Cracks In The Foundation Quotes

It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their past, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often then not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

It's easy to look at people and make quick judgements about them, their present and their pasts, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. what a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceburg hidden from sight. And more often then not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

It’s easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their pasts, but you’d be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it’s lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

Yes, Soteria. I have. I assure you, my life has never been an easy one and you should be grateful every day you live that you can’t imagine what kind of childhood I had. (Acheron) I’m sorry, Ash. I didn’t know. (Tory) It’s easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present, and their past, but you’d be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it’s lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundations of their soul. (Acheron)

believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without ever realizing it. I don’t want to wait anymore. I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day. I choose to believe that there may be a thousand big moments embedded in this day, waiting to be discovered like tiny shards of gold. The big moments are the daily, tiny moments of courage and forgiveness and hope that we grab on to and extend to one another. That’s the drama of life, swirling all around us, and generally I don’t even see it, because I’m too busy waiting to become whatever it is I think I am about to become. The big moments are in every hour, every conversation, every meal, every meeting. The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it. I believe that if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within us and between us, dreams and stories and memories spilling over. The nuances and shades and secrets and intimations of love and friendship and marriage an parenting are action-packed and multicolored, if you know where to look. Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull of the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted. Your life, right now, today, is exploding with energy and power and detail and dimension, better than the best movie you have ever seen. You and your family and your friends and your house and your dinner table and your garage have all the makings of a life of epic proportions, a story for the ages. Because they all are. Every life is. You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural. You are more than dust and bones. You are spirit and power and image of God. And you have been given Today.

I will love you forever,” I murmured, and he stroked the hair off of my forehead. I will hold you to that.” His face was grim and his voice was sober—he touched my handprint of chaos as he said it, and I knew in my bones that it was a solemn vow, and not a sweet or a kind offering of love at all. Green would make me live if he had to crack the foundations of the world.

It’s easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their past, but you’d be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often then not, it’s lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

Many people may rightly say, “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

Sometimes life will tear your house apart so you can see the cracks in the foundation.

He set the backpack down on the floor. "It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their pasts, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul." - Ash

It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their pasts, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

Acheron: It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their pasts, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

Yes, liquor is the thin white coat of paint you wash over the cracks in your foundation. Makes any rotten house livable for a few hours. Sometimes days.

It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present, and the their past, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundations of their soul. (Acheron)

It's easy to look at people and make quick judgements about them, their present and their pasts, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only oneone tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from site. And more often than not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul." ~Acheron 2008

But it only takes a crack in the foundation of the world to bring careful architecture, strong with centuries, crumbling down. A small blade cuts the water and ripples outward like an echo. And then the world beneath shows itself, first as green shoots in the dirt. And then comes a woman, a witch, tearing her way through the green with her teeth.

He'd never known her secret, and he couldn't know. Even the strongest marriages hid tiny cracks that, if widened, could cause the whole foundation to crumble.

You were always trying to fix things instead of thinking about why they were broken. It’s hard to build anything if the foundation has cracks.

People can do things completely against their nature, completely. It’s like some tiny earthquake comes roaring through your body and soul, and it’s the only earthquake you’ll ever feel. But it damages so much, cracks the foundations of your life forever.

In the end, we are all our mothers’ children, no matter how saintly or evil they might be; and the loss of their love is the earthquake that cracks your foundation forever. It’s permanent damage.

Oceans recede and coastlines wither and crack. Nations lapse; others soon swagger in their places. Mountains crumble to dust, rains vanish into the sea, winds return whence they came, and every city men build has but a jumble of bones for its foundation. What is your need to me? I am the Watcher in the Dark.

There is no doubt, in my opinion, that unless you change your social order you can achieve little by way of progress. You cannot mobilize the community either for defence or for offence. You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.

No matter how good the walls and the materials are; if the foundations are not strong, the building will not stand. By and by, in some upper room, a crack will appear; and men will say: "There is the crack; but the cause is the foundation." So if, in youth, you lay the foundation of your character wrongly, the penalty will be sure to follow. The crack may be far down in old age, but somewhere it will certainly appear.

People can do things completely against their nature, completely. It’s like some tiny earthquake comes roaring through your body and soul, and it’s the only earthquake you’ll ever feel. But it damages so much, cracks the foundations of your life forever. So

One of the acid tests of our integrity is whether or not we keep the commitments and promises we have made or whether there are loopholes in our word. We might appropriately ask: Do we live the honor code with exactness, or are there loopholes in our word—cracks in our foundation of integrity? Do we honor our commitments as home teachers and visiting teachers, or are there loopholes in our performance? In other words, is our word our bond?

It’s easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their past, but you’d be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it’s lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

He’d calloused his mind plenty, but because his foundation was cracked, when shit got real he lost control of his mindset and became a slave to his self doubt.

It has often been said, in the twenty-first century and in earlier centuries, too, that Americans lack a shared past and that, built on a cracked foundation, the Republic is crumbling.

there are so many things wrong with me, so many cracks in my foundation, that patching one will hardly help with the stability of the whole. One less corner where the cold seeps in doesn’t matter when the roof still needs fixing and the doors don’t sit right in their frames and why bother with one crack when the whole house is falling down around you? I’ll spend my whole life trying to repair myself and still die a broken person. It sounds exhausting.

Friendship is a two-way street, where both hearts beat in harmony, sharing laughter and tears in equal measure. When one side bears the weight of affection, the foundation cracks, and the bond begins to fade. Mutuality is the lifeblood of true friendship, where give and take dance in balance, nourishing a connection that stands the test of time.

It's a familiar moment to students of history: the late stage of empire, hairline fractures shooting through the foundations of society. They're like cracks in the sidewalk; by the time you see them, the damage has already been done.

...marriage is the encounter of two egoisms that grind each other reciprocally and from which spread the cracks in the foundations of civilized society, the pillars of public welfare stand on the viper's eggshells of private barbarity.

Every relationship, no matter how strong you believe it to be, is actually quite fragile. Those little cracks in the foundation of any relationship, be it a tiny white lie or something more, is enough to cause your world to come crumbling down when you least expect it.

It is understandable you would want to come back as yourself into a wonderland with the sharpness of color of the Queen of Hearts in a newly opened pack of cards. But coming back as yourself is resurrection. It is uncommon. It may even be greater than the scope of mathematics. We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose. Some dust of our bodies may end up in a horse, wasp, cockerel, frog, flower, or leaf, but for every one of these sensational assemblies there are a quintillion microorganisms. It is far likelier that the greater part of us will become protists than a skyscraping dormouse. What is likely is that, sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate. You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead. You will be drowned in oblivion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory. It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in. It will be a submergence. You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms, because they are the foundation of all forms. In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead. Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you. You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it. Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity. It is stable. Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

Daedalus had told me a story once about the lords of Crete who used to hire him to enlarge their houses. He would arrive with his tools, begin taking down the walls, pulling up the floors. But whenever he found some problem underneath that must first be fixed, they frowned. That was not in the agreement! Of course not, he said, it has been hidden in the foundation, but look, there it is, plain as day. See the cracked beam? See the beetles eating the floor? See how the stone is sinking into the swamp? That only made the lords angrier. It was fine until you dug it up! We will not pay! Close it up, plaster over. It has stood this long, it will stand longer. So he would seal that fault up, and the next season the house would fall down. Then they would come to him, demanding back their money. “I told them,” he said to me. “I told them and told them. When there is rot in the walls, there is only one remedy.” The purple bruise at my throat was turning green at its edges. I pressed it, felt the splintered ache. Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.

I did not attend any Academy so it is not my job to police you or try to catch you in any act. If I get to the point where I feel the need to do that, I'd rather just walk away cuz it means you've lost my trust and without that, we have nothing left. Our foundation is cracked and I'm not living in a shaky house.

And indeed, they are horrified at what they hear through the speakers, see on the screens. They begin to perceive that ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity. “How could they?” the gleaners exclaim, of us. “Why would they do such things? How can they just leave those people to starve? Why do they not listen when that one complains of disrespect? What does it mean that these ones have been assaulted and no one, no one, cares? Who treats other people like that?” And yet, even amid their shock, they share the idea. The evil … spreads.

easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their past, but you’d be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it’s lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

Don't highlight the flaws in my structure if you're unwilling to repair the cracks in your very own foundation." ~Elissa Gabrielle

Why was it in hindsight you could see the cracks in a foundation you’d have otherwise thought was solid and smooth?

It's easy to look at people and make a quick judgments about them, their present and their past, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. and more often then not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity.

Forget the old man,” she says sternly, so coldly, so devoid of all the love that I know her to have, that I don’t recognize her, and for that I don’t recognize the world. They are my roots, my foundations, and they sit before me now uprooted and saying things I never thought they’d say. “You will not allow a Flawed to ruin your life,” she says, and her voice cracks.

In some way, she had always yearned for this, to slip through the final crack in the world. But she has a rope to teether her now, and walls that stood, and a foundation that was strong.

The only time people notice foundations is when there’s something wrong with them. In our culture, we have massive foundational issues, and the ideological cracks can be seen everywhere.

I am a lifetime practitioner of secretive eating, after all. As a kid who entered an empty house after school each day, I felt a desperation to eat. I knew no way other than eating to alleviate the loneliness, to fill in the spaces where comfort and security could have been. Food poured over the millions of cracks in the foundation of my family; it seeped into the fissures; it narrowed the chasms.

Fewer than one in twenty security professionals has the core competence and the foundation knowledge to take a system all the way from a completely unknown state of security through mapping, vulnerability testing, password cracking, modem testing, vulnerability patching, firewall tuning, instrumentation, virus detection at multiple entry points, and even through back-ups and configuration management.

With plastic siding that was cracked and fading, the trailer squatted on stacked cinder blocks, a temporary foundation that had somehow become permanent over time. It had a single bedroom and bath, a cramped living area, and a kitchen with barely enough room to house a mini refrigerator. Insulation was almost nonexistent, and humidity had warped the floors over the years, making it seem as if he were always walking on a slant. The linoleum in the kitchen was cracking in the corners, the minimal carpet was threadbare, and he’d furnished the narrow space with items he’d picked up over the years at thrift stores. Not a single photograph adorned the walls.

Hearing these things from the lips of not only my mother but from all of the adults I trusted, I often doubted my own mind. As I matured into a teenager, I noticed more cracks in the intellectual foundation that had been laid for me.

current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

God laid men as the foundation of the family, and we need to be careful not to allow any cracks in our character. If you see a crack developing, fix it immediately! Do not let it get any bigger, or the whole structure may collapse. You may think that character lapses affect only you, but they also affect those entrusted to your protection, teaching, and care. Evaluate the current state of your character and take steps to correct what you see. In doing so, you will strengthen your entire family.

When Jesus “starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably,” when his work in our lives “does not seem to make sense,” then he’s really getting somewhere. He’s pounding gaping holes in the painted drywall of our own wisdom to reveal the termite-infested 2x4s on the other side. Ripping up the carpet to point out an inch-wide crack in the foundation. What we thought would take a few months to fix and fancy up will, it turns out, require a lifetime of labor. But Christ is okay with that. He was, after all, raised in the home of a carpenter. And he’ll take his sweet time. C. S. Lewis says he “intends to come and live in it Himself,” but the truth is, he’s already moved in, put his underwear and socks in the drawers, and buckled on his tool belt. He’s here for the long haul.

Rather than complaining about inconsequential little irritations, I'm asking God to get right to the root of the problem, to eradicate the dry rot and fix the cracks in my foundation. I need Him to show me how to love Him and how to love His people. Even the ones I don't like - even myself.

We fell in. We fell in, stayed there long enough to desperately claim each other one more time in the dark underground beneath the cracked foundation of our relationship. And when we crawled out of the hole the next morning, we ended up on different sides where the earth had been cleaved in two.

Seattle. I’ve never seen a city so overrun with runaways, drug addicts, and bums. Pike Place Market: they’re everywhere. Pioneer Square: teeming with them. The flagship Nordstrom: have to step over them on your way in. The first Starbucks: one of them hogging the milk counter because he’s sprinkling free cinnamon on his head. Oh, and they all have pit bulls, many of them wearing handwritten signs with witticisms such as I BET YOU A DOLLAR YOU’LL READ THIS SIGN. Why does every beggar have a pit bull? Really, you don’t know? It’s because they’re badasses, and don’t you forget it. I was downtown early one morning and I noticed the streets were full of people pulling wheelie suitcases. And I thought, Wow, here’s a city full of go-getters. Then I realized, no, these are all homeless bums who have spent the night in doorways and are packing up before they get kicked out. Seattle is the only city where you step in shit and you pray, Please God, let this be dog shit. Anytime you express consternation as to how the U.S. city with more millionaires per capita than any other would allow itself to be overtaken by bums, the same reply always comes back. “Seattle is a compassionate city.” A guy named the Tuba Man, a beloved institution who’d play his tuba at Mariners games, was brutally murdered by a street gang near the Gates Foundation. The response? Not to crack down on gangs or anything. That wouldn’t be compassionate. Instead, the people in the neighborhood redoubled their efforts to “get to the root of gang violence.” They arranged a “Race for the Root,” to raise money for this dunderheaded effort. Of course, the “Race for the Root” was a triathlon, because God forbid you should ask one of these athletic do-gooders to partake in only one sport per Sunday.

Buying a home is always an impulse buy. It's an impossible thing for your brain to absorb fully: to warp your whole emotional and financial life around the shape of this absurd physical thing, this new collection of problems and regrets, ants and undiscovered mold, bad drainage, and cracked foundations that will be your burden until you sell it or it kills you. A thirty-year mortgage is hilarious when you are young and you don't even remember what day it is; it's a grim thing when you are older and see that this debt is a bright, un-ignorable line from the now of your life to its addled decline.

That spring, rain fell in great sweeping gusts that rattled the rooftops. Water found its way into the smallest cracks and undermined the sturdiest foundations. Chunks of land that had been steady for generations fell like slag heaps on the roads below, taking houses and cars and swimming pools down with them.

The model stripped down naked and stood with her arms out to her sides while genderless cohorts sprayed her body with large silver canisters of foundation. They wore masks over there faces and sprayed her from head to toe like they were putting out a fire. They airbrushed her into a mono-toned six-foot-two column of a human being with no visible veins, nipples, nails, lips, or eyelashes. When every single thing that was real about the model was gone, the make up artist fug through a suite case of brushes and plowed through hundreds of tubes of flesh colored colors and began to draw human features onto her face. At the same time, the hair stylist meticulously sewed with a needle and thread strand after strand of long blond hairs onto her thin light brown locks, creating a thick full mane of shimmering gold. The model had brought her own chef, who cooked her spinach soup from scratch. The soup was fed to her by one of her lackeys, who existed solely for this purpose. The blond boy stood in front of her, blowing on the soup and then feeding it to her from a small silver child's spoon, just big enough to fit between her lips. the model's mouth was barely open, maybe a quarter of an inch wide, so that she would not crack the flesh colored paint.

I honestly don’t understand how women read shit like this with pants on. God, do they read it in public? I would die. Straight up, die. I’d be fucking my fist in a public bathroom like a pervert if I tried to read these books out in the wild. I’d be walking around with a nine-inch boner pressing against my zipper all day.

Psychedelic experience seems to temporarily crack open a kind of new critical window; a window of opportunity with with great neuroplastic potential, with an enriched interpretation of the world in terms of personal relevance, amplified analogical thinking, and a wider web of semantic association; one that not only reveals the elemental foundations of thought and perception to the conscious mind, but invites it to participate, orient toward significance, integrate a variety of personally relevant information, and produce insightful experiences and emotional breakthroughs that can mark the beginning of a process of re-orienting priorities, attention, attitudes, and behavior. A change in the mobilization, distribution, and utilization of limited energetic resources by the serotonin system, in other words; an opportunity for the master homeostatic regulator to integrate all the various pertinent variables, re-orient and re-align the self, body, and outside world.

Daedalus had told me a story once about the lords of Crete who used to hire him to enlarge their houses. He would arrive with his tools, begin taking down the walls, pulling up the floors. But whenever he found some problem underneath that must first be fixed, they frowned. That was not in the agreement! Of course not, he said, it has been hidden in the foundation, but look, there it is, plain as day. See the cracked beam? See the beetles eating the floor? See how the stone is sinking into the swamp? That only made the lords angrier. It was fine until you dug it up! We will not pay! Close it up, plaster over. It has stood this long, it will stand longer.

When catastrophe strikes compassion and love unite. A storm can't break the spirit of love. A storm may crack your windows, tear off your roof, wreck your house, but it absolutely cannot destroy the foundation you hold within yourself. Stay strong. Stay rooted. Carry love in your heart, always, and know the sacred things in life can't be touched.

Caste puts the richest and most powerful of the dominant caste at a remove, in the penthouse of a mythical high-rise, and everyone else, in descending order, on the floors beneath them. It consigns people in the subordinate caste to the basement, amid the flaws in the foundation and the cracks in the stonework that it appears others choose not to see.

disappeared beneath Soviet avenues of cracked concrete; how variety – medieval stone foundations, baroque seminarium doors, classical columns, Prussian red brick walls, and delicate shop windows – had vanished behind spectacular monotony; how churches and pastry shops, farmers’ markets, tobacconists, a university and schools and law courts gave way to numbered apartment blocks.

The moments that change our lives arrive just like any other: stunning in their ordinariness, a second ticking on by, blink and you miss them spinning past. But they shiver through our lives like an earthquake, radiating out from that single heartbeat, shaking our very foundations, and revealing cracks and deep crevices that, in time, will fill up our lives with a future we could never dream of.

It’s easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their presents and their pasts, but you’d be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it’s lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul. Never judge, learn to respect and acknowledge the feelings of another.

Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

It’s easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their presents and their pasts, but you’d be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often than not, it’s lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul. Never judge, learn to respect and acknowledge the feelings of another.” –Unknown

... there are so many things wrong with me, so many cracks in my foundation, that patching one will hardly help with the stability of the whole. One less corner where the cold seeps in doesn’t matter when the roof still needs fixing and the doors don’t sit right in their frames and why bother with one crack when the whole house is falling down around you? I’ll spend my whole life trying to repair myself and still die a broken person. It sounds exhausting.

The Groningen gas field in northern Holland, discovered in 1959, was the biggest domestic source of gas within Europe, and the foundation on which the original European gas system had been built. It still ranks among the top ten gas fields in the world. But its days are numbered. Owing to its particular geology, production over many years has led to subsidence, sinking of the topsoil, which has triggered tremors and earthquakes, causing cracks and damage in houses.

Nineteenth-century clergyman Phillips Brooks maintained, “Character is made in the small moments of our lives.” Anytime you break a moral principle, you create a small crack in the foundation of your integrity. And when times get tough, it becomes harder to act with integrity, not easier. Character isn’t created in a crisis; it only comes to light. Everything you have done in the past—and the things you have neglected to do—come to a head when you’re under pressure.

Enoch asked Adam about the name he had uttered earlier, Yahweh Elohim. Adam apologized, “It slips out too often. It is the covenant name of Elohim. It is reserved for only the most sacred of relationships. It expresses his essence as the foundation of existence itself. The divine council of heavenly host uses it.” He paused for a moment. “We used it in the Garden, but now with the Edenic exile…” his voice cracked for a moment. “It is a name that should remain secret until latter days. For what purpose, I do not know. Perhaps it has to do with the seed of Eve.

He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors: to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root; his own occupations, calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing means of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy rains, which he calls making the bridge of arts, crying discourses pronounced by the authorities in favor of the French people, cleaning out the cracks in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which is composed of all the little morsels of worked copper which are found on the public streets.

Many people may rightly say, “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

On 119th Street there had been a sign for years in the front window of an old dilapidated three-storey brick house, announcing: FUNERALS PERFORMED. For five years past the house had been condemned as unsafe for human habitation. The wooden steps leading up to the cracked, scabby front door were so rotten one had to mount them like crossing a river on a fallen tree trunk; the foundation was crumbling, one side of the house had sunk more than a foot lower than the other, the concrete windowsills had fallen from all the upper windows and the constant falling of bricks from the front wall created a dangerous hazard for passing pedestrians.

On May 10th, the temperature and radioactive emissions from inside the reactor started to fall. By the 11th, days after the water finished draining, a team of technicians ventured into the sub-levels of the plant, bored a hole through a wall below the core and poked a radiometer through. It confirmed their worst fears: the molten core had cracked the reactor’s concrete foundations and at least partially poured into the basement. There was now next to nothing stopping it from breaking through the foundations of the building itself and reaching the water table below. A better and more permanent solution than injecting liquid nitrogen from the surface was required.

Wren’s voice dropped. “She feels terrible about it, Cath.” “Good!” Cath shouted. “So do I!” She took a step closer to her sister. “I’m probably going to be crazy for the rest of my life, thanks to her. I’m going to keep making fucked-up decisions and doing weird things that I don’t even realize are weird. People are going to feel sorry for me, and I won’t ever have any normal relationships—and it’s always going to be because I didn’t have a mother. Always. That’s the ultimate kind of broken. The kind of damage you never recover from. I hope she feels terrible. I hope she never forgives herself.” “Don’t say that.” Wren’s face was red, and there were tears in her eyes. “I’m not broken.” There weren’t any tears in Cath’s eyes. “Cracks in your foundation.” She shrugged. “Fuck that.” “Do you think I absorbed all the impact? That when Mom left, it hit my side of the car? Fuck that, Wren. She left you, too.” “But it didn’t break me. Nothing can break me unless I let it.” “Do you think Dad let it? Do you think he chose to fall apart when she left?” “Yes!” Wren was shouting now. “And I think he keeps choosing. I think you both do. You’d rather be broken than move on.” “Dad’s sick, Wren,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “And your omelette’s burnt. And I’d rather be broken than wasted.” She set the plate on the counter. “You can tell Laura to go fuck herself. Like, to infinity and beyond. She doesn’t get to move on with me. Ever.

IN ARCHITECTURAL ECHO of service pyramid theory, the Shorn block had rented out its bottom two levels to a series of shopping and eating units that collectively went under the name Basecamp. According to the Shorn promotional literature that Chris had read, Basecamp provided employment for more than six hundred people and, together with the Shorn-owned vehicle repair shops in the basement, was a working embodiment of the virtues of trickledown wealth creation. Prosperity spread out from the foundations of the Shorn block like vegetation from an aquifer, said the literature warmly, though the metaphor that occurred to Chris was water leaking from the cracked base of an old clay flowerpot. Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.

Vicky turned her face away from her son, towards the sea. She spoke softly, too softly for him to hear. “I only want to remember him.” The thrashing of the rain had dug tiny gutters around her feet. The ground had begun to loosen and Alexander felt it shift. A crack opened between them: twenty-two years of standing in the same spot had undermined the cliff’s foundation. Alexander reached out frantically towards his mother, his eyes wide with fright. He screamed for her to take his hand. Vicky reached out towards her son but when her hand was almost in his, she stopped. Her fear left her and she smiled. She let her hand drop to her side. “For God’s sake, Mother!” Alexander could say nothing more. The wind and rain howled, and blasts of thunder and lightning crashed everywhere, but he had never seen his mother so calm, so beautiful. It was as if she had been waiting for her turn, and it had finally come. The ground gave out under her and he watched his mother disappear with the cliff’s crumbling edge. Her body was never found. All the villagers said that she was finally returned to her beloved Tom, beneath the ocean’s waves.

Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps. Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goose-foot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.

Later in the evening, Devon and West had dinner in the dilapidated splendor of the dining room. The meal was of far better quality than they had expected, consisting of cold cucumber soup, roast pheasant dressed with oranges, and puddings rolled in sweetened bread crumbs. “I made the house steward unlock the cellar so I could browse over the wine collection,” West remarked. “It’s gloriously well provisioned. Among the spoils, there are at least ten varieties of important champagne, twenty cabernets, at least that many of bordeaux, and a large quantity of French brandy.” “Perhaps if I drink enough of it,” Devon said, “I won’t notice the house falling down around our ears.” “There are no obvious signs of weakness in the foundation. No walls out of plumb, for example, nor any visible cracks in the exterior stone that I’ve seen so far.” Devon glanced at him with mild surprise. “For a man who’s seldom more than half sober, you’ve noticed a great deal.” “Have I?” West looked perturbed. “Forgive me--I seem to have become accidentally lucid.” He reached for his wineglass. “Eversby Priory is one of the finest sporting estates in England. Perhaps we should shoot grouse tomorrow.” “Splendid,” Devon said. “I would enjoy beginning the day with killing something.

Madness is an insidious disease. We do not see the danger until it is too late. It creeps into the cracks and crevices of the mind and makes itself at home, like carpenter ants in the framing of a home. We do not know the floor has rotted away until one ill-timed step destroys the façade of normalcy. But carpenter ants do not destroy a home. They change it. As matter cannot be destroyed, they consume the structures we have built and rearrange it for their own use. While a home beset by such insects might seem uninhabitable for those who look at the situation from the outside, to the ants it was the intended outcome. We might inspect the foundation and find it derelict and dilapidated. We might scoff and say that anyone who lives within such a place is idiotic, and that they should have not neglected it in such a way. And, in extreme cases, they should move. Consider this metaphor in relation to one’s mind. That place in which we spend the entirety of our mortal lives. What happens when your home is beset by insects then? One cannot move out of one’s own mind, try as we might. We are trapped within these structures of ours, for better or worse and come what may. We must make do with what we are given and what we have left. Whereas you or I in our daily lives might seek a new homestead in such an infestation, in this labyrinth of the psyche, we cannot. There are different ways that a consciousness, once gnawed and riddled with holes, might come to adapt to such a state of being. Consider three men with this dilemma, if you will. The first man may seek to repair the damage—replace the eaten portions and shore up the foundations. This man is pragmatic, but shortsighted. He treats the symptoms, but not the cause. The second may seek to exterminate the infestation—to seek the illness at the root and rip it out. This man is wise, but must need act quickly before the house collapses around him. The third man merely laughs—he accepts his new state of being and does nothing to repair his home. He declares himself King of the Ants, lifts up hammer and sledge, and tears the remaining walls apart with his own two hands. You might think that man the fool. You might think him a harmless, laughing lunatic. It is a mistake that leads to ruin. For that man is the most dangerous of them all. -M. L. Harrow

The bad news is your flaws don’t come from nowhere. The world is deeply fucked from every angle; its damage is incomprehensibly vast and ancient, hooked into the future and printed upon you in endless, innumerable ways. You can’t reverse it. But art can unmake you differently. A perfect pop song, the kind that knees you in the chest while you’re standing in a checkout line, is the sound of something familiar resolving into something transcendent. A good poem finds the cracks in the foundations of your thinking and outlines them with glitter, or sets the whole building on fire. People make things with money they get from the government, or from jobs, or from stealing, and one time out of every 500 that you go to see those things they’ve made, some small corner of your world will come unlaced because of it. That’s not a lot, but it’s proof that the work of living can be more than just gesture: that there is more to do with structure than to surrender or be crushed by it. You can always be made a little more unsure; you can always be taken a little more apart.

The foundation of her mind cracked. This was where she broke. Right there. Right then. The only strength she had left came from hate.

Along with data from other research studies, these findings make it clear that when we’re trying to solicit cooperation from other people—be they coworkers, clients, students, or acquaintances—we should offer help to them in a way that’s unconditional and no-strings-attached. Approaching the potentially cooperative relationship in this way should not only increase the likelihood that you’ll secure their cooperation in the first place, but also ensure that the cooperation you do receive is built on a solid foundation of trust and mutual appreciation, rather than on a much weaker incentive system. You’ll also find this approach to be much longer lasting. Otherwise, the moment the incentive you’ve been promising or awarding can no longer be offered or is no longer desired by the other person, the brittle foundation of the relationship may crack, and the cooperative bridge you’ve built up may come crashing down.

All scientists, regardless of discipline, need to be prepared to confront the broadest consequences of our work—but we need to communicate its more detailed aspects as well. I was reminded of this at a recent lunch I attended with some of Silicon Valley’s greatest technology gurus. One of them said, “Give me ten to twenty million dollars and a team of smart people, and we can solve virtually any engineering challenge.” This person obviously knew a thing or two about solving technological problems—a long string of successes attested to that—but ironically, such an approach would not have produced the CRISPR-based gene-editing technology, which was inspired by curiosity-driven research into natural phenomena. The technology we ended up creating did not take anywhere near ten to twenty million dollars to develop, but it did require a thorough understanding of the chemistry and biology of bacterial adaptive immunity, a topic that may seem wholly unrelated to gene editing. This is but one example of the importance of fundamental research—the pursuit of science for the sake of understanding our natural world—and its relevance to developing new technologies. Nature, after all, has had a lot more time than humans to conduct experiments! If there’s one overarching point I hope you will take away from this book, it’s that humans need to keep exploring the world around us through open-ended scientific research. The wonders of penicillin would never have been discovered had Alexander Fleming not been conducting simple experiments with Staphylococci bacteria. Recombinant DNA research—the foundation for modern molecular biology—became possible only with the isolation of DNA-cutting and DNA-copying enzymes from gut- and heat-loving bacteria. Rapid DNA sequencing required experiments on the remarkable properties of bacteria from hot springs. And my colleagues and I would never have created a powerful gene-editing tool if we hadn’t tackled the much more fundamental question of how bacteria fight off viral infections.

just as he had a moment earlier. I hope it hurts, he thought. They slammed back and forth violently, beam to beam, until their bodies dropped into free fall down the shaft’s center. Despite Peter’s efforts, it had little effect on the uncontrollable spin into the dark. They crashed hard into the basement floor. The cement cracked beneath them as it absorbed their fall. The lower floors of the building rumbled as the vibrations from the impact shook its foundation. The beast’s weight on top of him made the sudden

Nobody else seems to notice the cracks and fissures threatening my own foundation, so now I use alcohol as an anesthetic.

Be the gatekeeper. Your heart is a precious gift. Your body is a temple be selective Respect it and be respected. Love yourself and be loved. If you don't respect and love yourself first, building a healthy relationship with another is like building a house with no foundation eventually the cracks and lack of a strong base will eventually cause it to crumble

If we are focused on winning we will develop holes in our foundation that will eventually crack under pressure.

The morning after never looks anywhere near as beautiful as the night before. Sometimes, it’s downright ugly. Because you can finally see everything. The cracks in the foundation. The shattered pieces. The old scars. The fresh wounds. The bloodshed. The carnage. And trust me, hearts don’t break without carnage. A lot of freakin’ carnage. And you just want to run. Because you don’t want to look… But it’s the only way that you can assess the damage.

FATHER OF THE COMPUTER Alan Turing was sneered at for not being a tough guy, a he-man with hair on his chest. He whined, croaked, stuttered. He used an old necktie for a belt. He rarely slept and went without shaving for days. And he raced from one end of the city to the other all the while concocting complicated mathematical formulas in his mind. Working for British intelligence, he helped shorten the Second World War by inventing a machine that cracked the impenetrable military codes used by Germany’s high command. At that point he had already dreamed up a prototype for an electronic computer and had laid out the theoretical foundations of today’s information systems. Later on, he led the team that built the first computer to operate with integrated programs. He played interminable chess games with it and asked it questions that drove it nuts. He insisted that it write him love letters. The machine responded by emitting messages that were rather incoherent. But it was flesh-and-blood Manchester police who arrested him in 1952 for gross indecency. At the trial, Turing pled guilty to being a homosexual. To stay out of jail, he agreed to undergo medical treatment to cure him of the affliction. The bombardment of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He stayed indoors, no longer went to the university. He heard whispers, felt stares drilling into his back. He had the habit of eating an apple before going to bed. One night, he injected the apple with cyanide.

All in all, time spent on improving relationships—with parents, with students and student-to-student—improves learning in the long run. Those solid relationships build the foundation that your educational house rests on—and wards off the cracks that cause things to crumble.

When trust is broken, foundational cracks occur which weaken the entire relationship. As with concrete, no amount of filling and patching you apply with the hope of fortifying the fracture will ever repair the weakness caused by the rift.

Some mills rose up behind those buildings, their windows broken or nonexistent, the brick edifices festooned with graffiti, the land reclaiming the lower floors and punching cracks through the foundations. It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She’d grown up in the absence, in other people’s memory of a dream so fragile it had probably been doomed from the moment of conception. If there had ever been a social contract between the country and its citizens, it was long gone now, save the Hobbesian agreement that had been in play since our ancestors had first stumbled from caves in search of food: Once I get mine, you’re on your own.

The light sprang up again, and there on the brink of the chasm, at the very Crack of Doom, stood Frodo, black against the glare, tense, erect, but still as if he had been turned to stone. 'Master!' cried Sam. Then Frodo stirred and spoke with a clear voice, indeed with a voice clearer and more powerful than Sam had ever heard him use, and it rose above the throb and turmoil of Mount Doom, ringing in the roof and walls. 'I have come,' he said. 'But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!' And suddenly, as he set it on his finger, he vanished from Sam's sight. [...] And far away, as Frodo put on the Ring and claimed it for his own, even in Sammath Naur the very heart of his realm, the power in Barad-dúr was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown. The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door of that he had made; and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom was hung. From all his policies and webs of fear and treachery, from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free; and throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the Power that wielded them was now bent with overewhelming force upon the Mountain. At his summons, wheeling with a rending cry, in a last desperate race there flew, faster than the winds, the Nazgúls, the Ringwraiths, and with a storm of wings they hurtled southwards to Mount Doom...

The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system’s checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations. The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation. I didn't deal in guilt and innocence, because everybody was guilty. Of something. But it didn't matter, because every case I took on was a house built on a foundation poured by overworked and underpaid laborers. They cut corners. They made mistakes. And then they painted over the mistakes with lies. My job was to peel away the paint and find the cracks. To work my fingers and tools into those cracks and widen them. To make them so big that either the house fell down or, failing that, my client slipped through.

And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

Grief shakes our foundations so hard sometimes it can open up cracks for healing to seep in

Opening our minds to other points of view could very well deliver a kick to the foundation, a kick that could lead to a crack that could splinter and spread till it brought the whole thing crashing down on our heads.