Chains Novel Quotes

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

You must realize, Dani, that you cannot go back to your time, no matter if we save your friends or not.

Anthropology is the science of human beings,” she said.

They enjoyed ham and butter sandwiches for lunch and washed them down with carbonated iced tea.

Dani didn’t recognize the song, but the unmistakable sound of the band that no one had sounded like before or since was in the air.

Well, thank you, Charles. Can I have another one of those for Aideen?

I sincerely want to use her knowledge to help me with my dissertation.

she seemed comforted by the fact that their ordeal might be coming to an end,

O-I-M. It stands for Organic Intelligent Material.” “Does that mean it’s alive?” “It is definitely alive. And because we infuse it with AI, it’s an intelligent living being. And we treat it as such.

Assemble the links Piece by piece. Then travel through time And earn your release.

Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends.   You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? —Thus Spake Zarathustra

No one loves anything they're miserably chained to.

Matt was almost completely naked. A tattered loincloth and an ugly chain with a yellow diamond were his only apparel.

He was desire, and I was his prisoner, chained up by his kisses. Submissive to his touch.

Then she saw the animal, a German Shepherd, from the looks of him at this remove. He probably belonged on one of the farms out here, where owners don’t feel obligated to pen or chain their animals. Suddenly she saw he was coming without surcease directly toward her. He was still a long way off, but she was now terrified.

I thought about how I used to watch my mother sleep sometimes, how innocent she looked with her hands tucked under the pillow. In those moments, I saw her as a little girl, and I felt that nothing was her fault—just a chain of fears and feelings passed down from generation to generation. In those moments I thought, You can show her how to love you better by being loving to her. But it was easier to be loving when the person was asleep.

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that the mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.

Then Pasquale himself began to be silent, defeated by Lila’s capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides.

There’s a rattle of chains and a clatter from the donkeyengine where a tall man in blue overalls stands at a lever in the middle of a cloud of steam that wraps round your face like a wet towel.

This planet was a marketplace where evil tugged murderously at its chains. Its spies were everywhere. At windy corners where young girls with knowing children’s faces were selling flowers and matches, on the operating tables at the hospitals, in the slums, at railway stations, under viaducts.

A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the alternative scenerios explored in a detective novel.

When strangers on a train or a plane ask what I do for a living, I say, "I kill people." This response makes for a short conversation. No eye contact and no sudden movement from my seat-mate. Only peace and quiet. Rare is the fellow passenger who asks why I do it. I suppose I got tired hanging out in a book all day waiting for a story to begin. I write the kind of novels I want to read. And why the theme of solving murders? Violent death is larger than life and it's the great equalizer. By law, every victim is entitled to a paladin and a chase, else life would be cheapened. And the real reason I do this? My brain is simply bent this way. There is nothing else I would rather do. This neatly chains into my theory of the writing life. If you scratch an artist, under the skin you will find a bum who cannot hold down a real job. Conversely, if you scratch a bum... but I have never done that. The heart of my theory has puritan roots: if you love what you do, you cannot call it honest work.

I appreciate the scientific rigor with which you’ve approached this project, Anna,” said Christopher, who had gotten jam on his sleeve. “Though I don’t think I could manage to collect that many names and also pursue science. Much too time-consuming.” Anna laughed. “How many names would you want to collect, then?” Christopher tilted his head, a brief frown of concentration crossing his face, and did not reply. “I would only want one,” said Thomas. Cordelia thought of the delicate tracery of the compass rose on Thomas’s arm, and wondered if he had any special person in mind. “Too late for me to only have one,” declared Matthew airily. “At least I can hope for several names in a carefully but enthusiastically selected list.” “Nobody’s ever tried to seduce me at all,” Lucie announced in a brooding fashion. “There’s no need to look at me like that, James. I wouldn’t say yes, but I could immortalize the experience in my novel.” “It would be a very short novel, before we got hold of the blackguard and killed him,” said James. There was a chorus of laughter and argument. The afternoon sun was sinking in the sky, its rays catching the jeweled hilts of the knives in Anna’s mantelpiece. They cast shimmering rainbow patterns on the gold-and-green walls. The light illuminated Anna’s shabby-bright flat, making something in Cordelia’s heart ache. It was such a homey place, in a way that her big cold house in Kensington was not. “What about you, Cordelia?” said Lucie. “One,” said Cordelia. “That’s everyone’s dream, isn’t it, really? Instead of many who give you little pieces of themselves—one who gives you everything.” Anna laughed. “Searching for the one is what leads to all the misery in this world,” she said. “Searching for many is what leads to all the fun.

Four: Too many wasteful ‘synchronization' meetings interrupted the actual work.

There is a direct chain of events between excessive desires in the present and widespread pain in the future

definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was

Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely "usual" people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility. To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible--and perhaps uninteresting as well.

Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom's chain; Again from its brumal sleep Wakens the ferine strain.

A powerful process automatically takes care of progress, productivity and profits.

Their history is a long chain of disappearances, erasures and reconstructions. There are so many reasons not to exist here, or not to exist completely.

JIMIN STOP LOOKING AT YOURSELF. SUGA YOU DON'T NEED THAT MANY GOLD CHAINS. J-HOPE YOU’RE KNOCKING PEOPLE OUT SHAKING YOUR BUTT. GOOD BOY JUNGKOOK CARRY ON." Jin shouted to everyone. "PPALI PPALI COME ON HYUNG IS OUTSIDE!

A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now. I find, for example, in Aristotle some thing about the spawning, etc., of the pout and perch, because I know something about it already and have my attention aroused; but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes.

The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one’s own errors impoverish and cripple one’s children? Such is the endless chain of the generations?

Always that damned discipline that you wear like chain mail ... You would have got on well with Bernard de Clairvaux and his gang of Knights Templar. If you'd been captured by Saladin, I'm sure you'd rather have had your throat cut than renounce your faith. But not from devotion, from pride.

In the forensics novels the contents of a victim’s pockets on the night of her death Say Something about her character. My Ford’s Theatre ticket stub and Jimmy Carter key chain say that I am the corniest, goody-goody person in town. Luckily, I survived the evening unscathed so no one will ever find out about that losery Jimmy Carter key chain.

Not to waste the spring I threw down everything, And ran into the open world To sing what I could sing... To dance what I could dance! And join with everyone! I wandered with a reckless heart beneath the newborn sun. First stepping through the blushing dawn, I crossed beneath a garden bower, counting every hermit thrush, counting every hour. When morning's light was ripe at last, I stumbled on with reckless feet; and found two nymphs engaged in play, approaching them stirred no retreat. With naked skin, their weaving hands, in form akin to Calliope's maids, shook winter currents from their hair to weave within them vernal braids. I grabbed the first, who seemed the stronger by her soft and dewy leg, and swore blind eyes, Lest I find I, before Diana, a hunted stag. But the nymphs they laughed, and shook their heads. and begged I drop beseeching hands. For one was no goddess, the other no huntress, merely two girls at play in the early day. "Please come to us, with unblinded eyes, and raise your ready lips. We will wash your mouth with watery sighs, weave you springtime with our fingertips." So the nymphs they spoke, we kissed and laid, by noontime's hour, our love was made, Like braided chains of crocus stems, We lay entwined, I laid with them, Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea, Our bodies draping wearily. We slept, I slept so lucidly, with hopes to stay this memory. I woke in dusty afternoon, Alone, the nymphs had left too soon, I searched where perched upon my knees Heard only larks' songs in the trees. "Be you, the larks, my far-flung maids? With lilac feet and branchlike braids... Who sing sweet odes to my elation, in your larking exaltation!" With these, my clumsy, carefree words, The birds they stirred and flew away, "Be I, poor Actaeon," I cried, "Be dead… Before they, like Hippodamia, be gone astray!" Yet these words, too late, remained unheard, By lark, that parting, morning bird. I looked upon its parting flight, and smelled the coming of the night; desirous, I gazed upon its jaunt, as Leander gazes Hellespont. Now the hour was ripe and dark, sensuous memories of sunlight past, I stood alone in garden bowers and asked the value of my hours. Time was spent or time was tossed, Life was loved and life was lost. I kissed the flesh of tender girls, I heard the songs of vernal birds. I gazed upon the blushing light, aware of day before the night. So let me ask and hear a thought: Did I live the spring I’d sought? It's true in joy, I walked along, took part in dance, and sang the song. and never tried to bind an hour to my borrowed garden bower; nor did I once entreat a day to slumber at my feet. Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song, like morning birds they pass along, o'er crests of trees, to none belong; o'er crests of trees of drying dew, their larking flight, my hands, eschew Thus I'll say it once and true… From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

Lila had remained there, chained in a glaring way to that world, from which she imagined she had taken the best.

Rutherford’s and Soddy’s discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs.

She said she wouldn't be here tonight. She wanted to stay in. Her mouth is hot, her hands all knowing. I'm too far gone to resist. My Secret Princess. Did she lie and disguise herself to hide to plain sight? To find herself a stranger, to spend tonight with no one? She could only see one of my eyes and nothing else of my face. A shoddy thrown together costume became my new identity, and with it, this pirate stole the princess.

O Satan! Mephisto! Judas! O Benaiah! O evil eyes that glint beneath the lights! O clink of silver! O darkness, O death, O hell! Sheathed knives and chained wallets: lustful, grabbing, cheating, killing, hating, laughing in the lights . . .

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name... Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people. When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely of their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or, better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own-the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence.

Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I’m able to say.

Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She'd always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration. All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family. She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she'd first suspected that her parents weren't all that interested in her. Then she'd kept going, plowing through children's books with their predictable anthropomorphism, heading eventually into the strange and beautiful formality of the nineteenth century, and pushing backward and forward into histories of bloody wars, into discussions of God and godlessness. What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long, unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she would able to read there, because this was college, and reading was what you did.

There is a custom in the Ghost Realm where if a ghost has a special someone, they entrust their ashes to that person." "I didn't know the Ghost Realm had such a romantic practice." "They do." "But, not many dare practice it." "It certainly is painful to think about, to have given everything for love and lose everything in return." "What's there to be afraid of? If it were me, I'd have no regrets giving away my ashes. Who cares if they want me to disintegrate or just scatter the ashes for fun!" ................................................................................... And dangling from the chain, there was a crystal-clear ring.

Nikolai did not want to be rescued from that special house and restored to the brilliancy of the Romanov throne, of this I am absolutely certain. If so many of his people felt locked in the chains of poverty, then he felt entrapped by the riches of the dynasty, which is to say that peasant and Tsar alike were liberated by the revolution.

They were pretending to be a mother and father with their baby, but it wasn’t peaceful: they were pretending to have a fight. I stopped. Dede instructed Mirko: You have to hit me, understand? The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.

Look, I’m a chain-smoking drunk. I’m annoying. I talk too much. I have a shitty temper. At best, I can pretend to be tender and considerate for about three days before I blow my cover. I’m great at wasting money, and I’m no help at all on the everyday-life front, but I’m great at causing trouble. My own mother stopped being able to cope with me and kicked me out ages ago.

It’s probably not that brilliant of a revelation. It’s just part of growing up, I guess—realizing that the stuff you were laser-focused on was just a tiny shard of an infinite universe, and quite possibly the tiniest and least important shard. And you start thinking that maybe you should chain your soul to something bigger, something that’s outside the universe. So you start looking.

the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that mind, like the author's, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do.

I think she’ll like me,” I said, concerned that my own mother wouldn’t like me. My fear exposed the unspoken shame of all families: if you didn’t know the people you were related to, would you befriend them? In the days when families hunted and gathered, this wouldn’t be a question worth pondering, but once butchering a mammoth stopped being a household chore, we began to suspect families are chain gangs held together by manacles of DNA.

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the author's, begins to create.

...that the true protagonist of an sci-fi story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the author's, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create -- and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.

She was a woman who liked to be busy. If she needed something, she picked up the telephone and, link by link, put together the chain that led to her goal. She knew how to ask in such a way that saying no was impossible. And she crossed ideological borders confidently, she respected no hierarchies, she tracked down cleaning women, bureaucrats, industrialists, intellectuals, ministers, and she addressed all with cordial detachment, as if the favor she was about to ask she was in fact already doing for them. Amid

we can picture history, not in terms of chains, but rather in terms of cascading waves unfolding in time, producing new information, new options-"miracles," if you wish. This new information, whether it be a novel arrangement in the 1)NA molecule to produce a new species or a novel arrangement of language to produce a new idea, is what ultimately rules. Meat and hones, cathedrals, species, the tread of mighty armies, all are subsumed in rhythm, and a rearrangement of vocal sounds or pen scratches on paper can bring an empire down.

The Ranatonga on a level keel, and spilling the wind from her sails, came round in a great curve on the dazzling water, her great shadow following her across the coral gardens of the lagoon floor. Then the rumble of the anchor chain echoed and passed away in the woods, and ship and shadow swung slowly to the tide and came to rest. To port lay the reef booming to the blue and to starboard the island beach of white coral sand, answering the reef with a thudding song, whilst north and south the two arms of the lagoon, curving, lost themselves beyond capes where the banyans and palms trooped to the very water.

Deep in the minds of most energetic persons lies some strong desire, some strong ambition, or some resolute hope, which unconsciously moulds, or, at least, influences their every act. No matter what their circumstances in life may be, or how much they may yield to those circumstances for a time, the one idea remains ever the same. This is, in fact, one of the secrets of how individual force of character comes out at times. The great idea, whatever it may be, sits enthroned in the mind, and round it gather subordinate wishes and resolves, as the feudal nobles round the King, and so goes on the chain down the whole gamut of man’s nature from the taming or suppression of his wildest passions down to the commonplace routine of his daily life. And yet we wonder at times to see, when occasion offers, with what astonishing rapidity certain individuals assert themselves, and how, when a strange circumstance arises, some new individual arises along with it, as though the man and the hour were predestined for each other. We need not wonder if we will but think that all along the man was ready, girt in his armour, resolved in his cause, and merely awaiting, although, perhaps, he knew it not, the opportunity to manifest himself.

Forgive me,' Poe repeated earnestly. I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more than one. 'I want you to have this,' he said, fishing a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He took a step toward me. I stood my ground. He closed the distance between us, the timepiece in his hand. 'It belonged to my father, David Poe--not John Allan, who fostered me but would not adopt me. My real father was David Poe, Jr., the actor. It's said that he abandoned my mother and me. It's a lie. He died--too young: He was only twenty-seven.' I accepted his gift. It felt substantial in my hand. In spite of myself, I was pleased to have it.

...all the little dos and don'ts, the petty prejudices and snobberies, the silly sentimentalities and religious hypocrisies that made up the veneer of what so many of Forster's contemporaries considered civilization. As Forster saw it, these little things blinded people to the values of the good life. They were distractions which stood between mankind and the liberty of spirit which is one essential to any real happiness. And they blocked human communication, the basis of mutual understanding, which is the other. "Only connect" was Forster's famed motto. While we are chained to shibboleths, we are still children. We are not serious, we play with life.

He called it a proteinaceous infectious particle, or prion. Prusiner’s paper fared well in peer review, but the editors of Science hesitated for months before publishing it, afraid of a backlash. The idea was outlandish—​but it was also right. Prusiner received a Nobel Prize for his heresy in 1997. Further work by Prusiner and others revealed that prions behave something like the secret weapon from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut imagined a form of water called ice-nine, a “super-crystal” that froze at room temperature and turned any normal water it touched into itself. A single crystal would set off a chain reaction, causing the oceans to ice over, ending all life on Earth.

Everywhere I saw much vice and little virtue; everywhere I found the vanity, envy, avarice, and intemperance that enslaved the weak to the whims of the strong; everywhere I could divide man into two classes, to be pitied equally. In one, the rich man was a slave to his pleasures; in the other, the poor man a victim of fate—yet I never perceived in one the urge to do better nor in the other the possibility of becoming better, as if both cultivated their common unhappiness and sought only to add shackles to shackles. The wealthiest among them invariably tightened his chains by doubling his desires while the poorest, insulted and mistrusted by the other, received not the slightest encouragement necessary to bear his burden.

And now?[...]The printed word? The book trade, that old carcass tossed here and there by its ravenous jackals? Greedy authors, greedy agents, brainless book chains with their Vivaldi-riddled espresso bars, publishers owned by metallurgy conglomerates[...]And meanwhile language, the human languages we all must use, no longer degraded by the barking murderous coinages of Goebbels and the numskull doublespeak of bureaucratic Communism, is becoming the mellifluous happy-talk of Microsoft and Honda, corporate conspiracies that would turn the world into one big pinball game for child-brained consumers. Is the gorgeous, fork-tongued, edgy English of Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, of Charles Dickens and Saul Bellow becoming the binary code for a gray-suited empire directed by men walking along the streets of Manhattan and Hong Kong jabbering into cell phones?

I telephoned Adele. I did it with some embarrassment, which I overcame by reminding myself of all the times I had seen her at work, for my book, in the search for the apartment in Florence. She was a woman who liked to be busy. If she needed something, she picked up the telephone and, link by link, put together the chain that led to her goal. She knew how to ask in such a way that saying no was impossible. And she crossed ideological borders confidently, she respected no hierarchies, she tracked down cleaning women, bureaucrats, industrialists, intellectuals, ministers, and she addressed all with cordial detachment, as if the favor she was about to ask she was in fact already doing for them. Amid a thousand awkward apologies for disturbing her, I told Adele in detail about my friend, and she became curious, interested, angry. At the end she said: "Let me think.

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.

This meant that I went from being the person who responded to everyone all the time, to being a person who doesn’t respond to hardly anyone, at all. At first, it was hard. My text inbox went from typically ten unread messages to over four hundred. I would read letters from readers, and instead of responding with a novel-length letter, I began saving them to a folder and sending out energetic blessings instead. If an email landed in my inbox, I would let it sit sometimes for up to seven days before even opening it. I got to things when I got to things. At first, some people were super annoyed, but after a few years of this practice, people came to understand I don’t respond to things immediately, and sometimes I don’t respond at all. To me, this is the only sane way to live. I’m not chained to my phone or to other people’s expectations of responsiveness. I don’t prove my love by texting back in two minutes.

I regret that almost all novels ever written are much too obedient to the rules of unity of action. What I mean to say is that at their core is one single chain of causally related acts and events. These novels are like a narrow street along which someone drives his characters with a whip. Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded is concentrated. The novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw… Do you think that everything that is not a mad chase after a final resolution is a bore? As you eat this wonderful duck are you bored? Are you rushing towards a goal? On the contrary, you want the duck to enter into a slowly as possible and you never want its taste to end. A novel shouldn’t be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses.

If You Could Read My Mind" If you could read my mind, love What a tale my thoughts could tell Just like an old-time movie 'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well In a castle dark or a fortress strong With chains upon my feet You know that ghost is me And I will never be set free As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see If I could read your mind, love What a tale your thoughts could tell Just like a paperback novel The kind the drugstores sell When you reach the part where the heartaches come The hero would be me But heroes often fail And you won't read that book again Because the ending's just too hard to take I'd walk away like a movie star Who gets burned in a three-way script Enter number two A movie queen to play the scene Of bringing all the good things out in me But for now love, let's be real I never thought I could act this way And I've got to say that I just don't get it I don't know where we went wrong But the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back If you could read my mind, love What a tale my thoughts could tell Just like an old-time movie 'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well In a castle dark or a fortress strong With chains upon my feet But stories always end And if you read between the lines You'll know that I'm just tryin' to understand The feelings that you lack I never thought I could feel this way And I've got to say that I just don't get it I don't know where we went wrong But the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back Gordon Lightfoot, Sit Down Young Stranger / If You Could Read My Mind (1970)

In my introduction to Warriors, the first of our crossgenre anthologies, I talked about growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, in the 1950s, a city without a single bookstore. I bought all my reading material at newsstands and the corner “candy shops,” from wire spinner racks. The paperbacks on those spinner racks were not segregated by genre. Everything was jammed in together, a copy of this, two copies of that. You might find The Brothers Karamazov sandwiched between a nurse novel and the latest Mike Hammer yarn from Mickey Spillane. Dorothy Parker and Dorothy Sayers shared rack space with Ralph Ellison and J. D. Salinger. Max Brand rubbed up against Barbara Cartland. A. E. van Vogt, P. G. Wodehouse, and H. P. Lovecraft were crammed in with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mysteries, Westerns, gothics, ghost stories, classics of English literature, the latest contemporary “literary” novels, and, of course, SF and fantasy and horror—you could find it all on that spinner rack, and ten thousand others like it. I liked it that way. I still do. But in the decades since (too many decades, I fear), publishing has changed, chain bookstores have multiplied, the genre barriers have hardened. I think that’s a pity. Books should broaden us, take us to places we have never been and show us things we’ve never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to a single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller. It seemed to me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.

New trout, having never seen rain on the river, rise eagerly to ripples on the Mink. Some windows close against the moist and some open for the music. Rain slips and slides along hawsers and chains and ropes and cables and gladdens the cells of mosses and weighs down the wings of moths. It maketh the willow shiver its fingers and thrums on doors of dens in the fens. It falls on hats and cats and trucks and ducks and cars and bars and clover and plover. It grayeth the sand on the beach and fills thousands of flowers to the brim. It thrills worms and depresses damselflies. Slides down every window rilling and murmuring. Wakes the ancient mud and mutter of the swamp, which has been cracked and hard for months. Falls gently on leeks and creeks and bills and rills and the last shriveled blackberries like tiny dried purple brains on the bristles of bushes. On the young bear trundling through a copse of oaks in the woods snorffling up acorns. On ferns and fawns, cubs and kits, sheds and redds. On salmon as long as your arm thrashing and roiling in the river. On roof and hoof, doe and hoe, fox and fence, duck and muck. On a slight man in a yellow slicker crouched by the river with his recording equipment all covered against the rain with plastic wrap from the grocery store and after he figures out how to get the plastic from making crinkling sounds when he turns the machine on he settles himself in a little bed of ferns and says to the crow huddled patiently in rain, okay, now, here we go, Oral History Project, what the rain says to the river as the wet season opens, project number …something or other … where’s the fecking start button? …I can’t see anything … can you see a green light? yes? is it on? damn my eyes … okay! there it is! it’s working! rain and the river! here we go!

DEONTOLOGY AND CONCEQUENTIALISM, A NOVEL APPROACH: Consequentialism and Deontology (Deontological Ethics) are two contrasting categories of Normative Ethics, the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental principles that determine the morality of human actions (or non-actions). Their supposed difference is that while Consequentialism determines if an action is morally right or wrong by examining its consequences, Deontology focuses on the action itself, regardless of its consequences. To the hypothetical question “Should I do this man a little injustice, if by this I could save the whole humanity from torture and demise?”, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a pure deontologist (absolutist) answers: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus” (Do justice even if the whole world would perish). Superficially, it seems that a decent deontologist don’t care about consequences whatsoever. His/her one and only duty is to invariably obey to pre-existing, universal moral rules without exceptions: “do not kill”, “do not lie”, “do not use another human as a means to an end”, and so on. At this point I would like to present my thesis on this subject. The central idea here is that deontological ethics only appears to be indifferent to the consequences of an action. In fact, it is only these very consequences that determine what our moral rules and ethical duties should be. For example, the moral law “do not kill”, has its origin to the dire consequences that the killing of another human being brings about; for the victim (death), the perpetrator (often imprisonment or death) and for the whole humanity (collapse of society and civilization). Let us discuss the well-worn thought experiment of the mad axeman asking a mother where their young children are, so he can kill them. We suppose that the mother knows with 100% certainty that she can mislead him by lying and she can save her children from certain death (once again: supposing that she surely knows that she can save her children ONLY by lying, not by telling the truth or by avoiding to answer). In this thought experiment the hard deontologist would insist that it is immoral to lie, even if that would lead to horrible consequences. But, I assert that this deontological inflexibility is not only inhuman and unethical, it is also outrightly hypocritical. Because if the mother knows that their children are going to be killed if she tells the truth (or does not answer) and they are going to be saved if she tells a harmless lie, then by telling the truth she disobeys the moral law “do not kill/do not cause the death of an innocent”, which is much worse than the moral rule “do not lie”. The fact that she does not kill her children with her own hands is completely irrelevant. She could have saved them without harming another human, yet she chose not to. So the absolutist deontologist chooses actively to disobey a much more important moral law, only because she is not the immediate cause, but a cause via a medium (the crazy axeman in this particular thought experiment). So here are the two important conclusions: Firstly, Deontology in normative ethics is in reality a “masked consequentialism”, because the origin of a moral law is to be found in its consequences e.g. stealing is generally morally wrong, because by stealing, someone is deprived of his property that may be crucial for his survival or prosperity. Thus, the Deontology–Consequentialism dichotomy is a false one. And secondly, the fact that we are not the immediate “vessel” by which a moral rule is broken, but we nevertheless create or sustain a “chain of events” that will almost certainly lead to the breaking of a moral law, does surely not absolve us and does not give us the right to choose the worst outcome. Mister Immanuel Kant would avoid doing an innocent man an injustice, yet he would choose to lead billions of innocent people to agonizing death.

Mona sat watching them, two weird figures in the uncertain light. as they wrestled with the reluctant charcoal in the censer. Then Jelkes rose upright and whirled the thing on its yard-long clashing chains round and round his head. clouds of smoke and showers of sparks flying in every direction; his enormous shadow stretched far across the vaulting of the roof. grotesque and demoniac, the cloak of his ulster flapping like the wings of a bat. Hugh, his face invisible in the shadow of his cowl, stood silently watching him. Mona clutched the arms of her chair, her heart beating in her throat and nearly suffocating her. Jelkes and Hugh, tall men in any case, looked enormous in the uncertain light. Hugh was in very deed the renegade monk returned from the tomb; Jelkes a being of another order of creation altogether.

Who, me? He said it like I was a detective who always ran into murders wherever she went, or an anime protagonist who’s always stirring up chains of battles with powerful baddies. Nah, I was just your average fifteen-year-old girl in a bear onesie who’d been summoned to this other world by a god. The only trouble I’d stirred up was the tunnel to Mileela and the 10,000 monsters and the stuff at Misa’s birthday party when I’d gone to beat the crap out of people! Which, uh…hmm. Okay, considering how little time I’d actually been here, when you think about it, maybe that did count for a lot of incidents. Now I just felt guilty.

Now she glanced at the piles of books and papers on her desk. There are no chains, she thought, except those we create for ourselves. That, of course, was not entirely true: there were plenty of chains, real or imaginary, that people created for others--or that desks created, she thought...

If time was a dimension wholly within the boundaries of material creation, and if God was beyond time, then he could, if he so wished, accept the prayer of a man who lived at the end of the second millennium and apply it to the needs of those who had gone before. Were not the death and Resurrection of Christ still active and effective, not simply as a linear chain of cause and effect, but as a living thing whose generative power is undiminished? The Mass itself was a mysterious suspension of time, a reaching through impossible barriers into the eternal Present, a moment of union with the Sacrifice on the Cross of Calvary. History, therefore, was a limited dimension, a compression of an unspeakably vast and beautiful dance into a solid icon, an incarnate Logos, a terrarium of fertile gardens in the cup of a Hand. The metaphors mixed and agitated in his mind, each reflecting a facet of the light of understanding, none of them complete, none of them a summation of the entire problem.

Hull’s reaction to the intercept was concern, but the cryptologists and the ranking military officers all the way up the chain of command dismissed his worries.

Sometimes I think we only recollect what we have remembered before. What we recall is having recalled something already, so our strongest and truest memories come from a chain of often recalled things, and in that chain, over the years, events get adjusted and sorted around and stretched to fit the way we see things along the way.

Kundalini is a primitive spirit, a creative force that typically resides in a dormant state within our bodies. We realize our innate power and completeness upon awakening. We know there is everything within us that we need to be happy and fulfilled. Kundalini is not a physical reality but a perceptible reality. Once we have been awakened, we are shedding our old tendencies, and negativity like a snake sheds off its old skin. The kundalini is said to empower us with Shakti — that Divine Mother's primordial energy. Charged with this feminine creative force, we get filled with the vigor, enthusiasm, willpower, and self-confidence that we need to shake off negative memories and emotions hidden deep within our subconscious mind. Our mind is getting dormant. Issues and issues that had once held our focus now seem insignificant. Such a mind-state automatically produces intuitive wisdom.  Released from the endless chain of uncertainty and misunderstanding, insight is our guardian and guide.  The strength of discernment is unfailing. The reason kundalini awakening is such a remarkable aspect of spiritual awakening is that it is not based on complex theological arguments or religious norms that are culturally defined. Instead, Kundalini concentrates on the divine's immediate, ultimate experience within us. And regardless of your particular religious background and values, we can all use kundalini yoga to assist in our spiritual evolution. Most ancient myths allude to the meaning of kundalini. Tiresias narrative is a prime example. If Tiresias–the ancient Greek seer discovered two copulating snakes, he would stick his staff between them to distinguish them. He was immediately turned into a woman and remained like that for seven years until he was able to repeat his action and turn back into a male. In this novel, the force of change, powerful enough to completely reverse both male and female physical polarities, emerges from the fusion of the two serpents, passed on by the ring. Tiresias staff was later passed on to Hermes along with serpents. Several medical organizations use the ancient Greek icon of Hermes, the Greek god and messenger of all gods, called “Karykeion.” In occult Hermetic philosophy, Hermes Caduceus represents the masculine's potential as a central phallic rod surrounded by two coupling serpents ' writhing, woven Shakti energies. The rod also represents the spine (sushumna), while the serpents perform metaphysical currents (pranas) along the inda and pingala channels from the chakra at the base of the spine to the pineal gland in a double helix pattern.

The most fundamental objection to Gamow’s scheme is that it does not distinguish between the direction of a sequence; that is, between Thr. Pro. Lys. Ala. and Ala. Lys. Pro. Thr…. There is little doubt that Nature makes this distinction, though it might be claimed that she produces both sequences at random, and that the “wrong” ones—not being able to fold up—are destroyed. This seems to me unlikely. That observation, made in passing, was the first acknowledgment of a theoretical question that is still unanswered: in general terms, what does the cell do with information it possesses on the DNA—and some organisms possess some DNA sequences in thousands of copies—that it does not use to code for proteins? This difficulty brings us face-to-face with one of the most puzzling features of the DNA structure—the fact that it is non-polar, due to the dyads at the side; or put another way, that one chain runs up while the other runs down. It is true that this only applies to the backbone, and not to the base sequence, as Delbrück has emphasized to me in correspondence. This may imply that a base sequence read one way makes sense, and read the other way makes nonsense. Another difficulty is that the assumptions made about which diamonds are equivalent are not very plausible…. [Gamow’s idea] would not be unreasonable if the amino acid could fit on to the template from either side, into cavities which were in a plane, but the structure certainly doesn’t look like that. The bonds seem mainly to stick out perpendicular to the axis, and the template is really a surface with knobs on, and presents a radically different aspect on its two sides…. What, then are the novel and useful features of Gamow’s ideas? It is obviously not the idea of amino acids fitting on to nucleic acids, nor the idea of the bases sequence of the nucleic acids carrying the information. To my mind Gamow has introduced three ideas of importance: (1) In Gamow’s scheme several different base sequences can code for one amino acid…. This “degeneracy” seems to be a new idea, and, as discussed later, we can generalise it. (2) Gamow boldly assumed that code would be of the overlapping type…. Watson and I, thinking mainly about coding by hypothetical RNA structures rather than by DNA, did not seriously consider this type of coding. (3) Gamow’s scheme is essentially abstract. It originally paid lip service to structural considerations, but the position was soon reached when “coding” was looked upon as a problem in itself, independent as far as possible of how things might fit together…. Such an approach, though at first sight unnecessarily abstract, is important. Finally it is obvious to all of us that without our President the whole problem would have been neglected and few of us would have tried to do anything about it.

He went slowly along a long gray corridor, the redoubtable masonry of clammy stone on either side stacked and mortared against the penetration of hope. The familiar smell of disinfectant and floor wax was in his nostrils, the walls lined with scarred wooden benches with high backs that may have been pews rescued from a desanctified church. In passing he read names carved into the seats circumscribed with hearts or conjoined with chains and there were admonitions in crude calligraphy to fuck off, to eat shit. In one high seat back an optimistic vandal had inscribed his assurance that Millimaki would be reborn. The work of feral children, of wives and lovers mutely enraged by their celibacy, their infidelities. Mothers had dug their nails into the soft wood as they waited in the dank corridor to see the fruit of their wombs turned out so briefly from their cages.

There are a billion stars up there, but you can only have one. Sometimes there are people born with the star already burning inside them. They don't have to go searching for it; it brought them here in the first place. Those people are born on a path, with their hands on someone's shoulders, and someone coming behind them with a hand in theirs. Their eyes are up there as straight as anyone can point. Everything they hear, everything they read, all points the same way. Nothing stops them. They don't see crevices, they walk through storms, they step on thorns - nothing matters. Their eyes are too far ahead of them. Only some of them forget to look around. It hurts to look around. You see paths and woods. You see a smile that you had never had time to see to the end before. You see love that you took and hurried on with because there wasn't time to tarry. You hear songs that you forget to sing - words you forgot to say. You see that your footsteps are treading on blood and chains of the ones who were born loving you

He pondered darkly on how a man is brought down from being a hawk in flight to a slave in chains.

You’ve had quite a ride with the men in your life.” “The worst of the lot.” I chuckled, feeling lighter. “The last five years of my life have been nothing but chaotic. I wasn’t sure I’d make it out this time. Seeing him look at me like that, even in chains, chilled me to the bone. It hunts my thoughts still, and I can’t shake him from my head.

In the chains of my thoughts Weave you like a thread of memories.

The house stands on stilts over the water, and is a meeting place for the scum of the city!” “Sally!” her father reproved. “Well, it’s the truth! Ma Harper and her no-account husband, Claude, run an outdoor dance pavilion, but their income is derived from other sources too. Black market sales, for instance.” “Sally, your tongue is rattling like a chain!” “Pop, you know very well the Harpers are trash.” “Nevertheless, don’t make statements you can’t prove.

KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) is a novel technology - a type of consensus network - that allows to move certain functions of decentralized identity-management systems off-chain to a different layer, and minimize the role of the distributed ledger.

His snowshoe paws are encased in chains as he hops on his hind legs. On his forehead was placed a wreath of thorns, crimson and blasphemous it was. His eyes were drenched in white, no colors can be discerned whatsoever in the reflection of his pupils, only a harrowing stillness of nothingness can be glimpsed through his gaze. He was the image of a ghostly figure, his silhouette swirling like the clouds in the loftiest mountains in eternal Paradise; a divine messenger before all animals and humanity. He wears shimmering chest armor resembling the scorching rays of the sunlight, with a fire crown of thorns burning on his forehead, which embodies the colors of the Earth's horizon, showcasing seventeen stars in its center. He had a voluminous, metallic beard, which was made of arctic sand from the Northern Winter lands - it was wizardly like - something out of a mythical folk tale that comes from a children's novel. His body glistens like the shattered fragments from the Moon, with his fur appearing like green moss surrounded by waterfalls flowing from each corner on his appearance - evolving into snowflakes, ice, as well as winter storms if you inflict your might at his anguish. He’s a supernatural being that all the Witches of the globe worshiped. He is greater, more superior, more virtuous than all deities people pray to on Earth. He’s the lunar father of all the Heavens and Earth, the All-father of all Animals and Mankind. When you see the Hare flying in the skies of the Universe, He’s bestowing the blessings of Sprout, Summer, Autumn, Winter. As the Hare Lunar King steps on the green grass, the mountains will begin to shake, the oceans will become huge typhoons, earthquakes will rumble across the nations as mankind annihilates each other in the guise of the Hare Lunar Emperor. However, the hare will grieve for all humankind, for he knows that the Earth is devoid of vengeance, so he must demolish it in preparation to reconstruct it from a pristine foundation. That future is nigh, that soon will arrive - it’s unfolding as I converse. The Lunar Rabbit King is coming back with his swarm of rabbits - mankind will not evade the menace of long ears - for their King will tell the sinister world with a voice of a thundering lion roar, ‘it is completed! go into the depths of your abysmal eternity, and enslave yourself as the locust of the earth in the fires of tribulation, for you will be tormented from sunrise to sunset, where sunlight is no more; forevermore.

Books have a way of dwelling like parasites, carried forth in the minds of readers, turning up by force of succession in later works of art. I was part of that living chain of ideas reaching into the future.

Slagg,' said the Countess, 'go away! I would like to see the boy when he is six. Find a wet nurse from the Outer Dwellings. Make him green dresses from the velvet curtains. Take this gold ring of mine. Fix a chain to it. Let him wear it around his wry little neck. Call him Titus. Go away and leave the door six inches open.

While I'm writing you I might mention the new novel I'm considering writing; it has to do with the phonograph record business, which I was involved with, at the retail end, for over seven years. I guess I'll make it a S-F novel, though, setting it in the future. My memory tapes (so to speak) have few if any gaps in them about my years in the record business, what with the rip-offs and payola. The small profits for the retailer, the huge chains that are wholesalers-retailers who crowd out the little guy. Provisionally, I will call the record company DOGSHIT RECORDS INC. (Or DRI, as they have now EMI, RCA, MCA, etc.) In my head I've blocked out the tory of an android who has an agent who is another android, but neither knows the other is an invader. (There is a sort of mutual surprise ending, but the main thing is to lay forth the inner workings of an industry for our readership, in a novel of the sort I tend to write and they tend to read.) The musical artist's agent is named (are you ready?) Skim Morewithit, and so forth. There are rip-offs of royalties, two sets of books, all the usual stuff you find today and yesterday in the record business. As to locale, I haven't decided. Maybe on Jupiter, because it will be a (ahem) heavy novel.

Religions have held back the development of consciousness in civilizations throughout history. Thus, over time, humanity has been condemned to follow the rules of a game that has only benefited governmental, financial, political and religious systems. However, the new generations are breaking with this gap, freeing themselves from the chains and shackles inherited from their ancestors. In short, they are waking up and opening their eyes to take the reins of the new millennium. It will not be an easy task, as the ancient group still submits to non-human governments that decide the future of our civilization. No one can predict what will happen. But believe me when I say that this is only the beginning and that, without suffering, there will be no reward... ever!" From the book The Devil's Writer (A Novel for God).

They read in an airline magazine that they can manage their whole supply chain in the cloud for $499 per year, and suddenly that’s the main company initiative.

When I was a boy I felt that the roll of rhyme in poetry was to compel one to find the un-obvious- because of the necessity of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel associations, and almost guarantees deviations from routine chains or trains of thought. It becomes, paradoxically, a sort of automatic mechanism of originality.

There were, he had come to the conclusion after many tedious evenings at Almack’s, two types of chaperone. Given the number of events he had been forced to squire Hen to, Richard considered he had conducted something of an exhaustive study of chaperones. Both types were aging spinsters (Richard discounted young widows looking after their younger sisters’ debuts; those tended to need a chaperone even more than the young ladies they were ostensibly supervising), but that was all they had in common. The first was the frumpy henwit. Although of indeterminate age, she dressed in the ruffles of a seventeen-year-old. Her hair, no matter how sparse or grey, was curled and frizzed until it looked like a nest built by a particularly talentless blue jay. She twittered and simpered when spoken to, read the sappiest sort of novels in her spare time, and generally contrived to accidentally lose her charge at least twice a day. Rogues and seducers loved the first sort of chaperone; she made their endeavours that much easier. And then there was the other type of chaperone. The grim dragon of a chaperone. The sort who looked like her spine had been reinforced with a few Doric columns. Chaperone number two would sneer at a flounce or a frizz. She never simpered when she could snarl, read forbidding sermons by seventeenth-century puritans, and all but chained her charge to her wrist. As the woman bore down on him, Richard, using his brilliant powers of deduction, was quickly able to conclude that this chaperone fell into the second type. Grey hair rigidly pulled back. Mouth pressed into a grim line. The only incongruous note was the cluster of alarmingly purple flowers on the top of her otherwise severe grey bonnet. Maybe the milliner confused her order and she didn’t have time to change it, Richard concluded charitably.

They say I am a reformer. They say wrong: for I have long since given up any such chimerical idea, as that of being able to make men happier who are wicked and miserable by prescription. Withdrawing, therefore, from any such Utopian and hopeless attempt, I believed the best thing I could do was, to relieve, where I could, individual distress, and to lighten the chains that villany often imposes on simplicity under the name of law. In this I have done some good, and what else ought a man to do on this earth?

Love Hurts. I daresay there’s two or three poems, six novels and at least twelve songs on the subject. That’s how the Janus-faced beast of poetry gets written in the first place, in all its myriad of magical forms. So; why cover this hitherto uncharted and highly original territory? Why leap fearlessly into the unknown, nostrils flared, eyes flashing fire? Well, in the name of love, lust and limerence, why on earth not? Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, yet also vital, valuable and necessary. My last tête à tête gave me plenty, incorporating elements of the forbidden, of rebellion, pornography, pregnancy, parental approval – followed by fury – of infidelity, friend estrangement, life on one island that was heavenly and a second that veered between purgatorial and infernal, of violence, miscarriage, masturbating Indians, pepper spray, antipathy, disloyalty, evictions, a planned future, failed globetrotting and habitual lies, whilst being indicative of a wider, all-encompassing social corrosion, and while the story itself may remain merely hinted at or alluded to in the course of this generalised polemic, it’s as worthy or valid as any other such tale told round the campfire and whispered across the beaches of the world. All life’s a roll of the dice, tiger; ride into the bastard storm and if your wounds hurt, be grateful you survived to lick them, even in the darkest nights of the soul when the sun is a mattress fire the god of your love died in. Love Hurts, and in a stupendous and savage cosmos, it’s my right to sit at the keyboard and bleed. Besides, love, poverty and war are the necessary accoutrements to a fulfilled life; this is the all-encompassing theme of our human condition and the crooning, persuasive symphony of that philosophically unfathomable miracle of life itself… especially as love leads to poverty and war. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, after all. I certainly am… we choose our own chains... ~excerpt, "Love Hurts

the presence of an old salt aboard the Elizabeth Seaman was profoundly reassuring. “Iron men in wooden boats,” they were called, as opposed to the wooden men in iron boats of today, like Kittredge, Farmingdale, and Eddie himself. Old salts partook of an origin myth, being close to the root of all things, including language. Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech derived from the sea, from “keeled over” to “learning the ropes” to “catching the drift” to “freeloader” to “gripe” to “brace up” to “taken aback” to “leeway” to “low profile” to “the bitter end,” or the very last link on a chain. Using these expressions in a practical way made him feel close to something fundamental—a deeper truth whose contours he believed he’d sensed, allegorically, even while still on land. Being at sea had brought Eddie nearer that truth. And the old salts were nearer still.

Let's not forget that in the throughput world the linkages are as important as the links. Which means that if we decided to do something in one link, we have to examine the ramifications on the other links.

Like everywhere else in the world, the book stores of Britain are struggling with being pushed out of the market by online booksellers. The most popular book store chain in the UK is Waterstones. They are closing locations and cutting back as they lost business, but they aren't losing business as fast and as hard as the book stores in the US. There is one reason for this: sales. If you go into a book store in the UK, you will be greeted by tables covered with bestsellers and crime novels and other popular books, stacked high with signs saying “3 for £10”. Take heed, American booksellers: people buy more things when you lower the price sometimes. People love a special offer.

Shaking his head, he continues, “It’s harder than ever to convince the business to do the right thing. They’re like kids in a candy store. They read in an airline magazine that they can manage their whole supply chain in the cloud for $499 per year, and suddenly that’s the main company initiative. When we tell them it’s not actually that easy, and show them what it takes to do it right, they disappear. Where did they go? They’re talking to their Cousin Vinnie or some outsourcing sales guy who promises they can do it in a tenth of the time and cost.” I laugh. “A couple of years ago, someone in Marketing asked my group to support a database reporting tool that one of their summer interns wrote. It was actually pretty brilliant, given that she only had a couple of months to work on it, and then it started being used in daily operations. How in the hell do you support and secure something that’s written in Microsoft Access? When the auditors found out that we couldn’t secure access to all the data, we spent weeks cobbling together something that satisfied them. “It’s like the free puppy,” I continue. “It’s not the upfront capital that kills you, it’s the operations and maintenance on the back end.

But surprisingly, people were significantly more likely to benefit from weak ties. Almost 28 percent heard about the job from a weak tie. Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads. Here’s the wrinkle: it’s tough to ask weak ties for help. Although they’re the faster route to new leads, we don’t always feel comfortable reaching out to them. The lack of mutual trust between acquaintances creates a psychological barrier. But givers like Adam Rifkin have discovered a loophole. It’s possible to get the best of both worlds: the trust of strong ties coupled with the novel information of weak ties. The key is reconnecting, and it’s a major reason why givers succeed in the long run. After Rifkin created the punk rock links on the Green Day site for Spencer in 1994, Excite took off, and Rifkin went back to graduate school. They lost touch for five years. When Rifkin was moving to Silicon Valley, he dug up the old e-mail chain and drafted a note to Spencer. “You may not remember me from five years ago; I’m the guy who made the change to the Green Day website,” Rifkin wrote. “I’m starting a company and moving to Silicon Valley, and I don’t know a lot of people. Would you be willing to meet with me and offer advice?” Rifkin wasn’t being a matcher. When he originally helped Spencer, he did it with no strings attached, never intending to call in a favor. But five years later, when he needed help, he reached out with a genuine request. Spencer was glad to help, and they met up for coffee. “I still pictured him as this huge guy with a Mohawk,” Rifkin says. “When I met him in person, he hardly said any words at all. He was even more introverted than I am.” By the second meeting, Spencer was introducing Rifkin to a venture capitalist. “A completely random set of events that happened in 1994 led to reengaging with him over e-mail in 1999, which led to my company getting founded in 2000,” Rifkin recalls. “Givers get lucky.

Doing so would have set into motion a chain of events ending in my death. So I came to Midgard.” “Midgard?