Concoct Quotes

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.

It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means "ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue," and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase "root beer float" without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.

today, I added a new concoction to my recuperative regime; I began drinking honey and milk. Taken together, they form a powerful antioxidant that has been used by many cultures for centuries. As the saying goes—“ it couldn’t hurt.

yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say shame would not hold down your eyes but rather you would speak about what is just

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever

When witnesses concoct lies, they often miss the obvious.

It is human nature to concoct explanations to fill the great void of the unknown.

One thing we should not forget: if we don’t guard against those trying to sell justifications for letting the gory constructions of their criminal instincts run wild and concoct pretexts for their malicious acts, we might miss out on the moments they are stealing the appropriate junctures, impersonate a god and usurp the spirit of religious beliefs. (“No longer in the middle?”)

I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

She tossed him a small mirror so that he could see the results, and what he saw horrified him.  The boiling concoction left a deep trail of burnt skin that stretched from the crown of his head all the way to his chin – almost like an artificial sluice that burned his flesh to form a large rivulet that ran down the center of his face.

I want to say something but shame prevents me yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but rather you would speak about what is just

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

Once inside my skull, my doctor added some salt, just to taste.  He also poured some fruit into my skull – an apple, a pear, a few seedless grapes, and a ripe banana.  He then used an electric blender set on its highest speed to create what he had termed ‘a yogurt parfait.’  After he finished blending the ingredients, he beckoned the other doctors and a few of the nurses to sample his new concoction.

The cold buried deep inside the bones of her hands, her feet, her head, her back…everywhere. Viola felt old, chilled, and exflunctified. She brushed away her snow-white hair and with gnarled fingers tried tucking it under the black, lacy, silk nightcap that her great niece Annie had sewn for her. Each day, her clothes consisted of a long, white, embroidered nightgown, and a soft, warm, lavender sontag with the hair brooch secured upon her left shoulder. The few pleasures she had since she could no longer see were those of having mail or newspaper stories read to her by relatives who took turns caring for her. She could not tolerate people or activity. Food and drink were tasteless. Although the family made many attempts at a tray of concoctions for her each day, she had just quit eating. She remained closed in her bedroom in this dizzy age, propped in bed, eyes shut with her memories. “Who knew I would live this long?

Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies. Aristocracy with the meaning - the best are ruling. Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its "people's sovereignty" the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized.

When people enjoy problem-solving as a means of self-validation and accomplishment, we must be watchful. What if they frantically construct situations to concoct solutions for problems they like to create? What if their solutions appear to make conditions worse than before? The white knights of the world improvers, who don’t hesitate to destroy nature and cultural heritages, can be a threatening problem on their own when they deteriorate the quality of our lifestyle and environment. ("Why step out of nature" ?)

I had concocted the gunpowder myself from niter, sulfur, charcoal, and a happy heart. When working with explosives, I've found that attitude is everything.

Lucivar winced. "She guzzled half the flask — and it wasn't one of his home brews, it was the concoction you created." Jaenelle’s eyes widened. “You let her drink a ‘gravedigger’?” “No no no,” Wilhelmina said, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t ever drink a gravedigger until he’s had a bath.” She smiled placidly when Jaenelle and Lucivar just stared at her. “Mother Night,” Lucivar muttered. “Do you know that song?” Wilhelmina asked Jaenelle.

Amelia told me once about a suspicion she'd had for a while. It bothered her quite a bit. She said that Win and I had fallen ill with scarlet fever, and you made the deadly nightshade syrup, you'd concocted far more than was necessary. And you kept a cup on it on Win's nightstand, like some sort of macabre nightcap. Amelia said that if Win had died, she thought you would have taken the rest of that poison. And I've always hated you for that. Because you forced me to stay alive without the woman I loved, while you had no bloody hell intention of doing the same." Merripen didn't answer, gave no sign that he registered Leo's words. "Christ, man," Leo said huskily. "If you had the bollocks to die with her, don't you think you could work up the courage to live with her?

The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top

Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you've ever taken for granted, every plan or possibility you've ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you've ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant. Sooner or later, it will happen. So prepare yourself. Be ready not to be ready. Be ready to be brought to your knees and beaten to dust. Because no stable foundation, no act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from this fact: nothing is indestructible.

What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.

The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!

It quickly became a tracking operation, though. My chariot could not keep up with his truck. By the time I caught up with him, his truck was parked in one of those asphalt wastelands. What are they called again"? The Tuatha De Danann have no problem asking Druids for information. That's what we're for, after all. The secret to becoming an Old Druid instead of a dead Druid is to betray nary a hint of condescension when answering even the simplest questions. "They are called parking lots," I replied. "Ah, yes, thank you. He came out of a building called 'Crussh', holding one of these potions. Are you familar with the building, Druid?" "I belive that is a smoothie bar in England." "Quite right. So after I killed him and stowed his body next to the doe, I sampled his smooth concoction in the parking lot and found it to be quite delicious". See, sentences like that are why I nurture a healthy fear of the Tuatha De Danann.

No, the mother finally said. I think working mother is perhaps the most nonsensical concept ever concocted. I mean, who isn’t a working mother? And then add a paid job to it, so what are you then? A working working mother? Imagine saying working father.

Ow!" "Hold still," Sinead ordered. "And don't be such a baby." She dabbed at the angry red mark behind Ian's ear. "Cat scratches are prone to infection, you know." "And that's my fault?" Ian raged. "Why don't you lock that animal in the cellar? Or, better still, send him to a violen string factory! Ow! What is this stuff–acid?" "My own concoction," she replied cheerfully. "Amy and I use it on our blisters when we do marathon training. Soothing, right?" "They practice this kind of soothing in the Lucian stronghold–during interrogations.

I so love the smell of hatred and revenge. It’s the headiest of concoctions. (Noir) I personally feel that way toward blood. No better smell in the universe than when it’s combined with the aroma of those fearing death. (Jericho)

So. Are we concocting some elaborate scheme where we pretend to be twins to get your parents back together?

To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.

I catch myself thinking 'Thank God For This' out of habit, and then I understand what he's so concerned about. What if my parents' God, their whole belief system, is just something concocted by a bunch of scientists to keep us under control? And not just their beliefs about God and whatever else is out there, about right and wrong, about selfishness?

...but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo …Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.

Like everything else I'd seen at Xymos, it was jerry-built, half-baked, concocted in a hurry to solve present problems and never a thought to the future.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

They don't think up questions like that on the basis of what might be true; they concoct the questions on the basis of what might be sensational if it just happened to be true.

To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.

In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.

Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.

Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons

Those movies... ridiculously inaccurate. The real gods of Asgard — Thor, Loki, Odin, and the rest — are much more powerful, much more terrifying than anything Hollywood could concoct.

Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could talk about 'target-rich environments' and 'collateral damage' - that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing - and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace. Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, 'them' and 'us', victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents a total failure of the human spirit.

My hopes rose every time the phone rang, but it was never him. I concocted stories in my mind of every possible scenario where he would come for me or call me and declare his feelings. We would run far away together, where his father could never find us. In other words, I was delusional.

Time concocted by caffeine unnervingly familiar a ferociousness that sucks you in even as it wears you down

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

Because I infinitely prefer the spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries;

Knowing almost nothing about books or serious magazines, intellectually he is a creature of the movie house, where he is an easy prey to fantasies concocted by Hollywood for the gullible. He

beneath the fragile and very human veneer of the organized churches of the world, there lies a truth so real and so pristine that all of man’s concocted philosophical posings tumble into ruin beside it.

So, if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid.

My own monsters were self-concocted fits of overthinking.

... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.

Dimity: 'Will you ever stop seeing conspiracies?' Sophronia: 'When others stop concocting them, I suppose.

I want to write the world’s worst cookbook, which I’ll title: “The World’s Worst Cookbook.” It’ll feature recipes from “Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich” (peanut butter, jelly, and bread), to “Roasted Roadkill and Hitchhiker’s Surprise” (this recipe is a secret concoction handed down from my great grandfather to my grandfather, who told it to my dad just before he ran him over).


Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their graves in order to take their land & its riches? Wolves don’t sit in their caves, concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep! “Intellectual courage”? True “intellectual courage” is to dispense with these fig leaves & admit all peoples are predatory, but White predators, with our deadly duet of disease dust & firearms, are examplars of predacity par excellence, & what of it?

Since having a strong core self relies on acceptance of feelings, being out of touch with the emotional side puts a person out of touch with herself. What then remains to be esteemed? Only a false self, a concoction of what we would like to imagine ourselves to be and what we have divined others want us to be. Sooner or later, people come to realize that this false self — wanting what they think they should want, feeling what they think they should feel — does not work for them. When they look inside themselves, they discover a frightening emptiness, a vacuum, an absence of a true self or of intrinsic motivation.

I visualized myself at Norma's house, stretched out on her couch, my eyes closed, and she at bthe paino playing a powerful movement from some Symphony in D major by Beethoven, by Brahms, by Sibelius, by Tschaikowsky, by anybody, by Thomas Wolfe, by Ernest Hemmingway, by William Saroyan, by Jack Kerouac, by George Apostolos, by Sebastian the Prince, by Love, by Earth, by Fire, by Water, by All, Everything, Love you and I, me myself, egotist, Earth, Fire, a mad and wild concoction of all Life, and of the all-embracing All.

Think of it in terms of men's and women's cultures: women live in male systems, know male rules, speak male language when around men, etc. But what do men really know about women? Only screwed up myths concocted to perpetuate the power imbalance. It is the same situation when it comes to dominant and non-dominant or colonizing and colonized cultures/ countries/ people. As a bilingual/bicultural woman whose native culture is not American, I live in an American system, abide by American rules of conduct, speak English when around English speakers, etc., only to be confronted with utter ignorance or concocted myths and stereotypes about my own culture. -- Judit Moschkovich - "--But I Know You, American Woman

My task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence, that is, what sort of man I am, what I believe in, and what I hope for, is that right? And therefore I declare that I accept God pure and simple. But this, however, needs to be noted: if God exists and if he indeed created the earth, then, as we know perfectly well, he created it in accordance with Euclidean geometry, and he created human reason with a conception of only three dimensions of space. At the same time there were and are even now geometers and philosophers, even some of the most outstanding among them, who doubt that the whole universe, or, even more broadly, the whole of being, was created purely in accordance with Euclidean geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid cannot possibly meet on earth, may perhaps meet somewhere in infinity. I, my dear, have come to the conclusion that if I cannot understand even that, then it is not for me to understand about God. I humbly confess that I do not have any ability to resolve such questions, I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world. And I advise you never to think about it, Alyosha my friend, and most especially about whether God exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, not only willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us; I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was 'with God,' who himself is God, and so on and so forth, to infinity. Many words have been invented on the subject. It seems I'm already on a good path, eh? And now imagine that in the final outcome I do not accept this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. With one reservation: I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man's Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world's finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with men--let this, let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it! Let the parallel lines even meet before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it.

When on the eve of glory, whilst brooding over the prospects of a bright and happy future, whilst meditating upon the risky right of justice, there we remain, wanderers on the cloudy surface of mental woe, disappointment and danger, inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated imagery, partakers of the poisonous dregs of concocted injustice. Yet such is life.

It was not Monsieur Arouet, but a colleague of his—a lady novelist—who remarked to me once that writing novels was a cannibal’s art, in which one often mixed small portions of one’s friends and one’s enemies together, seasoned them with imagination, and allowed the whole to stew together into a savory concoction.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.

The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.

Once upon a time, there was a prince. From a young age, he knew he was destined for greatness for he knew that one day, he would inherit the kingdom from his father. But the prince also had a secret. He was scared of failure. Terrified of it. So completely frightened of not being as good a king as his father, that he would stay up every night braced with the fear of mediocrity. And so, the prince took a medicine to calm his anxiety and he slew trolls! And he took more, and he slew dragons! But one day, he took too much and nearly lost everything. So he was banished. The kingdom would not have him. He was the talk of the countryside, an embarrassment to his family and more important, a disappointment to the king. But the prince would concoct a plan. He would venture back to the land of the queen. There, he would reclaim greatness and thereby gain entrance to the kingdom. And all was going well until of course, this little shit came along.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

O Heavenly Children, the stories you have concocted in God's name have angered Him; for he would never instigate war between brothers, or encourage tribes to harbor resentment towards one another. He prefers the man who loves over the one who hates. And the man who spreads kindness, peace and knowledge, over the one who spreads lies, fear and terror — and misuses His name.

Swallowing hard, she looked at him. He raised his eyes from the frothy concoction on his spoon at the precise moment she looked up, and their gazes locked over the length of the polished wood table. Where would you drip whipped cream on him, Lisa? The answer came with frightening swiftness and conviction: Everywhere. She wanted to explore his body, the hard ripples, the smooth skin. The candlelight bathed his olive skin with a golden hue, and his dark good looks were set off perfectly by his linen shirt and the splash of black and crimson draped across his chest. He was mesmerizing. "Are you hungry, lass?" He licked his spoon languidly. She couldn't tear her gaze away. "No. I've eaten quite enough," she managed. "You seem to be watching my dessert most intently. Are you certain there isn't something else you wish to sate your appetite?" Besides you to remove your clothing, lie on the table, and let me finger paint you with whipped cream, you mean? "Nope," she said casually. "Not a thing." She watched him for a moment; he still had a great deal of dessert left. How was she going to get through this?

All these war scares are concocted by the Pentagon—no offense meant to your brother—to get more appropriations, and give more handouts to Europe, and jack up taxes. It’s all part of the damnable inflationary pattern that’s designed to cheat people on pensions and with fixed incomes and so forth. Now I know your brother thinks he’s doing the right thing, and I appreciate your telling Elizabeth.

No state, however democratic,” Bakunin wrote, “not even the reddest republic—can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo–People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves. . . .” “But the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled ‘the people’s stick

What is this?" she asked, her eyes scanning the page. "It's not..." She ran her fingertips over the words as if expecting them to vanish. "My contract." She whispered. "I don't want you beholden to Per Haskell. Or me." Another half-truth. His mind had concocted a hundred schemes to bind her to him, to keep her in this city. But she'd spent enough of her life caged by debts and obligations, and it would be better for them both when she was gone. "How?" she said. "The money-" "It's done." He'd liquidated every asset he had, used the last of the savings he'd accrued, every ill-gotten cent. She pressed the envelope to her chest, above her heart. "I have no words to thank you for this." "Surely the Suli have a thousand words for such an occasion?" "Words have not been invented for such an occasion." "If I end up on the gallows, you can say something nice over the corpse," he said.

I'm what the botanists call a hybrid," he said the first time Cora heard him speak, "A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offence. In this room we recognize it for what it is - a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.

This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies.

Madams Manec's energy, Marie-Lauren is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off stalks, wakes early, works late, concocts basques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure's hand on the back of Madame's apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rose bushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.

If you are trying to mislead your enemies, it is often better to concoct something ambiguous and hard to read, as opposed to an outright deception—that deception can be uncovered and enemies can turn their discovery to their advantage, especially if you think they are still fooled and act under that belief.

What the hell was your pal Bertin demanding?” he asked. “Sipping syrup?” “It’s a cocktail he prefers when he gets, ah, overly excited.” “A cocktail?” “Of sorts. Lemon–lime soda, vodka, codeine in solution, and a Jolly Rancher candy.” “A what?” “Bertin prefers the watermelon–flavored variety.” D’Agosta shook his head. “Christ. Only in Louisiana.” “Actually, I understand the concoction originated in Houston.

If writers write not just with paper and ink or a word processor but with their own life's blood, then I think something like this is perhaps always the case. A book you write out of the depths of who you are, like a dream you dream out of those same depths, is entirely your own creation. All the words your characters speak are words that you alone have put into their mouths, just as every situation they become involved in is one that you alone have concocted for them. But it seems to me that nonetheless that a book you write, like a dream you dream, can have more healing and truth and wisdom in it at least for yourself than you feel in any way responsible for.

We make a fatal mistake when we try to force Scripture to offer redemption to those who want to go to heaven but who don't want a relationship with the living God. By trying to offer some minimal standard of conduct that will allow them to qualify for salvation while continuing to to pursue their own agendas, we distort the gospel and destroy its power, and we concoct legalistic games to give them a false sense of security.

You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance, you cannot kill a dream or an ambition. God, manufactured by mortals in their own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that every one of us treads toward extinction. As long as men are obliged to die, some of them, unable to endure the prospect, will concoct fond illusions.We cannot assassinate or kill an illusion. In fact, illusion is more likely to kill us — for God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence, and the critical mind. All the rest follows in a chain reaction.

Everything he said sounded wonderful, but it wasn't true. I was desperately insecure and I did care what people thought. Jackson wasn't really talking about me. He was talking about an idea of me he'd concocted in his head. As soon as he remembered me and my true weaknesses in the clear light of day, he'd be as cruel this time as he had been the last.

You're assuming,' said Dr. Robert, 'that the brain produces consciousness. I'm assuming that it transmits consciousness. And my explanation is no more farfetched than yours. How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. All one can do is to accept the facts and concoct hypotheses. And one hypothesis is just about as good, philosophically speaking, as another. You say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which causes them to produce a set of subjective events to which people have given the name 'mystical experience.' I say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a large 'M' to flow into your mind with a small 'm.' You can't demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis, and I can't demonstrate the truth of mine. And even if you could prove that I'm wrong, would it make any practical difference?

There are many different things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them. It is difficult to hide an airplane, for instance, because you generally need to find a deep hole or an enormous haystack, and sneak the airplane inside in the middle of the night, but it is easy to hide a secret about an airplane, because you can merely write it on a tiny piece of paper and tape it to the bottom of your mattress any time you are at home. It is difficult to hide a symphony orchestra, because you usually need to rent a soundproof room and borrow as many sleeping bags as you can find, but it is easy to hide a secret about a symphony orchestra, because you can merely whisper it into the ear of a trustworthy friend or music critic. And it is difficult to hind yourself, because you sometimes need to stuff yourself into the trunk of an automobile, or concoct a disguise out of whatever you can find, but it is easy to hide a secret about yourself because you can merely type it into a book and hope it falls into the right hands. My dear sister, if you are reading things I am still alive, and heading north to try and find you.

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

We are afraid of what we will do to others, afraid of the rage that lies in wait somewhere deep in our souls. How many human beings go through the world frozen with rage against life! This deeply hidden inner anger may be the product of hurt pride or of real frustration in office, factory, clinic, or home. Whatever may be the cause of our frozen rage (which is the inevitable mother of depression), the great word of hope today is that this rage can be conquered and drained off into creative channels … …What should we do? We should all learn that a certain amount of aggressive energy is normal and certainly manageable in maturity. Most of us can drain off the excess of our angry feelings and destructive impulses in exercise, in competitive games, or in the vigorous battles against the evils of nature and society. We also must realize that no one will punish us for the legitimate expression of self-assertiveness and creative pugnacity as our parents once punished us for our undisciplined temper tantrums. Furthermore, let us remember that we need not totally repress the angry part of our nature. We can always give it an outlet in the safe realm of fantasy. A classic example of such fantasy is given by Max Beerborn, who made a practice of concocting imaginary letters to people he hated. Sometimes he went so far as to actually write the letters and in the very process of releasing his anger it evaporated. As mature men and women we should regard our minds as a true democracy where all kinds of ideas and emotions should be given freedom of speech. If in political life we are willing to grant civil liberties to all sorts of parties and programs, should we not be equally willing to grant civil liberties to our innermost thoughts and drives, confident that the more dangerous of them will be outvoted by the majority within our minds? Do I mean that we should hit out at our enemy whenever the mood strikes us? No, I repeat that I am suggesting quite the reverse—self-control in action based upon (positive coping mechanisms such as) self expression in fantasy.

It became clearer and clearer to me that I had found a woman who possessed the strength and like-mindedness I'd been hoping to locate my entire adult life. 'In marriage, choose someone you're comfortable solving problems with' was an aphorism I'd been acquainted with. I had long ago concocted my own turbocharged version, which better fit my own history and worldview. The blessing to be carefully preserved, I'd concluded, is a partner with whom you're not only be able to endure a crisis but whose companionship you could continue to enjoy in spite of the crisis. It became apparent that I might have found exactly that.

The tinkering of evolution can concoct perceptual interfaces with endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful; the vast majority of these, however, are to us most inconceivable. Evolution is not finished tinkering with the perceptual interfaces of Homo sapiens. The mutations that bless one in twenty-five with some form of synesthesia are surely part of the process, and some of these mutations might catch on; much of the tinkering centers on our perceptions of color. Evolution defies our silly stricture that our perceptions must be veridical. It freely explores endless forms of sensory interfaces, hitting now and then on novel ways to shepherd our endless foraging for fitness.

Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. ... At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. ... And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense. .... Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.

I think that the trademark of the Devil in this world, is the awful rift between women. Women backbiting other women, women envying other women and so on and so forth. And then there is the telltale sign of God in this world, which is the intoxicating potion of joy that is concocted when a woman reaches out to another woman, when women will take an extra step, go an extra mile, or just go out of their way an inch for their fellow woman, regardless of the varying degrees of things we hold important such as beauty, intelligence, status and so on and so forth. Beautiful acts of God are seen in the kindness of women towards other women. And when I say this, I am also thinking about gay men in the same light.

7 ALL ELECTRIC J. B. STRAUBEL HAS A TWO-INCH-LONG SCAR that cuts across the middle of his left cheek. He earned it in high school, during a chemistry class experiment. Straubel whipped up the wrong concoction of chemicals, and the beaker he was holding exploded, throwing off shards of glass, one of which sliced through his face. The wound lingers as a tinkerer’s badge of honor. It arrived near the end of a childhood full of experimentation with chemicals and machines. Born in Wisconsin, Straubel constructed a large chemistry lab in the basement of his family’s home that included fume hoods and chemicals ordered, borrowed, or pilfered. At thirteen, Straubel found an old golf cart at the dump. He brought it back home and restored it to working

The mind state caused by ambiguity is called uncertainty, and it’s an emotional amplifier. It makes anxiety more agonizing, and pleasure especially enjoyable. The delight of crossword puzzles, for example, comes from pondering and resolving ambiguous clues. Detective stories, among the most successful literary genres of all time, concoct their suspense by sustaining uncertainty about hints and culprits. Mind-bending modern art, the multiplicities of poetry, Lewis Carroll’s riddles, Márquez’s magical realism, Kafka’s existential satire—ambiguity saturates our art forms and masterpieces, suggesting its deeply emotional nature. Goethe once said that “what we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.” So it is with ambiguity.

After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed – on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn’t have a game – and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn’t get would hardly make a difference, and then what was there? The loathsomely familiar room where you lived, your horrible face and body, and the rebuke of other people, how they were unbothered, how you would seem, if you tried to explain, kind of weird and kind of boring and not even original. Why did their lives proceed so easily? Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around? Not, of course, that you would actually succeed if you tried.

More than that, these adverts sell a dubious world view. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Microcellular Complexes, their Neutrillium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Végétal and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly under-represented in the sciences.

A predator’s intention…… It is my intention to cause you fear such as you have never known. It is my desire to take your fear to a whole new level of terror. I can smell your fear as its sweet scent flows through my universe. This small universe that I have created and am permitting you to exist in. I say these things because you only exist right now because I have allowed it, for if I should choose, I could snuff you out as if extinguishing a candle flame. I will make you thank me later for allowing you to breathe. I will mix you a concoction of fear, pain, uncertainty, and arousal, such as you have never known. You see my curious little prey these all create very similar physical reactions. My little prey… they have common traits on the emotional side too. Curious prey, curious prey, let me growl my intentions into your curious ear. I will keep you in a constant state of fear, pain, uncertainty, and arousal. I know exactly what I am doing; I am a skilled and professional predator. It is my full intention to own you! I will keep you in a constant emotional whirlpool. This is the universe of my making, and you exist in it by my power, and by my choice. I want you in a constant state of fear, physical discomfort, pain, uncertainty, and arousal. I am purposely blurring the lines between your emotions, and your physical sensations. As I do this… I am creating a desire and a craving within you to be man handled and taken by me. I am intentionally working you into a state of intense arousal, and desperation. I am conditioning you to crave your new life as my prey…

I squinted at the western sky behind Thaddeus, a blood-red smear melting into blackness. Twisting my neck, I glanced the opposite direction. My teeth clenched at a magnified, round moon nearly as scarlet as the portending sunset, its luminous face half masked by hazy cloud cover. Hatred, vengeance, anger... such emotions coursed through my veins in a poisonous concoction that muddied my mind, impelling me to grip my sword tighter and fight with every ounce of strength I possessed against those who threatened my family - my kind. Currently, Thaddeus was behaving as such a threat, using his powers of persuasion to condone human sacrifice for some outrageously perceived good. He wanted an offering for the monsters; a desperate, futile offering of human flesh that would in no way protect the other villagers from being mauled as he promised.

In learning any subject of a technical nature where mathematics plays a role, one is confronted with the task of understanding and storing away in the memory a huge body of facts and ideas, held together by certain relationships which can be “proved” or “shown” to exist between them. It is easy to confuse the proof itself with the relationship which it establishes. Clearly, the important thing to learn and to remember is the relationship, not the proof. In any particular circumstance we can either say “it can be shown that” such and such is true, or we can show it. In almost all cases, the particular proof that is used is concocted, first of all, in such form that it can be written quickly and easily on the chalkboard or on paper, and so that it will be as smooth-looking as possible. Consequently, the proof may look deceptively simple, when in fact, the author might have worked for hours trying different ways of calculating the same thing until he has found the neatest way, so as to be able to show that it can be shown in the shortest amount of time! The thing to be remembered, when seeing a proof, is not the proof itself, but rather that it can be shown that such and such is true. Of course, if the proof involves some mathematical procedures or “tricks” that one has not seen before, attention should be given not to the trick exactly, but to the mathematical idea involved.

Aware she’d likely never tasted such a thing before, she took a cautious sip. Nothing came up. “The straw’s defective.” Dev shot her a quick grin. It altered his face, turning him strikingly beautiful. But that wasn’t the odd part. The odd part was that seeing him smile made her heart change its rhythm. She lifted her hand a fraction, compelled to trace the curve of his lips, the crease in his cheek. Would he let her, she thought, this man who moved with the liquid grace of a soldier . . . or a beast of prey? “Did I say milk shake?” he said, withheld laughter in his voice. “I meant ice cream smoothie—with enough fresh fruit blended into it to turn it solid.” Glancing at her when she didn’t move, he raised an eyebrow. She felt a wave of heat across her face, and the sensation was so strange, it broke through her fascination. Looking down, she took off the lid after removing the straw and stared at the swirls of pink and white that dominated the delicious-smelling concoction. Intrigued, she poked at it with the tip of her straw. “I can see pieces of strawberry, and what’s that?” She looked more closely at the pink-coated black seeds. “Passion fruit?” “Try it and see.” Handing her his water bottle, he started the car and got them on their way. “How would I know?” She put his water in the holder next to the unopened bottle. “And I need a spoon for this.” Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a plastic-wrapped piece of cutlery. “Here.” “You did that on purpose,” she accused. “Did you want to see how hard I’d try to suck the mixture up?” Another smile, this one a bare shadow. “Would I do that?” It startled her to realize he was teasing her. Devraj Santos, she thought, wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humor. That was something she just knew. And, it was wrong. That meant the shadow-man didn’t know everything, that he wasn’t omnipotent. A cascade of bubbles sparkled through her veins, bright and effervescent. “I think you’re capable of almost anything.” Dipping in the spoon, she brought the decadent mixture to her lips. Oh! The crisp sting of ice, the cream rich and sweet, the fruit a tart burst of sensation. It was impossible not to take a second bite. And a third.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and the novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage. To make our meaning plain — Orlando could come home from one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr M. amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it.