Chronicles Of Wasted Time Quotes

When life brings you mountains, you don’t waste your time asking why; you spend your time climbing over them.

Time spent on preparation is seldom wasted.

I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. He whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.

She felt the press of time as keenly as Kai had. She’d already wasted too much of it. Kissing Thorne in the atrium. Hiding in that cabinet. Dodging in and out of corridors like a lost rabbit.

I have never been able to understand why perfectly sensible people waste time being wittily obscure instead of just saying what they want and going on about their business.

We were none of us particularly drunk. But then again, none of us were particularly sober either. Our exact positioning between these two points is a matter of pointless conjecture, and I will waste no time on it.

lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays…

[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind.

I'm not falling anymore. That's what L says, and she's right. I guess you could say I'm flying. We both are. And I'm pretty sure somewhere up there in the real blue sky and carpenter bee greatness, Amma's flying, too. We all are, depending on how you look at it. Flying or falling, it's up to us. Because the sky isn't really made of blue paint, and there aren't just two kinds of people in this world, the stupid and the stuck. We only think there are. Don't waste your time with either-with anything. It's not worth it.

We're running out of time, he said. As if time were the kind of thing you could run out of, as if it were measured into bowls that were handed to us at birth and if we ate too much or too fast or right before jumping into the water then our time would be lost, wasted, already spent. But time is beyond our finite comprehension. It's endless, it exists outside of us; we cannot run out of it or lose track of it or find a way to hold on to it. Time goes on even when we do not. We have plenty of time, is what Castle should have said. We have all the time in the world, is what he should have said to me. But he didn't because what he meant tick tock is that our time tick tock is shifting. It's hurtling forward heading in an entirely new direction slamming face-first into something else and tick tick tick tick tick it's almost time for war

But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with our friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, then the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.

She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age.

Tobias, knowing nothing about Shanti, couldn’t contain his displeasure at a woman tagging along. He kept his distaste to huffs, however, being a well-versed fighter—he knew better than to piss off the Captain. Shanti, knowing better than to waste time, didn’t punch him in the throat. All in all, they got along.

Some clever children don’t discover how bright they are until after they’ve left school,’ continued Mr Holcombe, ‘and then spend the rest of their lives regretting the wasted years.

Good-bye, good-bye,' muttered Gwystyl. 'I hate to see you waste your time, not to mention your lives. But that's the way of it, I suppose. Here today, gone tomorrow, and what's anyone to do about it? Good-bye. I hope we meet again. But not soon. Good-bye.

Any religious expression of truth, however bizzare or uncouth, is more sufficing than any secular one, however elegant and intellectually brilliant. Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell. As it might be pigs in a crowded sty, jostling and shoving to bury their snouts in the trough; until one of them momentarily lifts his snout upwards in the air, in so doing expressing the hope of all enlightenment to come; breaking off from his guzzling to point with his lifted snout to where the angels and archangels gather round God's throne.

If the monkey really wanted to get the weasel, he would’ve stopped wasting time and burned down the mulberry bush.

I read of a Buddhist teacher who developed Alzheimer's. He had retired from teaching because his memory was unreliable, but he made one exception for a reunion of his former students. When he walked onto the stage, he forgot everything, even where he was and why. However, he was a skilled Buddhist and he simply began sharing his feelings with the crowd. He said, "I am anxious. I feel stupid. I feel scared and dumb. I am worried that I am wasting everyone's time. I am fearful. I am embarrassing myself." After a few minutes of this, he remembered his talk and proceeded without apology. The students were deeply moved, not only by his wise teachings, but also by how he handled his failings. There is a Buddhist saying, "No resistance, no demons.

The first humans were especially ungrateful. After the birth of the sun and the moon, they asked for stars. After the crops rose from the ground, they asked for beasts to fill the fields. After some time, the god of the ground, weary of their demands, thought it best to destroy them and begin again with humbler beings. So it goes that the god of the sky thought the first humans too clever to waste, and he agreed to keep them in the sky with the promise that they would never again interfere with the ground. --The History of Internment, Chapter 1

It is unwise to waste in thought what could be earned and secured in action.

It is irony, is it not, that you live so short a time, and waste so much of it being stupid?

[T]he whole character of secret Intelligence ... is that nothing should ever be done simply if there are devious ways of doing it.

Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her

Austerity has always made me happy, and its opposite, miserable. I find it strange that, knowing this, I should so often have inflicted upon myself the nausea of over-indulgence, and had to fight off the black dogs of satiety. Human beings, as Pascal points out, are peculiar in that they avidly pursue ends they know will bring them no satisfaction; gorge themselves with food which cannot nourish and with pleasures which cannot please. I am a prize example.

When you ran that roof race with me you started with one stocking marked, a loose row of bullion on your hoqueton, and your hair needing a cut. Your manners, social and personal, derive directly from the bakehouse; your living quarters, any time I have seen them, have been untidy and ill-cleaned. In the swordplay just now you cut consistently to the left, a habit so remarkable that you must have been warned time and again; and you cannot parry a coup de Jarnac. I tried you with the same feint for it three times tonight.... These are professional matters, Robin. To succeed as you want, you have to be precise; you have to have polish; you have to carry polish and precision in everything you do. You have no time to sigh over seigneuries and begrudge other people their gifts. Lack of genius never held anyone back,' said Lymond. 'Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that. You never did work with your whole brain and your whole body at being an Archer; and you ended neither soldier nor seigneur, but a dried-out huddle of grudges strung cheek to cheek on a withy.

Grown up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.

To succeed as you want, you have to be precise; you have to have polish; you have to carry polish and precision into everything you do. You have no time to sigh over seigneuries and begrudge other people their gifts. Lack of genius never held anyone back,’ said Lymond. ‘Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.

I hope they spent those last few hours well. I hope they didn’t waste them on mindless tasks: kindling the evening fire and cutting vegetables for dinner. I hope they sang together, as they so often did. I hope they retired to our wagon and spent time in each other’s arms. I hope they lay near each other afterward and spoke softly of small things. I hope they were together, busy with loving each other, until the end came. It is a small hope, and pointless really. They are just as dead either way. Still, I hope.

Love is precious, and shouldn’t be wasted on every passing whim, or it will mean nothing by the time you truly wish to share it with someone who matters.” I said softly. Silvers, Shayne (2012-10-08). Obsidian Son: A Novel In The Nate Temple Supernatural Thriller Series (The Temple Chronicles Book 1) (p. 194). Argento Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Learning from experience means, in practice, learning from suffering; the only schoolmaster. Everyone knows that this is so, even though they try to persuade themselves and their fellows otherwise. Only so is it possible to understand how it came about that, through all the Christian centuries, people have been prepared to accept the Cross, ostensibly a symbol of suffering, as the true image and guarantee of their creator's love and concern for them. To climb the highest, stoniest mountain to set it on its peak, to carry it to the remotest, darkest, most forbidding corners of the earth; to build great cathedrals to glorify it; to find in it the inspiration for the most sublime achievements and noblest lives over the last two thousand years.

The weakest link in any chain of security is not the technology itself, but the person operating it; iron gates have no compassion to appeal to, nor fears to exploit, nor insecurities to use to one’s advantage. They are, however, operated by us – by beings of unlimited vulnerability and limited energy. Why waste time brute-forcing what can be easily circumvented by a clever façade and a crimson tongue?

I say to you, place your trust in the God who loves you and all will be well. Do not waste the time given you in fretting over events you cannot control. If you only let him, God will amend all. Have just a little faith.

Now I often think of the first time I received artillery fire, and the subsequent obliteration of the enemy observation post. I'll never know how many men manned the OP, but in memory I fix the number at two, and though at the time I was angry that the pompus captain took the handset from me and stole m y kills, I have lately been thankful he insisted on calling the fire mission, ans sometimes when I am feeling hopeful or even religious, I think that buy taking my two kills the pompous captain handed me life, some extra moments of living for myself or that I can offer others, though I have no idea to use or disuse these extra moments, or if I've wasted them already.

In worldly terms, she was totally innocent; Eve before the fall, with no knowledge of good and evil. She made one realize how necessary the Fall was; without it, there would have been no human drama, and so no literature, no art, no suffering, no religion, no laughter, no joy, no sin and no redemption. Only camera work (towards which Mrs. Dobbs's painting was reaching) and sociology (which her sister, Beatrice Webb, may be said to have invented).

It wasn't easy for the two of us to build something out of nothing. I had that tendency toward solitude common only to children. When trying to accomplish something serious, I liked to do it myself. Having to check things out with other people and get them to understand seemed to me a great waste of time and energy when it was a lot easier to work alone in silence....Still, little, by little, the two of us learned to devote our bodies and minds to this newly created being we called "our home.

If Solange was't trying to get herself killed, Lucy was. I was beginning to think that all of my training wasn't actually about killing vampires anymore, it was about saving my girlfriend and her best friend from themselves. And it was a full-time job.

All this was only, in my father's estimation, a means; the end was the Earthly Paradise, the translation of William Morris's 'News from Nowhere' into 'News from Somewhere.' Then Whitman's sense of abounding joy in his own and all creation's sensuality would sweep away the paltry backwaters of bourgeois morality; the horrors of industrial ugliness which Ruskin so eloquently denounced would dissolve, and die forgotten as a dream (phrases from hymns still washed about in my father's mind) as slums were transformed into garden cities, and the belching smoke of hateful furnaces into the cool elegance of electric power. As for the ferocious ravings of my namesake, Carlyle, about the pettifogging nature of modern industrial man's pursuits and expectations -- all that would be corrected as he was induced to spend ever more of his increasing leisure in cultural and craft activities; in the enjoyment of music, literature and art. It was pefectly true -- a point that Will Straughan was liable to bring up at the Saturday evening gatherings -- that on the present form the new citizenry might be expected to have a marked preference for dog-racing over chamber music or readings from 'Paradise Lost,' but, my father would loftily point out, education would change all that. Education was, in fact, the lynchpin of the whole operation; the means whereby the Old Adam of the Saturday night booze-up, and fondness for Marie Lloyd in preference to Beatrice Webb, would be cast off, and the New Man be born as potential fodder for third Programmes yet to come.

I wish that some time, long ago, something had not been said that was said, or something done that was not done. Something, had we known, which might have let him grow differently, something which would have seen him become another man than the bitter, bent thing I saw up there. It is best now if he is dead. But it is a waste of something that might have been.

I hope they spent those last few hours well. I hope they didn’t waste them on mindless tasks: kindling the evening fire and cutting vegetables for dinner. I hope they sang together, as they so often did. I hope they retired to our wagon and spent time in each other’s arms. I hope they lay near each other afterward and spoke softly of small things. I hope they were together, busy with loving each other, until the end came.

When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme, In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have expressed Even such a beauty as you master now. So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring; And for they looked but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing: For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Ready yourselves!' Mullone heard himself say, which was strange, he thought, for he knew his men were prepared. A great cry came from beyond the walls that were punctuated by musket blasts and Mullone readied himself for the guns to leap into action. Mullone felt a tremor. The ground shook and then the first rebels poured through the gates like an oncoming tide. Mullone saw the leading man; both hands gripping a green banner, face contorted with zeal. The flag had a white cross in the centre of the green field and the initials JF below it. John Fitzstephen. Then, there were more men behind him, tens, then scores. And then time seemed to slow. The guns erupted barely twenty feet from them. Later on, Mullone would remember the great streaks of flame leap from the muzzles to lick the air and all of the charging rebels were shredded and torn apart in one terrible instant. Balls ricocheted on stone and great chunks were gouged out by the bullets. Blood sprayed on the walls as far back as the arched gateway, limbs were shorn off, and Mullone watched in horror as a bloodied head tumbled down the sloped street towards the barricade. 'Jesus sweet suffering Christ!' Cahill gawped at the carnage as the echo of the big guns resonated like a giant's beating heart. Trooper O'Shea bent to one side and vomited at the sight of the twitching, bleeding and unrecognisable lumps that had once been men. A man staggered with both arms missing. Another crawled back to the gate with a shattered leg spurting blood. The stench of burnt flesh and the iron tang of blood hung ripe and nauseating in the oppressive air. One of the low wooden cabins by the wall was on fire. A blast of musketry outside the walls rattled against the stonework and a redcoat toppled backwards onto the cabin's roof as the flames fanned over the wood. 'Here they come again! Ready your firelocks! Do not waste a shot!' Johnson shouted in a steady voice as the gateway became thick with more rebels. He took a deep breath. 'God forgive us,' Corporal Brennan said. 'Liberty or death!' A rebel, armed with a blood-stained pitchfork, shouted over-and-over.

He says the witch was dressed as a man and wore her hair also like a man's. Not only that, but in the boy's fevered dream, she fought better than any soldier. As I said, beyond belief." The forester shrugged in apology for wasting his lord's time. The corners of Gilliam's mouth lifted in sudden respect, and he touched the pin at his shoulder. "She did it all alone," he said quietly. "My lord?" the forester asked. "Hobbe, this is no dream. The boy has indeed seen my bride." Hobbe blinked. "Condolences, my lord.

We were none of us particularly drunk. But then again, none of us were particularly sober, either. Our exact positioning between those two points is a matter of pointless conjecture, and I will waste no time on it.

You may not care what happens to the rest of the world. But I do. This is bigger than my life, than all of our lives. If grandfather Enoch prophesied the truth and Betenos and I are the lineage of the Seed, then why would you give up? Would you dishonor the faith of the one you loved most on this earth?” That got through Methuselah’s wall of silence. Lamech was right. His son was absolutely right. Methuselah had placed his faith in this world and not in Elohim’s promised world to come. He had relied on his senses for so long that he had worn them out. He had lost his taste, his smell, his touch; he had become blind, deaf and dumb. He had neglected prayer because Elohim seemed so distant and his prayers almost futile. He had come to believe that things got done because he got up and did them, not because of Elohim’s solicited favor. Since Elohim was going to do what he was going to do anyway, then why bother wasting time talking to him about it? He had become a self-made man who lifted himself up by his own sandal straps. And it was all a self-deluded lie. He had missed the whole point that his wife had been trying to tell him: he distrusted Elohim because of the betrayal of the gods. He had lived a life of self-reliance rather than a life of faith. He had sought desperately for significance in this world. But he now understood his significance would be as the protector of Elohim’s Seed, not the fulfiller of his own.

I’ve been so busy,” Carrie protested. “I barely have time to do the things I have to do.” “Nonsense.” Sarah leaned forward and fixed Carrie with her eyes. “You listen to me good, girl. You done got the healin’ gift, and you got it good. It ain’t nothin’ you done. It be a gift from God. But you better not let that gift go to waste. You got to stretch it. You got to work it. Dreams are like that, too. You got to stretch ‘em. You got to work ‘em. Most of the people in this world have dreams, but they too lazy to make ‘em come true. They want it to be easy. Big dreams don’t come easy, you hear me?” Carrie nodded, listening with all her heart. She

Consider this sweetheart, The only regret I have ever had is losing my chance with you all those years ago. By some miraculous twist of fate, we have a second chance, so if I want to show you every day that this chance isn't a waste of your time, I will.

Why would I waste my time with hate? What was done to me was unforgivable, of course. Completely unforgivable. Those who did it are no longer alive to be punished or to apologize. Even if they were and did, it would not undo what they did.

Look at you, so eager to get settled in your new routine. What a novelty. Most of my acquisitions tend to waste time whining about their fate. ‘Why am I here?,’ ‘Who are you?’,” the purple fellow mocked.

I hope they spent those last few hours well. I hope they didn’t waste them on mindless tasks: kindling the evening fire and cutting vegetables for dinner. I hope they sang together, as they so often did. I hope they retired to our wagon and spent time in each other’s arms. I hope they lay near each other afterward and spoke softly of small things. I hope they were together, busy with loving each other, until the end came. It

In the silence I felt it all unravelling, the audience waking with the dream unfinished, all my work ruined, wasted. And all the while burning inside me was the song, the song. The song! Without knowing what I did, I set my fingers back to the strings and fell deep into myself. Into years before, when my hands had calluses like stones and my music had come as easy as breathing. Back to the time I had played to make the sound of Wind Turning a Leaf on a lute with six strings... And then it was done. Raising my head to look at the room was like breaking the surface of the water for air. I came back into myself, found my hand bleeding and my body covered in sweat. Then the ending of the song struck me like a fist in my chest, as it always does, no matter where or when I listen to it. I buried my face in my hands and wept.

Lara, are you alright?" Keir asked, still seething. "I'm fine, belov—" "As if you really care!" Antas stood, and walked over to face Keir. "You, who have dallied with another, even as your so-called warprize attempts to claim you." Dallied? Did that mean what I thought it meant? I flushed, and then went cold at the idea that Keir would turn to another while— "Lower your hood, and show all how true you are to the one you would bond with." Antas pointed at Keir. "Do it now, warrior." There was absolute silence in the tent as Keir glared at Antas. But then his expression changed slightly, and his eyes crinkled in silent humor. Keir lifted his hands and lowered his hood to reveal a small purplish bruise on his neck. A love bite. Oh Goddess above. I blushed bright red, heat flooding my face. My love bite. Keir arched an eyebrow as the Elders reacted to the sight. Antas, however, was nearly foaming at the mouth. "You see? You see? He has broken faith with this Xyian even before she—" It took everything I had to say the words aloud before the entire Council of Elders. "I put that there." "Eh?" Antas twisted to face me. I drew a deep breath, and raised my voice. "That is my mark on his neck." As the group reacted to that, my blush deepened, if that was possible. Then I made the mistake of looking at Keir, and had to cover my mouth to prevent myself from laughing. He looked so smug. Simus was under no such handicap. He was howling with mirth. Antas was scowling, as were Essa and Wild Winds. "How so?" Antas snapped. "You have been kept apart from—" "Her bath." Amyu spoke. "It had to be during her bath." I looked over my shoulder to see that she was none too happy either. I turned back to face the Elders. "It was in my bath," I admitted. "Keir snuck in to see me." As one, the Eldest turned to glare at Keir. Keir shrugged. Simus laughed and slapped him on the back. "The skies favor the bold." Antas paused as a ripple of laughter swept the room again. "So you talked to Keir, despite our rules, despite our—" "We didn't waste time talking," I snapped right back, glaring at him. Then I realized what I'd announced to the room, and blushed bright red. "HEYLA!" Simus shouted. "Truly, the attraction between Warlord and Warprize is as the heat of the summer!

Foreword By Jonathan Aitken IN IT is one of the best books on prison life I have read. Jonathan Robinson writes with passion and authenticity of the time he served in HMPs Bedford and Hollesley Bay. Yet although his diary-based narrative of inmate life, his ear for dialogue and his humour combine to make a rattling good yarn, the importance of IN IT lies not in its chronicles of detail but in its crusading for reform. A former helicopter pilot who stole from his employer, Jonathan Robinson wastes

Hate you?" Paragon slowly digested her words before he spoke again. He did not turn to look at her, but kept his eyes focused on the river ahead of him as the ship moved steadily against the current. "Why would I waste my time with hate? What was done to me was unforgivable of course. Completely unforgivable. Those who did it are no longer alive to be punished or to apologize. Even if they were and did, it would not undo what they did. The torments I endured cannot be undone. The stolen future cannot be given back to me,

It’s times like these when the future is uncertain that we need to live our lives to the full. Don’t waste time in useless worry, dear Chana, fretting over what might never happen. Worry doesn’t change a single thing. Just live.

By removing the Bible from schools, we would be wasting so much time and money in punishing criminals and so little pains to prevent crime. Take the Bible out of our schools and there would be an explosion in crime. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

THERE CAME A time when there was great movement upon the Earth and above it, when the destiny of Men and Gods was hammered out upon the forge of Fate, when monstrous wars were brewed and mighty deeds were designed. And there rose up in this time, which was called the Age of the Young Kingdoms, heroes. Greatest of these heroes was a doom-driven adventurer who bore a crooning runeblade that he loathed. His name was Elric of Melniboné, king of ruins, lord of a scattered race that had once ruled the ancient world. Elric, sorcerer and swordsman, slayer of kin, despoiler of his homeland, white-faced albino, last of his line. Elric, who had come to Karlaak by the Weeping Waste and had married a wife in whom he found some peace, some surcease from the torment in him. And Elric, who had within him a greater destiny than he knew, now dwelt in Karlaak with Zarozinia, his wife, and his sleep was troubled, his dream dark, one brooding night in the Month of Anemone…

We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning. These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.

Our Archive is really what St Mary’s is all about. As Dr Bairstow always says – it’s important to have a true record of events. Not the political version, not the religious version, not the version put about by the winners – and definitely not the bought-and-paid-for version – but the actual, warts and all, correct version. Given the way History has been rewritten, reimagined or downright faked over the last hundred years or so, you can imagine how many people would like to get their hands on our Archive. To misrepresent, alter, amend or completely obliterate the inconvenient bits of History not quite in line with current fashionable thinking. And if that ever did happen, everything we had ever accomplished would be a complete waste of time because we wouldn’t be able to go back and do it again. There are no do-overs in History.

The seventies were crazy everywhere, but crazier in Los Angeles. It was the era of freewheeling drugs and sex, the rag end of the sixties. I refer to sprees, to strange couplings and triplings, to nights that started with beer and wine and ended with cocaine and capsules, to debaucheries too various to chronicle. In a sense, we were all Robert Mitchum, smoking rope in bed with two girls while the sun was still noon high. We thought it was normal. You would walk into a house for a pool party, and there, on the cocktail table in the center of the living room, as if it were nuts or cooked shrimp, would be a platter of cocaine. We did it because we were stupid, because we did not know the danger. When I talk about my drug years, I am talking about twenty-four months in the middle of the seventies. I was in the rock and roll world, which meant I was around the stuff all the time. Of course, it was more than mere proximity. I was fun when I was high, talkative and all-encompassing. I could go forever, never be done talking. To some extent, I was really self-medicating, using the drugs to skate over issues in my own life. The fact is, money and success had come so fast, while I was away doing something else, not paying attention, that, when I finally realized where I was and just what I had, I could not understand it. There was this voice in my head, saying, Who do you think you are? What do you think you did? You are a fraud! You don’t deserve any of this! I tortured myself, and let the anxiety well up, then beat back the anxiety with the drugs, on and on, until one day, I stood up and said, “Screw it. That’s over. I’m done.” No rehab, no counseling, nothing like that. Just a moment of clarity, in which I saw myself from the outside, the mess I was making, the waste. I was slipping, not working as hard as I used to. I started leaving the office early on Fridays, then skipping Fridays altogether. Then I started leaving early on Thursdays, then arriving late on Mondays. I was letting myself go. Then one day, I just decided, It has to stop. I threw away the pills and bottles, took a cold shower, had a barbershop shave, and stepped into the cool of Sunset Boulevard, and began fresh. Maybe it had to do with my family situation. I was a father again.

Old enough to know that most things are a waste of time. And that wasting time can be a beautiful thing.

Those who say you can not do it have already buried their own dreams. Don’t waste your time at their graves.

To succeed as you want, you have to be precise; you have to have polish; you have to carry polish and precision into everything you do. You have no time to sigh over seigneuries and begrudge other people their gifts. Lack of genius never held anyone back,” said Lymond. “Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.

Time—Einstein famously said that it was purely an illusion, just a construct of the conscious mind. A nice idea, but try having this conversation with someone who sensed theirs ending. Time was something we all desperately wanted more of when it ran short, yet we wasted it frivolously when we thought we had enough.

Belial said, “Let us stop wasting time, Nazarene. I know who you are. I saw the entire circus show in the desert. The dreadfully smelly and theatrical Baptizer, the Holy Spirit descending like a vulture, Yahweh blathering from heaven, blah, blah, blah.” Jesus drifted off in his memory to a mere month ago, where he had been baptized in the Jordan River not too far from this hellish wasteland. John the Baptizer had left the communal sect of Qumran by the Dead Sea to become a lone voice crying in the wilderness to prepare the way for Messiah’s advent. He was baptizing people in preparation for that arrival. But when he saw Jesus, he protested that he was not worthy to tie the thong of Jesus’s sandal, and that it should be Jesus who baptized John instead.

I desperately wanted to say Please Don’t Waste Your Time on Me because I feared that I would somehow be the cause of his undoing if I allowed him to faun over me in the ways that his heart desired. He was, after all, Enlightened and I was a Caster. There was no possibility of his interest in me ever becoming anything more than a romantic fable...

You listen to me good, girl. You done got the healin’ gift, and you got it good. It ain’t nothin’ you done. It be a gift from God. But you better not let that gift go to waste. You got to stretch it. You got to work it. Dreams are like that, too. You got to stretch ‘em. You got to work ‘em. Most of the people in this world have dreams, but they too lazy to make ‘em come true. They want it to be easy. Big dreams don’t come easy, you hear me?” Carrie nodded, listening with all her heart. She had seldom seen Sarah so intense. Sarah continued. “I don’t want to hear nothin’ ‘bout being too tired to work on your dream. You go’s ahead and do the thin’s you got to do, and then you work on that dream. God’ll give you the strength to do it when you think you don’t got none. And another thin’,” she added in a stern voice. “Make sure you ain’t fillin’ up yo’ days with dream killers.” “Dream killers?” “Dream killers,” Sarah repeated, nodding her head. “They be all those thin’s you think be so infernal important. You step back and take a look. Them thin’s may not be all that important. Not if they be robbin’ you of yo’ time to follow yo’ dream. This here plantation will suck you dry if you let it. There always be one more thin’ that need to be done. You can one-more-thin’ yo’ way right into the death of yo’ dream.” She paused again. “You got what I’m sayin’ to you, Miss Carrie?”              “I’ve got it.” Carrie nodded. “You’re right as usual. I’ve been letting other things take up my time. I’ve been waiting until I could leave, rather than making the most of my time here to prepare.” All the wasted hours raised their heads to taunt her. “I’ll start studying tonight, Miss Sarah. I’ll do all I can to make sure I’m ready for my dream,” she promised. Sarah nodded her head, obviously satisfied with what she saw and heard. “I believe you,” she said. “Just you remember one more thin’. God be the one that plants dreams in yo’ heart. Them thin’s you think be sent yo’ way to kill yo’ dream? They really be thin’s sent to make you stronger—better able to live that dream. Don’t you be runnin’ away from the hard times. Embrace them and suck all you can out of ‘em.” She