Biography Of X Quotes

Perhaps that's what all books are, the end of someone's trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

I do not belong to the era of writers who will be able to make any sense of this particularly turbulent chapter of American history; one cannot make a bed while still tangled in its sheets.

People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.

Here was one of the white man's most characteristic behavior patterns - where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don't share his vainglorious self-opinion.

I have broken every rule I ever set for myself. And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life.

Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most I of my I’s?

There is no such thing as privacy. There is no experience or quality or thought or pain that has not been felt by all the billions of living and dead.

Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

I'd always thought of myself a rational person, but the moment she was gone I ceased to be whoever I thought I was.

She could not hurt me. I had no more space, at the time, to hold any new hurts.

Cancer researchers knew that X-rays, soot, cigarette smoke, and asbestos represented vastly more common risk factors for human cancers.

--and there it was again, that useless, human blame two people will toss between each other when they become too tired or weak to carry the weight of love.

I was angry," he said, "and I'm still angry, but you can't really be angry with a place unless you love it. You have to love it to wish it to be better, to wish it could be different.

A loss tinged with shame, regret, or a sense of something unfinished is the most dangerous sort, a black-hole grief that pulls a person relentlessly toward its center, and when our lives come to one of these we are forced to bow before it or to detach completely.

Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root.

This cowardice, unknowingness in the face of my own feelings is why I betray those I love, verbally, when I refused to express my feelings for them.

I had ceded all control of my life to this feeling of a storm approaching and the glad certainty it would demolish everything I knew.

She kept losing track of the people she loved, and losing track of herself along with them.

Voici assez d'éloges donnés aux morts, médisons un peu des vivants!

The very effect of X-rays killing rapidly dividing cells—DNA damage—also created cancer-causing mutations in genes.

Dostoyevsky’s widow insisted that her husband was to literature what the physicist-founder of the X-ray was to the human body: the inventor of a wholly new means of peering inside the human soul.

For now, the Simple Daily Practice means doing ONE thing every day. Try any one of these things each day: A) Sleep eight hours. B) Eat two meals instead of three. C) No TV. D) No junk food. E) No complaining for one whole day. F) No gossip. G) Return an e-mail from five years ago. H) Express thanks to a friend. I) Watch a funny movie or a stand-up comic. J) Write down a list of ideas. The ideas can be about anything. K) Read a spiritual text. Any one that is inspirational to you. The Bible, The Tao te Ching, anything you want. L) Say to yourself when you wake up, “I’m going to save a life today.” Keep an eye out for that life you can save. M) Take up a hobby. Don’t say you don’t have time. Learn the piano. Take chess lessons. Do stand-up comedy. Write a novel. Do something that takes you out of your current rhythm. N) Write down your entire schedule. The schedule you do every day. Cross out one item and don’t do that anymore. O) Surprise someone. P) Think of ten people you are grateful for. Q) Forgive someone. You don’t have to tell them. Just write it down on a piece of paper and burn the paper. It turns out this has the same effect in terms of releasing oxytocin in the brain as actually forgiving them in person. R) Take the stairs instead of the elevator. S) I’m going to steal this next one from the 1970s pop psychology book Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: when you find yourself thinking of that special someone who is causing you grief, think very quietly, “No.” If you think of him and (or?) her again, think loudly, “No!” Again? Whisper, “No!” Again, say it. Louder. Yell it. Louder. And so on. T) Tell someone every day that you love them. U) Don’t have sex with someone you don’t love. V) Shower. Scrub. Clean the toxins off your body. W) Read a chapter in a biography about someone who is an inspiration to you. X) Make plans to spend time with a friend. Y) If you think, “Everything would be better off if I were dead,” then think, “That’s really cool. Now I can do anything I want and I can postpone this thought for a while, maybe even a few months.” Because what does it matter now? The planet might not even be around in a few months. Who knows what could happen with all these solar flares. You know the ones I’m talking about. Z) Deep breathing. When the vagus nerve is inflamed, your breathing becomes shallower. Your breath becomes quick. It’s fight-or-flight time! You are panicking. Stop it! Breathe deep. Let me tell you something: most people think “yoga” is all those exercises where people are standing upside down and doing weird things. In the Yoga Sutras, written in 300 B.C., there are 196 lines divided into four chapters. In all those lines, ONLY THREE OF THEM refer to physical exercise. It basically reads, “Be able to sit up straight.” That’s it. That’s the only reference in the Yoga Sutras to physical exercise. Claudia always tells me that yogis measure their lives in breaths, not years. Deep breathing is what keeps those breaths going.

Ich habe hundertmal überlebt. Ich wohne auf einer Sonneninssel. Das Restgeld reicht noch über mein Ende hinaus. Man kann nur in einem Bett schlafen, 3 x am Tag essen ... unterm Strich habe ich gewonnen. Ich bin gesund wie ein Waldesel.

From the first moment we met in April 1989, there was an unnamable sentiment between us, one that arrived so quickly there was no moment to question it. It wasn't love, nor was it lust or obsession. It was something both visceral and beyond viscera.

I believe the world—all parts of the world—I believe it is all logical, only there is not enough time in one life to locate every explanation, do you understand?” he asked. “We must live with the explanations we have, and respect the absences of those who are absent.

This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

I cannot remember what we spoke about, only that it felt as if we were resuming a conversation we'd been having for years. What do people ever talk about at times like this, the first meeting of years and years of meetings? It seems at such times that we are the least in a hurry to explain ourselves, intuitively knowing there is time to get to all of it, that there is plenty of time.

X believed that making fiction was sacred...and she wanted to live in that sanctity, not to be fooled by the flimsiness of perceived reality, which was nothing more than a story that had fooled most of the world. She chose, instead, to live a life in which nothing was fixed, nothing was a given--that her name might change from day to day, moment to moment, and the same was true for her beliefs, her memories, her manner of dress, her manner of speech, what she knew, what she wanted. All of it was always being called into question. All of it was costume and none of it was solid. Not even her past was a settled matter, and though anything else around her might fluctuate, that unsettled core--her history--was to remain unsettled.

Try any one of these things each day: A) Sleep eight hours. B) Eat two meals instead of three. C) No TV. D) No junk food. E) No complaining for one whole day. F) No gossip. G) Return an e-mail from five years ago. H) Express thanks to a friend. I) Watch a funny movie or a stand-up comic. J) Write down a list of ideas. The ideas can be about anything. K) Read a spiritual text. Any one that is inspirational to you. The Bible, The Tao te Ching, anything you want. L) Say to yourself when you wake up, “I’m going to save a life today.” Keep an eye out for that life you can save. M) Take up a hobby. Don’t say you don’t have time. Learn the piano. Take chess lessons. Do stand-up comedy. Write a novel. Do something that takes you out of your current rhythm. N) Write down your entire schedule. The schedule you do every day. Cross out one item and don’t do that anymore. O) Surprise someone. P) Think of ten people you are grateful for. Q) Forgive someone. You don’t have to tell them. Just write it down on a piece of paper and burn the paper. It turns out this has the same effect in terms of releasing oxytocin in the brain as actually forgiving them in person. R) Take the stairs instead of the elevator. S) I’m going to steal this next one from the 1970s pop psychology book Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: when you find yourself thinking of that special someone who is causing you grief, think very quietly, “No.” If you think of him and (or?) her again, think loudly, “No!” Again? Whisper, “No!” Again, say it. Louder. Yell it. Louder. And so on. T) Tell someone every day that you love them. U) Don’t have sex with someone you don’t love. V) Shower. Scrub. Clean the toxins off your body. W) Read a chapter in a biography about someone who is an inspiration to you. X) Make plans to spend time with a friend. Y) If you think, “Everything would be better off if I were dead,” then think, “That’s really cool. Now I can do anything I want and I can postpone this thought for a while, maybe even a few months.” Because what does it matter now? The planet might not even be around in a few months. Who knows what could happen with all these solar flares. You know the ones I’m talking about. Z) Deep breathing. When the vagus nerve is inflamed, your breathing becomes shallower. Your breath becomes quick. It’s fight-or-flight time! You are panicking. Stop it! Breathe deep. Let me tell you something: most people think “yoga” is all those exercises where people are standing upside down and doing weird things. In the Yoga Sutras, written in 300 B.C., there are 196 lines divided into four chapters. In all those lines, ONLY THREE OF THEM refer to physical exercise. It basically reads, “Be able to sit up straight.” That’s it. That’s the only reference in the Yoga Sutras to physical exercise. Claudia always tells me that yogis measure their lives in breaths, not years. Deep breathing is what keeps those breaths going.

The Collins grave plot is 4 ft in width and 8 ft in depth and the ‘Celtic Cross’ intended to be erected thereon will be 11′ 6″ in height and the sculptor has specified for a minimum base of 4′ 6″ x 3′ 0″ x 1′ 3″ high. While the plot in its present layout is fully that width the committee will not allow the foundation of the monument to exceed 4′ without Government authority.32

the trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving.

The happiest years are the shortest. We only notice them after they're gone," X wrote in The Reason I'm Lost. "Therefore, the attempt to avoid suffering is the most suicidal impulse of all. It is to ask your life to go by so quickly that you never see a moment of it.

Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to be a part of X's life had to accept this hazard - she lived in a play without intermission in which she'd cast herself in every role.

Mr. Smith wished to warm his cold hands on her heat, while I have been scorched by it.

X believed that making fiction was sacred ...and she wanted to live in that sanctity...

Others thought I was not in my right mind, that I was grieving inappropriately, that I should be patient, let another year or two pass, that I should back away from grief as if evading a large animal --go slowly, be patient, make no sudden movements.

...but according to his artist statement their subject was "toxic masculinity," a topic that had become popular after men, millennia too late, become aware of its existence.

She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.

One of the armed guards smiled and said, “God bless,” and I felt his sincerity, despite his weapons. It was a reminder of the enormous paradoxes in a religious worldview that holds as much dazed and romantic hope as it does fatalism—the possibility of heaven for some, and the certainty of hell for others.

I had to abandon that safe inertia in order for my life to become recognizable as my life.

but now that Mr. Smith’s false narrative was out there and I was in our cabin alone, I had nothing to do but avenge him and his lies, to avenge reality itself, to avenge everything.

This sort of gesture—to force someone into feeling what they wanted to avoid—was something X did all her life to anyone she felt she had the right to change. It seems that the more she loved someone, the more pain she wanted to dredge up, the more demanding she became, no matter the cost, no matter the damage.

I’d somehow known her before I knew her, or perhaps writing toward the future had created an absence in me that only she, for whatever reason, could fill.

Like many other women at that age and time, I harbored a swelling anger that I did not know how to express, as if a new organ had grown inside me but had not yet begun to function.

Time takes those sensations away and without them the story seems simpler and we hold that simplicity up and call it clarity.

A loss tinged with shame, regret, or a sense of something unfinished is the most dangerous sort, a black-hole grief that pulls a person relentlessly toward its center, and when our lives come to one of these we are forced to either bow before it or detach completely.

...and though most of the time I did not question the illusion I lived within, there were moments when I could see our life clearly and knew that everything was beautiful and nothing was right.

The most valuable blessing we can offer anybody is our consideration.

Keeping your body sound is a statement of appreciation to the entire universe.

Back in 1415, Prince Henry and his brothers had convinced their father, King John of Portugal, to capture the principal Muslim trading depot in the western Mediterranean: Ceuta, on the northeastern tip of Morocco. These brothers were envious of Muslim riches, and they sought to eliminate the Islamic middleman so that they could find the southern source of gold and Black captives. After the battle, Moorish prisoners left Prince Henry spellbound as they detailed trans-Saharan trade routes down into the disintegrating Mali Empire. Since Muslims still controlled these desert routes, Prince Henry decided to “seek the lands by the way of the sea.” He sought out those African lands until his death in 1460, using his position as the Grand Master of Portugal’s wealthy Military Order of Christ (successor of the Knights Templar) to draw venture capital and loyal men for his African expeditions. In 1452, Prince Henry’s nephew, King Afonso V, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write a biography of the life and slave-trading work of his “beloved uncle.” Zurara was a learned and obedient commander in Prince Henry’s Military Order of Christ. In recording and celebrating Prince Henry’s life, Zurara was also implicitly obscuring his Grand Master’s monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves. In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africans in the modern era. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas. Zurara’s inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry’s racist policies concerning African slave-trading.1

I love my fans [and] Slayer fans,” wrote Lombardo. “But the fact is: Today's Slayer is not SLAYER. They can play all of the songs, but the heart and the backbone is gone.  If the current mindset was present at the beginning, we would have never made it this far.  We were not greedy sellouts, going through the motions on stage merely to cash a check. We were the epitome of the punk/thrash mentality. If they ever get back

before. She recognized it and nailed the diagnosis.   According to their best guess, a spider had bitten his arm, causing the rapid onset of a bacterial infection called necrotizing fasciitis. The gangrene-like, flesh-eating infection immediately had begun digging into his skin and muscle. The hospital staff told Hanneman if he had waited another hour to come in, he would have died46-4.   The hospital admitted Jeff immediately.

Exodus guitarist, Kirk Hammett.   “I think Gary Holt – I think Metallica took the wrong dude,” King told me 2007. “Gary Holt’s bad-ass. And that’s not to say Kirk Hammett isn’t. Gary is the one that, historically, I just like Gary’s playing.”   Now, as always, Slayer wouldn’t repeat Metallica’s mistake.   Holt wasn’t

But I did not find this so awful. Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to be a part of X’s life had to accept this hazard—she lived in a play without intermission in which she’d cast herself in every role.

It wasn’t a will to live that kept me alive then, but rather a curiosity about who else might come forward with a story about my wife. Who else might call to tell me something almost unfathomable? ... It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived in with her.

I’d always thought of myself a rational person, but the moment she was gone I ceased to be whoever I thought I was.

Perhaps that’s what all books are, the end of someone’s trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

without thinking I snapped at her—You’re being the worst kind of man, I said, immediately regretting the insult, assuming she was going to get out of bed and angrily turn on all the lights and rail at me, but instead she dreamily repeated the phrase—The worst kind of man—and fell asleep smiling.

But nothing could be more human than falling prey to the desires that have slipped beyond our control. I desired her beyond reason, beyond self-protection, beyond common sense, and it is just as difficult to call that love from afar as it is not to call it love when within it.

Democracy is only as good as the people can make it, and we’re a country of idiots, don’t you think so?" “I don’t think so,” Lehrer said. “That’s because you’re an idiot, too.

One realizes everything later. Sorrow always comes late. Sometimes sooner because it gives advance notice. Coming to find you at night, digging holes in your brain and stomach and veins with pain, wounds, something dark comes to you. But you still don’t know what it is.

I was old enough to know I’d be wrong about many things of which I’d once been certain, but still young enough to see possibility and perfection in new certainties.

The seven-page letter, the first of many Johnson received, ends abruptly—“I once entertained some children with a ghost story, and one of them fainted.

She took my hand and looked briefly at me. Years lay between us.

This cowardice, unknowingness in the face of mu own feelings is why I betray those I love, verbally, when I refused to express my feelings for them.

X was not exactly a person to me yet, but a possibility, a different way of life. I defied her then and for a long time after, believed her to be an oracle, almost inhuman. Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.

It must be a kind of suicide to love a person like this, a person so edgeless. It must be like drowning.

You think love isn't an interrogation?

I felt all our years together mounting up in me, full of things, full of words, positively saturated with sentences spoken that were meant to vanish immediately, or sentences spoken that were meant to stand forever, words we gave each other to explain ourselves, words that were misunderstood, words we stole, images we held in private, moments made significant to one and not the other or to the other and not the one, two realities pressed against each other, stupid impossible human points of view, views of nothing, conflicting views, incomplete views, impossible to reconcile, impossible to forget.

I was pressed between my husband and Serra when X appeared before us, just like that, this woman who would soon destroy my life as it had been.

But what good is this after-death clarity? Must this be the way that people see one another-can we get a clear image only once we're too far away to touch?

But I know now a person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them, and no matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drips at the edges, then rushes out completely. People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.

How closely our lives drift past other lives; how narrowly we become ourselves and not some adjacent other, someone both near at hand and much too far away.

The winter she was dead it seemed every day for monthsw on end was damp and bright—it had always just rained, but I could never rmemeberthe rain—and I took the tain down to the city a few days a week seartching (it seemed) for a building I might enter and fall from , a task about which I could never quite determine my own sincerity, as it seemed to me the seriousness of anyone looking for such a thing could not be understood until a body needed to be scraped from the sidewalk. They gave me a document that described her body in the most discrete terms, as if we could ever say for certain where she ended and where the world began.

Is life in the small things, in songs or stories, or is it in the large things, in the country, its laws, in the liberty and safety of others? I feel it cannot be in both. I cannot be in both. I am so weary, Phil, I can hardly sleep but I can hardly get out of bed.

X was a nocturnal woman, but also a diurnal one—in fact, it seemed she never grew tired, or jet-lagged, not even weary on a warm afternoon—while I've always just been a regular person, tired at certain intervals.

Although Chester wrote about Harlem and black workers struggling to get ahead, he was reared in the Deep South and Cleveland, the middle-class child of college teachers. He was the first twentieth-century black American to walk the path of petty criminal and convict turned dynamic writer that would later make celebrities out of Malcolm X, Claude Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Robert Beck, Nathan McCall, and several others. Himes’s early novels—If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Lonely Crusade (1947), The Third Generation (1953), and The Primitive (1955)—revealed a fundamentally racist American society less inclined to lynch blacks but preferring to dismantle them psychologically.

From several tons of pitchblende, four hundred tons of washing water, and hundreds of buckets of distilled sludge waste, they finally fished out one-tenth of a gram of the new element in 1902. The metal lay on the far edge of the periodic table, emitting X-rays with such feverish intensity that it glowered with a hypnotic blue light in the dark, consuming itself. Unstable, it was a strange chimera between matter and energy––matter decomposing into energy. Marie Curie called the new element radium, from the Greek word for “light”.

Dad had bought a stack of these biographies, towering over one hundred now. Martin Luther King Jr. Frederick Douglass. Mary McLeod Bethune. Richard Allen. Ida B. Wells. Dad kept urging me to pull from the tower for every writing project.

Musk of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors, a choice some readers protested. A conversation ensued online about what makes someone an inventor. You put Elon Musk at the top of the list of candidates for the greatest living inventor. You do not, however, mention a single invention credited to Mr. Musk. Nor are any such inventions mentioned in the various online biographies of Mr. Musk. Are you not confusing inventor with businessman? Peter Blau