Breach Of Time Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Breach Of Time. Here they are! All 200 of them:

A man must at times be hard as nails: willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman's resentment like tenderness.
Elisabeth Elliot (The Mark of a Man)
I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.
Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Dreams that last hold secrets from the past. Out of reach. Impossible to breach. Fragile to clutch. Fleeting to touch. Like stars and snowflakes and visions all aglow. Time is endless in our youth. Our dreams are rustproof. Our time to chase is aloof. From the horizon of hope comes the challenge to dare. Our time to dream has changed in midair. Dreams that last hold secrets from the past—  uniquely ours to share if we so care. Starla Jordan's therapy - writing song lyrics or poetry.
JoDee Neathery (A Kind of Hush)
Perhaps it was one of those mild, sunny winter days when you have a feeling of holiday and eternity-the illusory feeling that the course of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap that is closing around you.
Patrick Modiano (Dora Bruder)
So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan right? [Will nods] Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally... I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you, I can't read in some fuckin' book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.
Robin Williams
What would you do if you were me? she said. If I were you-you, or if I were you-me? If you were me-me. If I were you-you, he said, I'd do exactly what you're doing.
Robert Hass (Time and Materials)
In life, there are no true beginnings or endings. Events flow into each other, and the more you try to isolate them in a container, the more they spill over the sides, like canal-water breaching its artificial banks. A related point is that the things we label 'beginnings' and 'endings' are often, in reality, indistinguishable. They are one and the same thing. This is one of the things the Death card symbolizes in tarot - an end that is also a new beginning.
Gavin Extence (The Universe Versus Alex Woods)
If it were not for collectors England would be full, so to speak, of rare birds and wonderful butterflies, strange flowers and a thousand interesting things. But happily the collector prevents all that, either killing with his own hands or, by buying extravagantly, procuring people of the lower classes to kill such eccentricities as appear. ... Eccentricity, in fact, is immorality--think over it again if you do not think so now--just as eccentricity in one's way of thinking is madness (I defy you to find another definition that will fit all the cases of either); and if a species is rare it follows that it is not Fitted to Survive. The collector is after all merely like the foot soldier in the days of heavy armour-he leaves the combatants alone and cuts the throats of those who are overthrown. So one may go through England from end to end in the summer time and see only eight or ten commonplace wild flowers, and the commoner butterflies, and a dozen or so common birds, and never be offended by any breach of the monotony.
H.G. Wells (The Wonderful Visit)
Might it be possible at some future time, when neurophysiology has advanced substantially, to reconstruct the memories or insight of someone long dead?...It would be the ultimate breach of privacy.
Carl Sagan (Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science)
Nate: “With all the times you’ve said ‘fuck’ tonight, I think I know what you really want. What you need, Lila.” Lila: “What is it that you think I need?” Nate: “Cock. You need a fucking hard cock in your tight little pussy.” Lila: “You’re an expert on what my pussy needs?” Nate: “Yes, and it needs a cock to fuck it.”
K.I. Lynn (Breach (Breach, #1))
A professional who doesn't deliver as committed is not just lazy, he is a liar.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
The trouble with solving a crime was there was never just one puzzle; not even in the most straightforward of cases. Just as different witnesses gave differing testimony of the same events, different players on her side had their own takes on how the puzzles should best be solved.
Daniel B. Greene (Breach of Peace (Lawful Times, #1))
Let's put a chimpanzee in a tiny cage fronted by concrete bars. The animal would go berserk, throw itself against the walls, rip out its hair, inflict cruel bites on itself, and in 73% of cases will actually end up killing itself. Let's now make a breach in one of the walls, which we will place next to a bottomless precipice. Our friendly sample quadrumane will approach the edge, he'll look down, but remain at the edge for ages, return there time and again, but generally he won't teeter over the brink; and in all events his nervous state will be radically assuaged.
Michel Houellebecq (Whatever)
Sundays, especially in late afternoon, if you are alone, open a breach in time.
Patrick Modiano (The Black Notebook)
Take Smits with you.” “Who?” Chapman had come to a full stop and was again staring at her. She could never predict what would catch his attention. “Officer Smits. He was at the manor this morning. I believe he got back just before you.” “Ah! Smits. Not Shits.
Daniel B. Greene (Breach of Peace (Lawful Times, #1))
There are those among us who have erred, deeply and significantly. Who have wounded the world and broken themselves. The worst of them lose themselves in their errors. The best of them crawl back, one foot at a time, and seek to amend their breaches. That is the way of the brave.
Chloe Neill (Wild Things (Chicagoland Vampires, #9))
It is difficult to reconstruct an emotion. At times it is difficult even to admit to one. I have practiced long and hard at denying entry to such twin imposters as triumph and disaster, or love and hate, but sometimes the barriers are breached.
Simon Mawer (Mendel's Dwarf)
I’m mad at myself and pissed at you for wrapping me around your little fucking finger.” “But I didn’t…” “I know!” he yelled, his anger seeping from him. “And that ticks me off more. I hate that you turn me on. I hate the way I need you all the fucking time. I don’t want that. I can’t want that. I can’t want you… but I do, so fucking much I do.
K.I. Lynn (Breach (Breach, #1))
Not content with ignoring the normal requirements of biology, the cat was also in clear breach of the laws of physics.
Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (Dirk Gently, #3))
[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches," including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [..] and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.
Noam Chomsky
Someone knocked on the back door. He push back the chair and had to pause. The wolf was angry that someone had breached his sanctuary. Not even his pack had been brave enough the past few days to approch him in his home. By the time he stalked into the kitchen, he had it mostly under control. He jerked open the back door and expect to see one of his wolves. But it was Mercy. She didn't look cheerful—but then, she seldom did when she had to come over and talk to him. She was tough and independent and not at all happy to have him interfere in any way with that independence. It had been a long time since someone had bossed him around the way she did—and he liked it. More than a wolf who'd been Alpha for twenty years ought to like it. She smelled of burnt car oil, Jasmine from the shampoo she'd been using that month, and chocolate. Or maybe that last was the cookies on the plate she handed him. "Here," she said stiffly. And he realize it was shyness in the corner of her mouth. "Chocolate usually helps me regain my balance when life kicks me in the teeth." She didn't wait for him to say anything, just turned around and walked back to her house. He took the cookies back to the office with him. After a few minutes, he ate one. Chocolate, thick and dark, spread across his tongue, it's bitterness alleviated by a sinfull amount of brown sugar and vanilla. He'd forgotten to eat and hadn't realized it. But it wasn't the chocolate or the food that made him feel better. It was Mercy's kindness to someone she viewed as her enemy. And right at that moment, he realized something. She would never love him for what she could do for her. He ate another cookie before getting up to make himself dinner.
Patricia Briggs (Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, #5))
Someone is pounding on a door within you and hoping for an answer. They want to tell us the secret tale of ourselves. The stories we’ve never told. Some African tribes believe if you were to tell someone your entire story the audience would actually become you. From then on, the only life the teller would have would be in and through the listener. Some believe this is the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. How I wished for my story to be blemish free. How I wished to be a good-natured soul giving back to the world, regardless of how broken I was. In the end, it’s those things we are willing to die to change that sculpt our story. Some people open the floodgates of their minds and hearts so memories burst forth like water through a breached dam. Pieces of our lives can be found among the floating wreckage, and somewhere, the presence of God hovers over the surface of the deep. Inside, I am treading, biding my time, waiting for the magic I thought I owned as a child. Many seek this enchantment. I sought my wife, daughter and the power to conjure hope.
Christopher Hawke (Unnatural Truth)
the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.
Solvej Balle (On the Calculation of Volume I)
I’m just really going to miss you, you know?” Alice’s voice caught in her throat. “I don’t know how many people I really, really love, who really, really love me, you know what I mean? I know that sounds pathetic, but it’s true.” “It is true,” Leonard said. “But that love doesn’t vanish. It’s still there, inside everything you do. Only this part of me is going somewhere, Al. The rest? You couldn’t get rid of it if you tried. And you never know what’s going to happen next. I was older than you are now when I met Debbie. Time to go forward into the breach. Until the future, at last.
Emma Straub (This Time Tomorrow)
There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down—traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time. To some this is a welcome release from the restraints of moral, social, and spiritual dogma. To others it is a dangerous and terrifying breach with reason and sanity, tending to plunge human life into hopeless chaos. To most, perhaps, the immediate sense of release has given a brief exhilaration, to be followed by the deepest anxiety. For if all is relative, if life is a torrent without form or goal in whose flood absolutely nothing save change itself can last, it seems to be something in which there is “no future” and thus no hope.
Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity)
It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements which involve its reality are erroneous. Such an assertion involves a far greater departure from the natural position of mankind than is involved in the assertion of the unreality of Space or of the unreality of Matter. So decisive a breach with that natural position is not to be lightly accepted. And yet in all ages the belief in the unreality of time has proved singularly attractive.
J.M.E. McTaggart (The Unreality of Time)
Never Underestimate. Just as in any other negotiation, watching before acting is as important as listening before speaking. It's doubly important in China, however, where customs are time-honored and breaches of protocol not so quickly forgiven.
Irl M. Davis (An Entrepreneur in Asia: A Personal Journey of Global Proportions)
There is no entrance that joy cannot enter, no door that faith cannot open, no bridge that patience cannot cross, and no wall that love cannot breach. There is no entrance that hope cannot enter, no door that truth cannot open, no bridge that grace cannot cross, and no wall that humility cannot breach. There is no entrance that knowledge cannot enter, no door that curiosity cannot open, no bridge that understanding cannot cross, and no wall that wisdom cannot breach. There is no entrance that time cannot enter, no door that chance cannot open, no bridge that destiny cannot cross, and no wall that eternity cannot breach. There is no entrance that the mind cannot enter, no door that the heart cannot open, no bridge that the soul cannot cross, and no wall that the individual cannot breach.
Matshona Dhliwayo
for a week she has been tormented, she burns to write something, gentle warmth emanates from her whole body, but still nothing comes of it. Besides, at the same time she is also busy burning old books, manuals, professional papers, theoretical volumes--because they keep her from doing the one thing that now seems urgent and right to her: shouting her loud hymn of ecstatic pleasure, breaching the tide of the old tongue's hard blare.
Hélène Cixous (The Book of Promethea)
Wechsler and the New York Times showed that Adams’ two immediate successors as president, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as well as many others, regarded Adams’ political censorship of ‘seditious’ newspapers that criticised the state as a clear breach of the First Amendment and an attack on democracy.
Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
There are those amongst us who have erred, deeply and significantly. Who have wounded the world and broken themselves. The worst of them lose themselves in their errors. The best of them crawl back, one foot at a time, and seek to amend their breaches. That is the way of the brave. -Gabriel Keene, Pack Apex, pp. 37
Chloe Neill (Wild Things (Chicagoland Vampires, #9))
What better argument for inaction than the promise of future action? What better defenders of the status quo than well-meaning leaders who hedged? A quote floated up from a half-forgotten high-school history class. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
Eliot Peper (Breach (Analog, #3))
It was certain to rain guards as soon as the fence was breached. Some would call that overwhelming odds. He thought of it as a target-rich environment.
Marc Cameron (Time of Attack (Jericho Quinn, #4))
Instead, the land itself seemed to hold its breath, as if haunted by the events from the night before.
Daniel B. Greene (Breach of Peace (Lawful Times, #1))
There's not enough time spend between the sheet's to compensate the breach
Melinda Haynes
Most people find it difficult to think outside the box, whereas we spend most of our time outside the box looking in.
Halo Scot (Edge of the Breach (Rift Cycle, #1))
When I really look at her, it's too much. Every time I'm with her, her eyes and her mouth and her voice and her smile find every vulnerable spot on me to breach. To seize. To conquer
Colleen Hoover (Ugly Love)
Violet,' Xaden groans against my mouth. The plea in his tone floods my veins with a whole different form of power. Knowing he's just as affected by our attraction as I am is a rush. 'This isn't what you want.' 'It's exactly what I want,' I counter. I want to replace the anger with lust, the death of the day with the pulse-pounding assurance of my own life, and I know he's capable of delivering all that and more. 'You said to do whatever I need.' I arch my back, pressing the tips of my breasts against his chest. His breathing changes, and there's a war in his eyes that I'm determined to win. It's time to stop dancing around this unbearable tension and break it. He leans down, his mouth only inches from mine. 'And I'm telling you that I'm the last thing you need.' The barely leashed growl of his voice rumbles up through his chest, and every nerve ending in my body flares to life. 'Are you suggesting someone else?' My heart races as I chance calling his bluff. 'Fuck no.' The unmistakable flare of jealousy narrows his eyes for a heartbeat before his hips pin mine to the door, and my instant relief at his answer is replaced by a jolt of pure lust. I can see that infamous control of his hovering on the edge, balancing precariously on the point of a knife. All he needs is one. Little. Push. And I'm about to shamelessly shove. 'Good.' I tilt my head up to his and draw his bottom lip between mine, sucking before gently nipping him with my teeth. 'Because I only want you, Xaden.' The words breach something within him, and he gives. Finally. One mouths collide, and the kiss is hot and hard and completely out of our control.
Rebecca Yarros (Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1))
1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.
Dina Ben-Lev
Just as Mikah’s anticipation nearly reached a breaking point, the stranger’s finger breached Mikah’s tender hole up to the second knuckle. Mikah instinctively tightened around the intrusion, emitting a soft whimper. The man pulled his finger completely out of Mikah and immediately penetrated him again, further this time. Mikah shook with pleasure as the finger teased itself out again.
Chance Christopher (The Stranger)
One by one our skies go black. Stars are extinguished, collapsing into distances too great to breach. Soon, not even the memory of light will survive. Long ago, our manifold universes discovered futures would only expand. No arms of limit could hold or draw them back. Short of a miracle, they would continue to stretch, untangle and vanish – abandoned at long last to an unwitnessed dissolution. That dissolution is now. Final winks slipping over the horizons share what needs no sharing: There are no miracles. You might say that just to survive to such an end is a miracle in itself. We would agree. But we are not everyone. Even if you could imagine yourself billions of years hence, you would not begin to comprehend who we became and what we achieved. Yet left as you are, you will no more tremble before us than a butterfly on a windless day trembles before colluding skies, still calculating beyond one of your pacific horizons. Once we could move skies. We could transform them. We could make them sing. And when we fell into dreams our dreams asked questions and our skies, still singing, answered back. You are all we once were but the vastness of our strangeness exceeds all the light-years between our times. The frailty of your senses can no more recognize our reach than your thoughts can entertain even the vaguest outline of our knowledge. In ratios of quantity, a pulse of what we comprehend renders meaningless your entire history of discovery. We are on either side of history: yours just beginning, ours approaching a trillion years of ends. Yet even so, we still share a dyad of commonality. Two questions endure. Both without solution. What haunts us now will allways hunt you. The first reveals how the promise of all our postponements, ever longer, ever more secure – what we eventually mistook for immortality – was from the start a broken promise. Entropy suffers no reversals. Even now, here, on the edge of time’s end, where so many continue to vanish, we still have not pierced that veil of sentience undone. The first of our common horrors: Death. Yet we believe and accept that there is grace and finally truth in standing accountable before such an invisible unknown. But we are not everyone. Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts. There are some who reject such an outcome. There are some who still fight for an alternate future. No matter the cost. Here then is the second of our common horrors. What not even all of time will end. What plagues us now and what will always plague you. War.
Mark Z. Danielewski (One Rainy Day in May (The Familiar, #1))
Bri, you started your time at Canterwood with a giant lie. But you came to Canterwood to get a fresh start, just like me, and I wish you’d trusted me enough to tell me the truth. It was a major breach of BFF code.
Jessica Burkhart (Famous)
There will be times when people will breach the boundaries of your heart. When it happens, seek inner forgiveness to unburden your soul from resentment. Look back, Each person that came into your life served a purpose.
Anoir Ou-chad (The Alien)
It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Beszel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time ... you can't come back from that.
China Miéville (The City & the City)
All my life I have been trained by that siren. Before I could walk I knew the siren meant death. It meant somehow the fences had been breached and the Unconsecrated were shuffling among us. It meant grab weapons, move to the platforms and pull up the ladders - even if it necessitated leaving the living behind. Growing up, my mother used to tell me about how in the beginning, when her own great-great-great-grandmother was a child, that siren would wail almost constantly as the village was bombarded with the Unconsecrated. But then the fences has been fortified, the Guardians had formed and time had passed with the Unconsecrated dwindling to the point that I couldn't remember a time in the past few years when that siren had wailed and it had not been a drill. I know that in my life there have been breaches but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose. I can fear the Unconsecrated well enough without them.
Carrie Ryan
I stared at him in stunned silence. This was not the Nathan I knew. The mask was gone, and for the first time I was seeing the true Nathan without any inhibitions. He was raw and lay bare before me. He was stunning. More beautiful than usual in his agony.
K.I. Lynn (Infraction (Breach, #2))
It’s our version of a black hole. Just like amply compact mass can distort space and time to cause a black hole, a sufficiently dense breach of discipline in our office causes a black hole that sucks the offender away for eternity, never to spit him back.
Pawan Mishra (Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy)
If your church is not going to support the committed same-sex relationships of LGBT congregants, be honest about that. Bait-and-switch is deceptively un-Christ-like and serves to push gay and transgender believers farther away each time the deception happens.
Kathy Baldock (Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBT Community)
This time she broke it, saying, “I love you.” Sam squeezed her hand in response. “We really need to get better at staying mad at each other.” “I am still mad.” She met his eyes. “But we could be about to die, so, priorities.” He smiled down at her. “Priorities.
Daniel B. Greene (Breach of Peace (Lawful Times, #1))
We were here. Together. He had let me breach his high, impenetrable walls. I knew it would take time to hammer through the rest. But I wasn’t fazed by the task. I was inspired. To know all of this man. To have him love me and let me see his soul. It was worth it all.
Tillie Cole (Lord of London Town (Adley Firm, #1))
If they were a woman’s footprints, you’d have a different theory?” Khlid took another unconscious drag from a cigarette. “I didn't say that. But—have you met many Imperial ladies, ma’am?” “I have not had the pleasure.” “They aren’t the type to run for a weapon. With the looks of this place, someone would’ve only come to this shed last night looking for two things: a weapon or a place to avoid death. Only one set of prints, so no chase. The royal men like to think they’re heroic. I could see one coming here with a last stand in mind.
Daniel B. Greene (Breach of Peace (Lawful Times, #1))
There are those amongst us who have erred, deeply and significantly. Who have wounded the world and broken themselves. The worst of them lose themselves in their errors. The best of them crawl back, one foot at a time, and seek to amend their breaches. That is the way of the brave.
Chloe Neill (Wild Things (Chicagoland Vampires, #9))
How to rebuild trust Trust is a tricky thing. It is the foundation of every healthy relationship. It is the security that makes intimacy possible. It can be simultaneously strong and yet very fragile. It takes great effort and time to build, but it can be broken quickly. Almost every relationship has encountered difficulties over broken trust. I would even argue that most difficulties in relationships stem directly from a breach of trust. Strong relationships (especially marriages) require strong trust, so here are a few ways to to build it (or rebuild it).
Dave Willis
their footfalls? Finally some combination thereof, or these many things as permutations of each other—as alternative vocabularies? However it was, by January I was winnowed, and soon dispensed with pills and analysis (the pills I was weaned from gradually), and took up my unfinished novel again, Our Lady of the Forest, about a girl who sees the Virgin Mary, a man who wants a miracle, a priest who suffers spiritual anxiety, and a woman in thrall to cynicism. It seems to me now that the sum of those figures mirrors the shape of my psyche before depression, and that the territory of the novel forms a map of my psyche in the throes of gathering disarray. The work as code for the inner life, and as fodder for my own biographical speculations. Depression, in this conceit, might be grand mal writer’s block. Rather than permitting its disintegration at the hands of assorted unburied truths risen into light as narrative, the ego incites a tempest in the brain, leaving the novelist to wander in a whiteout with his half-finished manuscript awry in his arms, where the wind might blow it away. I don’t find this facile. It seems true—or true for me—that writing fiction is partly psychoanalysis, a self-induced and largely unconscious version. This may be why stories threaten readers with the prospect of everything from the merest dart wound to a serious breach in the superstructure. To put it another way, a good story addresses the psyche directly, while the gatekeeper ego, aware of this trespass—of a message sent so daringly past its gate, a compelling dream insinuating inward—can only quaver through a story’s reading and hope its ploys remains unilluminated. Against a story of penetrating virtuosity—The Metamorphosis, or Lear on the heath—this gatekeeper can only futilely despair, and comes away both revealed and provoked, and even, at times, shattered. In lesser fiction—fiction as entertainment, narcissism, product, moral tract, or fad—there is also some element of the unconscious finding utterance, chiefly because it has the opportunity, but in these cases its clarity and force are diluted by an ill-conceived motive, and so it must yield control of the story to the transparently self-serving ego, to that ostensible self with its own small agenda in art as well as in life. * * * Like
David Guterson (Descent: A Memoir of Madness (Kindle Single))
Laden with all these new possessions, I go and sit at a table. And don't ask me what the table was like because this was some time ago and I can't remember. It was probably round." [...] "So let me give you the layout. Me sitting at the table, on my left, the newspaper, on my right, the cup of coffee, in the middle of the table, the packet of biscuits." "I see it perfectly." "What you don't see," said Arthur, "because I haven't mentioned him yet, is the guy sitting at the table already. He is sitting there opposite me." "What's he like?" "Perfectly ordinary. Briefcase. Business suit. He didn't look," said Arthur, "as if he was about to do anything weird." "Ah. I know the type. What did he do?" "He did this. He leaned across the table, picked up the packet of biscuits, tore it open, took one out, and . . ." "What?" "Ate it." "What?" "He ate it." Fenchurch looked at him in astonishment. "What on earth did you do?" "Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do. I was compelled," said Arthur, "to ignore it." "What? Why?" "Well, it's not the sort of thing you're trained for, is it? I searched my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience, or even primal instincts to tell me how to react to someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits." "Well, you could. . ." Fenchurch thought about it. "I must say I'm not sure what I would have done either. So what happened?" "I stared furiously at the crossword," said Arthur, "couldn't do a single clue, took a sip of coffee, it was too hot to drink, so there was nothing for it. I braced myself. I took a biscuit, trying very hard not to notice," he added, "that the packet was already mysteriously open. . ." "But you're fighting back, taking a tough line." "After my fashion, yes. I ate the biscuit. I ate it very deliberately and visibly, so that he would have no doubt as to what it was I was doing. When I eat a biscuit," said Arthur, "it stays eaten." "So what did he do?" "Took another one. Honestly," insisted Arthur, "this is exactly what happened. He took another biscuit, he ate it. Clear as daylight. Certain as we are sitting on the ground." Fenchurch stirred uncomfortably. "And the problem was," said Arthur, "that having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around. What do you say? 'Excuse me... I couldn't help noticing, er . . .' Doesn't work. No, I ignored it with, if anything, even more vigor than previously." "My man..." "Stared at the crossword again, still couldn't budge a bit of it, so showing some of the spirit that Henry V did on St. Crispin's Day . ." "What?" "I went into the breach again. I took," said Arthur, "another biscuit. And for an instant our eyes met." "Like this?" "Yes, well, no, not quite like that. But they met. Just for an instant. And we both looked away. But I am here to tell you," said Arthur, "that there was a little electricity in the air. There was a little tension building up over the table. At about this time." "I can imagine."” "We went through the whole packet like this. Him, me, him, me . . ." "The whole packet?" "Well, it was only eight biscuits, but it seemed like a lifetime of biscuits we were getting through at this point. Gladiators could hardly have had a tougher time." "Gladiators," said Fenchurch, "would have had to do it in the sun. More physically gruelling." "There is that. So. When the empty packet was lying dead between us the man at last got up, having done his worst, and left. I heaved a sigh of relief, of course. "As it happened, my train was announced a moment or two later, so I finished my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper . . ." "Yes?" "Were my biscuits." "What?" said Fenchurch. "What?" "True." "No!
Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4))
We stay in that sunshine, on that marvellous summit, for an hour and an era. We don’t talk much. Up there, language seems impossible, impertinent, sliding stupidly off this landscape. Its size makes metaphor and simile seem preposterous. It is like nowhere I have ever been. It shucks story, leaves the usual forms of meaning-making derelict. Glint of ice cap, breach of whales, silt swirls in outflows, sapphire veins of a crevasse field. A powerful dissonance overtakes my mind, whereby everything seems both distant and proximate at the same time. It feels as if I could lean from that summit and press a finger into the crevasses, tip a drop of water from the serac pool, nudge a berg along the skyline with my fingertip. I realize how configured my sense of distance has become from living so much on the Internet, where everything is in reach and nothing is within touch. The immensity and the vibrancy of the ice are beyond anything I have encountered before. Seen in deep time – viewed even in the relatively shallow time since the last glaciation – the notion of human dominance over the planet seems greedy, delusory. Up there on that summit, at that moment, gazing from the Inner Ice to the berg-filled sea, the idea of the Anthropocene feels at best a conceit, at worst a perilous vanity. I recall the Inuit word I first heard in northern Canada: ilira, meaning ‘a sense of fear and awe’, and also carrying an implication of the landscape’s sentience with it. Yes. That is what I feel here. Ilira.
Robert Macfarlane (Underland: A Deep Time Journey)
Sam broke it with, “Are you sure you’re up to this? You’ve been through it today.” “I am barely standing.” Khlid laced her fingers through her husband’s. “But if you try and get me taken off of this, I’ll kill you.” “Ha!” Sam pulled her a little closer. “I will just be sure to watch your back extra close.
Daniel B. Greene (Breach of Peace (Lawful Times, #1))
you repair any breach in the relationship as quickly as possible. You want to restore a collaborative, nurturing connection with your child. Ruptures without repair leave both parent and child feeling disconnected. And if that disconnection is prolonged—and especially if it’s associated with your anger, hostility, or rage—then toxic shame and humiliation can grow in the child, damaging her emerging sense of self and her state of mind about how relationships work. It’s therefore vital that we make a timely reconnection with our kids after there’s been a rupture. It’s our responsibility as parents to do this.
Daniel J. Siegel (No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind)
Sometimes it was easy—our bot on point would breach a door with an explosive charge and I would rush up behind him to immolate the living fuck out of the dark. It was just a big wall of smoke and hell and screams. Other times I had to see their faces while I did it. Watch them contort, wail, bubble, and melt.
C. Robert Cargill (Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1))
It is a uniquely distressing experience to see yourself only through the eyes of others, too often those you have injured in some way, to know irrefutably what you have done but not why you did it, not the mitigating circumstances, the beliefs you held at the time which made your actions seem reasonable then.
Anne Perry (A Breach of Promise (William Monk, #9))
Pilots were not excused all these rigorous new checks, and when Woodie Menear’s turn came, the security screener expressed concern about the presence of a pair of tweezers in his cabin baggage. As it happened, tweezers – unlike corkscrews or metal scissors, for example – were not on the list of forbidden items; Menear was not breaching regulations by trying to bring them on board. But the official paused just long enough to spark frustration on the part of the pilot, who, like his colleagues, had been growing ever more exasperated by each new restriction. This time it was too much. Menear did not explode in rage; he merely asked a sarcastic question. But it was one that would lead to his immediate arrest, a night in jail, his suspension by US Airways, and months of legal wranglings before he was finally acquitted of ‘making terroristic threats’ and permitted to return to his job. ‘Why are you worried about tweezers,’ Menear asked, ‘when I could crash the plane?
Oliver Burkeman (The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking)
When the value of money is increased, then those are enriched who at the time possess credit money or claims to credit money. Their enrichment must be paid for by debtors, among them the State (i.e., the tax-payers). Yet those who are enriched by the increase in the value of money are not the same as those who were injured by the depreciation of money in the course of the inflation; and those who must bear the cost of the policy of raising the value of money are not the same as those who benefited by its depreciation. To carry out a deflationary policy is not to do away with the consequences of inflation. You cannot make good an old breach of the law by committing a new one.
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit)
You know how diamonds grow, Mick? How they become?' The tears were rolling down his face as he spoke, the words coming like water gushing through breaches in a dam. 'By adding microscopic layers of crystals bit by bit, day by seemingly inconsequential day, over millions of years. It's the sum of all those days that makes them whole. That's how we grow, each experience adding another layer, turning us into the people we become. That's why non of us are the same, even though some of us look like we should be. We might have the same DNA, but we're different people. You've grown differently to me, into the brightest diamond of them all. I've been living in your light all this time.
Eoin Dempsey
In Italy, most laws are honored more in the breach than the observance. “Fatta la legge, trovato l’inganno”, goes one saying that means, “pass a law and we’ll find a way to get around it”. You don’t have to spend much time in Rome to realize that stop signs, and even red lights, are often disregarded, as are those reading “no parking or standing”, and even “one way”.
Sari Gilbert (My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City)
No one spoke of the great trouble, not even Mrs. March, for all had learned by experience that when Jo was in that mood words were wasted, and the wisest course was to wait till some little accident, or her own generous nature, softened Jo's resentment and healed the breach. It was not a happy evening, for though they sewed as usual, while their mother read aloud from Bremer, Scott, or Edgeworth, something was wanting, and the sweet home peace was disturbed. They felt this most when singing time came, for Beth could only play, Jo stood dumb as a stone, and Amy broke down, so Meg and Mother sang alone. But in spite of their efforts to be as cheery as larks, the flutelike voices did not seem to chord as well as usual, and all felt out of tune.
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women #1))
I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of 'race' - 'race' itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard - usually believing himself white - proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same 'race.' But a great number of 'black' people are already beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead 'races' (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose - the organization of people beneath, and beyond, and the umbrella of rights.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
Tell me the story," said Fenchurch firmly. "You arrived at the station." "I was about twenty minutes early. I'd got the time of the train wrong." "Get on with it." Fenchurch laughed. "So I bought a newspaper, to do the crossword, and went to the buffet to get a cup of coffee." "You do the crossword?" "Yes." "Which one?" "The Guardian usually." "I think it tries to be too cute. I prefer The Times. Did you solve it?" "What?" "The crossword in the Guardian." "I haven't had a chance to look at it yet," said Arthur, "I'm still trying to buy the coffee." "All right then. Buy the coffee." "I'm buying it. I am also," said Arthur, "buying some biscuits." "What sort?" "Rich Tea." "Good Choice." "I like them. Laden with all these new possessions, I go and sit at a table. And don't ask me what the table was like because this was some time ago and I can't remember. It was probably round." "All right." "So let me give you the layout. Me sitting at the table. On my left, the newspaper. On my right, the cup of coffee. In the middle of the table, the packet of biscuits." "I see it perfectly." "What you don't see," said Arthur, "because I haven't mentioned him yet, is the guy sitting at the table already. He is sitting there opposite me." "What's he look like?" "Perfectly ordinary. Briefcase. Business suit. He didn't look," said Arthur, "as if he was about to do anything weird." "Ah. I know the type. What did he do?" "He did this. He leaned across the table, picked up the packet of biscuits, tore it open, took one out, and..." "What?" "Ate it." "What?" "He ate it." Fenchurch looked at him in astonishment. "What on earth did you do?" "Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do. I was compelled," said Arthur, "to ignore it." "What? Why?" "Well, it's not the sort of thing you're trained for is it? I searched my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience or even primal instincts to tell me how to react to someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits." "Well, you could..." Fenchurch thought about it. "I must say I'm not sure what I would have done either. So what happened?" "I stared furiously at the crossword," said Arthur. "Couldn't do a single clue, took a sip of coffee, it was too hot to drink, so there was nothing for it. I braced myself. I took a biscuit, trying very hard not to notice," he added, "that the packet was already mysteriously open..." "But you're fighting back, taking a tough line." "After my fashion, yes. I ate a biscuit. I ate it very deliberately and visibly, so that he would have no doubt as to what it was I was doing. When I eat a biscuit," Arthur said, "it stays eaten." "So what did he do?" "Took another one. Honestly," insisted Arthur, "this is exactly what happened. He took another biscuit, he ate it. Clear as daylight. Certain as we are sitting on the ground." Fenchurch stirred uncomfortably. "And the problem was," said Arthur, "that having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject a second time around. What do you say? "Excuse me...I couldn't help noticing, er..." Doesn't work. No, I ignored it with, if anything, even more vigor than previously." "My man..." "Stared at the crossword, again, still couldn't budge a bit of it, so showing some of the spirit that Henry V did on St. Crispin's Day..." "What?" "I went into the breach again. I took," said Arthur, "another biscuit. And for an instant our eyes met." "Like this?" "Yes, well, no, not quite like that. But they met. Just for an instant. And we both looked away. But I am here to tell you," said Arthur, "that there was a little electricity in the air. There was a little tension building up over the table. At about this time." "I can imagine.
Douglas Adams
I got to wondering why [babies] cry all the time.... Animals might whimper if they are hungry or cold. But they don't start screaming. It's a bad idea. The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you've no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you're defenseless you keep your mouth shut.... There were alway babies at the bus station and they were always crying. And these were not mild complaints. I couldn't understand how the least discomfort could take the form of agony. No other creature was so sensitive. The more I thought about it the clearer it became to me that what I was hearing was rage. And the most extraordinary thing was that no one seemed to find this extraordinary. ... The rage of children seemed inexplicable other than as a breach of some deep and innate covenant having to do with how the world should be and wasnt. How would a child know how the world should be? A child would have to be born so. ... At what age in a child's life does rage become sorrow?... I think I know why. The injustice over which they are so distraught is irremediable. And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. At some point they get this.
Cormac McCarthy (Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2))
Human beings, who were created to live in harmony with each other, the earth, and God, now find themselves distanced from or at odds with their fellow humans, their physical surroundings, and their Lord. Redemption, then, consists in healing these breaches and restoring right relationships among all of these parties. The things we eat play a part in this. The contemporary American diet is too often a case study in alienation, consisting as it does of foods that come from all over the world and are available all of the time... just as global communication technologies erode the time people spend talking in person to people they actually know, so the constant availability of foods from all over the world erodes the connection people have to their own local environment and the foods associated with it.
Margaret Kim Peterson (Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life)
The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken.
Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language)
It had been along time since I breached the surface of the world above. My parents wouldn’t allow it. So as far as I knew, the survivors that remained were savages. I’d seen a few things before our colony was built and most of the inhabitants left ran wildly through the bare, desert terrain, filth covering them from head to toe, bones protruding their leathery skin, and foam dripping from their mouths in search of one thing… Nourishment.
Lauren Hammond
He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.
Stephen King (Pet Sematary)
Virginity being blown down man will quicklier be blown up; marry, in blowing him down again, with the breach yourselves made you lose your city. It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. That you were made of is mettel to make virgins. Virginity, by being once lost may be ten times found; by being ever kept it is ever lost. ‘Tis too cold a companion. Away with ‘t! There’s little can be said in’t; ’tis against the rule of nature. To speak on the part of virginity, is to accuse your mothers; which is most infallible disobedience. He that hangs himself is a virgin; virginity murthers itself, and should be buried in highways out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against nature. Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese; consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach. Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love which is the most inhibited sin in the canon. Keep it not; you cannot choose but loose by’t. Out with ‘t! Within the year it will make itself two, which is a goodly increase, and the principal itself not much the worse. Away with ‘t! Tis a commodity that will lose the gloss with lying; the longer kept, the less worth: off with ’t, while ’tis vendible; answer the time of request. Virginity, like an old courtier, wears her cap out of fashion; richly suited, but unsuitable: just like the brooch and the toothpick, which wear not now. Your date is better in your pie and your porridge than in your cheek; and your virginity, your old virginity, is like one of our French withered pears: it looks ill, it eats drily. Marry, 'tis a withered pear; it was formerly better; marry, yet 'tis a withered pear! Will you anything with it?
William Shakespeare
You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.
Ned Beauman (Venomous Lumpsucker)
How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border.
China Miéville (The City & the City)
The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.' Subsequent military theory has put the accent on the first clause instead of on the last: in particular, on the words 'one point' instead of on the word 'equilibrium'. The former is but a physical metaphor, whereas the latter expresses the actual psychological result which ensures 'that the rest is nothing'. His own emphasis can be traced in the strategic course of his campaigns. The word 'point' even, has been the source of much confusion, and more controversy. One school has argued that Napoleon meant that the concentrated blow must be aimed at the enemy's strongest point, on the ground that this, and this only, ensures decisive results. For if the enemy's main resistance be broken, its rupture will involve that of any lesser opposition. This argument ignores the factor of cost, and the fact that the victor may be too exhausted to exploit his success-so that even a weaker opponent may acquire a relatively higher resisting power than the original. The other school-better imbued with the idea of economy of force, but only in the limited sense of first costs-has contended that the offensive should be aimed at the enemy's weakest point. But where a point is obviously weak this is usually because it is remote from any vital artery or nerve centre, or because it is deliberately weak to draw the assailant into a trap. Here, again illumination comes from the actual campaign in which Bonaparte put this maxim into execution. It clearly suggests that what he really meant was not 'point', but 'joint'-and that at this stage of his career he was too firmly imbued with the idea of economy of force to waste his limited strength in battering at the enemy's strong point. A joint, however, is both vital and vulnerable. It was at this time too, that Bonaparte used another phrase that has subsequently been quoted to justify the most foolhardy concentrations of effort against the main armed forces of the enemy. 'Austria is our most determined enemy....Austria overthrown, Spain and Italy fall of themselves. We must not disperse our attacks but concentrate them.' But the full text of the memorandum containing this phrase shows that he was arguing, not in support of the direct attack upon Austria, but for using the army on the frontier of Piedmont for an indirect approach to Austria.
B.H. Liddell Hart (Strategy)
Rather than lacking a theory of mind, it is argued here that due to differences in the way autistic people process info, they are not socialised into the same shared ethno as neurotypical people, and thus breaches in understanding happen all the time, leaving both in a state of confusion. The difference is that the neurotypical person can repair the breach, by the reassuring belief that ~99 out of 100 people still think and act like they do, and remind themselves that they are the normal ones.
Damian Milton (A Mismatch of Salience)
He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness. Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples. When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of dead-looking snow. It had taken him some time to get back to his usual equanimity. He slid down in the warm, foamy water until just his face and his knobby white knees were exposed. Once he had read Wuthering Heights over a weekend and gone to school susceptible to any heroine, only to have the girl who sat in front of him, whom he had admired for some months, emit a loud fart which had murdered him in a small way and kept him from speaking a word to anyone the whole week following. He had laughed at a very funny joke about a Negro when Irwin told it at a party, and then the following day had seen some white men lightly kicking a Negro man in the pants, and temporarily he had questioned laughter altogether. He had gone to several universities with the vague exaltation of Old Man Axelrod and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness. He had come to take shallower breaths, and the two had become mercifully mixed into melancholy contentment. He wondered how pain would breach that low-level strength. "I'm a small man of definite limitations," he declared to himself, and relaxed in the admission.
Edward Lewis Wallant (The Tenants of Moonbloom)
There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’ s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want— hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha.
Stephen King (Pet sematary)
She pulls up to the drive way Parks the car, Gets Out, Walks up to the door, And embraces me with an iron hold She is a friend and hugs me the same way she used to, Her hands sliding into their old creases along my body I let her into the house, knowing I could never refuse As she walks through my doors, she reminds me why she stands in my living room She tells me that she has returned because of my actions I didn’t learn from the last time Its my fault I should have been better, she berates me I should have let people in, she tells me I should not have gotten mad, she shares with me I should not have locked myself away, she lets me know I silently bear all the responsibility for her return As we start to get deep into conversation, I realize she has brought her bags Suitcase after suitcase lets me know she is here to stay She tells me she will run my life from now on She will make my schedule She will direct how I act She has come to my doors, breached my walls, destroyed my defenses, and announced her ownership. Crownless in my own kingdom I am defeated. This old friend is called Loneliness
Anonymous
Una’s death struck Samuel like a silent earthquake. He said no brave and reassuring words, he simply sat alone and rocked himself. He felt that it was his neglect had done it. And now his tissue, which had fought joyously against time, gave up a little. His young skin turned old, his clear eyes dulled, and a little stoop came to his great shoulders. Liza with her acceptance could take care of tragedy; she had no real hope this side of Heaven. But Samuel had put up a laughing wall against natural laws, and Una’s death breached his battlements. He became an old man.
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
There was no night there at this season, any more than all the year through in heaven. Indeed we have seldom real positive night in this world—so many provisions have been made against it. Every time we say, "What a lovely night!" we speak of a breach, a rift in the old night. There is light more or less, positive light, else were there no beauty. Many a night is but a low starry day, a day with a softened background against which the far-off suns of millions of other days show themselves: when the near vision vanishes the farther hope awakes. It is nowhere said of heaven, there shall be no twilight there,
George MacDonald (Warlock o' Glenwarlock)
Here’s a fact for you: In 1995, according to the Washington Post, computer hackers successfully breached the Pentagon’s security systems 161,000 times. That works out to eighteen illicit entries every hour around the clock, one every 3.2 minutes. Oh, I know what you’re going to say. This sort of thing could happen to any monolithic defense establishment with the fate of the earth in its hands. After all, if you stockpile a massive nuclear arsenal, it’s only natural that people are going to want to go in and have a look around, maybe see what all those buttons marked “Detonate” and “Code Red” mean. It’s only human nature.
Bill Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away)
Sometimes time can play tricks. One moment it idles by, an hour can seem a lifetime, such as when sitting by the river at dusk watching the bats snatching insects above the limpid waters; the breaching fish causing ringed ripples and a satisfying plop. Other times, time flashes by in an immodest fashion. So it is with the start of war. First time quivers with the last strum of a wonderful peace, the note holding in the air, mysterious and haunting, filling the listener with awe. Then, with a rising crescendo the terror starts with uncouth haste; with a boom the listener is shaken from their reverie and delivered into the servitude, of an ear-shattering cacophony.
M.A. Lossl (Mizpah Cousins: life, love and perilous predicaments during the Great War era.)
The Heart Shattered Glass was a courageous scream from the abyss from an abandoned woman, written in four days from the side of a precipice down which she was hurling all her worldly goods, one at a time, meditating on their meaning. It had taken the world by storm with its candor and wit. The fact that the author had subsequently fallen madly in love with and married the book’s publicist had only prolonged its popularity, but it was truly a book that deserved its worldwide fame. It was . . . She got it exactly. Exactly what it feels like. Nina looked at the tightly buttoned-up woman she had struggled to connect with and marveled, not for the first time, at the astonishing amount of seething emotion that could exist beneath the most restrained exterior. To look at Lesley you would think she was just a middle-aged shopkeeper quietly going about her business. The fact that she completely and utterly empathized with an American woman who had let her own blood drip down a mountainside in anguish, who had changed sexuality and howled at the moon with a wolf pack, just went to show. There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew—apart from, sometimes, music—to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds.
Jenny Colgan (The Bookshop on the Corner (Kirrinfief, #1))
Article V For the most convenient management of the general interests of the United States, delegates shall be annually appointed in such manner as the legislatures of each State shall direct, to meet in Congress on the first Monday in November, in every year, with a powerreserved to each State to recall its delegates, or any of them, at any time within the year, and to send others in their stead for the remainder of the year. No State shall be represented in Congress by less than two, nor more than seven members; and no person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years; nor shall any person, being a delegate, be capable of holding any office under the United States, for which he, or another for his benefit, receives any salary, fees or emolument of any kind. Each State shall maintain its own delegates in a meeting of the States, and while they act as members of the committee of the States. In determining questions in the United States in Congress assembled, each State shall have one vote. Freedom of speech and debate in Congress shall not be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Congress, and the members of Congress shall be protected in their persons from arrests or imprisonments, during the time of their going to and from, and attendence on Congress, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.
Benjamin Franklin (The Articles of Confederation)
I no longer hold the title for worst breach of manners in the Four Nations,” Kyoshi said. “And I am never, ever going to let you forget it.” Rangi reached over and took her hand. Red scars traveled down Kyoshi’s wrist in wavy, branching patterns like the veins of a palm frond, a token from when she’d fought the lightning. “For as long as you live?” Rangi asked solemnly. Kyoshi smiled and nodded. “For as long as I live.” Rangi pressed her lips to the healed skin on Kyoshi’s knuckles. The kiss sealed a promise to always give each other a hard time for the rest of their days. If Kyoshi held any longing for the past, it was for those simpler moments when she was Rangi’s greatest and only headache.
F.C. Yee (Avatar: The Shadow of Kyoshi (The Kyoshi Novels, #2))
Well, well, well. The mighty Uthman-ul-Dosht comes with mercy, and offers peace. These are strange times we live in, eh, Tulkis? Have the Gurkish learned to love their enemies? Or simply fear them?' 'One need not love one's enemy, or even fear him, to desire peace. One need only love oneself.' 'Is that so?' 'It is. I lost two sons in the wars between our peoples. One at Ulrioch in the last war. He was a priest, and burned in the temple there. The other died not long ago, at the siege of Dagoska. He led the charge when the first breach was made.' Glokta frowned and stretched out his neck. A hail of flatbow bolts. Tiny figures, falling in the rubble. 'That was a brave charge.' 'War is harshest on the brave.
Joe Abercrombie (Before They Are Hanged (The First Law, #2))
Most people in Europe in 1950 held views that seventy years later would be regarded as anathema. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (arising from their catastrophic breach during the Second World War) had been adopted by the United Nations as recently as December 1948, but there was little popular understanding of what it meant in practice. Racist views and blatant racial discrimination were widely accepted and scarcely seen as remarkable. Few people of skin colours other than white lived in European countries. Capital punishment was still in existence, and executions were routinely carried out for people found guilty of the worst crimes. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence. Abortion was illegal. The influence of the Christian churches was profound, and attendance at church services still relatively high. By the time post-war children approached old age, human rights were taken for granted (however imperfect the practice), holding racist views was among the worst of social stigmas (though less so in Eastern and Southern than in Western Europe), multicultural societies were the norm, capital punishment had disappeared from Europe, gay marriage and legal abortion were widely accepted, and the role of the Christian churches had diminished greatly (though the spread of mosques, a feature of modern European cities almost wholly unknown in 1950, testified to the importance of religion among Muslim minorities).
Ian Kershaw (Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017)
All of a sudden, he drew his hand away, and Lillian whimpered in protest. Cursing, Marcus tucked her body beneath his and pulled her face into his shoulder just as the door opened. In a moment of frozen silence breached only by her ragged breaths, Lillian peered out from the concealing shelter of Marcus’s body. She saw with a start of fright that someone was standing there. It was Simon Hunt. A ledger book and a few folders secured with black ribbon were clasped in his hands. Blank-faced, Hunt lowered his gaze to the couple on the floor. To his credit, he managed to retain his composure, though it must have been difficult. The Earl of Westcliff, known to his acquaintances as an eternal proponent of moderation and self-restraint, was the last man Hunt would have expected to be rolling on the study floor with a woman clad in her nightgown. “Pardon, my lord,” Hunt said in a carefully controlled voice. “I did not anticipate that you would be… meeting… with someone at this hour.” Marcus skewered him with a savage stare. “You might try knocking next time.” “You’re right, of course.” Hunt opened his mouth to add something, appeared to think better of it, and cleared his throat roughly. “I’ll leave you here to finish your, er… conversation.” As he withdrew from the room, however, it seemed that he couldn’t keep from ducking his head back in and asking Marcus cryptically, “Once a week, did you say?” “Close the door behind you,” Marcus said icily, and Hunt obeyed with a smothered sound that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
Lisa Kleypas (It Happened One Autumn (Wallflowers, #2))
There has never been a more necessary time for law enforcement officers who reveal misconduct to be protected. By rising to uphold our Nation's values, ethical law enforcement officers choose a conflict for which no education, experience, or training can prepare them. They discover their communities breached and their opponent already beyond their gates. They confront criminals, intimidators, and tyrants that disguise themselves wearing the same badge they hold so dear. They advance against others who would otherwise seek to abuse the public, control the narrative, investigate themselves or obscure the truth beneath a facade of pursuing the greater good. Afterward, they often find themselves cast out, lost, and silenced permanently from their profession for doing nothing more than what we asked of them: Policing.
Austin Handle
Don't be lit me Mungo. It's not too late for you. But it was already too late. It had always been too late. When they were younger, Mungo and Hamish had been playing in the bathroom. They had filled the scalloped sink and they were slamming Action Men together in an underwater battle. Hamish was resting his weight on the lip of the sink, and Mungo couldn't see, so he jumped up and did the same. There had been the tiniest fracture in the porcelain - Mo-Maw had dropped a glass ashtray into it one time - and now the weight of their play breached it and the water poured everywhere. Just before the sink split, Mungo put his hand over the crack and tried to hold back the water - it worked, and then it failed, and he was soaked and bloody from the chipped porcelain. He tried all afternoon, but there was no way to put the crack back together.
Douglas Stuart (Young Mungo)
There must be more than this, Sarah Boyle thinks, from time to time. What could one do to justify one's passage? Or less ambitiously, to change, even in the motion of the smallest mote, the course and circulation of the world? Sometimes Sarah's dreams are of heroic girth, a new symphony using laboratories of machinery and all invented instruments, at once giant in scope and intelligible to all, to heal the bloody breach; a series of paintings which would transfigure and astonish and calm the frenzied art world in its panting race; a new novel that would refurbish language. Sometimes she considers the mystical, the streaky and random, and it seems that one change, no matter how small, would be enough. Turtles are supposed to live for many years. To carve a name, date and perhaps a word of hope upon a turtle's shell, then set him free to wend the world, surely this one act might cancel out absurdity?
Pamela Zoline (The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories)
At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can’t find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world.
Timothy Egan (The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (Vintage Departures))
As TARDIS comes to rest, the only sound, its insistent hum, seems to fill the space entirely, and then this too is lost as the viewer is thrown outside, no longer a participant, but forced into the detached role of observer: the police box now sitting at a tilt in a dark and barren alien landscape accompanied by the chilling audionaturalism of wind noise [...] In the silence of electronic sound, the audience ejection is experienced as sudden sensory deprivation, making the impression of das unheimliche the dominant one. Again the fourth wall is breached, this time a figure cuts between us and the ship, carrying a spear rather than a torch, his shadow lengthening impossibly across the landscape towards TARDIS. When the end titles and signature start up, the eerie recognition threatens to become full blown horror as if the music, having transported us here, is now leaving us to face an awakening of our repressed pasts. Next week, the titles inform us, THE CAVE OF SKULLS.
Dene October (Mad Dogs and Englishness: Popular Music and English Identities)
Ravic went into his room to read. He had once bought several volumes of world history and now he took them out. It was not particularly cheerful to read them. The only thing one gained by it was a strangely depressing satisfaction that what was happening today was not new. Everything had happened before dozens of times. The lies, the breaches of faith, the murders, the St. Bartholomew massacres, the corruption through the lust for power, the unbroken chain of wars—the history of mankind was written in blood and tears, and among the thousands of bloodstained statues of the past, only a few wore the silver halo of kindness. The demagogues, the cheats, the parricides, the murderers, the egoists inebriated with power, the fanatic prophets who preached love with the sword, it was the same time and again—and time and again patient peoples allowed themselves to be driven against one another in a senseless slaughter for kaisers, kings, religions, and madmen—there was no end to it.  
Erich Maria Remarque (Arch of Triumph)
Thus, besides the will, which is entirely dependent on its content, man has a further auxiliary in the unconscious, that maternal womb of creative fantasy, which is able at any time to fashion symbols in the natural process of elementary psychic activity, symbols that can serve to determine the mediating will. I say “can” advisedly, because the symbol does not of its own accord step into the breach, but remains in the unconscious just so long as the energic value of the conscious contents exceeds that of the unconscious symbol. Under normal conditions this is always the case; but under abnormal conditions a reversal of value sets in, whereby the unconscious acquires a higher value than the conscious. The symbol then rises to the surface without, however, being taken up by the will and the executive conscious functions, since these, on account of the reversal of value, have now become subliminal. The unconscious, on the other hand, has become supraliminal, and an abnormal state, a psychic disturbance, has supervened.
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
Beneath her skirts, she guided his erection to her entrance; drawing his fingers from her sheath, so hot and wet and ready for him, he caught her hand, twined her fingers with his, and drew them away. And sank slowly, carefully, into her scalding heat. Her breath hitched. She tensed, then through the kiss caught her breath and fought to relax, to reverse the instinctive tightening. Her fingers clutched his. He pressed in, steady, sure, not too fast yet not too slow that she had time to think too much. Then he reached the barrier that was her maidenhood; with one powerful thrust he breached it, with the movement forging deep into her body. She cried out, the sound muffled between their lips, and tensed. He held still, giving her time to adjust. Giving himself time to still his whirling senses. To assimilate the feel of scalding velvet gripping him so tightly. To grit his teeth and hold against the powerful, all but overwhelming urge to ride her, hard and fast. As some part of him had wanted to do for a very long time.
Stephanie Laurens (The Taste of Innocence (Cynster, #14))
Excepting the sublime breach—somewhere else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
The body is not a fortress, no matter what we may do to make it such. This may be one of life's greatest frustrations, or is it humiliations? I spend a lot of time thinking about bodies and boundaries and how people seem hell-bent on ignoring those boundaries at all costs. I am not a hugger. I never have been and I never will be. I hug my friends, and do so happily, but I am sparing with such affections. A hug means something to me; it is an act of profound intimacy, so I try not to get too promiscuous with it. Also, I find it awkward, opening myself up, allowing people to touch, to breach my fortress. When I tell strangers I am not a hugger, some take this as a challenge, like they can hug me into submission, like they can will my aversion to hugs away by the strength of their arms. Oftentimes, they will draw me into their body, saying something condescending like, "See, it isn't that bad." I think, I never thought it was, and I stand there, my arms limply by my sides, probably grimacing, but still, they don't get the message that I am not a willing participant in this embrace. The fortress hath been breached.
Roxane Gay (Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body)
Here we may observe and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it that a near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union, so much kept and so far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before. As the people who had been used to join with the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their parish churches and to conform to the worship which they did not approve of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those things all returned again to their less desirable channel and to the course they were in before.
Daniel Defoe (A Journal of the Plague Year: (Classic Illustrated Edition))
how he would get to Tronjheim’s base—where the Urgals were breaking in. There was no time to climb down. He looked at the narrow trough to the right of the stairs, then grabbed one of the leather pads and threw himself down on it. The stone slide was smooth as lacquered wood. With the leather underneath him, he accelerated almost instantly to a frightening speed, the walls blurring and the curve of the slide pressing him high against the wall. Eragon lay completely flat so he would go faster. The air rushed past his helm, making it vibrate like a weather vane in a gale. The trough was too confined for him, and he was perilously close to flying out, but as long as he kept his arms and legs still, he was safe. It was a swift descent, but it still took him nearly ten minutes to reach the bottom. The slide leveled out at the end and sent him skidding halfway across the huge carnelian floor. When he finally came to a stop, he was too dizzy to walk. His first attempt to stand made him nauseated, so he curled up, head in his hands, and waited for things to stop spinning. When he felt better, he stood and warily looked around. The great chamber was completely deserted, the silence unsettling. Rosy light filtered down from Isidar Mithrim. He faltered—Where was he supposed to go?—and cast out his mind for the Twins. Nothing. He froze as loud knocking echoed through Tronjheim. An explosion split the air. A long slab of the chamber floor buckled and blew thirty feet up. Needles of rocks flew outward as it crashed down. Eragon stumbled back, stunned, groping for Zar’roc. The twisted shapes of Urgals clambered out of the hole in the floor. Eragon hesitated. Should he flee? Or should he stay and try to close the tunnel? Even if he managed to seal it before the Urgals attacked him, what if Tronjheim was already breached elsewhere? He could not find all the places in time to prevent the city-mountain from being captured. But if I run to one of Tronjheim’s gates and blast it open, the Varden could retake Tronjheim without having to siege it. Before he could decide, a tall man garbed entirely in black armor emerged from the tunnel and looked directly at him. It was Durza. The Shade carried his pale blade marked with the scratch from Ajihad. A black roundshield with a crimson ensign rested on his arm. His dark helmet was richly decorated, like a general’s, and a long snakeskin cloak billowed around him. Madness burned in his maroon eyes, the madness of one who enjoys power and finds himself in the position to use it.
Christopher Paolini (Eragon (The Inheritance Cycle, #1))
Until that moment Elizabeth wouldn’t have believed she could feel more humiliated than she already did. Robbed of even the defense of righteous indignation, she faced the fact that she was the unwanted gest of someone who’d made a fool of her not once but twice. “How did you get here? I didn’t hear any horses, and a carriage sure as well can’t make the climb.” “A wheeled conveyance brought us most of the way,” she prevaricated, seizing on Lucinda’s earlier explanation, “and it’s gone on now.” She saw his eyes narrow with angry disgust as he realized he was stuck with them unless he wanted to spend several days escorting them back to the inn. Terrified that the tears burning the backs of her eyes were going to fall, Elizabeth tipped her head back and turned it, pretending to be inspecting the ceiling, the staircase, the walls, anything. Through the haze of tears she noticed for the first time that the place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a year. Beside her Lucinda glanced around through narrowed eyes and arrived at the same conclusion. Jake, anticipating that the old woman was about to make some disparaging comment about Ian’s house, leapt into the breach with forced joviality. “Well, now,” he burst out, rubbing his hands together and striding forward to the fire. “Now that’s all settled, shall we all be properly introduced? Then we’ll see about supper.” He looked expectantly at Ian, waiting for him to handle the introductions, but instead of doing the thing properly he merely nodded curtly to the beautiful blond girl and said, “Elizabeth Cameron-Jake Wiley.” “How do you do, Mr. Wiley,” Elizabeth said. “Call me Jake,” he said cheerfully, then he turned expectantly to the scowling duenna. “And you are?” Fearing that Lucinda was about to rip up at Ian for his cavalier handling of the introductions, Elizabeth hastily said, “This is my companion, Miss Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones.” “Good heavens! Two names. Well, no need to stand on formality, since we’re going to be cooped up together for at least a few days! Just call me Jake. What shall I call you?” “You may call me Miss Throckmorton-Jones,” she informed him, looking down the length of her beaklike nose. “Er-very well,” he replied, casting an anxious look of appeal to Ian, who seemed to be momentarily enjoying Jake’s futile efforts to create an atmosphere of conviviality. Disconcerted, Jake ran his hands through his disheveled hair and arranged a forced smile on her face. Nervously, he gestured about the untidy room. “Well, now, if we’d known we were going to have such…ah…gra…that is, illustrious company, we’d have-“ “Swept off the chairs?” Lucinda suggested acidly. “Shoveled off the floor?
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
There was a time when we were told that breaches, by the States, of the regulations of the federal authority were not to be expected; that a sense of common interest would preside over the conduct of the respective members, and would beget a full compliance with all the constitutional requisitions of the Union. This language, at the present day, would appear as wild as a great part of what we now hear from the same quarter will be thought, when we shall have received further lessons from that best oracle of wisdom, experience. It at all times betrayed an ignorance of the true springs by which human conduct is actuated, and belied the original inducements to the establishment of civil power. Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint. Has it been found that bodies of men act with more rectitude or greater disinterestedness than individuals? The contrary of this has been inferred by all accurate observers of the conduct of mankind; and the inference is founded upon obvious reasons. Regard to reputation has a less active influence, when the infamy of a bad action is to be divided among a number than when it is to fall singly upon one. A spirit of faction, which is apt to mingle its poison in the deliberations of all bodies of men, will often hurry the persons of whom they are composed into improprieties and excesses, for which they would blush in a private capacity.
Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)
Naomi: im cooking lol Naomi: if its bad we can order in Naomi: what time you home ? She has attached a picture: his small green casserole dish on one of the hotplates. Disorientated feeling, as though his centre of gravity disturbed, walls shifting: like passing out, he thinks. As if he will pass out there and then, and at the thought, remembering, he sits down on a kitchen chair. The little green dish on the stovetop, what time you home. Christ, he thinks, what is he doing, what on earth. In the bath the other night, murmuring in her ear, I want you to be happy. Was he lying then: and why, for what, for what possible reason. Strong sudden impulse he feels to begin praying, already mouthing the silent words, and then frightened by himself he stops. To pray for what: forgiveness, guidance. From whom: God he barely believes in, sentimental Jesus commanding us to love one another. In over his head, fathoms over, and something has to be done. How capable he has been of holding in his mind with no apparent struggle such contradictory beliefs and feelings. The false true lover, the cynical idealist, the atheist at his prayers. Everything lethally intermixed, everything breaching its boundaries, nothing staying in its right place. She, the other, himself. Even Christine, Ivan, this married girlfriend of his. Their father: from beyond the grave. Conceptual collapse of one thing into another, all things into one. No. To answer first the simple question of where to sleep tonight. Marry me. I love you. What time you home.
Sally Rooney (Intermezzo)
The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived. It wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists. That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more than that -- the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on his own for about three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one or two things in the whole world --samurai movies and the Macintosh -- and he understood them far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for someone like Juanita.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
The sensational event of the ancient world was the mobilisation of the underworld against the established order. This enterprise of Christianity had no more to do with religion than Marxist socialism has to do with the solution of the social problem. The notions represented by Jewish Christianity were strictly unthinkable to Roman brains. The ancient world had a liking for clarity. Scientific research was encouraged there. The gods, for the Romans, were familiar images. It is some what difficult to know whether they had any exact idea of the Beyond. For them, eternal life was personified in living beings, and it consisted in a perpetual renewal. Those were conceptions fairly close to those which were current amongst the Japanese and Chinese at the time when the Swastika made its appearance amongst them. It was necessary for the Jew to appear on the scene and introduce that mad conception of a life that continues into an alleged Beyond! It enables one to regard life as a thing that is negligible here below—since it will flourish later, when it no longer exists. Under cover of a religion, the Jew has introduced intolerance in a sphere in which tolerance formerly prevailed. Amongst the Romans, the cult of the sovereign intelligence was associated with the modesty of a humanity that knew its limits, to the point of consecrating altars to the unknown god. The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world—in order to ruin it—re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It's the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx. Peace can result only from a natural order. The condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy amongst nations. The most capable nations must necessarily take the lead. In this order, the subordinate nations get the greater profit, being protected by the more capable nations. It is Jewry that always destroys this order. It constantly provokes the revolt of the weak against the strong, of bestiality against intelligence, of quantity against quality. It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over Bolshevism. The more we render the Jew incapable of harming us, the more we shall protect ourselves from this danger. The Jew plays in nature the rôle of a catalysing element. A people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order. In 1925 I wrote in Mein Kampf (and also in an unpublished work) that world Jewry saw in Japan an opponent beyond its reach. The racial instinct is so developed amongst the Japanese therefore compelled to act from outside. It would be to the considered interests of England and the United States to come to an understanding with Japan, but the Jew will strive to prevent such an understanding. I gave this warning in vain. A question arises. Does the Jew act consciously and by calculation, or is he driven on by his instinct? I cannot answer that question. The intellectual élite of Europe (whether professors of faculties, high officials, or whatever else) never understood anything of this problem. The élite has been stuffed with false ideas, and on these it lives. It propagates a science that causes the greatest possible damage. Stunted men have the philosophy of stunted men. They love neither strength nor health, and they regard weakness and sickness as supreme values. Since it's the function that creates the organ, entrust the world for a few centuries to a German professor—and you'll soon have a mankind of cretins, made up of men with big heads set upon meagre bodies.
Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
Hunsford, near Westerham, Kent, 15th October. “Dear Sir,— “The disagreement subsisting between yourself and my late honoured father always gave me much uneasiness, and since I have had the misfortune to lose him, I have frequently wished to heal the breach; but for some time I was kept back by my own doubts, fearing lest it might seem disrespectful to his memory for me to be on good terms with anyone with whom it had always pleased him to be at variance.—’There, Mrs. Bennet.’—My mind, however, is now made up on the subject, for having received ordination at Easter, I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her ladyship, and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England. As a clergyman, moreover, I feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in all families within the reach of my influence; and on these grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures are highly commendable, and that the circumstance of my being next in the entail of Longbourn estate will be kindly overlooked on your side, and not lead you to reject the offered olive-branch. I cannot be otherwise than concerned at being the means of injuring your amiable daughters, and beg leave to apologise for it, as well as to assure you of my readiness to make them every possible amends—but of this hereafter. If you should have no objection to receive me into your house, I propose myself the satisfaction of waiting on you and your family, Monday, November 18th, by four o’clock, and shall probably trespass on your hospitality till the Saturday se’nnight following, which I can do without any inconvenience, as Lady Catherine is far from objecting to my occasional absence on a Sunday, provided that some other clergyman is engaged to do the duty of the day.—I remain, dear sir, with respectful compliments to your lady and daughters, your well-wisher and friend, “William Collins
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
When you lived in the human world, you had legends of the dread beasts and faeries who would slaughter you if they ever breached the wall, didn’t you? Things that slithered through open windows to drink the blood of children? Things that were so wicked, so cruel there was no hope against their evil?” The hair on her neck rose. “Yes.” Those stories had always unnerved and petrified her. “They were based on truth. Based on ancient, near-primordial beings who existed here before the High Fae split into courts, before the High Lords. Some call them the First Gods. They were beings with almost no physical form, but a keen, vicious intelligence. Humans and Fae alike were their prey. Most were hunted and driven into hiding or imprisonment ages ago. But some remained, lurking in forgotten corners of the land.” He swallowed another mouthful. “When I was nearing three hundred years old, one of them appeared again, crawling out of the roots of a mountain. Before he went into the Prison and confinement weakened him, Lanthys could turn into wind and rip the air from your lungs, or turn into rain and drown you on dry land; he could peel your skin from your body with a few movements. He never revealed his true form, but when I faced him, he chose to appear as swirling mist. He fathered a race of faeries that still plague us, who thrived under Amarantha’s reign—the Bogge. But the Bogge are lesser, mere shadows compared to Lanthys. If there is such a thing as evil incarnate, it is him. He has no mercy, no sense of right or wrong. There is him, and there is everyone else, and we are all his prey. His methods of killing are creative and slow. He feasts on fear and pain as much as the flesh itself.” Her blood chilled. “How did you trap such a thing?” Cassian tapped a spot on his neck where a scar slashed beneath his ear. “I quickly learned I could never beat him in combat or magic. Still have the scar here to prove it.” Cassian smiled faintly. “So I used his arrogance against him. Flattered and taunted him into trapping himself in a mirror bound with ash wood. I bet him the mirror would contain him—and Lanthys bet wrong. He got out of the mirror, of course, but by that time, I’d dumped his miserable self into the Prison.
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4))
As the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy. And they especially did not like a paragraph I wrote about the motivations of the colonists who declared independence from Britain. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Later, in response to other scholars who believed we hadn’t been specific enough and to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.” But that mattered little to some of our critics. The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.16 The assertions about the role slavery played in the American Revolution shocked many of our readers. But these assertions came directly from academic historians who had been making this argument for decades. Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.17 We based them on the wealth of scholarship that has redefined the field of American history since at least the 1960s, including Benjamin Quarles’s landmark book The Negro in the American Revolution, first published in 1961; Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; and Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. What seemed to provoke so much ire was that we had breached the wall between academic history and popular understanding, and we had done so in The New York Times, the paper of record, in a major multimedia project led by a Black
Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had a strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them bold and venturous, they were no more shy of one another, or restrained within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse. One would say to another, “I do not ask how you are, or say how I am; it is certain we shall all go; so ’tis no matter who is sick or who is sound;” and so they ran desperately into any place or any company. As it brought the people into publick company, so it was surprizing how it brought them to crowd into the churches. They enquired no more into who, they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met with, or what condition the people seemed to be in, but looking upon themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches without the least caution, and crowded together, as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there. Indeed, the zeal which they shewed in coming, and the earnestness and affection they shewed in their attention to what they heard, made it manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be their last. Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away all manner of prejudice or of scruple about the person who they found in the pulpit when they came to the churches. It cannot be doubted but that many of the ministers of the parish churches were cut off, among others, in so common and dreadful a calamity; and others had courage enough to stand it, but removed into the country as they found means for escape. As then some parish churches were quite vacant and forsaken, the people made no scruple of desiring such Dissenters as had been a few years before deprived of their livings by virtue of the Act of Parliament called the Act of Uniformity to preach in the churches; nor did the church ministers in that case make any difficulty of accepting their assistance; so that many of those who they called silenced ministers had their mouths opened on the occasion and preached publickly to the people. Here we may observe, and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it, that a near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union so much kept and far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before. As the people who had been used to join with the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their parish churches, and to conform to the worship which they did not approve of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those things all returned again to their less desirable channel, and to the course they were in before.
Daniel Defoe (A Journal of the Plague Year)
Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
I, Prayer (A Poem of Magnitudes and Vectors) I, Prayer, know no hour. No season, no day, no month nor year. No boundary, no barrier or limitation–no blockade hinders Me. There is no border or wall I cannot breach. I move inexorably forward; distance holds Me not. I span the cosmos in the twinkling of an eye. I knowest it all. I am the most powerful force in the Universe. Who then is My equal? Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? None is so fierce that dare stir him up. Surely, I may’st with but a Word. Who then is able to stand before Me? I am the wind, the earth, the metal. I am the very empyrean vault of Heaven Herself. I span the known and the unknown beyond Eternity’s farthest of edges. And whatsoever under Her wings is Mine. I am a gentle stream, a fiery wrath penetrating; wearing down mountains –the hardest and softest of substances. I am a trickling brook to fools of want lost in the deserts of their own desires. I am a Niagara to those who drink in well. I seep through cracks. I inundate. I level forests kindleth unto a single burning bush. My hand moves the Universe by the mind of a child. I withhold treasures solid from the secret stores to they who would wrench at nothing. I do not sleep or eat, feel not fatigue, nor hunger. I do not feel the cold, nor rain or wind. I transcend the heat of the summer’s day. I commune. I petition. I intercede. My time is impeccable, by it worlds and destinies turn. I direct the fates of nations and humankind. My Words are Iron eternaled—rust not they away. No castle keep, nor towers of beaten brass, Nor the dankest of dungeon helks, Nor adamantine links of hand-wrought steel Can contain My Spirit–I shan’t turn back. The race is ne’er to the swift, nor battle to the strong, nor wisdom to the wise or wealth to the rich. For skills and wisdom, I give to the sons of man. I take wisdom and skills from the sons of man for they are ever Mine. Blessed is the one who finds it so, for in humility comes honor, For those who have fallen on the battlefield for My Name’s sake, I reach down to lift them up from On High. I am a rose with the thorn. I am the clawing Lion that pads her children. My kisses wound those whom I Love. My kisses are faithful. No occasion, moment in time, instances, epochs, ages or eras hold Me back. Time–past, present and future is to Me irrelevant. I span the millennia. I am the ever-present Now. My foolishness is wiser than man’s My weakness stronger than man’s. I am subtle to the point of formlessness yet formed. I have no discernible shape, no place into which the enemy may sink their claws. I AM wisdom and in length of days knowledge. Strength is Mine and counsel, and understanding. I break. I build. By Me, kings rise and fall. The weak are given strength; wisdom to those who seek and foolishness to both fooler and fool alike. I lead the crafty through their deceit. I set straight paths for those who will walk them. I am He who gives speech and sight - and confounds and removes them. When I cut, straight and true is my cut. I strike without fault. I am the razored edge of high destiny. I have no enemy, nor friend. My Zeal and Love and Mercy will not relent to track you down until you are spent– even unto the uttermost parts of the earth. I cull the proud and the weak out of the common herd. I hunt them in battles royale until their cries unto Heaven are heard. I break hearts–those whose are harder than granite. Beyond their atomic cores, I strike their atomic clock. Elect motions; not one more or less electron beyond electron’s orbit that has been ordained for you do I give–for His grace is sufficient for thee until He desires enough. Then I, Prayer, move on as a comet, Striking out of the black. I, His sword, kills to give Life. I am Living and Active, the Divider asunder of thoughts and intents. I Am the Light of Eternal Mind. And I, Prayer, AM Prayer Almighty.
Douglas M. Laurent
Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume. "The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat; "its wood could only be American!" Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent. "I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,--death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!" The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths. For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight. But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Herman Melville
Hyphen This word comes from two Greek words together meaning ‘under one’, which gets nobody anywhere and merely prompts the reflection that argument by etymology only serves the purpose of intimidating ignorant antagonists. On, then. This is one more case in which matters have not improved since Fowler’s day, since he wrote in 1926: The chaos prevailing among writers or printers or both regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education … The wrong use or wrong non-use of hyphens makes the words, if strictly interpreted, mean something different from what the writers intended. It is no adequate answer to such criticisms to say that actual misunderstanding is unlikely; to have to depend on one’s employer’s readiness to take the will for the deed is surely a humiliation that no decent craftsman should be willing to put up with. And so say all of us who may be reading this book. The references there to ‘printers’ needs updating to something like ‘editors’, meaning those who declare copy fit to print. Such people now often get it wrong by preserving in midcolumn a hyphen originally put at the end of a line to signal a word-break: inter-fere, say, is acceptable split between lines but not as part of a single line. This mistake is comparatively rare and seldom causes confusion; even so, time spent wondering whether an exactor may not be an ex-actor is time avoidably wasted. The hyphen is properly and necessarily used to join the halves of a two-word adjectival phrase, as in fair-haired children, last-ditch resistance, falling-down drunk, over-familiar reference. Breaches of this rule are rare and not troublesome. Hyphens are also required when a phrase of more than two words is used adjectivally, as in middle-of-the-road policy, too-good-to-be-true story, no-holds-barred contest. No hard-and-fast rule can be devised that lays down when a two-word phrase is to be hyphenated and when the two words are to be run into one, though there will be a rough consensus that, for example, book-plate and bookseller are each properly set out and that bookplate and book-seller might seem respectively new-fangled and fussy. A hyphen is not required when a normal adverb (i.e. one ending in -ly) plus an adjective or other modifier are used in an adjectival role, as in Jack’s equally detestable brother, a beautifully kept garden, her abnormally sensitive hearing. A hyphen is required, however, when the adverb lacks a final -ly, like well, ill, seldom, altogether or one of those words like tight and slow that double as adjectives. To avoid ambiguity here we must write a well-kept garden, an ill-considered objection, a tight-fisted policy. The commonest fault in the use of the hyphen, and the hardest to eradicate, is found when an adjectival phrase is used predicatively. So a gent may write of a hard-to-conquer mountain peak but not of a mountain peak that remains hard-to-conquer, an often-proposed solution but not of one that is often-proposed. For some reason this fault is especially common when numbers, including fractions, are concerned, and we read every other day of criminals being imprisoned for two-and-a-half years, a woman becoming a mother-of-three and even of some unfortunate being stabbed six-times. And the Tories have been in power for a decade-and-a-half. Finally, there seems no end to the list of common phrases that some berk will bung a superfluous hyphen into the middle of: artificial-leg, daily-help, false-teeth, taxi-firm, martial-law, rainy-day, airport-lounge, first-wicket, piano-concerto, lung-cancer, cavalry-regiment, overseas-service. I hope I need not add that of course one none the less writes of a false-teeth problem, a first-wicket stand, etc. The only guide is: omit the hyphen whenever possible, so avoid not only mechanically propelled vehicle users (a beauty from MEU) but also a man eating tiger. And no one is right and no-one is wrong.
Kingsley Amis (The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage)
When trust is destroyed, it can be rebuilt only if the following two steps happen: 1) the trust-breaker admits the true values that caused the breach and owns up to them, and 2) the trust-breaker builds a solid track record of improved behavior over time.
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
The CIA breached the FBI’s servers seven times over a six-year period to find out what information the FBI had in their possession and to learn if there was an ongoing FBI criminal investigation into the CIA’s activities, according to Montgomery.
Mary Fanning (THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup "The Political Crime of the Century": How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else)
I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of “race”—“race” itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard—usually believing himself white—proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same “race.” But a great number of “black” people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead “races” (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me (One World Essentials))
No. Look, I’m not selling you a time-travel adventure and I’m not selling you a story about a hapless human having to hitchhike around the galaxy, because then that would simply be more of the same, wouldn’t it?” “I get that, Francis. They’re not human, so forget the hitchhiking. What special powers do they have? I mean, they do have special powers, don’t they?” “They are masters of administration.” “Ah. I see. Anything else? Telepathy? Telekinesis?” “Oh, yes,” enthused Why. “They can spot even a minor breach of rules from a million miles, and they can swoop in to put it right.” “Hmm. So is… is that it?” “Of course not! Once they find even the tiniest infraction they can immediately propose and–wait, this is the genius bit–implement a new, tighter set of regulations!
Mark Speed (Doctor How and the Big Finish: Book 5)
The most worrisome fact is that, according to an article5 by The Economist magazine, the average time between an attacker breaching a network and its owner noticing the intrusion is 205 days.
Prabath Siriwardena (Advanced API Security: OAuth 2.0 and Beyond)
4. "The Heart Shattered Glass was a courageous scream from the abyss from an abandoned woman, written in four days from the side of a precipice down which she was hurling all her worldly goods, one at a time, meditating on their meaning. It had taken the world by storm with its candor and wit. The fact that the author had subsequently fallen madly in love with and married the book’s publicist had only prolonged its popularity, but it was truly a book that deserved its worldwide fame. It was . . . She got it exactly. Exactly what it feels like. Nina looked at the tightly buttoned-up woman she had struggled to connect with and marveled, not for the first time, at the astonishing amount of seething emotion that could exist beneath the most restrained exterior. To look at Lesley you would think she was just a middle-aged shopkeeper quietly going about her business. The fact that she completely and utterly empathized with an American woman who had let her own blood drip down a mountainside in anguish, who had changed sexuality and howled at the moon with a wolf pack, just went to show. There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew—apart from, sometimes, music—to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds.
Jenny Colgan (The Bookshop on the Corner (Kirrinfief, #1))
Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....
Lionel Tiger (Men in Groups)
…American men actually engage most in hunting and fishing. The desire of men in wealthy societies to re-create the food-gathering conditions of very primitive people appears to be an appropriate comment on the power of the hunting drives discussed earlier. Not only is hunting expensive in many places – think of the European on safari in Africa – but it is also time-consuming, potentially dangerous, and frequently involves considerable personal discomfort. Men do it because it is ‘fun’. So they say, and so one must conclude from their persistent rendition of the old pattern. What is relevant from our point of view is that hunting, and frequently fishing, are group activities. A man will choose his co-hunters very carefully. Not only does the relative intimacy of the hunt demand some congeniality, but there is also danger in hunting with inept or irresponsible persons. It is a serious matter, and even class barriers which normally operate quite rigidly may be happily breached for the period of the hunt. Some research on hunters in British Columbia suggests the near-piety which accompanies the hunt; hunting is a singular and important activity. One particular group of males takes along bottles of costly Crown Royal whisky for the hunt; they drink only superior whisky on this poignant re-creation of an ancient manly skill. But when their wives join them for New Year's celebrations, they drink an ordinary whisky: the purely formal and social occasion does not, it seems, merit the symbolic tribute of outstanding whisky. Gambling is another behaviour which, like hunting and sport, provides an opportunity in countless cultures for the weaving of and participation in the web of male affiliation. Not the gambling of the London casino, where glamorous women serve drinks, or the complex hope, greed, fate-tempting ritual, and action of the shiny American palaces in Nevada, and not the hidden gambling run by racketeers. Rather, the card games in homes or small clubs, where men gather to play for manageable stakes on a friendly basis; perhaps – like Jiggs and his Maggie – to avoid their women, perhaps to seek some money, perhaps to buy the pleasant passage of time. But also to be with their friends and talk, and define, by the game, the confines of their intimate male society. Obviously females play too, both on their own and in mixed company. But there are differences which warrant investigation, in the same way that the drinking of men in groups appears to differ from heterosexual or all-female drinking; the separation of all-male bars and mixed ones is still maintained in many places despite the powerful cultural pressures against such flagrant sexual apartheid. Even in the Bowery, where disaffiliated outcast males live in ways only now becoming understood, it has been noted that, ‘There are strong indications that the heavy drinkers are more integrated and more sociable than the light. The analytical problem lies in determining whether socialization causes drinking or drinking results in sociability when there is no disapproval.’ In the gentleman's club in London, the informally segregated working man's pub in Yorkshire, the all-male taverns of Montreal, the palm-wine huts of west Africa, perhaps can be observed the enactment of a way of establishing maleness and maintaining bonds which is given an excuse and possibly facilitated by alcohol. Certainly, for what they are worth in revealing the nature of popular conception of the social role of drinking, advertisements stress the manly appeal of alcohol – particularly whisky – though it is also clear that there are ongoing changes in the socio-sexual implications of drinking. But perhaps it is hasty to regard the process of change as a process of female emancipation which will culminate in similarity of behaviour, status, and ideals of males and females. The changes are still too recent to warrant this. Also, they have been achieved under sufficiently self-conscious pressure...
Lionel Tiger (Men in Groups)
a word, in times of public calamity, when the flood of God’s wrath comes rolling in upon a nation, like waves irresistibly, at the wide breach which the high crying sins of the times make, and the few righteous that are found upon the place labour to stand in the gap, by their prayers, begging the life of the nation, but God will not hear, even then sincerity will be a sweet support while we share with others in the common calamity
William Gurnall (The Christian in Complete Armour - The Ultimate Book on Spiritual Warfare)
He would remove any lick of wild jungle from our woods, one tree at a time, and put up trip wires that would let him know if his territory had been breached. He walked this world fully barricaded inside himself, and we were all his enemies. Me, Mom, Sephie, the bramble and brush.
Jess Lourey (Unspeakable Things)
Because you don’t leave a display like that for people who are dead.
Daniel B. Greene (Breach of Peace (The Lawful Times, #0.5))
For example, I learned that it was my right under international law to be told why I was being arrested, but the night the military took me from my home, I wasn’t told why. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel also ratified in 1991, says that all persons, including children, should be given reasons for their arrest at the time of their arrest. Another violation occurred when the soldiers posed with me, a minor, while taking my picture before leading me into the police station. They had no right to humiliate me like that, nor to film my arrest and publish the video without my parents’ permission. And then there was the interrogation. Banning my parents and my lawyer from being with me and putting me in a room alone with men and no female officers were all clear violations. The way the interrogators shouted at me, threatened me, and sexually harassed me by commenting on my appearance in order to coerce a confession were all breaches of the Convention Against Torture. The fact that I was held so long in pretrial detention was another violation.
Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t. When this conversational balance becomes lopsided, social connections fray. To make matters worse, when this occurs, the people who are overventing and inadvertently alienating those around them are less capable of solving problems. This makes it harder for them to fix the breach in their relationships, begetting a vicious cycle that can end with a toxic outcome: loneliness and isolation.
Ethan Kross (Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It)
Unfortunately, building a track record for trust takes time—certainly a lot more time than it takes to break trust. And during that trust-building period, things are likely to be pretty shitty. So both people in the relationship must be conscious of the struggle they’re choosing to undertake. I use the example of cheating in a romantic relationship, but this process applies to a breach in any relationship. When trust is destroyed, it can be rebuilt only if the following two steps happen: 1) the trust-breaker admits the true values that caused the breach and owns up to them, and 2) the trust-breaker builds a solid track record of improved behavior over time. Without the first step, there should be no attempt at reconciliation in the first place. Trust is like a china plate. If you break it once, with some care and attention you can put it back together again. But if you break it again, it splits into even more pieces and it takes far longer to piece together again. If you break it more and more times, eventually it shatters to the point where it’s impossible to restore. There are too many broken pieces, and too much dust.
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
This was clear less than thirty minutes into the speech, when—as I debunked the phony claim that the bill would insure undocumented immigrants—a relatively obscure five-term Republican congressman from South Carolina named Joe Wilson leaned forward in his seat, pointed in my direction, and shouted, his face flushed with fury, “You lie!” For the briefest second, a stunned silence fell over the chamber. I turned to look for the heckler (as did Speaker Pelosi and Joe Biden, Nancy aghast and Joe shaking his head). I was tempted to exit my perch, make my way down the aisle, and smack the guy in the head. Instead, I simply responded by saying “It’s not true” and then carried on with my speech as Democrats hurled boos in Wilson’s direction. As far as anyone could remember, nothing like that had ever happened before a joint session address—at least not in modern times. Congressional criticism was swift and bipartisan, and by the next morning Wilson had apologized publicly for the breach of decorum, calling Rahm and asking that his regrets get passed on to me as well. I downplayed the matter, telling a reporter that I appreciated the apology and was a big believer that we all make mistakes. And yet I couldn’t help noticing the news reports saying that online contributions to Wilson’s reelection campaign spiked sharply in the week following his outburst. Apparently, for a lot of Republican voters out there, he was a hero, speaking truth to power. It was an indication that the Tea Party and its media allies had accomplished more than just their goal of demonizing the healthcare bill. They had demonized me and, in doing so, had delivered a message to all Republican officeholders: When it came to opposing my administration, the old rules no longer applied. —
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
When Trust Has Been Broken If you break any of your agreements about trust, there are steps to fix what’s been broken. These steps hold true for minor or major breaks, but you can’t skip any of these steps. 1  Set a specific time and place to talk. 2  Each partner names the feelings he or she experienced during the incident or breach in trust, without blame or criticism. 3  The receiving partner listens without feedback or judgment. 4  Each person describes his or her point of view about what happened during the incident without blaming or criticizing their partner, while their partner only listens and tries to empathize. The listener shouldn’t bring up their own point of view until it’s their turn to speak. 5  Explain and examine any feelings that were triggered by the incident but that were originally felt long before this relationship. For example, one of you is a no-show for a dinner date, and that triggers a feeling of abandonment the other had from childhood or the rejection or infidelity in a past relationship. 6  Each partner assesses how they contributed to the incident and holds himself or herself accountable. 7  Each apologizes and accepts the other’s apology. 8  You make a plan together to prevent this from happening again. Each of the eight dates are experiments in vulnerability, and we hope that on this first date your conversation about what trust means to each of you will bring you not only closer together, but also closer to creating the relationship you both want for a lifetime.
John M. Gottman (Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love)
I swerved around the father, he clutched the baby out of my way and sprinted for the gloomy breach behind them as the clock rolled over my head. ‘Marcel, no!’ I yield, All the same, and all, my voice was lost in the scream of the chime. I could see him now. And I could see that he could not see me. It was him, no hallucination this time at all. Then I realized that my delusions were more flawed than I'd realized; they'd never done him justice. Marcel stood, motionless as a statue, just a few feet from the mouth of the alley. His eyes were closed, the rings underneath them deep purple, his arms relaxed at his sides, his palms turned forward.
Marcel Ray Duriez (Nevaeh 13: Going in and Out)
These were a rate of meningitis in those receiving Mosquirix 10 times that of those who did not, increased cerebral malaria cases, and a doubling in the risk of death (from any cause) in girls.” Dr. Doshi says WHO’s Malaria Vaccine Study represents a “serious breach of international ethical standards.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Some of Gandhi’s oldest disciples were also opposed to his sharing a bed with Manu. These dissenters included Narhari Parikh, who had joined Gandhi as farback as 1917. The criticisms of those close to him prompted a remarkable letter written by Gandhi to Satish Chandra Mukerji, a patriot who was one of the pioneers of the national education movement in Bengal. Mukerji was several years older than Gandhi; and, perhaps more significantly, had renounced worldly pursuits to become a sanyasi, taking renunciation so far as to discard his clothes altogether (earning him the affectionate appellation, ‘Nanga Baba’, or naked saint). Now, writing to Mukerji on 1 February, Gandhi said: 'I put before you a poser. A young girl (19) who is in the place of granddaughter to me by relation shares the same bed with me, not for any animal satisfaction but for (to me) valid moral reasons. She claims to be free from the passion that a girl of her age generally has and I claim to be a practised brahmachari. Do you see anything bad or unjustifiable in this juxtaposition? I ask the question because some of my intimate associates hold it to be wholly unjustifiable and even a breach of brahmacharya. I hold a totally opposite view. As you are an experienced man and as I have regard for your opinion, I put the question. You may take your own time to answer the question. You are in no way bound to answer it if you don’t wish to.
Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
Names don’t help me much anymore. They belong to that time when everything was kept in its place. Before the winds came up and the water came up and licked the land away, this land is your land, this land is my land, this land is gone. For more than fifty years I have come to this place, a city older than our flag, and now it is dead. Nine months ago I was in the dead city after the wind rose, the levees breached, and water came in. Two months ago I was again in the dead city. Soon, I know I must return to the dead city.
Charles Bowden (Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future)
Nevertheless, the issue of Catholic marriage deserves some additional theoretical and historical consideration to prevent ambiguity. Naturally in our case it is not the arguments of “free thinkers” that turn us against this kind of marriage. Earlier I mentioned the contamination between the sacred and the profane. It is worth recalling that marriage as a rite and sacrament involving indissolubility took shape late in the history of the Church, and not before the twelfth century. The obligatory nature of the religious rite for every union that wished to be considered more than mere concubinage was later still, declared at the Council of Trent (1563). For our purposes, this does not affect the concept of indissoluble marriage in itself, but its place, significance, and conditions have to be clarified. The consequence here, as in other cases regarding the sacraments, is that the Catholic Church finds itself facing a singular paradox: proposals intending to make the profane sacred have practically ended up making the sacred profane. The true, traditional significance of the marriage rite is outlined by Saint Paul, when he uses not the term “sacrament” but rather “mystery” to indicate it (“it is a great mystery,” taken verbatim—Ephesians 5:31-32). One can indeed allow a higher idea of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble union not in words, but in fact. A union of this type, however, is conceivable only in exceptional cases in which that absolute, almost heroic dedication of two people in life and beyond life is present in principle. This was known in more than one traditional civilization, with examples of wives who even found it natural not to outlive the death of their husbands. In speaking of making the sacred profane, I alluded to the fact that the concept of an indissoluble sacramental union, “written in the heavens” (as opposed to one on the naturalistic plane that is generically sentimental, and even at base merely social), has been applied to, or rather imposed on, every couple who must join themselves in church rather than in civil marriage, only to conform to their social environment. It is pretended that on this exterior and prosaic plane, on this plane of the Nietzschean “human, all too human,” the attributes of truly sacred marriage, of marriage as a “mystery,” can and must be valid. When divorce is not permitted in a society like the present, one can expect this hypocritical regime and the rise of grave personal and social problems. On the other hand, it should be noted that in Catholicism itself the theoretical absoluteness of the marriage rite bears a significant limitation. It is enough to remember that if the Church insists on the indissolubility of the marriage bond in space, denying divorce, it has ceased to observe it in time. The Church that does not allow one to divorce and remarry does permit widows and widowers to remarry, which amounts to a breach of faithfulness, and is at best conceivable within an openly materialistic premise; in other words, only if it is thought that when one who was indissolubly united by the supernatural power of the rite has died, he or she has ceased to exist. This inconsistency shows that Catholic religious law, far from truly having transcendent spiritual values in view, has made the sacrament into a simple, social convenience, an ingredient of the profane life, reducing it to a mere formality, or rather degrading it.
Julius Evola (Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul)
At the time of his outburst there were only 789 Jews left in Norway.55 The court found that Kholardi’s “remarks were demeaning, untruthful and offensive, but they are not breaching the law.” This is a fine outcome if you, like me, believe that hate speech laws undermine an inherent and neutral right to free expression. But in Norway people do not. It is still illegal to “deliberately or grossly negligently publicly present a discriminatory or hateful expression,” and it “shall be punished
David Harsanyi (Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent – An Unapologetic Polemic on Economic and Cultural Superiority)
When an armed and violent intruder breaches the premises of your home or workplace, the first course of action is to attempt escape. But if a timely exit isn’t possible, proceed to a lockdown.
Clint Emerson (100 Deadly Skills: Survival Edition: The SEAL Operative's Guide to Surviving in the Wild and Being Prepared for Any Disaster)
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them. With a zigzag and a dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New (for you in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new). All this means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you turn toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established. You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went. You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you but the novelty as well, which could also merely be that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the bindings become dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You can never tell. Let’s see how it begins.
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)
But Massachusetts was so much afraid of the spread of their principles, that they made a law in November that year, which said, “Forasmuch as experience hath plentifully and often proved, that since the first rising of the Anabaptists, about one hundred years since, they have been the incendiaries of the commonwealths, and the infectors of persons in main matters of religion, and the troubles of churches in all places where they have been, and that they who have held the baptizing of infants unlawful, have usually held other errors or heresies together therewith, though they have (as other heretics use to do) concealed the same till they spied out a fit advantage and opportunity to vent them, by way of question or scruple; and whereas divers of this kind have, since our coming to New England, appeared amongst ourselves, some whereof (as others before them) denied the ordinance of magistracy, and the lawfulness of making war, and others the lawfulness of magistrates, and their inspection into the breach of the first table; which opinions, if they should be connived at by us, are like to be increased amongst us, and so must necessarily bring guilt upon us, infection and trouble to the churches, and hazard to the whole commonwealth; it is ordered and agreed, that if any person or persons, within this jurisdiction, shall either openly condemn or oppose the baptizing of infants, or go about secretly to seduce others from the approbation or use thereof, or shall purposely depart the congregation at the ministration of the ordinance, or shall deny the ordinance of magistracy, or their lawful right and authority to make war, or to punish the outward breaches of the first table, and shall appear to the court willfully and obstinately to continue therein, after due time and means of conviction, every such person or persons shall be sentenced to banishment.
Isaac Backus (Your Baptist Heritage: 1620-1804)
In 1935, in the pit of the Depression, when milk was being sold below cost, Merritt’s father had helped write the “milk control” laws, which partly govern California’s milk business (they have since been updated several times), especially the relations between the milk companies and grocery stores. After World War II, these laws increasingly were honored in the breach, as the big creameries and the big supermarket chains cut deals for illegal rebates or illegal financing or both. This is the normal result of quasi-fascist laws that try to regulate the marketplace. But in 1935, Benito Mussolini’s concept of binding state and industry together (the fasces is a Roman symbol, an ax with a bundle of sticks tied around its handle; the sticks represent the industries and the church, the ax represents the state, a one-for-all-and-all-for-one construct) was so popular around the world that Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to copy it with the Blue Eagle National Recovery Administration, until the Supreme Court threw it out in 1937. Relics of Mussolini, however, linger in all the states of the union, sometimes in milk control laws (and always in alcoholic beverage laws).
Joe Coulombe (Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys)
Associating with Benjamin was fraught with considerable difficulties, though on the surface these seemed insignificant in view of his consummate courtesy and willingness to listen. He always was surrounded by a wall of reserve, which could be recognized intuitively and was evident to another person even without Benjamin’s not infrequent efforts to make that area noticeable. These efforts consisted above all in a secretiveness bordering on eccentricity, a mystery-mongering that generally prevailed in everything relating to him personally, though it sometimes was breached unexpectedly by personal and confidential revelations. There were primarily three difficult requirements. The first was respect for his solitude; this was easy to observe, for it was dictated by a natural sense of limits. I soon realized that he appreciated this respect, a sine qua non for associating with him, and that it heightened his trust. The observance of the second requirement was particularly easy for me: his utter aversion to discussing the political events of the day and occurrences of the war. Some reviewers of the Briefe expressed astonishment at the fact that the published letters contain no reference to the events of the First World War (which, after all, so decisively influenced our generation) and blamed the editors (I was the one responsible for this period) for an incomprehensible omission or, worse, censorship. The fact of the matter is that in those years anyone who wished to have a closer association with Benjamin either had to share this attitude (as I did) or respect it. ...The third requirement, that of overlooking his secretiveness, often demanded a real effort, because there was something surprising, even ludicrous, about such secretiveness in someone as sober, as melancholy as Benjamin. He did not like to give the names of friends and acquaintances if he could avoid it. When circumstances of his life were mentioned, there frequently was attached an urgent request for absolute secrecy; more often than not this made very little sense. Gradually, but even then only partially, this secretiveness (which by that time others had noticed as well) began to dissipate, and Benjamin began to speak of people without the accompanying stamp of anonymity, at least when he had initiated the discussion. It was in keeping with this aversion that he tried to keep his acquaintances separate; for a time this was more effective with me, who came from another environment—Zionist youth—than it was with those from the same sphere as he, namely members of the German-Jewish intelligentsia. Only occasionally did it turn out that we had mutual acquaintances, such as the poet Ludwig Strauss or the philosopher David Baumgardt. Other friends and acquaintances of his I did not meet until years later, from 1918 on, some of them only after 1945. In short, then, to associate with Benjamin took a great deal of patience and consideration—qualities that were by no means natural to my temperament and that, to my own surprise, I was able to muster only in my association with him.
Gershom Scholem
Haidt and his colleagues call this idea “moral foundations theory.” [4] Drawing on evolutionary biology, cultural psychology, and several other fields, they show that beliefs about morality stand on five pillars: Care/harm: Children are more vulnerable than the offspring of other animals, so humans devote considerable time and effort to protecting them. As a result, evolution has instilled in us the ethic of care. Those who nurture and defend the vulnerable are kind; those who hurt them are cruel. Fairness/cheating: Our success as a species has always hinged on cooperation, including exchanges that evolutionary scientists call “reciprocal altruism.” That means we value those whom we can trust and disdain those who breach our trust. Loyalty/disloyalty: Our survival depends not only on our individual actions, but also on the cohesiveness of our group. That’s why being true to your team, sect, or nation is respected—and forsaking your tribe is usually reviled. Authority/subversion: Among primates, hierarchies nourish members and protect them from aggressors. Those who undermine the hierarchy can place everyone in the group at risk. When this evolutionary impulse extends to human morality, traits like deference and obedience toward those at the top become virtues.[5] Purity/desecration: Our ancestors had to contend with all manner of pathogens—from Mycobacterium tuberculosis to Mycobacterium leprae—so their descendants developed the capacity to avoid them along with what’s known as a “behavioral immune system” to guard against a broader set of impurities such as violations of chastity. In the moral realm, write one set of scholars, “purity concerns uniquely predict (beyond other foundations and demographics such as political ideology) culture-war attitudes about gay marriage, euthanasia, abortion, and pornography.” [6] Moral foundations theory doesn’t say that care is more important than purity or that authority is more important than fairness or that you should follow one set of foundations instead of another. It simply catalogs how humans assess the morality of behavior. The theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. But its descriptive power is considerable. Not only did it reshape my understanding of both human reasoning and modern politics; it also offered an elegant way to interpret our moral regrets.
Daniel H. Pink (The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward)
Dagny, all three of us are in love”—she jerked her head to him—“with the same thing, no matter what its forms. Don’t wonder why you feel no breach among us. You’ll be one of us, so long as you’ll remain in love with your rails and your engines—and they’ll lead you back to us, no matter how many times you lose your way. The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
For Penina Mezei petrify motive in folk literature stems from ancient, mythical layers of culture that has undergone multiple transformations lost the original meaning. Therefore, the origin of this motif in the narrative folklore can be interpreted depending on the assumptions that you are the primary elements of faith in Petrify preserved , lost or replaced elements that blur the idea of integrity , authenticity and functionality of the old ones . Motif Petrify in different genres varies by type of actor’s individuality, time and space, properties and actions of its outcome, the relationship of the narrator and singers from the text. The particularity of Petrify in particular genres testifies about different possibilities and intentions of using the same folk beliefs about transforming, says Penina Mezei. In moralized ballads Petrify is temporary or eternal punishment for naughty usually ungrateful children. In the oral tradition, demonic beings are permanently Petrifying humans and animals. Petrify in fairy tales is temporary, since the victims, after entering into the forbidden demonic time and space or breaches of prescribed behavior in it, frees the hero who overcomes the demonic creature, emphasizes Mezei. Faith in the power of magical evocation of death petrifaction exists in curses in which the slanderer or ungrateful traitor wants to convert into stone. In search of the magical meaning of fatal events in fairy tales, however, it should be borne in mind that they concealed before, but they reveal the origin of the ritual. The work of stone - bedrock Penina Mezei pointed to the belief that binds the soul stone dead or alive beings. Penina speaks of stone medial position between earth and sky, earth and the underworld. Temporary or permanent attachment of the soul to stone represents a state between life and death will be punished its powers cannot be changed. Rescue petrified can only bring someone else whose power has not yet subjugated the demonic forces. While the various traditions demons Petrifying humans and animals, as long as in fairy tales, mostly babe, demon- old woman. Traditions brought by Penina Mezei , which describe Petrify people or animals suggest specific place events , while in fairy tales , of course , no luck specific place names . Still Penina spotted chthonic qualities babe, and Mezei’s with plenty of examples of comparative method confirmed that they were witches. Some elements of procedures for the protection of the witch could be found in oral stories and poems. Fairy tales keep track of violations few taboos - the hero , despite the ban on the entry of demonic place , comes in the woods , on top of a hill , in a demonic time - at night , and does not respect the behaviors that would protect him from demons . Interpreting the motives Petrify as punishment for the offense in the demon time and space depends on the choice of interpretive method is applied. In the book of fairy tales Penina Mezei writes: Petrify occurs as a result of unsuccessful contact with supernatural beings Petrify is presented as a metaphor for death (Penina Mezei West Bank Fairytales: 150). Psychoanalytic interpretation sees in the form of witches character, and the petrification of erotic seizure of power. Female demon seized fertilizing power of the masculine principle. By interpreting the archetypal witch would chthonic anima, anabaptized a devastating part unindividualized man. Ritual access to the motive of converting living beings into stone figure narrated narrative transfigured magical procedures some male initiation ceremonies in which the hero enters into a community of dedicated, or tracker sacrificial rites. Compelling witches to release a previously petrified could be interpreted as the initiation mark the conquest of certain healing powers and to encourage life force, highlights the Penina.
Penina Mezei
I did request to meet with him at least once before submitting the completed work to make sure my edits met with his approval. The answer from the Pentagon was brief and absolute. “Visiting or otherwise communicating with any detainee in the detention facility in Guantanamo, unless you are legal counsel representing the detainee, is not possible,” a public affairs officer wrote. “As you are aware, the detainees are held under the Law of War. Additionally, we do not subject detainees to public curiosity.” The phrase “public curiosity” comes from one of the pillars of the Law of War, the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Article 13 of the convention, “Humane Treatment of Prisoners,” says: Prisoners must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody will be prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention.… Prisoners must at all times be protected, particularly from acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity. Measures of reprisal against prisoners of war are prohibited.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi (The Mauritanian (originally published as Guantánamo Diary))
Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.
Barbara Ehrenreich (Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything)
I fear I’m going to be next.” Eve waited to make this prediction until the footmen had left and the tea trays were on the low table before the sofa. Louisa looked up from her book—Louisa’s nose was always in a book—and frowned. “Next? Next as in what? We’re supposed to divine the context without any further clues, Evie?” She set the book aside and leaned forward in her chair. “Food is next, and about time too.” “What did you mean, dearest?” Jenny was sitting at the other end of the sofa, slippers off, back resting against the arm and her knees drawn up before her. “Next to get married.” Eve’s sisters were silent for a few moments, but they exchanged the most maddening of older-sister looks before Jenny leapt into the breach. “Is Mr. Trottenham your choice then? He’s a very pleasant fellow, I must agree.” “Not Trit-Trot,” Louisa said, picking up a chocolate tea cake. “He’s a ninnyhammer.” “He is a ninnyhammer.” Eve’s best decoys were always ninnyhammers. “I don’t know who. I just have a feeling I’d better choose someone, or Her Grace and His Grace will start nosing about, and then all is lost.” “Lost
Grace Burrowes (Lady Eve's Indiscretion (The Duke's Daughters, #4; Windham, #7))
We can wait for the system to collapse of its own accord, for the rage of the downtrodden and dispossessed to build, for chaos of some sort to expose and destroy it. But implosion might take a long time. And when it happens, we may find ourselves even more powerless than we are now. They—the hardcore, racist, undereducated, fundamentalist Christian, anit-civil liberties Right—are preparing to step into the breach, to seize power. They can't wait to unleash their venomous hatred on the city-dwelling commie hipster fags they despise. They are armed. They recognize that the system is doomed. They've seen this coming. They're organized and willing to merge their disparate brands of conservatism under a common leadership. Most importantly, they get it. They don't need to be convinced that everything is in play. They're putting it in play.
Ted Rall (The Anti-American Manifesto)
Far below the waterline in the very lowest compartment of a ship you will find a deck covering the bottom of the vessel from the centerline, most frequently the keel, to the sides creating a space called the inner bottom. The purpose of this space is to protect the ship from flooding if the hull were to become compromised or breached by a grounding. This deck, known as the bilge is also the collecting place for water and oil that flows from spills, rough seas, rain, leaks in the hull, engine oil and lubricant. The bilge being a vast expanse would be difficult to pump dry if it wasn’t for collection wells that are designed to pump the contents into holding tanks. These wells were and are still known as a stuffing box or a rose box. In years past these wells were pumped directly into the sea without considering the adverse consequences to the ecology. The discharge of bilge sludge is now normally restricted and for commercial vessels discharging this toxic waste is totally outlawed and regulated under Marpol Annex I. On larger ships waste water can be passively treated by methods such as bioremediation, which uses bacteria or archaea to break down the hydrocarbons in the waste and bilge water. Once treated the water could be safely returned to the sea. Pumping the bilges was a constant undertaking by the ship’s engineers and was necessary to keep the ship afloat. There were times however when the drain in the rose box would become clogged, and that was when the lowest ranking member of the engine department was called upon to clear the blockage. On most ships this task would fall to the “Wiper” or on a training ship a “Mug or Plebe.” Never knowing what had clogged the drain in the rose box we were ready for anything. When, as a midshipman, my turn came to reach into the rose box I came up with rags, paper and thick gunk. Disgusting as it was it could have been worse! I have heard tales of dead rats and once the ship’s pet cat clogging the drain, but it was all in a day’s work. Coming back up on deck the sun shone brighter and the flying fish were a welcome sight!
Hank Bracker
know both of them felt badly over this estrangement, and would have been glad at any time to come to a reconciliation; but neither would make the advance. Under these circumstances my father would not write to Hamer for the appointment, but he wrote to Thomas Morris, United States Senator from Ohio, informing him that there was a vacancy at West Point from our district, and that he would be glad if I could be appointed to fill it. This letter, I presume, was turned over to Mr. Hamer, and, as there was no other applicant, he cheerfully appointed me. This healed the breach between the two, never after reopened
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: All Volumes)
And then. Astonishing. Again. As she was skipping up the back stairs on her way to the attic bedroom to fetch something, something innocent - a book, a handkerchief, afterwards she would never remember what - she was almost sent flying by Howie on his way down. 'I was looking for a bathroom,' he said. 'Well, we only have one,' Ursula said, 'and it's not up these-' but before the sentence was finished she found herself pinned awkwardly against the neglected floral wallpaper of the backstairs, a pattern that had been up since the house was built. 'Pretty girl,' he said. His breath smelt of mint. And then again she was again subjected to pushing and shoving from the outsized Howie. But this time it was not his tongue trying to jam its way into her mouth but something inexpressibly more intimate. She tried to say something but before a sound came out his hand clamped over her mouth, over half her face in fact, and he grinned and said 'Ssh,' as if they were conspirators in a game. With his other hand he was fiddling with her clothes and she squealed in protest. Then he was butting up against her, the way the bullocks in the Lower Field did against the gate. She tried to struggle but he was twice, three times her size even and she might as well have been a mouse in Hattie's jaws. She tried to see what he was doing but he was pressed so tightly against her that all she could see was his big square jaw and the slight brush of stubble, unnoticeable from a distance. Ursula had seen her brothers naked, knew what they had between their legs - wrinkled cockles, a little spout - and it seemed to have little to do with this painful piston-driven thing that was now ramming inside her like a weapon of war. Her own body breached. The arch that led to womanhood did not seem so triumphal any more, merely brutal and completely uncaring. And then Howie gave a great bellow, more ox than Oxford man, and was hitching himself back together and grinning at her. 'English girls,' he said, shaking his head and laughing. He wagged his finger at her, almost disapproving, as if she had engineered the disgusting thing that had just happened and said, 'You really are something!' He laughed again and bounded down the stairs, taking them three at a time, as though his descent had been barely interrupted by their strange tryst. Ursula was left to stare at the floral wallpaper. She had never noticed before that the flowers were wisteria, the same flower that grew on the arch over the back porch. This must be what in literature was referred to as 'deflowering', she thought. It had always sounded like a rather pretty word. When she came back downstairs a half-hour later, a half-hour of thoughts and emotions considerably more intense than was usual for a Saturday morning, Sylvie and Hugh were on the doorstep waving a dutiful goodbye to the disappearing rear end of Howie's car. 'Thank goodness they weren't staying,' Sylvie said. 'I don't think I could have been bothered with Maurice's bluster.' 'Imbeciles,' Hugh said cheerfully. 'All right?' he said, catching sight of Ursula in the hallway. 'Yes,' she said. Any other answer would have been too awful.
Kate Atkinson (Life After Life (Todd Family, #1))
So be optimistic whatever your perception of the universe happens to be. You wouldn’t look at an ocean and deny the existence of ships. So don’t look at the vastness of space and time and deny that there could be vehicles that can traverse the enormity before us. In time we will breach the walls that surround us. That is just who we are.
Pol Bard (Star Doors Blue)
I heard the squirt of lube as he lay behind me. My breathing was getting heavy, both from nerves and excitement. I was about to let a man go where no one ever had before. Max pressed his lube-slicked tip against my hole. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. Not sure which I wanted to do. Then he breached me, his cock slid inside me. The sting was ten times as strong, followed by a burning sensation that had my toes curling. I gasped, reached back to hold onto him, and let out a groan. He slowly thrust forward, taking his time. Inch by inch, he entered my ass as I squirmed and let out grunting sounds. I don’t know how he kept his composure. “So tight,” he whispered. “Max.” It felt so good, the slight pain followed by the burst of pleasure. He held my hips, shifting forward still, filling me until I thought I might scream. I slammed my hand on the floor, overwhelmed. I needed to come, but I wanted this to last. “Max.” “Shh.” He started to pull out. I felt a sense of emptiness just then, a loneliness that seeped from my bones. He pushed back inside and I started chanting his name. I couldn’t stop. My brain wasn’t functioning right as Max glided inside me again. His fingers dug into my hip. Blond hair tickled my back. He nipped my shoulder, then kissed the sting. “Elric. Oh, fuck. Elric.” He was moving faster now, but never really pounding. I realized he was being gentle with me. He was making my first time good. It made me smile into the darkness. “Almost, baby. Almost.” He kissed my shoulder again, his length skating in and out, thanks to abundant amounts of lube. He fit perfectly despite being so large. “So good. So. Fucking… Elric!” He shouted my name and gave a hard thrust. I clenched; the pain was a bit intense on that one, but I held my tongue and let him come for as long as he could. I listened to the way he groaned and his soft moan as his orgasm finished. Max eased his grip and slowly pulled his spent cock out of my ass. He fell to his back with a grunt and a sigh. Well, now there was a new pain. I winced and lay on my back beside him. “What’d you think?” He glanced at me. “I think … I’ve been missing out.
James Cox (All That Shatters (Sons of Outlaws, #5))
Law and order: At level four, right and wrong are determined by a codified system of rules, impartial judges, and prescribed punishments. At this level, individuals defer judgment to properly elected or otherwise constituted authority. Right is getting a proper pay or reward for good work and a prescribed infliction of punishment for breaking the rules. Authority figures are rarely questioned; “He must be right—he is the president, the judge, the pastor, the pope.” Elementary school children operate at this level and find security, predictability, and peace in the rules. At this level, tattletales abound as children are intolerant of rule breakers and demand fairness, which is typically some imposed punishment. The black-and-white thinking of this level of operation leads to fragmenting into divergent groups or cliques who share a core set of group rules and who demean and criticize those who don’t share their rules. This was ancient Israel at the time of Christ—“We have a law!” the Pharisees proclaimed, as they sought to stone Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. The Jews in Christ’s day were separatists who were intolerant of those who didn’t keep their rules and obey their rituals. This is much of our modern world too, with its codified laws, courts, prosecutors, judges, juries, and imposed punishments. Authority at this level rests in the coercive pressure of the state to bring punishment upon those who deviate from the established laws. At this level, police agencies and law enforcers are required to monitor the populace, search for breaches in the law, and inflict codified penalties. This is the first level that requires the emergence of thinking but only minimal thinking—basic indoctrination and memorization of rules. One doesn’t have to understand reasons for things. One only has to know the rules and obey them.
Timothy R. Jennings (The God-Shaped Heart: How Correctly Understanding God's Love Transforms Us)
Occasionally the ideals seemed more honored in the breach than in the observance, but in times of moral quandary a conscientious officer could anchor himself with a few simple questions: Is it good for the troops? Is it good for the country? Is it honorable?
Rick Atkinson (The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966)
Legal You will learn that there are restrictions placed upon you in some areas. These restrictions are for your own protection. You will be prohibited from administering medications, recording sponge counts, or carrying out direct physician’s orders regarding treatment of a patient out of your scope of practice. As soon as you overstep your limitations and boundaries and perform any of these actions, you are placing yourself in legal jeopardy. Whether functioning under the supervision of a surgeon or a registered nurse, a CST is always part of the surgical team and you must carry out your responsibilities within the scope of your practice. Never try to do a task that does not fall within that realm. All counts are significant and have important legal ramifications. When performing a count, it is crucial to ensure that the count is correct for the patient’s well-being. When you are scrubbed, you count sponges while the registered nurse observes and records the count. At any given time during a surgical procedure, the CST may request a sponge, and possibly a sharps count to take place. If you are assisting the circulating nurse in a nonsterile role, you may assist with the counts as long as the nurse verifies it. In this scenario, the nurse is legally acting as the surgeon’s agent. It is the responsibility of the registered nurse to obtain the required medications for a case. The CST draws the drugs into syringes and mixes drugs when scrubbed; during this process, the proper sequence of medication verification and labeling must occur. In any phase of your responsibilities, there are possible grounds for legal breaches. Shortcuts may cause a patient to suffer tragic complications, even loss of life. Negligence must be avoided. Both as an employed CST and as a student, you carry the responsibility to do no harm. If you should become discouraged in your role or begin to feel this responsibility is overwhelming, it could simply mean that you need a change; it isn’t always the other team players or the place of employment that are at
Karen L Chambers (Surgical Technology Review Certification & Professionalism)
We are going to fuck now. And you can try to prove to me whatever the hell you want,” Prophet growled before putting his mouth on Tommy’s. Because enough talking. It was time for the goddamned kissing, hard and fast and smooth and slow and any and every way in between, until Tommy was humping his thigh. He allowed it, wondering if he should just keep kissing Tommy and let him get off like this, because fuck, that would be hot. But he was too far gone for that. Instead, he pulled back and turned Tom around, pushed him down, chest first, against the table. Kicked Tom’s thighs apart and sank to his knees because he hadn’t been kidding about using his tongue. Breached Tom, who nearly shot off the table, but then stilled. Tom’s entire body shuddered, and Prophet buried his tongue deep, speared it in and out, opening the man so he could ride him hard. Tom began to hump the table, but Prophet held him steady so he couldn’t. Tom was cursing. Begging. Prophet
S.E. Jakes (Catch a Ghost (Hell or High Water, #1))
The Babylonian army finally managed to breach the city wall that was protecting Jerusalem in 587 B.C., allowing them to swarm into the city.  There appears to have been a few months of negotiations between the Babylonians and the Judeans regarding terms of surrender, and during that time King Zedekiah fled under cover of night. 
Charles River Editors (King Solomon and the Temple of Solomon: The History of the Jewish King and His Temple)
Philip Knox was the CFO. He had his hands full with public company filings and stock exchange time lines, not to mention the demands of a fifteen-member banking syndicate whose covenants were now in breach. Again, we were well enough impressed with this CFO’s ability to be all over the critical cash flow and earnings information.
Bill Ferris (Inside Private Equity: Thrills, spills and lessons by the author of Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained)
Everyone matters, Greg Foster,” he said at last, and his voice was gentle. “Everyone, every time. She is yours, and she is mine, and she is her own, and she matters. She will always matter, long after she is gone.
Elizabeth Bonesteel (Breach of Containment (Central Corps #3))
They’re supposed to help look for the king.” Merdigen shrugged. “Why the urgency to find the king? You have a queen, after all.” Merdigen’s priorities tended to be rather skewed at times. “I need some fresh air,” Alton said. “Sure, sure, leave me alone. Me and my beard.” Alton shook his head. Just before he stepped through the tower wall to the outside world, he heard Merdigen mutter, “I wish I could go out and have some fresh air.” The weather was fine, so Alton saddled up Night Hawk for a ride down to the main encampment at the breach. Hawk tossed his head and pranced, and Alton was assailed by guilt that he did not pay his horse nearly enough attention. • • • At the main encampment he examined the cracks around the breach, made measurements, and recorded his findings in his logbook. He took reports from the officers on duty there. They kept watch over the breach and
Kristen Britain (Firebrand (Green Rider, #6))
The Implementation of GDPR into law is a sensible and proactive approach to help protect data, systems and remove neglect and possible misuse or data breach of data.  It is unlikely that all EU and UK business will be ready on time, but we do recommend that serious consideration is given to the topic and your approach going forward.
Alistair Dickinson (The Essential Business Guide to GDPR: A business owner’s perspective to understanding & implementing GDPR)
BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.
Amy Davidson
justified the hyperbole. With the ongoing “war” approaching the ten-year mark, the U.S. economy shed a total of 7.9 million jobs in just three years.3 For only the second time since World War II, the official unemployment rate topped 10 percent. The
Andrew J. Bacevich (Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (The American Empire Project))
Misconduct, or non-conforming behaviour, as it is sometimes called, can be tackled in many ways such as counseling, warning, etc. In extreme cases such as, criminal breach of trust, theft, fraud, etc. the employer is also at liberty to initiate action against the employee, if the misconduct of the latter falls within the purview of the penal provisions of the law of the land. However such proceedings generally conducted by the State agencies, are time consuming and call for a high degree of proof. In addition to the above option, the employer also has an option to deal with the erring employee within the terms of employment. In such an eventuality, the employee may be awarded any penalty which may vary from the communication of displeasure, to the severance of the employer-employee relationship i.e. dismissal from service. Disciplinary authorities play a vital role in this context. Efficiency of the disciplinary authorities is an essential pre-requisite for the effective functioning of the reward and punishment function, more specifically the latter half of it.3. There was a time when the employer was virtually free to hire and fire the employees. Over a period of time, this common law notion has gone. Today an employer can inflict punishment on an employee only after following some statutory provisions depending upon the nature of the organisation.Briefly, the various statutory provisions which govern the actions of different types of organisation are as under: (a) Government: Part XIV of the Constitution relates to the terms of employment in respect of persons appointed in connection with the affairs of the State. Any action against the employees of the Union Government and the State Governments should conform to these Constitutional provisions, which confer certain protections on the 1
Anonymous
to go and have a night in a hotel somewhere. I’d have been happy to have them both, even with Pat’s clinginess and Crystal’s present obstreperousness. But Vicky kept putting me off. In fact, we’d almost had words about it – Vicky grumbled that Crystal didn’t want to sleep in her own bed any more, and couldn’t understand why Mummy and Daddy didn’t let her sleep with them, like Auntie Anna had. ‘Does Peter still never get up with the kids in the night?’ I asked, knowing the answer. Vicky snorted. ‘Um…let me think…No. Well, occasionally at weekends. But you know, being a carpenter’s a pretty stressful job…’ She turned and went into a cubicle. ‘You should ask him to help a bit more. Maybe just on alternate nights. You’ve got to do something, if you feel this wretched.’ The sound of Vicky sighing floated over the top of the cubicle door, followed by the sound of the toilet flushing. ‘I’m sure it’ll get better eventually,’ she said, emerging wearily. ‘In about sixteen years’ time.’ I took out my make-up bag and reapplied my lipstick. I knew it wasn’t very charitable of me, but sometimes I couldn’t shake the thought that, apart from on the subject of Peter, Vicky was making a fuss about nothing: her kids were healthy and gorgeous. What else could she possibly ask for? Even if she looked a bit jaded, she didn’t have any stretch marks or cellulite, and her stomach was flatter than mine. ‘Come on, then,’ said Vicky, shouting over the noise of the hand-dryer. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friend, once more.’ By
Louise Voss (Lifesaver)
If any can show just cause why this couple may not be lawfully joined in matrimony, speak now or --- "Reverend Norton halted, looking behind them with raised eyebrows. Before Grace had time to wonder why the minister paused - if someone was, indeed, objecting to their union - the rapid click of toenails on the wooden floor made both of them look back over their shoulders. Frey groaned and made a face. "Gertie!" He released Grace's hand. Who? A brown and black dog trotted up the aisle to them, tail held high. She had soft brown eyes and a thin, dark line down the middle of her forehead that gave her a worried look. She stopped in front of Frey and looked at him, her head cocked as if in expectation. The tips of her ears flopped forward. Seth burst into laughter. "Do you think Gertie's objecting to your marriage?" Obviously aghast at his breach of decorum, Trudy gave Seth an owlish glare. Frey shrugged in apparent chagrin. "I'm sorry. I left her tied up on my porch." She looked from the man to his dog... The dog sniffed her fingers. Seeming to approve, she edged closer. Grace rubbed Gertie's head. "If Reverend Norton doesn't mind," she said to the dog, "I'm fine with you remaining for the rest of the ceremony.
Debra Holland (Grace: Bride of Montana (American Mail-Order Bride, #41))
Clinton’s fundamental agreeableness comes in direct conflict at times with his hypomanic temper. After he impulsively explodes, he immediately feels bad and wants to heal the breach between himself and the person he has just attacked. The contradictory combination of a temper and empathic warmth sometimes leads to humorous situations. Ernie
John D. Gartner (In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography)
major security breach.” “True, but what you may not realize is that this time it’s compromised US spying operations globally. Our operatives are at risk, not only from governments that are not our friends, but also from international criminal elements. Any of them might become aware of you, and your value.” “Wait a minute,” Sarah objected. “What value? We don’t know anything of any value.” “They may not realize that yet. They may think you’ve cracked the pyramid code that people have been trying to decipher for hundreds of years. That may even be why they killed Mark, because he refused to give them the key. Until we know what it is that they think you know, your lives may be in danger.
J.C. Ryan (The 10th Cycle (Rossler Foundation, #1))
Trust is a tricky thing. It is the foundation of every healthy relationship. It is the security that makes intimacy possible. It can be simultaneously strong and yet very fragile. It takes great effort and time to build, but it can be broken quickly. Almost every relationship has encountered difficulties over broken trust. I would even argue that most difficulties in relationships stem directly from a breach of trust. Strong relationships (especially marriages) require strong trust, so here are a few ways to to build it (or rebuild it).
David Willis
He turns around and resumes his pace, saying over his shoulder, “Tell me. All those projects that Jimmy your CISO is pushing. Do they increase the flow of project work through the IT organization?” “No,” I quickly answer, rushing to catch up again. “Do they increase operational stability or decrease the time required to detect and recover from outages or security breaches?” I think a bit longer. “Probably not. A lot of it is just more busywork, and in most cases, the work they’re asking for is risky and actually could cause outages.” “Do these projects increase Brent’s capacity?” I laugh humorlessly. “No, the opposite. The audit issues alone could tie up Brent for the next year.” “And what would doing all of Jimmy’s projects do to WIP levels?” he asks, opening the door
Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
Iran has launched nuclear-tipped missiles at Israel. It’s been reported that some of those that were launched, exploded shortly after being fired, while others have reportedly gone way off target. One missile seems to have accidently nuked the city of Mosul in Iraq, killing thousands of that cities’ citizens. Some of the missiles seemed to have been duds and fell harmlessly to the ground near the borders of Israel, but none of them have breached Israel’s border. We have yet to hear a reaction from the Israeli government, so stay tuned for more updates. We now return to your regularly scheduled program.
Cliff Ball (Times of Trouble: Christian End Times Novel (The End Times Saga Book 2))
However, from the beginning of its existence, God warned Israel against relying on treaties with other nations, instead of relying on Him. (Exodus 23:32) Israel didn’t listen, and always suffered for it. Today is no different. If you had a customer who entered into multiple contracts with you, and over time, breached every single contract, every one, how smart would you be to give consideration, serious consideration, to signing another contract? Your family and friends might recommend a guardianship. However, the appointment of a guardian for an entire nation is not a legal or feasible alternative. There are many indications that Israel may soon enter into another peace treaty.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
Ezekiel Chapters 38 and 39 God reveals to Israel eye-opening details about a future major invasion of Israel, after Israel’s return to the land and re-establishment as a nation. The first end times peace treaty, like all of Israel’s prior peace agreements, will be broken. Ezekiel reveals to us a number of specifics as to how Israel’s first end times peace treaty will be breached. He even lists the identities of the nations that will seek to conquer, kill and destroy Israel.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
What a subject is this for our contemplation! "The same fire," says St. Chrysostom, "which purifies gold, consumes wood; so in the fire of tribulation the just acquire new beauty and perfection, while the wicked, like dry wood, are reduced to ashes." (Hom.14 in Matt.1). St. Cyprian expresses the same thought by another illustration: "As the wind in harvest time scatters the chaff but cleanses the wheat, so the winds of adversity scatter the wicked but purify the just." (De Unitate Eccl.).   The passage of the children of Israel through the Red Sea is still another figure of the same truth. Like protecting walls the waters rose on each side of the people, and gave them a safe passage to the dry land; but as soon as the Egyptian army with its king and chariots had entered the watery breach, the same waves closed upon them and buried them in the sea. In like manner the waters of tribulation are a preservation to the just, while to the wicked they are a tempestuous gulf which sweeps them into the abyss of rage, of blasphemy, and of despair.
Louis of Granada (The Sinner's Guide)
Halloween (known among European pagans as Samhain, pronounced “sa-wen”) is traditionally the day when the dead return to visit the living, similar to the Asian “Wandering Souls” festival mentioned above. It is the day when the gate between the living and the dead is open, a favorite day for evocations of spirits and demons. Candlemas, on the other hand, is the day of “quickening,” when the earth begins to wake from its slumber, a day of promise for the future, of the celebration of fertility, of anticipation for the bounty of the coming year. One could say, therefore, that the first rocket launch on Halloween was an evocation of the daimon of flight, or perhaps in a darker context a breaching of the barrier between this world and the next, an initiatic rending of the veil of the Temple: space being seen as the domain of both the dead and the higher spiritual forces. The actual birth of the American space program on Candlemas is, of course, also an auspicious event, ripe with mythical connotations. It is not the intention of this author to suggest that the selection of these dates was deliberate on the part of von Karman, Parsons, von Braun or the other space engineers. Indeed, by the time of the Explorer I launch in 1958 Parsons himself had already been dead six years. It is the intention, however, to point out these synchronicities as they occur, because they are evidence of deeper, more sinister, forces at work,
Jim Hougan (Sinister Forces—The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Paperback) Book 1))
Aquarius Horoscope 2015 In A Nutshell Aquarians, 2015 will give you mixed results. You may feel some breach within your relations with loved ones. But, don't cry your eyes out, everything happens for some good reason. Your bitter language could be one of its reasons. So, try to be as polite as possible. As per the horoscopes for 2015, you may stay stressed due to the health of a family member. But, nothing to be worried about, time will pass by swiftly. On the other hand, your health looks fine. Horoscopes 2015 foretell that you may stay busy with lawsuits. But don't worry, you will break the back of the beast. As per 2015 predictions, the second half of the year will bring betterment to your love life. Married life will be very blissful. Cupids seem quite happy with you. You will be on cloud nine. 2015 horoscopes say that good improvement at workplace is seen. It is a celebration time. According to the 2015 astrology, income and education will also increase. Looks like you are going to be on the ball this time. Remedy: Donate yellow clothes to a priest.
Punit Pandey (Horoscope 2015 By AstroSage.com: Astrology 2015)
Pike had at least four minutes inside if the breach registered at a top private security firm. The duty monitor would run a system diagnostic to make sure the alarm hadn’t been triggered by a malfunction, then phone the subscriber. If the subscriber could not be reached, the monitor would alert a mobile unit or the police, who would respond only after finishing their current call. Four minutes was the best-case response time, but Pike knew the real-world response times were much longer. Pike
Robert Crais (Taken (Elvis Cole, #15; Joe Pike, #4))
By Thursday the news had leaked out and a group of photographers waited for her outside the hospital. “People thought Diana only came in at the end,” says Angela. “Of course it wasn’t like that at all, we shared it all.” In the early hours of Thursday, August 23 the end came. When Adrian died, Angela went next door to telephone Diana. Before she could speak Diana said: “I’m on my way.” Shortly after she arrived they said the Lord’s Prayer together and then Diana left her friends to be alone for one last time. “I don’t know of anybody else who would have thought of me first,” says Angela. Then the protective side of Diana took over. She made up a bed for her friend, tucked her in and kissed her goodnight. While she was asleep Diana knew that it would be best if Angela joined her family on holiday in France. She packed her suitcase for her and telephoned her husband in Montpellier to tell him that Angela was flying out as soon as she awoke. Then Diana walked upstairs to see the baby ward, the same unit where her own sons were born. She felt that it was important to see life as well as death, to try and balance her profound sense of loss with a feeling of rebirth. In those few months Diana had learned much about herself, reflecting the new start she had made in life. It was all the more satisfying because for once she had not bowed to the royal family’s pressure. She knew that she had left Balmoral without first seeking permission from the Queen and in the last days there was insistence that she return promptly. The family felt that a token visit would have sufficed and seemed uneasy about her display of loyalty and devotion which clearly went far beyond the traditional call of duty. Her husband had never known much regard for her interests and he was less than sympathetic to the amount of time she spent caring for her friend. They failed to appreciate that she had made a commitment to Adrian Ward-Jackson, a commitment she was determined to keep. It mattered not whether he was dying of AIDS, cancer or some other disease, she had given her word to be with him at the end. She was not about to breach his trust. At that critical time she felt that her loyalty to her friends mattered as much as her duty towards the royal family. As she recalled to Angela: “You both need me. It’s a strange feeling being wanted for myself. Why me?” While the Princess was Angela’s guardian angel at Adrian’s funeral, holding her hand throughout the service, it was at his memorial service where she needed her friend’s shoulder to cry on. It didn’t happen. They tried hard to sit together for the service but Buckingham Palace courtiers would not allow it. As the service at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge was a formal occasion, the royal family had to sit in pews on the right, the family and friends of the deceased on the left. In grief, as with so much in Diana’s life, the heavy hand of royal protocol prevented the Princess from fulfilling this very private moment in the way she would have wished. During the service Diana’s grief was apparent as she mourned the man whose road to death had given her such faith in herself. The Princess no longer felt that she had to disguise her true feelings from the world. She could be herself rather than hide behind a mask. Those months nurturing Adrian had reordered her priorities in life. As she wrote to Angela shortly afterwards: “I reached a depth inside which I never imagined was possible. My outlook on life has changed its course and become more positive and balanced.
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
The other factor in regaining trust after it’s been broken is a practical one: a track record. If someone breaks your trust, words are nice; but you then need to see a consistent track record of improved behavior. Only then can you begin trusting that the cheater’s values are now aligned properly and the person really will change. Unfortunately, building a track record for trust takes time—certainly a lot more time than it takes to break trust. And during that trust-building period, things are likely to be pretty shitty. So both people in the relationship must be conscious of the struggle they’re choosing to undertake. I use the example of cheating in a romantic relationship, but this process applies to a breach in any relationship. When trust is destroyed, it can be rebuilt only if the following two steps happen: 1) the trust-breaker admits the true values that caused the breach and owns up to them, and 2) the trust-breaker builds a solid track record of improved behavior over time. Without the first step, there should be no attempt at reconciliation in the first place. Trust is like a china plate. If you break it once, with some care and attention you can put it back together again. But if you break it again, it splits into even more pieces and it takes far longer to piece together again. If you break it more and more times, eventually it shatters to the point where it’s impossible to restore. There are too many broken pieces, and too much dust.
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
The next few moments border on the apocryphal—though Pat told and retold the story quite consistently throughout his life. A stray ball rolled in his direction. As he had so many times in Australia, O’Dea picked up the ball and booted it back toward the players. It flew far over their heads and landed perhaps 75 yards from where he was standing. The players looked at one another and started to shout at the unfamiliar figure. Thinking he had somehow made a breach of etiquette, Pat turned to walk away. But he was quickly intercepted by a short, curly-haired fellow who introduced himself as Phil King, head football coach.
Dave Revsine (The Opening Kickoff: The Tumultuous Birth of a Football Nation)
Sennacherib: I swiftly marched to Babylon which I was intent upon conquering. I blew like the onrush of a hurricane and enveloped the city like a fog. I completely surrounded it and captured it by breaching and scaling the walls. I did not spare his mighty warriors, young or old, but filled the city square with their corpses...I turned over to my men to keep the property of that city, silver, gold, gems, all the moveable goods. My men took hold of the statues of the gods in the city and smashed them. They took possession of the property of the gods. The statues of Adad and Shala, gods of the city Ekallati that Marduk-nadin-ahe, king of Babylonia, had taken to Babylon at the time of Tiglath Pileser I, King of Assyria, I brought out of Babylon after four hundred and eighteen years. I returned them to the city of Ekallati. The city and houses I completely destroyed from foundations to roof and set fire to them. I tore down both inner and outer city walls, temples, temple-towers made of brick and clay - as many as there were - and threw everything into the Arahtu canal. I dug a ditch inside the city and thereby levelled off the earth on its site with water. I destroyed even the outline of its foundations. I flattened it more than any flood could have done. In order that the site of that city and its temples would never be remembered, I devastated it with water so that it became a mere meadow.
D. Brendan Nagle (The Ancient World: Readings in Social and Cultural History (3rd Edition))
The child and the home shall never change, if that child’s mother has any say over the matter. But explanations make truths mundane. The poet seeks to awaken in the listener all that is known yet unspoken. Words to conjure an absence of words. But children will grow up, and time will drive spears through the thickest walls. And sometimes the walls are breached from within.
Steven Erikson (Dust of Dreams (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #9))
Her text went on to suggest the issues with voting machines were somehow connected to human trafficking, a central fear for believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory. It was a striking example of how Q was blending with Stop the Steal. “We could find all of the trafficking rings, we can track all the money in minutes,” the woman continued. “I really wanna be part of this. I am available my kids are all grown I’m ready to put my whole heart and full time exposing this just fraud in Jesus name.” These were the true believers. I am not naming the woman because she’s not a public figure. While I think it’s vital the public knows what people in power did in the leadup to January 6th, I’m not in the business of publicly shaming ordinary American citizens. That said, the woman’s text is worth pointing out because it is indicative of the type of alarming content that was pouring into Meadows’s phone. It was deeply troubling to see such crazed rhetoric reaching a man who was, at the time, White House chief of staff. If all the conspiracy allegations had not already seeped into the White House, they were there now.
Denver Riggleman (The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th)
On November 4, while the votes were still being counted, Rick Perry, Trump’s former secretary of energy, wrote Meadows about his “AGRESSIVE STRATEGY.” “Why can’t the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS […] and just send their own electors to vote,” Perry mused. Perry sent the message to a group chat that included Meadows and two people who were still part of Trump’s cabinet at the time: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and Secretary of Agriculture George Ervin “Sonny” Perdue III. “Interesting,” Carson wrote. Alternate electors were a central element of various plots to overturn Trump’s loss that were cooked up by his allies in the weeks after the election. There were basically five states that mattered in the 2020 presidential race: Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The rest of the results were predictable. It was all coming down to the margin in those swing states. Of course, presidential elections aren’t technically decided in the states. They
Denver Riggleman (The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th)
Antifa is not an organized group. It is an ideology and a set of tactics, namely, violently confronting the right wing. Antifa is short for “anti-fascist.” The name is borrowed from World War II–era German anti-Nazi activism. Here in America, the antifa movement became an increasingly large feature of the political scene after Trump’s election. Alt-right groups like the Proud Boys also saw a surge in membership during this time. The two factions brawled in the streets at protests. They fed off each other. Trump and other Republicans spent the second half of 2020 criticizing violence and vandalism from antifa and Black Lives Matter activists during the civil rights demonstrations that erupted around the country after the police killing of George Floyd. Then January 6th took place.
Denver Riggleman (The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th)
I don’t need a white knight to slay my dragons. I need someone who will stand by me and hand me a new sword each time one breaks.
Vicki Tharp (Breach of Trust (Valley Boys Book 4))
For an enterprise, the digital readiness in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) business environment an accurate, reliable, and timely information flow along with the customer trust, play a fundamental role. Destructive and demoralising, the financial impact of experiencing a data breach continues to increase year over year for businesses. A very complex situation of a data breach / ransomware / malware attack (to name a few cyberthreats) leads to even more complex and challenging reputational damage, making, potentially, a cyber-attack costs ongoing for years. As threat actors are innovating, cybersecurity experts assert their own unique interpretation of trust. The Zero Trust approach therefore is a powerful and promising concept.
Ludmila Morozova-Buss
For the next two hours, he would toy with her, giving her a chance to repent. Whether she did or not made no difference. He fingered the knife in his pocket. The blade was sharp and tonight she would feel it. Her time would run out an hour before sunrise. As with the others, he would weigh down her body with a cement block. Barely alive, she would struggle against death as they all had. The water would fill her lungs. The last thing she would see on this earth would be his eyes, the eyes of her murderer. How long would it take before her family, her friends reported her missing? A day, possibly two? Surely no longer. Then the search would begin. He would watch the news reports, recording them all on his DVR. In a week or two, some tourist or jogger would spot a floater in the Potomac. All evidence washed away, she would be just another woman executed by the D.C. Killer. He would add her disc to his collection. He whiled away the time thinking about his first kill. She had lounged in her bath, thinking she was alone. When he entered the bathroom, she smiled. The expression on his face made her smile falter. He came at her, grasping her by the shoulders. He pushed her down, holding her struggling body under. Her eyes wide with terror, she tried to plead with her murderer, to ask her husband “Why?” He sank her body in the Potomac, the first victim of the D.C. Killer. The door opened. Shannon Miller stood in the breach, surveying the parking lot. Nervous, she started to go back inside, then changed her mind. She peered toward him, her eyes straining to penetrate the mist and gloom. He was a shadow, invisible to her. Seeing no threat, she stepped out, locked the door and hurried across the deserted lot to her car, a red Toyota with more rust than red. The tap-tap of her high heels pulsated on the cracked asphalt. The beat of her shoes matched the throb of his heart. He could hear her heavy, fearful breathing. He smiled. The moon scurried behind the clouds as if hiding its face in horror. He was an avenger, a messenger of God. His mission was to rid the nation's capital of immoral women. Fearing him, prostitutes now walked the streets in pairs. Even in their terror, they still pursued their wicked trade. At times he saw them huddled in groups of three or four. They reminded him of children in a thunderstorm. Like a spirit, he crept in her direction. The only light was cast by the Miller Lite sign and a distant street lamp. The light in the parking lot had burned out weeks ago, throwing it into darkness. He stalked her as a lion does its prey. He moved slowly, silently, low to the ground, keeping the car between them. His dark running suit blended with the night. He was the Dark Angel, the Angel of Death. In another life, he had passed over Egypt, killing the firstborn of those condemned by God. Her eyes darted in every direction, still she didn't see him. He was invisible. Her hands shook as she tried to get the key in the door. The 11 o'clock news reported that another one had been found. If he stuck with his pattern, the D.C. Killer would strike again tonight. By morning a woman would be dead. She prayed it wouldn’t be her. She fumbled, dropping the key ring. She stooped to pick it up, her head turning in every direction, her ears alert to every sound. Now, without seeing him, she sensed him. She lowered her eyes, trying again, successfully this time. She turned the key. There was a click. She sighed, unaware that she had been holding her breath. The dome light flashed as she opened the door. He was on her in an instant. Their bodies slammed against the door. The light blinked out. He held her in an iron grip with one hand over her mouth and the blade poking into her
Darrell Case
A rise in sea level is not like the filling of your bathtub. If it were, accommodation would be easier and could be accomplished in slow steps that might give people the time to figure out the best way to cope. No, while a barely noticeable rise in water levels continues in the background, the great damage that is done comes more suddenly, when storms whip up waves that magnify high tides, engulfing houses and encampments, eroding cliffs, breaching sandbars, and pushing salt water up rivers and into groundwater.
Mary Soderstrom (Against the Seas: Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters)
Her host subsequently admitted that his wife had been a weekly guest for some time, and he protested that it did not breach the letter of the Savage Club’s rules, for they only said that a guest must behave like a gentleman.
Seth Alexander Thevoz (Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs)
desert kingdom. Given a less fraught time, Dragon decided, he would have loved to bring his easel in here and set up for a long, satisfying session of painting. The fluted arches, delicate frescoes and screens, and gold-leaf decorated treasure chests certainly created a most royal space. As Azania spoke, he returned his attention to her. “Brother, I wish to congratulate you upon your ascension to the throne of T’nagru, despite the grief and difficulty our kingdom faces at this time.” He inclined his head, weighted down with the great crown – it looked terribly uncomfortable, Dragon decided. A statement regarding the weighty nature of leadership. Everyone knew that this Skartun siege had only been a precursor to a much greater invasion later in the season. One Jabiz out of thirty had tested their mettle, and breached the outer gates of the citadel with a monstrous Bloodworm which still lay on the sand outside the gates. Did flesh rot in such a waterless desert climate? Or would it simply shrivel? Unexpected thirst tickled his gravelly throat. He coughed aside, the sound echoing loudly despite the large crowd gathered for the King’s coronation event. The Princess said, “I am sorry that I cannot make the formal genuflections, but my
Marc Secchia (I am Dragon (Dragon Fires Rising #2))
Even the old rule of matrilocal residence may have been honored in the breach as often as not by this time. The able man could arrange a suitable adoption for himself, thus gaining access to traditional sachemship.
Dean R. Snow (The Iroquois)
is essentially to deny agency, to say we would all lie, cheat, and steal, all of the time, if only we knew for sure we would get away with it. Rather, we restrain from theft, destruction, and breach of contract because we respect the agency of others.
Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Is Venice: Essays on the Past and Future of Capitalism)
When trust is destroyed, it can be rebuilt only if the following two steps happen: 1) the trust-breaker admits the true values that caused the breach and owns up to them, and 2) the trust-breaker builds a solid track record of improved behavior over time. Without the first step, there should be no attempt at reconciliation in the first place.
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
After the news came that their troops had surrendered, an Urdu newspaper in Lahore wrote that ‘today the entire nation weeps tears of blood . . . Today the Indian Army has entered Dacca. Today for the first time in 1,000 years Hindus have won a victory over Muslims . . . Today we are prostrate with dejection.’ Within days, however, the Urdu press was seeking consolation from the lessons of history. While the defeat was certainly ‘a breach in the fortress of Islam’, even the great Muhammad of Ghori had lost his first war in the subcontinent. But as another Lahore newspaper reminded its readers, Ghori had come back ‘with renewed determination to unfurl the banner of Islam over the Kafir land of India’.54
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: A History (3rd Edition, Revised and Updated))
I peeked out from under the tarp to see a gray whale breaching. It cut through the haze and spiraled upward, propelling its entire body through the air right next to the tiny rowboat. It was as big as a yellow school bus and crusted over with a thick layer of barnacles. I was intensely nervous about its size. The only time I'd ever seen a whale was in an aquarium in a Florida resort. This one seemed much larger. And infinitely freer. It was the first time in my life I understood how scary and dangerous things that are free really are.
Margot Berwin (Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire)
Davies takes the view that if, on the one hand, this state is a return to an earlier “frozen experience” (Winnicott, 1954a, p. 86 in this book), on the other hand, it may be an entirely new experience for the patient who has taken the risk of letting himself be known in this narcissistically vulnerable state. Where primary process thinking dominates, the potential for change may be greater, since defences are breached and access to unconscious material may be enhanced. Davies suggests that the regressed state is ruptured by the recog- nition of dependence within the analysis: this can be a life or death moment, as hate finds expression when the patient emerges from the regression. Destructiveness is definitively present as the subject recognizes the presence of a discrete other, the “otherness” of the other (p. 92)
Rosine J. Perelberg (Time and Memory (The Psychoanalytic Ideas Series))
It’s one of the great privileges of adulthood to know that there’s nothing commonplace in watching a minke whale breaching a few metres from your boat,
Katherine May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times)