Compact Living Quotes

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With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty Holding the leash of blood So that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surf In aromatic loam, or in sea music Beautiful nude Equally beautiful your feet Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound Your ears, small shells Of the splendid American sea Your breasts of level plentitude Fulfilled by living light Your flying eyelids of wheat Revealing or enclosing The two deep countries of your eyes The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of Burnished gold Fine alabaster To sink into the two grapes of your feet Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises Flowering fire Open chandelier A swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materials Agate? Quartz? Wheat? Did your body come together? Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remained Astonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body Yet suffocate itself So much is clarity Taking its leave of you As if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.
Pablo Neruda
I have never been a nag. I have always been rather proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Nick is forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize I am more type A than Nick, and I try not to inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him. Nick is not the kind of guy who is going to think to vacuum or clean out the fridge. He truly doesn't see that kind of stuff. Fine. Really. But I do like a certain standard of living - I think it's fair to say the garbage shouldn't literally overflow, the plates shouldn't sit in the sink for a week with smears of bean burrito dried on them. That is just being a good grown-up roommate. And Nick's doing anything anymore, so I nag, and it pisses me off: You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag because you are not living up to your end of a very basic compact. Don't do that, It's not ok to do.
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing-- in my collection and others-- in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music--vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison--room as brain-- is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.
Jonathan Lethem (The Disappointment Artist: Essays)
The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class.
John Williams (Stoner)
As he began to withdraw from them, it became clear to Grenouille for the first time that for eighteen years their compacted human effluvium had oppressed him like air heavy with an imminent thunderstorm. Until now he had thought that it was the world in general he had wanted to squirm away from. But it was not the world, it was the people in it. You could live, so it seemed, in this world, in this world devoid of humanity. On
Patrick Süskind (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Penguin Essentials))
A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labor fifty hours to spend one hour reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your family budget around that—you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb—a 43,000-fold leap in affordability in two centuries. And the progress wasn’t finished: Nordhaus published his article before LED bulbs flooded the market. Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
Where once there had been life, now was death. And out of death, thus, was life sustained. And in that bloody compact, both the living and the dead were joined in a loop as ancient and immutable as the moon that arced above them.
Nicholas Evans (The Loop)
New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
E.B. White
It is the responsibility, yet the individual choice, of each of us to use the light we have to dispel the work of darkness, because if we do not, the power of falsehood rises. Through our inaction it becomes stronger, and a more potent force. It can even lead to the dimming of the light of all humanity born on this planet. That is why we struggle. That is why we fight to contribute to the confirmation of what is good, to seal our compact with love within our own lives and within our world.
John Lewis (Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America)
I suppose I knew on an intellectual level that graves weren't especially made for getting out of. I mean, you start with a hermetically sealed casket and then you dump six feet of dirt on top of it. Over time the earth gets compacted, which can't make it easy to dig through. So even if you're a very angry and determined zombie, you've kind of got your work cut out for you just escaping from the grave. Which was, I suppose, why we got hit with an initial wave of zombie bugs, birds and rodents. I bet some people would say if you've never picked undead mosquitoes out of your teeth, you've never lived. Under that definition, I'd be just as happy to have not lived, thanks.
C.E. Murphy (Walking Dead (Walker Papers, #4))
My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer.
Nadine Gordimer (Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories)
Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
Peasants live in a closed reality with a single, compact center of oppressive decision; the urban oppressed live in an expanding context in which the oppressive command center is plural and complex.
Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too. You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India’s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger—again just one aspect of poverty—is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging—and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.
Palagummi Sainath (Everybody loves a good drought)
For thirty-five years now I've been compacting old paper and books, living as I do in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations; living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts.
Bohumil Hrabal (Too Loud a Solitude)
living up to your end of a very basic compact. Don’t do that, it’s not okay to do.
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
Can we, then, set aside the impatience that the Internet tends to breed, and the habits of being distracted which our highly compacted modern lives create, in order to focus on what really matters?
David F. Wells (God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World)
On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, All nations, All identities that have existed or may exist All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect's wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words.
Clarice Lispector
It’s this feeling like the universe is compacting around me, while something in my rib cage is expanding. I’m the culmination of their lost dreams, their missed other lives, and at the same time, they’re proud of me.
Emily Henry (Happy Place)
Trust me” government asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what’s best for us. My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs — in the people. The responsibility to live up to that trust is where it belongs, in their elected leaders. That kind of relationship, between the people and their elected leaders, is a special kind of compact.
Ronald Reagan
ON the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining—I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the future. A VAST SIMILITUDE interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids, All the substances of the same, and all that is spiritual upon the same, All distances of place, however wide, All distances of time—all inanimate forms, All Souls—all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes—the fishes, the brutes, All men and women—me also; All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages; All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe; All lives and deaths—all of the past, present, future; This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd, and shall forever span them, and compactly hold them, and enclose them.
Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.
Henry David Thoreau (The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau: Canoeing in the Wilderness, Walden, Walking, Civil Disobedience and More)
It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me, which led me to consider the effects of what I was now doing. Three years before I was engaged in the same manner, and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my hear, and filled it for ever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another being, of whose disposition I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, night refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not convince a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he would be again along, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Living in a dense environment means a less stressful and time-consuming commute to work without the aid of a car. It's about a greater sense of community and partnership that naturally develops when you walk through a place and casually collide with neighbors. It's about feeling a sense of attachment to stores and bars and restaurants and their owners and employees. Frequently I will stop in to say a hello at a restaurant or store even if I'm not shopping or eating. It's about using a compact life to reduce environmental impact. For me, it boils down to this: a place you walk through is a place you know and love.
Philip Langdon (Within Walking Distance: Creating Livable Communities for All)
She had never wavered for an instant from her conviction that she had made a compact with the Devil; now she was growing accustomed to the thought. She perceived that throughout the greater part of her life she had been growing accustomed to it; but insensibly, as people throughout the greater part of their lives grow accustomed to the thought of their death. When it comes, it is a surprise to them. But the surprise does not last long, perhaps but for a minute or two. Her surprise also was wearing off. Quite soon, and she would be able to fold her hands upon it, as the hands of the dead are folded upon their surprised hearts.
Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman)
The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape.
John Williams (Stoner)
We live in the era of the “bottom line” mentality, with TED talks, sound bites, and news summaries. There is so much information to digest, we can only hope to grasp the world with compact and seemingly complete stories. We don’t want to be left dangling. We are all suckers for this information diet, and we all have come to depend on it, just like we have all succumbed to the instant gratification of texting and cell phones. And yet what separates the dilettante from the sophisticate is the appreciation that everything is not simple. The trick seems to be able to talk clearly while remaining fully aware of the underlying complexity of any story. For me it is the overwhelming realization that when trying to figure out how the brain does its masterful trick of enabling minds, we are barely at the starting line. Dig as deep as you want into human history: As long as there is a written record of thought, there is a record of humans wondering about the nature of life. It becomes obvious that all of us are just hopping into an ongoing conversation, not structuring one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Humans may have discovered some of the constraints on the thought processes, but we have not yet been able to tell the full story.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience)
1962 that “No data processing system, whether artificial or living, can process more than 2 × 1047 bits per second per gram of its mass,” which means that a hypothetical supercomputer the size of the earth (= c. 6 × 1027 grams) grinding away for as long as the earth has existed (= about 1010 years, with c. 3.14 × 107 seconds/year) can have processed at most 2.56 × 2092 bits, which number is known as Bremermann’s Limit.
David Foster Wallace (Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity)
It seemed as if nothing were to break that tie — as if the years were merely to compact and cement it; and as if those years were to be all the years of their natural lives. Eighteen-forty-two turned into eighteen-forty-three; eighteen-forty-three into eighteen- forty-four; eighteen-forty-four into eighteen-forty-five. Flush was no longer a puppy; he was a dog of four or five; he was a dog in the full prime of life — and still Miss Barrett lay on her sofa in Wimpole Street and still Flush lay on the sofa at her feet. Miss Barrett’s life was the life of “a bird in its cage.” She sometimes kept the house for weeks at a time, and when she left it, it was only for an hour or two, to drive to a shop in a carriage, or to be wheeled to Regent’s Park in a bath-chair. The Barretts never left London. Mr. Barrett, the seven brothers, the two sisters, the butler, Wilson and the maids, Catiline, Folly, Miss Barrett and Flush all went on living at 50 Wimpole Street, eating in the dining-room, sleeping in the bedrooms, smoking in the study, cooking in the kitchen, carrying hot-water cans and emptying the slops from January to December. The chair-covers became slightly soiled; the carpets slightly worn; coal dust, mud, soot, fog, vapours of cigar smoke and wine and meat accumulated in crevices, in cracks, in fabrics, on the tops of picture-frames, in the scrolls of carvings. And the ivy that hung over Miss Barrett’s bedroom window flourished; its green curtain became thicker and thicker, and in summer the nasturtiums and the scarlet runners rioted together in the window-box. But one night early in January 1845 the postman knocked. Letters fell into the box as usual. Wilson went downstairs to fetch the letters as usual. Everything was as usual — every night the postman knocked, every night Wilson fetched the letters, every night there was a letter for Miss Barrett. But tonight the letter was not the same letter; it was a different letter. Flush saw that, even before the envelope was broken. He knew it from the way that Miss Barrett took it; turned it; looked at the vigorous, jagged writing of her name.
Virginia Woolf (Flush)
that living bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues, out of which the various organs — brain, heart, lungs, and so on — are compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up in various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest, each material having its peculiar composition and proportions. No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its parts — what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials. And the conception wrought out by Bichat, with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily on medical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim, oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action of medicaments.
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
THIRD DEFINITIVE ARTICLE OF PERPETUAL PEACE III. The rights of men, as citizens of the world, shall be limited to the conditions of universal hospitality. We are speaking here, as in the previous articles, not of philanthropy, but of right; and in this sphere hospitality signifies the claim of a stranger entering foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility. The latter may send him away again if this can be done without causing his death; but, so long as he conducts himself peaceably, he must not be treated as an enemy. It is not a right to be treated as a guest to which the stranger can lay claim-a special friendly compact on his behalf would be required to make him for a given time an actual inmate-but he has a right of visitation. This right to present themselves to society belongs to all mankind in virtue of our common right of possession of the surface of the earth on which, as it is a globe, we cannot be infinitely scattered, and must in the end reconcile ourselves to existence side by side: at the same time, originally no one individual had more right than another to live in any one particular spot.
Immanuel Kant (Perpetual Peace)
INTROSPECTION: LOOKING WITHIN What is there to say about the inner life? It is as complex as the watery byways of Venice, Delicate as the hands of an infant child, Curious and compact as the wisdom of an acorn. It is as magnificent as the profile of an African queen. It eludes comprehension and yet it is ever present, Enveloping every moment of life. One lives from the inside out. A gnarl of emotion, biography, memory, and spirit. Each blending and bending into the other Like knotted strands of crocheted comforter. It is a world I will never truly understand, And yet the only reality I can ever know. What
Karyn D. Kedar (The Dance of the Dolphin : Finding Prayer, Perspective and Meaning in the Stories of Our Lives)
To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . . Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . . The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . . Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities as Coke and Kames much more frequently. As Gilbert Chinard puts it, "The Jeffersonian philosophy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason"--that is, Jefferson was more strongly influenced by his understanding of British history, the Anglo-Saxon age particularly, than by the eighteenth-century rationalism of which Locke was a principal forerunner. . . . Adams treats Locke merely as one of several commendable English friends to liberty. . . . At bottom, the thinking Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century found their principles of order in no single political philosopher, but rather in their religion. When schooled Americans of that era approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed their American experience and justified convictions they held already. So far as Locke served their needs, they employed Locke. But other men of ideas served them more immediately. At the Constitutional Convention, no man was quoted more frequently than Montesquieu. Montesquieu rejects Hobbes's compact formed out of fear; but also, if less explicitly, he rejects Locke's version of the social contract. . . . It is Montesquieu's conviction that . . . laws grow slowly out of people's experiences with one another, out of social customs and habits. "When a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural," Montesquieu says. It was from Montesquieu, rather than from Locke, that the Framers obtained a theory of checks and balances and of the division of powers. . . . What Madison and other Americans found convincing in Hume was his freedom from mystification, vulgar error, and fanatic conviction: Hume's powerful practical intellect, which settled for politics as the art of the possible. . . . [I]n the Federalist, there occurs no mention of the name of John Locke. In Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention there is to be found but one reference to Locke, and that incidental. Do not these omissions seem significant to zealots for a "Lockean interpretation" of the Constitution? . . . John Locke did not make the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or foreordain the Constitution of the United States. . . . And the Constitution of the United States would have been framed by the same sort of men with the same sort of result, and defended by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had Locke in 1689 lost the manuscripts of his Two Treatises of Civil Government while crossing the narrow seas with the Princess Mary.
Russell Kirk (Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution)
On the Beach at Night Alone On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
Walt Whitman (Poems From "Leaves of Grass")
We are all of us dreamers of dreams; On visions our childhood is fed; And the heart of the child is unhaunted, it seems, By the ghosts of dreams that are dead. From childhood to youth's but a span And the years of our youth are soon sped; Yet the youth is no longer a youth, but a man, When the first of his dreams is dead. There's no sadder sight this side the grave Than the shroud o'er a fond dream spread, And the heart should be stern and the eyes be brave To gaze on a dream that is dead. 'Tis a cup as of wormwood and gall When the doom of a great dream is said, And the best of a man is under the pall When the best of his dreams is dead. He may live on by compact and plan When the fine bloom of living is shed, But God pity the little that's left of a man When the last of his dreams is dead. Let him show a brave face if he can, Let him woo fame or fortune instead, Yet there's not much to do but bury a man When the last of his dreams is dead.
William Herbert Carruth
Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude — which was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tones — Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her. The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward, and carried them far away from their old eager pacing towards the same blank limit — carried them away to the new things that would come with the coming years, when Eppie would have learned to understand how her father Silas cared for her; and made him look for images of that time in the ties and charities that bound together the families of his neighbours.
George Eliot (Complete Works of George Eliot)
There are Californians who waiver in their allegiance to the climate of California. Sometimes the climate of San Francisco has made me cross. Sometimes I have thought that the winds in summer were too cold, that the fogs in summer were too thick. But whenever I have crossed the continent—when I have emerged from New York at ninety-five degrees, and entered Chicago at one hundred degrees—when I have been breathing the dust of alkali deserts and the fiery air of sagebrush plains—these are the times when I have always been buoyed up by the anticipation of inhaling the salt air of San Francisco Bay. If ever a summer wanderer is glad to get back to his native land, it is I, returning to my native fog. Like the prodigal youth who returned to his home and filled himself with husks, so I always yearn in summer to return to mine, and fill myself up with fog. Not a thin, insignificant mist, but a fog—a thick fog—one of those rich pea-soup August fogs that blow in from the Pacific Ocean over San Francisco. When I leave the heated capitals of other lands and get back to California uncooked, I always offer up a thank-offering to Santa Niebla, Our Lady of the Fogs. Out near the Presidio, where Don Joaquin de Arillaga, the old comandante, revisits the glimpses of the moon, clad in rusty armor, with his Spanish spindle-shanks thrust into tall leathern boots—there some day I shall erect a chapel to Santa Niebla. And I have vowed to her as an ex-voto a silver fog-horn, which horn will be wound by the winds of the broad Pacific, and will ceaselessly sound through the centuries the litany of Our Lady of the Fogs. Every Californian has good reason to be loyal to his native land. If even the Swiss villagers, born in the high Alps, long to return to their birthplace, how much more does the exiled Californian yearn to return to the land which bore him. There are other, richer, and more populous lands, but to the Californian born, California is the only place in which to live. And to the returning Californian, particularly if he be native-born, the love of his birthplace is only intensified by visits to other lands. Why do men so love their native soil? It is perhaps a phase of human love for the mother. For we are compact of the soil. Out of the crumbling granite eroded from the ribs of California’s Sierras by California’s mountain streams—out of earth washed into California’s great valleys by her mighty rivers—out of this the sons of California are made, brain, and muscle, and bone. Why then should they not love their mother, even as the mountaineers of Montenegro, of Switzerland, of Savoy, lover their mountain birth-place? Why should not exiled Californians yearn to return? And we sons of California always do return; we are always brought back by the potent charm of our native land—back to the soil which gave us birth—and at the last back to Earth, the great mother, from whom we sprung, and on whose bosom we repose our tired bodies when our work is done.
Jerome Hart (Argonaut Letters)
The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us-Is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority . . . The majority has might-unfortunately-but right it is not. Right-are I and a few others. The minority is always right. . . I have a mind to make a revolution against the lie that the majority is in the possession of truth. What kind of truths are those around which the majority usually gathers? They are truths that have become so old that they are on the way toward becoming shaky. But once a truth has become that old, it is also on the way toward becoming a lie . . . A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen years; at most twenty, rarely more. But such aged truths are always exceedingly thin. Nevertheless it is only at that stage that the majority makes their acquaintance . . . All these majority truths . . . are rather like rancid, spoiled . . . hams. And that is the source of the moral scurvy that rages all around us...
Henrik Ibsen (An Enemy of the People)
The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us-Is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority . . . The majority has might-unfortunately-but right it is not. Right-are I and a few others. The minority is always right. . . I have a mind to make a revolution against the lie that the majority is in the possession of truth. What kind of truths are those around which the majority usually gathers? They are truths that have become so old that they are on the way toward becoming shaky. But once a truth has become that old, it is also on the way toward becoming a lie . . . A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen years; at most twenty, rarely more. But such aged truths are always exceedingly thin. Nevertheless it is only at that stage that the majority makes their acquaintance . . . All these majority truths . . . are rather like rancid, spoiled . . . hams. And that is the source of the moral scurvy that rages all around us... (Qtd. by Walter Kaufmann)
Henrik Ibsen (An Enemy of the People)
We enjoy the poetics but also know we can’t always live off our feelings. We’ve long intuited that a long-distance marathon like ours must be run on more than romance. We delight in each other enough that when we don’t, we still push each other to push through the pain barrier. To try to make it to the next level. Ali calls this “the work of love,” and maybe some days that’s shorthand for me being hard work. But she’s right: love is work. Good work. We may let the scaffolds fall, but we have built our wall. Ali gets fidgety when I get too serious. As I am now. Struggling to express how every day that we give to each other adds both weight and … weightlessness. Gravity and grace. Am I more desperate for our marriage to make it than Ali, who is never as desperate as her husband? I have the most to learn from this relationship, and one of the profoundest lessons it has taught me is in raising children. I’d had that blood-brother compact with my childhood friend Guggi to never grow up, but as Ali and I had kids, I slowly understood that you can’t have a child and remain a child. I really don’t like goodbyes, but sometimes you have to say goodbye.
Bono (Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story)
Anna is not just a woman, not just a splendid specimen of womanhood, she is a woman with a full, compact, important moral nature: everything about her character is significant and striking, and this applied as well to her love. She cannot limit herself as another character in the book, Princess Betsy, does, to an undercover affair. Her truthful and passionate nature makes disguise and secrecy impossible. She is not Emma Bovary, a provincial dreamer, a wistful wench creeping along crumbling walls to the beds of interchangeable paramours. Anna gives Vronski her whole life, consents to a separation from her adored little son—despite the agony it costs her not to see the child and she goes to live with Vronski first abroad in Italy, and then on his country place in central Russia, though this "open" affair brands her an immoral woman in the eyes of her immoral circle. (In a way she may be said to have put into action Emma's dream of escaping with Rodolphe, but Emma would have experienced no wrench from parting with her child, and neither were there any moral complications in that little lady's case.) Finally Anna and Vronski return to city life. She scandalizes hypocritical society not so much with her love affair as with her open defiance of society's conventions.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Russian Literature)
With our desire to have more, we find ourselves spending more and more time and energy to manage and maintain everything we have. We try so hard to do this that the things that were supposed to help us end up ruling us. We eventually get used to the new state where our wishes have been fulfilled. We start taking those things for granted and there comes a time when we start getting tired of what we have. We're desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are. The objects that are supposed to represent our qualities become our qualities themselves. There are more things to gain from eliminating excess than you might imagine: time, space, freedom and energy. When people say something is impossible, they have already decided that they don't want to do it. Differentiate between things you want and things you need. Leave your unused space empty. These open areas are incredibly useful. They bring us a sense of freedom and keep our minds open to the more important things in life. Memories are wonderful but you won't have room to develop if your attachment to the past is too strong. It's better to cut some of those ties so you can focus on what's important today. Don't get creative when you are trying to discard things. There's no need to stock up. An item chosen with passion represents perfection to us. Things we just happen to pick up, however, are easy candidates for disposal or replacement. As long as we stick to owning things that we really love, we aren't likely to want more. Our homes aren't museum, they don't need collections. When you aren't sure that you really want to part with something, try stowing it away for a while. Larger furniture items with bold colors will in time trigger visual fatigue and then boredom. Discarding things can be wasteful. But the guilt that keeps you from minimizing is the true waste. The real waste is the psychological damage that you accrue from hanging on to things you don't use or need. We find our originality when we own less. When you think about it, it's experience that builds our unique characteristics, not material objects. I've lowered my bar for happiness simply by switching to a tenugui. When even a regular bath towel can make you happy, you'll be able to find happiness almost everywhere. For the minimalist, the objective isn't to reduce, it's to eliminate distractions so they can focus on the things that are truly important. Minimalism is just the beginning. It's a tool. Once you've gone ahead and minimized, it's time to find out what those important things are. Minimalism is built around the idea that there's nothing that you're lacking. You'll spend less time being pushed around by something that you think may be missing. The qualities I look for in the things that I buy are: - the item has a minimalistic kind of shape and is easy to clean - it's color isn't too loud - I'll be able to use it for a long time - it has a simple structure - it's lightweight and compact - it has multiple uses A relaxed moment is not without meaning, it's an important time for reflection. It wasn't the fallen leaves that the lady had been tidying up, it was her own laziness that she had been sweeping away. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. With daily cleaning, the reward may be the sense of accomplishment and calmness we feel afterward. Cleaning your house is like polishing yourself. Simply by living an organized life, you'll be more invigorated, more confident and like yourself better. Having parted with the bulk of my belongings, I feel true contentment with my day-to-day life. The very act of living brings me joy. When you become a minimalist, you free yourself from all the materialist messages that surround us. All the creative marketing and annoying ads no longer have an effect on you.
Fumio Sasaki (Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism)
demonstrating that the first of these, the integral fast reactor, was safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island 2 and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), an even more advanced concept developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is fueled by thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years. Running at atmospheric pressure, and without ever reaching a criticality, the LFTR doesn’t require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground. In 2015 Microsoft founder Bill Gates had begun funding research projects similar to these fourth-generation reactors in a quest to create a carbon-neutral power source for the future. By then, the Chinese government had already set seven hundred scientists on a crash program to build the world’s first industrial thorium reactor as part of a war on pollution. “The problem of coal has become clear,” the engineering director of the project said. “Nuclear power provides the only solution.
Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
Someone must be having a big party, Shyla thought as she turned into her neighborhood, the rhythmic salsa beat of Latin music was so loud. A car she didn't recognize was parked in the middle of her driveway. She had to drive over the grass in order to get around it. She pushed the automatic opener to raise the garage door. Another car was parked where she normally parked, and it wasn't Carl's. It belonged to Pilar. Leaving her car where it was, she got out and went into the house through the back door from the garage. Inside the house, the noise was almost deafening. Two young children were thrashing one another in the middle of the family room while some woman, presumably their mother, yelled at them in Spanish. The woman barely noticed Shyla. Shyla went into the living room and could hear other voices and laughter coming from her bedroom. There, she found a young woman going through her jewelry box, and someone else holding up one of her bras. When they saw Shyla, they stopped laughing. Pilar and another elderly woman were just coming down the stairs when Shyla went back into the living room. "Shyla, why are you home?" Pilar asked, then shrugged. Shyla could hardly hear her over the noise. "I live here," she said, too stunned to say anything else. She went back into the family room and turned off the compact disc player. There, on the floor, lay her great grandmother's china clock, broken.
Barbara Casey (Shyla's Initiative)
You are a totally pathetic, historical example of the phallocentric, to put it mildly." "A pathetic, historical example," Oshima repeats, obviously impressed. By his tone of voice he seems to like the sound of that phrase. "In other words you're a typical sexist, patriarchic male," the tall one pipes in, unable to conceal her irritation. "A patriarchic male," Oshima again repeats. The short one ignores this and goes on. "You're employing the status quo and the cheap phallocentric logic that supports it to reduce the entire female gender to second-class citizens, to limit and deprive women of the rights they're due. You're doing this unconsciously rather than deliberately, but that makes you even guiltier. You protect vested male interests and become inured to the pain of others, and don't even try to see what evil your blindness causes women and society. I realize that problems with restrooms and card catalogs are mere details, but if we don't begin with the small things we'll never be able to throw off the cloak of blindness that covers our society. Those are the principles by which we act." "That's the way every sensible woman feels," the tall one adds, her face expressionless. [...] A frozen silence follows. "At any rate, what you've been saying is fundamentally wrong," Oshima says, calmly yet emphatically. "I am most definitely not a pathetic, historical example of a patriarchic male." "Then explain, simply, what's wrong with what we've said," the shorter woman says defiantly. "Without sidestepping the issue or trying to show off how erudite you are," the tall one adds. "All right. I'll do just that—explain it simply and honestly, minus any sidestepping or displays of brilliance," Oshima says. "We're waiting," the tall one says, and the short one gives a compact nod to show she agrees. "First of all, I'm not a male," Oshima announces. A dumbfounded silence follows on the part of everybody. I gulp and shoot Oshima a glance. "I'm a woman," he says. "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't joke around," the short woman says, after a pause for breath. Not much confidence, though. It's more like she felt somebody had to say something. Oshima pulls his wallet out of his chinos, takes out the driver's license, and passes it to the woman. She reads what's written there, frowns, and hands it to her tall companion, who reads it and, after a moment's hesitation, gives it back to Oshima, a sour look on her face. "Did you want to see it too?" Oshima asks me. When I shake my head, he slips the license back in his wallet and puts the wallet in his pants pocket. He then places both hands on the counter and says, "As you can see, biologically and legally I am undeniably female. Which is why what you've been saying about me is fundamentally wrong. It's simply impossible for me to be, as you put it, a typical sexist, patriarchic male." "Yes, but—" the tall woman says but then stops. The short one, lips tight, is playing with her collar. "My body is physically female, but my mind's completely male," Oshima goes on. "Emotionally I live as a man. So I suppose your notion of being a historical example may be correct. And maybe I am sexist—who knows. But I'm not a lesbian, even though I dress this way. My sexual preference is for men. In other words, I'm a female but I'm gay. I do anal sex, and have never used my vagina for sex. My clitoris is sensitive but my breasts aren't. I don't have a period. So, what am I discriminating against? Could somebody tell me?
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
I used to think my sister and I were just two nice southern girls who would get married in a few years, have babies, and settle down to a life of sipping sweet tea on a porch swing under the shade of waxy-blossomed magnolias, raising our children together near Mom and Dad and each other. Then I discovered Alina and I descend not from good, wholesome southern stock but from an ancient Celtic bloodline of powerful sidhe-seers, people who can see the Fae, a terrifying race of otherworldly beings that have lived secretly among us for thousands of years, cloaked in illusions and lies. Governed loosely by a queen, and even more loosely by a Compact few support and many ignore, they have preyed on humans for millennia.
Karen Marie Moning (Bloodfever (Fever #2))
I believe that information technologies, especially well-designed, purposeful ones, empower and renew us and serve to amplify our reach and our abilities. The ensuing connectedness dissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some of the most visible recent examples of this dissolving of layers are the transformations we have seen in music, movies and books. Physical books and the bookstores they inhabited have been rapidly disappearing, as have physical compact discs, phonograph records, videotapes and the stores that housed them. Yet there is more music than ever before, more books and more movies. Their content got separated from their containers and got housed in more convenient, more modular vessels, which better tie into our lives, in more consumable ways. In the process, layers of inefficiency got dissolved. By putting 3000 songs in our pockets, the iPod liberated our music from the housings that confined it. The iPhone has a high-definition camera within it, along with a bunch of services for sharing, distributing and publishing pictures, even editing them — services that used to be inside darkrooms and studios. 3D printing is an even more dramatic example of this transformation. The capabilities and services provided by workshops and factories are now embodied within a printer that can print things like tools and accessories, food and musical instruments. A remarkable musical flute was printed recently at MIT, its sound indistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday.
Jeffrey Word (SAP HANA Essentials: 5th Edition)
She understood that becoming a nun was a lifetime commitment. Testing her daughter’s resolve was wise. The Koehler family together, 1923 First Homes As an adult, I visited Rosie’s first home at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, to get a sense of her early life and that of her famous family. The compact Victorian residence stands three stories tall on a small lot in the Boston suburb. It was easy to picture the young Kennedy children playing in the back yard. Rose Kennedy wrote in Times to Remember, her 1974 autobiography: “It was a nice old wooden-frame house with clapboard siding; seven rooms, plus two small ones in the converted attic, all on a small lot with a few bushes and trees . . . about twenty-five minutes from the center of the city by trolley.” 5 The family home on Beals Street is now the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service. From the deep browns and reds of the rugs on the hardwood floors to the homey couch and chairs, the home felt warm and comfortable to me. I suppressed a desire to kick off my sandals and flop on the sofa. The Kennedys’ house on Beals Street, Rosie’s first home But my perspective as a child would have triggered a different impression. I would have whispered to my mother, “They’re rich!” (I’ve since discovered that money isn’t the only measure of wealth. There’s wealth in memories, too.) A lovely grand piano occupies one corner of the Kennedys’ old living room. It was a wedding gift to Rose Kennedy from her uncles, and she delighted in playing her favorite song, “Sweet Adeline,” on it. Although her children took piano lessons, Mrs. Kennedy lamented that her own passion never ignited a similar spark in any of her daughters. She did often ask Rosemary to perform, however. I see an image of Rosemary declaring she couldn’t, her hands stretching awkwardly across the keys. But her mother encouraged Rosie to practice, confident she’d
Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff (The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women)
classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism.*4 Art is robust; science, not always (to put it mildly). Some Procrustean beds make life worth living: art and, the most potent of all, the poetic aphorism. — Aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, short sayings, even, to some extent, epigrams are the earliest literary form—often integrated into what we now call poetry. They carry the cognitive compactness of the sound bite (though both more potent and more elegant than today’s down-market version),*5 with some show of bravado in the ability of the author to compress powerful ideas in a handful of words—particularly in an oral format.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto Book 4))
The problem is that newer artificial lights like LEDs and compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs don’t contain most of the infrared, violet, and red light that’s found in sunlight. Instead, they increase the intensity of blue light to a level that our eyes, brains, and bodies haven’t evolved to handle. This is what I call “junk light” because it’s just as unhealthy and aging as junk food.
Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
forty-one of the 102 passengers signed the Mayflower Compact, agreeing to establish a colony dedicated to God’s glory and the advancement of the Christian faith.19
Sean Hannity (Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink)
living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts.
Bohumil Hrabal
I understand how awful it is. Here you come, headlong, into a tight little group of people who have always lived together, who have the habit of moving around each other on land they know and own and understand, and every threat to what they're used to only makes them still more compact and self-assured. An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.
Tove Jansson (The Summer Book)
A good book is a book that does not leave the reader intact; it is a challenge hurled at us to change something in ourselves and in the world. A good book is a book that reflects something more than ourselves or the art of the person who has written it: it is a force, a tool or weapon, to make the dreams of today become the reality of tomorrow. A good book is a book that poses, with specific compactness and intensity of expression, a real problem for a real man in a real world. A good book is a fighting book, which helps usher in the new man. A good book is a book which does not separate its beauty from that of the real world it expresses, because there is no new art without new men. A good book is a book that teaches us how to live and how to die.
Roger Garaudy (The Literature of the Graveyard)
Modern” science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. It was no Bloombury but there could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90% of the writing and editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each other’s material, and so on. For a field which was conceptually based on expansion, the smashing of barriers, the far-reaching and so on, science fiction was amazingly insular.
Barry N. Malzberg (Breakfast in the Ruins)
Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature. All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another. When men enter into society, it is by voluntary consent; and they have a right to demand and insist upon the performance of such conditions and previous limitations as form an equitable original compact. Every natural right not expressly given up, or, from the nature of a social compact, necessarily ceded, remains. All positive and civil laws should conform, as far as possible, to the law of natural reason and equity.
Charles River Editors (The Sons of Liberty: The Lives and Legacies of John Adams, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and John Hancock)
There is nothing that I so admire as purposefulness. I have an enormous respect for people who know exactly what they are doing and where they are going. Such people are compact and integrated. They have clear edges. They give an impression of invulnerability and balance, and I wish I were one of them.
Louise Dickinson Rich
I had noticed that yeast cells fed with lower amounts of sugar were not just living longer, but their rDNA was exceptionally compact—significantly delaying the inevitable ERC accumulation, catastrophic numbers of DNA breaks, nucleolar explosion, sterility, and death. Why was that happening? THE
David A. Sinclair (Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To)
Obvious fact: Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. ‘Us’ meaning laymen. It’s like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time. As in for instance we ‘know,’ as high-school graduates and readers of Newsweek, that time is relative, that quantum particles can be both there and not, that space is curved, that colors do not inhere in objects themselves, that astronomic singularities have infinite density, that our love for our children is evolutionarily preprogrammed, that there is a blind spot in the center of our vision that our brains automatically fill in. That our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pâté. That we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, and hydrogen is flammable, and yet we are not flammable. We ‘know’ a near-infinity of truths that contradict our immediate commonsense experience of the world. And yet we have to live and function in the world. So we abstract, compartmentalize: there’s stuff we know and stuff we ‘know’. I ‘know’ my love for my child is a function of natural selection, but I know I love him, and I feel and act on what I know. Viewed objectively, the whole thing is deeply schizoid; yet the fact of the matter is that as subjective laymen we don’t often feel the conflict. Because of course our lives are 99.9% concretely operational, and we operate concretely on what we know, not on what we ‘know’.
David Foster Wallace (Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity)
It's this feeling like the universe is compacting around me, while something in my rib cage is expanding. I'm the culmination of their list dreams, their missed other lives, and at the same time, they're proud of me.
Emily Henry (Happy Place)
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. Once language has said all it has to say and falls silent, I wonder how we will go on living. Problems already begin to appear, perhaps they are not problems as yet, rather different layers of meaning, displaced sediments, new questioning formulations, take for example the phrase, 'Over the great nakedness of truth, the diaphanous cloak of imagination.' It seems clear, compact, and conclusive, a child would be able to understand and repeat it in an examination without making any mistakes, but the same child might recite with equal conviction a different phrase, 'Over the great nakedness of imagination, the diaphanous cloak of truth,' which certainly gives one more to ponder, more to visualize with pleasure, the imagination solid and naked, the truth a gauzy covering. If our maxims are reversed and become laws, what world will be created by them. It is a miracle that men do not lose their sanity each time they open their mouths to speak.
José Saramago (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis)
She laughs then, which was my goal, and I catch a glimpse of the girl I remember. If Parker wasn’t laughing, she was smiling. Always. She was a compact ball of sunshine who drove away the constant storm cloud I lived under. For a while.
Emma St. Clair (Just Don't Fall (Sweater Weather #1))
Winter rose Finally after many days the sun rose, And it turned lively, the stiff, but beautiful winter rose, That will soon be covered in frost, Where its scent and its radiant colour will be lost, And its petals will kiss each other with a passionate compactness, And lie suspended in this state with a beautiful aptness, That humans fail to acquire, Because we are a rose where every petal is a dichotomous desire, So the rose of our life never achieves this beautiful compactness, Because it tries to grow against the winter’s stillness, And as it does so, its frost bitten petals fall apart and break into pieces, Unlike the winter rose where it seems beauty reposes in peace in so many pieces, Holding them together, for it believes in winter’s silence and its stillness, That whispers to it silent songs of patience and its eventual fairness, Like this winter rose I hold your memories together, Though many might say I am a cold and insensitive lover, But my love Irma, the petals of hope and love have a melancholic dichotomy of their own, And like the beautiful winter rose your memories within me have grown, Waiting, waiting for the winter silence to end, Even if that means a million winter’s I have to defend, So, let the winter rose be, and let the winter stay as long as it wants to, For my mind and heart have entered into a beautiful hibernation, where no one wishes to be, but sometimes we have to!
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
American Indians, for example, had resisted every effort by the English to teach them the arts of civilization. Franklin thought this striking, yet hardly inexplicable. “They visit us frequently,” he told Collinson, “and see the advantages that arts, sciences, and compact society procure us. They are not deficient in natural understanding, and yet they have never shewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our arts.” The reason was plain enough: “In their present way of living, almost all their wants are supplied by the spontaneous productions of nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when game is so plenty.” Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” In one case an Englishman raised with the Indians inherited a substantial estate; he came home to test his new circumstances but soon abandoned them, leaving the estate to a younger brother and carrying off only a gun and a coat. Franklin related yet another story that further illustrated his point. Some years earlier one of the colonies had concluded a treaty with the Six Nations (the Iroquois confederacy of the lower Great Lakes region). All that remained was the exchange of civilities. The English commissioners offered to underwrite the education of half a dozen of the brightest Indian lads at the College of William and Mary, the finest educational institution in the region. The Indians responded that they were most grateful for this kind offer but must decline. Some Indian youths had been educated in this way several years before and had returned good for nothing, being unable to hunt, trap, or fight. The Indians made a counteroffer: to take a dozen English children to the Indians’ great council, where they would be raised as real and useful men.
H.W. Brands (The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin)
Counties provided the primary building blocks for legislative districts for most of the nation’s history and in less populated areas people still identify with counties, so to the extent possible counties should be kept whole in districting plans. Even when the need to minimize population deviations makes it impossible to avoid splitting counties, mapmakers should strive to avoid districts that connect far-flung pieces of geography by means of touch points, waterways, or narrow necks since those designs make it difficult for voters to know what district they live in. In more compact districts, voters are more likely to know the name of their legislator. Moreover, campaigning is easier in compact
Charles S. Bullock III (Redistricting: The Most Political Activity in America)
HEALTH HACK #5: Infrared and Red Light Therapy Red and infrared light have been found to be effective tools for muscle recovery and pain relief, with the potential to treat inflammation and play a role in detoxification and treatment for other kinds of illness and injury. This cutting-edge technology is now available in the form of compact lamps for home use.
Mukesh Bansal (Hacking Health: The Only Book You’ll Ever Need to Live Your Healthiest Life)
Connect more. Break the chains. Cause a few hurricanes wherever you go! Connection, that's the key. That's what keeps us going. It doesn't matter who you're connecting to, whether it's the people or Nature or simply with your own self. Traveling to over 20 countries, working in institutions and frameworks that pulled me from my tip to toe from nurturing passions to absorbing diverse cultures and lifestyles, knowing people from different communities, I have realised all that matters in Life is our urge to grow and to leave an impact of the work that we do, even if that is in proportions and pieces that aren't very akin to success. Because the truth is Success is not measured in quantitative approaches to workspaces but in the qualitative impact that we draw around in the lives of people we work with or just engage in our daily communication. Life is actually a process of learning and unlearning, a growth that smells like evolution but actually is more of an adaptive ability to embrace change. We change as individuals every fraction of a second through the connections we make and nothing stays compact or static anymore and that's exactly what knowledge stands for, knowledge of life of cosmos and of our passions. They Grow! So don't keep rigid fixed sets of notions because thoughts and ideas keep growing every moment and that's why we need to challenge ourselves to flow with this process of life, to sail along the voyage of this adventure called Life. And while you do that, keep a heart that feels all, detached but connected. Detached from any sort of bias and connected to the roots of your soul and your culture. Because what you bring to the table is entirely YOUR mark which should look like your unique beautiful self. Be absolutely crazy and passionate about all that you do, be it work or life and let the fire inside you burn so bright that those who connect with you feel your warmth and bask in your sunshine, at the moment and always.
Debatrayee Banerjee
AMANDA: We're being so bad, so terribly bad, we'll suffer for this, I know we shall. ELYOT: Can't be helped. AMANDA: Starting all those awful rows all over again. ELYOT: No, no, we're older and wiser now. AMANDA: What difference does that make? The first moment either of us gets a bit nervy, off we'll go again. ELYOT: Stop shilly-shallying, Amanda. AMANDA: I'm trying to be sensible. ELYOT: You're only succeeding in being completely idiotic. AMANDA: Idiotic indeed! What about you? ELYOT: Now look here Amanda AMANDA[stricken]: Oh my God! ELYOT [rushing to her and kissing her]: Darling, darling, I didn't mean it. AMANDA: I won't move from here unless we have a compact, a sacred, sacred compact never to quarrel again. ELYOT: Easy to make but difficult to keep. AMANDA: No, no, it's the bickering that always starts it. The moment we notice we're bickering, either of us, we must promise on our honor to stop dead. We'll invent some phrase or catchword, which when either of us says it, automatically cuts off all conversation for at least five minutes. ELYOT: Two minutes dear, with an option of renewal. AMANDA: Very well, what shall it be? ELYOT [hurriedly]: Solomon Isaacs. AMANDA: All right, that'll do. ELYOT: Come on, come on. AMANDA: What shall we do if we meet either of them on the way downstairs? ELYOT: Run like stags. AMANDA: What about clothes? ELYOT: I've got a couple of bags I haven't unpacked yet. AMANDA: I've got a small trunk. ELYOT: Send the porter up for it. AMANDA: Oh this is terrible - terrible - ELYOT: Come on, come on, don't waste time. AMANDA: Oughtn't we to leave notes or something? ELYOT: No, no, no, we'll telegraph from somewhere on the road. AMANDA: Darling, I daren't, it's too wicked of us, I simply daren't. ELYOT [seizing her in his arms and kissing her violently]: Now will you behave? AMANDA: Yes, but Elyot darling - ELYOT: Solomon Isaacs!
Noël Coward (Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy in Three Acts)
Spanish word sendereando, for hiking, is compact and pretty (sendero is path), but the wisest phrase for this activity is the Latin solvitur ambulando (“it is solved by walking”), attributed to Saint Augustine. The phrase was mentioned by the long-distance walker Patrick Leigh-Fermor to Bruce Chatwin. “Hearing it, immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook,” Chatwin’s biographer wrote. Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.
Paul Theroux (The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road)
I’d lived a lot of years walking down the wrong roads, and those days had compacted like the folds of an accordion, into an inch of time. Now everything expanded. My life was wailing like a beautiful prayer, the moments stretching into hours, the days to years. I could see now that it was possible to live a long life poorly, or a short life well, and that at any moment one might shift their position and, after years of hibernation, decide to crawl out of the den and live.
Kim Dinan (The Yellow Envelope: One Gift, Three Rules, and A Life-Changing Journey Around the World)
And, as the storm of water thrashed the very pinnacles that toppled into mist, he had seen the ribs of cliff laid bare and bleeding—as it were the laceration of a living land that he looked on. Then, ‘Corne et tonnerre!’ he had seemed to cry to himself, ‘the very world is torn by some inhuman power, and flows to the sea in rivers of purple!’ and he heard the bells of the ocean receding innumerably, choke at their moorings, muffled and congested with the floating scum of carnage that no wind might ruffle and only God’s fire cleanse. Now, in a moment, he saw that what he had taken for land was in truth a great cliff built up of human bodies—a vast reserve of human force accumulated by, and for the use of, a single dominant will. And this cliff was washed by the waves of an ocean of blood, to which its life contributed in a thousand spouting rivulets. And it was compact of limitless pain; and the cry of torture never ceased within it. And suddenly the dreamer—as in the way of dreams—felt himself to be a constituent agony of that he gazed upon—a pulp of suffering self-contained, yet partaking of the wretchedness of all.
Bernard Capes (The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror)
Tesla is a vehicle for an idea: that we humans have better ways to power our lives than to burn a dinosaur-era compaction that dirties the air and skanks up the chemistry of the atmosphere. That notion applies to more than just cars. Tesla also sells its batteries as energy storage units. Since it acquired SolarCity in 2016 and added solar panels to its offerings, Musk has made his intentions clear: Tesla is an energy company. This is the story of how the electric car became a Trojan horse for a new energy economy. I believe it is the most important technology story of the twenty-first century.
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
A common book was not composed by all the apostles conjointly, both that they might not seem to have entered into a compact and that it might not appear of greater authority than that which would be written separately by each individual. This seems to have been the reason why Christ abstained from writing—that we might say that here is one who writes his epistle not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the heart (2 Cor. 3:2). It was sufficient, therefore, for these things to be written by some and approved by the rest. Yea, it adds great weight and authority to the apostolic writings that they wrote in different places, for various reasons and on different occasions, in a different style and method to different persons and yet so consistent with each other.
Francis Turretin (Institutes of Elenctic Theology (Vol. 1))
A common book was not composed by all the apostles conjointly, both that they might not seem to have entered into a compact and that it might not appear of greater authority than that which would be written separately by each individual. This seems to have been the reason why Christ abstained from writing that we might say that here is one who writes his epistle not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the heart (2 Cor. 3:2). It was sufficient, therefore, for these things to be written by some and approved by the rest. Yea, it adds great weight and authority to the apostolic writings that they wrote in different places, for various reasons and on different occasions, in a different style and method to different persons and yet so consistent with each other.
Francis Turretin (Institutes of Elenctic Theology (Vol. 1))