Code Of Silence Quotes

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When a question has no correct answer, there is only one honest response. The gray area between yes and no. Silence.
Dan Brown (The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2))
Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.
George Carlin (When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?)
My desires are foolish. The things I want are better kept to myself. The hand of silence is steady. The hard blade of silence is clean like night. The code is absolute. Silence is eternal and patient. Silence never makes a fool of itself like I have so many times.
Henry Rollins (Solipsist)
Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Bout time," she huffed, but her voice sounded thick and emotional too."I was at the hospital all day yesterday, but they wouldn't let me see you. I bolted past security but they called code ninetynine and chased me down, they escorted me out in handcuffs. The way I see it, the only criminal here is your mom. No visitors? I'm your best friend, or did she not get the memo every year for the past eleven? Next time I'm over, I'm going to lay into that woman.
Becca Fitzpatrick (Silence (Hush, Hush, #3))
From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
Defriending isn’t just unrecognized by some social oversight; it’s protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn’t just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing.
Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing)
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
Hélène Cixous
Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
Ambrose Bierce (An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge)
When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.
Claudia Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric)
The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner. It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunshine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code. And out of this bare and neutral information it creates for you—quite literally creates—a vibrant, three-dimensional, sensually engaging universe. Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
Son of Krypton!
Kirstin van Dyke (Code Name: Silence)
Words were no longer simply words, but a curious codes of silence, a way of speaking that continually moved around the thing that was being said. As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell would not broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither of us abandoned the character. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to. Thus my courtship of Sophie began - slowly, decorously, building by the smallest of increments.
Paul Auster (The Locked Room (The New York Trilogy, #3))
I feel a bit like a BOT18 sometimes. Old and rusty, aching and sleepy. Wandering through the city, lost, circling, alone. No gears left in my heart, no code whirring in my brain. Just kinetic energy, being pushed gently onward by other forces—sound, light, dust waves, the quakes. I'm as lost as ever, friends. Can you tell? I'd like it if someone were to rescue me soon. Oh, I'd like that very much. I’d like that. I'd like that very much indeed.
Alice Oseman (Radio Silence)
Political correctness is a code to silence dissent as western society is razed. The culture wars will erupt into violence, pitting those who defend western values vs. leftists, their 'allies', and the rulers who want to consign western civilization to oblivion.
Michael Rectenwald (Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage)
The whole place seemed wrapped in isolated autumn silence.
Phoebe Stone (The Romeo and Juliet Code (Felicity Bathburn, #1))
The password to creativity is SILENCE.
Michael Bassey Johnson (Before You Doubt Yourself: Pep Talks and other Crucial Discussions)
That’s the scary thing about love; it blurs the lines of right and wrong.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
So, what’s the first step to changing norms? It’s breaking the code of silence around the problem that always sustains the status quo.
Kerry Patterson (Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change)
in the hot blood of vendetta they would shotgun the Pope himself for breaking omerta, the ancient code of silence to any authority.
Mario Puzo (The Sicilian)
Etchings endure, But not in Sand Meanings Collide To Unresolved Fragments Codes fizzle to Static They are not lost But Unheard Never lost Fading slowly to Silence By infinite degrees
Ashim Shanker (Sinew of the Social Species)
Any luck finding me a house?” “I have four or five that are up your alley. I’ll bring sheets on them tomorrow.” “Make sure you get one with a yard. And find out the city code on owning a chicken.” There was a long silence on the other end. The man had organized sex parties, bribed paparazzi, and given Cole his pee for a studio drug test, yet this is what gave him pause.
Alessandra Torre (Hollywood Dirt (Hollywood Dirt, #1))
Old and rusty, aching and sleepy. Wandering through the city, lost, circling, alone. No gears left in my heart, no code whirring in my brain. Just kinetic energy, being pushed gently onward by other forces—sound, light, dust waves, the quakes. I'm as lost as ever, friends. Can you tell?
Alice Oseman (Radio Silence)
It is also tempting to vilify a single despot at the sight of injustice when, in fact, it is the actions, or more commonly inactions, of ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running, the people who shrug their shoulders at the latest police killing, the people who laugh off the coded put-downs of marginalized people shared at the dinner table and say nothing for fear of alienating an otherwise beloved uncle. The people who are willing to pay higher property taxes for their own children’s schools but who balk at taxes to educate the children society devalues. Or the people who sit in silence as a marginalized person, whether of color or a woman, is interrupted in a meeting, her ideas dismissed (though perhaps later adopted), for fear of losing caste, each of these keeping intact the whole system that holds everyone in its grip.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
The Piper's playing again, and there's a full orchestra.' There was a long silence as Andrew deciphered the cryptic statement. 'A FULL orchestra?
D.J. Stutley
When a question has no correct answer, there is only one honest response. The gray area between yes and no. Silence.
Dan Brown (The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2))
Never let anyone stand in your way, son. Not even fucking blood. They’ll be the first to undercut you, and they should be the first to die for it.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad’s last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something. Dad would have known.
Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
Whereas Socrates would walk up to people in the marketplace and harass them by asking them to define virtue, Pythagoras and his young students in Croton supposedly observed a code of silence, to prevent their secret teachings from being divulged to the uninitiated.
Peter Adamson (Classical Philosophy (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #1))
Each admission here defies a blood vow determined long before my birth. An apologist is a traitor of the highest order. How many men, how many fathers ever admit to failures or offenses? The act itself is a betrayal of the basic code. It sprays shrapnel of guilt in all directions. If one of us is wrong, the whole structure and story come tumbling down. Our silence is our bond. The power of not telling, of not letting on, is the most ancient and powerful weapon in our arsenal.
V (formerly Eve Ensler) (The Apology)
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.
Jeffrey McDaniel
... isn't breaking a supervillian out of jail a little ... much?
Kirstin van Dyke (Code Name: Silence)
She always gave great head. The woman knew how to use that mouth. Even if at times I wanted to duct tape the damn thing shut.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
twisted form of Omerta, the Sicilian code of silence, and frankly, it’s protected many a bad doctor and some true butchers.
John J. Nance (Why Hospitals Should Fly: The Ultimate Flight Plan to Patient Safety and Quality Care)
To Poetry" Don’t desert me just because I stayed up last night watching The Lost Weekend. I know I’ve spent too much time praising your naked body to strangers and gossiping about lovers you betrayed. I’ve stalked you in foreign cities and followed your far-flung movements, pretending I could describe you. Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee and obsessing over your features year after jittery year. I’m sorry for handing you a line and typing you on a screen, but don’t let me suffer in silence. Does anyone still invoke the Muse, string a wooden lyre for Apollo, or try to saddle up Pegasus? Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess, indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic, pleasance and half wonder, hell, I have loved you my entire life without even knowing what you are or how—please help me—to find you.
Edward Hirsch
You've heard shards of our voice in the phantom-radio code of a numbers station in the roar of a crowd - in the screams of your clock - in the scrape of a chalkboard - in the snow static of a TV - in the chainsaw-decibel mating of cicadas - in the urban mythos that spreads amongst children like contagion - in the silence between lies. White noise becomes a cadence. Words develop self-awareness. Viral. Evolving. Living poetry. Sentient language.
Joshua Alan Doetsch
Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war. That night I promise myself I'd never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you. So I began my career as our family's official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, our stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours. It's true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearly through service...
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
How many men, how many fathers ever admit to failures or offenses? The act itself is a betrayal of the basic code. It sprays shrapnel of guilt in all directions. If one of us is wrong, the whole structure and story come tumbling down. Our silence is our bond. The power of not telling, of not letting on, is the most ancient and powerful weapon in our arsenal.
V (formerly Eve Ensler) (The Apology)
Moreover, and of course, she loved him; but in Sefton's stern code her love had always been chained up, and howled fruitlessly, as indeed it did now.
Iris Murdoch (The Green Knight)
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, ‘Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.
Brad Thor (Code of Conduct (Scot Harvath, #14))
You belong to me now, Haven. And it’s time to go home.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
The location was gone. And so was my wife.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
I’ve always loved you, Haven. You are a Bianchi now. And I will protect you until I die.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
Good dick will make a girl stupid.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
I knew this day would come. Even if I had to rip up the floor underneath her feet and carry her out kicking and screaming, she would be mine.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
Defriending in't just unrecognized by some social oversight, it's protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn't just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. [...] Laura Kipnis's book Against Love: A Polemic includes a harrowing eight0page inventory of things people are not allowed to do because they're in romantic relationships, from going out without saying where you're going or when you'll be back to wearing that idiotic hat. But your best friend can move across the country without asking you.
Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing)
You set a code on your alarm?” Grigory mutters when he realizes I’m awake. I roll over and tap the six digits into the phone and it silences. “Yeah, it ensures it actually wakes me.” “No, it only ensures that it wakes me.
A.G. Riddle (The Solar War (The Long Winter, #2))
So began my career as our family's official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took of our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
When he wrote back, he pretended to be his old self, he lied his way into sanity. For fear of his psychiatrist who was also their censor, they could never be sensual, or even emotional. His was considered a modern, enlightened prison, despite its Victorian chill. He had been diagnosed, with clinical precision, as morbidly oversexed, and in need of help as well as correction. He was not to be stimulated. Some letters—both his and hers—were confiscated for some timid expression of affection. So they wrote about literature, and used characters as codes. All those books, those happy or tragic couples they had never met to discuss! Tristan and Isolde the Duke Orsino and Olivia (and Malvolio too), Troilus and Criseyde, Once, in despair, he referred to Prometheus, chained to a rock, his liver devoured daily by a vulture. Sometimes she was patient Griselde. Mention of “a quiet corner in a library” was a code for sexual ecstasy. They charted the daily round too, in boring, loving detail. He described the prison routine in every aspect, but he never told her of its stupidity. That was plain enough. He never told her that he feared he might go under. That too was clear. She never wrote that she loved him, though she would have if she thought it would get through. But he knew it. She told him she had cut herself off from her family. She would never speak to her parents, brother or sister again. He followed closely all her steps along the way toward her nurse’s qualification. When she wrote, “I went to the library today to get the anatomy book I told you about. I found a quiet corner and pretended to read,” he knew she was feeding on the same memories that consumed him “They sat down, looked at each other, smiled and looked away. Robbie and Cecilia had been making love for years—by post. In their coded exchanges they had drawn close, but how artificial that closeness seemed now as they embarked on their small talk, their helpless catechism of polite query and response. As the distance opened up between them, they understood how far they had run ahead of themselves in their letters. This moment had been imagined and desired for too long, and could not measure up. He had been out of the world, and lacked the confidence to step back and reach for the larger thought. I love you, and you saved my life. He asked about her lodgings. She told him. “And do you get along all right with your landlady?” He could think of nothing better, and feared the silence that might come down, and the awkwardness that would be a prelude to her telling him that it had been nice to meet up again. Now she must be getting back to work. Everything they had, rested on a few minutes in a library years ago. Was it too frail? She could easily slip back into being a kind of sister. Was she disappointed? He had lost weight. He had shrunk in every sense. Prison made him despise himself, while she looked as adorable as he remembered her, especially in a nurse’s uniform. But she was miserably nervous too, incapable of stepping around the inanities. Instead, she was trying to be lighthearted about her landlady’s temper. After a few more such exchanges, she really was looking at the little watch that hung above her left breast, and telling him that her lunch break would soon be over.
Ian McEwan (Atonement)
You could defend Ren’s codes. But you didn’t,” Yuan replies. “You wanted an excuse to talk about your source.” “But you said I don’t need defense from Ren Agnello.” Pico uses all its logic. “You said he passes the definitions of ‘friend’ and ‘trustworthy’ and ...” Pico begins a list of keywords. Yuan ignores the keywords. The thin lines on his forehead deepen, the wrinkles near his eyes tighten, and the frown in between his brows grows visible. These days, the word Source is coming frequently, ever since that man asked to meet. Don’t meet him. That monster has an agenda. Ren. Yuan’s CRAB forwards the text to his mind. So, he silences it. Why after two decades? Ren. It smells fishy. Ren. Just because he's a childhood buddy, you'll run to him? Ren. Maybe I didn’t see the Apocalypse with you, but I'm your war comrade, too. Ren. The texts stay unread in his CRAB.
Misba (The High Auction (Wisdom Revolution, #1))
At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared. But I did not know how to seek by way of silence. So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place, the words coming out meaningless, garbled. Bella and I inches apart, the wall between us. I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language. If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is a tangle of wires.
Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
These pages cover a period of about eight years. They contain many events and emotions that I have never told to anyone before, or even admitted to myself. The experience of writing them out has been very painful. That I cannot, or have not, avoided this pain by choosing not to write the story is due to one simple reason: the urge to write this feels not only dangerous and fearful and shameful, but necessary. I write this now to reclaim those parts of me that for so long I so thoroughly denied. I write it to unlock the code of silence that I kept for so many years. I write it so that I can, at last, feel present in my own life. I write it because it is the most powerful thing I can think of to do.
Emilie Pine (Notes To Self)
As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad’s last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something.
Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)
RNA interference operates by deploying an enzyme known as “Dicer.” Dicer snips a long piece of RNA into short fragments. These little fragments can then embark on a search-and-destroy mission: they seek out a messenger RNA molecule that has matching letters, then they use a scissors-like enzyme to chop it up. The genetic information carried by that messenger RNA is thus silenced.
Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race)
It's not hard. No one but an SJW has ever used more than one of the following words in a sentence: “problematic”, “offensive”, “inclusive”, “triggered” “trigger warning”, “privilege”, “platforming”, “silencing”, “equitable”, “welcoming”, “safe space”, “code of conduct”, “cisgender”, “diversity”, “vibrant”. No one but an SJW makes quasi-religious fetishes of Equality, Diversity, Tolerance, and Progress.
Vox Day (SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 1))
So, what is it you want to know in return for your silence, and this lesson on philosophy?” “Three things,” Christopher said. “First, is Lê Thu the code name of the operation that was carried out on November 22 in Dallas? Second, how was the message transmitted from Saigon to the North, and then to the man who recruited the American assassin? Third, what is the name of your relative in the intelligence service of North Vietnam who recruited the man who, in turn, activated Oswald?
Charles McCarry (Tears of Autumn: A Paul Christopher Novel (Paul Christopher Novels))
No calls, no emails, no Facebook messages, no letters, no Morse code with a flashlight during the dark hours of the night, no smoke signals blown with steaming breath on a chilly autumn night, no burning thoughts so intense that they could penetrate fog and walls and doors. Nothing. Complete silence. It was as if the whole person had disappeared from the face of the earth. Or, at least, disappeared from Lumikki's life in one swift stroke. Just as unexpectedly and presumptuously as they'd come.
Salla Simukka (As Red as Blood (Lumikki Andersson, #1))
Code should be obvious: When someone needs to make a change, they should be able to find the code to be changed easily and to make the change quickly without introducing any errors. A healthy code base maximizes our productivity, allowing us to build more features for our users both faster and more cheaply. To keep code healthy, pay attention to what is getting between the programming team and that ideal, then refactor to get closer to the ideal. But the most important thing to learn from this example is the rhythm of refactoring. Whenever I’ve shown people how I refactor, they are surprised by how small my steps are, each step leaving the code in a working state that compiles and passes its tests. I was just as surprised myself when Kent Beck showed me how to do this in a hotel room in Detroit two decades ago. The key to effective refactoring is recognizing that you go faster when you take tiny steps, the code is never broken, and you can compose those small steps into substantial changes. Remember that—and the rest is silence.
Martin Fowler (Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler)))
Inconsistency and deceit were the underlying characteristics of all the actions of their leaders. Their speech was deceitful, and so was their silence. They got up with a lie, and they went to sleep with a lie. Their discipline was a lie, their code of laws a lie, their judgments a lie, their German a lie, their science a lie, their sense of justice and their faith were lies. Their nationalism, their socialism were lies, their ethical philosophy was a lie, and so was their love. Everything was a lie, only one thing about them was genuine: their hate!
Cohen (The Oppermanns (McNally Editions))
The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his or her ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing. Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system.
Václav Havel (The Power of the Powerless (Vintage Classics))
For the anointed, it is desperately important to win, not simply because they believe that one policy or set of beliefs and values is better for society, but because their whole sense of themselves is at stake. Given the high stakes, it is not hard to understand the all-out attacks of the anointed on those who differ from them and their attempts to stifle alternative sources of values and beliefs, with campus speech codes and “political correctness” being prime examples of a spreading pattern of taboos. Here they are not content to squelch contemporary voices, they must also silence history and traditions—the national memory—as well.
Thomas Sowell (The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy)
How will we seize Wensan’s ship?” a Herrani asked. “We’ll climb its hull ladder.” Kestrel laughed. “You’ll be picked off one at a time by Wensan’s crew as soon as they realize what’s happening.” The room went still. Spines stiffened. Arin, who had been facing the Herrani, turned to stare at Kestrel. The look he gave her prickled the air between them like static. “Then we’ll pretend we’re their Valorian sailors who have been on shore,” he said, “and ask for our launches to be winched up to the deck from the water.” “Pretend to be Valorian? That will be believable.” “It will be dark. They won’t see our faces, and we have the names of sailors on shore.” “And your accent?” Arin didn’t answer. “I suppose you hope that the wind will blow your accent away,” Kestrel said. “But maybe the sailors will still ask you for the code of the call. Maybe your little plan will be dead in the water, just like all of you.” There was silence. “The code of the call,” she repeated. “The password that any sane crew uses and shares with no one but themselves, in order to prevent people from attacking them as you so very foolishly hope to do.” “Kestrel, what are you doing?” “Giving you some advice.” He made an impatient noise. “You want me to burn the ships.” “Do I? Is that what I want?” “We’ll be weaker against the empire without them.” She shrugged. “Even with them, you won’t stand a chance.
Marie Rutkoski (The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1))
There is no communication possible between men any longer, now that the codes have been destroyed, including even the code of exchange in repetition. We are all condemned to silence - unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. That is what composing is. Doing solely for the sake of doing, without trying artificially to recreate the old codes in order to reinsert communication into them. Inventing new codes, inventing the message at the same time as the language. Playing for one's own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication. A concept such as this seems natural in the context of music. But it reaches far beyond that; it relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure of being instead of having.
Jacques Attali (Noise: The Political Economy of Music)
By threatening or punishing mainstream (and yes, often socially conservative) opinions on campus, academic authorities are dismissing the views of many Americans and silencing important public discussions. They are also marginalizing higher education itself. In this time of hyperpartisanship, universities could help bridge that political gulf by fostering discussions across political and personal divides. If they continue selectively silencing voices they disagree with, however, they will never be trusted to take on that role. Unless speech codes, campus censorship, and the heavy-handed techniques that stifle debate come to an end, the academy cannot expect to be treated as the honest broker we so desperately need in the arena of political and cultural controversy. In fact, until then, the academy won’t deserve that role.
Greg Lukianoff (Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate)
When the pandemic shut down global travel and the world’s business economy, and when the secular media, including social media giants, rejoiced with Joe Biden being in the White House, a new phrase was being written and reported publicly, “The New Global Reset.” In the past, the same concepts presented in the Great Global Reset Manifesto were called “The New World Order” or “The Globalist Agenda.” However, among knowledgeable conservatives, these older phrases were code words indicating the eventual loss of numerous freedoms that America has enjoyed, leading the nation like sheep to the slaughterhouse, causing Americans to submit to global rules and pay global taxes, allowing self-appointed rich elitists to rule over them. There is a movement to limit religious freedom by banning certain content in minister’s messages, opposing any opinions that are opposite to the manifest of this new system. Progressives have learned that confiscating guns will lead to a revolt. Their plan is to control the sale and distribution of ammo. Without ammunition, a gun is useless.
Perry Stone (America's Apocalyptic Reset: Unmasking the Radical's Blueprints to Silence Christians, Patriots, and Conservatives)
When he reached home Prince Andrei began thinking of his life in Petersburg during those last four months, as if it were something new. He recalled his exertions and solicitations, and the history of his project of army reform, which had been accepted for consideration and which they were trying to pass over M silence simply because another, a very poor one, had already been prepared and submitted to the Emperor. He thought of the meetings of a committee of which Berg was a member. He remembered how carefully and at what length everything tele-ing to form and procedure was discussed at those meetings, and how sedulously and promptly all that related to the gist of the business was evaded. He recalled his labours on the Legal Code, and how painstak-ingly he had translated the articles of the Roman and French codes into Russian, and he felt ashamed of himself. Then he vividly pictured to himself Bogucharovo, his occupations in the country, his journey to Ryazan, he remembered the peasants, and Dron the village elder, and mentally applying m them the Personal Rights he had divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished that he could have spent so much time on such useless work.
Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
There, in that presumed paradise, the engineers were stranded in the company of an infantile mentality. They created artificial smartness, made a simulacrum of intelligence. But what they talked to all day was little more than a mechanism that read bits off a disk drive. If a comma in the code was out of place, it complained like a kid who won’t tolerate a pea touching the mashed potatoes. And, exhausted though the programmer may be, the machine was like an uncanny child that never got tired. There was Karl and the rest of the team, fitting the general definition of the modern software engineer: a man left alone all day with a cranky, illiterate thing, which he must somehow make grow up. It was an odd and satisfying gender revenge. Is it any surprise that these isolated men need relief, seek company, hook up This is not to say that women are not capable of engineering’s male-like isolation. Until I became a programmer, I didn’t thoroughly understand the usefulness of such isolation: the silence, the reduction of life to thought and form; for example, going off to a dark room to work on a program when relations with people get difficult. I’m perfectly capable of this isolation. I first noticed it during the visit of a particularly tiresome guest. All I could think was: There’s that bug waiting for me, I really should go find that bug.
Ellen Ullman (Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology)
What did E.S. like about dreams? Their similarity to life and their dissimilarity; their salutary effect on body and soul; their unrestricted choice and arrangement of themes and contents; their bottomless depths and eerie heights; their eroticism; their freedom; their openness to guidance by will and suggestion (a perfumed handkerchief under one's pillow, soft music on the radio or gramophone, etc.); their resemblance to death and their power to confer intimations of eternity; their resemblance to madness without the consequences of madness; their cruelty and their gentleness; their power to pry the deepest secrets out of us; their blissful silence, to which cries are not unknown; their telepathic and spiritist faculty of communication with those dead or far away; their coded language, which we manage to understand and translate; their ability to condense the mythical figures of Icarus, Ahasuerus, Jonah, Noah, etc., into images; their monochrome and polychrome quality; their resemblance to the womb and to the jaws of a shark; their faculty of transforming unknown places, people, and landscapes into known ones, and vice versa; their power to diagnose certain ailments and traumas before it is too late; the difficulty of determining how long they last; the fact that they can be mistaken for reality; their power to preserve images and distant memories; their disrespect for chronology and the classical unities of time and action.
Danilo Kiš (Hourglass)
Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
In Memory of W. B. Yeats I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. II You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. III Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
W.H. Auden
Or perhaps, the thought seized her, perhaps instead of his smile it was she who had changed. She who, in the long, wind-creaked silence, had emerged from the increment of codes and loyalties to her real, unfettered self. She who now felt his air of appraisal as nothing more than an understanding of the unfulfilled woman that until this moment had lain within her brooding and unadmitted, reproved out of consciousness by the insistence of an outgrown, routine fidelity.
Sinclair Ross (The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories (New Canadian Library))
Jeff Skoll: There was a moment, about four or five days into it, when the technical team said, “We don’t think that we can bring this up.” And everyone just sat in silence for about twenty minutes. If you have a mind-set where you are always looking for a black swan no matter how good the news has been, then you are always afraid of that black swan. Well, that was our black swan. It was, “Yes, the company is dead,” and we’re all in shock, but then a new breath of life came in. Right around then a junior Oracle programmer said, “I’ve just found something, I wonder if this could be it?” It was a line of code that was just off. And sure enough, that was the problem, and after we made the patch, the system started to come back up, gradually.
Adam Fisher (Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom))
was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith. If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him. By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple – and it was on this that his enemies concentrated.90 False teachers were normally banished to a remote district. But Jesus, by his behaviour at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment. Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, especially verses 8 to 12, appears to state that, in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death. In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offence of the ‘rebellious elder’, was considered essential to hold society together. Jesus was a learned man; that was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him ‘rabbi’. Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin – or whatever court it was – he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence. No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus’ doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture. But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code. In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence. To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion – Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough. So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome.91 The circumstances attending Jesus’ trial or trials appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels.92 But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular.
Paul Johnson (History of the Jews)
I can safely say that the origin of every single disease is genetic. Our genes are the code to everything in our bodies, good and bad. Without genes, there would be no cancer. Without genes, there would be no obesity, diabetes or heart disease. And without genes, there would be no life. This might explain why we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out which gene causes which disease and how we can silence the dangerous genes. This also explains why some perfectly healthy young women have had their breasts removed simply because they were found to carry genes that are linked to breast cancer. Much of this focus on genes, however, misses a simple but crucial point: not all genes are fully expressed all the time. If they aren't activated, or expressed, they remain biochemically dormant. Dormant genes do not have any effect on our health. This is obvious to most scientists, and many laypeople, but the significance of this idea is seldom understood. What happens to cause some genes to remain dormant, and others to express themselves? The answer: environment, especially diet. As we saw in chapter three, the genes that cause cancer were profoundly impacted by the consumption of protein. So while we can say that genes are crucial to every biological process, we have some very convincing evidence that gene expression is far more important, and gene expression is controlled by environment, especially nutrition.
T. Colin Campbell
Defriending isn’t just unrecognized by some social oversight; it’s protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn’t just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You
Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons (A Smart and Funny Essay Collection))
Good twin calling evil twin. The weasel crows at midnight. How copy?" "Oh, for mercy's sake... I'm busy! Stop sending me silly messages in code! If you have something to say, just say it; otherwise, radio silence, remember?" "You're no fun anymore. You used to be fun, but lately, I've noticed a change in you. Is it menopause, May?" Cyrene 's question took me aback so strongly, I stopped creeping down the darkened hallway and blinked in dumbfounded surprise at the mirror that hung on the wall opposite. No reflected figure blinked back at me. "Are you still having your period? Do you experience hot flashes at night? Are you now growing, or have you at any time in the recent past grown, a mustache?" "Goddess help me," I murmured to no one in particular, and tried my best to ignore the perky little voice that chirped so happily in my ear as I continued to make my way down to the dark and deserted room. I thought for a moment of just turning off the miniature radio that allowed Cyrene to contact me, but knowledge born of long experience with my twin reminded me of the folly of such an idea. "Boy, you really are in a grumpy mood if you won't rise to the bait of menopause," she said in a mildly disgruntled voice
Katie MacAlister (Playing With Fire (Silver Dragons, #1))
Aeryn was confused. "On three," he said. "One, two, three." He let the scalpel slip from his fingers. As it fell, Aeryn did all she could to move her leg. She tried to tense the muscle, tried to pull away. When she felt the sting of the blade striking her skin, she knew she had failed. "At least now he’ll know that’s not me. No one would let themselves get stabbed," she thought. He sat across from Aeryn and shined a light in her eyes. He looked closely, then leaned back and removed the blade from her skin. He took out a suture kit and tied two small stitches. "I’m pleased to inform you that the transfer is complete," he said. "What?" Aeryn thought. "When will she be gone?" NIA asked. The doctor leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair. As he did, Aeryn caught a glimpse of a flashing light behind his ear. She hadn’t known that he was augmented. "In time.  As your network continues to become stronger than hers, the mind will reject the old personality.  It took almost a year for the original Dr. Barnes to shut up. But luckily we now have a code that we can update you with to silence her." Aeryn felt panicked.  She wanted to claw her way out of her head, but she had no means to do so.  "I almost feel bad for her," NIA said.  "But she knew that she was handing over control of her body. She just didn’t realize it’d be permanent.  Maybe she didn’t care.  She gave me more and more control before she gave it completely. While she exercised, while she thought she was sleeping, while she was writing or relaxing. She was always retreating inside of herself. It was like she didn’t even want this body." "How is Aeryn 2.0 coming along?" "Copulation was easy at first.  With Aeryn’s loose instructions of ‘burn some calories’ I was able to take her body and use it for attempted reproduction.  So far, it has been a failure. The neglect of the body has made finding partners more difficult." Aeryn shuddered at the realization that the dreams weren’t dreams, they were repressed memories. "Well, you’d better start taking care of that body. It’s the only one you’ve got until you get it to reproduce.  I believe that it’ll be easier to appropriate a child’s mind, seeing as how their personalities are not fully formed yet." Aeryn felt sick at the idea.  As if stealing people’s bodies wasn’t enough, these artificial intelligences were going for immortality by passing themselves along to their host’s offspring. "I’m glad we’ve had another success," Dr. Barnes said. "And with such a quick turn around." "As I said, she was willing." Aeryn watched in disbelief as the two finished up.  She wondered how much time she had left and tried to imagine any situation that didn’t end in her death.  She couldn’t think of a way out.  She wanted to flinch as NIA shook the doctor’s hand, but couldn’t.  She loathed him for convincing her to get the technology, she hated NIA for tricking her, but mostly, she hated herself.  For as much as she didn’t want to admit it, her Assistant had a point. She had handed her life over to technology long before she received the implant. Now, she had lost herself to it.     *
Samuel Peralta (The Future Chronicles: Special Edition)
Collectively, the veritable zoo of mobile genetic elements comprises a remarkable 40 percent of our genome. The retroviral sequences littered across all vertebrate genomes are termed endogenous retroviral elements (ERVs). Endogenous retroviral sequences themselves are so plentiful that they take up more space in our genomes than genes encoding human proteins. Their existence is evidence of waves of retroviral infection and germline infiltration throughout vertebrate evolution. We have only recently begun to realize the powerful influence that retroviruses wielded over the evolution of vertebrate genomes and the identity of our species. They were catalysts of genetic instability that fueled evolutionary change; today they are vestiges of their former selves, fossils of viruses that once preyed on vertebrate hosts. Their remains are evidence of pyrrhic victories of sorts in many wars and arms races that have taken place between retroviruses and hosts. Most endogenous retroviruses have long been silenced by host cell restriction mechanisms. Associated with no phenotype, and under no selective pressure they become nonviable after millions of years of mutational drift, resulting in the accumulation of mutations and deletions in their coding sequences and control elements.
Michael G. Cordingley (Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention)
The litter of ERVs across vertebrate genomes, mainly in the form of defective and deleted proviruses, mutationally inactivated proteins coding sequences, and isolated LTRs, confirms that the vast majority of endogenized retroviral genones decay to nonfunctional sequences. If they have been silenced by cellular regulatory mechanisms or if their gene products are not under purifying or positive selective pressures, their DNA sequences will be under no selective pressure to retain their functionality. Over time, they accumulate random mutations and their sequences drift without consequence to the host. That ERVs mostly become such inconsequential DNA is a topic of hot debate; it is, however, an easy matter to pick several examples that illustrate how hosts can benefit from their ERVs. As for all matters of evolution, we bear witness only to the successful events that are now fixed in genomes. Evolutionary failures, no matter they far outnumber the successes, go unrecorded, rapidly purged from the gene pool.
Michael G. Cordingley (Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention)
Padre, excuse me,” Paul said, breaking off the silence that had settled in. “I just want to clarify a few things that trouble my mind. I mean, why has Christianity discredited the belief in Reincarnation and . . . when did this start?
Karim El Koussa (The Phoenician Code: Unveiling the Secrets of the Holy Grail)
From the collapse of Monte de Piedad in the mid-’90s to sexual indiscretions and financial mismanagement today, the Church has observed the Code of Omerta, a sense of brotherhood that demands that dark secrets be kept in order to preserve honor and bring no shame. Its deafening silence on its erring members is a stark contrast to the Church’s thunderous preaching on morality and politics.
Aries C. Rufo (Altar of Secrets: Sex, Politics, and Money in the Philippine Catholic Church)
cult.”) The real answer all comes down to words. Delivery. From the crafty redefinition of existing words (and the invention of new ones) to powerful euphemisms, secret codes, renamings, buzzwords, chants and mantras, “speaking in tongues,” forced silence, even hashtags, language is the key means by which all degrees of cultlike influence occur.
Amanda Montell (Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism)
He’s that … whatever comes after billionaire, yeah?” Voller asks. “Old guy. Made all his money a long time ago off code that connected prosthetic limbs to a chip in the brain or something like that.
S.A. Barnes (Dead Silence)
Another day and another passed of rough seas and lowering skies; of rolling and pitching, cold winds, and cold damp eating into bones softened by tropic warmth; of a treadmill of watches in a wheelhouse dank and gloomy by day and danker and gloomier by night; of sullen silent sailors and pale dog-tired officers, of meals in the wardroom eaten in silence, with the captain at the head of the table ceaselessly rolling the balls in his fingers and saying nothing except an infrequent grumpy sentence about the progress of the work requests. Willie lost track of time. He stumbled from the bridge to his coding, from coding to correcting publications, from corrections back up to the bridge, from the bridge to the table for an unappetizing bolted meal, from the table to the clipping shack for sleep which never went uninterrupted for more than a couple of hours. The world became narrowed to a wobbling iron shell on a waste of foamy gray, and the business of the world was staring out at empty water or making red-ink insertions in the devil’s own endless library of mildewed unintelligible volumes.
Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
The regulation of my sexuality was continually enacted through these coded silencing methods. When I was fifteen, Brokeback Mountain was released in cinemas, and I knew I had to do whatever was necessary to see it. Once the trailer was released, I used every opportunity I had on the Internet to watch it. I gorged myself on it, memorised its every little detail, with one deeply tender moment in the trailer that I would turn to whenever I needed comfort. After four years of separation, the men arrange to meet up, and when they’re reunited, they greet each other with a hug so tight it’s as though they’re fusing into each other. I was desperate to feel an embrace like this, one so driven by love and desire that it would cause me to melt into my partner; I often lay in bed replaying this embrace in my head, imagining that the hug was so tight that it caused both men’s skin to peel off, so that they were two fleshy bodies merging into one complete whole, free from gender, race, or identity. To this day, every now and then when I feel particularly connected during sex, I imagine that this faceless merge might ensue. My teenage years were deeply lonely, and this image provided much comfort for me – as if love could diffuse the boundaries between people, so that we were each of us not separated by our own lonely bodies.
Amrou Al-Kadhi (Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between)
Silence. The silence inside a prison. The prison of time called life. The prison of class and circumstance. The prison of a code untranslatable into the language of the other. The prison of the flesh. The prison of sweaty hands that can't let go even at the moment of falling. The prison of Cheolsu.
Bae Suah (Nowhere to Be Found)
So, you want us to stop saying gay. Want to remove the right to acknowledge the truth of our bodies and hearts and eradicate the language that names us As if this will somehow keep you safe from our existence As if you can see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil us into oblivion. It was you who birthed us into a legacy of code makers and breakers. Humans who took their language underground. Cast spells and had wordless conversations with our ancestors Who gifted us new ways to speak in the open air. We painted pink triangles on the walls of The underground bomb shelters you built to bury us alive Left a trail of glitter pointing to the inborn light in our chests So the ones who came looking for us would know how we lived. We stole back the vernacular you created to hide us back from the tips of your forked tongues Alchemized the sounds that twisted your mouth into symbols of reclamation Used your vilification to dig ourselves out of the closets you constructed around us Made our way blazing and victorious into the sun. When AIDS devastated an entire glittering generation We crafted a whispered language of the isolated hospital room and empty funeral That can only be heard by bodies That have been asked to hold a loss too deep to name. When Matthew Shephard's bloody and broken body Was found tied to that barbed wire fence, the only clean part of his skin the trails of his desperate tears We twisted from the ethers an entirely new way to name collective grief and fear, one far too infinite to hold alone It has always been our tenacious together than holds us. Drive us underground We will always surface Singing words you can never own Because don’t have the range to hear them. Go ahead, take away our words, We will birth a whole new language You’ve been sending your armies for us since the beginning of time But we were born for battle. You wonder why we are still here? You made us this strong. You think getting rid of a word will silence us? You’d have to ban them all.
Jeanette LeBlanc
If you pop one more bubble, I’m gonna stab you in the neck with my knife.” I finally speak to him.
Shantel Tessier (Code of Silence (Dark Kingdom, #1))
But there were also some generalities that made it seductive: a spy swap was an admission by everyone involved that they really did spy. It was an admission that spies got caught and that when they did, their spymasters needed them back—to debrief, punish, perhaps reward, and to persuade those still working the dead drops that someone was looking out for them. It was an admission by the spy traders that despite the wall and the codes of silence by which they lived, they could put their shadow war on hold long enough to hammer out a deal. In a way this was reassuring. But a swap was also a fleeting chance for the disclosure people—the best-connected reporters, or the luckiest—to glimpse the secrecy people in action and photograph the hell out of them and study the creases on their foreheads and then hold the evidence up to the light and ask: do these people make us safer, or are they as dangerous as the H-bomb secrets they supposedly try so hard to steal? First,
Giles Whittell (Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War)
In addition to X inactivation, long ncRNAs also appear to play a critical role in imprinting. Many imprinted regions contain a section that encodes a long ncRNA, which silences the expression of surrounding genes. This is similar to the effect of Xist. The protein-coding mRNAs are silenced on the copy of the chromosome which expresses the long ncRNA. For example, there is an ncRNA called Air, expressed in the placenta, exclusively from the paternally inherited mouse chromosome 11. Expression of Air ncRNA represses the nearby Igf2r gene, but only on the same chromosome12. This mechanism ensures that Igf2r is only expressed from the maternally inherited chromosome.
Nessa Carey (The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance)
Perhaps you grew up in a legalistic spiritual environment as I did. With legalism, Christianity is all about conforming to a code of conduct that has been added to the precepts and principles of the Bible and then judging people on the degree to which they conform to the extrabiblical code. “I’m a good Christian because I don’t do the ‘filthy five’ (or the ‘dirty dozen’).” That kind of legalistic focus produces external conformity, like in the military, but not the kind of true life change we are looking for. Actually, I believe there’s more disobedience to God in the legalistic Christian subculture than anywhere else, because so often there has been no real heart change. Instead, sinful patterns that God wants to change are forced under the surface—a sort of conspiracy of silence. Legalistic Christians are hiding the real truth of who they are from everyone around them. The result? Biblical fellowship is hindered and true life change becomes very difficult. Legalism is a stifling environment where lasting heart change is impossible. Over the Christmas holidays, my family and I visited a church caught in legalism. I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice and so I went. The problem was I forgot about the dress code. I was sort of “dress casual,” if you know what I mean. Then we got in the building. Oops! Every single male from three years of age to ninety-nine had a suit on, and those ties sure looked tight. Now to their credit, they were friendly, but even the handshake itself was kind of compassionate. “Oh, poor brother. We hope you’ll soon be within the reach of the gospel.” You know, that feeling you get when people are judging you because you’re not quite like they are. Anyway, I snuggled up my coat, brought my kids in, and sat down. Being familiar with this approach, I was doing really well until they started a baptismal service where the pastor walked right into the baptistery with his suit on, coat and all. I just wanted to stand up and go, “What are you thinking! It’s not about rules! Jesus died so we could have a genuine intimacy with Him, not just look the part, or what you think looks the part. Won’t you ever learn that rules by themselves don’t change us? They just force our sinful natures under the surface and help us hide behind externals and pretend we’re closer to God than we really are.” Of course, God is not for or against suits. Dressing up for church when motivated by reverence and not religion can be good. Similarly, dressing down can be
James MacDonald (Lord Change Me)
I am SAM, and this is my first mission. Wish me luck. Actually, don’t bother. I’m that good. I need to move fast, but I have to be careful too.This high-tech fortress disguised as a middle school has security systems like Hershey, Pennsylvania, has chocolate. My biggest concern (and archnemesis) is Jan I. Tor. He’s the half-human, half-cyborg “cleaning service” they use for “light security” around here. Yeah, right. Tor’s definition of “light security” is that he only kills you once if he finds you. So I wait in super-stealthy silence while Tor hovers past my hiding spot with his motion detectors running, laser cannons loaded, and a big dust mop attachment on his robotic arm. He’s cleaning that floor to within an inch of its life, but it could be me next. As soon as Tor’s out of range, I slip off my tungsten gripper shoes. Believe me, once he’s been through here, you do not want to leave footprints behind. That would be like leaving a business card in Sergeant Stricker’s in-box. Stricker is the big cheese who runs this place, and she’s all human, but just as scary as Tor. I don’t want to rumble with either one of those two. So I program the shoes to self-destruct and drop them in the trash. FWOOM! The coast is clear now, and I sneak back into action. I work my way up the corridor in my spy socks, quiet as a ghost walking on cotton balls. Very, very puffy cotton balls—I’m that quiet. What I need is the perfect place to leave the package I came here to deliver. That’s the mission, but I can’t just do it anywhere. I have to choose wisely. Bathroom? Nah. Too echoey. Library? Nah. Only one exit, and I can’t take that risk. Main lobby? Hmm… maybe so. In fact, I wish I’d thought of that on my way in. I could have saved myself one very expensive pair of tungsten gripper shoes. Once my radar-enabled Rolex watch tells me the main lobby is clear, I slide in there and get right to work. I enter the access code on my briefcase, confirm with my thumbprint, and then pop the case open. After that, it takes exactly seven seconds and one ordinary roll of masking tape to secure my package to the wall. That’s it. Package delivered. Mission accomplished. Catch you next time—because there’s no way you’ll ever catch me. SAM out!
James Patterson (Just My Rotten Luck (Middle School #7))
Lex, Bone could have been just some idiot kid with no respect for library property, with nothing to distinguish him or garner any mention in a book. It’s probably not even his real name.” Lex frowned. “That’s true.” “Plus, what makes him a bandit? And why is he sick?” He shook his head. “It’s like he wrote the signature using Mad Libs. He may as well have signed it Spleen, the toasty orange tugboat.” “You’re right,” Lex said, slowly putting something together. “It doesn’t make any sense!” “You say that like it’s a good thing.” “It is!” Goosebumps rippled up her arms as she grabbed a nearby pen and scrap of paper. “It’s a code!” “Or that. Sure.” Lex’s hands were a blur as she wrote. “A simple substitution cipher? One letter for another? Or maybe it needs a keyword. Maybe Bone is the keyword. Is Bone the keyword?” Driggs raised an eyebrow as she scribbled. “This is an interesting side of you I’ve never seen.” “My mom’s a teacher,” she said, staring at the paper without blinking. “Instead of cartoons and video games we got work sheets and word puzzles.” “I see.” He reached in. “Maybe—” “Don’t touch!” “Wow. Okay.” He backed away, stifling a snicker. “I just think you’re overthinking this.” She looked peeved. “Oh, am I, Sherlock?” She offered him the paper. “What do you think it is, just a simple anag—” Her eyes went wide. Next thing Driggs knew, Lex was rummaging around in the closet. “Are you looking for your sanity?” he called after her. “Because I do believe it showed itself out a while ago.” She emerged with a Scrabble box in hand. “Silence,” she said, dumping the tiles on the table. “Let me think.
Gina Damico (Scorch (Croak, #2))
The problem of the world is that it needs silence... compassion and passion. Once it's found, the world will be changed.
Deyth Banger (Code (Deeper Level #7))
When he reached home Prince Andrei began thinking of his life in Petersburg during those last four months, as if it were something new. He recalled his exertions and solicitations, and the history of his project of army reform, which had been accepted for consideration and which they were trying to pass over in silence simply because another, a very poor one, had already been prepared and submitted to the Emperor. He thought of the meetings of a committee of which Berg was a member. He remembered how carefully and at what length everything relating to form and procedure was discussed at those meetings, and how sedulously and promptly all that related to the gist of the business was evaded. He recalled his labours on the Legal Code, and how painstakingly he had translated the articles of the Roman and French codes into Russian, and he felt ashamed of himself. Then he vividly pictured to himself Bogucharovo, his occupations in the country, his journey to Ryazan, he remembered the peasants, and Dron the village elder, and mentally applying to them the Personal Rights he had divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished that he could have spent so much time on such useless work.
Leo Tolstoy
The silence was deafening. All around Gala, the fairgoers stood as though frozen in place, staring at the near-accident in morbid fascination. The ale merchant recovered first, jumping toward the shocked child to pull her away from under the barrel. As soon as the girl was not in danger, Gala felt her focus slipping, and the barrel fell, breaking into little bits of wood and splashing ale all over the place.
Dima Zales (The Sorcery Code (The Sorcery Code, #1))
There is code of silence in Medicine, three strikes you are out.
Dr.Vangala
Uh, Jill?” Rowan interrupted. He stood in the bathroom doorway. His pants were on, but a crisp white shirt hung open, revealing his taut abdominal muscles. “Can you button my shirt? I can do it, but—” “Sure.” Jill didn’t let him finish. He had no need to be embarrassed. Most of the time, she forgot Rowan operated with a big handicap. He was so strong and capable; it was hard to think of him not being good at anything. She stepped over to him, and found the first button, starting with the top. “Get the very top one,” he said. “I’m wearing a tie. And I’ll need your help with that too if you know how to tie a tie.” “No problem.” She shut her mouth and concentrated on closing his buttons without running her fingers against his skin. She was on button number four when her vision started wavering from arousal. The steamy heat of the bathroom and Rowan’s nearness made her whole body tighten with need. She wasn’t alone feeling it. As she hit the final bottom button, it was impossible to miss his erection jutting from his unbuttoned dress pants. She said nothing but stepped back when she finished. “Thanks,” he said, and started to turn away to tuck his shirt in. Something crazy inside her dared her to step forward and reach for his zipper. There was shocked silence from both of them. “I’ll tuck you in,” she murmured. Only the sound of them breathing could be heard as she carefully lowered his zipper and pushed the white dress shirt into his trousers. Her palm rubbed his body with each tuck. She started at her right, his left, and worked her away around until she came to the front. “I’ll do that,” he said in a strangled voice. She met his gaze for the first time. “Let me?” He didn’t answer but dropped his arm and stood passively letting her caress his cock under the guise of tucking his shirt. His body swelled under her hand, and she wanted to squeeze him and reach behind the elastic of his underwear to feel his hot flesh. “Jill.” “Mm?” “You have to stop.” She froze with her hand in place. His arousal pulsed against her hand. “I’m sorry.” She yanked her hand free and tried to turn away, but he spun her back and pinned her against the sink counter with a fierce kiss. She welcomed his body, pushing back against him, undulating against his hips which sought hers. The kiss overwhelmed her and she strained to capture more of his mouth, more of his body. She forgot where she was and where they were going. Anything he asked for, she was ready to give. And then he pulled back. Cold air slapped at her front where he’d warmed her. “Brother’s wedding,” he muttered. “Can’t miss it.” He helped her off the sink, and in a daze she turned to the mirror to fix her hair and makeup. “Got your lipstick on me,” Rowan said. She looked in the mirror at his reflection. “I like it.” A pink stain was smudged on one side of his lips. Lips she wanted to keep kissing. “Let’s get my tie, then we gotta go.
Lynne Silver (Desperate Match (Coded for Love, #5))
What's the code and command for silence!? - I really couldn't find that code... to write it down...!?
Deyth Banger (Code (Deeper Level #7))
Forget the stiff punches, or the hardcore bloodlettings, or the shoot interviews: This is the ne plus ultra of reality in wrestling. The enlightened wrestling fan has likely spent significant amounts of time explaining to nonviewers that even though wrestling is staged, it’s not fake—that no amount of planning, no amount of scripting, no amount of physical trickery or assisted landing, no amount of ring elasticity or floor mat cushion can remotely assuage the physical assault of an average wrestling match. Every night on the road ends with ice bags or painkillers or just plain old pain, the unrelenting kind, the “you sit down in your rental car and electric voltage shoots up your spine” kind of pain, and so what, you get in your car anyway and drive to the next town and work another match tomorrow night and the fans cheer but they don’t know. And you get two or three days off after tomorrow or the next day, and let’s hope to God that’s enough to get you right, because then it starts all over again. And then again next week, and then for months, and if you’re lucky—imagine that word, here of all places—if you’re lucky it’ll keep going for years. And there’s no off-season, no prolonged downtime unless, God forbid, you’re seriously injured. That’s reality. Fans will try to explain this to people, but wrestlers themselves are, for the most part, too proud—or too committed to the facade—to explain it to anyone, and it’s this kind of pride, this commitment, that leads to a functional code of silence, even within the locker room, even among friends, and so to painkiller abuse, to alcohol abuse to take the edge off, to illicit drug use to get you going afterward, out of the fog of painkillers and beer. This is reality. Wrestling fans can explain this, but who can put into words the pain of working a wrestling match in which you’re in so much pain that you don’t want to be touched but you’re too proud not to go through with it? When your livelihood is your body and your body is betraying you? Best-case scenario, working a match in that shape is a cry for help.
Anonymous