Counting Descent Quotes

Kings built tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the kingdom of Gondor sank into ruin, the line of kings failed, the white tree withered and the rule of Gondor was given over to lesser men.

Beware, Underlanders, time hangs by a thread. The hunters are hunted, white water runs red. The Gnawers will strike to extinguish the rest. The hope of the hopeless resides in a quest. An Overland warrior, a son of the sun, May bring us back light, he may bring us back none. But gather your neighbors and follow his call Or rats will most surely devour us all. Two over, two under, of royal descent, Two flyers, two crawlers, two spinners assent. One gnawer beside and one lost up ahead. And eight will be left when we count up the dead. The last who will die must decide where he stands. The fate of the eight is contained in his hands. So bid him take care, bid him look where he leaps, As life may be death and death life again reaps.

Tell me, at what velocity does joy travel?

it would be nice to be something in a museum one day because that’s what I’ve been told means you’ve lived a meaningful life but I think instead I might like to be in a garden where even after I die the residue of me can help grow something more beautiful than I ever was

...paleness is always looked upon as a strong proof of aristocratic descent and distinguished breeding.

do you know what it means for your existence to be defined by someone else’s intentions?

We are charred vessels vestiges of wood & wonder anchors tethered to our bows. It is the irony of a ship burning at sea, surrounded by the very thing that could save us.

To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves.

poor ain’t poor unless you name it so & kids prefer playing to counting so there was never much time to wallow in anything but laughter.

Death was ever present, because the Númenóreans still, as they had in their old kingdom, and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars.

Too afraid to touch anything, I found sitting in the custom made indow cubby the safest place for me to be as I played games with raindrops. Rainy days made the time pass more quickly as I pretended I was the tiniest raindrop on its descent down the glass. My goal would be to not make it to the bottom. I counted on morphing with the other, bigger raindrops and kept count of the times I won and the times I lost. The heaviness of the storm would dictate my luck. The heavier the storm, the more likely gravity would ruin my chances at survival. When I started losing more than I was winning, I rested my forehead on the cold hard glass and asked them if disintegrating on impact was really all that bad. It was time for a new distraction.

Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say. The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused reproductive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought - in error - to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves). To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other chemicals were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the substance was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times.

Something You Should Know is that as a kid, I once worked at a pet store. I cleaned the cages of small animals like turtles, hamsters, rabbits, and hermit crabs. I watched the hermit crab continue to grow, molt, shed its skin and scurry across the bottom of the aquarium to find a new shell. Which left me afraid for the small creature, to run around all exposed that way, to have to live its entire life requiring something else to feel safe. Perhaps that is when I became afraid of needing anything beyond myself. Perhaps that is why, even now, I can want so desperately to show you all of my skin, but am more afraid of meeting you, exposed, in open water.

BEWARE, UNDERLANDERS, TIME HANGS BY A THREAD. THE HUNTERS ARE HUNTED, WHITE WATER RUNS RED. THE GNAWERS WILL STRIKE TO EXTINGUISH THE REST. THE HOPE OF THE HOPELESS RESIDES IN A QUEST.   AN OVERLAND WARRIOR, A SON OF THE SUN, MAY BRING US BACK LIGHT, HE MAY BRING US BACK NONE. BUT GATHER YOUR NEIGHBORS AND FOLLOW HIS CALL OR RATS WILL MOST SURELY DEVOUR US ALL.   TWO OVER, TWO UNDER, OF ROYAL DESCENT, TWO FLYERS, TWO CRAWLERS, TWO SPINNERS ASSENT. ONE GNAWER BESIDE AND ONE LOST UP AHEAD. AND EIGHT WILL BE LEFT WHEN WE COUNT UP THE DEAD.   THE LAST WHO WILL DIE MUST DECIDE WHERE HE STANDS. THE FATE OF THE EIGHT IS CONTAINED IN HIS HANDS. SO BID HIM TAKE CARE, BID HIM LOOK WHERE HE LEAPS, AS LIFE MAY BE DEATH AND DEATH LIFE AGAIN REAPS.

Jill had, as you might say, quite fall in love with the Unicorn. She thought- and she wasn't far wrong- that he was the shiningest, delicatest, most graceful animal she had ever met; and he was so gentle and soft of speech that, if you hadn't known, you would hardly have believed how fierce and terrible he could be in battle. "Oh, this is nice!" said Jill. "Just walking along like this. I wish there could be more of this sort of adventure. It's a pity there's always so much happening in Narnia." But the Unicorn explained to her that she was quite mistaken. He said that the Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve were brought out of their own strange world into Narnia only at times when Narnia was stirred and upset, but she mustn't think it was always like that. In between their visits there were hundreds and thousands of years when peaceful King followed peaceful King till you could hardly remember their names or count their numbers, and there was really hardly anything to put into the History Books. And he went on to talk of old Queens and heroes whom she had never heard of. He spoke of Swanwhite the Queen who had lived before the days of the White Witch and the Great Winter, who was so beautiful that when she looked into any forest pool the reflection of her face shone out of the water like a star by night for a year and a day afterwards. He spoke of Moonwood the Hare who had such ears that he could sit by Caldron Pool under the thunder of the great waterfall and hear what men spoke in whispers at Cair Paravel. He told how King Gale, who was ninth in descent from Frank the first of all Kings, had sailed far away into the Eastern seas and delivered the Lone Islanders from a dragon and how, in return, they had given him the Lone Islands to be part of the royal lands of Narnia for ever. He talked of whole centuries in which all Narnia was so happy that notable dances and feasts, or at most tournaments, were the only things that could be remembered, and every day and week had been better than the last. And as he went on, the picture of all those happy years, all the thousands of them, piled up in Jill's mind till it was rather like looking down from a high hill on to a rich, lovely plain full of woods and waters and cornfields, which spread away and away till it got thin and misty from distance.

We always limit our personality much too narrowly! We always count as pertaining to our person only what we recognize as individual differences that set us apart. But we’re comprised of everything that comprises the world, each of us, and just as our body bears within it the lines of evolutionary descent all the way back to the fish and even much farther beyond that, in the same way our soul contains everything that has ever dwelt in human souls. All the gods and devils that ever existed, whether among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are all inside us, they exist there as possibilities, as wishes, as ways of escape. If mankind died out except for a single halfway-gifted child that had received no education, that child would rediscover the whole course of events, it would be able to produce again the gods, demons, Edens, positive and negative commandments, the Old and the New Testament.

He grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me with the strength of his terrible grip. 'Suffering is temporary!' And so are you! I almost lost you. You would have died, leaving me alone. When I saw you on your sickbed, inching ever further out of reach, I swore I would never let that happen. You are mine. You belong to me. Do you think I enjoyed what i had to do? i hated it. But I had to do it. All my work, all my sacrifce, has been for a single purpose. I am going to defy death. I am going to steal the spark of creation from it, to make life eternal, untouchable by corruption. And I am doing it for you. When I succeed - and I will succeed - then you will count yourself the most blessed creature on God's earth, because you will no longer be subject to Him. I will step into that place. I will be you god, Elizabeth. I will re-create you in my image, and we will have our Eden. And it will never be taken from me.' 'You are mad.' My voice trembled, but I could contain my fury.

The German people is gradually being threatened with the loss of its genetic quality, assertion of identity, and self-preservation drive. Instead, internationalism is triumphing and destroying the value of our people, democracy is spreading by smothering the individual identity, and a nasty pacifist sewage is ultimately poisoning the mindset of bold self-preservation. We see the effects of these human vices appearing everywhere in the life of our people. Not only in the area of political concerns—no, also in the economic area, and last but not least a downward sliding [sic] is noticeable in our cultural life. If this descent is not halted, our people will no longer be able to be counted among those nations with a promising future. Eliminating these general aspects of decay is the great domestic policy task of the future. This is the mission of the National Socialist movement. From this work, a new body politic must come into being, which must also overcome the most serious disadvantage of the present, the division between the classes, for which the bourgeoisie and the Marxists are equally culpable.

The German people is gradually being threatened with the loss of its genetic quality, assertion of identity, and self-preservation drive. Instead, internationalism is triumphing and destroying the value of our people, democracy is spreading by smothering the individual identity, and a nasty pacifist sewage is ultimately poisoning the mindset of bold self-preservation. We see the effects of these human vices appearing everywhere in the life of our people. Not only in the area of political concerns—no, also in the economic area, and last but not least a downward sliding [sic] is noticeable in our cultural life. If this descent is not halted, our people will no longer be able to be counted among those nations with a promising future. Eliminating these general aspects of decay is the great domestic policy task of the future. This is the mission of the National Socialist movement. From this work, a new body politic must come into being, which must also o vercome the most serious disadvantage of the present, the division between the classes, for which the bourgeoisie and the Marxists are equally culpable.

her nerves and prepared to go down into the basement. As she timidly walked down the flight of stairs, she started counting each step. It was a peculiar habit she’d had ever since she could remember, and half the time she didn’t even realize she was doing it. Her descent seemed like an eternity as the air around her grew darker and heavier. Even though she knew they were coming, she jumped every time the steps creaked underneath her feet. Not sure if she could take anymore, she

Thousands of years of wandering stripped the Central Australian aboriginal of independent ability toplan a future, and made him master only of the moment. His dwellings always have been temporary crude things of sticks and leaves and grass, built in a few hours and abandoned at the mystic call of far-away food, water, or tribal ceremony. He gorged himself today, starved tomorrow, and shared his temporary possessions. He believed in his descent from spirit and dream forms of totemic ancestors in an amazingly intricate and ceremonial network, which still baffles many of the world’s foremost anthropologists. A curiously talented race, with the minds of designing mathematicians yet little ability to count; whose great strength and past lay back in the ages of legend and ceremony; whose future was never their own concern, but the pawn of circumstance; a people who could not think ahead, but feverishly worshipped the traditions of the past.

Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless

Our stars weren't meant for their sky. We have never known the same horizon.

Once again he could hear the planet’s joints and lifeblood. Stirrings in the stone. Ancient events. Here, time was like water. The tiniest creatures were his fathers and mothers. The fossils were his children. It made him into remembrance itself. He let his bare palms ricochet upon the walls, drawing in the heat and the cold, the sharp and the smooth. Plunging, galloping, he pawed at the flesh of God. This magnificent rock. This fortress of their being. This was the Word. Earth. Moment by moment, step by step, he felt himself becoming prehistoric. It was a blessed release from human habits. In this vast, capillaried monastery, through these openings and fretted spillways and yawning chthonic fistulae, drinking from pools of water older than mammal life altogether, memory was simply memory. It was not something to be marked on calendars or stored in books or labeled in graphs or drawn on maps. You did not memorize memory any more than you memorized existence. He remembered his way deeper by the taste of the soil and by the drag of air currents that had no cardinal direction. He left behind the cartography of the Holy Land and its entry caves through Jebel el Lawz in the elusive Midian. He forgot the name of the Indian Ocean as he passed beneath it. He felt gold, soft and serpentine, standing from the walls, but no longer recognized it as gold. Time passed, but he gave up counting it. Days? Weeks? He lost his memory even as he gained it.

Hecataeus the historian was once at Thebes, in Egypt, where he boasted that he descended directly from a god, in sixteen generations. But the priests reacted with him precisely as they also did with me (though I myself did not boast my own lineage): they brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me colossal wooden figures. They counted these statues, showing me that they were precisely the number they had previously told me. Custom was that every high priest set up a statue of himself there during his lifetime. Pointing to these and counting, the priests showed me that each high priest succeeded his father. They went through the whole line of figures, from the statue of the man who had most recently died, back to the earliest. Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, but the priests traced a line of descent by counting the statues, and these were three hundred and forty-five. The priests refused to believe that a man could be descended from a god in only sixteen generations; they refused to believe that a man could be born before a god. And all those men whose statues stood there had been good men, but not gods.

As New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Carolina looked to attract settlers, their proprietors focused on two sets of incentives: religious indifference and generous land grants. The land granted had a quasi tax placed on it, known as a quitrent. For the proprietors of vast lands, receiving the income of the quitrents, along with making the remaining land more valuable as it became populated, was the basic business model. As it turned out, the least religiously tolerant and theologically most uniform place in English America was New England; rules of Sabbath and observation were codified in most local laws. Everyone else was primarily interested in the pursuit of money, and if that meant tolerance, so be it. The Lords Proprietors of Carolina offered an especially unique incentive. For every family member brought over, the family was granted 150 acres. But the definition of family was a generous and loose one. Looking to populate Carolina from the English holdings in the Caribbean, the Lords Proprietors counted all Africans as members of their owner’s family, entitling the owner to an additional 150 acres for each slave. By 1720 this catalyzing structure led to people of African descent becoming the majority of the colony—a condition that would hold for generations.

Contrary to the idea that anyone with even remotely German descent would be recognized as ethnically German, German ancestry at times counted for very little compared with language skills in the family. This can be seen in the case of Barbara and Marko K. from Komletinci in Croatian Syrmia. Their first application, filed in 1963, to relocate to West Germany with their four sons was rejected even though both partners had German mothers and Barbara even spoke German quite well. Over a year after the family had filed their application for the second time in 1968, they received a letter from the BVA explaining that they were in fact not German Volkszugehörige, because this required a Bekenntnis. And the “most reliable evidence” for this Bekenntnis—according to the BVA—was the use of the German language in the family. Since the consulate in Zagreb had revealed that the family spoke Croatian at home, they had to be considered ethnically Croatian and were therefore denied permission to immigrate.40 This outright identification of language and Bekenntnis, which was not covered by section 6 of the BVFG, had become common administrative practice for Germans from Yugoslavia. In the overall system of co-ethnic immigration to the FRG, it was not until the large-scale Russian German immigration of the 1990s that language skills obtained such an important status.

在澳购买毕业证【咨询Q、微:2026614433】（办理LTU毕业证成绩单原版）如何在澳洲办理拉筹伯大学毕业证本科学位和硕士学位毕业证。 SSBNSVBSSVBNSVBSNCSVSCSSKJSLKSJSKLSJKSLSJSNMSSNBVSBNVSNBSVSBN A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view--whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.

《国外学历NYU毕业证办理指南》办2021新版纽约大学毕业证((+Q微2026614433))购买NYU毕业证办理NYU文凭购买纽约大学本科毕业证退学办文凭/办国外毕业证/出售美国毕业证书/在美国买国外毕业证书New York University Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University. On a brilliantly sunny July day, six-year-old Ruby is abandoned by her father in the suffocating dark of a Tennessee cave. Twenty years later, transformed into soap opera star Eleanor Russell, she is fired under dubious circumstances. Fleeing to Europe, she marries a glamorous stranger named Orlando Montague and keeps her past closely hidden.

there are two kinds of lineages in the world; some there be tracing and deriving their descent from kings and princes, whom time has reduced little by little until they end in a point like a pyramid upside down; and others who spring from the common herd and go on rising step by step until they come to be great lords; so that the difference is that the one were what they no longer are, and the others are what they formerly were not.

On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water.” These are adult eels, silver eels, and this descent that slid down my mind in the fall from a long spring ascent the eels made years ago…sometimes as high as 8,000 feet above sea level. There they lived without breeding “for at least 8 years.” In the late summer of the year they reached maturity, they stopped eating, and their dark color vanished. They turned silver; now they are heading to the sea. Down streams to rivers, down rivers to the seas, south in the North Atlantic where they meet, they are returning to the Sargasso Sea, where, in floating sargassum weed in the deepest waters of the Atlantic, they will mate, release their eggs, and die. This, the whole story of eels at which I have just hinted, is extravagant to the extremes, and food for another kind of thought, a thought about the meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures. Imagine a chilly night and a meadow; balls of dew droop from the curved grass. All right: the grass at the edge of the meadow begins to tremble and sway. Here come the eels. The largest are five feet long. They stream into the meadow, sift between grasses, veer from your path. There are too many to count. All you see is a silver slither, like twisted ropes of water falling roughly…If I saw that sight, would I live? If I stumbled across it, would I ever set foot out of my door again? Or would I be seized to join that compelling rush, would I cease eating, and pale, and abandon all to start walking?