Copy Love Quotes

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things. We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less. These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete... Remember, to spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever. Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side. Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent. Remember, to say, "I love you" to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you. Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person might not be there again. Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

...the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I worship the ground this guy walks on. I’m excited to meet him tonight. I’m dying to meet him tonight. If he wanted to carry me off and make me his love slave, I’d do it, so long as I got advance copies of his books.

Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.

Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.

Stay true to yourself. An original is worth more than a copy.

Kill me, Doug. Just kill me now. Put me out of my misery.” “Christ, Kincaid, what did you say to him?” murmured Doug. “Well,” I told Doug, “I ripped on his fans and on how long it takes for his books to come out.” Doug stared at me, his expectations exceeded. “Then I said—not knowing who he was—that I’d be Seth Mortensen’s love slave in exchange for advanced copies of his books.

Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.

Why escape your intended purpose by copying and trying to be someone else? You will discover who you were meant to be only after you have shown confidence being yourself.

Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed.

Originals cost more than imitations.

You were born an original work of art. Stay original always. Originals cost more than imitations.

A person who is truly cool is a work of art. And remember, original works of art cost exponentially higher than imitations. Just take a look at the the coolest people in history. They will always be a part of history for being extremely original individuals, not imitations.

You were born an original work of art. Stay original.

Be yourself because an original is worth more than just a copy.

Love does not need true copies signed by a registrar of marriages.

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

I initially wanted to hire a maid in hopes that she would become my replacement—that if Andrew fell in love with another woman, he would finally let me go. But that’s not why I hired Millie. That’s not why I gave her a copy of the key to the room. And that’s not why I left a bottle of pepper spray in the blue bucket in the closet. I hired her to kill him. She just doesn’t know it.

There are few things more beautiful to an author's eye, he confessed to Billy, than a well-read copy of one of his books.

April 11, 2004 Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the rules of thought, feeling, and behavior in these circumstances? It seems like there should be a rule book somewhere that lays out everything exactly the way one should respond to a loss like this. I'd surely like to know if I'm doing it right. Am I whining enough or too much? Am I unseemly in my occasional moments of lightheartedness? At what date and I supposed to turn off the emotion and jump back on the treadmill of normalcy? Is there a specific number of days or decades that must pass before I can do something I enjoy without feeling I've betrayed my dearest love? And when, oh when, am I ever really going to believe this has happened? Next time you're in a bookstore, as if there's a rule book. 11:54 p.m. Jim

My “Best Woman” speech Good evening everyone, my name is Rosie and as you can see Alex has decided to go down the non-traditional route of asking me to be his best woman for the day. Except we all know that today that title does not belong to me. It belongs to Sally, for she is clearly his best woman. I could call myself the “best friend” but I think we all know that today that title no longer refers to me either. That title too belongs to Sally. But what doesn’t belong to Sally is a lifetime of memories of Alex the child, Alex the teenager, and Alex the almost-a-man that I’m sure he would rather forget but that I will now fill you all in on. (Hopefully they all will laugh.) I have known Alex since he was five years old. I arrived on my first day of school teary-eyed and red-nosed and a half an hour late. (I am almost sure Alex will shout out “What’s new?”) I was ordered to sit down at the back of the class beside a smelly, snotty-nosed, messy-haired little boy who had the biggest sulk on his face and who refused to look at me or talk to me. I hated this little boy. I know that he hated me too, him kicking me in the shins under the table and telling the teacher that I was copying his schoolwork was a telltale sign. We sat beside each other every day for twelve years moaning about school, moaning about girlfriends and boyfriends, wishing we were older and wiser and out of school, dreaming for a life where we wouldn’t have double maths on a Monday morning. Now Alex has that life and I’m so proud of him. I’m so happy that he’s found his best woman and his best friend in perfect little brainy and annoying Sally. I ask you all to raise your glasses and toast my best friend Alex and his new best friend, best woman, and wife, Sally, and to wish them luck and happiness and divorce in the future. To Alex and Sally!

An original is worth more than a copy.

I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better.

When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you love a person deeply, you want to serve them and earn their regard. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies.

Someone gave me a copy of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a fable about a shepherd boy who travels to the Pyramids in search of treasure when all the time it's at home. I loved that book and read it over and over again. 'When you want something all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it,' it says. I don't think that Paulo Coelho had come across the Taliban or our useless politicians.

Your father, Jo. He never loses patience,--never doubts or complains,--but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully, that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him. He helped and comforted me, and showed me that I must try to practise all the virtues I would have my little girls possess, for I was their example. It was easier for your sakes than for my own; a startled or surprised look from one of you, when I spoke sharply, rebuked me more than any words could have done; and the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.

Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.” —Yohji Yamamoto

After soft kisses, they pressed their hands together palm to palm. The tingling scattered all over Livia's body, warming her. "Do you feel that?" she whispered with a smile. His lips moved in his silent count. Blake wrapped his fingers around her hand. She copied the movement. Their hands together now resembled a heart-not a cartoon rendering of the shape, but a real human heart. He touched her lips with his and murmured, "I've been feeling it since you first smiled at me.

But realize this: we are living through writing’s Cambrian explosion, not its mass extinction. Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard—variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

I grabbed the closest box of books and heaved it onto my bed. It contained all the books I had read in Iraq. Dog-eared, with broken spines, speckled with dirt, food, and even a little blood, most of the copies were marked up with notes in the margins. The better the book, the worse it looked--that's the way it should be. As I saw it, they were almost more like diaries than books.

Love was a miracle the flesh couldn’t copy.

When you start loving yourself, life starts loving you, too.

People like to say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. There tends to be a whispered reverence around the expression, as if it has magical healing powers. Better to be hated than ignored by that angry ex of yours; better to be hated than ignored, generally. Otherwise, you may spend your life staring straight down the barrel of the opposite of love. But I think that's bullshit. Nonsense print copy for a paper towel. A sound bit e to needlepoint on a throw pillow. Could indifference really be worse than hate? How depressing to think we could be spending most of our days surrounded by people who feel something worse than hate toward us.

My mother read it when she was a teenager," Henry said, picking a piece of lint off his lap. "To Kill a Mockingbird. The day she accepted my father's proposal, she gave him a copy and told him that Atticus Finch is the kind of father she wants her husband to be.

I think I’m falling in love with you.” The words leave my lips in the faintest whisper. He keeps quiet for a solid minute. I second-guess myself, but he squeezes me tighter into him. “Elena?” “Mm.” I copy him. “I already know I am.

Like most music that affects me deeply, I would never listen to it while others were around, just as I would not pass on a book that I especially loved to another. I am embarrassed to admit this, knowing that it reveals some essential lack or selfishness in my nature, and aware that it runs contrary to the instincts of most, whose passion for something leads them to want to share it, to ignite a similar passion in others, and that without the benefit of such enthusiasm I would still be ignorant of many of the books and much of the music I love most... But rather than an expansion, I've always felt a diminishment of my own pleasure when I've invited someone else to take part in it, a rupture in the intimacy I felt with the work, an invasion of privacy. It is worst when someone else picks up the copy of a book I've just been enthralled by and begins casually to thumb through the pages.

71. Rare Things-- A son-in-law who's praised by his wife's father. Likewise, a wife who's loved by her mother-in-law. A pair of silver tweezers that can actually pull out hairs properly. A retainer who doesn't speak ill of his master. A person who is without a single quirk. Someone who's superior in both appearance and character, and who's remained utterly blameless throughout his long dealings with the world. You never find an instance of two people living together who continue to be overawed by each other's excellence and always treat each other with scrupulous care and respect, so such a relationship is obviously a great rarity. Copying out a tale or a volume of poems without smearing any ink on the book you're copying from. If you're copying it from some beautiful bound book, you try to take immense care, but somehow you always manage to get ink on it. Two women, let alone a man and a woman, who vow themselves to each other forever, and actually manage to remain on good terms to the end.

I think we’re all just copying what we see. Scenes from movies. Feelings that songs say we’re supposed to have. Fights that our parents have. We just reenact them. And of course they’re all reenacting stuff, too.

Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone.

Look under the passenger seat in a black plastic bin. There should be a book.” Raphael hopped out, dug under the seat, and pulled out a dog-eared copy of The Almanac of Mystical Creatures. “Got it,” I said into the phone. “Page seventy-six.” Raphael flipped the book open and held it up. On the left page a lithograph showed a three-headed dog with a serpent for a tail. The caption under the picture said CERBERUS. “Is that your dog?” Kate asked. “Could be. How the heck did you know the exact page?” “I have perfect memory!” I snorted. She sighed into the phone. “I spilled coffee on that page and had to leave the book open to dry it out. It always opens to that entry now.

A word of all the words I've got in there... But if I wrote... Let's get it written, then, This letter I've composed a hundred times, Written and rewritten in my mind: it's ready And all I have to do is lay my soul Open beside the paper and copy it out.

If someone wants to seem to be something, stubbornly and for a long time, he eventually finds it hard to be anything else. The profession of almost every man, even the artist, begins with hypocrisy, as he imitates from the outside, copies what is effective.

For what is love if one loves a woman without knowing her? Just a decision to love? Or even an imitation? The question concerns us all: If, from our childhood on, the examples of love were not there inviting us to copy them, would we know what "loving" means?

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy. The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

I often took him as one of God's little jokes on me. When I was in desperate trouble, what saved me from a fate worse than death? To what do I owe my life? Was it love, affection, understanding, friends, wisdom? No no no. It was a man who looks like a poor copy of Walt Disney, drives pink Cadillacs, wears baby-blue alligator shoes, and appears to have the emotional depth of a slightly retarded potato.

I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. I thought the physical world - the trades - was the place you ended up if you weren't bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job. Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now.

Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens's latest novel and who kept battered copies of Catcher in the Rye in our back pockets and backpacks. We are the ones who saw to it that Pride and Prejudice never went out of print.

But perhaps the most damning argument came from nature herself. Had David followed his own advice to look to nature for truth, he would have seen it. This dazzling, feathery, squawking, gurgling mound of counterevidence. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. There are crows that have better memories than us, chimps with better pattern-recognition skills, ants that rescue their wounded, and blood flukes with higher rates of monogamy. When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top. We don’t have the biggest brain or the best memory. We’re not the fastest or the strongest or the most prolific. We’re not the only ones that mate for life, that show altruism, use tools, language. We don’t have the most copies of genes in circulation. We aren’t even the newest creation on the block.

The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.

If a child sees something in a parent that the child aspires to, he or she will copy that parent and be content. If a children feel that a parent is living a life that shows compassion and understanding, patience and love, that child will not have to reach a stage of rebellion against that parent. Why rebel against someone who has listened to you and wants to help you fufill your dreams? A parent who has proven time and again that growth and happiness of his or her children is priority number one does not have to worry about where these children are heading in life. They will be sensitive and productive members of society for as long as they live.

He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. 'What's the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more then there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.

The difference between Marilyn’s and Jayne’s approach to intellectual pursuits is that Marilyn carried big heavy books around and hung out with brainy people to absorb their intellect, while Jayne really had a thirst for knowledge. Jayne was very proud of the fact that if she like something enough she would commit it to memory. At that time, The Satanic Bible was still in monograph form, and Jayne had pored over those pages until she knew most of it by heart...Marilyn gave me a copy of Stendhal’s On Love, and I still have a copy of Walter Benton’s This is My Beloved, which we bought together on Sunset Boulevard. Marilyn turned me on to it—wanted me to read it and write something in it for her. I got as far as writing her name in it, but I ended up with the book. It meant a lot to me during a particularly dark period in my life after I left L.A. Jayne kept insisting I read The Story of O and I, Jan Cremer. She gave me a dog-eared copy of each. It seems a distinctly feminine trait to want to share books with people they care deeply about.

Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

There is a payoff for examining the divine author's literary style. It will tell you something about Him. Whereas, Jonah's actions are extensively described and laboriously detailed, God's reactions (although miraculous) are only described in sparse, minimalist terms. God seems much more amused by Jonah than Jonah is with God. Every miracle is directed at Jonah. Yet, very little copy is used to described God's miracles. Although God's miracles are much more astonishing than Jonah's immature fits of rebellion, more copy is dedicated to Jonah.

But really it says everything that’s wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and shopping novel that wasn’t even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don’t even sell ten thousand copies. It’s just not right.

Mitchell Maxwell’s Maxims • You have to create your own professional path. There’s no longer a roadmap for an artistic career. • Follow your heart and the money will follow. • Create a benchmark of your own progress. If you never look down while you’re climbing the ladder you won’t know how far you’ve come. • Don’t define success by net worth, define it by character. Success, as it’s measured by society, is a fleeting condition. • Affirm your value. Tell the world “I am an artist,” not “I want to be an artist.” • You must actively live your dream. Wishing and hoping for someday doesn’t make it happen. Get out there and get involved. • When you look into the abyss you find your character. • Young people too often let the fear of failure keep them from trying. You have to get bloody, sweaty and rejected in order to succeed. • Get your face out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Close your e-mail and pick up the phone. Personal contact still speaks loudest. • No one is entitled to act entitled. Be willing to work hard. • If you’re going to buck the norm you’re going to have to embrace the challenges. • You have to love the journey if you’re going to work in the arts. • Only listen to people who agree with your vision. • A little anxiety is good but don’t let it become fear, fear makes you inert. • Find your own unique voice. Leave your individual imprint on the world, not a copy of someone else. • Draw strength from your mistakes; they can be your best teacher.

He thought he kept the universe alone; For all the voice in answer he could wake Was but the mocking echo of his own From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. Some morning from the boulder-broken beach He would cry out on life, that what it wants Is not its own love back in copy speech, But counter-love, original response. And nothing ever came of what he cried Unless it was the embodiment that crashed In the cliff's talus on the other side, And then in the far-distant water splashed, But after a time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving human when it neared And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush--and that was all.

What best remind us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never recapture it. Or rather we should never recapture it had not a few words been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable.

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other. Age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities. Those they love are taken from them and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year. At length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last - the only unpoisoned gift ever had for them - and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they have existed – a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever. Then another myriad takes their place and copies all they did and goes along the same profitless road and vanishes as they vanished - to make room for another and another and a million other myriads to follow the same arid path through the same desert and accomplish what the first myriad and all the myriads that came after it accomplished - nothing!

I'm glad this happened," he said softly. I hoped it was for real,and I didn't want to talk about it too much and ruin the lovely illusion that we were a couple. So I said noncommittally, "Me too." "Because I've been trying to get you back since the seventh grade." I must have given him a very skeptical look. He laughed at my expression. "Yeah, I have a funny way of showing it. I know. But you're always on my mind. You're in the front of my mind,on the tip of my tongue. So if someone breaks a beaker in chemistry class, I raise my hand and tell Ms. Abernathy you did it. If somebody brings a copy of Playboy to class, I stuff it in your locker." "Oh!" I thought back to the January issue. "I wondered where that came from." "And if Everett Walsh tells the lunch table what a wicked kisser you are and how far he would have gotten with you if his mother hadn't come in-" I stamped my foot on the floorboard of the SUV."That is so not true! He'd already gotten as far as he was going. He's not that cute, and I had to go home and study for algebra. "-It drives me insane to the point that I tell him to shut up or I'll make him shut up right there in front of everybody. Because I am supposed to be your boyfriend, and my mother is supposed to hate you,and you're supposed to be making out with me." Twisted as this declaration was,it was the sweetest thing a boy had ever said to me.I dwelled on the soft lips that had formed the statement,and on the meaning of his words. "Okay." I scooted across the seat and nibbled the very edge of his superhero chin. "Ah," he gasped, moving both hands from the steering wheel to the seat to brace himself. "I didn't mean now.I meant in general.Your dad will come out of the house and kill me.

All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked. In the end everything is either a revolt against the adults we encountered or an attempt to copy them. That’s why someone who hated their own childhood often has greater empathy than someone who loved theirs. Because someone who had a hard time dreamed of other realities, but someone who had it easy can hardly imagine that things could be any different. We take happiness so easily for granted if we’ve had it from the start.

THEY WERE PEOPLE who went in for Negroes—Michael and Anne—the Carraways. But not in the social-service, philanthropic sort of way, no. They saw no use in helping a race that was already too charming and naive and lovely for words. Leave them unspoiled and just enjoy them, Michael and Anne felt. So they went in for the Art of Negroes—the dancing that had such jungle life about it, the songs that were so simple and fervent, the poetry that was so direct, so real. They never tried to influence that art, they only bought it and raved over it, and copied it. For they were artists, too.

Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact,” said Slartibartfast cheerfully. “We’re making a copy from our original blueprints.” There was a pause. “Are you trying to tell me,” said Arthur, slowly and with control, “that you originally…made the Earth?” “Oh yes,” said Slartibartfast. “Did you ever go to a place…I think it was called Norway?” “No,” said Arthur, “no, I didn’t.” “Pity,” said Slartibartfast, “that was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear of its destruction.

. Even Proust—there’s a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she’s sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so—the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting’s blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because—the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself…as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organiser of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares.

Here," I said, the morning after the lazy, stupid Derek incident, as I intercepted Camden on his way to his locker shortly before the first-period bell and dragged him into an empty physics lab. I handed him three problem sets with the words PECKER and BALLS written all over them in multicolored highlighters, plus pictures of stick-figure people having sex in different positions. "This is to force your douche-bag friends to copy over the stuff in their own handwriting before they hand it in. There's no way I'm letting us get caught just because our clients get lazy." I crossed my arms and stared at him, daring him to get mad. He didn't. He just looked at the papers, surprised, then looked at me. "That's actually a really good idea," he said, sounding impressed. "I know," I said. "And these pictures you drew are weirdly hot." "I don't disagree," I said. "By the way, I'm charging you for the highlighters I bought." I think he might've said "I love you" as I walked out of the classroom, but the hallway was noisy, so I couldn't be sure.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)

I'm Perfect at Feelings,
 so I have no problem telling you
 why you cried over the third lost
 metal or the mousetrap. I knew
 that orgasms weren't your fault 
and that feeling of keeping solid
 in yourself but wanting an ecstatic
 black hole was just bad beauty. 

 Certain loves were perfect
 in the daytime and had every 
right to express carnally behind
 the copy machine and there are 
no hard feelings for the boozy 
sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain,
 whenever it felt right for you.

 And when the moment of soft 
levitation with erasing hands 
made you feel dirty, like
 the main person to think up love
 in the first place, I knew that.
 It's okay, you're an innocent
 with the brilliance of an animal stuffing yourself sick on a kill.
 Don't, don't feel like the runt alien 
on my ship: I get you. I know
 the dimensions of your wishing 
and losing and don't think you
 a glutton with petty beefs. But
 even I, who know your triggers,

 your emblematic sacs of sad fury,
 I understand why the farthest fat trees 
sliver down with your disappointment 
and why the big sense of the world,
 wrong before you, shrugs but
 somewhere grasps your spinning,
 stunning, alone. But you have me.

Realize that people are idiots. The sooner you accept this fact the better. Most people are going to doubt you. Even the people closest to you will doubt you. There's a misconception that if you personally know the writer that means they're not a good writer; If they haven't sold a million copies, that means they're not a good writer. Many of the authors I love most died destitute with little notoriety, Anne Frank and Edgar Alan Poe, just to name a couple. Jane Austin's books received little attention while she was alive. Now you can't turn on a tv without seeing some variation of her work. Sometimes an artist is ahead of their time, but no less an artist.

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore. "By telling you my life's story. "See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like: TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS! or BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS! "Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday. "I am tomorrow.

Carol would not be a bad one to [settle down] with. She's pretty and bright, and maybe this is what love is. She's good company: her interests broaden almost every day. She reads three books to my one, and I read a lot. We talk far into the night. She still doesn't understand the first edition game: Hemingway, she says, reads just as well in a two-bit paperback as he does in a $500 first printing. I can still hear myself lecturing her the first time she said that. Only a fool would read a first edition. Simply having such a book makes life in general and Hemingway in particular go better when you do break out the reading copies. I listened to myself and thought, This woman must think I'm a government-inspected horse's ass. Then I showed her my Faulkners, one with a signature, and I saw her shiver with an almost sexual pleasure as she touched the paper where he signed. Faulkner was her most recent god[.]

On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind." I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared. If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand. That's why I love books.

The Mockingbird All summer the mockingbird in his pearl-gray coat and his white-windowed wings flies from the hedge to the top of the pine and begins to sing, but it’s neither lilting nor lovely, for he is the thief of other sounds— whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges plus all the songs of other birds in his neighborhood; mimicking and elaborating, he sings with humor and bravado, so I have to wait a long time for the softer voice of his own life to come through. He begins by giving up all his usual flutter and settling down on the pine’s forelock then looking around as though to make sure he’s alone; then he slaps each wing against his breast, where his heart is, and, copying nothing, begins easing into it as though it was not half so easy as rollicking, as though his subject now was his true self, which of course was as dark and secret as anyone else’s, and it was too hard— perhaps you understand— to speak or to sing it to anything or anyone but the sky.

Anne had wandered down the the Dryard's Bubble and was curled up among the ferns at the root of the n=big white birch where sher and Gilbert had so often sat ion summers gone by. Hew had gone into the newspaper office again when college was closed, and Avonlea seemed very dull without him. He never wrote to her, and Anne missed the letters that neer came. To be sure, Roy wrote twice a week; his letters were exquisite compositions which would have read beautifully in a memoir or biography. Anne felt herself more deeply in love with him that ever when she read the; but her heart never game that queer, quick, painful bound at sight of his letters which had given one day when Mrs. Hiram Sloane had handed her out an envelope addressed in Gilbert's black, upright handwriting. Anne had hurried home to the east gable and opened it eagrly--to find a typewritten copy of some college society report--"only that and nothing more." Anne flung the harmless screed across her room and sat down to write and especially nice epistle to Roy

Maeve, you wrote this to Tillie Olsen, who treasured it, and had it up on her studio wall. I copied it, and it’s now on the [bulletin] board over my desk.” The passage reads: I have been trying to think of the word to say to you that would never fail to lift you up when you are too tired or too sad [to] not be downcast. But I can think only of a reminder—you are all it has. You are all your work has. It has nobody else and never had anybody else. If you deny it hands and a voice, it will continue as it is, alive, but speechless and without hands. You know it has eyes and can see you, and you know how hopefully it watches you. But I am speaking of a soul that is timid but that longs to be known. When you are so sad that you “cannot work” there is always danger fear will enter in and begin withering around. A good way to remain on guard is to go to the window and watch the birds for an hour or two or three. It is very comforting to see their beaks opening and shutting. This is real friendship—the kind that takes another’s soul as seriously as one’s own. Aristotle considered it the highest order of love, philia, or “friendship love,” in which tending to somebody else’s welfare is central to our own flourishing.

My lord?” Nick turned at the tentative, feminine voice, to find two young women standing nearby, watching him eagerly. Nick spoke, wary. “Yes? ” “We—” one of them began to speak, then stopped, uncertain. The other nudged her toward him. “Yes?” “We are fans.” Nick blinked. “Of?” “Of yours.” “Of mine.” “Indeed!” The second girl smiled broadly and stepped closer, holding out what looked suspiciously like— Nick swore under his breath. “Would you be willing to autograph our magazine? ” Nick held up a hand. “I would, girls, but you’ve got the wrong brother.” He pointed to Gabriel. “That is Lord Nicholas.” Rock snorted as the two shifted their attention to the Marquess of Ralston, a dazzlingly handsome copy of their prey, and tittered their excitement. Gabriel instantly eased into his role, turning a brilliant smile on the girls. “I would be happy to autograph your magazine.” He took the journal and the pen they proffered and said, “You know, I must confess, this is the first time I’ve ever drawn the attention of ladies when in the company of my brother. Ralston has always been considered the more handsome of us.” “No!” the girls protested. Nick rolled his eyes. “Indeed. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you it’s the marquess who is the best specimen. Surely you’ve heard that.” He looked up at them with a winning smile. "You can admit it, girls. My feelings shan’t be hurt." Gabriel held up the magazine, displaying the cover, which boasted: Inside! London’s Lords to Land! “Yes … there’s no question that this is going to do wonders for my reputation. I’m so happy to see that it’s getting around that I’m on the hunt for a wife!” The girls nearly expired from delight.

In a room filled with babies, you will know yours from his cry. You'll tilt your head to listen, and from the pitch and tone or jagged howl, you'll instinctively know if he has a wet diaper, a lost pacifier, or if he needs good now. Before long, you'll know his favorite colors, what he wants for lunch, what he'll refuse to eat for dinner, that spiders fascinate him, but bull frogs prompt nightmares, and how long it takes him to start complaining on a long car ride. You may even bet on it. And the first time you see him copy your husband, with a hand gesture, or a tilt of his head, your heart will jump into your throat, and for a few seconds, you'll fall in love with the man you married all over again.

Louie's mother, Louise, took a different tack. Louie was a copy of herself, right down to the vivid blue eyes. When pushed, she shoved; sold a bad cut of meat, she'd march down to the butcher, frying pan in hand. Loving mischief, she spread icing over a cardboard box and presented it as a birthday cake to a neighbor, who promptly got the knife stuck. When Pete told her he'd drink his castor oil if she gave him an empty candy box. "You only asked for the box, honey," she said with a smile. "That's all I got." And she understood Louie's restiveness. One Halloween, she dressed as a boy and raced around town trick-or-treating with Louie and Pete. A gang of kids, thinking she was one of the local toughs, tackled her and tried to steal her pants. Little Louise Zamperini, mother of four, was deep in the melee when the cops picked her up for brawling.

And yet there are other days, when I’m downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar’s dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: “A Stronger Loving World.” To the only panel he’s circled. Oscar—who never defaced a book in his life—circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt’s plan has succeded in “saving the world.” Veidt says: “I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.” And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.

So your only hope is among the PACIFISTS or PEACEFUL ANARCHISTS. They say we can only improve the world by improving ourselves and hoping others copy us. This means not fighting anyone, giving away money and either living on the free gifts of others or on the work of our own hands. Buddha, Jesus, and Saint Francis took this path and in this century Prince Kropotkin, Count Leo Tolstoï and an American bachelor farmer-author called Thoreau. The movement attracts a lot of harmless aristocrats and writers. They annoy governments by refusing to pay taxes they think evil—which is most of them, since armies and weapons are what taxes mainly pay for. However, the police only imprison and flog ordinary Pacifists. The admirers of the famous ones keep them out of serious trouble. When you go into politics, Bell, be sure to become a Pacifist Anarchist. People will love you.

I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba'ath Party central committee: perhaps a hundred men. Suddenly the doors are locked and Saddam, in the chair, announces a special session. Into the room is dragged an obviously broken man, who begins to emit a robotic confession of treason and subversion, that he sobs has been instigated by Syrian and other agents. As the (literally) extorted confession unfolds, names begin to be named. Once a fellow-conspirator is identified, guards come to his seat and haul him from the room. The reclining Saddam, meanwhile, lights a large cigar and contentedly scans his dossiers. The sickness of fear in the room is such that men begin to crack up and weep, rising to their feet to shout hysterical praise, even love, for the leader. Inexorably, though, the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. When it is over, about half the committee members are left, moaning with relief and heaving with ardent love for the boss. (In an accompanying sequel, which I have not seen, they were apparently required to go into the yard outside and shoot the other half, thus sealing the pact with Saddam. I am not sure that even Beria or Himmler would have had the nerve and ingenuity and cruelty to come up with that.)

Neil said nothing. Andrew hooked his fingers in the collar of Neil's shirt and tugged just enough for Neil to feel it. "I know what I'm doing. I knew what I was agreeing to when I took Kevin's side. I knew what it could cost us and how far I'd have to go. Understand? You aren't going anywhere. You're staying here." Andrew didn't let go until Neil nodded, and then he reached for Neil's hand. He took his cigarette back, put it between his lips, and pressed a warm key into Neil's empty palm. Neil lifted his hand to look at it. The hardware logo engraved in it meant it was a copy. To what, Neil didn't know, but it only took him a moment to figure it out. Andrew used this key to unlock the front door and then took it off the ring on the porch. Now he was giving it to Neil. "Get some sleep," Andrew said. "We're going home tomorrow. We'll figure this out then." Andrew went around Neil to the front door. He had no sympathy or comfort for his family as they grieved Seth's unexpected death, but he would keep watch on them from the doorway until they were okay again. It was harder than it should have been for Neil to look away from him, but he finally set off down the hall.

I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better. That’s how Capaldi sees it, and there’s a part of me that fears he’s right. Chrissie, on the other hand, isn’t like me. She may not know it yet, but she’ll never let herself be persuaded. If the moment ever comes, never mind how well you play your part, Klara, never mind how much she wishes it to work, Chrissie just won’t be able to accept it. She’s too … old-fashioned. Even if she knows she’s going against the science and the math, she still won’t be able to do it. She just won’t stretch that far. But I’m different. I have … a kind of coldness inside me she lacks. Perhaps it’s because I’m an expert engineer, as you put it. This is why I find it so hard to be civil around people like Capaldi. When they do what they do, say what they say, it feels like they’re taking from me what I hold most precious in this life. Am I making sense?

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I'm getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before committing it to print. The best thing you can do as a beginning writer is to write, write, write - and read, read, read. Concentrating on publication prematurely is a mistake. You don't pick up a violin and expect to play Carnegie Hall within the year - yet somehow people forget that writing also requires technical skills that need to be learned, practiced, honed. If I had a dollar for every person I've met who thought, with no prior experience, they could sit down and write a novel and instantly win awards and make their living as a writer, I'd be a rich woman today. It's unrealistic, and it's also mildly insulting to professional writers who have worked hard to perfect their craft. Of course, then you hear stories about people like J.K. Rowling, who did sit down with no prior experience and write a worldwide best-seller...but such people are as rare as hen's teeth. Every day I work with talented, accomplished writers who have many novels in print and awards to their name and who are ‘still’ struggling to make a living. The thing I often find myself wanting to say to new writers is: Write because you love writing, learn your craft, be patient, and be realistic. Anais Nin said about writing, "It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."

In Paris, Julien’s position with regard to Madame de Renal would very soon have been simplified; but in Paris love is the child of the novels. The young tutor and his timid mistress would have found in three or four novels, and even in the lyrics of the Gymnase, a clear statement of their situation. The novels would have outlined for them the part to be played, shown them the model to copy; and this model, sooner or later, albeit without the slightest pleasure, and perhaps with reluctance, vanity would have compelled Julien to follow. In a small town of the Aveyron or the Pyrenees, the slightest incident would have been made decisive by the ardour of the climate. Beneath our more sombre skies, a penniless young man, who is ambitious only because the refinement of his nature puts him in need of some of those pleasures which money provides, is in daily contact with a woman of thirty who is sincerely virtuous, occupied with her children, and never looks to novels for examples of conduct. Everything goes slowly, everything happens by degrees in the provinces: life is more natural.

Oh well,' said Jack: and then, 'Did you ever meet Bach?' 'Which Bach?' 'London Bach.' 'Not I.' 'I did. He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master's music-library. We searched through the papers — such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees — we searched for hours, and no uncle's pieces did we find. But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.' 'Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.' 'And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry.' 'A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not? Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?' 'I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and blackbeetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, 'cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well — to hear Viotti dashing away.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")

5. When Begging Ends I love the idea of Divine Source. It reminds us that everything, the fulfillment of every need, always emanates from the One. So if you learn how to keep your vibration high and attuned to That, whatever is needed to sustain you can always occur, often in surprising and delightful ways. Your Source is never a particular person, place, or thing, but God Herself. You never have to beg. Furthermore, Divine Source says that whatever resonates with you will always find you. That which does not, will fall away. It’s that simple. When Outrageous Openness first came out, I experienced this as I took the book around—some stores were simply not drawn to it. But knowing about Divine Source and resonance, I didn’t care. I remember taking it to a spiritual bookstore in downtown San Francisco. The desultory manager sort of half-growled, “Oh, we have a long, long wait here. You can leave a copy for our ‘pile’ in the back room. Then you could call a ton and plead with us. If you get lucky, maybe one day we’ll stock it. Just keep hoping.” “Oh, my God, no!” I shuddered. “Why would I keep twisting your arm? It’ll go easily to the places that are right. You never have to convince someone. The people who are right will just know.” He looked stunned when I thanked him, smiling, and left. And sure enough, other store clerks were so excited, even from the cover alone. They nearly ripped the book out of my hands as I walked in. When I brought it to the main bookstore in San Francisco’s Castro district, I noticed the manager striding toward me was wearing a baseball cap with an image of the goddess Lakshmi. “Great sign,” I mused. He held the book for a second without even cracking it open, then showed the cover to a coworker, yelling, “Hey, let’s give this baby a coming-out party!” So a few weeks later, they did. Sake, fortune cookies, and all. Because you see, what’s meant for you will always, always find you. You never have to be bothered by the people who aren’t meant to understand. And anyway, sometimes years later, they are ready . . . and they do. Change me Divine Beloved into One who knows that You alone are my Source. Let me trust that You fling open every door at the right time. Free me from the illusion of rejection, competition, and scarcity. Fill me with confidence and faith, knowing I never have to beg, just gratefully receive.

Joe was the only constant thing in my life. And I loved him like a brother. But that phrase has a very precise meaning. A lot of those stock sayings do. Like when people say they slept like a baby. Do they mean they slept well? Or do they mean they woke up every ten minutes, screaming? I loved Joe like a brother, which meant a lot of things in our family. The truth was I never knew for sure if I loved him or not. And he never knew for sure if he loved me or not, either. We were only two years apart, but he was born in the fifties and I was born in the sixties. That seemed to make a lot more than two years’ worth of a difference to us. And like any pair of brothers two years apart, we irritated the hell out of each other. We fought and bickered and sullenly waited to grow up and get out from under. Most of those sixteen years, we didn’t know if we loved each other or hated each other. But we had the thing that army families have. Your family was your unit. The men on the bases were taught total loyalty to their units. It was the most fundamental thing in their lives. The boys copied them. They translated that same intense loyalty onto their families. So time to time you might hate your brother, but you didn’t let anybody mess with him. That was what we had, Joe and I. We had that unconditional loyalty. We stood back to back in every new schoolyard and punched our way out of trouble together. I watched out for him, and he watched out for me, like brothers did. For sixteen years. Not much of a normal childhood, but it was the only childhood I was ever going to get. And Joe was just about the beginning and end of it. And now somebody had killed him. I sat there in the back of the police Chevrolet listening to a tiny voice in my head asking me what the hell I was going to do about that.

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water. Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.

The thing that weighed on him most, however, was the irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another. Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Dresden, described as a “happy mix of courage and fervent devotion.” Nazi-controlled newspapers reported an endless succession of “fanatical vows” and “fanatical declarations” and “fanatical beliefs,” all good things. Göring was described as a “fanatical animal lover.” Fanatischer Tierfreund. Certain very old words were coming into darkly robust modern use, Klemperer found. Übermensch: superman. Untermensch: sub-human, meaning “Jew.” Wholly new words were emerging as well, among them Strafexpedition—“punitive expedition”—the term Storm Troopers applied to their forays into Jewish and communist neighborhoods. Klemperer detected a certain “hysteria of language” in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation—“This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!”—and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, “copied from American cinema and thrillers,” that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In late July 1933 Klemperer saw a newsreel in which Hitler, with fists clenched and face contorted, shrieked, “On 30 January they”—and here Klemperer presumed he meant the Jews—“laughed at me—that smile will be wiped off their faces!” Klemperer was struck by the fact that although Hitler was trying to convey omnipotence, he appeared to be in a wild, uncontrolled rage, which paradoxically had the effect of undermining his boasts that the new Reich would last a thousand years and that all his enemies would be annihilated. Klemperer wondered, Do you talk with such blind rage “if you are so sure of this endurance and this annihilation”?

Certainty is an unrealistic and unattainable ideal. We need to have pastors who are schooled in apologetics and engaged intellectually with our culture so as to shepherd their flock amidst the wolves. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, and of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true. God could not possibly have intended that reason should be the faculty to lead us to faith, for faith cannot hang indefinitely in suspense while reason cautiously weighs and reweighs arguments. The Scriptures teach, on the contrary, that the way to God is by means of the heart, not by means of the intellect. When a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. unbelief is at root a spiritual, not an intellectual, problem. Sometimes an unbeliever will throw up an intellectual smoke screen so that he can avoid personal, existential involvement with the gospel. In such a case, further argumentation may be futile and counterproductive, and we need to be sensitive to moments when apologetics is and is not appropriate. A person who knows that Christianity is true on the basis of the witness of the Spirit may also have a sound apologetic which reinforces or confirms for him the Spirit’s witness, but it does not serve as the basis of his belief. As long as reason is a minister of the Christian faith, Christians should employ it. It should not surprise us if most people find our apologetic unconvincing. But that does not mean that our apologetic is ineffective; it may only mean that many people are closed-minded. Without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong. No atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his worldview. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose without an adequate basis. It is our job to discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless. We are witnesses to a mighty struggle for the mind and soul of America in our day, and Christians cannot be indifferent to it. If moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible apprehension of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm. God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed. Because of the need for instruction and personal devotion, these writings must have been copied many times, which increases the chances of preserving the original text. In fact, no other ancient work is available in so many copies and languages, and yet all these various versions agree in content. The text has also remained unmarred by heretical additions. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been transmitted with only trifling discrepancies.

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

So,” Will begins, “do you play ball as well as you run?” I laugh a little. I can’t help it. He’s sweet and disarming and my nerves are racing. “Not even close.” The conversation goes no further as we move up in our lines. Catherine looks over her shoulder at me, her wide sea eyes assessing. Like she can’t quite figure me out. My smile fades and I look away. She can never figure me out. I can never let her. Never let anyone here. She faces me with her arms crossed. “You make friends fast. Since freshman year, I’ve spoken to like . . .” She paused and looks upward as though mentally counting. “Three, no—four people. And you’re number four.” I shrug. “He’s just a guy.” Catherine squares up at the free-throw line, dribbles a few times, and shoots. The ball swished cleanly through the net. She catches it and tosses it back to me. I try copying her moves, but my ball flies low, glides beneath the backboard. I head to the end of the line again. Will’s already waiting it half-court, letting others go before him. My face warms at his obvious stall. “You weren’t kidding,” he teases over the thunder of basketballs. “Did you make it?” I ask, wishing I had looked while he shot. “Yeah.” “Of course,” I mock. He lets another kid go before him. I do the same. Catherine is several ahead of me now. His gaze scans me, sweeping over my face and hair with deep intensity, like he’s memorizing my features. “Yeah, well. I can’t run like you.” I move up in line, but when I sneak a look behind me, he’s looking back, too. “Wow,” Catherine murmurs in her smoky low voice as she falls into line beside me. “I never knew it happened like that.” I snap my gaze to her. “What?” “You know. Romeo and Juliet stuff. Love at first sight and all that.” “It’s not like that,” I say quickly. “You could have fooled me.” We’re up again. Catherine takes her shot. It swishes cleanly through the hoop. When I shoot, the ball bounces hard off the backboard and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap. With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line. Will’s there, fighting laughter. “Nice,” he says. “Glad I’m downcourt of you.” I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. “Happy to amuse you.” His smile slips then, and he’s looking at me with that strange intensity again. Only I understand. I know why. He must remember . . . must recognize me on some level even though he can’t understand it. “You want to go out?” he asks suddenly. I blink. “As in a date?” “Yes. That’s what a guy usually means when he asks that question.