Bookshelf Related Quotes

Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands.

Mum's mobile was the most immoblie cell phone in the world. It often lived on the top of the bookshelf closest to the front door. It was there so she'd see it before she left the house. The trouble was, Mum was alwayd leaving the house in a mad rush and the mobile stayed put.

George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathroom sink and spinning on the top and pointing out the way the water swirled down the drain. Taking me to the bookshelf and flipping open a book on weather and showing me a cyclone. Then a spiral galaxy. Pulling me back to the bathroom sink, to my glass jar of collected seashells, and pointing out the same curl in a miniature conch. See? he said, holding the seashell up to his hair. Yes! I clapped. His eyes were warm with teaching pleasure. It's galactic hair, he said, smiling. At school, George was legendary already. He was so natural at physics that one afternoon the eighth-grade science teacher had asked him to do a preview of the basics of relativity, really fast, for the class. George had stood up and done such a fine job, using a paperweight and a yardstick and the standard-issue school clock, that the teacher had pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. I'd like to be the first person to pay you for your clarity of mind, the teacher had said. George used the cash to order pizza for the class. Double pepperoni, he told me later, when I'd asked.

Common Elements of this Trope Here are some elements that are common to stories using the marriage-of-convenience trope: Characters choose to get married, either due to their personal circumstances or because of their goals. Marriage generally happens before the hero and heroine fall in love. Sex often happens before there is any emotional intimacy between the couple. The hero and heroine will usually come together in a way that is certain to generate conflict—so initially the sparks will fly but eventually an amazing love story will emerge. There is an immense romantic arc – from two strangers with no romantic aspirations through to them being fully committed to each other. There is strong attractional tension – our couple do not want to be attracted to each other. It can be challenging for a writer to come up with plausible story scenarios since there are relatively few situations or reasons for a couple to contemplate entering into this type of relationship—especially with contemporary stories where the couple could simply opt to live together. Additional tropes are often incorporated into the plot.

Lansing strongly objected to any introduction of the concept of “laws of humanity” and to trials of foreign leaders before any foreign or international court. International law, he contended, regulated relations among nations; it had no jurisdiction over what a state chooses to do to its own people.

The State Department’s “Riga” faction, which had refused to intervene in European affairs on behalf of Jewish refugees during the war, led the way in insisting that the U.S. intervene on behalf of threatened European elites after the conflict was over. These two tactics, which might seem at first to be contradictory, were in fact based on what seemed to them to be the overriding importance of preserving a stable European political center, with relatively open markets, and a willingness to cooperate with U.S. geopolitical and economic strategies. This was the purported “vital national interest” of which Allen Dulles had spoken.

new international treaties intended to defend human rights have been signed since the end of World War II, including conventions against slavery, torture, race and sex discrimination, apartheid, and genocide.2 Each new agreement suggests that there is broad popular support for fundamental change in this aspect of state behavior and international relations.

The “legalization” established at Wannsee (and in related laws and decrees) achieved a relatively smooth linkage between the surface world of wartime life and the officially denied world of mass extermination.

Hackworth focused on what had long been the most active aspect of international law, the impact of war on commercial relations.

The similarities between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust suggest that the “Nazi problem” in postwar Germany is only partially traceable to the pressures of the cold war. Throughout the twentieth century, regardless of the prevailing atmosphere in East-West relations, most powerful states have attended to genocide only insofar as it has affected their own stability and short-term interests. Almost without exception, they have dealt with the aftermath of genocide primarily as a means to increase their power and preserve their license to impose their version of order, regardless of the price to be paid in terms of elementary justice.

It wasn’t enough for him to keep the pictures online, he got them all printed out and each album had the year it related to and the place we’d visited written on the spine on a sticker. They’re all there now, on the bookshelf in the living room. Lined up in order – a photographic journey through time and space. Lizzie