Cold And Calculating Quotes

Fedin laughed outright, a grim, calculating gesture as hard and unfeeling as cold steel. “Twenty million Russians have been slaughtered by the Fascists in the last six years..... Always remember this, Squadron Leader. It was our war, our victory and now it is our Berlin. We tolerate your presence in this city… if that.

Dorian looked at the carpet, at all the threads woven together. 'What do I do now?' They were gone: the woman he'd loved--and the man he hated. He met her stare. No calculation, no coldness, no pity in those turquoise eyes. Just unflinching honesty, as there had been from the very start with her. 'What do I do?' She had to swallow before she said. 'You light up the darkness.

Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.

Like when I saw a spider, I behaved as if it were the size of a horse with the cold calculation of an assassin.

Behind every coincidence, every stroke of luck, and every miracle, there is inevitably a cold and calculating mind.

I love you, i love your smile your snarl your grin, your face when your sleeping.I love your hair streaming behind you as we fly, with the sunlight making it shine, if it doesn't have too much mud or blood in it, I love seeing your wings spreading out, white and brown and tan and speckled, and the tiny downy feathers right at the top of your shoulders. I love your eyes, whether they're cold or calculating or suspicious or laughing or warm, like when you look at me.

[The Old Astronomer to His Pupil] Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet, When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet; He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how We are working to completion, working on from then to now. Pray remember that I leave you all my theory complete, Lacking only certain data for your adding, as is meet, And remember men will scorn it, 'tis original and true, And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you. But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learned the worth of scorn, You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn, What for us are all distractions of men's fellowship and smiles; What for us the Goddess Pleasure with her meretricious smiles. You may tell that German College that their honor comes too late, But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant's fate. Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. What, my boy, you are not weeping? You should save your eyes for sight; You will need them, mine observer, yet for many another night. I leave none but you, my pupil, unto whom my plans are known. You 'have none but me,' you murmur, and I 'leave you quite alone'? Well then, kiss me, -- since my mother left her blessing on my brow, There has been a something wanting in my nature until now; I can dimly comprehend it, -- that I might have been more kind, Might have cherished you more wisely, as the one I leave behind. I 'have never failed in kindness'? No, we lived too high for strife,-- Calmest coldness was the error which has crept into our life; But your spirit is untainted, I can dedicate you still To the service of our science: you will further it? you will! There are certain calculations I should like to make with you, To be sure that your deductions will be logical and true; And remember, 'Patience, Patience,' is the watchword of a sage, Not to-day nor yet to-morrow can complete a perfect age. I have sown, like Tycho Brahe, that a greater man may reap; But if none should do my reaping, 'twill disturb me in my sleep So be careful and be faithful, though, like me, you leave no name; See, my boy, that nothing turn you to the mere pursuit of fame. I must say Good-bye, my pupil, for I cannot longer speak; Draw the curtain back for Venus, ere my vision grows too weak: It is strange the pearly planet should look red as fiery Mars,-- God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars.

He turned his head and caught her with his eyes. She froze, locked by the intensity of his stare. His eyes were stark and cold, the concentrated green of pale jade. Outlined in smudged black kohl, those eyes focused on her, unblinking through the feathery strands of his jet black hair, and it was like being watched through a cage by a complacent and calculating cat. Discomfort welled in her, thick and black as an oil spring. Who was this guy and what was his royal problem? Her gaze flicked briefly to the small metal loop that hugged one corner of his bottom lip. He blinked once, then slowly lifted one hand and crooked a beckoning finger at her. Isobel hesitated but then as though spellbound to obey, she found herself leaning in. “What are you staring at?” he whispered.

I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.

He was the kind of young man whose handsome face has brought him plenty of success in the past and is now ever-ready for a new encounter, a fresh-experience, always eager to set off into the unknown territory of a little adventure, never taken by surprise because he has worked out everything in advance and is waiting to see what happens, a man who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman's sensuality, and explores it, without discriminating between his friend's wife and the parlour-maid who opens the door to him. Such men are described with a certain facile contempt as lady-killers, but the term has a nugget of truthful observation in it, for in fact all the passionate instincts of the chase are present in their ceaseless vigilance: the stalking of the prey, the excitement and mental cruelty of the kill. They are constantly on the alert, always ready and willing to follow the trail of an adventure to the very edge of the abyss. They are full of passion all the time, but it is the passion of a gambler rather than a lover, cold, calculating and dangerous. Some are so persistent that their whole lives, long after their youth is spent, are made an eternal adventure by this expectation. Each of their days is resolved into hundreds of small sensual experiences - a look exchanged in passing, a fleeting smile, knees brushing together as a couple sit opposite each other - and the year, in its own turn, dissolves into hundreds of such days in which sensuous experience is the constantly flowing, nourishing, inspiring source of life.

Coldness etched his gaze. Aloofness whispered from his posture. Calculation radiated from his every pore. I'd never been so intimidated or so intimately challenged.

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.

Dear Max - You looked so beautiful today. I'm going to remember what you looked like forever. ... And I hope you remember me the same way - clean, ha-ha. I'm glad our last time together was happy. But I'm leaving tonight, leaving the flock, and this time it's for good. I don't know if I'll ever see any of you again. The thing is, Max, that everyone is a little bit right. Added up all together, it makes this one big right. Dylan's a little bit right about how my being here might be putting the rest of you in danger. The threat might have been just about Dr. Hans, but we don't know that for sure. Angel is a little bit right about how splitting up the flock will help all of us survive. And the rest of the flock is a little bit right about how when you and I are together, we're focused on each other - we can't help it. The thing is, Maximum, I love you. I can't help but be focused on you when we're together. If you're in the room, I want to be next to you. If you're gone, I think about you. You're the one who I want to talk to. In a fight, I want you at my back. When we're together, the sun is shining. When we're apart, everything is in shades of gray. I hope you'll forgive me someday for turning our worlds into shades of gray - at least for a while. ... You're not at your best when you're focused on me. I mean, you're at your best Maxness, but not your best leaderness. I mostly need Maxness. The flock mostly needs leaderness. And Angel, if you're listening to this, it ain't you, sweetie. Not yet. ... At least for a couple more years, the flock needs a leader to survive, no matter how capable everyone thinks he or she is. The truth is that they do need a leader, and the truth is that you are the best leader. It's one of the things I love about you. But the more I thought about it, the more sure I got that this is the right thing to do. Maybe not for you, or for me, but for all of us together, our flock. Please don't try to find me. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, besides wearing that suit today, and seeing you again will only make it harder. You'd ask me to come back, and I would, because I can't say no to you. But all the same problems would still be there, and I'd end up leaving again, and then we'd have to go through this all over again. Please make us only go through this once. ... I love you. I love your smile, your snarl, your grin, your face when you're sleeping. I love your hair streaming out behind you as we fly, with the sunlight making it shine, if it doesn't have too much mud or blood in it. I love seeing your wings spreading out, white and brown and tan and speckled, and the tiny, downy feathers right at the top of your shoulders. I love your eyes, whether they're cold or calculating or suspicious or laughing or warm, like when you look at me. ... You're the best warrior I know, the best leader. You're the most comforting mom we've ever had. You're the biggest goofball, the worst driver, and a truly lousy cook. You've kept us safe and provided for us, in good times and bad. You're my best friend, my first and only love, and the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, with wings or without. ... Tell you what, sweetie: If in twenty years we haven't expired yet, and the world is still more or less in one piece, I'll meet you at the top of that cliff where we first met the hawks and learned to fly with them. You know the one. Twenty years from today, if I'm alive, I'll be there, waiting for you. You can bet on it. Good-bye, my love. Fang P.S. Tell everyone I sure will miss them

...I know I’ve broken all the rules of all the games, that all the great players and best love calculators recommend that you play, if you want to make someone like you a lot. But that’s okay, because I give up. I’ve got my coffee sitting in my San Francisco cup, I’ve got Kona island and a working beating heart that’s not cold, hard, or numb—very workable and capable of loving, breaking, mending and repeating. So that’s just what I’ll do. Because I’m too tired. Too tired uping all nighting wasting my precious timing wishing it was your heart pumping, wanting me— like I used to want you.

The eyes! Cold and calculating, hard grey eyes, with the feel of a malevolent intelligence behind them.

Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiousity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion for sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cess-pit of moral filth.

If anything, revenge is the absence of emotion. It's pure, calculated thought stripped bare of entangling emotions. It's cold, deliberate action.

The greatest gift anyone could give anyone is for the other to feel worthy, adored and more than enough for all that they are. This is a gentle reminder that the people you surround yourself with in every direction should feel both uplifting and safe to your mind and heart. Not confusing, not draining, not controlling, not vague, not calculating, not unreliable, not cold, not dismissive, and not manipulative. Don’t mess around with the energy you take into your body and being, work wise, friendship wise, and relationship wise. Life is too short and delicate for these damaging things. It’s really that simple.

The more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men. ‘What a cold-blooded jest!’ said he to himself. ‘It was not devised by a God.’ From that time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art

I would never have supposed that inexperienced girl was capable of such cold-blooded, calculating manipulation!

Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician. Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there. Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16. A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death. A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you. Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water. And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.

If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance, no satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.

The (narcissitic) rage may turn into, or be accompanied by, a cold hatred that gives her qualities of power, invincibility, and calculation. This hatred underlies the desire for vengeance, for wanting to inflict pain and suffering, and for actually enjoying getting back at the person who failed her.

What would you have me do? Seek for the patronage of some great man, And like a creeping vine on a tall tree Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone? No thank you! Dedicate, as others do, Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon In the vile hope of teasing out a smile On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad For breakfast every morning? Make my knees Callous, and cultivate a supple spine,- Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust? No thank you! Scratch the back of any swine That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right Too proud to know his partner's business, Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire God gave me to burn incense all day long Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you! Shall I go leaping into ladies' laps And licking fingers?-or-to change the form- Navigating with madrigals for oars, My sails full of the sighs of dowagers? No thank you! Publish verses at my own Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint Of a small group of literary souls Who dine together every Tuesday? No I thank you! Shall I labor night and day To build a reputation on one song, And never write another? Shall I find True genius only among Geniuses, Palpitate over little paragraphs, And struggle to insinuate my name In the columns of the Mercury? No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be afraid, Love more to make a visit than a poem, Seek introductions, favors, influences?- No thank you! No, I thank you! And again I thank you!-But... To sing, to laugh, to dream To walk in my own way and be alone, Free, with a voice that means manhood-to cock my hat Where I choose-At a word, a Yes, a No, To fight-or write.To travel any road Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt If fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne- Never to make a line I have not heard In my own heart; yet, with all modesty To say:"My soul, be satisfied with flowers, With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them In the one garden you may call your own." So, when I win some triumph, by some chance, Render no share to Caesar-in a word, I am too proud to be a parasite, And if my nature wants the germ that grows Towering to heaven like the mountain pine, Or like the oak, sheltering multitudes- I stand, not high it may be-but alone!

Victor, the tall Nigerian man, was evidently her stepfather; and Josh, her half brother. But Pip didn’t like those words, those cold technicalities. The people you love weren’t calculated, subtracted, or held at arm’s length across a decimal point.

Like when I saw a spider, I behaved as if it were the size of a horse with the cold calculation of an assassin." Poppy From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout

He wants to say, because Anne is not a carnal being, she is a calculating being, with a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes. "I believe any woman who can say no to the King of England and keep on saying it, has the wit to say no to any number of men, including you, including Harry Percy, including anyone else she may choose to torment for her own sport while she is arranging her career in the way it suits her. So I think, yes, you've been made into a fool, but not quite in the way you thought.

I don't think it's really about being bitchy or demanding or cold or calculating: those characteristics, after all, can be attached to most women with even the paltriest of evidence. I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated...

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.

I escaped by the skin of my teeth. When I think of his cold and calculating manner, I shudder.

I love you. I love your smile, your snarl, your grin, your face when you’re sleeping. I love your hair streaming out behind you as we fly, with the sunlight making it shine, if it doesn’t have too much mud or blood in it. I love seeing your wings spreading out, white and brown and tan and speckled, and the tiny, downy feathers right at the top of your shoulders. I love your eyes, whether they’re cold or calculating or suspicious or laughing or warm, like when you look at me. You’re the best warrior I know, the best leader. You’re the most comforting mom we’ve ever had. You’re the biggest goof ball, the worst driver, and a tr uly lousy cook. You’ve kept us safe and provided for us, in good times and bad. You’re my best friend, my first and only love, and the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, with wings or without.

Dr. Fuselier had the opposite reaction. Insanity was marked by mental confusion. Eric Harris expressed cold, rational calculation. Fuselier ticked off Eric’s personality traits: charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy. It was like reciting the Psychopathy Checklist.

Deliberate deception is not a mistake. It's calculating and cold.

That was when I saw it: behind the beauty and fake innocence was something else, something cold and calculating. Even when she smiled, I could see sin so deeply ingrained in her that no cardigan could hide it. [...] To anyone else, she was pure and naive, but this girl was hiding something. I knew only because the same sin had dwelled in me my entire life. The difference was she held it deep within her, and I let mine out of cage on a regular basis.

Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could see the constellation Orion. People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow, like this: But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur. And there aren't any lines in space, so you could join bits of Orion to bits of Lepus or Taurus or Gemini and say that they were a constellation called the Bunch of Grapes or Jesus or the Bicycle (except that they didn't have bicycles in Roman and Greek times, which was when they called Orion Orion). And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don't know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away. And that is the truth. I stayed awake until 5:47. That was the last time I looked at my watch before I fell asleep. It has a luminous face and lights up if you press a button, so I could read it in the dark. I was cold and I was frightened Father might come out and find me. But I felt safer in the garden because I was hidden. I looked at the sky a lot. I like looking up at the sky in the garden at night. In summer I sometimes come outside at night with my torch and my planisphere, which is two circles of plastic with a pin through the middle. And on the bottom is a map of the sky and on top is an aperture which is an opening shaped in a parabola and you turn it round to see a map of the sky that you can see on that day of the year from the latitude 51.5° north, which is the latitude that Swindon is on, because the largest bit of the sky is always on the other side of the earth. And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don't even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means that they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something. I didn't sleep very well because of the cold and because the ground was very bumpy and pointy underneath me and because Toby was scratching in his cage a lot. But when I woke up properly it was dawn and the sky was all orange and blue and purple and I could hear birds singing, which is called the Dawn Chorus. And I stayed where I was for another 2 hours and 32 minutes, and then I heard Father come into the garden and call out, "Christopher...? Christopher...?

He rose and stood tottering in that cold dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination... Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

Try not to breathe,” I tell Lira. “It might get stuck halfway out.” Lira flicks up her hood. “You should try not to talk then,” she retorts. “Nobody wants your words being preserved for eternity.” “They’re pearls of wisdom, actually.” I can barely see Lira’s eyes under the mass of dark fur from her coat, but the mirthless curl of her smile is ever-present. It lingers in calculated amusement as she considers what to say next. Readies to ricochet the next blow. Lira pulls a line of ice from her hair, artfully indifferent. “If that is what pearls are worth these days, I’ll make sure to invest in diamonds.” “Or gold,” I tell her smugly. “I hear it’s worth its weight.” Kye shakes the snow from his sword and scoffs. “Anytime you two want to stop making me feel nauseated, go right ahead.” “Are you jealous because I’m not flirting with you?” Madrid asks him, warming her finger on the trigger mechanism of her gun. “I don’t need you to flirt with me,” he says. “I already know you find me irresistible.” Madrid reholsters her gun. “It’s actually quite easy to resist you when you’re dressed like that.” Kye looks down at the sleek red coat fitted snugly to his lithe frame. The fur collar cuddles against his jaw and obscures the bottoms of his ears, making it seem as though he has no neck at all. He throws Madrid a smile. “Is it because you think I look sexier wearing nothing?” Torik lets out a withering sigh and pinches the bridge of his nose. I’m not sure whether it’s from the hours we’ve gone without food or his inability to wear cutoffs in the biting cold, but his patience seems to be wearing thin. “I could swear that I’m on a life-and-death mission with a bunch of lusty kids,” he says. “Next thing I know, the lot of you will be writing love notes in rum bottles.” “Okay,” Madrid says. “Now I feel nauseated.” I laugh.

Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn’t matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat

I could be quite irrational. Like when I saw a spider, I behaved as if it were the size of a horse with the cold calculation of an assassin.

Xaden watches me with a cold, calculating look that feels like he’s plotting my death from where he stands as the wingleader for Fourth Wing.

Archer Moore—the cold, calculated man I’ve been told to avoid my entire life—is on his knees for me. And it might be my favorite thing I’ve ever seen.

A chill runs through me. Am I really that cold and calculating?

She should have been used to it by now, the lingering looks while people tried to work out the logistics of her family. Victor, the tall Nigerian man, was evidently her stepfather; and Josh, her half brother. But Pip didn't like those words, those cold technicalities. The people you love weren't calculated, subtracted, or held at arm's length across a decimal point.

Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market? On one level the difference between an obligation and a debt is simple and obvious. A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified. This allows debts to become simple, cold, and impersonal-which, in turn, allows them to be transferable. If one owes a favor, or one’s life, to another human being-it is owed to that person specifically. But if one owes forty thousand dollars at 12-percent interest, it doesn’t really matter who the creditor is; neither does either of the two parties have to think much about what the other party needs, wants, is capable of doing-as they certainly would if what was owed was a favor, or respect, or gratitude. One does not need to calculate the human effects; one need only calculate principal, balances, penalties, and rates of interest. If you end up having to abandon your home and wander in other provinces, if your daughter ends up in a mining camp working as a prostitute, well, that’s unfortunate, but incidental to the creditor. Money is money, and a deal’s a deal. From this perspective, the crucial factor, and a topic that will be explored at length in these pages, is money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic-and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The factor of violence, which I have been emphasizing up until now, may appear secondary. The difference between a “debt” and a mere moral obligation is not the presence or absence of men with weapons who can enforce that obligation by seizing the debtor’s possessions or threatening to break his legs. It is simply that a creditor has the means to specify, numerically, exactly how much the debtor owes.

the climax of their journey is a showdown with IT, the cold and calculating disembodied intelligence that has cast a black shadow over the universe in its quest to make everyone behave and believe the same.

Not all generous hearts are gullible enough to be screwed by cold, calculating, business propaganda. A person who has an eye for what is right and the truth will immediately spot the cunning ways of a selfish "user and hungry grabber" who took initiative to grab the originality from other people they tried to profile, fake befriended and extracted favours." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from If I Could Tell You

She had long been a cold and calculating person, and yet she had never given in to the darkness entirely. She would remember her mother's touch or the voice of a lost friend, and the tiniest bit of hope would return.

It would be wrong to believe that the deceivers at this game are sharply separated from the deceived, that the world is neatly divided between the cold calculators and the innocent dupes. Everybody is a little of both; you must be a dupe of your own comedy to play it with conviction. The romantic and satanic vision of the cold calculator, of the totally lucid manipulator of other people’s desires, is a more sophisticated version of the narcissistic illusion.

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

Faster and faster, those three bulls closed in. Lysandra remained at the mouth of the bay. Holding the line. Aedion’s heart stopped. “She’s dead,” one of the sentries hissed. “Oh, gods, she’s dead—” “Shut your rutting mouth,” Aedion snarled, scanning the bay, slipping into that cold, calculating place that allowed him to make decisions in battle, to weigh the costs and risks.

The whole plan of extermination was nothing less than a cold blooded, calculated political measure, having for its object the annihilation of a superior element in the population, which might prove troublesome, and to this must be added the motive of greed.

...and I saw that it is one thing for a crowd, in an almost ecstatic frenzy, mistaking the laws of the devil for those of the Lord, to commit a massacre, but it is another thing for an individual to commit a crime in cold blood, with calculation, in silence.

that cold and calculating? Gale didn’t say, “Katniss will pick whoever it will break her heart to give up,” or even “whoever she can’t live without.” Those would have implied I was motivated by a kind of passion. But my best friend predicts I will choose the

Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them.

There are Christians and churches that boast of being mature when really they are spiritually frostbitten. We have developed a prejudice against feeling and emotion until amens would be no scarcer if they cost a hundred dollars apiece -- and the real truth is, we have lost our first love. . . . This accounts for a lot of church troubles. When we love the Lord we love the brethren. When we break up the fallow ground of our hearts we uncover roots of bitterness. . . . There is a reckless enthusiasm about first love. It is not cold and calculating.

Why do I trust you?” Gal asks. My blood runs cold. But Gal’s tone isn’t cruel or calculating. It’s hopeful. Warming. He’s on to something. “Maybe you don’t trust me—I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, after everything—but I trust you with my life. I know I can trust you because you throw your life on the line to save me. Time and time again, no matter how little I deserve it. You’ve sacrificed everything for me.

Rage swallowed remorse. Rage drop-kicked self-pity. Rage murdered sorrow. And then, like blood-red wine tucked into the refrigerator, rage chilled to become cold, calculating anger. Anger was a creature that arrived on her doorstep with a suitcase full of strategy and vengeance. It tipped its hat at her and hopped into her brain. It knocked on the Logic Department's door. It found a broken mirror somewhere in the crevices between her hippocampus and her hypothalamus, and it was wondering if somebody had misplaced it. No retaliation? It scoffed. Think again, missy.

In one of the awkward alignments of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon had lined up the democratic United States with this authoritarian government, while the despots in the Soviet Union found themselves standing behind democratic India. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the brilliant White House national security advisor, were driven not just by such Cold War calculations, but a starkly personal and emotional dislike of India and Indians.

I really can’t keep it up anymore,” Huahua said. “No one’s doing any better,” Specs said lightly. “It’s not the same. This is impossible!” “Think of yourself as a computer. You’re just cold hardware, and reality is just data. Accept your input and perform your calculations. That’s how you keep it up.

It took hours, but all of a sudden as she was drawing the plug-in for a vacuum pump that felt as if it was radiating cold, although she didn't know how, Claire saw . . . something. It was like a flash of intuition, one of those moments that came to her sometimes when she thoughtabout higher-order physics problems. Not calculation, exactly, not logic. Instinct.She saw what he was doing, and for that one second, it was beautiful.Crazy, but in a beautiful kind of way. Like everything Myrnin did, it twisted the basicrules of physics, bent them and reshaped them until they became . . . something else. He's agenius, she thought. She'd always known that, but this . . . this was something else. Something beyond all his usual tinkering and weirdness. "It's going to work," she said. Her voice sounded odd. She carefully set the vacuum pumpin its place on the meticulously labeled canvas sheet. Myrnin, who was sitting in his armchair with his feet comfortably on a hassock, looked up. He was reading a book through tiny little square spectacles that might have once belonged to Benjamin Franklin. "Well, of course it's going to work," he said. "What did you expect? I do know what I'm doing." This from a man wearing clothing from the OMG No store, and his battered vampire-bunny slippers. He'd crossed his feet at the ankles on top of a footstool, and both the bunnies' red mouths were flapping open to reveal their sharp, pointy teeth. Claire grinned, suddenly full of enthusiasm for what she was doing. "I didn't expectanything else," she said. "When's lunch?

Love is the bane (The Sonnet) Love is the boon, Love is the bane. Love is relief, Love is the pain. From love will come your troubles, From love will rise your answer. You'll fail in love, you'll fly in love, In love's insanity your sight will clear. Love is torture, Love is disaster. Love exposes the counterfeits, While it purifies the lover. In a world run by calculating coldness, be the anomaly of love insensible. Cure for this anemic world, is your love impossible.

The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years,9 and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as the “Thousand-Year Reich.” It lasted twelve years and four months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known in more than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages. The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius.

It would be wrong to believe,” Girard writes, “that the deceivers at this game are sharply separated from the deceived, that the world is neatly divided between the cold calculators and the innocent dupes. Everybody is a little of both; you must be a dupe of your own comedy to play it with conviction. The romantic and satanic vision of the cold calculator, of the totally lucid manipulator of other people’s desires, is a more sophisticated version of the narcissistic illusion.

While you and I are allowed the luxury of our pain, president isn't. A president must take into account how his citizens feel and he must manage them and lead them, but he must not succumb to personal feelings. His job is to maintain a ruthless sense of proportion while keeping the coldness of his calculation to himself.

But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left the pack and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made a long bend around. Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded the bend, the frost wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him, he saw another and larger frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank into the immediate path of the rabbit. It was Spitz. The rabbit could not turn, and as the white teeth broke its back in mid air it shrieked as loudly as a stricken man may shriek. At sound of this, the cry of Life plunging down from Life’s apex in the grip of Death, the fall pack at Buck’s heels raised a hell’s chorus of delight.

Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s, … or other sentient being's, was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole. Anrej's mind was not like the cold ratiocination of the Council, nor the poetic dream conciousness of the Weaver ... but with underlying structure and subconcious flow, with calculating rationality and impulsive fancy, self-maximizing analysis and emotional flow, it was [the combination thereof].

Cold, calculative, and entirely destructive eyes hold me hostage.

She hated him, this man, and these men: the ones who picked her up without expression and used her without emotion. The ones who picked her up with no more regard than they had for picking lint off the collars of their well-pressed suits. She preferred the sweaty nervousness of young virgins or the eager speediness of excited old vets with their knobby fingers and waxy breath to these cold, hard men. These were the ones who called her squaw. Who called her half-breed, the ones who would just as soon slap her than bother to put on the condom she always handed them. She often wondered why they didn’t just keep the $80 it cost to be with her and drive their comfortable, bucket-seated SUVs home to the suburbs. They could kiss their wives hello and then slip into very hot showers to jerk off for free. Their peckish wives could spend the money they saved spending an afternoon getting the silk wraps and pedicures that would goad them into putting out anyways. To these men she had no name and no face. She was a hole. Consequently, she held no regard for these bastards. She gave them the calculated respect accorded to dangerous dogs.

In hindsight, Khrushchev stands out as a rare case of a nuclear optimist. His nuclear brinkmanship was exceptionally crude and aggressive, reckless and ideology-driven. The architect of the New Look played hardball. But he relied more on his instincts than on strategic calculations. And he was not a master of diplomatic compromise. His improvisations, lack of tact, rudeness, and spontaneity let him down, after several strokes of luck. His ideological beliefs, coupled with his emotional vacillations between insecurity and overconfidence, made him a failure as a negotiator.

Where some saw a cold-hearted calculating slut, there was actually a girl who had done a lot of growing up to realise she should only get something of equal or greater value for everything she gave.

She should have been used to it by now, the lingering looks while people tried to work out the logistics of her family, the numbers and hedged words scribbled across their family tree. The giant Nigerian man was quite evidently her stepfather and Joshua her half-brother. But Pip didn’t like using those words, those cold technicalities. The people you love weren’t algebra: to be calculated, subtracted, or held at arm’s length across a decimal point. Victor and Josh weren’t just three-eighths hers, not just forty percent family, they were fully hers. Her dad and her annoying little brother.

Perhaps most insidious of all the psychopath’s evils: their relationship cycle. In which they gleefully and systematically wipe out the identity of an unsuspecting victim. Cold & calculated emotional rape.

I looked down at the Nightside, spread out before me like the most seductive whore in the world. Promising everything and anytthing, her wide smile and inviting eyes hiding the cold calculation in her heart.

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump. So, I made an unexpected decision. I decided

I don’t need you to save me. I need you to stand with me, to lean on me so I can lean on you. You don’t always have to be perfect, cold, and calculating. It’s okay to break every now and again, but don’t do it alone.

While each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic, while in Sibylline rapture Heraclitus gazes but does not peer, knows but does not calculate, his contemporary Parmenides stands beside him as counter-image, likewise expressing a type of truth-teller but one formed of ice rather than fire, pouring cold piercing light all around.

And it was only as he rose from the bed, his body illuminated by the colored lights of the city, that I caught the glint of calculation behind his eyes, a cold, blank set to his face. His shadow self, and not a nice one.

From the mountain peaks for streams descend and flow near the town; in the cascades the white water is calling, but the mistis do not hear it. On the hillsides, on the plains, on the mountaintops the yellow flowers dance in the wind, but the mistis hardly see them. At dawn, against the cold sky, beyond the edge of the mountains, the sun appears; then the larks and doves sing, fluttering their little wings; the sheep and the colts run to and fro in the grass, while the mistis sleep or watch, calculating the weight of their steers. In the evening Tayta Inti gilds the sk, gilds the earth, but they sneeze, spur their horses on the road, or drink coffee, drink hot pisco. But in the hearts of the Puquios, the valley is weeping and laughing, in their eyes the sky and the sun are alive; within them the valley sings with the voice of the morning, of the noontide, of the afternoon, of the evening.

Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact

European history knows two forms of terror. The first is the uncontrollable explosion of bloodlust in a victorious mass uprising. The other is cold, calculated cruelty committed by a victorious state as a demonstration of power and intimidation. The two forms of terror normally correspond to revolution and repression. The first is revolutionary. It justifies itself by the rage and fever of the moment, a temporary madness. The second is repressive. It justifies itself by the preceding revolutionary atrocities.

I decided to ask eight Vietnam combat veterans if they would be willing to take a standard pain test while they watched scenes from a number of movies. The first clip we showed was from Oliver Stone’s graphically violent Platoon (1986), and while it ran we measured how long the veterans could keep their right hands in a bucket of ice water. We then repeated this process with a peaceful (and long-forgotten) movie clip. Seven of the eight veterans kept their hands in the painfully cold water 30 percent longer during Platoon. We then calculated that the amount of analgesia produced by watching fifteen minutes of a combat movie was equivalent to that produced by being injected with eight milligrams of morphine, about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room for crushing chest pain.

At first, tattooing was just another cold calculation, a logical piece of his plans. But he’s come to enjoy it. The pop of parting skin, the sting of ink, the release. The feeling that he is slowly erasing everything soft and vulnerable, forging himself into the weapon he needs.

František Štorm has made a habit of infusing historical styles with his own eccentric brand of expression. His Farao is a perfect example. Most modern interpretations of Clarendon and other Egyptians are somewhat cold and calculated. Štorm went back to their ancestors — the uneven, untamed type of the 19th century — and celebrated its imperfections. Farao has exaggerated ball terminals and serifs, inconsistent contrast, and a potpourri of seemingly incompatible features. Yet it all comes together in a wonderful, sparkling typeface full of humor and life. This is Clarendon let loose.

One could be forgiven for supposing that rationality (or, more softly, ‘reasonableness’) is irrelevant – and even possibly opposed – to being a good lover. This is perhaps because we tend to think of love as a feeling, rather than as an achievement of intelligence. A reasonable or rational person is not one who is only interested in logic, or someone who tries in a cold, robotic fashion to substitute calculation and analysis for kindness or yearning. We are reasonable when we are moved by accurate explanation. Thus a reasonable person is slow to anger; they do not jump to conclusions

You're not actually falling for him, are you?" he asks her one day, on one of the rare occasions he can get her alone. "I'll pretend you didn't just ask that," she tells him in disgust. But Connor has reasons to wonder. "On that first night here, he offered you his blanket, and you accepted it," he points out. "Only because I knew it would make him cold." "And when he offers you his food, you take it." "Because it means he goes hungry." It's coolly logical. Connor finds it amazing that she can put her emotions aside and be as calculating as Roland, beating him at his own game. Another reason for Connor to admire her.

Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an Image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his list pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to reenter the earth by immersing himself in that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life's accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred, the landscape disappeared.

There is pleasure in reading a version of myself I know in my heart could never exist, since mine is not an iron mind coldly calculating every possible option and outcome. Instead I am a businessman who loves excitement, loves tension, loves risk and the unexpected, and just happens to possess an extraordinary, on occasion even miraculous, degree of good luck.

It's funny, most people think that revenge is a passionate affair, driven by rage and pain. But it can't be. Feelings such as those make you weak. They overwrite thought and cause reckless impulses that lead to poor decisions. If anything, revenge is the absence of emotion. It's pure, calculated thought stripped bare of entangling emotions. It's cold, deliberate action.

I continued to be fascinated by this weeping, and by all of womankind.  How is it that a woman lets a man go to Florence as he swears his love for her, saying that he will be back at daybreak the following day so the two can never again part, and while she doesn’t exactly swear a promise to be there to meet him at daybreak, she gives him all the reason in the world to make him believe that she will be there, her love and passion for him being so strong, her tears being so numerous.  Then finally the moment the hopeful gentleman leaves, the woman turns into a cold and calculating absconder who pays-off hotel staff-members with gold to make sure that they deceive the poor devil who will return at the point of day only to have his heart completely shattered

I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and— But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated by some converse characteristic.

There was no part of this house that felt inviting. Paul's cold, calculating hand could be seen behind every choice. The concrete on the entryway floor was polished to a dark mirror straight out of Snow White. The spiral stairs looked like a robot's asshole. The endless white walls made Lydia feel like she was trapped inside a straightjacket. The sooner she was out of here the better.

Harry’s childhood friend Tresko had once explained that the poker player who bases his game on his ability to intuit a bluff is bound to lose. It’s true that we all give ourselves away with superficial mannerisms while lying; however, you have no chance of exposing a good bluffer unless you coldly and calculatedly chart all these mannerisms against each individual, in Tresko’s opinion.

No woman had ever managed to stir up such a storm inside his head. Not one had ever been capable of making him lose his concentration with such antics, such lightness of touch. He couldn’t think of even one of the many girlfriends he had given his heart to who was capable of putting on such a show for him, without any audience other than the mountains looming ever higher in the growing shadows. Not a single one, he said to himself, watching her with lowered eyes as he began to feel rather confused. He tried to regain the normal pulse of his feelings. He attempted to return to the cold calculations of numbers and time equations necessary for him to finish drawing up his plans. Because the day was passing quickly and he would not have a second chance to finish or correct them.

Modernism deliberately abstracted Nature and glamorized convenience, and this is why we have ended up seeing the natural world as some sort of gigantic production system seemingly capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit. … We have become semi-detached bystanders, empirically correct spectators, rather than what the ancients understood us to be, which is participants in creation. This ideology was far from benign or just a matter of fashion. The Marxism of the Bolshevik regime totally absorbed, adopted and extended the whole concept of Modernism to create the profoundly soulless, vicious, dehumanized ideology which eventually engineered the coldly calculated death of countless millions of its own citizens as well as entire living traditions, all for the simple reason that the end justified the means in the great ‘historic struggle’ to turn people against their true nature and into ideological, indoctrinated ‘machines.

The air is crisp on my skin, and though my hands are wrapped under thick gloves, I shove my fists into my pockets anyway. The wind penetrates here through every layer, including skin. I’m dressed in fur so thick that walking feels like an exertion. It slows me down more than I would like, and even though I know there’s no imminent threat of attack, I still don’t like being unprepared in case one comes. It shakes me more than the cold ever could. When I turn to Lira, the ends of her hair are white with frost. “Try not to breathe,” I tell her. “It might get stuck halfway out.” Lira flicks up her hood. “You should try not to talk then,” she retorts. “Nobody wants your words being preserved for eternity.” “They’re pearls of wisdom, actually.” I can barely see Lira’s eyes under the mass of dark fur from her coat, but the mirthless curl of her smile is ever-present. It lingers in calculated amusement as she considers what to say next. Readies to ricochet the next blow. Lira pulls a line of ice from her hair, artfully indifferent. “If that is what pearls are worth these days, I’ll make sure to invest in diamonds.” “Or gold,” I tell her smugly. “I hear it’s worth its weight.” Kye shakes the snow from his sword and scoffs. “Anytime you two want to stop making me feel nauseated, go right ahead.” “Are you jealous because I’m not flirting with you?” Madrid asks him, warming her finger on the trigger mechanism of her gun. “I don’t need you to flirt with me,” he says. “I already know you find me irresistible.” Madrid reholsters her gun. “It’s actually quite easy to resist you when you’re dressed like that.” Kye looks down at the sleek red coat fitted snugly to his lithe frame. The fur collar cuddles against his jaw and obscures the bottoms of his ears, making it seem as though he has no neck at all. He throws Madrid a smile. “Is it because you think I look sexier wearing nothing?” Torik lets out a withering sigh and pinches the bridge of his nose. I’m not sure whether it’s from the hours we’ve gone without food or his inability to wear cutoffs in the biting cold, but his patience seems to be wearing thin. “I could swear that I’m on a life-and-death mission with a bunch of lusty kids,” he says. “Next thing I know, the lot of you will be writing love notes in rum bottles.” “Okay,” Madrid says. “Now I feel nauseated.

Sarah doesn’t make any gesture, sound, or remark to let me know how displeased she is with me. To let me know how much she hates me. And then I wonder, Does she even care? Does she care that I was cheating on her? Or is she trying to be strong? Is she trying to be professional? I can’t tell. I can’t read her. She’s my wife, and at this moment, I don’t even know her. The look she gives me is cold and distant. Her movements are almost robotic. Her eyes are clear and calculating.

Calculated, focused destruction – the cold cruelty of an impartial predator – was devastating. A man in his forties, lean and sharp-eyed and jaded, could draw you in with such skill you never noticed that he was planning to cut you down all along. A man like that could play charades and spin lies effortlessly; they could let you go without a backward thought. A man like that was untouchable. Jade had always thought she’d been smarter than to be fooled so thoroughly. But she’d been wrong.

I see poisoners—so calculating, so cold-blooded—as most like the villains of our horror stories. They’re closer to that lurking monster in the closet than some drug-impaired crazy with a gun. I don’t mean to dismiss the latter—both can achieve the same awful results. But the scarier killer is the one who thoughtfully plans his murder ahead, tricks a friend, wife, lover into swallowing something that will dissolve tissue, blister skin, twist the muscles with convulsions, knows all that will happen and does it anyway.

Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7.

At some point in the future, new stars will cease being born. Slowly but surely, the stars of our universe are winking out. A day will come when the night sky will be totally black, and the day sky will be totally black as well. Solar systems will become planets orbiting dead stars. According to astrophysical calculations, in about a million billion years, plus or minus, even those dead solar systems will be disrupted from chance gravitational encounters with other stars. In about ten billion billion years, even galaxies will be disrupted, the cold spheres that were once stars flung out to coast solo through empty space.

Next, he says, he discovered the “moral stain on this ‘chosen people’… Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!” The Jews were largely responsible, he says he found, for prostitution and the white-slave traffic. “When for the first time,” he relates, “I recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back.”61

Kilorn and I don’t really see eye to eye on the Feats of First Friday. For me, watching two champions rip into each other is not enjoyable, but Kilorn loves it. Let them ruin each other, he says. They’re not our people. He doesn’t understand what the Feats are about. This isn’t mindless entertainment, meant to give us some respite from grueling work. This is calculated, cold, a message. Only Silvers can fight in the arenas because only a Silver can survive the arena. They fight to show us their strength and power. You are no match for us. We are your betters. We are gods. It’s written in every superhuman blow the champions land.

At least he liked you,” Rhys countered, then clarified for me, “my father and mother, despite being mates, were wrong for each other. My father was cold and calculating, and could be vicious, as he had been trained to be since birth. My mother was soft and fiery and beloved by everyone she met. She hated him after a time—but never stopped being grateful that he had saved her wings, that he allowed her to fly whenever and wherever she wished. And when I was born, and could summon the Illyrian wings as I pleased … She wanted me to know her people’s culture.” “She wanted to keep you out of your father’s claws,” Mor said, swirling her wine, her shoulders loosening as Azriel at last blinked, and seemed to shake off whatever memory had frozen him. “That, too,” Rhys added drily. “When I turned eight, my mother brought me to one of the Illyrian war-camps. To be trained, as all Illyrian males were trained. And like all Illyrian mothers, she shoved me toward the sparring ring on the first day, and walked away without looking back.” “She abandoned you?” I found myself saying. “No—never,” Rhys said with a ferocity I’d heard only a few times, one of them being this afternoon. “She was staying at the camp as well. But it is considered an embarrassment for a mother to coddle her son when he goes to train.

Similarly, we revere our founding fathers precisely because they were loudmouths on the subject of freedom: Give me liberty or give me death! Even the Christianity of early American religious revivals, dating back to the First Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, depended on the showmanship of ministers who were considered successful if they caused crowds of normally reserved people to weep and shout and generally lose their decorum. “Nothing gives me more pain and distress than to see a minister standing almost motionless, coldly plodding on as a mathematician would calculate the distance of the Moon from the Earth,” complained a religious newspaper in 1837.

I remember my first winter in Russia. The bitter cold that singed my ears, crept into my gloves, tightened around my body like a vise. I can still see the road to the textile factory, the deep banks of snow heaped up in front of the bus stations. I remember the exhaustion, the hours hunched over the machines, trudging back to the residence, in the snow, numb with cold, still shaking from the jolt of the machines, choking on the smoke and the dust. After days like that, our evening meal was like a benediction. We calculated the price of everything--butter, cheese, meat--leaving ourselves just enough to keep going, to keep from falling on our faces in the snow. The rest was always for our families.

Why are you washing your own shirt?" "Because it was dirty," he replied with calculated condescension. She ignored it with admirable restraint. "There are maids to wash--" "I didn't wish to inconvenience--" "The shirts of the men who--" "A maid by asking her to wash--" "And I would have washed the stupid thing for you anyway!" Grimm's mouth snapped shut. "I mean, that is . . . well, I would have if . . . if all the maids were dead or taken grievously ill and there was no one else who could"--she shrugged--"and it was the only shirt you owned . . . and bitterly cold . . . and you were sick yourself or something." She snapped her mouth shut, realizing there was no way out of the verbal quagmire into which she'd leapt.

Lily liked the fog, and didn't even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, wind-swept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff's dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to bring light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor's garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry.

Smokers exist in every kitchen. It kills a tastebud or two but we all die, and no one knows better than those who club the fish, clean the guts from the meat, and serve for your delectation a plate from which all blood has been wiped. We cook despite bad pay and sore backs and inadequate sleeps in apartments we can't afford and we wake up choosing again that most temporary of glories that is made, and then consumed: we know. We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don't, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured. When I learned to smoke behind a restaurant, my breath curling toward an inconsolable sky, I learned what it means to live by the tongue, dumb beast, obedient to neither time nor money, past nor future, loyal to a now worth living. I took my cigarette to the filter, and for the first time I appraised my employer back. He claimed to have evolved past fear. He lied. Behind the mask was a damp, scared boy. Fear of toxins, fear of carcinogens, tear of flood and smog and protest and entropy and all that could not be optimized, controlled, bought and held behind glass. Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.

Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless steam-boats was spread over the restless mirror of the Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends. The mystery was destroyed. Like all mysteries, it lived only in the hearts of its worshippers. The hearts changed; the men changed. The once loving and devoted servants went out armed with fire and iron, and conquering the fear of their own hearts became a calculating crowd of cold and exacting masters. The sea of the past was an incomparably beautiful mistress, with inscrutable face, with cruel and promising eyes. The sea of to-day is a used-up drudge, wrinkled and defaced by the churned-up wakes of brutal propellers, robbed of the enslaving charm of its vastness, stripped of its beauty, of its mystery and of its promise.

The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years,9 and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as the “Thousand-Year Reich.” It lasted twelve years and four months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known in more than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.

It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against the world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats, I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered 'round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

The Internet sites (Facebook, Meetic, and thousands of other sites) are based on a virtual and simulated second-hand sex through a screen interface. The first encounter is not natural; it occurs in solitude, in front of a machine interface, and everything else flows from there. Dialogue in front of the screen falsifies and misguides the rest of the relationship, because it suppresses the direct emotion of the first meeting and establishes the relationship on lies, even if these are involuntary. The accident of the first meeting — in a bar, at a party, an office, a friend’s house — is replaced by calculated effort in front of a cold screen. Imagination supplants reality. Romanticism or desire are transmitted in computer files. Psychologically, a contact receives a certain bias if it originates from a computer search. If you later happen to meet the person, you understand quickly that she does not correspond to the electronic persona with which one chatted.

The relationship of the Jews to prostitution and, even more, to human trafficking, could be studied here better than in any other West European city... Walking at night along the streets of the Leopoldstadt, at almost every turn, whether one wished it or not, one witnessed certain happenings that were unknown to most Germans... A cold shiver ran down my spine when I first realized that it was the cold-blooded, shameless, and calculating Jew who skillfully directed this revolting exploitation of the scum of the big city... Then I became enraged... I no longer hesitated about bringing up the Jewish question. No; now I sought it. As I learned to track down the Jew in many different spheres of cultural and artistic life-and in various manifestations of life everywhere-I suddenly found him where I least expected to... I now realized that the Jews were the leaders of Social Democracy. With that revelation, the scales fell from my eyes. My long inner struggle was at an end.

He had coldly and calculatingly looked at her as he regarded any attractive woman, and he had decided, almost without emotion, that she would make him an ideal wife... Once that decision made, violent possessiveness followed. His desire for her had grown, stimulated by her own resistance and the barrier of respectability and convention which, for him, had been both new and tantalizing. He had believed that she needed him, his strength and his protection, and he had been pleased and triumphant, but not surprised, when he had forced her to reveal that need, for he wanted her helpless and dependent upon him. But now, lying there in the army camp...Curt realized his own need, his own complete, dependency upon her for happiness. He, like Oregon, rugged and violent, had to have the beauty and delicacy and fineness of a woman-and it had to be Kitty. That was the strange thing about it, he considered; the realization, for the first time in his life, that one woman, and only one, would do.

In the car ahead, Jane was thinking fast and furiously. She had felt the purpose for which Tarzan had asked a few words with her, and she knew that she must be prepared to give him an answer in the very near future. He was not the sort of person one could put off, and somehow that very thought made her wonder if she did not really fear him. And could she love where she feared? She realized the spell that had been upon her in the depths of that far-off jungle, but there was no spell of enchantment now in prosaic Wisconsin. Nor did the immaculate young Frenchman appeal to the primal woman in her, as had the stalwart forest god. Did she love him? She did not know—now. She glanced at Clayton out of the corner of her eye. Was not here a man trained in the same school of environment in which she had been trained—a man with social position and culture such as she had been taught to consider as the prime essentials to congenial association? Did not her best judgment point to this young English nobleman, whose love she knew to be of the sort a civilized woman should crave, as the logical mate for such as herself? Could she love Clayton? She could see no reason why she could not. Jane was not coldly calculating by nature, but training, environment and heredity had all combined to teach her to reason even in matters of the heart. That she had been carried off her feet by the strength of the young giant when his great arms were about her in the distant African forest, and again today, in the Wisconsin woods, seemed to her only attributable to a temporary mental reversion to type on her part—to the psychological appeal of the primeval man to the primeval woman in her nature. If he should never touch her again, she reasoned, she would never feel attracted toward him. She had not loved him, then. It had been nothing more than a passing hallucination, super-induced by excitement and by personal contact. Excitement would not always mark their future relations, should she marry him, and the power of personal contact eventually would be dulled by familiarity. Again she glanced at Clayton. He was very handsome and every inch a gentleman. She should be very proud of such a husband.

I,” he said, a faint note of derision in his voice, “am the least favored scion of our ruling house, House Mara Sant.” He was from Brontes, then. Which might explain the eyes…she thought again of certain differences, and suppressed a shudder. “I am a Prince of the Blood,” he continued, sounding both embittered and proud, “third in line for the Dragon Throne, and grand nephew to the Emperor. Owing to a…political dispute, I am now also an exile. Presented with a choice between resigning my commission in the na-vy and leaving to become governor of a mining planet and staying to face my uncle’s as-sassins….” He shrugged slightly, as if the choice were of no consequence. “A…political dispute?” “I gambled,” he said bluntly. “I lost.” “You seem…sanguine,” she remarked, surprise blunting the instinct to guard her tongue. “He shouldn’t have let me live.” That anyone could discuss their own murder with such cold calculation horrified her. He horrified her. She chewed her lip, digesting all that he’d told her: not merely a naval officer, but a prince—and a maverick one at that. She wondered what he could have done. “So you see,” he finished, “I’m no more free than you.” He laughed, then, but without humor. “We can be prisoners together. I am en route to a wretched planet called Tarsonis to assume governorship and as you have no other, more pressing engagement, you are coming with me.

If you’re going to shoot me, do it. Do you think I’m afraid of you?” Camille asked. No bullet could hurt worse than the thought of her father drowning, or the sight of Oscar gurgling for air as he lay in a pool of his own blood. She stared into the barrel of the rifle. “You’re a coward. Heartless and cruel, and the devil won’t even want you.” A single shot and she’d be back with her father and Oscar. She’d have them both. Perhaps that was why Umandu hadn’t worked; her heart hadn’t been able to decide. McGreenery pressed the cold steel against her throat. He bared his teeth, losing every ounce of composure and calculated grace. Camille threw a glance toward Ira, who finally jammed his knife into the ribs of his opponent. He pulled the blade free in time to see her at the end of McGreenery’s rifle. But instead of running toward her, he stopped and stared. What was he doing? McGreenery reeled forward. The rifle and stone clattered to the floor. His lips parted. “What-?” he rasped. Camille stared at him, equally bewildered. A sharp metal spike protruded from his chest and glinted in the single band of sunlight streaming from the dome’s entrance. McGreenery collapsed to his knees and revealed his assailant to her. Oscar placed a foot on McGreenery’s back and kicked him forward, sliding him off the very spear McGreenery had used to kill him. “Let’s see how you like it,” Oscar said and tossed the spear aside.

I stared through the front door at Barrons Books and Baubles, uncertain what surprised me more: that the front seating cozy was intact or that Barrons was sitting there, boots propped on a table, surrounded by piles of books, hand-drawn maps tacked to the walls. I couldn’t count how many nights I’d sat in exactly the same place and position, digging through books for answers, occasionally staring out the windows at the Dublin night, and waiting for him to appear. I liked to think he was waiting for me to show. I leaned closer, staring in through the glass. He’d refurnished the bookstore. How long had I been gone? There was my magazine rack, my cashier’s counter, a new old-fashioned cash register, a small flat-screen TV/DVD player that was actually from this decade, and a sound dock for my iPod. There was a new sleek black iPod Nano in the dock. He’d done more than refurnish the place. He might as well have put a mat out that said WELCOME HOME, MAC. A bell tinkled as I stepped inside. His head whipped around and he half-stood, books sliding to the floor. The last time I’d seen him, he was dead. I stood in the doorway, forgetting to breathe, watching him unfold from the couch in a ripple of animal grace. He crammed the four-story room full, dwarfed it with his presence. For a moment neither of us spoke. Leave it to Barrons—the world melts down and he’s still dressed like a wealthy business tycoon. His suit was exquisite, his shirt crisp, tie intricately patterned and tastefully muted. Silver glinted at his wrist, that familiar wide cuff decorated with ancient Celtic designs he and Ryodan both wore. Even with all my problems, my knees still went weak. I was suddenly back in that basement. My hands were tied to the bed. He was between my legs but wouldn’t give me what I wanted. He used his mouth, then rubbed himself against my clitoris and barely pushed inside me before pulling out, then his mouth, then him, over and over, watching my eyes the whole time, staring down at me. What am I, Mac? he’d say. My world, I’d purr, and mean it. And I was afraid that, even now that I wasn’t Pri-ya, I’d be just as out of control in bed with him as I was then. I’d melt, I’d purr, I’d hand him my heart. And I would have no excuse, nothing to blame it on. And if he got up and walked away from me and never came back to my bed, I would never recover. I’d keeping waiting for a man like him, and there were no other men like him. I’d have to die old and alone, with the greatest sex of my life a painful memory. So, you’re alive, his dark eyes said. Pisses me off, the wondering. Do something about that. Like what? Can’t all be like you, Barrons. His eyes suddenly rushed with shadows and I couldn’t make out a single word. Impatience, anger, something ancient and ruthless. Cold eyes regarded me with calculation, as if weighing things against each other, meditating—a word Daddy used to point out was the larger part of premeditation. He’d say, Baby, once you start thinking about it, you’re working your way toward it. Was there something Barrons was working his way toward doing? I shivered.

The Story of the Moon Once, night, unchallenged, extended its dark grace across the sky. To the credit of the town, the stars at night had been enough, though sometimes the townspeople went about bumping their heads in sleep. Eventually, three brothers, traveling through a foreign town, found an evening that did not disappear behind the mountains, for a shining globe sat in an oak tree. The brothers stopped. That one is the moon, said a man from the foreign town. The brothers conferred. They could make a certain use of it. The brothers stole the moon down and put it in their wagon. Seized it. Thieved its silver. Altogether greedy. The wagon shining brights. At home: the moon delivered. Then, celebration: dancing in red coats on the meadow. Number four brother smiling wide. The moon installed--it extended its silver calculations. Time and more time. The brothers aged, took sick, petitioned the town that each quarter of the moon, as it was their property, be portioned out to share their graves. Done, and the light of the moon diminished in fractions. They had extinguished it, part for part, and night, unimpeded, fell. Altogether lanternless. The people were silent. The dark rang loud. Underground: cold blazing. The dead woke, shivering in the light. Some went out to play and dance, others hastened to the taverns to drink, quarrel, and brawl. Noise and more noise. Noise up to heaven. Saint Peter took his red horse through the gates and came down. The moon, for the third time, taken. The dead bidden back into their graves. One wonders why a story like this exists.

He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Indeed, he did not know that he existed at all: everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred and he tasted it. And that was all. Hence his loves might, if you wished, be all described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices that reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of the beast’s sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the color of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, unattached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life.

Marriages in the bourgeois sense of the word, and I mean in the most respectable sense of the word 'marriage', haven't the least to do with love no kind of institution can be made from love - and just as little with money; but rather with the social permission given to two people to satisfy their sexual desires with each other, of course under certain conditions, but such conditions as have the interests of society in view. It's clear that the prerequisites for such a contract must include some degree of liking between the parties concerned and very much goodwill - the will to be patient, conciliatory, to care for one another - but the word love should not be misused to describe it! For two lovers in the whole and strong sense of the word, sexual satisfaction is not the essential thing and really just a symbol: for one party, as has been said, a symbol of unconditional submission, for the other a symbol of assent to this, a sign of taking possession.- Marriage in the aristocratic sense, the old nobility's sense of the word, is about breeding a race (is there still a nobility today?) Quaeritur, in other words about maintaining a fixed, particular type of ruling men: man and woman were sacrificed to this viewpoint. Obviously, the primary requirement here was not love, on the contrary! - and not even that measure of mutual goodwill on which the good bourgeois marriage is based. The decisive thing was first the interest of the dynasty, and above that the class. Faced with the coldness, severity and calculating clarity of this noble concept of marriage, which has ruled in every healthy aristocracy, in ancient Athens as in eighteenth-century Europe, we would shiver a little, we warm-blooded animals with our ticklish hearts, we 'moderns'! And this is precisely why love as passion, in the grand understanding of the word, was invented for the aristocratic world and within it―where coercion and privation were greatest...

I opened the door with a smile on my face that soon melted when I saw his messy appearance. The doorframe held him up as he leaned all of his weight against it. Expressionless, bloodshot eyes stared back at me as he lifted his hand and ran it roughly down his unshaved face. His hair was disheveled and there was blood on the front of his shirt. Panic rose up as I took him in. I rushed to him and ran my fingers down his body, as I checked for injuries. “You’re bleeding! Oh my God, Devin! What happened? Are you OK?” “It’s not my blood,” he slurred. I took a better look at his gorgeous face. His unfocused eyes attempted to meet mine and it was then that the smell of liquor reached me. “You’re drunk?” “Abso-fucking-lutely.” He attempted to move toward me and almost fell over. I wrapped my arms around him and helped him into my apartment. Once we made it to the couch I let him collapse onto the cushion before I went straight to work on his clothes. I removed his blood-stained shirt first and threw it to the side. Quickly checked him over again just to be sure that he wasn’t injured somewhere. His skin felt cold and clammy against my fingertips. His knuckles were busted open, so I went to the bathroom and got a wet towel and the first aid kit. I cleaned his fingers then wrapped them up. I felt fingers in my hair and looked up to see a very drunk Devin staring back at me. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” he whispered as his heavy head fell against the back of my couch again. Shaking my head, I dropped onto my knees on the floor and removed his boots. Once I was done getting Devin out of his shoes, I went to the hallway closet and pulled out a blanket for him. When I got back to the couch, he was standing there looking back at me in all his tattooed, muscled glory. He was still leaning a bit to the side when his eyes locked on mine. “Come here,” he rasped. He looked as if he was about to crumble and I couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol or if something was really breaking him down. “Are you OK, baby?” I asked. He closed his eyes and sighed. “I love it when you call me baby.” I went to him and he groaned as I softly ran my hands up his chest and put my arms around his neck. On my tiptoes, I softly kissed the line of his neck and his chin. “Tell me what happened, Devin.” When he finally opened his eyes, he looked at me differently. The calm and collected Devin was gone and an anxiety-ridden shell of a man stood before me. His shoulders felt tense beneath my fingers and his eyes held a crazed demeanor. “I need you, Lilly.” He captured my face softly in his hands as he slurred the words. “Please tell me what happened?” “Make it go away, baby,” he whispered as he leaned in and started to kiss me. I let him as I melted against his body. He collapsed against the couch once more, but this time he took me with him. Not once did he break our kiss, and soon, I felt his velvet tongue against mine. I kissed him back and let my fingers play in the hair at the back of his neck. He broke the kiss and started down the side of my neck. “I need you, Lilly,” he repeated against my skin. “I’m here.” I bit at my bottom lip to stop myself from moaning. “Please, just make it all go away,” he drunkenly begged. “I don’t know what’s going on, but tell me what to do to make it better. I want to make it better, Devin.” I stopped him and stared into his eyes as I waited for his response. “Don’t leave me,” he said desperately. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m here. I’ll do whatever it takes to make it better.” I wanted to cry. He looked so hurt and afraid. It was strange to see such a strong, confident man so lost and unsure. He flipped me onto my back on the couch and crawled on top of me. His movements were less calculated—slower than usual. “I want you. I need to be inside you,” he said aggressively.

The assessment will be guided by insights from research in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology that allow us to predict how the universe will unfold over epochs that dwarf the timeline back to the bang. There are significant uncertainties, of course, and like most scientists I live for the possibility that nature will slap down our hubris and reveal surprises we can’t yet fathom. But focusing on what we’ve measured, on what we’ve observed, and on what we’ve calculated, what we’ll find, as laid out in chapters 9 and 10, is not heartening. Planets and stars and solar systems and galaxies and even black holes are transitory. The end of each is driven by its own distinctive combination of physical processes, spanning quantum mechanics through general relativity, ultimately yielding a mist of particles drifting through a cold and quiet cosmos. How will conscious thought fare in a universe experiencing such transformation? The language for asking and answering this question is provided once again by entropy. And by following the entropic trail we will encounter the all-too-real possibility that the very act of thinking, undertaken by any entity of any kind anywhere, may be thwarted by an unavoidable buildup of environmental waste: in the distant future, anything that thinks may burn up in the heat generated by its own thoughts. Thought itself may become physically impossible. While the case against endless thought will be based on a conservative set of assumptions, we will also consider alternatives, possible futures more conducive to life and thinking. But the most straightforward reading suggests that life, and intelligent life in particular, is ephemeral. The interval on the cosmic timeline in which conditions allow for the existence of self-reflective beings may well be extremely narrow. Take a cursory glance at the whole shebang, and you might miss life entirely. Nabokov’s description of a human life as a “brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”6 may apply to the phenomenon of life itself. We mourn our transience and take comfort in a symbolic transcendence, the legacy of having participated in the journey at all. You and I won’t be here, but others will, and what you and I do, what you and I create, what you and I leave behind contributes to what will be and how future life will live. But in a universe that will ultimately be devoid of life and consciousness, even a symbolic legacy—a whisper intended for our distant descendants—will disappear into the void. Where, then, does that leave us?

Radiation from the Big Bang may give us a clue to dark matter and dark energy. First of all, the echo, or afterglow, of the Big Bang is easy to detect. Our satellites have been able to detect this radiation to enormous accuracy. Photographs of this microwave background radiation show that it is remarkably smooth, with tiny ripples appearing on its surface. These ripples, in turn, represent tiny quantum fluctuations that existed at the instant of the Big Bang that were then magnified by the explosion. What is controversial, however, is that there appear to be irregularities, or blotches, in the background radiation that we cannot explain. There is some speculation that these strange blotches are the remnants of collisions with other universes. In particular, the CMB (cosmic microwave background) cold spot is an unusually cool mark on the otherwise uniform background radiation that some physicists have speculated might be the remnants of some type of connection or collision between our universe and a parallel universe at the beginning of time. If these strange markings represent our universe interacting with parallel universes, then the multiverse theory might become more plausible to skeptics. Already, there are plans to put detectors in space that can refine all these calculations, using space-based gravity wave detectors. LISA Back in 1916, Einstein showed that gravity could travel in waves. Like throwing a stone in a pond and witnessing the concentric, expanding rings it creates, Einstein predicted that swells of gravity would travel at the speed of light. Unfortunately, these would be so faint that he did not think we would find them anytime soon. He was right. It took until 2016, one hundred years after his original prediction, before gravity waves were observed. Signals from two black holes that collided in space about a billion years ago were captured by huge detectors. These detectors, built in Louisiana and Washington State, each occupy several square miles of real estate. They resemble a large L, with laser beams traveling down each leg of the L. When the two beams meet at the center, they create an interference pattern that is so sensitive to vibrations that they could detect this collision. For their pioneering work, three physicists, Rainer Weiss, Kip S. Thorne, and Barry C. Barish, won the Nobel Prize in 2017. For even greater sensitivity, there are plans to send gravity wave detectors into outer space. The project, known as the laser interferometry space antenna (LISA), might be able to pick up vibrations from the instant of the Big Bang itself. One version of the LISA consists of three separate satellites in space, each connected to the others by a network of laser beams. The triangle is about a million miles on each side.

Although I am still far from this kind of interior understanding of myself, with profound respect for its significance I have sought to preserve my individuality―worshipped the unknown God. With a premature anxiety I have tried to avoid coming in close contact with those things whose force of attraction might be too powerful for me. I have sought to appropriate much from them, studied their distinctive characteristics and meaning in human life, but at the same time guarded against coming, like the moth, too close to the flame. I have had little to win or to lose in association with the ordinary run of men, partly because what they do―so-called practical life―does not interest me much, partly because their coldness and indifference to the spiritual and deeper currents in man alienate me even more from them. With few exceptions my companions have had no special influence upon me. A life that has not arrived at clarity about itself must necessarily exhibit an uneven side-surface; confronted by certain facts [*Facta*] and their apparent disharmony, they simply halted there, for, as I see it, they did not have sufficient interest to seek a resolution in a higher harmony or to recognize the necessity of it. Their opinion of me was always one-sided, and I have vacillated between putting too much or too little weight on what they said. I have now withdrawn from their influence and the potential variations of my life's compass resulting from it. Thus I am again standing at the point where I must begin again in another way. I shall now calmly attempt to look at myself and begin to initiate inner action; for only thus will I be able, like a child calling itself "I" in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself "I" in a profounder sense. But that takes stamina, and it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown. I will remember that philosopher's method of having his disciples keep silent for three years; then I dare say it will come. Just as one does not begin a feast at sunrise but at sundown, just so in the spiritual world one must first work forward for some time before the sun really shines for us and rises in all its glory; for although it is true as it says that God lets his sun shine upon the good and the evil and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust, it is not so in the spiritual world. So let the die be cast―I am crossing the Rubicon! No doubt this road takes me into battle, but I will not renounce it. I will not lament the past―why lament? I will work energetically and not waste time in regrets, like the person stuck in a bog and first calculating how far he has sunk without recognizing that during the time he spends on that he is sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot's wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill." ―from_Journals_, (The Search for Personal Meaning)

I don’t know what to do with you,” he said, his voice growing curt with anger again. “Deceitful little minx. I’m of half a mind to put you to work, milking the goats. But that’s out of the question with these hands, now isn’t it?” He curled and uncurled her fingers a few times, testing the bandage. “I’ll tell Stubb to change this twice a day. Can’t risk the wound going septic. And don’t use your hands for a few days, at least.” “Don’t use my hands? I suppose you’re going to spoon-feed me, then? Dress me? Bathe me?” He inhaled slowly and closed his eyes. “Don’t use your hands much.” His eyes snapped open. “None of that sketching, for instance.” She jerked her hands out of his grip. “You could slice off my hands and toss them to the sharks, and I wouldn’t stop sketching. I’d hold the pencil with my teeth if I had to. I’m an artist.” “Really. I thought you were a governess.” “Well, yes. I’m that, too.” He packed up the medical kit, jamming items back in the box with barely controlled fury. “Then start behaving like one. A governess knows her place. Speaks when spoken to. Stays out of the damn way.” Rising to his feet, he opened the drawer and threw the box back in. “From this point forward, you’re not to touch a sail, a pin, a rope, or so much as a damned splinter on this vessel. You’re not to speak to crewmen when they’re on watch. You’re forbidden to wander past the foremast, and you need to steer clear of the helm, as well.” “So that leaves me doing what? Circling the quarterdeck?” “Yes.” He slammed the drawer shut. “But only at designated times. Noon hour and the dogwatch. The rest of the day, you’ll remain in your cabin.” Sophia leapt to her feet, incensed. She hadn’t fled one restrictive program of behavior, just to submit to another. “Who are you to dictate where I can go, when I can go there, what I’m permitted to do? You’re not the captain of this ship.” “Who am I?” He stalked toward her, until they stood toe-to-toe. Until his radiant male heat brought her blood to a boil, and she had to grab the table edge to keep from swaying toward him. “I’ll tell you who I am,” he growled. “I’m a man who cares if you live or die, that’s who.” Her knees melted. “Truly?” “Truly. Because I may not be the captain, but I’m the investor. I’m the man you owe six pounds, eight. And now that I know you can’t pay your debts, I’m the man who knows he won’t see a bloody penny unless he delivers George Waltham a governess in one piece.” Sophia glared at him. How did he keep doing this to her? Since the moment they’d met in that Gravesend tavern, there’d been an attraction between them unlike anything she’d ever known. She knew he had to feel it, too. But one minute, he was so tender and sensual; the next, so crass and calculating. Now he would reduce her life’s value to this cold, impersonal amount? At least back home, her worth had been measured in thousands of pounds not in shillings. “I see,” she said. “This is about six pounds, eight shillings. That’s the reason you’ve been watching me-“ He made a dismissive snort. “I haven’t been watching you.” “Staring at me, every moment of the day, so intently it makes my…my skin crawl and all you’re seeing is a handful of coins. You’d wrestle a shark for a purse of six pounds, eight. It all comes down to money for you.

Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 169 The thick, frosty rain had long since subsided. A thin, fur clad figure peered through the thick, rain soaked foliage, just outside the army's encampment. The old Wizard's raspy whisper suddenly broke the silence. He shivered against the cold and swore to himself, as no eyes peered back at him from the forest. "Damnable rabbits!" He shook both stiff, old legs from the bitter cold of the forest night and from the puddle he had been standing in. The half-asleep guard paid no attention or tribute to the thin, fur clad bearer of wood, as he trudged through the camp's outer perimeter with a load of firewood in his arms. Slumber played a barbaric tune to the rhythms of the wind through the trees, while the army slept. Arkin readjusted the stack of wood held precariously in his arms, as he walked through the center of camp. His steady, silent pace took him around large mud puddles and before a roaring fire built beneath a rocky shelf. The large bonfire spit colorful sparks into the blackness and the cold of the night. His thin arms let fall the wood he had gathered, while he surveyed the camp. A long, walking stick suddenly appeared in his hand, as if by magic, while his senses took in all around him. The small, white haired Wizard leaned lazily on his heavy staff for a thoughtful moment, while his calculating eye took in the figures huddled on the ground around the small campfires. Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 170 In the forest, two sets of eyes suddenly blinked their timidity at Arkin and then disappeared. "Dull witted rabbits to save a future King," he grumbled. "Will wonders never cease." From an ancient leather pouch, old weathered hands drew a sparkling dust that seemed to be alive in its’ every glimmer. The old man watched its’ mesmerizing glow for a moment. Then, as if youth possessed his body once again, Arkin began dancing like a misguided wood nymph through the camp, sprinkling the powder on the slumbering figures. The old Wizard's ritualistic dance took him the complete circumference of the camp. An old Wizard smiled broadly, as he danced by the giant, blond Nobleman chained helplessly to a tree. Their eyes met in an exchanged mischievous greeting. Garish beamed his roguish smile at him, hope renewed once more. The blond, captive Nobleman had to fight back the mounting laughter in his throat, from the comforting sight of his mentor and the queer fairy dance he was performing. His gaze followed the little man's every step with pure delight. The little Grand Master Wizard slowed his mischievous fairy dance only long enough to retrieve the glimmering Sword of Damen from the pile of weapons in the center of the camp. Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 171 The Old Man carefully concealed the sword under his cloak and continued his fairy dance, while sprinkling the sparkling powder over the sleeping figures. Stooping low, he picked up a shield and flung it over his shoulder. Once again the old, fur clad Wizard’s movements brought him to where he had first entered the camp, through the forest. The half-asleep guard awakened faintly, to watch the little man in his queer dance, as he moved towards him. He made no effort to detain the Old One but merely stared in disbelief, as Arkin vanished into the forest once again. The guard stood dazed in disbelief at the sight and then rubbed away the sleep from his eyes, uncertain if he had been daydreaming.

He loves you,’ I said, and smoothed the tumbled hair off her flushed face. ‘He won’t stop.’ I got up, brushing yellow leaves from my skirt. ‘We’ll have a bit of time, then, but none to waste. Jamie can send word downriver, to keep an eye out for Roger. Speaking of Roger …’ I hesitated, picking a bit of dried fern from my sleeve. ‘I don’t suppose he knows about this, does he?’ Brianna took a deep breath, and her fist closed tight on the leaf in her hand, crushing it. ‘Well, see, there’s a problem about that,’ she said. She looked up at me, and suddenly she was my little girl again. ‘It isn’t Roger’s.’ ‘What?’ I said stupidly. ‘It. Isn’t. Roger’s. Baby,’ she said, between clenched teeth. I sank down beside her once more. Her worry over Roger suddenly took on new dimensions. ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Here, or there?’ Even as I spoke, I was calculating – it had to be someone here, in the past. If it had been a man in her own time, she’d be farther along than two months. Not only in the past, then, but here, in the Colonies. I wasn’t planning to have sex, she’d said. No, of course not. She hadn’t told Roger, for fear he would follow her – he was her anchor, her key to the future. But in that case – ‘Here,’ she said, confirming my calculations. She dug in the pocket of her skirt, and came out with something. She reached toward me, and I held out my hand automatically. ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.’ The worn gold wedding band sparked in the sun, and my hand closed reflexively over it. It was warm from being carried next to her skin, but I felt a deep coldness seep into my fingers. ‘Bonnet?’ I said. ‘Stephen Bonnet?’ Her throat moved convulsively, and she swallowed, head jerking in a brief nod. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you – I couldn’t; not after Ian told me about what happened on the river. At first I didn’t know what Da would do; I was afraid he’d blame me. And then when I knew him a little better – I knew he’d try to find Bonnet – that’s what Daddy would have done. I couldn’t let him do that. You met that man, you know what he’s like.’ She was sitting in the sun, but a shudder passed over her, and she rubbed her arms as though she was cold. ‘I do,’ I said. My lips were stiff. Her words were ringing in my ears. I wasn’t planning to have sex. I couldn’t tell … I was afraid he’d blame me. ‘What did he do to you?’ I asked, and was surprised that my voice sounded calm. ‘Did he hurt you, baby?’ She grimaced, and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them against herself. ‘Don’t call me that, okay? Not right now.’ I reached to touch her, but she huddled closer into herself, and I dropped my hand. ‘Do you want to tell me?’ I didn’t want to know; I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, too. She looked up at me, lips tightened to a straight white line. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t want to. But I think I’d better.’ She had stepped aboard the Gloriana in broad daylight, cautious, but feeling safe by reason of the number of people around; loaders, seamen, merchants, servants – the docks bustled with life. She had told a seaman on the deck what she wanted; he had vanished into the recesses of the ship, and a moment later, Stephen Bonnet had appeared. He had on the same clothes as the night before; in the daylight, she could see that they were of fine quality, but stained and badly crumpled. Greasy candle wax had dripped on the silk cuff of his coat, and his jabot had crumbs in it. Bonnet himself showed fewer marks of wear than did his clothes; he was fresh-shaven, and his green eyes were pale and alert. They passed over her quickly, lighting with interest. ‘I did think ye comely last night by candlelight,’ he said, taking her hand and raising it to his lips. ‘But a-many seem so when the drink is flowin’. It’s a good deal more rare to find a woman fairer in the sun than she is by the moon.

Thanks to modern research on trauma, we can understand that the men of the Inquisition are deeply programmed by the religious ideology, more so even than the common folk. Visceral hatred and cold, calculating, victimization of the feminine, life, and Nature, are an outcome of, and ‘compensation’ for, their own conditioning into total subservience to their ‘holy’ mission at the price of induced self-hatred. This involves a certain form of dehumanization, also deliberately achieved especially under Jesuit training (see next section).

I didn’t want to wake up. There was nothing but pain waiting for me in the real world. If I was asleep, I couldn’t feel anything. If I was asleep, I didn’t have to face Ash and the cold contempt on his face when he looked at me. The knowledge that everything had been a calculated game to him. Darkness was my retreat, my sanctuary.

And until my time here is served, I’ll allow myself to become my father’s daughter—cold, cruel, deceptive, calculating, and unapologetic. But it’s the acceptance of one thing that truly sets me free. My heart has no place here.

In making policy on Palestine over most of the past century, leaders in both Britain and the United States were driven primarily by powerful strategic and domestic political considerations, rather than by principle. The strategic considerations included the goals of dominating this crucial piece of territory, keeping it in friendly hands, and denying it to others. The political ones included cold calculations of the considerable domestic electoral and financial advantages to be obtained from supporting Zionism, as against the negligible domestic political costs. There also existed naive sympathy for Zionism among many British and American politicians, based on a particularly Protestant immersion in the Bible. This sympathy was often combined with a laudable desire to make amends for the persecution of the Jews in different parts of Europe (often combined with a less laudable, indeed reprehensible, desire to have the victims of persecution find haven somewhere other than Great Britain or the United States). The result of such attitudes, which necessarily ignored or downplayed vital realities on the ground in Palestine, has been an enduring tragedy.

By pinpointing my shortcoming, he unshackled me from the heart that continues to weigh me down. A heart that has proven to be worthless. No one wants it, and I gave it way too freely. It’s made me reckless and weak. And so, I’ll stop supplying it with hope and lies. I’ll deny its existence and stupid aspirations. I’ll let it wither, try to take away its strength, and any power it holds over my decisions. And until my time here is served, I’ll allow myself to become my father’s daughter—cold, cruel, deceptive, calculating, and unapologetic. But it’s the acceptance of one thing that truly sets me free. My heart has no place here.

In the essay, Benda said that we must throw away “the regular clichés about liberation” from the traditional obligations of marriage and family. In the Christian model, marriage and family offers three gifts that are urgently needed for believers struggling within a totalitarian order. The first is the fruitful fellowship of love in which we are bound together with our neighbor without pardon by virtue simply of our closeness; not on the basis of merit, rights and entitlements, but by virtue of mutual need and its affectionate reciprocation—incidentally, although completely unmotivated by notions of equality and permanent conflict between the sexes.2 The second gift is freedom given to us so absolutely that even as finite and, in the course of the conditions of the world, seemingly rooted beings, we are able to make permanent, eternal decisions; every marriage promise that is kept, every fidelity in defiance of adversity, is a radical defiance of our finitude, something that elevates us—and with us all created corporeally—higher than the angels.3 The third gift is the dignity of the individual within family fellowship. In practically all other social roles we are replaceable and can be relieved of them, whether rightly or wrongly. However, such a cold calculation of justice does not reign between husband and wife, between children and parents, but rather the law of love. Even where love fails completely . . . and with all that accompanies that failure, the appeal of shared responsibility for mutual salvation remains, preventing us from giving up on unworthy sons, cheating wives, and doddering fathers.4

evoked my own youthful idealism, the part of me still untouched by cynicism, cold calculation, or caution dressed up as wisdom.

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump.

His mind calculated, but cold numbness ran the length of his spine. The thought of killing an innocent soldier terrified him and he knew that, whatever happened now, he really had committed a crime.

The strength of the goddess lies in the capacity to give up that which is most precious, in order to ensure growth and regeneration; transformation can only take place when old attitudes and values give way to new ones. Hers is not a cold, calculating strength, denying all emotion; on the contrary, she feels the deepest emotions and does not restrict her mourning. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the goddess to comprehend and certainly to integrate, for it goes against our cultural teachings. The active, dynamic aspect of feminine nature, that which promotes change and transformation, counterbalances the static, elemental aspect, the maternal, which, although it provides for growth, is essentially conservative and protective. Both are equally important in psychological development.

The schizoid repression of feeling, and retreat from emotional relationships, may, however, go much further and produce a serious breakdown of constructive effort. Then the unhappy sufferer from incapacitating conflicts will succumb to real futility: nothing seems worth doing, interest dies, the world seems unreal, the ego feels depersonalized. Suicide may be attempted in a cold, calculated way to the accompaniment of such thoughts as 'I am useless, bad for everybody, I'll be best out of the way.' One patient who had never reached that point, said: 'I feel I love people in an impersonal way; it seems a false position, hypocritical. Perhaps I don't do any loving. I'm terrified when I see young people go off and being successful and I'm at a dead bottom, absolute dereliction, excommunicate.

Our apartment was always cold when the wind whipped off the river, and my father walked to the mountains every day to look for wood to keep us warm. He would eat the snow to fill himself up. My mother did whatever small business deals she could in order to buy a little corn or frozen potatoes. But now we were hungry all the time. I no longer dreamed of bread. All I wanted was to have something to eat for my next meal. Skipping a meal could literally mean death, so that became my biggest fear and obsession. You don’t care how food tastes and you don’t eat with pleasure. You eat only with an animal instinct to survive, unconsciously calculating how much longer each bite of food will keep your body going.

Even now as the window closes (is it a window? I don’t know. There are many analogies about the end of fertility, none of them good. They involved clocks grinding to a halt, or flowers withering, or reaching for an egg carton and finding out they're all gone, or maybe there’s one egg left, but it’s a little weird looking, and the shell is all rippled and strange and it’s probably from some sort of lizard), I’m hesitant to say those words: that I don’t want to be a mother. It sounds like a cold and calculated thing, something a comic supervillain would say before she starts up her penis-shrinking laser

A good but plain-Jane drill you prob’ly know pits the shooter against two to four standard IDPA/ USPSA cardboard torso targets. Using a shot-timer like the PACT Club Timer III, from the beep, put two rounds in each, slow enough to assure all hits are in top-scoring zones. Check your elapsed times. Push faster until you start dropping rounds outside the sweet spots, then back off, slow down and work your way up again. Maybe you integrate a reload. It’s sound, but it lacks panache. Kick it up. Between and around those full-size cardboards, add in half-size*, and some 10" and 5" mini-torsos**. Vary your drills; don’t just shoot left-to-right and back again. Shoot the little guys first, then the larger ones or vice versa or “Connor-versa,” which appears to onlookers to be a spazz-pattern. It is actually coldly calculated — by a spazz. Me. The variety is healthy. You can snap-shoot the full and half-size targets, but the minis force you to concentrate, bear down and get squinty. Sure, program reloads in too, and switching from right to left hand. Now add more fun with malfunction drills: Say you have 10 identical 15-round magazines and six inert dry-fire rounds. In six mags, stagger placement of duds, like second round in one, sixth round in another, blah-blah. Then mix the mags up so you don’t know where the surprises are. And on the timer, give yourself no slack for correcting your malf’s. Now for the spicy stir-fry sauce: Between sweeps of the targets, while gripping your pistol in one hand, bring your other hand back, touch your thumb to your nose, waggle your fingers vigorously, and shout as loudly as possible “O ye sinners, now shall ye repent! Let the Great Slaying begin!” or, “For freedom, Fritos and chicken-fried steak!” or, “Back awaaay from the bulgogi and nobody gets hurt!” Note: Never mess with my bulgogi. Never. Or, try shouting “I love you and blood sausage too!” — but shout it in German; makes it confusing and terrifying. Ich liebe dich und blutwurst auch! Exercising exemplary muzzle control and strictly observing all range safety protocols, slump your shoulders, hang your head and slowly turn around, looking dazed, lost, spaced-out ... Then, by degrees, “recover consciousness” and smile. It’s unlikely anyone will be there by this point, so that smile can be very genuine. If any looky-lou’s are still present, they’ll prob’ly be frozen like deer caught in headlights. Perfecto! If you see me at the range and I’m munchin’ a sammich and sippin’ coffee, stop and say howdy. But if I’m shooting drills, well ... Trouble not, etcetera. Connor OUT

Akil is one of the most resourceful men I’ve ever met. His ‘business’ sense is keen. He’s calm and calculating. That trait often makes men cold, but not Akil; he’s as capable of passion as he is level-headed. He’s intelligent beyond what I suspect I can comprehend, and when I’m with him, the ground feels more solid beneath my feet.” Madigan pressed his lips together. Why the fuck had he said that last part? That was completely unnecessary. It’d just slipped out. Warmth spread over his thigh, and he glanced down to find Azrael’s palm splayed there. Azrael gave it a light squeeze.

The Dark Cloud Is the memory bank you have which time does not seem to heal Is the speed with which you block men who lie that they care about how you feel Is the questioning of where society is going and whether our icy coldness will lead us to complete destruction Is the stock market obsession some of us have and how we crave calculated instruction

Obedience tends to be a cold, legal word of calculated action: sacrifice throbs with life and passion. Certainly the one will inevitably involve the other. Sacrifice can only be worked out by obedience, but obedience will need sacrifice to give it fire and momentum.

He was a married man - it was too cruel, too calculating, too bloody unfair of him to pursue her in cold blood.

It is to be lamented that even philosophers frequently forget themselves on this subject, and relate, with the greatest indifference, the numerous barbarous and merciless experiments they have performed on the suffering and innocent brutes, even on those which show affection for them; and then coldly make their observations and calculations on every different form in which the agony produced by them manifests itself. But this they do for the advancement of science and expect much praise from their meritorious exertions; forgetting that science should be subservient to the welfare of man and other animals, and ought not to be pursued merely through emulation, nor even for the sensual gratification the mind derives from them, at the expense of justice, the destruction of the happiness of others, and the production of their misery - as pleasure and pain are the only things of importance.

Nevertheless, the ship he had chosen as a target was unlucky. Whether the German crew released the torpedo in panic or cold-blooded calculation will probably never be known. It left its mountings and entered a hatch on the American Wacosta without ever touching the water, exploding inside the ship.

Were Beecher’s observations relevant to people with PTSD? Mark Greenberg, Roger Pitman, Scott Orr, and I decided to ask eight Vietnam combat veterans if they would be willing to take a standard pain test while they watched scenes from a number of movies. The first clip we showed was from Oliver Stone’s graphically violent Platoon (1986), and while it ran we measured how long the veterans could keep their right hands in a bucket of ice water. We then repeated this process with a peaceful (and long-forgotten) movie clip. Seven of the eight veterans kept their hands in the painfully cold water 30 percent longer during Platoon. We then calculated that the amount of analgesia produced by watching fifteen minutes of a combat movie was equivalent to that produced by being injected with eight milligrams of morphine, about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room for crushing chest pain. We concluded that Beecher’s speculation that “strong emotions can block pain” was the result of the release of morphinelike substances manufactured in the brain. This suggested that for many traumatized people, reexposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety.17 It was an interesting experiment, but it did not fully explain why Julia kept going back to her violent pimp.

The Russians now decided in July to support the Cubans as part of a grand strategy to win more concessions in Berlin and redraw the missile imbalance, harking back to Khrushchev’s assessment of Kennedy as a man who would bark but ultimately not bite at this Soviet initiative. It was a calculated risk.

Measuring the Acquisition Network Effect To increase the Acquisition Effect, you have to be able to directly measure it. The good news is that viral growth can be rolled up into one number. Here’s how you calculate it: Let’s say you’ve built a new productivity tool for sharing notes, and after it launches, 1,000 users download the new app. A percentage of these users invite their colleagues and friends, and over the next month, 500 users download and sign up—what happens next? Well, those 500 users then invite their friends, and get 250 to sign up, who create another 125 sign-ups, and so on. Pay attention to the ratios between each set of users—1000 to 500 to 250. This ratio is often called the viral factor, and in this case can be calculated at 0.5, because each cohort of users generates 0.5 of the next cohort. In this example, things are looking good—starting with 1,000 users with a viral factor of 0.5 leads to a total of 2,000 users by the end of the amplification—meaning an amplification rate of 2x. A higher ratio is better, since it means each cohort is more efficiently bringing on the next batch of users.

This is the Rocketship Growth Rate—the precise pace at which a startup must grow to break out. How do you calculate this rate of growth? First, by setting a goal of exceeding a billion dollars of valuation—thus being in a position to achieve an IPO—and working backward. Hitting a $1 billion valuation generally requires at least $100 million in top-line recurring revenue annually, based on the rough market multiple of 10x revenue. You’d want to hit that in 7–10 years, to sustain the engagement of the key employees and also reward investors who often work in decade-long time cycles. These two goals—revenue and time—work together to create an overall constraint. Neeraj Agarwal, a venture capitalist and investor in B2B companies, first calculated this growth rate by arguing that SaaS companies in particular need to follow a precise path to reach these numbers:64 Establish great product-market fit Get to $2 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) Triple to $6 million in ARR Triple to $18 million Double to $36 million Double to $72 million Double to $144 million SaaS companies like Marketo, Netsuite, Workday, Salesforce, Zendesk, and others have all roughly followed this curve. And the rough timing makes sense. The first phase, in which the team initially gets to product/market fit, takes 1–3 years. Add on the time to reach the rest of the growth milestones, and the entire process might take 6–9 years. Of course, after year 10, the company might still be growing quickly, though it’s more common for it to be growing 50 percent annualized rather than doubling. The argument is that products with network effects both can see higher growth rates as they tap into the various network forces I’ve discussed, and can compound these growth rates for a longer period of time—and looking at the data, I think that’s generally true.

You can't think about just one person while you're saving the world. You have to be a cold, calculating bastard

And from what I’ve heard, both his son and nephew are replicas of him — cold, ruthless, and calculating.

And from what I’ve heard, both his son and nephew are replicas of him—cold, ruthless, and calculating.

This is the Rocketship Growth Rate—the precise pace at which a startup must grow to break out. How do you calculate this rate of growth? First, by setting a goal of exceeding a billion dollars of valuation—thus being in a position to achieve an IPO—and working backward.

Could she love Clayton? She could see no reason why she could not. Jane was not coldly calculating by nature, but training, environment and heredity had all combined to teach her to reason even in matters of the heart.

But Pip didn't like those words, those cold technicalities. the people you love weren't calculated, subtracted, or held at arm's length across a decimal point.

All three of the North brothers enlisted as soon as we turned nineteen. I was pulled into special ops for my cold, calculating mind and my sharpshooting. The poison—that, I learned on the job. There are only two reasons the government needs to hide what a soldier does. One, because he’s going to kill someone. Or two, because he’s going to gather secret information. A spy, basically. That’s what they recruited Josh for. He’s a fucking chameleon when he wants to be.

Nothing is so cold and so calculating as money in a void where love and hope had been. I don’t want his billions of dollars, or however much his fortune amounts to. I never

Nothing is so cold and so calculating as money in a void where love and hope had been. I don’t want his billions of dollars, or however much his fortune amounts to. I never did.

Identity influences every aspect of our character, but it has special relevance to grit. Often, the critical gritty-or-not decisions we make—to get up one more time; to stick it out through this miserable, exhausting summer; to run five miles with our teammates when on our own we might only run three—are a matter of identity more than anything else. Often, our passion and perseverance do not spring from a cold, calculating analysis of the costs and benefits of alternatives. Rather, the source of our strength is the person we know ourselves to be.

Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold.

G.I. Joes or cap guns, as if the war were sustained by the passions of boys rather than the cold calculations of Ivy League technocrats scheduling our deaths.

You don’t have to suffer alone, Ry. I’m here, your brothers are here. I know the weight you carry, trying to save us all, but that isn’t your job, okay? I don’t need you to save me. I need you to stand with me, to lean on me so I can lean on you. You don’t always have to be perfect, cold, and calculating. It’s okay to break every now and again, but don’t do it alone.

so to be a good boss you have to be steadfast and tireless, generous and kind, a glad-hander and an organ grinder, but you also have to have a hide thick as shoe leather, you have to be calculating, devious, treacherous, cruel, a real hard-ass, and, when it’s necessary, truly cold-blooded. And you trust no one. But on the off chance that you do find one man you can trust, you do whatever the hell you have to do to keep that fellow.

As she grew older, Ammu learned to live with this cold, calculating cruelty. She developed a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big. She did exactly nothing to avoid quarrels and confrontations. In fact, it could be argued that she sought them out, perhaps even enjoyed them.

In another two minutes, if he didn’t turn to the right, they were going to pass directly in front of the First Territorial Bank. Emma clutched his upper arm and immediately withdrew when she felt the granite-hardness of his muscles beneath her fingers. “I don’t want Fulton to see us!” she protested in a somewhat frantic whisper, as though Fulton might have spies stationed in the branches of the elms and maples along the sides of the street. “I’m afraid he probably will,” Steven lamented without any conviction at all, as he continued past the last turn that would have saved Emma from certain exposure. “Sorry, Miss Emma, but there was nothing in our agreement about avoiding the banker.” Emma looked down at the hard-packed dirt of the road and calculated that she’d probably turn an ankle if she jumped, not to mention ruining her favorite spring dress. She folded her arms. “You’re deliberately trying to compromise me.” “Oh, no, Miss Emma,” Steven assured her suavely, tilting the brim of that obnoxious hat just for a moment. “I haven’t even started on that yet.” Emma folded her arms across her bosom and glared straight ahead. “I will not miss you when you leave,” she said coldly. “In fact, I will celebrate.” They

Americans, Lincoln warned, had fallen victim to “wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of the courts.” If respect for the rule of law disintegrated, the stage would be set for the emergence of an ambitious tyrant, a “towering genius” who would seek to gain a place in history even greater than the founders by “emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.” The remedy was for Americans to rededicate themselves to the rule of “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” and make respect for the rule of law their “political religion.”60

A person who magnanimously exhibits their passion allows us to witness their authentic personality whereas a cold and calculating personality remains inscrutable.

Yes, Pilcher was a money-man. They were a type. It was easy to spot them. You could always tell one by that cold fire in his eyes. It was not the hot fire of the man who would never interrupt a dream to calculate the risk, but the cold fire of the man whose mind was geared to the rules of the money game. It was a game that was played with numbers on pieces of paper … common into preferred, preferred into debentures, debentures into dollars, dollars into long-term capital gains. It was the net dollars after tax that were important. They were the numbers on the scoreboard, the runs that crossed the plate, the touchdowns, the goals. Net dollars were the score markers of the money-man’s game. Nothing else mattered. A factory wasn’t a living, breathing organism. It was only a dollar sign and a row of numbers after the Plant & Equipment item on the balance sheet. Their guts didn’t tighten when they heard a big Number Nine bandsaw sink its whining teeth into hard maple. Their nostrils didn’t widen to the rich musk of walnut or the sharply pungent blast from the finishing room. When they saw a production line they looked with blind eyes, not feeling the counterpoint beat of their hearts or the pulsing flow of hot blood or the trigger-set tenseness of lungs that were poised to miss a breath with every lost beat on the line

There was a time when slavery was good. It did its work, and when it finished creating capital it withered and died a natural death. Colonialism was good. It spread industrial culture of shared resources and markets. But to revive colonialism now would be an error. There was a time when the cold war dicated our every calculation in domestic and international relations. It is over. We are in the post-cold war era, and our calculations are affected by the laws and needs of globalization. The history of capital can be summed up in one phrase: in search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has the chance at the entire globe for its theater. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands.

Be guided by reason. Cold Calculated unimpassioned reason

He was cold and arrogant, and had a calculator instead of a heart.

Snow child, indeed. There was something cold, even calculating, about the girl’s beauty. Something was wrong here, though how the hell could I tell Harry that? I imagined the conversation: Harry, I went to Damask Rose to check up on you. Trust me, my friend, this girl is way out of your league. Plus, I had a bad feeling about her generally. Steer clear. I knew where his mind was right now: she would feel like the best thing that had ever happened to him, and anything or anyone that threatened that comfortable sense would be rationalized away or ignored. A heads-up from a friend would be useless. Or worse.

After an insight occurs, one must check it out to see if the connections genuinely make sense. The painter steps back from the canvas to see whether the composition works, the poet rereads the verse with a more critical eye, the scientist sits down to do the calculations or run the experiments. Most lovely insights never go any farther, because under the cold light of reason fatal flaws appear. But if everything checks out, the slow and often routine work of elaboration begins

His brow furrowed in a way that suggested he was calculating my likely ability to be that naive.

We go back to our silent fishing, but I'm smiling the whole time. The tension has dimmed. Well, until Blake shoves Graham into the river. A gasp leaves me, my mouth hanging open as I watch my roommate sputter to the surface of the dirty water. I drop my fishing pole, frozen in place. My dad mutters, “What the hell?” Blake throws his head back and laughs like I have never seen nor heard him laugh before. The loud and hearty sound is cut off short when Graham comes barreling out of the water, his body aimed straight for him, his eyes daggers of retribution. He lunges for his brother, wrapping his arms around his stomach and heaving him toward the water. Blake stumbles back, landing on his rear just inside the water. The sound of jeans smacking into water is sharp. He swipes water out of his eyes as Graham smirks at him. “What is wrong with you two?” I demand, more annoyed than worried. They seem to be getting along, even if they are being brutish about it. Suddenly I have the attention of two wet men, twin calculating gleams in their eyes. Graham is closest, his steps slow and purposeful as he approaches me. “Don't even think about it.” I put my hands out in front of me to ward him off. His grin deepens as he reaches me. Water drips from his hair down his face to become one with his soggy clothes. “Don't think about what?” A glance over my shoulder tells me a tree, the first form of cover I think of, is too far away. Not one to give up, I move for it anyway, but a wet, strong hand grabs the back of my shirt and pulls me away from where I want to go until I am flush with a cold chest. Cold clothes; warm body, I should say. His skin is burning through the dampness of his shirt. “Graham, I swear, if you throw me in that water, I will never speak to you again.” His voice is low and close as he says, “You make it sound like that wouldn't be a good thing.” I haven't even finished my sound of incredulity before I am gathered into his arms, my arms unconsciously going around his neck to anchor me to him. His touch is gentle, his eyes are smiling. “I mean it. This won't be good for you.” “Oh, I don't know about that.” His arms swing out, and I tighten my hold on him, threatening him even as he is laughing at me. He does it again as we move closer to the water and I glare all my irk at him. “If I go, you go.” He tilts his head as he studies me. His voice is unnaturally sober as he tells me, “That's fine with me.” I don't have time to process that before he lets go of me. I hit the water, refusing to let go of his neck, and we both go under. Lucky for me, the water is only a couple feet deep. Unlucky for Graham, I twist around until I am straddling him, keeping him down with my weight so the only thing above water is his head. I give him a sweet smile. He doesn't return it. “Hi,” I purr. He grunts in response. “Fancy meeting you here.” “What can I say? Where you go, I follow.” I pat his cheek. “That's so sweet.” “I'm a sweet guy.” “So sweet,” I agree. “Hey! You're scaring the fish away.” This from Blake, who is now standing near my father. “The fish love me!” I declare, sweeping my arms out wide and losing my balance. I splash into the water, first laughing, and then choking as water goes down my throat. Graham lifts me out of the water by my shirt. “The weight of your arrogance obviously tipped you over.” “It was more like the air couldn't handle all my splendor.” Half of his mouth lifts. “Something like that.” “Fishing with the three of you is impossible,” Dad grumbles and stomps to the cooler, opening a can of soda and gulping it down

Raging politeness,” this extreme friendliness is sometimes termed, but even if that is true, it is better than the cold stare or the averted eyes or the calculated snub I was used to in New England.

a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine. For Britain it was a cold political calculation. To help or even permit Jews to regain their historical country was not going to accomplish Britain’s immediate oil goals, nor would it help its long-term strategies, whose aim was to maintain its foothold in the Middle East and preserve its Empire.

Sin’s cold, calculating, and dangerous. She scares the shit outta me. I wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley and that’s the truth. Compared to her, you’re a damned Sun angel.” “You just don’t know her,” Cass said in a soft voice, her mouth curving the slightest bit. “She’s really very sweet.” “Sure,” Nick scoffed. “Sweet as sugar. Let’s get back to why you won’t let me put my hands on you.

Another possibility is that the sweat glands were the driving force behind the rise of EDAR-V370A. East Asians are usually assumed to have evolved in a cold climate because of certain traits, such as narrow nostrils and a fold of fat over the eyelid, which seem helpful in conserving body heat. But researchers have calculated that the EDAR variant emerged some 35,000 years ago, at which time central China was hot and humid.

Contrary to Capone thinking it had to do with him educating me on the game, this cold exterior that was turning me into this calculating savage day by day had more so to do with the anger I felt behind Ayesha’s death. “You sure you don’t want

Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction.

Vegetarians have wicked, shifty eyes and laugh in a cold, calculating manner. They pinch little children, steal stamps, drink water, and favor beards.”)

Whatever Patricio was looking for, he didn’t seem to find it. His frown deepened. “Help with what?” he asked finally. “A young woman is dying in my castle. I need your help to save her life.” “What business is it of mine if you’ve taken too much from one of your blood whores?” Patricio asked, his voice thick with disgust. “If—” His voice cut off as Kirill pressed the blade of his dagger against the angel’s stomach. He would have preferred to press the steel against the judging angel’s throat, but he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his leverage to reach up as high as that would require given the disparity in their height. Instead, he pressed the blade into the angel’s tunic, easily sliding through the material until he was rewarded with the scent of fresh blood. He did a few quick calculations, angling the knife so he could easily find the angel’s heart if the situation degraded. “Never speak of her in that manner again,” he said softly, his voice as cold as his own grave. “I need your blood to save her life. There’s no reason you have to die for me to get it.” Tension roared to life in the air around him, coming from within as well as from the princes standing behind him. Kirill cursed. He hated having people behind him, especially when weapons had been drawn. Irina, even now you distract me. Patricio stepped forward, pressing his body against the blade and driving it farther into his skin. His eyes flashed with a hint of that same brilliant lightning Kirill had seen when the angel was feeding. “You would offer me harm in my own kingdom?” “Your kingdom, my kingdom, or the land of oblivion. If you judge Irina so wrongly again, I will kill you and leave your rotting carcass for the vultures.” -Patricio and Kirill

One of the particularly striking things about the middle class proclivity for authenticity is that it significantly blurs the boundaries between public and private life. It involves projecting the internal search for authenticity into ever more public spaces. Almost any aspect of social life, even the most apparently inauthentic, becomes a potential zone for articulating our true self. For instance, employees seek to express and explore their authentic identities in their place of employment (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011). This encourages employees to bring what had previously been considered as private sentiments such as love, desire, and emotions into the workplace (Illouz, 2006; 2008). At the same time, we also witness the extension of the workplace into all aspects of our private lives (see also Fleming and Spicer, 2004). This can mean the number of hours and effort devoted to work time is radically extended. Many of the activities such as socializing, undertaking leisure activities and even romance become implicated with work. As our private life shifts into the public sphere it becomes denuded of intimacy and subjected to forms of cold instrumental calculation. Moreover, our public life becomes increasingly infused with emotive and highly personal expressions that had once been curbed by reason, rationality and due process.

Peasants without land and without steady employment, without running water or electricity in their homes, without medical assistance when mothers give birth, and without schools for their children…Factory workers who have no labor rights, and who get fired from their jobs if they demand such rights, human beings who are at the mercy of cold economic calculations…Mothers and the wives of those who have disappeared, or who are political prisoners…Shantytown dwellers, whose wretchedness defies imagination, suffering the permanent mockery of the mansion nearby.216

Liv’s head jerked up and she found she was staring into a pair of wholly alien eyes. They weren’t the gold of a Beast Kindred or the pale ice blue of a Tranq Kindred or any of the varying shades of brown, green, or blue she’d seen in the few Twin Kindred she’d met. They were a deep glossy black that reminded her of a black hole—a place where even light couldn’t escape. As she watched a red vertical slit appeared in the center of each large iris and elongated alarmingly like a cat’s. Only no cat she’d ever seen had crimson and black eyes. “Who…who are you?” she asked, finding her voice at last. The eyes were set in a cold, calculating masculine face with skin the strange color of a dark grey pearl. The speaker had hair as black as his eyes which was pulled back from the stark bones of his face in a way that seemed to emphasize the cruel set of his mouth. More than that, Liv couldn’t see except that he wore some kind of cape over his shoulders. “Who are you?” she asked again since he hadn’t answered her the first time. “I am your destiny. Are you mine?

Now that difference was a cold lump within her, a lump which had grown with every moment of time since they had snapped out of hyper to enter this system. Were the old calculations really to be trusted? Was this the home planet from which her species had lifted into space at the beginning of man's climb to the stars?

Her eyes are cold and calculating. She regards me like I’m a stain on the floor, a blemish that needs to be rubbed

I don't need you to save me. I need you to stand with me, to lean on me so I can lean on you. You don't always have to be perfect, cold, and calculating. It's okay to break every now and then, but don't do it alone.

The research revealed a physiological anomaly among many of the most violent husbands, who regularly beat up their wives or threaten them with knives or guns: the husbands do so in a cold, calculating state rather than while being carried away by the heat of fury. As their anger mounts, the anomaly emerges: their heart rate drops, instead of climbing higher, as is ordinarily the case with mounting fury. This means they are growing physiologically calmer, even as they get more belligerent and abusive. Their violence appears to be a calculated act of terrorism, a method for controlling their wives by instilling fear.

Of course, thoughts never passed through Mouchette's head in such a logical way. She was vague and jumped quickly from one thing to another. If the very poor could associate the various images of their poverty they would be overwhelmed by it, but their wretchedness seems to them to consist simply of an endless succession of miseries, a series of unfortunate chances. They are like blind men who with trembling fingers count out the coins whose value they cannot calculate. For the poor, the idea of poverty is enough. Their poverty is faceless. Now that she had abandoned the struggle Mouchette returned to her instinctive, unconscious, animal-like resignation. As she had never been ill, the cold which chilled her was scarcely a suffering, but rather a discomfort like so many others. It was not threatening, and did not suggest death. In any case, Mouchette thought of death as something as strange and unlikely as winning a big prize in the lottery. At her age, dying and becoming a lady were equally fantastic adventures.

People found him cold and unemotional, overly calculating and shrewd.

His eyes hold mine as he lifts his Scotch to his lips and takes a sip, emotionless and cold. He’s fucking pissed. Out-of-control Elliot Miles is manageable. Cold and calculating Elliot Miles is a completely different story. This situation is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.

Deliberate deception is not a mistake. It's calculating and cold. Especially when aimed at the one you profess to love. And if one can't be trusted in love, one can't be trusted in anything

Dowager wanted power, so she created a coup, and placed herself in charge. She was cold, calculating, and brutal; she stated, “Whoever makes me unhappy for a day, I will make suffer a lifetime.

The giant Nigerian man was quite evidently her stepfather and Joshua her half-brother. But Pip didn't like using those words, those cold technicalities. The people you love weren't algebra: to be calculated, subtracted, or held at arm's length across a decimal point. Victor and Josh weren't just three-eighths hers, not just forty per cent family, they were fully hers. Her dad and her annoying little brother.

Clausius’s entropy, indicated by the letter S, is a measurable and calculable quantity15 that increases or remains the same but never decreases, in an isolated process. In order to indicate that it never decreases, we write: ΔS ≥ 0 This reads: “Delta S is always greater than or equal to zero,” and we call this “the second principle of thermodynamics” (the first being the conservation of energy). Its nub is the fact that heat passes only from hot bodies to cold, never the other way around.