Crossword Puzzle Clue In Quotes

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

WHEN ASKED “ What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness. Because it’s true. Latin, geography, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome: unless you know these things, you’ll be limited to doing the puzzles in People magazine, where the clues read “Movie title, Gone ____ the Wind” and “It holds up your pants.” It’s not such a terrible place to start, but the joy of accomplishment wears off fairly quickly.

I have known a number of actors very well. I have found them good company. Their gift of mimicry, their knack of telling a story, their quick wit, make them often highly entertaining. They are generous, kindly and courageous. But I have never quite been able to look upon them as human beings. I have never succeeded in achieving any intimacy with them. They are like crossword puzzles in which there are no words to fit the clues. The fact is, I suppose, that their personality is made up of the parts they play and that the basis of it is something amorphous. It is a soft, malleable thing that is capable of taking any shape and being painted in any colour.

You, Joelle, are fucking goddamn mind-blowingly beautiful. I have no idea how you don't see it. Those glasses that you think made you look nerdy? If they're nerdy, then nerdy is so incredibly hot. Because when you wear your glasses, you look smart and sexy. Your hair that you think is unruly and messy? It's not. It's wild. And wild is so fucking hot, I can't even begin to tell you." He presses his eyes shut and shakes his head, like he can barely contain the thought. "I can't take my eyes off it. Every time you brush past me and I feel your hair on my skin, I get goose bumps. And your skin is so soft that every time I've touched you, I've almost lost my damn mind. Like when you were on my lap kissing me, I honest to god thought I was going to pass out. I mean, did you not feel my boner against you? You felt so fucking good I could barely take it." My eyes are wide as I soak in every word he says. "When we started working in the same space together, I overheard you mention how big your ass is when you were joking with your mom and aunt. Why? Your ass is a fucking national treasure. Why do you think I spent so much time grabbing it while we were fooling around?" Against his palm, I let out a muffled "oh" sound. It's the sound I make when I've figured out an especially challenging crossword puzzle clue. These are some damn good points he's making. Shaking his head, he looks away for a split second, like he's so frustrated, so hell-bent on getting these words out that he needs a moment to collect himself. His eyes cut back to me. "Do you have any idea the way people look at you? Everywhere you go, people can't take their eyes off you. Nonstop. And you don't even notice it because you're too focused on others. Do you have any clue how sexy it is? Everyone else is so concerned with their image and what people think of them. But you don't give it a second thought. Even if you don't realize it, you come off so sure of yourself. It's the hottest thing ever.

Sometimes what’s exceptional about a sign is not the sign itself, but its timing. Your favorite pick-me-up song plays on the radio just when you’re feeling especially down. The number 100 appears on your Starbucks receipt just when you’re worrying about flunking a test. The answer to a crossword puzzle clue is randomly spoken by someone on TV just when you’re about to give up on it. All of these simple, surprising occurrences can be signs from the Other Side, because their timing makes us feel connected to the world in a way we can’t quite explain—as if all we have to do is release our feelings of fear and doubt into the universe, and the universe will respond with playful, wonderful reassurances.

While we were standing by, Clinton was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, which he reputedly could dispatch in a matter of minutes. He asked me about a clue—a three-letter word starting with some letter or other. I had no idea, so I asked my son Jamie. ¶ 'Who's so stupid they don't know that?' Jamie retorted in a voice that could be heard at the other end of the phone. ¶ 'The President of the United States,' I said.

He's kind of like a crossword puzzle, in and of himself, a grid of clues leading to the complete theme.

The mind state caused by ambiguity is called uncertainty, and it’s an emotional amplifier. It makes anxiety more agonizing, and pleasure especially enjoyable. The delight of crossword puzzles, for example, comes from pondering and resolving ambiguous clues.

I enlisted a couple of sherpas to guide me through the world of word combinations. One was OneLook, a combination reverse dictionary and thesaurus site. When I typed a string of letters, OneLook found words that began with, contained, or ended with that string. I could also give OneLook gap-toothed strings, that is, combinations of letters and blanks, and OneLook would find possible combinations: all seven-letter words, say, that have A as their second letter and end with C. But my primary helper was XWord Info, which mines data from the entire New York Times crossword archives. XWord Info provides helpful options like bite-sized fragments of common speech that wouldn’t necessarily appear in a dictionary list (ARE TOO, AM SO, OR NOT). XWord Info also knows every clue that has been used for every answer to every past Times puzzle ever published, save a handful that were lost to posterity after newspaper strikes in the 1940s.

There are two ways to begin a puzzle: themed, with the major answers constellating around a mini-riddle; or themeless, usually with longer clues, and no help from a little internal narrative. If I were going to create a themeless puzzle, I’d start with what constructors call a “seed patch.” Seeds are the two or three ne-plus-ultra answers of the themeless, the ones that inspired the whole thing, and without which the puzzle would have no reason to exist. A seed might be a triple or quadruple stack of fifteen-letter words. Or a seed patch might be a few somewhat unrelated but buzzy bits of a recent news cycle. Prolific constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley publishes a new themeless puzzle on his website every Monday, mostly aimed at crossword junkies for whom the easy Times Mondays don’t cut it. Quigley’s themelesses often serve as something of a digest of the latest memes.

Grid art has only gotten better over time. In a Times crossword from 2009 by Elizabeth Gorski, the black squares at the grid’s center formed a spiral, with THE SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM / MUSEUM as answers spanning the top of the spiral, and—for the geometrically impaired—SPIRAL SHAPE across the bottom. Eight artworks hanging in the spiral-shaped Guggenheim museum appeared as clues, with each artist hung as an answer in the puzzle.

CROSSWORD INSTRUCTIONS 1.Read the Clues: Start by carefully reading through all the clues, both across and down. Each clue corresponds to a word or phrase you must fill in the grid. 2.Scan for Easy Answers: Look for clues that seem easy to solve based on your initial understanding of the clue or if you immediately know the answer. Fill in these answers first. 3.Work from Known Letters: As you fill in words, use the letters you've already entered to help solve other clues that intersect with them. 4.Think of Synonyms: Clues often contain synonyms or indirect references to the answer. If you're stuck, think of alternative words to fit the clue. 5.Consider Word Length: Pay attention to the number of letters in each answer. This can help you eliminate possibilities and narrow down potential answers. 6.Don't Get Stuck: If you're completely stuck on a clue, don't dwell on it for too long. Move on to other clues and come back to it later with fresh eyes. 7.Check for Mistakes: Once you've completed the puzzle or filled in as much as you can, go back and double-check your answers. Look for any mistakes or inconsistencies, especially where intersecting words meet. 8.Enjoy the Process: Solving a crossword puzzle is meant to be fun and challenging. Don't get discouraged if you find it difficult at times. Take