“
          Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.
          ”
          ”
         
        Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
       
        
          “
          Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ann Patchett (Truth & Beauty)
       
        
          “
          I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: 'Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire;' or maybe just: 'Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.'
And then smile very serenely until they say, 'Oh.
          ”
          ”
         
        Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar)
       
        
          “
          Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
          ”
          ”
         
        Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad)
       
        
          “
          If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world.
          ”
          ”
         
        Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)
       
        
          “
          Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular.
          ”
          ”
         
        Guy Deutscher (Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages)
       
        
          “
          I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.
          ”
          ”
         
        Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
       
        
          “
          The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.
          ”
          ”
         
        Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way)
       
        
          “
          But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.
          ”
          ”
         
        Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art)
       
        
          “
          Then he read the first sentence from the introduction: Without question this modern American dictionary is one of the most surprisingly complex and profound documents ever to be created, for it embodies unparalleled etymological detail, reflecting not only superb lexicographic scholarship, but also the dreams and speech and imaginative talents of millions of people over thousands of years—for every person who has ever spoken or written in English has had a hand in its making.
          ”
          ”
         
        Andrew Clements (Frindle)
       
        
          “
          I hope you will be surprised and knowing at once. I hope you'll always have love. I hope you'll always have a good sense of humour. I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.
          ”
          ”
         
        Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar)
       
        
          “
          The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted invention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander for ever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop.
          ”
          ”
         
        Mark Forsyth (The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase)
       
        
          “
          Hope is intrinsically positive in English, but in Greek (and the same with the Latin equivalent, spes) it is not. Since it really means the anticipation of something good or bad, a more accurate translation would probably be ‘expectation’. Before we can worry about whether it’s advantageous to us that it remains in the jar, we first have to decide if it is intrinsically good or bad. This is a genuinely complex linguistic and philosophical puzzle. No wonder it’s easier to just blame Pandora.
          ”
          ”
         
        Natalie Haynes (Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths)
       
        
          “
          when a person says to you, “How do you do?” he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, “How do I do what?” The complexities of the English language are
          ”
          ”
         
        Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way)
       
        
          “
          A world where complex English skills have come to be mistaken for intellectuality.
          ”
          ”
         
        Nitya Prakash
       
        
          “
          Refugees such as ourselves could never dare question the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth. But Dr. Hedd was beyond reproach, for he was an English immigrant. His very existence as such validated the legitimacy of the former colonies, while his heritage and accent triggered the latent Anglophilia and inferiority complex found in many Americans. Dr. Hedd was clearly aware of his privilege and was amused at the discomfort he was causing his American hosts.
          ”
          ”
         
        Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1))
       
        
          “
          English is curvaceous, complex, and beautiful. Fluent and fierce. She is the lover you will always adore but will never fully know because there’s too much to know. She is a true seductress—devious and overt, offering endless possibilities.
          ”
          ”
         
        Samara O'Shea (For the Love of Letters: A 21st-Century Guide to the Art of Letter Writing)
       
        
          “
          He says, "It's just a hat."
But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.
          ”
          ”
         
        Cecilia Rabess (Everything's Fine)
       
        
          “
          In short order, I became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist. I recorded a short video for Merriam-Webster’s website refuting the notion that “irregardless” wasn’t a word; I took to Twitter and Facebook and booed naysayers who set “irregardless” up as the straw man for the demise of English. I continued to find evidence of the emphatic “irregardless” in all sorts of places—even in the oral arguments of a Supreme Court case. One incredulous e-mail response to my video continued to claim “irregardless” wasn’t a real word. “It’s a made-up word that made it into the dictionary through constant use!” the correspondent said, and I cackled gleefully before responding. Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales? I began telling correspondents that “irregardless” was much more complex than people thought, and it deserved a little respectful respite, even if it still was not part of Standard English. My mother was duly horrified. “Oh, Kory,” she tutted. “So much for that college education.” —
          ”
          ”
         
        Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
       
        
          “
          The introductory statement for Paul’s famous paragraph on marriage in Ephesians is verse 21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”1 In English, this is usually rendered as a separate sentence, but that hides from readers an important point that Paul is making. In the Greek text, verse 21 is the last clause in the long previous sentence in which Paul describes several marks of a person who is “filled with the Spirit.” The last mark of Spirit fullness is in this last clause: It is a loss of pride and self-will that leads a person to humbly serve others. From this Spirit-empowered submission of verse 21, Paul moves to the duties of wives and husbands.
          ”
          ”
         
        Timothy J. Keller (The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God)
       
        
          “
          I hope when people ask what you’re going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you’ll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.
          ”
          ”
         
        Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar)
       
        
          “
          The English team’s revisions showed that the Cambrian had been a time of unparalleled innovation and experimentation in body designs. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. Name a creature, from a nematode worm to Cameron Diaz, and they all use architecture first created in the Cambrian party.
          ”
          ”
         
        Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
       
        
          “
          person says to you, “How do you do?” he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, “How do I do what?” The complexities of the English language are
          ”
          ”
         
        Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way)
       
        
          “
          The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided.
          ”
          ”
         
        Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
       
        
          “
          Widespread introduction of the process [of irradiating foods] has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council - whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants - has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking industry is also working hard to get rid of the word 'irradiation,; much preferring the phrase 'cold pasteurization.'...From a purely scientific point of view, irradiation may be safe and effective. But he [a slaughterhouse engineer] is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking workforce.
          ”
          ”
         
        Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal)
       
        
          “
          English was a complex hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Norse, with a strong overlay of Norman-French, and was difficult for outsiders to learn fluently because of its consequent lack of linguistic logic.
          ”
          ”
         
        Diarmaid MacCulloch (Thomas Cromwell: A Life)
       
        
          “
          And this happened all over, in every working group, idiosyncratic professors from two dozen academic departments all fighting for explicit mission-statement representation. So, in the end, it was pretty easy to understand why the mission statement came out looking the way it did: a compound-complex, multi-semicoloned, many-branching grammatical nightmare that forced the English department to stage a collective symbolic walkout when the faculty senate approved it. Since
          ”
          ”
         
        Nathan  Hill (Wellness)
       
        
          “
          Are you a guy or a girl?
I've heard the question all my life. The answer is not so simple, since there are no pronouns in the English language as complex as I am, and I do not want to simplify myself in order to neatly fit one or the other.
          ”
          ”
         
        Leslie Feinberg (Transgender Warriors : Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman)
       
        
          “
          Every language is complex in its own way. Latin just happens to work its complexity into the shape of the word. Its morphological richness is an asset, not an obstacle. Consider the sentence He will learn. Tā huì xué. Three words in both English and Chinese. In Latin, it takes only one. Disce. Much more elegant, you see?’ Robin wasn’t sure he did. This routine – Latin in the morning, Greek in the afternoon – became Robin’s life for the foreseeable future. He was grateful for this, despite the toil.
          ”
          ”
         
        R.F. Kuang (Babel)
       
        
          “
          Aggression in a dog is similar to aggression in a human. We re both scared of what we don't understand, and our need to protect leads to aggression. Changing that aggression in a dog is more complex because the dog doesn't speak English, so I had to learn to speak dog.
          ”
          ”
         
        Andre Gatling (Penelope's Bully)
       
        
          “
          Aggression in a dog is similar to aggression in a human. We're both scared of what we don't understand, and our need to protect leads to aggression. Changing that aggression in a dog is more complex because the dog doesn't speak English, so I had to learn to speak dog.
          ”
          ”
         
        Andre Gatling (Penelope's Bully)
       
        
          “
          Millions of books have been published in English language. Can you merge them all into one book? Sounds impossible?
Merge all the words of all the books in a single file, delete multiple occurrences of the same word, arrange the words in alphabetical order. What do you get? A small book with list of all English words. A book smaller than a dictionary.
This world seems so complex. More outward you go, more complex it gets. More inward you go, simpler it gets. At the origin, it’s so simple that we can’t describe it using complicated human language.
          ”
          ”
         
        Shunya
       
        
          “
          In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story material, English publishers laid hands on the subtle, sensual adult fairy tales of the Continental tradition and revised them into simpler stories instilled with Victorian values. Although these simplified versions retained much of the violence of the older stories, elements of sexuality and moral complexity were carefully scrubbed away — along with the fiesty heroines who appeared everywhere in the older tales, tamed now into models of Victorian propiety and passivity. In the 20th century, the Walt Disney Studios watered down the tales further still in popular animated films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, continuing the trend of turning active heroines into powerless damsels in distress. Walt Disney considered even the Victorian versions of the tales too dark for 20th century audiences. "It's just that people now don't want fairy stories the way they were written,"  Disney commented. "They were too rough." 
          ”
          ”
         
        Terri Windling (Black Swan, White Raven)
       
        
          “
          what Koreans call jeong. It’s hard to explain in English; it’s not any particular emotion—not affection or even love—but a complex bond defined by its depth and history: that sense of belonging to the same whole, your fates intertwined, impossible to sever no matter how much you may want
          ”
          ”
         
        Angie  Kim (Happiness Falls)
       
        
          “
          Why did you come to the United States?' That's the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.
But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children's stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.
          ”
          ”
         
        Valeria Luiselli (Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions)
       
        
          “
          No one thinks of Thursday as Thor’s Day anymore, or of breakfast as breaking a fast. Modern English has thousands of former phrases and complex words that have congealed into what people now perceive as simple words, such as business (busyness), Christmas (Christ’s Mass), and spinster (one who spins).
          ”
          ”
         
        Steven Pinker
       
        
          “
          Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ masterfully explores the theme of self-deception and the intricate dynamics of marital relationships. As the narrative unfolds, it illuminates the ironic nature of marriage, where love and treachery often coexist. By restoring January’s sight, Chaucer metaphorically portrays his willful ignorance, allowing him to live in blissful ignorance of his wife’s infidelity. This allegory provokes readers to question the nature of self-deception and the precarious illusions individuals construct in their pursuit of happiness within the confines of marriage.
‘The Merchant’s Tale’ serves as a cautionary tale, addressing the complexities and pitfalls of love, trust, and the frailties of human nature. Chaucer’s exploration of self-deception requires readers to critically examine the choices and illusions woven throughout the tale, shedding light on the paradoxical nature of love and marriage. Through this literary masterpiece, Chaucer prompts us to question the realities of our own lives, reminding us of the delicate balance between truth and the seductive allure of self-imposed blindness. (from an article titled "Chaucer’s ‘The Merchant’s Tale’: Unveiling the Harsh Realities of Matrimony")
          ”
          ”
         
        Mouloud Benzadi
       
        
          “
          His marks begin to show upon the writing of the younger Germans of today. They are getting away from the old thunderous manner, with its long sentences and its tedious grammatical complexities. In the course of time, I daresay, they will develop a German almost as clear as French and almost as colourful and resilient as English.
          ”
          ”
         
        Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ By Friedrich Nietzsche(Original illustrated Edition))
       
        
          “
          For some reason, I keep thinking about how good her English is. There’s only a hint of an accent, and her vocabulary is rich, her sentence structures complex and varied. Athena had always made a big deal about how her parents had immigrated to the States without speaking a word of English, but Mrs. Liu’s English sounds fine to me.
          ”
          ”
         
        R.F. Kuang (Yellowface)
       
        
          “
          Now here he was, tailored iron-gray suit, thin maroon tie, a maroon handkerchief peeking out from his breast pocket. His oxblood wing tips gleamed. He looked like a supervillain or, worse, an upper-crust English spy, an openly promiscuous and functionally alcoholic heterosexual with an on-and-off-again messiah complex. It was the shoes, the way they were tied.
          ”
          ”
         
        Percival Everett (Dr. No)
       
        
          “
          THE METAPHYSICAL POETS
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime
(Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress)
While theatre was the most public literary form of the period, poetry tended to be more personal, more private. Indeed, it was often published for only a limited circle of readers. This was true of Shakespeare's sonnets, as we have seen, and even more so for the Metaphysical poets, whose works were published mostly after their deaths. John Donne and George Herbert are the most significant of these poets.
The term 'Metaphysical' was used to describe their work by the eighteenth-century critic, Samuel Johnson. He intended the adjective to be pejorative. He attacked the poets' lack of feeling, their learning, and the surprising range of images and comparisons they used. Donne and Herbert were certainly very innovative poets, but the term 'Metaphysical' is only a label, which is now used to describe the modern impact of their writing. After three centuries of neglect and disdain, the Metaphysical poets have come to be very highly regarded and have been influential in recent British poetry and criticism. They used contemporary scientific discoveries and theories, the topical debates on humanism, faith, and eternity, colloquial speech-based rhythms, and innovative verse forms, to examine the relationship between the individual, his God, and the universe. Their 'conceits', metaphors and images, paradoxes and intellectual complexity make the poems a constant challenge to the reader.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
       
        
          “
          It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists’ tobacco at prices it dictated and made 100,000 pounds a year for the King. Berkeley himself, returning to England years earlier to protest the English Navigation Acts, which gave English merchants a monopoly of the colonial trade, had said: . . . we cannot but resent, that forty thousand people should be impoverish’d to enrich little more than forty Merchants, who being the only buyers of our Tobacco, give us what they please for it, and after it is here, sell it how they please; and indeed have forty thousand servants in us at cheaper rates, than any other men have slaves. . . .
          ”
          ”
         
        Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
       
        
          “
          For decades to come, the English would burn coal primarily for home heating. The new fuel had still to be adapted to perform useful work. Burning it at home was straightforward; adapting it to industrial production, challenging and complex. Homes needed only a hearth with a chimney. Industry needed changes in coal’s very chemistry. In the meantime, increasing demand soon exhausted the superficial outcroppings of sea coal.
          ”
          ”
         
        Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
       
        
          “
          Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)
While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well.
The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.
          ”
          ”
         
        Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
       
        
          “
          Translation is often seen as something that anyone who is fluent in two languages can do; one simply reads a text in the source language and somehow comes up with an equivalent text in the target language. Common misconceptions of translation such as this can go as far as to treat it as an art form, a view that chooses to ignore the fact that art also requires extensive training and deep knowledge of methods and techniques. It only takes a few minutes of trying to translate a text to make one realize that such views could not be further from the truth. Translation, as we will see in this book, is a complex process that follows a scientific method, whereby we analyze the source text to determine its communicative functions; to identify functional equivalence problems; to apply translation strategies to generate target language candidates, or hypotheses; and to finally test them to assess their validity.
          ”
          ”
         
        Mustafa Mughazy (The Georgetown Guide to Arabic-English Translation)
       
        
          “
          The relationship between cricket (that most English of sports) and spying (at which the British have always excelled) is deep-rooted and unique. Something about the game attracts the sort of mind also drawn to the secret worlds of intelligence and counter-intelligence – a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honour interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ben Macintyre (Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies)
       
        
          “
          Here’s the thing about James Baldwin’s prose: As noted earlier, from the start, he was audacious in his love for complex sentences; one might say even fearless in the way he deployed the English language. Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, among English-language writers, dared put so much demand on the language. To watch them create a sentence is often like watching a high-wire act. Death-defying sentences. Lush, romantic sentences. Sentences that dared to swallow the entire world.
          ”
          ”
         
        James Baldwin (The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings)
       
        
          “
          And what do we do to fit our English-speaking Chinese, our docile and happy, our truly loyal servants, for the Asia of the future? We teach them English history: Henry the VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria, English geography, three-quarters of the book the British Isles, one quarter the rest of the world. literature, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and The Mill on the Floss, all in Basic, as they aren't to know the complexities of our tongue. We cut them from their own learning, their traditions; if that were cutting them off merely from the past, it wouldn't matter, but also and more dangerously, it cuts them from the present, and perhaps the future of Asia. With these happy eunuchs who are bound to us by their knowledge of English we run this country well as our colonial preserve. But we cannot pretend to think we can leave it to them to run it for themselves. All the revolutionaries in India were people who went back to their own literature and language. We'll see the same phenomenon here.
          ”
          ”
         
        Han Suyin (And the Rain My Drink)
       
        
          “
          Something about my going away to college changed her, softened her. I was already my mother's daughter by then, callous, too callous to understand that she was reckoning with the complex shades of loss -– her son, an unexpected, physical loss; her daughter, something slower, more natural. 4 weeks into my freshman year, she ended a phone call with "I love you," spoken in the reluctant mumble she reserved for English. I laughed so hard I started crying. An "I love you" from the woman who had once called the phrase aburofo nkwaseasem, white people foolishness. At first she chastised me for laughing, but before long she was laughing too, a big – bellied sound that flooded my dorm room. Later, when I told my roommate, Samantha, why I was laughing, she said, "It's, like, not funny? To love your family?" Samantha, rich, white, a local whose boyfriend would occasionally make the drive over from UMass, leaving me displaced in the common room, was herself the embodiment of aburofo nkwaseasem. I laughed all over again.
          ”
          ”
         
        Yaa Gyasi (Transcendent Kingdom)
       
        
          “
          In 2004, the Animals in War monument outside Hyde Park in London was created by the English sculptor David Backhouse. The monument includes two life-sized bronze mules carrying supplies, as well as statues of a horse and a dog and bas-relief carvings of other animals such as camels, elephants and birds who have been used in warfare. The inscription reads: *Animals in War. This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time. They had no choice.* ~ John Sorenson
          ”
          ”
         
        Anthony J. Nocella II (Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex (Critical Animal Studies and Theory))
       
        
          “
          Why do we love nonsense? Why do we love Lewis Carroll with his “‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe…”? Why is it that all those old English songs are full of “Fal-de-riddle-eye-do” and “Hey-nonny-nonny” and all those babbling choruses? Why is it that when we get “hep” with jazz we just go “Boody-boody-boop-de-boo” and so on, and enjoy ourselves swinging with it? It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world, not necessarily going anywhere. It seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is non-sense. Still, we want to use the word “significant.” Is this significant nonsense? Is this a kind of nonsense that is not just chaos, that is not just blathering balderdash, but rather has in it rhythm, fascinating complexity, and a kind of artistry? It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we come to the profoundest meaning.
          ”
          ”
         
        Alan W. Watts
       
        
          “
          Communication is complex. It’s not just the King’s English. Body language, gender connection, age connection, role connection, affluence and wealth connection, receiving or taking directions, and the state of mind of one person or another are all elements in communicating with someone. It’s not just being able to talk back and forth. It’s recognizing when to say it, how to say it, when to listen, whom you’re talking with, how they feel, what you’re trying to get down to, how important the circumstance is, what the necessity is timewise, and how rapidly the decision must be made.
          ”
          ”
         
        Bill   Walsh (The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership)
       
        
          “
          Valentine’s concept of introversion includes traits that contemporary psychology would classify as openness to experience (“thinker, dreamer”), conscientiousness (“idealist”), and neuroticism (“shy individual”).
A long line of poets, scientists, and philosophers have also tended to group these traits together. All the way back in Genesis, the earliest book of the Bible, we had cerebral Jacob (a “quiet man dwelling in tents” who later becomes “Israel,” meaning one who wrestles inwardly with God) squaring off in sibling rivalry with his brother, the swashbuckling Esau (a “skillful hunter” and “man of the field”). In classical antiquity, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen famously proposed that our temperaments—and destinies—were a function of our bodily fluids, with extra blood and “yellow bile” making us sanguine or choleric (stable or neurotic extroversion), and an excess of phlegm and “black bile” making us calm or melancholic (stable or neurotic introversion). Aristotle noted that the melancholic temperament was associated with eminence in philosophy, poetry, and the arts (today we might classify this as opennessto experience). The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton wrote Il Penseroso (“The Thinker”) and L’Allegro (“The Merry One”), comparing “the happy person” who frolics in the countryside and revels in the city with “the thoughtful person” who walks meditatively through the nighttime woods and studies in a “lonely Towr.” (Again, today the description of Il Penseroso would apply not only to introversion but also to openness to experience and neuroticism.) The nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer contrasted “good-spirited” people (energetic, active, and easily bored) with his preferred type, “intelligent people” (sensitive, imaginative, and melancholic). “Mark this well, ye proud men of action!” declared his countryman Heinrich Heine. “Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.”
Because of this definitional complexity, I originally planned to invent my own terms for these constellations of traits. I decided against this, again for cultural reasons: the words introvert and extrovert have the advantage of being well known and highly evocative. Every time I uttered them at a dinner party or to a seatmate on an airplane, they elicited a torrent of confessions and reflections. For similar reasons, I’ve used the layperson’s spelling of extrovert rather than the extravert one finds throughout the research literature.
          ”
          ”
         
        Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
       
        
          “
          The character and the play of Hamlet are central to any discussion of Shakespeare's work. Hamlet has been described as melancholic and neurotic, as having an Oedipus complex, as being a failure and indecisive, as well as being a hero, and a perfect Renaissance prince. These judgements serve perhaps only to show how many interpretations of one character may be put forward. 'To be or not to be' is the centre of Hamlet's questioning. Reasons not to go on living outnumber reasons for living. But he goes on living, until he completes his revenge for his father's murder, and becomes 'most royal', the true 'Prince of Denmark' (which is the play's subtitle), in many ways the perfection of Renaissance man.
Hamlet's progress is a 'struggle of becoming' - of coming to terms with life, and learning to accept it, with all its drawbacks and challenges. He discusses the problems he faces directly with the audience, in a series of seven soliloquies - of which 'To be or not to be' is the fourth and central one. These seven steps, from the zero-point of a desire not to live, to complete awareness and acceptance (as he says, 'the readiness is all'), give a structure to the play, making the progress all the more tragic, as Hamlet reaches his aim, the perfection of his life, only to die.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
       
        
          “
          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)
       
        
          “
          English political sagacity is compounded of instinctive reactions to immediate situations and a wisdom, gained by cumulative experience, which guides instinct through the complexities, intricacies and imponderabilities of modern politics. The most typical social philosopher of England is not John Locke but Edmund Burke. Constitutional government may have found its first justification in the rationally elaborated theories of "rights" in the philosophy of the former. But the actual history of constitutionalism in England has been dominated by the logic expressed in the philosophy of the latter. The Englishman trusts not in the abstract "natural rights" dictated by reason, but the "English rights" which are guaranteed to him by his own history.
          ”
          ”
         
        Reinhold Niebuhr
       
        
          “
          Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political and religious upheavals of the 1680s, and the specifically literary questions of neoclassicism opposed to more modern trends. He was Poet Laureate from 1668, but lost this position in 1688 on the overthrow of James II. Dryden had become Catholic in 1685, and his allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther (1687) discusses the complex issues of religion and politics in an attempt to reconcile bitterly opposed factions. This contains a well-known line which anticipates Wordsworth more than a century later: 'By education most have been misled … / And thus the child imposes on the man'. The poem shows an awareness of change as one grows older, and the impossibility of holding one view for a lifetime:
My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Followed false lights…
After 1688, Dryden returned to the theatre, which had given him many of his early successes in tragedy, tragi-comedy, and comedy, as well as with adaptations of Shakespeare.
......
Dryden was an innovator, leading the move from heroic couplets to blank verse in drama, and at the centre of the intellectual debates of the Augustan age. He experimented with verse forms throughout his writing life until Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which brings together critical, translated, and original works, in a fitting conclusion to a varied career.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
       
        
          “
          The so much boasted constitution of England. That it was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected, is granted. When the world was over run with tyranny the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue. But that it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demonstrated.
 Absolute governments (tho’ the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, that they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs, know likewise the remedy, and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures. But the constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine.
 I know it is difficult to get over local or long standing prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new republican materials.
 First.—The remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king.
 Secondly.—The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers.
 Thirdly.—The new republican materials, in the persons of the commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England.
 The two first, by being hereditary, are independent of the people; wherefore in a constitutional sense they contribute nothing towards the freedom of the state.
 To say that the constitution of England is a union of three powers reciprocally checking each other, is farcical, either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.
 To say that the commons is a check upon the king, presupposes two things:
 First.—That the king is not to be trusted without being looked after, or in other words, that a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.
 Secondly.—That the commons, by being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of confidence than the crown.
 But as the same constitution which gives the commons a power to check the king by withholding the supplies, gives afterwards the king a power to check the commons, by empowering him to reject their other bills; it again supposes that the king is wiser than those whom it has already supposed to be wiser than him. A mere absurdity!
          ”
          ”
         
        Thomas Paine (Common Sense)
       
        
          “
          And then now a very strange argument indeed ensues, me v. the Lebanese porter, because it turns out I am putting this guy, who barely speaks English, in a terrible kind of sedulous-service double-bind, a paradox of pampering: viz. the The-Passenger’s-Always-Right-versus-Never-Let-A-Passenger-Carry-His-Own-Bag paradox. Clueless at the time about what this poor little Lebanese man is going through, I wave off both his high-pitched protests and his agonized expression as mere servile courtesy, and I extract the duffel and lug it up the hall to 1009 and slather the old beak with ZnO and go outside to watch the coast of Florida recede cinematically à la F. Conroy. Only later did I understand what I’d done. Only later did I learn that that little Lebanese Deck 10 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck 10 Head Porter, who’d had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who’d received confirmed reports that a Deck 10 passenger had been seen carrying his own luggage up the Port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded rolling Lebanese heads for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and had reported (the Austrian Chief Steward did) the incident (as is apparently SOP) to an officer in the Guest Relations Dept., a Greek officer with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and officerial epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday’s supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag.
          ”
          ”
         
        David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:  Essays and Arguments)
       
        
          “
          Canada is an Aboriginal country as well as a settler country. We rarely see ourselves that way, but it is past time that we started doing so. The fact that settlers are in a significant majority does not take away from the simple fact that when Europeans made first contact with the northern half of North America, there were millions of people already here. From the Beothuk in Newfoundland – a population completely wiped out by disease and violence – across every corner of Canada to the far west and north, Canada’s first people had built a civilization, a way of life thousands of years old and rich in diversity. They were not “savages” (as they were called, in French and English), nor were they “ignorant wretches”, nor were they less than people. They had developed complex societies with distinct languages, systems of governance; they were real people with a real way of life.
          ”
          ”
         
        Bob Rae (What's Happened to Politics?)
       
        
          “
          Humans, whether contemplating the genesis of their customs or of their species, yearn to locate “an explicit point of origin,” rather than accept that most beginnings are gradual and complex. “Creation myths,” [Stephen Jay Gould] concluded, “identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular thing as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism.” 
As with baseball, so, too, with America’s birth. The country’s European founding was slow and messy: a primordial slime of false starts and mutations that evolved, over generations, into English colonies and the United States. Once on its feet, the newborn American nation looked back in search of origins, and located its heroes and sacred places on the stony shore of Massachusetts. The Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 begat the Founding Fathers of 1776. Cooperstown had Doubleday’s cow pasture, Plymouth it’s hallowed Rock.
          ”
          ”
         
        Tony Horwitz (A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World)
       
        
          “
          How exactly have you managed to spend your entire career until now pretending to be a nice person?” I demanded grouchily as I stomped down to the cafeteria on Monday the next week: in our library session after the English run that morning, she’d brought out a long checklist of the many, many things I’d done wrong or inefficiently that needed correcting, all of which she’d carefully observed while somehow managing to sail through the run completely undistressed herself. She was still demanding my attention for a few more of them on the stairs even after the lunch bell rang. She sniffed disparagingly. “It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.” It hadn’t occurred to me that there was an answer to my question, complete presumably with regularly tended checklists. I must have looked aghast,
          ”
          ”
         
        Naomi Novik (The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2))
       
        
          “
          Well, it's interesting this, because sometimes you come across an experience for which the language lacks a word. You might find that this word exists in another language. I was informed by a classics professor yesterday at Princeton - we were talking about this very thing - that the word does exist. It's called 'energia.' That is that complete loss of self in an absorbing task. Now, the trouble is that the word 'energy' is already firmly staked out for us in English. Psychologists have suggested the word 'flow.' I don't think that quite does it. There is a form of intense human happiness, often not recognized in the moment, that comes from losing yourself in something difficult. You cease to be aware of time; you cease to be aware of self; you experience no particular emotion because you are inseparable from the task. And sometimes it can happen with something as complex as writing, but it can also come with the making of a good meal. A game of tennis, a team game can do it too - you forget that you exist, everything goes except the matter in hand. It's bliss. I wish it happened to me in writing more often.
          ”
          ”
         
        Ian McEwan
       
        
          “
          In what way can it act as master? Through scores of incarnations, the ‘self ’ we end up with is derived from the attributes with which we endow our God, the abstract Ego or conceptive principles. All conception is a denial of the Kiã, and hence we human beings are its opposition, our own evil. As we are the offspring of ourselves, we are the conflict between whatever we deny and assert of the Kiã. It would seem that we cannot be too careful in our choice, for it determines the body we inhabit. Thus forever from ‘self ’ do I fashion the Kiã, which may be without likeness, but which may be regarded as the truth. From this process is the bondage made, and not through intellect shall we be free from it. The law of Kiã is always its own original purpose, undetermined by anything else, and its emanations are unchanging. Through our own conceptive process things materialize, and take their nature from that duality. Human beings take their law from this refraction, and their ideas create their reality. With what do they balance their ecstasy? They pay measure for measure with intense pain, sorrow, and miseries. With what do they balance their rebellion? Of necessity, with slavery! Duality is the law, and realization by experience relates and opposes by units of time. Ecstasy for any length of time is difficult to obtain, and takes a lot of work. The conditions of consciousness and existence would seem to be various degrees of misery alternating with gusts of pleasure and some more subtle emotions. Consciousness of existence consists of duality in some form or other. From it are created the illusions of time, size, entity, etc.: the world’s limit. The dual principle is the quintessence of all experience, and no ramification has enlarged its primordial simplicity, but can only be its repetition, modification or complexity: its evolution can never be complete. It can never go further than the experience of self, so returns and unites again and again, ever an anti-climax. Its evolution consists of forever returning to its original simplicity by infinite complication. No man shall understand its ‘reason why’ by looking at its workings. Know it as the illusion that embraces the learning of all existence. It is the most aged one who grows no wiser, and is the mother of all things. Therefore believe all ‘experience’ to be an illusion, and the result of the law of duality. Just as space pervades an object both inside and outside it, similarly within and beyond this ever-changing cosmos, there is this single principle.
          ”
          ”
         
        Austin Osman Spare (Book of Pleasure in Plain English)
       
        
          “
          Don’t think, muñeca. Everything will work itself out.”
“But--”
“No buts. Trust me.” My mouth closes over hers. The smell of rain and cookies eases my nerves.
My hand braces the small of her back. Her hands grip my soaked shoulders, urging me on. My hands slide under her shirt, and my fingers trace her belly button.
“Come to me,” I say, then lift her until she’s straddling me over my bike.
I can’t stop kissing her. I whisper how good she feels to me, mixing Spanish and English with every sentence. I move my lips down her neck and linger there until she leans back and lets me take her shirt off. I can make her forget about the bad stuff. When we’re together like this, hell, I can’t think of anything else but her.
“I’m losing control,” she admits, biting her lower lip. I love those lips.
“Mamacita, I’ve already lost it,” I say, grinding against her so she knows exactly how much control I’ve lost.
She moves her hips in a slow rhythm against me, an invitation I don’t deserve. My fingertips graze her mouth. She kisses them before I slowly slide my hand down her chin to her neck and in between her breasts.
She catches my hand. “I don’t want to stop, Alex.”
I cover her body with mine.
I can easily take her. Hell, she’s asking for it. But God help me if I don’t grow a conscience.
It’s that loco bet I made with Lucky. And what my mom said about how easy it is to get a girl pregnant. 
When I made the bet, I had no feelings for this complex white girl. But now…shit, I don’t want to think about my feelings. I hate feelings; they’re only good for screwing up someone’s life. And may God strike me down right now because I want to make love to Brittany, not fuck her on my motorcycle like some cheap whore.
I move my hands away from her cuerpo perfecto, the first sane thing I’ve done tonight. “I can’t take you like this. Not here,” I say, my voice hoarse from emotion overload. This girl was going to gift me with her body, even though she knows who I am and what I’m about to do. The reality is hard to swallow.
I expect her to be embarrassed, maybe even mad. But she curls into my chest and hugs me. Don’t do this to me, I want to say. Instead I wrap my arms around her and hold on tight.
“I love you,” I hear her say so softly it might have been her thoughts.
Don’t, I’m tempted to say. ¡Noǃ ¡Noǃ
My gut twists and I hold her tighter. Dios mío, if things were different I’d never give her up. I burrow my face in her hair and fantasize about stealing her away from Fairfield.
We stay that way for a long time, long after the rain stops and reality sets in.
          ”
          ”
         
        Simone Elkeles (Perfect Chemistry (Perfect Chemistry, #1))
       
        
          “
          Jung told the Society that apparitions (ghosts) and materializations were “unconscious projections” or, as he spoke of them to Freud, “exteriorisations.” “I have repeatedly observed,” Jung told his audience, “the telepathic effects of unconscious complexes, and also a number of parapsychic phenomena, but in all this I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is forthcoming I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology.” This sounds scientific enough, but a year later20 when Jung was again in England, he encountered a somewhat more real ghost. Jung spent some weekends in a cottage in Aylesbury outside of London rented by Maurice Nicoll, and while there was serenaded by an assortment of eerie sounds—dripping water, knocks, inexplicable rustlings—while an unpleasant smell filled the bedroom. Locals said the place was haunted, and one particularly bad night, Jung opened his eyes to discover an old woman’s head on the pillow next to his; half of her face was missing. Jung leaped out of bed, lit a candle, and waited until morning in an armchair. The house was later torn down. One would think that having already encountered the dead on their return from Jerusalem, Jung wouldn’t be shaken by a fairly standard English ghost, but the experience rattled him.
          ”
          ”
         
        Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
       
        
          “
          We are accustomed to thinking of Ernest Hemingway as a boozy, undisciplined genius who got through a quart of whiskey a day for the last twenty years of his life but nevertheless had the muse upon him. He was indeed an alcoholic driven by complex passions.2 But when it came to writing, he was the quintessence of discipline! His early writing was characterized by obsessive literary perfectionism as he labored to develop his economy of style, spending hours polishing a sentence, or searching for the mot juste—the right word. It is a well-known fact that he rewrote the conclusion to his novel A Farewell to Arms seventeen times in an effort to get it right. This is characteristic of great writers. Dylan Thomas made over two hundred handwritten(!) manuscript versions of his poem “Fern Hill.”3 Even toward the end, when Hemingway was reaping the ravages of his lifestyle, while writing at his Finca Vigia in Cuba he daily stood before an improvised desk in oversized loafers on yellow tiles from 6:30 A.M. until noon every day, carefully marking his production for the day on a chart. His average was only two pages — five hundred words.4 It was discipline, Ernest Hemingway’s massive literary discipline, which transformed the way his fellow Americans, and people throughout the English-speaking world, expressed themselves.
          ”
          ”
         
        R. Kent Hughes (Disciplines of a Godly Man)
       
        
          “
          The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth
There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury
Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis.
James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The
English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use
of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962).
The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either.
his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on
subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the
subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus,
Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists
that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life,
not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him
a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and
historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective
and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that
dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and
          ”
          ”
         
        Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
       
        
          “
          To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was get rid of my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature.” In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. Since I was willing to try anything, I figured, why not give that a shot? Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape. Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed.
          ”
          ”
         
        Haruki Murakami (Wind/Pinball: Two Novels)
       
        
          “
          Is It True?
English is a really a form of Plattdeutsch or Lowland German, the way it was spoken during the 5th century. It all happened when Germanic invaders crossed the English Channel and the North Sea from northwest Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia to what is now Scotland or Anglo Saxon better identified as Anglo-Celtic. English was also influenced by the conquering Normans who came from what is now France and whose language was Old Norman, which became Anglo-Norman.
Christianity solidified the English language, when the King James Version of the Bible was repetitively transcribed by diligent Catholic monks. Old English was very complex, where nouns had three genders with der, die and das denoting the male, female and neuter genders. Oh yes, it also had strong and weak verbs, little understood and most often ignored by the masses. 
In Germany these grammatical rules survive to this day, whereas in Britain the rules became simplified and der, die and das became da, later refined to the article the! It is interesting where our words came from, many of which can be traced to their early roots. “History” started out as his story and when a “Brontosaurus Steak” was offered to a cave man, he uttered me eat! Which has now become meat and of course, when our cave man ventured to the beach and asked his friend if he saw any food, the friend replied “me see food,” referring to the multitude of fish or seafood! Most English swear words, which Goodreads will definitely not allow me to write, are also of early Anglo-Saxon origin. Either way they obeyed their king to multiply and had a fling, with the result being that we now have 7.6 Billion people on Earth.
          ”
          ”
         
        Hank Bracker
       
        
          “
          By this time (in mid-2012) the country had been without a functioning government for more than twenty years, and the city was a byword for chaos, lawlessness, corruption, and violence. But this wasn’t the Mogadishu we saw. Far from it: on the surface, the city was a picture of prosperity. Many shops and houses were freshly painted, and signs on many street corners advertised auto parts, courses in business and English, banks, money changers and remittance services, cellphones, processed food, powdered milk, cigarettes, drinks, clothes, and shoes. The Bakara market in the center of town had a monetary exchange, where the Somali shilling—a currency that has survived without a state or a central bank for more than twenty years—floated freely on market rates that were set and updated twice daily. There were restaurants, hotels, and a gelato shop, and many intersections had busy produce markets. The coffee shops were crowded with men watching soccer on satellite television and good-naturedly arguing about scores and penalties. Traffic flowed freely, with occasional blue-uniformed, unarmed Somali National Police officers (male and female) controlling intersections. Besides motorcycles, scooters, and cars, there were horse-drawn carts sharing the roads with trucks loaded above the gunwales with bananas, charcoal, or firewood. Offshore, fishing boats and coastal freighters moved about the harbor, and near the docks several flocks of goats and sheep were awaiting export to cities around the Red Sea and farther afield. Power lines festooned telegraph poles along the roads, many with complex nests of telephone wires connecting them to surrounding buildings. Most Somalis on the street seemed to prefer cellphones, though, and many traders kept up a constant chatter on their mobiles. Mogadishu was a fully functioning city.
          ”
          ”
         
        David Kilcullen (Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla)
       
        
          “
          Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers… Parents and other passengers read on Kindles… Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing…
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago… My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading…
Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19thand 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts…
Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension: physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of “geometry” to words, and a spatial “thereness” for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.
          ”
          ”
         
        Maryanne Wolf
       
        
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          “
          ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.
          ”
          ”
         
        Aldous Huxley (Jesting Pilate)
       
        
          “
          You don’t like feeling powerless? Then change your definition of power. Do not fix unfixable problems. Do not devote yourself to things you cannot control. You cannot make this world respect you. You cannot make it dignify you. It will never bend to you. This world does not belong to door. She tied her long hair away from her face, meticulously turning on specific track lights and not others, perhaps to highlight the beauty of her Scandinavian-style furniture choices or the incomparable city view. Then she poured herself a glass of wine from a previously opened bottle, joining Reina on the sofa with an air of hospitably withheld dread.
“I was born here in Tokyo,” Reina commented. “Not far from here, actually. There was a fire the day I was born. People died. My grandmother always thought it meant something that I was—” She broke off. “What I was.”
“People often search for meaning where there is none,” said Aiya placidly. Perhaps in a tone of sympathy, though Reina wasn’t sure what to think anymore. “Just because you can see two points does not mean anything exists between them.”
“In other words, fate is a lie we tell ourselves?” asked Reina drolly.
Aiya shrugged. Despite the careful curation of her lighting, she looked tired. “We tell ourselves many stories. But I don’t think you came here just to tell me yours.”
No. Reina did not know why she was there, not really. She had simply wanted to go home, and when she realized home was an English manor house, she had railed against the idea so hard it brought her here, to the place she’d once done everything in her power to escape.
“I want,” Reina began slowly, “to do good. Not because I love the world, but because I hate it. And not because I can,” she added. “But because everyone else won’t.”
Aiya sighed, perhaps with amusement. “The Society doesn’t promise you a better world, Reina. It doesn’t because it can’t.”
“Why not? I was promised everything I could ever dream of. I was offered power, and yet I have never felt so powerless.” The words left her like a kick to the chest, a hard stomp. She hadn’t realized that was the problem until now, sitting with a woman who so clearly lived alone. Who had everything, and yet at the same time, Reina did not see anything in Aiya Sato’s museum of a life that she would covet for her own.
Aiya sipped her wine quietly, in a way that made Reina feel sure that Aiya saw her as a child, a lost little lamb. She was too polite to ask her to leave, of course. That wasn’t the way of things and Reina ought to know it. Until then, Aiya would simply hold the thought in her head.
“So,” Aiya said with an air of teacherly patience. “You are disappointed in the world. Why should the Society be any better? It is part of the same world.”
“But I should be able to fix things. Change things.”
“Why?”
“Because I should.” Reina felt restless. “Because if the world cannot be fixed by me, then how can it be fixed at all?”
“These sound like questions for the Forum,” Aiya said with a shrug. “If you want to spend your life banging down doors that will never open, try their tactics instead, see how it goes. See if the mob can learn to love you, Reina Mori, without consuming or destroying you first.” Another reflective sip. “The Society is no democracy. In fact, it chose you because you are selfish.” She looked demurely at Reina. “It promised you glory, not salvation. They never said you could save others. Only yourself.”
“And that is power to you?”
Aiya’s smile was so polite that Reina felt it like the edge of a weapon. “You don’t like feeling powerless? Then change your definition of power. Do not fix unfixable problems. Do not devote yourself to things you cannot control. You cannot make this world respect you. You cannot make it dignify you. It will never bend to you. This world does not belong to you, Reina Mori, you belong to it, and perhaps when it is ready for a revolution it will look to you for leadership.
          ”
          ”
         
        Olivie Blake (The Atlas Complex (The Atlas, #3))
       
        
          “
          Words have a history and a meaning, an origin and tradition of usage, a way of implying complex ideas and concepts that can often elude us when we only think about the way we use words in our native languages, especially if that language is modern American English.
          ”
          ”
         
        Daniel P. Horan (The Last Words of Jesus: A Meditation on Love and Suffering)
       
        
          “
          By the time that Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency, the elections which chose the President had transformed from referendums about who would best administer the international slave trade into contests about who’d get the chance to reduce illiterate Muslims into pulpy masses of intestines. 
The people who’d voted for Trump went nuts because they’d won and had no idea what to do with their impossible victory. 
The country’s political liberals went nuts because Trump put them in the position of facing an undeniable and yet unpalatable truth.
This was the truth that the political liberals could not deny and could not face: beyond making English Comp courses at community colleges very annoying, forty years of rhetorical progress had achieved little, and it turned out that feeling good about gay marriage did not alleviate the taint of being warmongers whose taxes had killed more Muslims than the Black Death.
You can’t make evil disappear by being a reasonably nice person who mouths platitudes at dinner parties. Social media confessions do not alleviate suffering. You can’t talk the world into being a decent place while sacrificing nothing.
The socialists didn’t go nuts. 
They were the people who’d thought about the complex problems facing the nation and decided that an honest solution to these problems could be achieved with applied Leftism.
But don’t get your hopes up. 
Despite being correct in their thinking, the socialists were the most annoying people in America. When they spoke, it was like bamboo slivers shoved under a fingernail. I don’t know why. It was the single biggest American tragedy of the last one hundred years.
Here was the difference between the priestly castes, many of whom had opinions on deadline for money, and everyone else: sane people shut the fuck up, nodded their heads, and did what they needed to survive in a toxic political landscape.
In an era when public discourse was the bought-and-paid property of roughly twenty companies, and the airing of an opinion could subject a person to unfathomable amounts of abuse and recrimination, the only reasonable option was to be quiet.
So when you next fawn over someone’s brave public thoughts, repeat the following: The contours of discourse are so horrendous that one thing has become certain. Any individual offering up a public opinion necessarily must be either hopelessly stupid or insane. I am engaging with a product of madness and idiocy.
          ”
          ”
         
        Jarett Kobek (Only Americans Burn in Hell)
       
        
          “
          Secondary school literacy skills are more complex and more embedded in subject matters than in primary schools (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004).
          ”
          ”
         
        Margarita Espino Calderon (Teaching Reading to English Learners, Grades 6 - 12: A Framework for Improving Achievement in the Content Areas)
       
        
          “
          Alexandre Dumas, also in the audience, wrote that Shakespeare arrived in France with the “freshness of Adam’s first sight of Eden.” Fellow attendees Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, along with Berlioz and Dumas, would create works inspired by those seminal evenings. The Bard’s electrifying combination of profound human insight and linguistic glory would continue catapulting across national borders to influence poets, painters, and composers the world over, as no other writer has done. Yet the UCLA English department—like so many others—was more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics.
          ”
          ”
         
        Heather Mac Donald (The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture)
       
        
          “
          Surface-sighted people have no sense of what psychologist Wade Nobles calls “the deep structure of culture,” the philosophies and values that change outward physical forms. It is this “deep structure” that transforms European Christianity into a new African Christianity, with mounting spirits, calls and responses, and Holy Ghost worship; it changes English into Ebonics, European ingredients into soul food. The cultural African survived in the Americans, created a strong and complex culture with Western “outward” forms “while retaining inner [African] values,” anthropologist Melville Herskovits avowed in 1941. The same cultural African breathed life into the African American culture that raised me. —
          ”
          ”
         
        Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials))
       
        
          “
          To gain a first was to receive a passkey that was supposed to open doors at the top — especially in the Civil Service, in the Diplomatic Service, and in similar public careers. Historical research was only one of those many doors, and by no means the most important one. Here, the English preference for the talented all-rounder — the adaptable and gentlemanly member of a ruling class — made itself plain. Most holders of firsts did not expect to stay in Oxford or in other centers of research and teaching. They made their way to the wider world.
Nor was the final examination itself — and the undergraduate teaching that prepared for it — designed to foster any special skills in research. The essays that were written for tutors every week were usually read out to them at the beginning of the tutorial. They were twenty minutes to half an hour long and were expected to be successful rhetorical performances. They were trial runs for the answers that were expected in the final examination. One was encouraged to "think on ones feet" — to give quick (even entertaining) answers to complex questions, even if these answers bordered on the flip and the facile. These were the virtues of civil servants and journalists.
          ”
          ”
         
        Peter Brown (Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History)
       
        
          “
          Since the eighteenth century, the Celtic fringes have posed for the urban intellectual as a location of the wild, the natural, the creative and the insecure. We can often find it said, with warm approval, that the Celts are impetuous, natural, spiritual and naive. I try in what follows to make a clear that such an approval is drawing on the same system of structural oppositions as is the accusation that the Celt is violent (impetuous), animal (natural), devoid of any sense of property (spiritual), or without manners (naive). I include the bracketed terms as effective synonyms of the words that precede them, that we would use to praise rather than deride... We are dealing here with a rich verbal and metaphorical complex, and I have not thought it very important to distinguish between those who find a favourable opinion of the Gael within this complex, and those who dip into it to find the materials for derision. In both cases the coherence of the statements can only be found at their point of origin, the urban intellectual discourse of the English language, and not at their point of application, the Celt, the Gael, the primative who is ever departing, whether his exit be made to jeers or to tears.
          ”
          ”
         
        Malcolm Chapman (The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture)
       
        
          “
          the highly complex patterns of plural formation in Old English have been replaced almost entirely by the iconic -s plural, which has spread to many hundreds of words that formerly didn’t have it.
          ”
          ”
         
        Robert McColl Millar (Trask's Historical Linguistics)
       
        
          “
          WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CAT AND A COMPLEX SENTENCE?” Jake spoke up. “Our English teacher told us that one just this year. A cat has claws at the end of its paws, and a complex sentence has a pause at the end of its clause.
          ”
          ”
         
        Stephen        King (The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, #3))
       
        
          “
          You may not realize it, but English contains many idioms that relate sequences to energy. Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. We often use idioms like these without much reflection on their deeper meaning, but I invite you to consider in more detail what expressions like these are really getting at. You may conclude that it is easier said than done.
          ”
          ”
         
        Dennis P. Waters (Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity (Resources for Ecological Psychology Series))
       
        
          “
          When I left home, I faithfully carried my copy of Sunset Song onward into life. Each reading brought a new layer and deeper understanding, but it was the notion of Two Chrisses that always echoed in my soul. Through Chris Guthrie, I understood the inferiority complex I felt as a working-class Scot as I began to move in different circles. I remember arriving at drama school with Doric words in my mouth, as other students looked blankly at my attempts to find an English equivalent. I'd then return home and feel 'posh' amongst my Scots speaking family. I was part of two worlds, but felt like I belonged in neither.
The feeling persistently lingered but surfaced in earnest during the pandemic. At that time, I was working with the Scots Language Centre on their 'Scots Wark' project, and I was asked to deliver a creative learning resource. My offering was called 'The Twa Chrisses: A Love Letter to Sunset Song', a cathartic and empowering story to scrieve, but it also made my fingers itch to write a full theatrical adaptation. Somehow, gorgeous synchronicity ensued when Andrew Panton, Artistic Director of Dundee Rep, and Finn den Hertog contacted me with this very idea.
          ”
          ”
         
        Morna Young (Sunset Song: 2024 Tour)
       
        
          “
          English mathematician Ada Lovelace and scientist Charles Babbage invented a machine called the “Difference Engine” and then later postulated a more advanced “Analytical Engine,” which used a series of predetermined steps to solve mathematical problems. Babbage hadn’t conceived that the machine could do anything beyond calculating numbers. It was Lovelace who, in the footnotes of a scientific paper she was translating, went off on a brilliant tangent speculating that a more powerful version of the Engine could be used in other ways.13 If the machine could manipulate symbols, which themselves could be assigned to different things (such as musical notes), then the Engine could be used to “think” outside of mathematics. While she didn’t believe that a computer would ever be able to create original thought, she did envision a complex system that could follow instructions and thus mimic a lot of what everyday people did. It seemed unremarkable to some at the time, but Ada had written the first complete computer program for a future, powerful machine—decades before the light bulb was invented. A
          ”
          ”
         
        Amy   Webb (The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity)
       
        
          “
          Freud for fun, can design complex statistical models, speaks fluent Spanish, English, Italian, and Zapotec,
          ”
          ”
         
        Nicolás Medina Mora (América del Norte)
       
        
          “
          It would seem that my hypothesis on linguistic intelligence being paraded as “brightness” went viral. In my country , a number of persons who have mastered the English language have discredited my intellect on the basis of grammar and linguistics. My thesis did underscore that true intellects can create new disciplines, theories and “synthesize” fundamental truths and concepts. True intellects have high social, emotional and intelligent quotients. They operate at a higher cognitive order because they are able to underpin foundational knowledge along with comprehension and thus develop complex ways of thinking. They have higher cognitive skills and functioning. A true intellect can move their audience in any language be it patois or English because their usage of words and delivery always resonates with the listener and reader. Their output makes you think, wonder, say … wow, I’ve never looked at it that way before. It doesn’t involve gloating or conceit. Pure complex yet revolutionized reasoning and speaking.
          ”
          ”
         
        Crystal Evans (Jamaican Acute-Ghetto-itis: Jamaican Sociological Commentary)
       
        
          “
          Fates are an often-misunderstood concept in European folklore, and the western obsession with Greek mythology is partially to blame. We tend to conceptualize the three fates as just three major Goddesses, like the Greek Moirae. Similar figures are found throughout Europe, but the situation in other European traditions tends to be more complex. The word “fairy” in many European languages, including English and Italian (fata) and French (fée) actually comes from the Latin word “fata” or “fate.
          ”
          ”
         
        T. D. Kokoszka (Bogowie: A Study of Eastern Europe's Ancient Gods)
       
        
          “
          The commercial genre which has developed from Tolkien is probably the most dismaying effect of all. I grew up in a world where Joyce was considered to be the best Anglophone writer of the 20th century. I happen to believe that Faulkner is better, while others would pick Conrad, say. Thomas Mann is an exemplary giant of moral, mythic fiction. But to introduce Tolkien's fantasy into such a debate is a sad comment on our standards and our ambitions. Is it a sign of our dumber times that Lord of the Rings can replace Ulysses as the exemplary book of its century? Some of the writers who most slavishly imitate him seem to be using English as a rather inexpertly-learned second language. So many of them are unbelievably bad that they defy description and are scarcely worth listing individually. Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence. That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.
          ”
          ”
         
        Michael Moorcock (Epic Pooh)
       
        
          “
          Author John Koenig describes this term in his book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where he describes specific emotions or feelings that have no English words. [2] 
 SONDER (noun): The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.
          ”
          ”
         
        Case Kenny (That's Bold of You: How To Thrive as Your Most Vibrant, Weird, and Real Self)
       
        
          “
          When I say “Christianese,” I am referring to informal, homogenous, and often vacant lingo intended to sound theologically profound. “God just laid it on my heart.” “Our pastor really brings the Word.” “The Bible helps us ‘do life’ together”—that kind of thing. Christianese simplifies the complex, complicates the simple, leans heavily into bumper-stickerisms, and often has the effect of making the speaker sound like they learned English from church marquees. In Christianese, you don’t merely read the Bible, you “spend time in the Word.” You aren’t disconnecting from God, you are “backsliding.” You aren’t sharing time and food with friends, you are “fellowshipping.” Your donation isn’t a gift or tithe, it is a “love offering.” You don’t have a devotional, you have “quiet time.
          ”
          ”
         
        Seth Andrews (Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot)
       
        
          “
          All seizures of power, no matter how ‘strong or well-meaning’ the seizers, will go the same way. That’s what power does. Meanwhile, at exactly the same time as the publication of The Lord of the Rings William Golding was bringing out his fables, Lord of the Flies (1954), and The Inheritors (1955), the meaning of which Golding conveniently summarized for commentators in a later essay, ‘Fable’, in his collection The Hot Gates: 
 
I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. 
(Hot Gates, p. 87) 
 
So the English choirboys, marooned on an idyllic desert island, invent murder and 
human sacrifice and create the ‘lord of the flies’ himself, Beelzebub; in The Inheritors our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, exterminate the gentle and friendly Neanderthals and create an entirely false legend of ogres and cannibals to justify their actions. A very similar if more complex argument was put forward, one might add, by the other great fantasy of the 1950s, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a work which began like Tolkien’s with a children’s book, The Sword in the Stone (1937), but took even longer than Tolkien’s to reach termination, appearing as a whole (though still unfinished) in 1958. White’s points are too many and too self-doubting to summarize readily, but there is at least no doubt that White saw in humanity a basic urge to destruction, expressed in a work written like The Lord of the Rings, nationibus in diro bello certantibus, ‘while the nations were striving in fearful war’. Orwell, Golding, White (and several other post-war authors of fantasy and fable): the thought that they expressed in their highly different ways was that people could never be trusted, least of all if they expressed a wish for the betterment of humanity. The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killing fields. That is why what Gandalf says has rung true to virtually everyone who reads it – though it is, I repeat, yet one more anachronism in Middle-earth, and the greatest of them, an entirely modern conviction.
          ”
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        Tom Shippey (J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century)
       
        
          “
          Readers new to Sedgwick might also benefit from some preliminary practice with long and syntactically complex sentences like this one, which might require an English, French, Scots or Yiddish dictionary as well as an alertness to the non-arbitrary associations that cluster around certain words and grammatical, rhetorical and syntactic strategies; which you might have to read repeatedly and break down into its relevant clauses; which may be more akin to a poem or prose poem than regular academic writing; and which might, therefore, require a sensitivity to the oblique and obscure, to rhythm, tone, form, nuance, double entendres and various kinds of imagery: skills which readers with literary passions might, perhaps, find less intimidating
          ”
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        Anonymous
       
        
          “
          While Dixieland men may have struggled with a language inferiority complex, the opposite is true of Southern women. We’ve always known our accent is an asset, a special trait that makes us stand out from our Northern peers in all the best ways.
For one thing, men can’t resist it. Our slow, musical speech drips with charm, and with the implied delights of a long, slow afternoon sipping home-brewed tea on the back porch.
In educated circles, Southern speech is considered aristocratic, and for good reason: it is far closer linguistically to the Queen’s English than any other American accent. Scottish, Irish, and rural English formed the basis of our language years ago, and the accent has held strong ever since. In the poor hill country there haven’t been many other linguistic influences, and in Charleston you’d be hard pressed to tell a British tourist from a native.
In the Delta of Mississippi and Louisiana, the mixture of French, West Indian, and Southern formed two dialects--Cajun and Creole--that in some places are far more like French than English.
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        Deborah Ford (Grits (Girls Raised in the South) Guide to Life)
       
        
          “
          The Complexity of Indian Accents in American English 
Not everyone from India has the same accent, so what’s important to think about when identifying what to focus on to create clear speech?
Here are some things to consider:
1. Some people from India are English-medium schooled. Some are not.
2. Many people from India speak with tense articulation, which might make their speech sound fast.
3. Complexity & Variety
If someone from India is having challenges speaking American English clearly at a comfortable pace, they may need to familiarize themselves with the vowels Americans use … they may be using British vowels, or some combination of vowels from their first languages and British vowels, and they are not aware of the vowel substitutions. They may also speak at a faster pace than American audiences are used to, and they may not pause and breathe as they go. They may have a lot of issues with the /w/ and /v/ sound distinctions, and their /th/ sounds make sound like /t/’s. Their /t/ sounds may have little bouncy/poppy qualities and they may be using a different part of their tongues to make the sounds. They may also be throaty speakers. And, for southern languages in particular, word stress patterns in American English and how to stress syllables by elongating them is key to intelligibility.
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        Rebecca Linquist
       
        
          “
          Seeing with wisdom means seeing things within the framework of our body/mind complex without prejudices or biases springing from our greed, hatred and delusion.
          ”
          ”
         
        Henepola Gunaratana (Mindfulness in Plain English)
       
        
          “
          The word “ooloi” could not be translated directly into English because its meaning was as complex as Nikanj’s scent. “Treasured stranger.” “Bridge.” “Life trader.” “Weaver.” “Magnet.” Magnet, my birth mother says. People are drawn to ooloi and can’t escape. She couldn’t, certainly. But then, neither could Nikanj escape her or any of its mates. The Oankali said the chemical bonds of mating were as difficult to break as the habit of breathing. Scents
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        Octavia E. Butler (Imago (Xenogenesis, #3))
       
        
          “
          Core subjects include English, reading, and language arts; world languages; arts; mathematics; economics; science; geography; history; and government and civics. Learning and innovation skills are those possessed by students who are prepared for the 21st century and include creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration. Information, media, and technology skills are needed to manage the abundance of information and also contribute to the building of it. These include information literacy; media literacy; and information, communications, and technology (ICT) literacy. Life and career skills are those abilities necessary to navigate complex life and work environments. These include flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, and leadership and responsibility.
          ”
          ”
         
        Laura M. Greenstein (Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Guide to Evaluating Mastery and Authentic Learning)