's important work Powers of the Weak. One of the most significant forms of power held by the weak is "the refusal to accept the definition of oneself that is put forward by the powerful". Janeway call this the "ordered use of the power to disbelieve". She explains:
It is true that one may not have a coherent self-definition to set against the status assigned by the established social mythology, and that is not necessary for dissent. By disbelieving, one will be led toward doubting prescribed codes of behaviour, and as one begins to act in ways that can deviate from the norm in any degree, it becomes clear that in fact there is not just one right way to handle or understand events.
Women need to know that they can reject the powerful's definition of their reality --- that they can do so even if they are poor, exploited, or trapped in oppressive circumstances. They need to know that the exercise of this basic personal power is an act of resistance and strength. Many poor and exploited women, especially non-white women, would have been unable to develop positive self-concepts if they had not exercised their power to reject the powerful's definition of their reality. Much feminist thought reflects women's acceptance of the definition of femaleness put forth by the powerful. Even though women organizing and participating in feminist movement were in no way passive, unassertive, or unable to make decisions, they perpetuated the idea that these characteristics were typical female traits, a perspective that mirrored male supremacist interpretation of women's reality. They did not distinguish between the passive role many women assume in relation to male peers and/or male authority figures, and the assertive, even domineering, roles they assume in relation to one another, to children, or to those individuals, female or male, who have lower social status, who they see as inferiors, This is only one example of the way in which feminist activists did not break with the simplistic view of women's reality s it was defined by powerful me. If they had exercised the power to disbelieve, they would have insisted upon pointing out the complex nature of women's experience, deconstructing the notion that women are necessarily passive or unassertive.
”
”
bell hooks (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center)
“
You ask for the impossible. You ask for the ruddy impossible. So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better lover her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and continuity.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
“
Most American women, particularly white women, have not decolonized their thinking either in relation to the racism, sexism, and class elitism they hold towards less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally.
”
”
bell hooks (Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)
“
He was always saying how his mother said, “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,' and, 'What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from,” until it made me tired.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
“
Global women's issues like forced female circumcision, sex clubs in Thailand, the veiling of women in Africa, India, the Middle East, and Europe, the killing of female children in China, remain important concerns. However feminist women in the West are still struggling to decolonize feminist thinking and practice so that these issues can be addressed in a manner that does not reinscribe Western imperialism...
A decolonized feminist perspective would first and foremost examine how sexist practices in relation to women's bodies globally are linked. For example: linking circumcision with life-threatening eating disorders (which are the direct consequence of a culture imposing thinness as a beauty ideal)...
”
”
bell hooks (Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)
“
You've got to keep the people who make you feel unalone. You can be surrounded by a tribe and still feel alone; but you can be with just one person and feel unalone. Do you realise how rare it is to feel unalone in your soul? It is the entire answer to being here! So why are you not keeping these extremely rare people or person? Why do you instead run after pictures in your mind of how things should be? If you have found unaloneness, you keep it, you need to keep it.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
Mes amis, j'écris ce petit mot pour vous dire que je vous aime, que je pars avec la fierté de vous avoir connus, l'orgueil d'avoir été choisi et apprécié par vous, et que notre amitié fut sans doute la plus belle œuvre de ma vie. C'est étrange, l'amitié. Alors qu'en amour, on parle d'amour, entre vrais amis on ne parle pas d'amitié. L'amitié, on la fait sans la nommer ni la commenter. C'est fort et silencieux. C'est pudique. C'est viril. C'est le romantisme des hommes. Elle doit être beaucoup plus profonde et solide que l'amour pour qu'on ne la disperse pas sottement en mots, en déclarations, en poèmes, en lettres. Elle doit être beaucoup plus satisfaisante que le sexe puisqu'elle ne se confond pas avec le plaisir et les démangeaisons de peau. En mourant, c'est à ce grand mystère silencieux que je songe et je lui rends hommage.
Mes amis, je vous ai vus mal rasés, crottés, de mauvaise humeur, en train de vous gratter, de péter, de roter, et pourtant je n'ai jamais cessé de vous aimer. J'en aurais sans doute voulu à une femme de m'imposer toutes ses misères, je l'aurais quittée, insultée, répudiée. Vous pas. Au contraire. Chaque fois que je vous voyais plus vulnérables, je vous aimais davantage. C'est injuste n'est-ce pas? L'homme et la femme ne s'aimeront jamais aussi authentiquement que deux amis parce que leur relation est pourrie par la séduction. Ils jouent un rôle. Pire, ils cherchent chacun le beau rôle. Théâtre. Comédie. Mensonge. Il n'y a pas de sécurité en l'amour car chacun pense qu'il doit dissimuler, qu'il ne peut être aimé tel qu'il est. Apparence. Fausse façade. Un grand amour, c'est un mensonge réussi et constamment renouvelé. Une amitié, c'est une vérité qui s'impose. L'amitié est nue, l'amour fardé.
Mes amis, je vous aime donc tels que vous êtes.
”
”
Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (La Part de l'autre)
“
Funny is like sexy, and they are kind of related. What turns one person on is hilarious to another person. And vice versa. And you can see all of this at the nexus of clowns. Many people think clowns are hilarious. (Many others think clowns are creepy.) But there is a certain percentage of people who think clowns are sexy. Don't believe me, Google "clown porn" right now. I dare you. And if you don't need to Google that, then it's because it is already saved on your browser. So when these dudes say, "Women aren't funny," they are forgetting a classically important addendum: "to me." They should be saying, "Women aren't funny to me." But they don't say "to me" because if you are a man in America, you are considered the norm. (Remember it's the NBA and the W[omen's]NBA, not the WNBA and the M[en's]NBA.) And if you are a white man in America, then you are also considered the norm.
”
”
W. Kamau Bell (The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6' 4", African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama's Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian)
“
FLESH
I drop my wedding ring
in holy water.
I hope it repels;
the years
of hate
and hope,
so I can finally relate
to the son we made.
”
”
Jessica Bell (Fabric)
“
So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
“
In a 1968 study of daily life in classrooms, Philip W. Jackson wrote that students spend as much as 50 percent of their time waiting for something to happen.
They wait for teachers to pass out papers. They wait for slower students to get their questions answered. They wait for the lunch bell to ring. Alas, forty-five years after Jackson published his book, millions of American students are still waiting. They’re waiting for all of the old reasons, and one relatively new one: they’re waiting for our education system to catch up with their lives.
”
”
Monica R. Martinez
“
in which I would play a futuristic astronaut. The mock-up I saw had me looking like a Power Ranger. That image didn’t resonate with me, and I had a feeling my audience wouldn’t relate to it, either. I told the executives at the label that I thought people would want to see my friends and me sitting at school, bored, and then as soon as the bell rang, boom—we’d start dancing.
”
”
Britney Spears (The Woman in Me)
“
FOR A FEW YEARS after World War II, scientists had been regarded as a new class of intellectuals, members of a public-policy priesthood who might legitimately offer expertise not only as scientists but as public philosophers. With Oppenheimer’s defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues. As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end. Scientists working within the system could not dissent from government policy, as Oppenheimer had done by writing his 1953 Foreign A fairs essay, and still expect to serve on government advisory boards. The trial thus represented a watershed in the relations of the scientist to the government. The narrowest vision of how American scientists should serve their country had triumphed.
”
”
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
“
Doesn't anybody get tired of it all? Of having the same lives as everybody else, doing the same things as everybody else, following the same rules as everybody else... people are identical to the groups they identify with and they stay in these groups 'til they die and they never really discover who they really are or who they actually can be. It's so boring, so tiring. So many imaginary ceilings, imaginary walls, imaginary limits, imaginary happiness.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
Selling your house, giving away possessions, working multiple jobs for a period of time, going back to school and moving in with friends or relatives, sharing a car with your partner and riding your bike more, investing all your savings in a new venture, living on the other side of the world for a year— your friends may not understand, your co-workers may not get it, your extended family may think you’ve lost your mind— that’s okay. Better to receive some odd looks and have a few people roll their eyes than spend your days wondering, What if I did that . . . ? Take that step. Make that leap. Try that new thing. If it helps clarify your ikigai, if it gets you up in the morning, if it’s good for you and the world, do it.
”
”
Rob Bell (How to Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living)
“
The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class- leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.
”
”
Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)
“
In everyday life males and females alike are relatively silent about love. Our silence shields us from uncertainty. We want to know love. We are simply afraid the desire to know too much about love will lead us closer and closer to the abyss of lovelessness.
”
”
bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
“
I could hear DJ breathing, so I knew he was still there, but he didn't speak for what felt like forever. A second is a second no matter what, right? It's a measurement, and those are kind of absolute even if they're made up. But time is also relative to the person experiencing it. That's why the last minute hugging your best friend before they leave for LA to spend the summer with their grandparents feels shorter than a heartbeat, and why the last minute before the last bell rings on the last day of school feels like an hour.
”
”
Shaun David Hutchinson (A Complicated Love Story Set in Space)
“
The aficionado, or lover of the bullfight, may be said, broadly, then, to be one who has this sense of the tragedy and ritual of the fight so that the minor aspects are not important except as they relate to the whole. Either you have this or you have not, just as, without implying any comparison, you have or have not an ear for music. Without an ear for music the principle impression of an auditor at a symphony concert might be of the motions of the players of the double bass, just as the spectator at the bullfight might remember only the obvious grotesqueness of a picador.
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Ernest Hemingway (HEMINGWAY PREMIUM 7-BOOK COLLECTION The Old Man And The Sea,A Farewell To Arms,For Whom The Bell Tolls,The Sun Also Rises,Across The River And Into The ... Afternoon (Timeless Wisdom Collection 1021))
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Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God’s truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers? Septimus We do. Thomasina Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manufacture? Septimus I do not know. Thomasina Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.
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Tom Stoppard (Arcadia (Faber Drama))
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Everything is fields, and a particle is just a smaller version of a field.
There is a harmonic relationship involved.
Disturbing ideas like those of Einstein in 1905 and Feynman Pocono Conference in 1948.
Here we go;
1) The universe is ringing like a bell. Neil Turok's Public Lecture: The Astonishing Simplicity of Everything.
2) The stuff of the universe is waves or fields.
3) Scale is relative, not fixed because all of these waves are ratios of one another.
4) The geometry is fractal. This could be physical or computational.
5) If the geometry is computational then, there is no point in speaking about the relationship of the pixels on the display.
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Rick Delmonico
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In comparison to the church, with its constant clamor, the huts had the hushed, sacred air of deathbed scenes, the light barely illuminating the pallid faces of the soldiers, the village women moving slowly in their dark shawls, their children sitting in transfixed vigil by the beds. For these, Margarete always had a crust of bread, a piece of carrot. Sometimes Lucius entertained them by showing them his father’s hand shadows, other times by letting them listen to their hearts. Their wide eyes grew wider with the cold bell of the stethoscope, not seeming to understand what they were hearing, but astonished nonetheless. Manifestly, he did this out of kindness, or a sort of effort at improving relations, though in truth there was something fortifying in the chance to touch skin without gangrene, without fever, the bodies without a wound.
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Daniel Mason (The Winter Soldier)
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There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf ’s work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three which
represent three different biographical contexts and a range of positions on Woolf ’s life: Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972), Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1996), and Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life
(2005). There is no one, true biography of Woolf (as, indeed, there cannot be of any subject of biography), but these three mark important phases in the writing and rewriting of Woolf ’s life. Hot debate continues over how biographers represent her mental health, her sexuality, her politics, her suicide, and of course her art, and over how we are to understand the latter in relation to all the former points of contention.
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Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
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The worst kind of person is the type that goes around minimizing the achievements of other people. If anything at all, I want to maximize whatever achievements and admirable qualities another person has. The better you do, or are, the louder I'll cheer for you. I am into wanting eagles to soar further and higher. I'm not a chicken farmer. There are so many chicken farmers. I cannot stand people who cannot stand in the light of another without trying to diminish it.
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C. JoyBell C.
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The two friends went on and on toward the sierra, at times keeping the highway, at times. deviating from it.
Whenever they passed through a town or a hamlet, the slow peal of bells tolling the death-knell announced to our hero that the Angel of Death was not losing his time; that his arm reached to every part of the world, and that, though Gil felt it now weighing upon his breast like a mountain of ice, none the less did it scatter ruin and desolation over the entire surface of the earth.
As they went, the Angel of Death related many strange and wonderful things to his protege.
The foe of history, he took pleasure in scoffing at its pretended utility, in disproof of which he narrated many facts as they had actually occurred, and not as they are recorded on monuments and in chronicles.
The abysses of the past opened before the entranced imagination of Gil Gil, revealing to him facts of transcendent importance concerning the fate of man and of empires, disclosing to him the great mystery of the origin of life and the no less great and terrible mystery of the end to which we, wrongly called mortals, are progressing, and causing him, finally, to comprehend, by the light of this sublime philosophy, the laws which preside at the evolution of cosmic matter, and its various manifestations in those ephemeral and transitory forms which are called minerals, plants,animals, stars, constellations, nebula, and worlds. ("The Friend Of The Death")
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Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (Ghostly By Gaslight)
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I have just related the story of a missed vocation: I needed God, He was given to me, I received Him without realizing that I was seeking Him. Failing to take root in my heart, He vegetated in me for a while, then He died. Whenever anyone speaks to me about Him today, I say, with the easy amusement of an old beau who meets a former belle: "Fifty years ago, had it not been for that misunderstanding, that mistake, the accident that separated us, there might have been something between us.
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Jean-Paul Sartre
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Short speeches pass between two men who speak
No common language; and besides, in time
Of war and taking towns, when many a shriek
Rings o’er the dialogue, and many a crime
Is perpetrated ere a word can break
Upon the ear, and sounds of horror chime
In like church-bells, with sigh, howl, groan, yell, prayer,
There cannot be much conversation there.
And therefore all we have related in
Two long octaves, pass’d in a little minute;
But in the same small minute, every sin
Contrived to get itself comprised within it.
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Lord Byron (Don Juan)
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The 1970s and 1980s: feminism, androgyny, modernism, aesthetics
In the 1970s and 1980s, Woolf studies expanded in a number of directions,
most notably in relation to feminism. Critical interest in Woolf developed at the same time as feminism developed in related academic disciplines. In this period her writings became central to the theoretical framing of feminism, in
particular to debates on Marxist and materialist feminism and to the emergent theories of androgyny. Both these areas of debate takeWoolf ’s A Room of One’s Own as a major point of reference...
...........
At the same time as feminist approaches to Woolf were developing and expanding, so, too, was the critical interest in her modernist theories and her formal aesthetics. Again, Woolf ’s writing became central to critical and theoretical formulations on modernism.
..........
This period also saw considerable critical interest in the influence of the visual arts on Woolf ’s writing, and particularly in the influence of the formalist theories of her Bloomsbury colleagues Roger Fry and Clive Bell.
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Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
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I have seen the most beautiful families blossom from the most unlikely relational circumstances. I've also seen the most ideal circumstances yield empty families that just don't work no matter how hard they try. Nobody can try and control this. The seeds of love and the seeds of family will fall wherever they want to fall and will take root wherever they may take root. There's no telling, there's no predicting what may be best. But that's the absolute beauty of it. Let people come together and love as they wish, there are no rules to this.
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C. JoyBell C.
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Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick.
The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard
Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15).
Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change.
Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge.
[Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own.
We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us.
The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution.
We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time.
The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts.
We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence.
We are indeed in relationship to all that is.
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George Leonard
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Is what I am not saying, young LaMont Chu, is why you cease to seem to give total effort of self since you begin with the clipping pictures of great professional figures for your adhesive tape and walls. No? Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of heaters, echo, being jammed in together, tarp is overclose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside clubs which ring the hour loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for coins. Inside roof too low for the lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside: the bad surface. Oh no look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline. Who could give the total, with crabgrass. Look here is low net high net. Opponent’s relatives heckle, opponent cheats, linesman in semifinal is impaired or cheats. You hurt. You have the injury. Bad knee and back. Hurt groin area from not stretching as asked. Aches of elbow. Eyelash in eye. The throat is sore. A too pretty girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd overwhelming or too small to inspire. Always something.’ [p.458]
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
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It's absolutely possible to experience bliss during breakups. Bliss that is different, but equal in value to, the euphoria experienced while sharing your life with someone. I am convinced that heartbreak is an unnaturally induced state which we were conditioned into believing is natural. It's a scam. I feel that the breaking of a relation can be equal in value to the making of it. And if we realize the joy that can be mined from the experience, we would eliminate this form of suffering, from our lives, altogether. You can feel catapulted into glistening self-love, enlightenment, growth and confidence, during emergence from the state of being in love with someone. It's a treasure trove of its own merit.
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C. JoyBell C.
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But I could not help being struck by the discovery how far more he had altered in relation to myself. This man, excellent, cultivated, whom I was far from annoyed at meeting, I could not bring myself to understand how I had been able to invest him long ago in a mystery so great that his appearance in the Champs-Elysées used to make my heart beat so violently that I was too bashful to approach his silk-lined cape, that at the door of the flat in which such a being dwelt I could not ring the bell without being overcome by boundless emotion and dismay; all this had vanished not only from his home, but from his person, and the idea of talking to him might or might not be agreeable to me, but had no effect whatever upon my nervous system.
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Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
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From an interview with Susie Bright:
SB: You were recently reviewed by the New York Times. How do you think the mainstream media regards sex museums, schools and cultural centers these days? What's their spin versus your own observations?
[Note: Here's the article Susie mentions: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/nat... ]
CQ: Lots of people have seen the little NY Times article, which was about an event we did, the Belle Bizarre Bazaar -- a holiday shopping fair where most of the vendors were sex workers selling sexy stuff. Proceeds went to our Exotic Dancers' Education Project, providing dancers with skills that will help them maximize their potential and choices. This event got into the Times despite the worries of its author, a journalist who'd been posted over by her editor. She thought the Times was way too conservative for the likes of us, which may be true, except they now have so many column inches to fill with distracting stuff that isn't about Judith Miller!
The one thing the Times article does not do is present the spectrum of the Center for Sex & Culture's work, especially the academic and serious side of what we do. This, I think, points to the real answer to your question: mainstream media culture remains quite nervous and touchy about sex-related issues, especially those that take sex really seriously. A frivolous take (or a good, juicy, shocking angle) on a sex story works for the mainstream press: a sex-positive and serious take, not so much. When the San Francisco Chronicle did its article about us a year ago, the writer focused just on our porn collection. Now, we very much value that, but we also collect academic journals and sex education materials, and not a word about those! I think this is one really essential linchpin of sex-negative or erotophobic culture, that sex is only allowed to be either light or heavy, and when it's heavy, it's about really heavy issues like abuse. Recently I gave some quotes about something-or-other for a Cosmo story and the editors didn't want to use the term "sexologist" to describe me, saying that it wasn't a real word! You know, stuff like that from the Times would not be all that surprising, but Cosmo is now policing the language? Please!
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Carol Queen (PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality)
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The facts of physics do not oblige us to accept one philosophy rather than the other...the laws of physics in any one reference frame account for all physical phenomena, including the observations of moving observers. And it is often simplest to work in a single frame, rather than to hurry after each moving object in turn...You can pretend that whatever inertial frame you have chosen is the ether of the 19th century physicists, and in that frame you can confidently apply the ideas of the FitzGerald contraction....It is a great pity that students don't understand this. Very often they are led to believe that Einstein somehow swept away all that went before. This is not true. Much of what went before survived the theory of relativity, with the added freedom that you can choose any inertial frame of reference in which to apply all those ideas.
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John S. Bell
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I grew up watching many parents use God as a threat towards their children. "Sit down and be still or God will get angry", "Listen to your mama and papa or God will get angry", "Don't say that word, it will make God angry." As a result, we have all of these adults today relating to God in that very same mindframe. God is a "sky daddy" literally sitting upon the clouds in our atmosphere, watching and getting ready to punish and get angry! A storyland God that is but a symbol of figments of childhood that were planted and then nourished throughout a person's growth, until now. It is not a sustainable God who has evolved along with a person's growth, as Someone a person can come to know in an organic and genuine way. It is a phantasmic God which is a staple of fear and tradition. And this is an absolute disservice that parents have done for their children.
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C. JoyBell C.
“
I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.
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Michael Finkel (The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession)
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Les travaux d’Alexander Todorov sont loin d’être les seuls à avoir mis en évidence une influence déterminante de l’apparence physique. D’autres études se sont, par exemple, concentrées directement sur l’impact qu’a la beauté sur les relations sociales. Là aussi, les résultats sont frappants. De nombreuses expériences ont montré que les individus considérés comme « beaux » sont aussi perçus globalement comme plus sociaux, plus puissants et plus compétents. Ils reçoivent plus facilement de l’aide lorsqu’ils en ont besoin. S’ils sont confrontés à la justice, ils ont tendance à être moins facilement jugés coupables et, quand ils sont condamnés, écopent d’une sentence moins sévère. Enfin, pour ce qui nous intéresse directement : une étude a montré que les personnes jugées belles emportent plus facilement la conviction de leurs interlocuteurs. Cet impact massif de la beauté sur les interactions sociales est une application directe de l’effet de halo. Il a été synthétisé en une formule cruelle, mais éloquente : « Ce qui est beau nous paraît bon10. »
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Clément Viktorovitch (Le Pouvoir rhétorique: Apprendre à convaincre et à décrypter les discours)
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Esther n'était certainement pas bien éduquée au sens habituel du terme, jamais l'idée ne lui serait venue de vider un cendrier ou de débarrasser le relief de ses repas, et c'est sans la moindre gêne qu'elle laissait la lumière allumée derrière elle dans les pièces qu'elle venait de quitter (il m'est arrivé, suivant pas à pas son parcours dans ma résidence de San Jose, d'avoir à actionner dix-sept commutateurs); il n'était pas davantage question de lui demander de penser à faire un achat, de ramener d'un magasin où elle se rendait une course non destinée à son propre usage, ou plus généralement de rendre un service quelconque. Comme toutes les très jolies jeunes filles elle n'était au fond bonne qu'à baiser, et il aurait été stupide de l'employer à autre chose, de la voir autrement que comme un animal de luxe, en tout choyé et gåté, protégé de tout souci comme de toute tâche ennuyeuse ou pénible afin de mieux pouvoir se consacrer à son service exclusivement sexuel. Elle n'en était pas moins très loin d'être ce monstre d'arrogance, d'égoïsme absolu et froid, au, pour parler en termes plus baudelairiens, cette infernale petite salope que sont la plupart des très jolies jeunes filles; il y avait en elle la conscience de la maladie, de la faiblesse et de la mort. Quoique belle, très belle, infiniment érotique et désirable, Esther n'en était pas moins sensible aux infirmités animales, parce qu'elle les connaissait ; c'est ce soir-là que j'en pris conscience, et que je me mis véritablement à l'aimer. Le désir physique, si violent soit-il, n'avait jamais suffi chez moi à conduire à l'amour, il n'avait pu atteindre ce stade ultime que lorsqu'il s'accompagnait, par une juxtaposition étrange, d'une compassion pour l'être désiré ; tout être vivant, évidemment, mérite la compassion du simple fait qu'il est en vie et se trouve par là-même exposé à des souffrances sans nombre, mais face à un être jeune et en pleine santé c'est une considération qui paraît bien théorique. Par sa maladie de reins, par sa faiblesse physique insoupçonnable mais réelle, Esther pouvait susciter en moi une compassion non feinte, chaque fois que l'envie me prendrait d'éprouver ce sentiment à son égard. Étant elle-même compatissante, ayant même des aspirations occasionnelles à la bonté, elle pouvait également susciter en moi l'estime, ce qui parachevait l'édifice, car je n'étais pas un être de passion, pas essentiellement, et si je pouvais désirer quelqu'un de parfaitement méprisable, s'il m'était arrivé à plusieurs reprises de baiser des filles dans l'unique but d'assurer mon emprise sur elles et au fond de les dominer, si j'étais même allé jusqu'à utiliser ce peu louable sentiment dans des sketches, jusqu'à manifester une compréhension troublante pour ces violeurs qui sacrifient leur victime immédiatement après avoir disposé de son corps, j'avais par contre toujours eu besoin d'estimer pour aimer, jamais au fond je ne m'étais senti parfaitement à l'aise dans une relation sexuelle basée sur la pure attirance érotique et l'indifférence à l'autre, j'avais toujours eu besoin, pour me sentir sexuellement heureux, d'un minimum - à défaut d'amour - de sympathie, d'estime, de compréhension mutuelle; l'humanité non, je n'y avais pas renoncé. (La possibilité d'une île, Daniel 1,15)
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Michel Houellebecq
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Calumny... gives [Harry] a spiritual purity in the sense that it scours away any outward show, any wish to live by the impression he makes on others. It gives him a lonely independence, so that he is able to act from his own depth. As he goes on to fulfill "his true destiny", which as far as he knows is his death, he is able to walk, hidden from view, past the woman he loves, without speaking, without looking back. This ability to act alone contrasts him with Voldemort, who needs others. That need is apparent in Voldemort's possession of Quirrell.
Voldemort's shallowness is apparent in the way Pettigrew has to do his work for him and then has to carry him to his rebirthing. Above all, it is in his need to be encircled by Death Eaters. Yet Voldemort is not truly in relationship with any of these people. He is connected to them only by magic, manipulation and threats. To be truly in relation with others, he would need, like Harry, to be capable of acting from his own depth. He would need to be able to act WITHOUT them. Voldemort, who wants to be independent, cannot truly act alone. ... Voldemort lives outwardly, in his domination of others; Harry lives inwardly, in the purity of his own being.
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Luke Bell (Baptizing Harry Potter: A Christian Reading of J.K. Rowling)
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This book festival...grew to attract thousands of visitors every year. Now they felt like they needed a new purpose. The festival’s continuing existence felt assured. What was it for? What could it do? How could it make itself count?
The festival’s leadership reached out to me for advice on these questions. What kind of purpose could be their next great animating force? Someone had the idea that the festival’s purpose could be about stitching together the community. Books were, of course, the medium. But couldn’t an ambitious festival set itself the challenge of making the city more connected? Couldn’t it help turn strong readers into good citizens? That seemed to me a promising direction—a specific, unique, disputable lodestar for a book festival that could guide its construction...We began to brainstorm.
I proposed an idea: Instead of starting each session with the books and authors themselves, why not kick things off with a two-minute exercise in which audience members can meaningfully, if briefly, connect with one another? The host could ask three city- or book-related questions, and then ask each member of the audience to turn to a stranger to discuss one of them. What brought you to this city—whether birth or circumstance?
What is a book that really affected you as a child? What do you think would make us a better city? Starting a session with these questions would help the audience become aware of one another. It would also break the norm of not speaking to a stranger, and perhaps encourage this kind of behavior to continue as people left the session. And it would activate a group identity—the city’s book lovers—that, in the absence of such questions, tends to stay dormant.
As soon as this idea was mentioned, someone in the group sounded a worry. “But I wouldn’t want to take away time from the authors,” the person said. There it was—the real, if unspoken, purpose rousing from its slumber and insisting on its continued primacy. Everyone liked the idea of “book festival as community glue” in theory. But at the first sign of needing to compromise on another thing in order to honor this new something, alarm bells rang. The group wasn’t ready to make the purpose of the book festival the stitching of community if it meant changing the structure of the sessions, or taking time away from something else. Their purpose, whether or not they admitted it, was the promotion of books and reading and the honoring of authors. It bothered them to make an author wait two minutes for citizens to bond. The book festival was doing what many of us do: shaping a gathering according to various unstated motivations, and making half-hearted gestures toward loftier goals.
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Priya Parker (The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters)
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This bold energetic man of rare intelligence and enterprise must also be understood as a man undone by his own deep flaws. He was known to drink to grievous excess, for example, which often turned him volatile and violent. On the other hand, his evil repute has been wildly exaggerated by careless journalists and their local informants, who seek to embellish their limited acquaintance with a “desperado”; with the result that the real man has been virtually entombed by tale and legend which since his death has petrified as myth. The most lurid view of Mr. Watson is the one perpetuated by the Islanders themselves, for as Dickens observed after his visit to this country, “These Americans do love a scoundrel.” Because his informants tend to imagine that the darkest interpretation is the one the writer wishes to hear, the popular accounts (until now, there have been no others) are invariably sensational as well as speculative: the hard facts, not to speak of “truth,” are missing. Also, this “Bloody Watson” material relates only to his final years in southwest Florida; one rarely encounters any reference to South Carolina, where Edgar Artemas Watson passed his boyhood, nor to the years in the Indian Country (always excepting his alleged role in the slaying of Belle Starr), nor even to the Fort White district of Columbia County in north Florida where he farmed in early manhood, married all three of his wives, and spent almost half of the fifty-five years of his life.
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Peter Matthiessen (Shadow Country)
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Try opening it.” He was doing that as she spoke, gently twisting the acorn in its cup without any success. It didn’t unscrew, so he tried harder, and then tried to pull it, but that didn’t work either. “Try twisting the other way,” said Asta. “That would just do it up tighter,” he said, but he tried, and it worked. The thread was the opposite way. “I never seen that before,” said Malcolm. “Strange.” So neatly and finely made were the threads that he had to turn it a dozen times before the two parts fell open. There was a piece of paper inside, folded up as small as it could go: that very thin kind of paper that Bibles were printed on. Malcolm and Asta looked at each other. “This is someone else’s secret,” he said. “We ought not to read it.” He opened it all the same, very carefully so as not to tear the delicate paper, but it wasn’t delicate at all: it was tough. “Anyone might have found it,” said Asta. “He’s lucky it was us.” “Luckyish,” said Malcolm. “Anyway, he’s lucky he hadn’t got it on him when he was arrested.” Written on the paper in black ink with a very fine pen were the words: We would like you to turn your attention next to another matter. You will be aware that the existence of a Rusakov field implies the existence of a related particle, but so far such a particle has eluded us. When we try measuring one way, our substance evades it and seems to prefer another, but when we try a different way, we have no more success. A suggestion from Tokojima, although rejected out of hand by most official bodies, seems to us to hold some promise, and we would like you to inquire through the alethiometer about any connection you can discover between the Rusakov field and the phenomenon unofficially called Dust. We do not have to remind you of the danger should this research attract the attention of the other side, but please be aware that they are themselves beginning a major program of inquiry into this subject. Tread carefully. “What does it mean?” said Asta. “Something to do with a field. Like a magnetic field, I s’pose. They sound like experimental theologians.” “What d’you think they mean by ‘the other side’?” “The CCD. Bound to be, since it was them chasing the man.
”
”
Philip Pullman (La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust, #1))
“
C’est à Ibn ‘Arabi que l’on attribue le rôle le plus éminent dans cette interprétation de plus en plus approfondie du principe féminin. Pour lui non seulement la nafs [âme] est féminine – comme c’est le cas généralement – mais aussi dhât, « essence divine », de sorte que la féminité, dans son œuvre, est la forme sous laquelle Dieu se manifeste le mieux (…) cette phrase savant exprime, en effet, parfaitement le concept d’Ibn ‘Arabi puisqu’il écrit au sujet de sa compréhension du divin :
« Dieu ne peut être envisagé en dehors de la matière et il est envisagé plus parfaitement en la matière humaine que dans toute autre et plus parfaitement en la femme qu’en l’homme. Car Il est envisagé soit comme le principe qui agit soit comme le principe qui subit, soit comme les deux à la fois (…) quand Dieu se manifeste sous la forme de la femme Il est celui qui agit grâce au fait qu’Il domine totalement l’âme de l’homme et qu’Il l’incite à se donner et à se soumettre entièrement à Lui (…) c’est pourquoi voir Dieu dans la femme signifie Le voir sous ces deux aspects, une telle vision est plus complète que de Le voir sous toute autre forme par laquelle Il se manifeste. »
(…)
Des auteurs mystiques postérieurs à Ibn ‘Arabi développèrent ses idées et représentèrent les mystères de la relation physique entre l’homme et la femme par des descriptions tout à fait concrètes. L’opuscule du soufi cachemirien Ya’qub Sarfi (mort en 1594), analysé par Sachiko Murata, en est un exemple typique ; il y explique la nécessité des ablutions complètes après l’acte d’amour par l’expérience « religieuse » de l’amour charnel : au moment de ce plaisir extatique extrême – le plus fort que l’on puisse imagine et vivre – l’esprit est tant occupé par les manifestations du divin qu’il perd toute relation avec son corps. Par les ablutions, il ramène ce corps devenu quasiment cadavre à la vie normale.
(…)
On retrouve des considérations semblables concernant le « mystère du mariage » chez Kasani, un mystique originaire de Farghana (mort en 1543). Eve, n’avait-elle pas été créée afin que « Adam pût se reposer auprès d’elle », comme il est dit dans le Coran (sourate 7:189) ? Elle était le don divin pour le consoler dans sa solitude, la manifestation de cet océan divin qu’il avait quitté. La femme est la plus belle manifestation du divin, tel fut le sentiment d’Ibn ‘Arabi.
”
”
Annemarie Schimmel (My Soul Is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam)
“
Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders―and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands―parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion―shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development―the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself―is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:―the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders - and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands - parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion - shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development - the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself - is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that: - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
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time proved that the persistent educational gap between black and white students was only indirectly traceable to segregation. Instead, the root of the problem appeared to be the substantial disparities in the resources provided to black students relative to white students. Many, including myself, decided that given the difficulty of integrating black and Latino students with their swiftly fleeing white counterparts, we should concentrate on desegregating the money.
”
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Derrick A. Bell (Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform)
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Whenever Stalin made a speech his audience would applaud so much that no one dared be the first to stop, applauding even to the point of collapse. The writer and Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, relates a tale from 1937 when, after eleven exhausting minutes of enthusiastic clapping, a factory director was the first to stop; he got ten years in a gulag. Eventually Stalin permitted the use of a bell to signify a stop. If Stalin, in a speech, mispronounced a word (Russian, after all, being his second language), those speaking after him, if using the same word, would mispronounce it in exactly the same way.
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Rupert Colley (Stalin: History in an Hour)
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Organizations seeking to commercialize open source software realized this, of course, and deliberately incorporated it as part of their market approach. In a 2013 piece on Pando Daily, venture capitalist Danny Rimer quotes then-MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos as saying, “The relational database market is a $9 billion a year market. I want to shrink it to $3 billion and take a third of the market.” While MySQL may not have succeeded in shrinking the market to three billion, it is interesting to note that growing usage of MySQL was concurrent with a declining ability of Oracle to sell new licenses. Which may explain both why Sun valued MySQL at one third of a $3 billion dollar market and why Oracle later acquired Sun and MySQL. The downward price pressure imposed by open source alternatives have become sufficiently visible, in fact, as to begin raising alarm bells among financial analysts. The legacy providers of data management systems have all fallen on hard times over the last year or two, and while many are quick to dismiss legacy vendor revenue shortfalls to macroeconomic issues, we argue that these macroeconomic issues are actually accelerating a technology transition from legacy products to alternative data management systems like Hadoop and NoSQL that typically sell for dimes on the dollar. We believe these macro issues are real, and rather than just causing delays in big deals for the legacy vendors, enterprises are struggling to control costs and are increasingly looking at lower cost solutions as alternatives to traditional products. — Peter Goldmacher Cowen and Company
”
”
Stephen O’Grady (The Software Paradox: The Rise and Fall of the Commercial Software Market)
“
The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.
”
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Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
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The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. In Europe, the practice dated back to the dark ages, with the Visigoths. During the middle ages, this mark of shame, denuding a woman of what was supposed to be her most seductive feature, was commonly a punishment for adultery. Shaving women's heads as a mark of retribution and humiliation was reintroduced in the 20th century. After French troops occupied the Rhineland in 1923, German women who had relations with them later suffered the same fate. And during the second world war, the Nazi state issued orders that German women accused of sleeping with non-Aryans or foreign prisoners employed on farms should also be publicly punished in this way. Also during the Spanish civil war, Falangists had shaved the heads of women from republican families, treating them as if they were prostitutes. Those on the extreme right had convinced themselves that the left believed in free love. (The most famous victim in fiction is Maria, the lover of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.)
”
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Antony Beevor
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ELECTIVE MUTISM
Social anxiety appears in many forms, some of which are only now coming to light. Socially anxious children, for example, are usually thought of as quiet and reserved and of course “shy.” But some children, though they function fairly well in their home environment, have great difficulty talking in social situations. Donny was one such child. At fourteen, he managed quite well at home, but never talked to his peers. His parents encouraged him to join in group activities, and even sent him off to an overnight camp. But he remained silent, even when he became lost in the woods. The child was alone for several hours; dusk was approaching, and he began to get cold, but he still could not bring himself to call out. The counselors were near enough for him to attract their attention and yet he remained mute.
Alarm bells went off for Melanie when she noticed that her daughter at age three had trouble talking with people outside their home. When the little girl went to see Santa Claus, and he asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she became hysterical and couldn’t respond verbally. And the problem continued: She would speak only with the immediate family, and never to peers or potential playmates. Elective mutism is a very specific symptom of social anxiety. Fear turns into panic which inhibits speech; the elective mute is capable—physically—of speaking to outsiders, but anxiety prevents him or her from speaking. Only recently has there been any media attention paid to this syndrome, and research in this area has just begun. After an article appeared in a New York-area newspaper, however, someone who had expressed interest in starting a self-help group for elective mutes was besieged with phone calls from desperate relatives, eager to get help for their silent family members. I have worked with people of all ages who suffer from varying degrees of elective mutism. From my perspective, elective mutism is treatable relatively easily in childhood or early adolescence. But treating the adult is very difficult because of the pervasive progression of the problem.
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
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Lester Dent’s Master Fiction Plot One of the most successful of the pulp writers was Lester Dent (1904-1959). In his relatively short life he churned out at least 175 novels, most of them about the titular character Doc Savage
”
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James Scott Bell (How to Write Pulp Fiction (Bell on Writing))
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According to the research of C. R. Snyder, hope isn’t a warm and fuzzy feeling; he actually defines it as a cognitive emotional process that has three parts. This is a process that most of us, if we’re lucky, are taught growing up, though it can be learned at any time: The three parts are goal, pathway, and agency. We can identify a realistic goal (I know where I want to go), and then we can figure out the pathway to get there, even if it’s not a straight line and involves a Plan B and scrappiness (I know I can get there because I’m persistent and I will keep trying in the face of setbacks and disappointment). Agency is belief in our ability to stay on that path until we’ve arrived (I know I can do this). Again, while a cynic might argue that someone who clings to hope is a sucker, or ridiculously earnest, this type of armor typically comes from pain. Often, people’s cynicism is related to despair. As the theologian Rob Bell explains, “Despair is the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.” That is a devastating line. The problem with cynicism and sarcasm is that they are typically system- and culturewide—it’s just so easy to take shots at other people. As brave leaders, it is essential not to reward or allow it. Reward clarity and kindness and real conversation, and teach hope instead.
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Brené Brown (Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.)
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She wasn't used to having backup; of all the many resources her prodigious mind was capable of accessing, help wasn't one of them. She was used to doing things on her own.
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Liz Braswell (As Old as Time)
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Belle couldn't even begin to sort out her thoughts, or what she wanted to say to Gaston. Her feeling ran from kill him to oh, why waste the effort, he's hopeless...
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Liz Braswell (As Old as Time)
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Derrick Bell, a law professor at Harvard and one of the founders of critical race theory, believed “progress in American race relations is largely a mirage, obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain control.”77
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Jon Harris (Christianity and Social Justice: Religions in Conflict)
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Patriarchy, like any system of domination (for example, racism), relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, one person is strong, the other weak, and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless. To those who support patriarchal thinking, maintaining power and control is acceptable by whatever means.
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bell hooks
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To this day, a central argument of the alcohol industry is that the most significant harms of alcohol are confined to a minority of excessive drinkers. This is specious—superficially correct, perhaps intuitively appealing to those with a personal experience of addiction, but in fact deeply wrong. Alcohol problems exist on a continuum, and numerous studies have found that most of the harmful effects of alcohol can be seen not among the most severe cases but in the much larger population of drinkers at the middle of the consumption bell curve—a group defined as “hazardous” or “at-risk” drinkers. People don’t need to be stereotypical alcoholics to drive drunk, get into fights, commit domestic violence, or develop alcohol-related diseases. Hazardous drinkers have fewer of these problems at an individual level, but they make up so much more of the population that they account for the most problems overall.
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Carl Erik Fisher (The Urge: Our History of Addiction)
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It’s in relation to a case at the Foundling Hospital. Ruby knew the victim and might be able to help me identify her assailant.
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Irina Shapiro (Murder at the Foundling Hospital (A Tate and Bell Mystery, #3))
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It was not always possible to take that war seriously. In the first place I could not understand why we, the French, and the English were fighting the Germans and the Austrians. Being in vaudeville all of my life had made me international-minded. I had met too many kindly German performers—singers and acrobats and musicians—to believe they could be as evil as they were being portrayed in our newspapers. Having known Germans, Japanese jugglers, Chinese magicians, Italian tenors, Swiss yodelers and bell-ringers, Irish, Jewish, and Dutch comedians, British dancers, and whirling dervishes from India, I believed people from everywhere in the world were about the same. Not as individuals, of course, but taken as a group.
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Buster Keaton (My Wonderful World of Slapstick)
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Humiliation takes my relatively thick skin and morphs it into full-grain leather,
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Maureen Sherry (Opening Belle)
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Unfortunately for the Inuit (and their Paleo imitators), the rest of the story isn’t so rosy. Turns out the Inuit are not healthy at all. They suffer from many chronic diseases and live, on average, ten years less than statistically matched Canadians (Choinière 1992; Iburg, Brønnum-Hansen, et al. 2001). In fact, they have the worst longevity of all populations in North America. There are many reasons for their short life expectancy: high rate of infections and TB, as well as a high suicide rate. While these may not be diet related (although more and more evidence suggests a strong connection between diet and the ability to fight of infection, and between diet and mood), Inuit also die of cancers of the GI tract and stroke, afflictions strongly correlated to diet (Paltoo and Chu 2004). Autopsy studies show they have less heart disease, likely due to their high omega-3 and low omega-6 and low-saturated-fat diet, but they are by no means free of heart disease (McLaughlin, Middaugh, et al. 2005). And there’s a possibility that autopsy statistics showing low heart disease are unreliable, based on really poor data collection (Bjerregaard, Young, et al. 2003; Bell, Mayer-Davis, et al. 1997). In fact, one of the likely reasons for their apparent low rates of heart disease and some cancers is their short life expectancy: Inuit eating their traditional diet simply don’t live long enough to demonstrate heart disease and cancer. In fact, the Westernization of their diet—adding the very foods the Paleo movement vilifies—may actually be prolonging their lives. A recent review of the literature suggests that a diet high in seafood does not lead to less heart disease and may lead to worse health (Fodor, Helis, et al. 2014)!
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Garth Davis (Proteinaholic: How Our Obsession with Meat Is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It)
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When anyone from seaboard or country caught leprosy, they left relatives and friends and went to Pratofungo to spend the rest of their lives waiting for the disease to devour them. There were rumours of great jollifications to greet each new arrival; from afar songs and music were to be heard coming from the lepers' houses till night-fall. Many things were said of Pratofungo, although no healthy person had ever been there; but all rumours were agreed in saying that life there was a perpetual party. Before becoming a leper colony the village had been a great place for prostitutes and visited by sailors of every race and religion; and the women there, it seemed, still kept the licentious habits of those times. The lepers did no work on the land. except for a vine-yard of strawberry grapes whose juice kept them the whole year round in a state of simmering tipsiness. The lepers spent most of their time playing strange instruments of their own invention, such as harps with little bells attached to the string, and singing in falsetto, and painting eggs with daubs of every colour as if for a perpetual Easter.
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Italo Calvino (Il visconte dimezzato)
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brain and other nerve-related problems such as headaches from concussions, vascular dementia (dementia caused by blood vessel problems in the brain), migraines, Bell’s palsy (a paralysis of the facial nerve), and tinnitus (ringing of the ears). He emphasized he was influenced by research that had been done in Israel on light therapy and the brain. Dr. Shimon Rochkind, a neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv University, originally pioneered work using lasers to treat injuries in the peripheral nervous system, that is, all the nerves in the body except those in the brain and spinal cord. Injury to peripheral nerves can lead to problems sensing or moving.
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Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
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St. Lawrence River
May 1705
Temperature 48 degrees
From the river they walked back to the town, and the boy was taken into the fire circle outside the powwow’s longhouse. Here he was placed on the powwow’s sacred albino furs. A dozen men, those who were now his relatives, sat in a circle around him. The powwow lit a sacred pipe and passed it, and for the first time in his life, the boy smoked.
Don’t cough, Mercy prayed for him. Don’t choke.
Afterward she found out they diluted the tobacco with dried sumac leaves to make sure he wouldn’t cough on his first pull.
Although the women had adopted him, it was the men who filed by to bring gifts. The new Indian son received a tomahawk, knives, a fine bow, a pot of vermilion paint, a beautiful black-and-white-striped pouch made from a skunk and several necklaces.
“Watch, watch!” whispered Snow Walker, riveted. “This is his father. Look what his father gives him!”
The warrior transferred from his own body to his son’s a wampum belt--hundreds of tiny shell circles linked together like white lace. The belt was so large it had to hang from the neck instead of the waist.
To give a man a belt was old-fashioned. Wampum had no value to the French and had not been used as money by the Indians for many years. But it still spoke of power and honor and even Mercy caught her breath to see it on a white boy’s body.
But of course, he was not white any longer.
“My son,” said the powwow, “now you are flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.”
At last his real name was called aloud, and the name was plain: Annisquam, which just meant “Hilltop.” Perhaps they had caught him at the summit of a mountain. Or considering the honor of the wampum belt, perhaps he kept his eyes on the horizon and was a future leader. Or like Ruth, he might have done some great deed that would be told in story that evening.
When the gifts and embraces were over, Annisquam was taken into the powwow’s longhouse to sit alone. He would stay there for many hours and would not be brought out until well into the dancing and feasting in the evening.
Not one of Mercy’s questions had been answered.
Was he, in his heart, adopted?
Had he, in his heart, accepted these new parents?
Where, in his heart, had he placed his English parents?
How did he excuse himself to his English God and his English dead?
The dancing began. Along with ancient percussion instruments that crackled and rattled, rasped and banged, the St. Francis Indians had French bells, whose clear chimes rang, and even a bugle, whose notes trumpeted across the river and over the trees.
”
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Caroline B. Cooney (The Ransom of Mercy Carter)
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In 1995, on the strength of the book, the famously conservative Hillsdale College invited me to participate in a series of lectures on welfare. My subject was to be “Race Relations and Welfare.” Bell Curve author Charles Murray was also a speaker, and the evening before my talk he and I participated in a long private conversation with several others about race and IQ, and the implications of racial differences for American society. Lissa Roche, daughter-in-law of Hillsdale president George Roche and one of the conference organizers, was present and joined actively in the conversation. The next day, in my talk, I spoke in some detail about black-white IQ differences, which I offered as one of the reasons blacks are more likely than whites to be on welfare.
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Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
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Christianity brought completely new rituals, beliefs and rules of conduct, such as baptism, church services, bell-ringing, burial in consecrated churchyards without grave-goods, a belief in one God (or the Trinity), very strict regulations about marriage between relatives, while exposing unwanted children, eating horseflesh and worshipping the old gods were prohibited.
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Else Roesdahl (The Vikings)
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Sadly, part of what Guinier and other parents must prepare their Black sons for is the prospect, and even the probability, that the group he is most likely to experience conflict and hostility with is not the police or the Ku Klux Klan but other Black males. For reasons that can never be fully explained, Black males kill and harm one another at a rate that far exceeds any other segment of the American population (Bell and Jenkins, 1990; Earls, 1994). The alarming homicide rates among young Black males is one of the major factors that has led to Black males being the only segment of the U.S. population with a declining life expectancy (Earls, 1994). Gangs, drug dealing, and the availability of guns are certainly contributing factors, but there is more going on related to the phenomenon of violence among and between Black males that defies easy explanation.
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Pedro A. Noguera (The Trouble With Black Boys: ...And Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education)
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Making the Right Decisions Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and without criticizing, and it will be given to him. James 1:5 HCSB Some decisions are easy to make because the consequences of those decisions are small. When the person behind the counter asks, “Want fries with that?” the necessary response requires little thought because the aftermath of that decision is relatively unimportant. Some decisions, on the other hand, are big … very big. If you’re facing one of those big decisions, here are some things you can do: 1. Gather as much information as you can: don’t expect to get all the facts—that’s impossible—but get as many facts as you can in a reasonable amount of time. (Proverbs 24:3-4) 2. Don’t be too impulsive: If you have time to make a decision, use that time to make a good decision. (Proverbs 19:2) 3. Rely on the advice of trusted friends and mentors. Proverbs 1:5 makes it clear: “A wise man will hear and increase learning, and a man of understanding will attain wise counsel” (NKJV). 4. Pray for guidance. When you seek it, He will give it. (Luke 11:9) 5. Trust the quiet inner voice of your conscience: Treat your conscience as you would a trusted advisor. (Luke 17:21) 6. When the time for action arrives, act. Procrastination is the enemy of progress; don’t let it defeat you. (James 1:22). People who can never quite seem to make up their minds usually make themselves miserable. So when in doubt, be decisive. It’s the decent way to live. There may be no trumpet sound or loud applause when we make a right decision, just a calm sense of resolution and peace. Gloria Gaither The Reference Point for the Christian is the Bible. All values, judgments, and attitudes must be gauged in relationship to this Reference Point. Ruth Bell Graham The principle of making no decision without prayer keeps me from rushing in and committing myself before I consult God. Elizabeth George If you are struggling to make some difficult decisions right now that aren’t specifically addressed in the Bible, don’t make a choice based on what’s right for someone else. You are the Lord’s and He will make sure you do what’s right. Lisa Whelchel We cannot be led by our emotions and still be led by the Holy Spirit, so we have to make a choice. Joyce Meyer
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Freeman Smith (Fifty Shades of Grace: Devotions Celebrating God's Unlimited Gift)
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riendship is a treasure. If you possess even one nugget of the real thing-you're rich! So celebrate! Give your friend a book or an item with a note explaining its importance. Or set up a spa day.
Why not add to her collection-or even start one for her! A bell, a miniature animal, an antique ...something in line with her interests. Personalized notepads are always great and practical!
You could get her a monogrammed Bible or a hymnbook for her devotional times. Or one of those wonderful little rosebush trees if she's into gardening.
Express your care and love for her friendship.
by not widen your circle of friends? Don't miss the joy of sharing your Christian life
through hospitality. Bible studies and small-group meetings are great ways to open your home and your heart. Fill a basket with food and take it to neighbors. What a surprise it will be for them!
Host a neighborhood barbecue, potluck, theme dinner (ask everyone to bring something related to the theme), or even start a dinner club and meet somewhere different each month.
Throw an "all girls" party for you and your friends.
Volunteer at a homeless shelter or hospital.
What do you enjoy most? Let that be the focus of your hospitality to others.
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Emilie Barnes (365 Things Every Woman Should Know)