Chic Quotes

Never use the word “cheap”. Today everybody can look chic in inexpensive clothes (the rich buy them too). There is good clothing design on every level today. You can be the chicest thing in the world in a T-shirt and jeans — it’s up to you.

You cannot fake chic but you can be chic and fake fur

I roll my eyes. 'Are you trying to find some sort of reason that I've become such an asshole? The reason is... I'm an asshole. There are some things in life that can't be explained. Period. Assholes are assholes. Rainbows are pretty. Kittens are cute. Chic flicks are sad. It's the way of things, no explanations.

I prefer the retro chic of spending Christmas just like Joseph and Mary did - Traveling arduously back to the place of your birth to be counted, with no guarantee of a bed when you get there.

Your worth is you. Your worth is your presence. Your worth is right there. Your worth isn't something you earn. Your worth isn't something you buy. Your worth isn't something you gain through status on popularity or stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your existence. You were born with worth, as all babies are, and that worth doesn't disappear simply because you have grown a little older. You are a human, being.

And then: 'Here comes your baby. Sois sage. Sois chic.' He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him. And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars.

Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.

I wondered what one wore to visit a vampire. The chic red sweater set didn't go so well with my darker hair, and I was afraid it might be construed as a flirtatious invitation to color me bloodier.

It's chic to be shy.

For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap-and-lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening of the cheeks.

Sneakers and even sweatpants are acceptable attire everywhere, even in upscale or fancy restaurants

Seth laughed when he saw me. “Hey,” I said, poking him with my foot, “be nice.” “I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you look anything less than…” He paused, playing with word choice. “Well-planned.” “Why, you silver-tongued romantic devil. That is the look I usually go for. Other women go for sexy or chic or beautiful. But me? Well-planned all the way.” “You know what I mean. Besides, unplanned isn’t a bad look for you. Not bad at all.” His voice sounded deliciously low and dangerous, and something ignited between us as we held each other’s eyes.

So we liked to speak our minds, but not our hearts. Too bad, because sometimes people needed to hear that. A whole mess of things could have been avoided if we just knew how to say the right thing.

Not all shabby is chic, just like not every porn actor is a star.

You read Salinger in Italian? Molto chic’ ‘I was told a good way to learn a language was to read translations of books you know by heart’ ‘That’s interesting.’ But Isabelle wasn’t at all interested. She had just discovered a new expression. She savoured it amorously. From now on everything that once has been "sublime" – a film, a Worth gown, a Coromandel screen – would be "molto chic". Like those devotees of the increase-your-word-power column in the Reader’s Digest who stake their conversational reputation on the number of times in a single day they find room for "plethora" and "infelicity" and "quintessential", dropping these words the way other people drop names, she hated to let any amusing phrase go once it had caught her fancy.

Chic rarely bothers to leave the Rue De Faubourg Saint-Honore.

It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.

To live well—to live within your means and to avoid the seduction of the material world. That is what I call prospering.

I am chic, sleek, and so unique.

I prefer the retro chic of spending Christmas just like Mary and Joseph did- traveling arduously back to the place of your birth to be counted, with no guarantee of a bed when you get there. You may end up sleeping on an old wicker couch with a dog licking your face while an Ab Rocket informercial plays in the background. It's a modern-day manger.

Sincerity is a Christian virtue, as is honesty about our struggles. But my generation needs to realize that Christianity is more than chic fragility, endless self-revelation, and the coolness that comes with authenticity.

Luck is buying a lottery ticket along with your Yoo-hoo and striking it rich. Nothing about my life is lucky- it is all about hard work, it is all uphill struggle.

This is not a race. The destination is not important. It is in the journey where all of the critical steps are taken. So enjoy this, my friend. Because life is meant to be celebrated. All of it.

Rejoice in every aspect of life—big or small. Let nothing pass you by. Appreciate everything—whether it is perceived as good or bad. You have the power to turn any experience into a pleasurable one. Challenge your preconceptions and luxuriate in the simple things of life.

Victimhood chic” is in style on both the right and the left today, among both the rich and the poor. In fact, this may be the first time in human history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly victimized simultaneously. And they’re all riding the highs of the moral indignation that comes along with it. Right

Querer es fácil, lo difícil es quedarse.

We're lucky." He slipped his hand around her waist and splayed it in the small of her back. "Most couples have only one first kiss. We'll have two.

Mess with a magical chic and you get some major clean-up when she is pissed!!!

I remember thinking that. You were dork chic before dork chic was chic.

This was how a manang self-destructed, probably. Not with drugs or alcohol, but cholesterol.

Whenever you give up an apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a vistor, the city seems to turn against you. It's much more expensive (because you need to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, your experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the down. You've turned your back from only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you rad that Manhattan rents are going up, they're climbing higher, they're reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again.

Before I met him, I wondered how I could possibly fit a relationship into my life. My days felt full, of people, things, and concerns, and I wondered what I'd give up to accommodate someone new. Anton made it seem easy. He didn't take me out of my life; instead, he sort of slid into the empty spaces and made himself comfortable.

Likewise, while the men and women were no more naturally attractive than their English counterparts, they dressed with an assurance and attention to detail that would have been considered the height of arrogance in England. Here, maintaining a certain chic was apparently nothing less than a civic duty.

God, the woman was cool. She had that pulled-together LA look about her, like she was ready to do a photo shoot for Vogue called Business Casual Chic.

Again from a distance, Sukie was once again struck by her mother's chic and how different things can seem from far away, how there's more than one truth, the faraway truth and the truth close up.

My fingers are blistered and they smell like lighter fluid— like burnt tin foil and rusted silverware. Quick question: Is it still considered heroin chic if I’m actually using heroin? No? Whatever.

Blue opened and closed her chilly fists. The top edges of her fingerless gloves were fraying; she’d done a bad job knitting them last year, but they had a certain trashy chic to them. If she hadn’t been so vain, Blue could’ve worn the boring but functional gloves she’d been given for Christmas. But she was vain, so instead she had her fraying fingerless gloves, infinitely cooler though also colder , and no one to see them but Neeve and the dead.

Logic is overrated and superfluous when it comes to love.

Le néo-libéralisme reprend les plus vieilles idées du patronat, sous un message chic et moderne. C'est une "révolution" conservatrice qui veut imposer un retour à une forme de capitalisme sauvage et cynique, qui organise l'insécurité et la précarité, qui se réclame du progrès mais qui glorifie l'archaïque loi du plus fort.

Chic, is first, when you don't have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn't matter or because you don't have any and it doesn't matter. Chic is not aspirational. Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness-- most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants.

Back to the present day…

My calendar lately is full of work. And you.

So now we just need to figure out what the hell people wear in Montana.” “Brokeback-chic?” I offered.

For everyone knows that a girl cannot live on chicken cordon blue alone.

It was all so long ago and Stalin doesn't matter any more. Stalin lost his chic before you were born. Sex is always chic.

—Quiero comprobar una teoría —dice colocando las manos a ambos lados de mi cabeza. —¿Qué teoría? —pregunto cuando mi nuca toca la pared. —Necesito saber si, cuando te bese, la tierra se moverá tanto como imagino.

I'm here to talk about the men in your life. To talk about the men in my life. I like the dress, by the way. Very boho chic or whatever. I was on my way home, and I wanted to find out if you had a good time at the toga party and also make sure that our plans for Zimbabwe were still on. I see you tried to claw your own eye out; it's edgy.

You know what I’m gonna do? I’m going to smoke two Marlboro Lights, brush my teeth, pull my hair into a chic/grungy little bun, put on my black shawl and a pair of Lanvin flats, walk down the hall to that smelly girl from Arizona’s room, steal ten Adderall from her stash, come back to my room, and write down all my life’s problems from start to finish.

Eckhart Tolle, the new age philosopher, says, “What you do is secondary. How you do it is primary.

The key to having a good day is to eliminate everything from your life that causes you stress.

She imagined herself whirling breathlessly beneath the flashing lights of some impossibly chic Manhattan disco. Suddenly, a hand touches her arm. She turns. ‘Pardon me,’ Mick Jagger says, 'I believe this next dance is mine.

I was the sort of beautiful that women knew they could never truly emulate. Men knew they would never even get close to a woman like me. Ruby was the elegant, aloof sort of beauty. Ruby was cool. Ruby was chic. But Celia was the sort of beautiful that felt as if you could hold it in your hands, like if you played your cards right, you might just get to marry a girl like Celia St. James.

Aside from infrequent comments ("Cheer up, love," or "It's not Hallo'ween"), no one wondered why a teenager was dressed up as a chic governess. Sylvie approved of Miri, even at the same time as she was confused by her. "It's a style at least," she said, and took off her rope of pearls and looped them around Miri's neck.

I only met her once. She was introduced to me by, of all people, Gertrude Lawrence . . . Stanwyck was gracious and laconic; very tiny; very chic; very controlled. But I met her! I saw the eyes, the lips. Contact was made." —Tennessee Williams

Next time, just say something. It doesn't have to be the first date. Maybe the third or the fourth. Don't wait a year if you're sure. Certainty is sexy. And owning up to your attraction is sexy, too, and if you do it right and you're not creepy about it, I bet she will respect you for it anyway even if she does not like you back.

...feel the fierce way desire tourniquets itself around you and clings Clubland South of Market tweak- chic trannies powder their noses from bullet-shaped compacts and flick their forked tongues like switchblades as they burn the night down bleed day to night to day to Mission sidewalks where pythons hide twenty dollar balloons beneath their tongues which get bartered in smiles quicker than a coke buzz and tossed out through the cracks Cottonmouth kisses camouflage emotions and strike with a vengeance when he wants and she wants and they want and I won't Genet was right, I suppose when he wrote "The only way to avoid the horror of horror is to give in to it" it's the nature of the economy of the business it's the nature of things...

She wished she hadn't succumbed to irritation. Because she wanted to know about his inner feelings. She always thought people were like pieces of art glass-- strong enough to handle and use, delicate enough to shatter under a strong blow, and filled with swirls of color that fascinated the eye. But while most people--and most glass--allowed light through, she could discern nothing of Devlin's heart and soul through the smoke and mirrors he held before him.

It has to be in a man's heart to love you, be faithful to you, respect you, and treat you like a queen. If it isn't in his heart, it doesn't matter how good you look, how much you do, how long you've been holding him down, or what your title is. He will view you on the same level as every other woman... ~facts

The truth of the matter is, these mundane tasks must be done. There is no getting around them. Almost everyone has to do a task on a daily basis that is less than fun. The key is to find pleasure in the task and to not wish you were doing something else while doing it.

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners'. - Emily Post

I look chic,” I say. “I look like I ride motorcycles on the Amalfi Coast.” “You look like they shoot you out of a cannon at a circus for gay people.

Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic.

I am a lumberjack... I can never manage to be a chic.

She can’t come across as snooty or aloof or sad or dour. She must be simultaneously chic, accessible, natural, friendly, and warm.

The woman serving me was wearing a white sports bra that looked like it had been mauled by tigers--desert isle chic.

Part of the well-oiled machinery of the day. Less worthy of proper notice, really, than the chic arrangements of greenery, the wavering flames atop the silver candlesticks.

Heroine chic might be chronic, but my ass is iconic.

...and now, in the season of the Radical Chic, the Black Panthers.

Eric Harris wanted a prom date. Eric was a senior, about to leave Columbine High School forever. He was not about to be left out of the prime social event of his life. He really wanted a date. Dates were not generally a problem. Eric was a brain, but an uncommon subcategory: cool brain. He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high. He worked his look hard: military chic hair— short and spiked with plenty of product—plus black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants. He blasted hard-core German industrial rock from his Honda. He enjoyed firing off bottle rockets and road-tripping to Wyoming to replenish the stash. He broke the rules, tagged himself with the nickname Reb, but did his homework and earned himself a slew of A’s. He shot cool videos and got them airplay on the closed-circuit system at school. And he got chicks. Lots and lots of chicks. On the ultimate high school scorecard, Eric outscored much of the football team. He was a little charmer. He walked right up to hotties at the mall. He won them over with quick wit, dazzling dimples, and a disarming smile.

To cut a long story short, coaching by Charlotte and Mr. Giordano was even worse than I’d expected. That was mainly because they were trying to teach me everything at the same time. While I was struggling to learn the steps of the minuet (rigged out in a hooped skirt with cherry-red stripes, not very chic worn with my school uniform blouse, which was the color of mashed potato), I was also supposed to be learning how greatly the political opinions of the Whigs and the Tories differed, how to hold a fan, and the difference between “Your Highness,” “Your Royal Highness,” “Your Serene Highness,” and even “Your Illustrious Highness.” After only an hour plus seventeen different ways of opening a fan, I had a splitting headache, and I couldn’t tell left from right. My attempt to lighten the atmosphere with a little joke—“Couldn’t we stop for a rest? I’m totally, serenely, illustriously exhausted”—went down like a lead balloon. “This is not funny,” said Giordano in nasal tones. “Stupid girl.

You may think that being chic has nothing to do with the most insignificant and mundane moments of the day. Moments like preparing your meals, emptying the dishwasher, and paying bills. But the secret is: those moments aren’t insignificant. Au contraire. They are very significant. That’s right—if you can change your attitude about making the pasta sauce, choosing your clothes for the day, folding the laundry, setting the table, or dealing with the incoming mail, you can completely change your life.

They [best dressed women] don’t want to look like their daughters. They want their own individual brand of chic. […] The cut and fit must be exactly right, and they are willing to spend hours in the fitting room to make sure of it. They spend money, too. But if any one of them went broke tomorrow she’d rather choose one perfectly cut expensive dress and make it do for years than buy a dozen cheap ones.

The light from her stolen lamp buzzing over her feathery head like a flickering motel sign. Sipping champagne from a wide-mouthed flute. Where does she get it? Never mind. Places. Ava never seems to worry about money. Yet somehow her apartment is like a movie of arty poverty in Paris. Run-down but chicly so.

Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?" Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to. "Malaysia?" "The stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the thread-tension." "Oh." "Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highlighters, in a really nasty fluorescent shade." "Are you joking?" "Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?" "Yes." She never did call him "Colin," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique." "How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?" "Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law.

In praise of mu husband's hair A woman is alone in labor, for it is an unfortunate fact that there is nobody who can have the baby for you. However, this account would be inadequate if I did not speak to the scent of my husband's hair. Besides the cut flowers he sacrifices his lunches to afford, the purchase of bags of licorice, the plumping of pillows, steaming of fish, searching out of chic maternity dresses, taking over of work, listening to complaints and simply worrying, there was my husband's hair. His hair has always amazed stylists in beauty salons. At his every first appointment they gather their colleagues around Michael's head. He owns glossy and springy hair, of an animal vitality and resilience that seems to me so like his personality. The Black Irish on Michael's mother's side of the family have changeable hair--his great-grandmother's hair went from black to gold in old age. Michael's went from golden-brown of childhood to a deepening chestnut that gleams Modoc black from his father under certain lights. When pushing each baby I throw my arm over Michael and lean my full weight. When the desperate part is over, the effort, I turn my face into the hair above his ear. It is as though I am entering a small and temporary refuge. How much I want to be little and unnecessary, to stay there, to leave my struggling body at the entrance. Leaves on a tree all winter that now, in your hand, crushed, give off a dry, true odor. The brass underside of a door knocker in your fingers and its faint metallic polish. Fresh potter's clay hardening on the wrist of a child. The slow blackening of Lent, timeless and lighted with hunger. All of these things enter into my mind when drawing into my entire face the scent of my husband's hair. When I am most alone and drowning and I think I cannot go on, it is breathing into his hair that draws me to the surface and restores my small courage.

Daisies are what boho dreams are made of. They bring to mind sun-soaked wild flower fields, spontaneous wanderings in the country air the simple joys of bundling found blooms and foliage into a worn basket. I can almost smell the sunshine when I look at these happy flowers and feel the urge to wear a flower crown and spin around barefoot! Daisies are the perfect addition to any laid back and rustic decor or shabby chic event!

there's three ways to look at it. Either (1) it's a massive coincidence that all the girls I ever liked happen to share the same nine letters, or (2) I just happen to think it particularly beautiful name, or (3) I never got over our two-and-a-half-minute relationship." "I remember thinking that. You were dork chic before dork chic was chic.

Quizás si te lo digo así, al fin te quede claro. Que tú no eres mi plan A, no eres mi primera opción. no encabezas mi lista. Porque no hay más planes, más números, ni siquiera hay lista. Estás tú y nada más. Y si quieres, yo a tu lado.

I came today because I realized that if I can't forgive her and love her as she is, then I can't expect anyone to do the same for me.

The press in New York has tended to favor New Society in every period, and to take it seriously, if only because it provides "news.

It got to be an American custom, like talk shows, Face the Nation, marriage counseling, marathon encounters, or zoning hearings.

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo.

One time, Kent was filling a pulpit at a small church in a small town. These places scare me, and for good reason. Knox was asleep on my shoulder and Mary was asleep in the car seat. A man walked up to me, not knowing that I was the preacher’s wife, and said: “So, is it chic for white women to adopt black kids these days?” I took a deep breath and stood up to meet his gaze. “Are you a Christian?” I asked him. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “Did God save you because it was chic?” We locked eyes until he dropped his head.

Liz and Willie were passing a miniature chateau--even in its modified version, it was seven or eight thousand square feet--and Liz said, "I guess I'm a Cincinnati opportunist. In New York, I play the wholesome-midwesterner card, but when I'm back here, I consider myself to be a chic outsider." Even before Willie replied, Liz felt the loneliness of having confided something true in a person who didn't care.

Al final la vida es esto: correr con la gente que quieres, sin saber bien a dónde, pero con la certeza de que en realidad no importa lo que haya al final del camino; lo que de verdad importa es recorrerlo juntos.

Goodwill shouldn't be just for men. It should also apply to women and children, and all animals, even the yucky ones like subway rats. I'd even extend the goodwill not just to living creatures but to the dearly departed, and if we include them, we might as well include the undead, those supposedly mythic beings like vampires, and if they're in, then so are elves, fairies, and gnomes. Heck, since we're already being so generous in our big group hug, why not also embrace those supposedly inanimate objects like dolls and stuffed animals (special shout-out to my Ariel mermaid, who presides over the shabby chic flower power pillow on my bed - love you, girl!). I'm sure Santa would agree. Goodwill to all.

Creating a home that makes you feel wonderful is a gift you give yourself that echoes through the rest of your life. A bedroom you love is one in which you want to have an organized, well-cared-for wardrobe, which means less money spent replacing your battered items. A happy, practical, smartly appointed kitchen is one you actually *want* to cook in, which means much less money spent eating out or ordering in. A chic and comfortable living room means more entertaining at home and embracing the lost art of dinner parties (always cheaper than doing drinks and a restaurant dinner!). Even a Zen, candle-filled, clean bathroom is one in which you want to spend time doing home spa treatments instead of feeling like you have to go somewhere expensive to feel beautiful. If you create a home that is most attuned to your life and somewhere you really enjoy being, everything benefits.

...the presence of others has become even more intolerable to me, their conversation most of all. Oh, how it all annoys and exasperates me: their attitudes, their manners, their whole way of being! The people of my world, all my unhappy peers, have come to irritate, oppress and sadden me with their noisy and empty chatter, their monstrous and boundless vanity, their even more monstrous egotism, their club gossip... the endless repetition of opinions already formed and judgments already made; the automatic vomiting forth of articles read in those morning papers which are the recognised outlet of the hopeless wilderness of their ideas; the eternal daily meal of overfamiliar cliches concerning racing stables and the stalls of fillies of the human variety... the hutches of the 'petites femmes' - another worn out phrase in the dirty usury of shapeless expression! Oh my contemporaries, my dear contemporaries... Their idiotic self-satisfaction; their fat and full-blown self-sufficiency: the stupid display of their good fortune; the clink of fifty- and a hundred-franc coins forever sounding out their financial prowess, according their own reckoning; their hen-like clucking and their pig-like grunting, as they pronounce the names of certain women; the obesity of their minds, the obscenity of their eyes, and the toneless-ness of their laughter! They are, in truth, handsome puppets of amour, with all the exhausted despondency of their gestures and the slackness of their chic... Chic! A hideous word, which fits their manner like a new glove: as dejected as undertakers' mutes, as full-blown as Falstaff... Oh my contemporaries: the ceusses of my circle, to put it in their own ignoble argot. They have all welcomed the moneylenders into their homes, and have been recruited as their clients, and they have likewise played host to the fat journalists who milk their conversations for the society columns. How I hate them; how I execrate them; how I would love to devour them liver and lights - and how well I understand the Anarchists and their bombs!

El sentimiento de rechazo por mí misma intenta ocuparlo todo, como siempre. Lo peor de las relaciones que acaban como la mía no es superar la ruptura. Lo peor es recomponer una autoestima que nunca ha sido fuerte, pero, tras lo sucedido, se ha quedado hecha añicos.

It was a common complaint amongst the Arts students that their library was in dire need of refurbishment. To call the old building shabby chic was being kind. It didn’t have automated stacks or self-service machines like the Management and Sciences library the other side of campus and the carpets and bookcases looked like they were probably the Victorian originals. But on days like this one, where the springtime sunshine streamed in through the high windows and set the dust motes dancing, Harriet sincerely felt that those BSc lot could stuff their vending machines and state of the art study pods. The Old Library was clearly suited for those who had poetry in their souls, rather than numbers in their heads.

«Tú y yo vamos a tenerlo todo. Tendremos los grandes momentos y los pequeños y serán para la eternidad». This Is Us

A veces, cuando alguien te importa, lo mejor que puedes hacer por esa persona es dar un paso atrás y dejarle respirar a solas, aunque cueste.

Dicen que las heridas sanan con el tiempo. No estoy de acuerdo. Hay heridas que, con el tiempo y las palabras adecuadas, sangran como si acabaran de abrirse.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

EXERCISE IS A PART OF LIFE, NOT A CHORE

You must drink plenty of water if you want to have good skin.

¿Cuál fue nuestro final y cuándo empezó a escribirse?

Stylish,” I said. “Alternate-universe chic.” “It’d have to be an alternate universe if I’m chic.

There are no chic people in Texas.

Founder’s Chic: Our Reverence for the Founding Fathers Has Gotten out of Hand," Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 2003.

other party guests paraded just in front of us one by one in their chic outfits, but the thick leaves of a potted cyclamen shielded us from view.

She draped her arm through mine, and, as we walked, I was sure she probably looked chic and cool and European. I felt slow and clumsy and American.

She was monumentally, conspicuously damaged in a way that was, to us then, ineffably chic.

I was trying to communicate—with nothing so obvious as a smile, but let’s say a smile of the eyes—my admiration for the chic of women in tuxedos escorting women in evening gowns.

Café. Donne de l’esprit. N’est bon qu’en venant du Havre. Dans un grand dîner, doit se prendre debout. L’avaler sans sucre, très chic, donne l’air d’avoir vécu en Orient.

We're not trying for perfect - we're aiming for posh shabby chic.

She wasn't thin like the freak girls who puked and starved themselves into what they thought was Paris Hilton chic. ("That's hott." Yeah, okay, whatever, Paris.)

Cheap objects resist involvement. We tend to invest less in their purchase, care, and maintenance, and that's part of what makes them so attractive. Cheap clothing lines—sold at discounters such as Target and H & M—are like IKEA emblems of the "cheap chic" where styles fills in for whatever quality goes lacking. There is nothing sinister in this, no deliberate planned obsolescence. These objects are not designed to fall apart, nor are they crafted not to fall apart. In many cases we know this and accept it, and have entered into a sort of compact. Perhaps we don't even want the object to last forever. Such voluntary obsolescence makes craftsmanship beside the point. We have grown to expect and even relish the easy birth and early death of objects.

How much time, after this realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone, interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another. In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve’s end, a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era’s tacky equivalents of people with leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric zirconium jewelry, NoCoat Lin-guaScrapers, and c.

La madurez es una cosa y perder la alegría es otra. Lo primero es un proceso lógico en todas las personas. Lo segundo es una pena, y nada, nada debería justificar nunca la pérdida de la alegría.

If I didn’t know any better, Wadsworth, my dear,” Thomas said, voice laced with teasing, his typical method of distracting me from my darkness, “I’d believe you were about to perform your own escape act. Am I to be your assistant, then?” He stared down at himself, frowning slightly. “I left my sequined dragon frock coat in London and this one’s a bit plain. It doesn’t particularly scream ‘carnival chic.

En fait, au XVème siècle, en Transylvanie, pendant la guerre contre les Ottomans, j'ai vraiment rencontré Vlad l'Empaleur, qui a inspiré le personnage mythique de Dracula, et qui n'a jamais eu les terribles canines que la légende lui attribue. Au contraire, une visite chez le dentiste lui aurait fait le plus grand bien : il avait les dents pourries, et une haleine des plus fétides. Et ce n'était pas un vampire, tout juste un catholique fanatique, doté d'un penchant fétichiste pour la décapitation, qui m'avait proposé une promenade dans sa calèche. J'ai le chic pour attirer les hommes qui sortent de l'ordinaire.

For example, Madame Chic’s wardrobe for winter consisted of three or four wool skirts, four cashmere sweaters, and three silk blouses. (Madame Chic rarely wore trousers.) She had a uniform of sorts and wore it well.

The ancient house is our chrysalis, trapping us until our metamorphosis is complete: our chic city wings plucked from our backs and we'll emerge as fat, white farm larvae. Like the ones living in the corral cow pies.

C'est dans ma neuvième année que j'ai appris le hollandais. A cette époque-là, j'avais un papa, un chic type dans mon genre, qui voulait que ses enfants réussissent dans la vie. Lui n'avait pas beaucoup travaillé à l'école ; ce qui ne l'empêchait pas, tous les étés, de nous acheter à ma sœur Christine et à moi des "cahiers de vacances". Le lundi soir, elle avait déjà fait son cahier jusqu'au jeudi. Moi, je n'ai jamais pu terminer le mien.

I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things. It seems to me that there is a false stigma around eagerness in our culture of ‘unbothered ambivalence.’ This outlook perpetuates the idea that it’s not cool to ‘want it.’ That people who don’t try hard are fundamentally more chic than people who do. And I wouldn’t know because I have been a lot of things but I’ve never been an expert on ‘chic.’ But I’m the one who’s up here so you have to listen to me when I say this: Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it most are the people I now hire to work for my company.

SHE WAS A KNOCKOUT. A stoned fox. I’d never seen her before. Not one of the cutesy Irish Barbie Dolls I normally fell for, this was something of a different class altogether. No disco glam or sparkles or fashionably trashy stripper chic. No make-up or slutty, revealing outfit. No desperate, tits-in-your-face “notice me” B.S. This was something pure and earthy -- fresh as newly cut grass. The smoking-hot girl next door, but yet completely of another world and time. A true classic.

I suppose we all have our quirks.” Her gaze travels over my outfit as she says “quirks.” I’m in my usual hacker chic outfit I wear on jobs, lots of tight black everything, punk meets goth, short on class and full of sass. Because fuck you, that’s why.

Slim young women were swathed in chic black dresses, here to attend a ceremony in one of the hotel’s many reception rooms. They wore small but expensive accessories, like vampire finches in search of blood, longing for a hint of light they could reflect.

The front room of his house was what I called 'untidy chic'. Prefects weren't subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect's room.

Lying on a beach [on Christmas] feels a little "first thought" to me. I prefer the retro chic of spending Christmas just like Joseph and Mary did - traveling arduously back to the place of your birth to be counted, with no guarantee of a bed when you get there.

Boston itself was a flea market of racism. It had all varieties, old and new. The city had corrupt, city hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-’em-back-to-Africa racists, and in the university areas phony radical-chic racists. . . . Other than that, I liked the city.

The offices are decorated with neon-Louis XVI furniture and are dominated by grey, Mr. Dior’s favourite colour when he opened the famous house on avenue Montaigne back in 1947. The design is even more stunning than I remembered: both chic and understated, with lots of open space –the apex of luxury. The silk curtains dressing the window fall to the floor like ball gowns, delicate silver vases holding pink roses have been artfully placed throughout the room, and grey and white settees and oval-backed chairs provided artful seating areas.

Lloro por lo que tuve, lo que perdí y lo mucho que me cuesta, en días como este, enfrentarme al simple hecho de vivir. Lloro porque la tristeza me come desde dentro y he aprendido, que es mejor dejarla salir así, en forma de lágrimas, que tragármela y dejar que me consuma.

Hun var så meget penere i ansiktet og snakket morsommere og var malet og var det de kalte chic, men hun var ikke så meget til det andre, slet ikke så storartet til det andre, det såes på hende, ingen bryster, flat, haha, gikk engang med hatten bak frem for å finde på noget.

It's a great idea to analyze how screen time has changed your life and how it alters your behavior. If you don't like what you see, implement changes. Get comfortable again with real human connection and don't give so much power to the screen and what is behind it. Real life is in the present moment, happening right now. We never know how many days we have in front of us. Let's live them fully, not virtually.

To do two things at once is to do neither. —Publilius Syrus This is one of my favorite quotes on multitasking and it absolutely pertains to eating. Before I lived in Paris, it was not uncommon to see me eating a meal standing up, perhaps at my kitchen counter, with my cell phone lodged between my ear and my shoulder. Or worse yet, in front of the TV. By the time the meal was over, I wouldn’t have known I had eaten anything at all.

In any other American city this size, the road would have been paved. But in Santa Fe, raw earth is as chic as raw fish. The wealthier locals like it especially in the winter, when they can hop into their four-wheel-drive vehicles and feel like cowboys as they go whizzing down the mudslides into town.

Though she looked like an updated sixties hippie straight out of Haight Ashbury, she was more Princeton than Berkeley — more Microsoft than Apple. But there was a softer side to her personality. She had eclectic tastes as was evident in how she decorated her home, making it feel old and new, comfortable and chic.

Naturally, she had enemies. Her success, her sex, her racial origin and her bohemian extravagance reminded the puritanical why actors used to be buried in unhallowed ground. And over the decades her acting style, once so original, inevitably dated, since naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel. If the magic always worked for some—Ellen Terry called her “transparent as an azalea” and compared her stage presence to “smoke from a burning paper”—others were less kind. Turgenev, though a Francophile and himself a dramatist, found her “false, cold, affected,” and condemned her “repulsive Parisian chic.

IRELAND Spenserian Sonnet abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee What is it about the Kelly velvet hillsides and the hoary avocado sea, The vertical cliffs where the Gulf Stream commences its southern bend, Slashing like a sculptor gone mad or a rancorous God who’s angry, Heaving galaxies of lichen shrouded stones for potato farmers to tend, Where the Famine and the Troubles such haunting aspects lend, Music and verse ring with such eloquence in their whimsical way, Let all, who can hear, rejoice as singers’ intonations mend, Gaelic souls from Sligo and Trinity Green to Cork and Dingle Bay, Where fiddle, bodhran, tin whistle, and even God, indulge to play, Ould sod to Beckett, Wilde and Yeats, Heaney and James Joyce, In this verdant, welcoming land, ‘tis the poet who rules the day. Where else can one hear a republic croon in so magnificent a voice? Primal hearts of Celtic chieftains pulse, setting inspiration free, In genial confines of chic caprice, we’re stirred by synchronicity.

A very ladylike bosom,” she said, approvingly. “There’s nothing there,” I complained. The clerk grinned. “I have been fitting bras for twenty-five years and no one ever thinks her breasts are good enough,” she said. “You’ll save yourself a lot of unhappiness if you accept and enjoy what you have. Neat little breasts are very chic.

Werewolves had been so rationalized and medicalized by the year 1000 that they became subject to a medieval type of “heroin chic” romanticism in literature, in which they were frequently portrayed as attractive, lonely, suffering, victimized, self-sacrificing, chivalrous heroes in fictional and mythological tales emerging during the Grail romance era. The “chivalrous werewolf” narratives often feature a noble knight or prince who transforms into a werewolf to protect the subject of his romantic love, but while he is a werewolf she betrays him by stealing his transformative device—either a potion, a ring, a belt or his clothes—trapping him forever in his lovelorn werewolf state.25

Ultimately, the salon, Steffens noted, helped change the public perception of Greenwich Village, although hardly in the manner Dodge had hoped. What had been a neighborhood better known for cheap rents and no shortage of decrepit apartments was becoming almost chic, a kind of Latin Quarter in Manhattan. Small theaters and art galleries sprang up, and midtown shoppers and tourists took the time to cruise through the Village for a look at the new trendsetters. Steffens did not recall it as being exceptionally fashionable back in 1911, judging his own lifestyle to be “Bohemian, but not the fake sort.” If it was not fake, it was hardly genuine, either. Steffens was not about to starve in Greenwich Village.

This is the part they don’t tell you about in the movies. Or in On the Road. This is not rock ’n’ roll. You are not William Burroughs, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if Kurt Cobain was slumped over in an alleyway in Seattle the day Bleach came out. There is no junkie chic. This is not Soho and you are not Sid Vicious. You are not a drugstore cowboy and you are not spotting trains. You are not a part of anything—no underground sect, no counter-culture movement, no music scene, nothing. You have just been released from jail and are walking down Mission Street, alternating between taking a hit off a cigarette and puking, looking for coins on the ground so you can catch a bus as you shit yourself.

Extracting pleasure from simple things can be the key to a happy life. If you slow down and take pleasure in simple things, you are more likely lead a contented and well-balanced existence and less likely to incur unhealthy habits like overspending, hoarding, and overeating. You are also more likely to be present in the moment and pleasant with your family.

Plopbottle closed his eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t a low-grade technician any more, he was Johnny Marino in Disco Night Fever. Confident, sophisticated, chic, and above all, not a goblin. He pointed down to the floor and up to the ceiling, he twirled his jacket round his head and spun on his heels. He hustled, he shimmied, he mash potatoed, he did the boogaloo.

Y tú eres un gran nieto. También fuiste un hijo increíble, Noah, y estoy segura de que ellos lo pensaban.

es lo que tienen los corazones: te mantienen con vida y laten como locos en los momentos menos esperados,

No puedes ser feliz durante un mes entero o una semana. Ni siquiera durante un día entero. Puedes estar contento, pero la felicidad, la verdadera felicidad está en momentos.

La felicidad dura lo que dura el pensamiento de que no hay ningún otro sitio en el mundo en el que quisiera estar justo ahora más que aquí.

la tendencia que tenemos los seres humanos a dar por sentado lo bueno y quejarnos de cosas que, en realidad, no son importantes.

you were attacked by cement monkeys?

when you live outside the law, you have to be flexible

Our highest intelligence is deep water flowing into the shallows

can be terribly elegant and make its furnishings—and inhabitants—stand out like high art.

The only way to get better is to practice.

que piensan que sonreír, aunque sea con el corazón roto, sana.

A todos los que tienen la suerte de seguir creyendo en la magia, incluso cuando parece que se ha extinguido. Sobre todo entonces.

Pero si algo me han enseñado los Dunas, es que hasta los pasos inestables conforman el camino.

Un minuto a solas con la persona adecuada puede parecer un segundo, y hacerse eterno si estás en compañía indeseada.

Yo quería empaparme y apenas he podido mojarme los labios.

La razón se extinguió entre nosotros hace ya muchos minutos, en algún momento entre música antigua y el baile de promesas que hemos realizado.

A veces, el amor no es suficiente. No todo el mundo está preparado para lo que implica amar

Any shameful habits? Hobbies?” “Donuts.

Joie de vivre is the opposite of this – it’s about graciously gliding through life as if you were making life happen to you instead of life happening to you.

There's a fortune of Authentic Vintage French Linen Tea Towels on every clothes line. These are the exact kind of linens that specialty shops in America sell for top dollar to affluent customers who pay dearly to add that touch of French Farmhouse Fabulousness to their million-dollar McMansions. Flaubert is so wrong. Even wash day in Normandy is achingly chic.

Nos cuesta aceptar que lo que antes nos parecía bueno, ahora ya no lo es y viceversa. Que antes podíamos opinar una cosa y ahora otra. Y no somos peores por eso. -Todas mis respuestas

The troubling implication is that mental illness in women is only acceptable (desirable, even) if it's beautiful - and a very specific type of beautiful at that - embodying a frail chicness that slots perfectly into the social narrative that white women must be protected at all costs, that their sadness can never be ugly, that Crazy women are only crazy if they're not hot.

A critic can call any poem 'doggerel.' That is no more than a slur. 'Doggerel' or 'maudlin' or 'sappy' or 'sentimental' is in the ear of the listener. By the by, 'sentimental' is okay as it is defined as 'marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism.' It is 'sentimentality' that is to be avoided, like the fiddleback spider, being as it is 'the quality or state of being sentimental to excess or in affectation.' Again we are faced with a judgement call and must keep a sharp eye on our outpourings to insure they are not overly gooey. The intellectual elite probably believe that most of the lyrics songwriters create are 'doggerel' of one kind or another--that is to say 'trivial"......the young songwriter has now been warned about the implacable nature of the enemy. Under a rather large umbrella, preferred twentieth-century taste in art of all kinds has been characterized by a kind of detachment, or sangfroid. It is simply not chic to be carried away in one's emotional reaction to a subject. All serious communication or complaint must be carefully wrapped in a protective coating of irony and/or satire.

Many tourists visit Athens without ever venturing beyond the Plaka (Old Town) and the ancient zone. With limited time, this is not a bad plan, as greater Athens offers few sights (other than the excellent National Archaeological Museum). But for a more authentic taste of the city, check out the trendy Psyrri district—right next door to the Plaka—with its dilapidated-chic hipster dining and nightlife scene.

The standard freak show chic bullshit which had beset the generation after mine thanks to a string of wildly successful reality shows centering on competitive body modification. I’d had fun watching Manual Mutants and Oddfellas when they first started, but then The League of Zeroes came along and made things too grotesque. They lost me when Rectal Rachelle died on the table during her ass-neck implant surgery.

Consumption was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth-century manners. It became rude to eat heartily. It was glamorous to look sickly. “Chopin was tubercular at a time when good health was not chic,” Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in 1913. “It was fashionable to be pale and drained; Princess Belgiojoso strolled along the boulevards … pale as death in person.” Saint-Saëns was right to connect an artist, Chopin, with the most celebrated femme fatale of the period, who did a great deal to popularize the tubercular look. The TB-influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks—at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly a matter of image. (“One can never be too rich. One can never be too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor once said.) Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The tubercular look had to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding. “I cough continually!” Marie Bashkirtsev wrote in the once widely read Journal, which was published, after her death at twenty-four, in 1887. “But for a wonder, far from making me look ugly, this gives me an air of languor that is very becoming.” What was once the fashion for aristocratic femmes fatales and aspiring young artists became, eventually, the province of fashion as such. Twentieth-century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

El peor dolor de todos es el que no se ve. Ese que es tan profundo que intentas a toda costa no pensar en él. El que vuelve en los peores momentos para hacerte sentir que eres débil. Que nunca podrás superarlo.

She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks.

A veces, los hijos te los pone la vida por delante cuando ya han sido gestados por otras mujeres. A veces, a los hijos los encuentras en el camino y basta un verano para crear un lazo que ya nada ni nadie puede romper.

In Plain Sight by Stewart Stafford How can I show the real me? My voice breaking as I speak, Parched hope's cracked lips, Delphic in this solitary chic. Vitriol cannot reach my shore, The purge reveals little to hide, Or does rage fester within me? A cannibal cheerleader inside. No father around guiding me, Burnt by mother's acid divide, Cataracts of persona non grata, A transient hat tipped in a lie. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Me acuerdo entonces del consejo que me dio mi padre hace años: «Tienes que amenazar a tus primos y hermanos con algo que puedas cumplir, Mandarlos al Everest de una patada no es realista, hijo, y lo que no es realista, no da miedo.»

Porque a veces es mucho más fácil coger a un completo desconocido, mirarlo a la cara y contarle qué te atormenta. Es como meter secretos dentro de una pompa de jabón. Se ira y se levará tus palabras lejos, donde no puedan hacerte daño.

I Feel Love,” by Donna Summer, and this had a profound influence on how I perceived music from that point on. Additionally, it led me toward a greater appreciation of disco; Chic were now filed next to the Clash in my album collection. These elements, merged with many other stylistic references, formed the basic blueprint for Duran Duran: the raw energy of punk, disco rhythms, electro pulses, and the panache of glam rock, which was already deeply embedded in our consciousness.

A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it’s in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That’s the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful—they are goddesses—and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser’s name? Paris. C’est normal.

The TV screen switched back to a picture of the crime scene, just in time to capture footage of my bod being police escorted out of the building, my shirt unbuttoned sufficiently for the entire State of Israel to know that I wear pick lace, push-up bras.

Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

The true act of blasphemy is achieved more by violating certain standards of dress than by political dissent, as Herbert Spencer proclaimed. You may think you are protesting social inequity or sexism by wearing poverty-chic or gas station elegance. Patched, faded, ragged, stained, wrinkled or drab. If you can’t exercise a keen sense of innovation or re-creation, it may have dawned on you to wear a uniform. Perhaps a frayed and patched mechanic’s jumpsuit or some other frayed uniform of the dehumanized. Who says 1984 hasn’t come home to roost?

«All the Amazon guys around Seattle were also aware of the trend. They all knew that, someday, European haute couture would sell online. The problem was that feat couldn’t be done by anybody from Amazon. Because Amazon guys were hacker geeks and cheesy hicks. Amazon had been invented to sell sci-fi books. The least chic thing in the world. The European couture biz would never go anywhere near a dorky sci-fi geek like Jeff Bezos. As for Jeff himself, Jeff would much rather conquer outer space with his private rocket than ever dress the First Lady of France.»

but the officers danced assiduously, especially one of them who had spent six weeks in Paris, where he had mastered various daring interjections of the kind of—'zut,' 'Ah, fichtr-re,' 'pst, pst, mon bibi,' and such. He pronounced them to perfection with genuine Parisian chic, and at the same time he said 'si j'aurais' for 'si j'avais,' 'absolument' in the sense of 'absolutely,' expressed himself, in fact, in that Great Russo-French jargon which the French ridicule so when they have no reason for assuring us that we speak French like angels, 'comme des anges.

Functional, elegant, outrageous or wacky: the choice is yours. The capital’s decidedly nonmainstream chic is best explored by browsing the vast variety of design shops that spatter its centre. Whether examining iconic 20th-century Finnish forms in the flagship emporia of brands such as Iittala, Marimekko and Artek, or tracking down the cutting-edge and just plain weird in the creative Punavuori backstreets in the heart of its Design District, you’re sure to find something you didn’t know you needed, but just can’t do without. And yes, they can arrange shipping.

The responsibility/fault fallacy allows people to pass off the responsibility for solving their problems to others. This ability to alleviate responsibility through blame gives people a temporary high and a feeling of moral righteousness. Unfortunately, one side effect of the Internet and social media is that it’s become easier than ever to push responsibility—for even the tiniest of infractions—onto some other group or person. In fact, this kind of public blame/shame game has become popular; in certain crowds it’s even seen as “cool.” The public sharing of “injustices” garners far more attention and emotional outpouring than most other events on social media, rewarding people who are able to perpetually feel victimized with ever-growing amounts of attention and sympathy. “Victimhood chic” is in style on both the right and the left today, among both the rich and the poor. In fact, this may be the first time in human history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly victimized simultaneously. And they’re all riding the highs of the moral indignation that comes along with it. Right now, anyone who is offended about anything—whether it’s the fact that a book about racism was assigned in a university class, or that Christmas trees were banned at the local mall, or the fact that taxes were raised half a percent on investment funds—feels as though they’re being oppressed in some way and therefore deserve to be outraged and to have a certain amount of attention. The current media environment both encourages and perpetuates these reactions because, after all, it’s good for business. The writer and media commentator Ryan Holiday refers to this as “outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet another part of the population. This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from real societal problems. It’s no wonder we’re more politically polarized than ever before. The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. The more people there are who proclaim themselves victims over tiny infractions, the harder it becomes to see who the real victims actually are. People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good. As political cartoonist Tim Kreider put it in a New York Times op-ed: “Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure.” But

Elizabeth herself has no time for honesty right now. She doesn’t think it would serve any purpose to tell Martha her real opinions, and she already knows what Martha thinks about her. But in any contest she knows she would win. Martha has only one vocabulary, the one she uses; but Elizabeth has two. The genteel chic she’s acquired, which is a veneer but a useful one: insinuating, flexible, accommodating. And another language altogether, older, harder, left over from those streets and schoolyards on the far edge of gentility where she fought it out after each one of her parents’ quick decampments.

Puede que Liam y yo consiguiéramos ser prácticamente uno durante muchos años, pero en aquel instante, mirándonos a los ojos en el salón de sus padres después de tanto tiempo, fuimos dos desconocidos intentando averiguar cuánto de lo que recordábamos del otro quedaba aún en pie. Y cuánto había muerto en el camino.

Oh,for God's sake." Frankie rolled his eyes under his green porkpie hat. The color perfectly matched the VINCE stitched onto the pocket of his brown bowling shirt. Frankie is all about vintage chic. "Give me the book.I'll throw it at him." Frankie's daring. He's also conversant in postmodern art and tells me he loves me on a regular basis. He does lie like a rug,but only to people he doesn't care about, like the gym teacher. "Badminton?" he gasped once, early in our friendship, when I assumed I'd found a gym partner (him) who would actually talk to me. "And risk this nose?" It's a good nose. In a really, really good face.

But Hillgarth had already come across him in a very different guise. In October 1941, he had bailed Dudley Clarke out of a Spanish jail. There was nothing so odd in that. Hillgarth was often bailing people out of jail. What made the occasion special, and acutely embarrassing, was Colonel Clarke’s outfit: he was dressed as a woman. A Spanish police photograph shows this master of deception in high heels, lipstick, pearls, and a chic cloche hat, his hands, in long opera gloves, demurely folded in his lap. He was not even supposed to be in Spain, but in Egypt. In spite of the colonel’s predicament, in the photo he seems thoroughly comfortable, even insouciant.

She only purchased what she would need for that day. She preferred to visit specialty shops like the local pâtisserie, charcuterie, or boulangerie instead of going to one giant supermarché, because the quality of goods she got at the specialty shops was superior to what one would find in a supermarket, and she got more exercise by going to more than one shop.

The two nieces of the deceased dowager in Connecticut were delighted with the prices Kate suggested for the items she wanted, and the clothes were delivered to Still Fabulous the following week. Kate was there when they came in, dropped off by a chauffeur with a van. She and Jessica, her assistant, checked them again, entered them in their inventory, and put them upstairs to show their most favored clients. Kate had already contacted several of them, and the editor from Harper’s Bazaar had said she wanted two of the fur coats. They were Revillon and in perfect condition. One was a shaved dark blue mink that had been worn only a few times, and the other was an incredibly chic skunk. She was picking them up in a few days.

The absolute success of these two movements is such that at this stage, "indie" and "yuppie" are meaningless designators. The yuppie aesthetic of connoisseurship has infiltrated everywhere and now there is only--for many of us--either luxury gelato or food made of chemical waste. Ikea, Martha Stewart, and Whole Foods make yuppiedom no longer a chic and extravagant choice but an enforced mode. It's either that or eat at a toxic toilet such as McDonald's. The indie aesthetic is likewise de rigueur. H&M, Urban Outfitters, and American Apparel sell the floppy "Brit on a holiday" look to all Americans. Radiohead and Arcade Fire music is blasted from speakers at stadiums. For many poor souls, there is no alternative to the alternative.

Dorothy miró dentro de aquel gorro, y vio algunas palabras escritas en el forro. <>. Así que leyó las instrucciones con mucho cuidado antes de ponérselo en la cabeza. -¡Ep-pe, pep-pe, cra-que! -exclamó, apoyada en su pie izquierdo. -¿Qué has dicho? -preguntó el Espantapájaros, porque no sabía lo que estaba haciendo Dorothy. -¡Ji-la, jo-la, lo-la! -Dorothy siguió, esta vez apoyada en su pie derecho. -¡Hola! -contestó el Hombre de Hojalata tranquilamente. -¡Ci-za, ce-za, chic! -completó Dorothy, ahora apoyándose en ambos pies. Y con esto terminó de pronunciar el hechizo. De inmediato se oyó un parloteo muy fuerte, acompañado del aleteo de la bandada de unos monos voladores acercándose. El Rey se inclinó hasta el suelo ante Dorothy y preguntó: -¿Cuáles son sus órdenes?

La felicidad no es un estado permanente, no va a quedarse para siempre porque siempre faltará algo. No puedo encerrarla en un bote de cristal y ponerla en el quicio de la ventana, como hacía de pequeña con la arena de la playa cuando íbamos de vacaciones. La felicidad no puedes quedártela para siempre porque los seres humanos somos tan estúpidos que necesitamos que algo vaya mal para valorar lo bueno cuando llega.

energy. My beauty is radiant. I am a calm and patient parent. Today I will relish the small things. Today I will make my home beautiful. I choose to eat healthful foods today. My home is a sanctuary. I can remain effortlessly in the present moment. My creativity is inspiring. I can get through any situation with grace. No matter what happens today, I will cultivate inner peace. I can change the world. All is well.

Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates” (p. 695). How do we manage to do it? Or how could we? “Well, one way is that performance of these standards has become part of what we understand as a decent, civilized human life” (p. 696). The mechanism then becomes shame: to not meet these expectations is not only to be abnormal but almost inhuman. One can see this at work in a heightened version of holier-than-Thou: You don’t recycle (gasp)? You use plastic shopping bags (horror)? You don’t drive a Prius (eek!)? “You won’t wear the ribbon?!”44 This has to also be seen in light of Taylor’s earlier analysis of the sociality of mutual display and the self-consciousness it generates (pp. 481-82). So what we get is justice chic.

I want to proudly acknowledge all the women we love: married mothers, single mothers, new mothers, "act brand new" mothers, patient mothers, "lose it in a hot second" mothers, older mothers, the "Yeahh, I still got it" mothers, working mothers, stay at home mothers, "wish I could stay at home" mothers, afro chic mothers, relaxed hair mothers, "new weave every 3 months" mothers, "make a weave last 6 months" mothers, the "all the neighborhood kids stay at my house" mother, the "go play in your own dam house" mother, cook every night mothers, "you better learn how to cook" mothers, old navy flip flop mothers, stiletto mothers, the "money is tight" mothers, "I'm tight with my money" mothers, throw-back mothers, throwed off mothers, the "Life Is Not Complicated, You Are" and "The Other 99 TYMES" loving mothers, and definitely all the "Girl, we bout to go hard at the next Sol-Caritas" show mothers!! We love you all! Happy Mother’s Day

Asia so degraded, so corrupted by the colonial era and by its own crowdedness that it can only choose between depravity and the puritan orgy of communIsm. The women of Thailand are so beautiful that they have become the hostesses of the Western world, sought after and desired everywhere for their grace, which is that of a submissive and affectionate femininity of nubile slaves - now dressed by Dior - an astounding sexual come-on in a gaze which looks you straight in the eye and a potential acquiescence to your every whim. In short, the fulfilment of Western man's dreams. Thai women seem spontaneously to embody the sexuality of the Arabian Nights, like the Nubian slaves in ancient Rome. Thai men, on the other hand, seem sad and forlorn; their physiques are not in tune with world chic, while their women's are privileged to be the currently fashionable form of ethnic beauty. What is left for these men but to assist in the universal promotion of their women for high-class prostitution?

In this age of consumer activism, pinpoint marketing, and unlimited and immediate information, we want the impossible: products and producers that will assure us that we are fashionable, and that don’t pollute, harm animals, or contain weird chemicals, that run on alternative energy, pay their workers good salaries, recycle their scraps, use natural ingredients, buy from local suppliers, donate generously to charity, donate in particular to their neighborhoods, and don’t throw their weight around by lobbying. (Or maybe they should lobby for the right causes?)

You got to be rich to go mucking around in Africa. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and my things belong together. It's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty; and even that's risky. They only look right on the really old girls. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds. He's been put together with care, his brown hair and bullfighter's figure had an exactness, a perfection, like an apple, an orange, something nature has made just right. Added to this, as decoration, were an English suite and a brisk cologne and what is still more unlatin, a bashful manner. Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot. Never love a wild thing. You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they are strong enough to run into the woods. Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany, but almost.

Oh, well, I know that Libby." He rolls his eyes. "I've never met anyone more committed to, well, life that you are." "Really?" I swallow rather hard. "Even though I keep on screwing my life up?" "Sweetheart, precisely because you keep screwing your life up! I mean look at you. You had the crappiest career eve in the world before you turned everything around and became this shit-hot jewellery designer. You set your head on fire with a cigarette and ended up being utterly adored by the guy who had to put you out... And I do adore you, by the way," he adds, in a nonchalant sort of way, "in case you ever had wondered. Oh, and then there's your love of life. Loads of girls would have just sunk...

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

First off, as we saw above, ignorant people act according to the demands of their society rather than following their own tastes and inclinations. As to how they will entertain themselves, what films they will see and what restaurants, cafés or nightclubs they’ll go out to, they base their decisions on their society’s standards. They think that doing the chic and fashionable things that society approves of will earn them position, importance and respect in the eyes of others. For example, to be seen in a popular nightclub “where everyone goes” is very important for their self-respect. Even if they feel uncomfortable there, being able to tell colleagues or friends the next day that they had a good time at that popular place allows them to put on airs. When we look at these places of entertainment, we see that nothing in them appeals to the human spirit; rather, they make people weary and anxious. Most of these places are very crowded and full of stale air, due to the many people smoking. Given the noise, it is hard to hear what other people are saying. No matter how good the music is or how delicious the food is, the crowd and the noise make it impossible to enjoy them. Even if this place was invigorating, bright, clean, and well-appointed, the result would be the same, because the people who go there do not follow the Qur’an’s morality and therefore are not content. In an environment filled with envy and rivalry, people cannot really enjoy themselves. This can take place only in a natural, intimate, friendly, and secure environment. However, they can hardly be content if they are constantly looking for faults in others and humiliate other people by criticizing their shortcomings. It’s obvious that people who socialize with one another mainly to vent their envy and rivalry cannot enjoy any of their shared meals, their conversations, listening to music together or dancing. Instead, they will totally wear themselves out, both spiritually and physically. This is a fact that they themselves cannot deny.

First off, as we saw above, ignorant people act according to the demands of their society rather than following their own tastes and inclinations. As to how they will entertain themselves, what films they will see and what restaurants, cafés or nightclubs they’ll go out to, they base their decisions on their society’s standards. They think that doing the chic and fashionable things that society approves of will earn them position, importance and respect in the eyes of others. For example, to be seen in a popular nightclub “where everyone goes” is very important for their self-respect. Even if they feel uncomfortable there, being able to tell colleagues or friends the next day that they had a good time at that popular place allows them to put on airs. When we look at these places of entertainment, we see that nothing in them appeals to the human spirit; rather, they make people weary and anxious. Most of these places are very crowded and full of stale air, due to the many people smoking. Given the noise, it is hard to hear what other people are saying. No matter how good the music is or how delicious the food is, the crowd and the noise make it impossible to enjoy them. Even if this place was invigorating, bright, clean, and well-appointed, the result would be the same, because the people who go 36 THOSE WHO EXHAUST ALL THEIR PLEASURES IN THIS LIFE there do not follow the Qur’an’s morality and therefore are not content. In an environment filled with envy and rivalry, people cannot really enjoy themselves. This can take place only in a natural, intimate, friendly, and secure environment. However, they can hardly be content if they are constantly looking for faults in others and humiliate other people by criticizing their shortcomings. It’s obvious that people who socialize with one another mainly to vent their envy and rivalry cannot enjoy any of their shared meals, their conversations, listening to music together or dancing. Instead, they will totally wear themselves out, both spiritually and physically. This is a fact that they themselves cannot deny.

When we feel frustrated, our first inclination is to change whatever isn't working for us. We can try to accomplish this by making demands on others, attempting to alter our own behavior, or by a variety of other means. Having moved us to action, frustration will have done its duty. The problem is that life brings many frustrations that are beyond us: we cannot alter time or change the past or undo what we have done. We cannot avoid death, make good experiences last, cheat on reality, make something work that won't, or induce someone to cooperate with us when they may not feel like it. We are unable to always make things fair or to guarantee our own or another's safety. Of all these unavoidable frustrations the most threatening for children is that they cannot make themselves psychologically and emotionally secure. These extremely important needs — to be wanted, invited, liked, loved, and special — are out of their control. As long as we parents are successful in holding on to our children, they need not be confronted with this deep futility, fundamental to human existence. It is not that we can forever protect them from reality, but children should not have to face challenges they are not ready for. Peer-oriented children are not so lucky. Given the degree of frustration they experience, they become desperate to change things, to somehow secure their attachments. Some become compulsively demanding in their relationships with one another. Some become preoccupied with making themselves more attractive in the eyes of their peers — hence the large increase in the demand for cosmetic surgery among young people and hence, too, their obsession with being fashionably chic at earlier and earlier ages. Some become bossy, others charmers or entertainers. Some bend over backward, turning into psychological pretzels to preserve a sense of closeness with their peers. Perpetually dissatisfied, these children are out of touch with the source of their discontent and rail against a reality they have no control over. Of course, the same dynamics may also occur in children's relationships with adults — and all too often do — but they are absolutely guaranteed to be present in peer-oriented relationships. No matter how much the peer-oriented child attempts to change things by making demands, altering her appearance, making things work for others; no matter how she tones down her true personality or compromises herself, she will find only fleeting relief. She'll find no lasting relief from the unrelenting attachment frustration, and there will be the added frustration of continually hitting against this wall of impossibility. Her frustration, rather than coming to an end, moves one step closer to being transformed into aggression.

The translucent, golden punch tastes velvety, voluptuous and not off-puttingly milky. Under its influence, I stage a party for my heroines in my imagination, and in my flat. It's less like the glowering encounter I imagined between Cathy Earnshaw and Flora Poste, and more like the riotous bash in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not everyone is going to like milk punch. So there are also dirty martinis, and bagels and baklava, and my mother's masafan, Iraqi marzipan. The Little Mermaid is in the bath, with her tail still on, singing because she never did give up her soaring voice. Anne Shirley and Jo March are having a furious argument about plot versus character, gesticulating with ink-stained hands. Scarlett is in the living room, her skirts taking up half the space, trying to show Lizzy how to bat her eyelashes. Lizzy is laughing her head off ut Scarlett has acquired a sense of humour, and doesn't mind a bit. Melanie is talking book with Esther Greenwood, who has brought her baby and also the proofs of her first poetry collection. Franny and Zooey have rolled back the rug and are doing a soft shoe shuffle in rhinestone hats. Lucy Honeychurch is hammering out some Beethoven (in this scenario I have a piano. A ground piano. Well, why not?) Marjorie Morningstar is gossiping about directors with Pauline and Posy Fossil. They've come straight from the shows they're in, till in stage make-up and full of stories. Petrova, in a leather aviator jacket, goggles pushed back, a chic scarf knotted around her neck, is telling the thrilling story of her latest flight and how she fixed an engine fault in mid-air. Mira, in her paint-stained jeans and poncho, is listening, fascinated, asking a thousand questions. Mildred has been persuaded to drink a tiny glass of sherry, then another tiny glass, then another and now she and Lolly are doing a wild, strange dance in the hallway, stamping their feet, their hair flying wild and electric. Lolly's cakes, in the shape of patriarchs she hates, are going down a treat. The Dolls from the Valley are telling Flora some truly scandalous and unrepeatable stories, and she is firmly advising them to get rid of their men and find worthier paramours. Celie is modelling trousers of her own design and taking orders from the Lace women; Judy is giving her a ten-point plan on how to expand her business to an international market. She is quite drunk but nevertheless the plan seems quite coherent, even if it is punctuated by her bellowing 'More leopard print, more leopard print!' Cathy looks tumultuous and on the edge of violent weeping and just as I think she's going to storm out or trash my flat, Jane arrives, late, with an unexpected guest. Cathy turns in anticipation: is it Heathcliff? Once I would have joined her but now I'm glad it isn't him. It's a better surprise. It's Emily's hawk. Hero or Nero. Jane's found him at last, and has him on her arm, perched on her glove; small for a bird of prey, he is dashing and patrician looking, brown and white, observing the room with dark, flinty eyes. When Cathy sees him, she looks at Jane and smiles. And in the kitchen is a heroine I probably should have had when I was four and sitting on my parents' carpet, wishing it would fly. In the kitchen is Scheherazade.