Define The Odds Quotes

A wager?" I repeated. "Yes," he said, and gave me a slow smile, bright with challenge. ... "Stake?" I asked cautiously. He was still smiling, an odd sort of smile, hard to define. "A kiss." My first reaction was outrage, but then I remembered that I was on my way to Court, and that had to be the kind of thing they did at Court. And if I win I don't have to collect. I hesitated only a moment longer, lured by the thought of open sky, and speed, and winning. "Done," I said.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

That becomes clear if you try to define the objects and things which supervene in each class. Odd and even, straight and curved, number, line, and shape can be defined without change but flesh, bone, and man cannot. They are like sbub nose, not like curved.

Before we go further we should define what optimism is. Real optimists don’t believe that everything will be great. That’s complacency. Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.

There is a difference between criticizing people and criticizing a people's uninformed ideals. That is, unless one defines himself or others by their ideals, then he is offended, and usually offended secretly. Because oddly enough, this person is the same person quickest to resort to dismissive name-calling, such as 'bigot' or 'zealot'. And oddly enough, he is always the one, the 'open-minded' one, who adamantly protests for, not only himself, but others not to listen to any type of scholarly theological truth inherently for the sake of his own personal, moral beliefs.

You wish your face was more—more, something. You don’t know what. Maybe not more. Less. Less flat. Less delicate. More rugged. Your jawline more defined. This face that feels like a mask, that has never felt quite right on you. That reminds you, at odd times, and often after two to four drinks, that you’re Asian. You are Asian! Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.

In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind.

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of “investing” is “gambling with the odds in your favor.

As anyone who starts a business knows, it is a fantastic race. There is a statistic that hangs over your head - over 90 percent of all new businesses fail in the first three years. For anyone with even a bit of competitive spirit in them, especially for someone who defines himself or herself as an entrepreneur, these overwhelming odds of failure are not intimidating, they only add fuel to the fire. The foolishness of thinking that you're a part of the small minority of those who actually will make it past three years and defy the odds is part of what makes entrepreneurs who they are, driven by passion and completely irrational.

I ran as fast as I could for as long as I could, from a past that no longer defined me, toward a future undetermined. All I knew was that there would be pain and there would be purpose.

Chic, is first, when you don't have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn't matter or because you don't have any and it doesn't matter. Chic is not aspirational. Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness-- most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants.

Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it.

In a society where mediocrity is too often the standard and too often rewarded,” he said, “there is intense fascination with men who detest mediocrity, who refuse to define themselves in conventional terms, and who seek to transcend traditionally recognized human capabilities.

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face -- that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat -- that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.

I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould. But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don’t know what I don’t know. There are universes of things out there — ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions — that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don’t know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered. Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can’t help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives. […] I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown. Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don’t know that we don’t know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. … In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown. You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you won’t know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete. This, just this, I am comfortable not knowing.

My past was and is who I am. What I am. You can’t just forget the very thing that molded you and gave you strength to beat the odds. As much as the past shapes us, we can choose to let it define us or we can carve a different path and define it ourselves.

It’s odd how people can get locked into a kind of time warp. There’s a time in their lives that defines them, and they hang on to it for all the subsequent decades; the same hair, the same style of clothes, the same music, even though the world around them has changed beyond recognition.

As Harry Potter was the only other thing I was passionate about, the doctors gave consent for me to leave the hospital and collect the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, from the local book shop. I was so ecstatic to have the book and excited to begin reading it, but there was never any hint of your imminent arrival and the way you would change my life so drastically. Luna, you instantly captivated me. I didn’t know why but there was something about you with your upside-down magazine, straggly blonde hair, and the honest, abashed way you stared at people without blinking that fascinated and perplexed me at once. You laughed hysterically at one of Ron’s quips and didn’t stop to excuse yourself and feel ashamed when it became clear that everyone found you strange. Throughout the book, I found myself waiting for your brief appearances and wanting to know more about you and why you were the way you were. You baffled me, not because you were odd (though indeed you were), but because you were… perfect. But it was a different kind of perfect to the perfectly thin, smiling magazine girls I simultaneously idolised and reviled. It was the way you carried your oddness like it was the most natural thing in the world. You didn’t market your oddness as your defining feature the way some insecure teenagers do, in guise of confidence and security. And nor were you oblivious to the awkward and uncomfortable feelings your oddness provoked in others. When, unable to comprehend how you wore your oddness so honestly and unashamedly, your peers reverted to mockery and bullying, you recognized this as a reflection of their own deep-seated insecurity and calmly let them carry on, quite above your head. You weren’t trying hard to present a certain aspect of yourself that would boldly identify you in the world. And that’s when it occurred to me how bizarre and positively ridiculous it was to apply the word “weird” to describe you, when you represented the most natural and unpretentious state possible to be; you were yourself.

Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been defined by tales of heroism. It is meant to represent humanity at our very best, willing to oppose all odds in order to protect the side of good.

Love hurts. Think back over romance novels you’ve loved or the genre-defining books that drive our industry. The most unforgettable stories and characters spring from crushing opposition. What we remember about romance novels is the darkness that drives them. Three hundred pages of folks being happy together makes for a hefty sleeping pill, but three hundred pages of a couple finding a way to be happy in the face of impossible odds makes our hearts soar. In darkness, we are all alone. So don’t just make love, make anguish for your characters. As you structure a story, don’t satisfy your hero’s desires, thwart them. Make sure your solutions create new problems. Nurture your characters doubts and despair. Make them earn the happy ending they want, even better…make them deserve it. Delay and disappointment charge situations and validate character growth. Misery accompanies love. It’s no accident that many of the stories we think of as timeless romances in Western Literature are fiercely tragic: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Cupid and Psyche… the pain in them drags us back again and again, hoping that this time we’ll find a way out of the dark. Only if you let your characters get lost will we get lost in them. And that, more than anything else, is what romance can and should do for its protagonists and its readers: lead us through the labyrinth, skirt the monstrous despair roaming its halls, and find our way into daylight.

Lately, she’d been having trouble picturing him. She could perfectly remember a picture of him, hanging above the mansion’s hearth. But him? That wasn’t so easy, though she loved him. That is not so odd an occurrence. A picture is an object, easy to define and contain, while a person is a soul—and is therefore neither of those things.

My time in camp with Kaden had become awkward several times, or perhaps I was just more self-conscious now. I had known he cared about me. It was hardly a secret. It was the reason I was still alive, but I hadn’t quite grasped how much he cared. And in spite of myself, I knew in my own way, I cared about him too. Not Kaden the assassin, but the Kaden I had known back in Terravin, the one who had caught my attention the minute he walked through the tavern door. The one who was calm and had mysterious, but kind, eyes. I remembered dancing with him at the festival, his arms pulling me closer, and the way he struggled with his thoughts, holding them back. He didn’t hold back the night he was drunk. The fireshine had loosened his lips and he laid it all out quite blatantly. Slurred and sloshy but clear. He loved me. This from a barbarian who was sent to kill me. I lay back, staring into the cloudless sky, a shade bluer and brighter than yesterday. Did he even know what love was? For that matter, did I? Even my parents didn’t seem to know. I crossed my arms behind my head as a pillow. Maybe there was no one way to define it. Maybe there were as many shades of love as the blues of the sky. I wondered if his interest had begun when I tended his shoulder. I remembered his odd look of surprise when I touched him, as if no one had ever shown him a kindness before. If Griz, Finch, and Malich were any indication of his past, maybe no one had. They showed a certain steely devotion to one another, but it in no way resembled kindness. And then there were those scars on his chest and back. Only cruel savage could have delivered those. Yet somewhere along the way, Kaden had learned kindness. Tenderness, even. It surfaced in small actions. He seemed like he was two separate people, the intensely loyal Vendan assassin and someone else far different, someone he had locked away, a prisoner just like me.

Does anyone ever? Just take the leap and hope for the best. The bets we dare to make when the odds are against us are what define us. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But that’s life. We can’t always protect ourselves. And as long as you do your honest best with what you have, everything else is just noise.

Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds our physical being from the very start of our existence. It sculpts us, determines how we begin, and where we end. The events in life that define us, that break us and remake us, all stem from death—the death of a place, a time, a relationship, of those we hold most dear, and finally ourselves. Death is the one inescapable aspect of life, the only immutable force, the single thing in this world that cannot and should not be changed. But death is never the end. It is the beginning.

Hope is one of our central emotions, but we are often at a loss when asked to define it. Many of us confuse hope with optimism, a prevailing attitude that "things turn out for the best." But hope differs from optimism. Hope does not arise from being told to "Think Positively," or from hearing an overly rosy forecast. Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in unalloyed reality. Although there is no uniform definition of hope, I found on that seemed to capture what my patients had taught me. Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see - in the mind's eye- a path to a better future. Hope acknowledges the significant obstacles and deep pitfalls along that path. True hope has no room for delusion.

Seth Godin defines true freedom as “the ability to choose.” Contentment in our lives is the doorway to experiencing true freedom.

Numbers do not define the degree of this villainy, for each of these women was a special soul, as is each person ever born.

All I could see in his slightly lopsided face were his two very bright eyes, which were examining me closely without betraying any definable emotion. And I had the odd impression of being watched by myself.

was odd that so much intellectual energy was invested into defining, and contrasting, the two signature groups of the British Invasion when what united them both was a restless experimentalism and a desire to expand outward, from the simple to the complex.

Never give up hope, that family can be a great source of love, that the eternal inner spirit lives on even when the human body is frail and through positive thinking it can overcome incredible odds. Yes, all of these. But also, that love for others defines us.

It’s odd how people can get locked into a kind of time warp. There’s a time in their lives that defines them, and they hang on to it for all the subsequent decades; the same hair, the same style of clothes, the same music, even though the world around them has changed beyond recognition. My

I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. ("The Haunted Spinney")

She asked him to come in, if only for a minute, as it would seem so odd otherwise, and as if she had been out alone in the dark. He gave way, and followed her in. Immediately that the door was opened he found, in addition to her parents, several neighbours sitting round. They all spoke in a congratulatory manner, and took him seriously as Arabella's intended partner. They did not belong to his set or circle, and he felt out of place and embarrassed. He had not meant this: a mere afternoon of pleasant walking with Arabella, that was all he had meant. He did not stay longer than to speak to her stepmother, a simple, quiet woman without features or character; and bidding them all good night plunged with a sense of relief into the track over the down. But that sense was only temporary: Arabella reasserted her sway in his soul. He walked as if he felt himself to be another man from the Jude of yesterday. What were his books to him? what were his intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a single minute of time day by day? 'Wasting!' It depended on your point of view to define that: he was just living for the first time: not wasting life. It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson; ay, or a pope!

wasn’t confined to medicine. Think about all those ancient Greek statues with defined scrotum and penises (although the penises are on the small side because sexuality was apparently at odds with intellectual pursuits and so a big brain, not a big penis, was the ideal). The vulvas of the time were but mysterious mounds concealed by crossed legs.

The idea of reimagining God as times and circumstances change should, therefore, not strike us as odd or the least bit troubling—our Bible is full of reimagining. Without it, there wouldn’t be a “New” Testament or a Christian faith tradition. The entire history of the Christian church is defined by moments of reimagining God to speak here and now.

It’s not a tangible thing. There won’t be one defining moment that you classify as happiness. It’s little moments, accumulated over time. It’s choosing each other, and knowing the person you chose to spend your life with will always fight for you, even when it’s tough, even when the odds aren’t in their favor. It’s doing all you can, giving her all you have, and accepting that it’s enough.

In good fiction, we have one eye on the hero or the good guys and a fascinated eye on the bad guys, who may be a lot more interesting. The plot leads all of these people (and us) into dark woods where we find, against all odds, a woman or a man with the compass, and it still points true north. That's the miracle, and it's astonishing. This shaft of light, sometimes only a glimmer, both defines and thwarts the darkness.

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book. "It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest. It's the boy from my dreams. The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life. I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey. I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed. Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade. "You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it. I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother. I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, though it's pretty clear no other table would have me. He buries his smile and returns to the book.Allowing a few minutes to pass,not nearly enough time for me to get a grip on myself,when he looks up and says, "Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganer roaming the halls,playing king of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask?" I clear the lump from my throat, push the words past my lips when I say, "No one's ever accused me of being shy." A statement that,while steeped in truth, stands at direct odds with the way I feel now,sitting so close to him. "So I guess it's your twin-or doppelganer,as you say." I keep my voice light, as though I'm not at all affected by his presence,but the trill note at the end gives me away.Every part of me now vibrating with the most intense surge of energy-like I've been plugged into the wall and switched on-and it's all I can do to keep from grabbing hold of his shirt, demanding to know if he dreamed the dreams too. He nods,allowing an easy,cool smile to widen his lips. "We're identical," he says. "As I'm sure you've guessed. Though it's easy enough to tell us apart. For one thing,he keeps his hair short.For another-" "The eyes-" I blurt,regretting the words the instant they're out.From the look on his face,he has no idea what I'm talking about. "Yours are...kinder." My cheeks burn so hot I force myself to look away,as words of reproach stampede my brain. Why am I acting like such an inept loser? Why do I insist on embarrassing myself-in front of him-of all people? I have to pull it together.I have to remember who I am-what I am-and what I was born to do.Which is basically to crush him and his kind-or,at the very least,to temper the damage they do.

Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. We are left only with dignity as a solution—dignity defined as the execution of a protocol of behavior that does not depend on the immediate circumstance. It may not be the optimal one, but it certainly is the one that makes us feel best. Grace under pressure, for example. Or in deciding not to toady up to someone, whatever

It’s the feelings you feel. Happiness and fear and—and love. The emotions you shed. It’s the memories you create with each other, with the people you love and the people you call friends. It’s your talents. Your empathy and sympathy. Your optimism. Your compassion. The pureness of your soul. All the things that make you you. Your inner strength, your heartbeat. Your smile and the people that are around you. The ones who care. The things that give us purpose. Those are the Gifts of Life; the things that define us as individuals — Odd.

She looked at him oddly. “Don’t you want to satisfy your curiosity? Now – and forever, for the one who’ll stay behind?” He thought about it, then shook his head. “One clone will see the finished city. One won’t. Both will share a past when they’d never even heard of the place. The clone outside, who never sees the city, will try to guess what it’s like. The clone inside will run other environments, and sometimes he won’t think about the city at all. When he does, sometimes he’ll misremember it. And sometimes he’ll dream about wildly distorted versions of what he’s seen. “I define all those moments as part of me. So … what is there to be curious about?

Before she could don her wide-brimmed hat and leave the sanctuary of their willow bower, Val did wrap his arms around her again, this time positioning his body behind hers. “I will come back after dark,” he whispered, “if you’ll allow it.” She went still, and he knew a moment’s panic. “Talk to me, Ellen.” He kissed her cheek. “Just be honest.” “My… tonight might not be a good time.” “Sweetheart…” Val let her go and turned her to face him. “I will not force myself on you, I just want… I want to see you.” To make sure she was all right, whatever that meant in the odd, new context in which he was trying to define the term. She must have sensed his bewilderment, because she turned away and spoke to him from over her shoulder. “My courses are due.” Val cocked his head. “So you become unfit company? Do you have the megrims and cramps and melancholy? Eat chocolates by the tin? Take to your bed?” “Sometimes.” Ellen peered at him, her expression guarded. “Then I will comfort you. I’ll cuddle you up and bring you tisanes and rub your back and your feet. I’ll read to you and beat you at cards and bring you hot-water bottles for your aches.” Ellen’s brows knit. “I truly am poor company at such times and usually before such times, as well.” “You are poor company for people who expect you to play on without missing a note, perhaps,” Val replied, holding her gaze. “May we sit a moment?” She nodded but had gone too shy even to meet his eyes. “My Uncle Tony’s wife,” Val said, wrapping an arm around Ellen’s shoulders, “is blunt to a fault. She told me relations with Tony were the best way to ease her cramps.” “Valentine!

Herein lay the rub. The Americans, like all Western armies, defined “winning” as killing the enemy and securing control over the battlefield. Their opponents in previous conflicts had generally accepted the same definition. Not so the Moros. What was important to them was the struggle and how one conducted oneself, personally and as a people, not necessarily a measurable outcome. They knew from the beginning they were no match for American firepower. It was a one-sided contest, what today is termed “asymmetric warfare,” but so what? Their measure was how well one did against the odds, the more overwhelmingly they were against one, the greater the glory. And being that life is transitory anyway, what mattered most was how much courage was shown and how well did one die. The Americans and the Moros were using different score cards for the same game. To the Moros, it was they who had “won.

Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable. Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow. And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness. The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.

Your Olympic medal.I went looking for you in your office." "The medal lures parents who can afford the tuition." "It's something to be proud of." "I am proud of it." With her free hand she brushed her hair as the breeze teased it. Her fingertips skimmed over the soft petals of the flower. "But it doesn't define me." "Not like,what was it? A British tie?" The laugh got away from her, and eased the odd tension that had been building inside her. "Here's a surprise. With a great deal of time and some effort, I might begin to like you." "I've plenty of time." He released her hand to toy with the ends of her hair. She jerked back. "You're a skittish one," he murmured. "No, not particularly." Usually, she thought. With most people. "The thing is, I like to touch," he told her and deliberately skimmed his fingers over her hair again. "It's that...connection.You learn by touching." "I don't..." She trailed off when those fingers ran firmly down the back of her neck. "I've learned you carry your worries right there, right at the base there. More worries than show on your face. It's a staggering face you have, Keeley. Throws a man off.

Every entry, whether revised or reviewed, goes through multiple editing passes. The definer starts the job, then it’s passed to a copy editor who cleans up the definer’s work, then to a bunch of specialty editors: cross-reference editors, who make sure the definer hasn’t used any word in the entry that isn’t entered in that dictionary; etymologists, to review or write the word history; dating editors, who research and add the dates of first written use; pronunciation editors, who handle all the pronunciations in the book. Then eventually it’s back to a copy editor (usually a different one from the first round, just to be safe), who will make any additional changes to the entry that cross-reference turned up, then to the final reader, who is, as the name suggests, the last person who can make editorial changes to the entry, and then off to the proofreader (who ends up, again, being a different editor from the definer and the two previous copy editors). After the proofreaders are done slogging through two thousand pages of four-point type, the production editors send it off to the printer or the data preparation folks, and then we get another set of dictionary pages (called page proofs) to proofread. This process happens continuously as we work through a dictionary, so a definer may be working on batches in C, cross-reference might be in W, etymology in T, dating and pronunciation in the second half of S, copy editors in P (first pass) and Q and R (second pass), while the final reader is closing out batches in N and O, proofreaders are working on M, and production has given the second set of page proofs to another set of proofreaders for the letter L. We all stagger our way through the alphabet until the last batch, which is inevitably somewhere near G, is closed. By the time a word is put in print either on the page or online, it’s generally been seen by a minimum of ten editors. Now consider that when it came to writing the Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, we had a staff of about twenty editors working on it: twenty editors to review about 220,000 existing definitions, write about 10,000 new definitions, and make over 100,000 editorial changes (typos, new dates, revisions) for the new edition. Now remember that the 110,000-odd changes made were each reviewed about a dozen times and by a minimum of ten editors. The time given to us to complete the revision of the Tenth Edition into the Eleventh Edition so production could begin on the new book? Eighteen months.

I will always be grateful to have been the Democratic Party’s nominee and to have earned 65,844,610 votes from my fellow Americans. That number—more votes than any candidate for President has ever received, other than Barack Obama—is proof that the ugliness we faced in 2016 does not define our country. I want to thank everyone who welcomed me into their homes, businesses, schools, and churches over those two long, crazy years; every little girl and boy who ran into my arms at full speed or high-fived me with all their might; and the long chain of brave, adventurous people, stretching back generations, whose love and strength made it possible for me to lead such a rewarding life in the country I love. Thanks to them, despite everything else, my heart is full. I started this book with some words attributed to one of those pathbreakers, Harriet Tubman. Twenty years ago, I watched a group of children perform a play about her life at her former homestead in Auburn, New York. They were so excited about this courageous, determined woman who led slaves to freedom against all odds. Despite everything she faced, she never lost her faith in a simple but powerful motto: Keep going. That’s what we have to do now, too. In 2016, the U.S. government announced that Harriet Tubman will become the face of the $20 bill. If you need proof that America can still get it right, there it is.

Gene looked at me, and smiled kindly. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he told me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.” He was right. I’d learned to write the novel I was writing, and nothing more. Still, it was a fine, strange novel to have learned how to write. I was always aware of how very far short it fell of the beautiful, golden, gleaming, perfect book I had in my head, but even so, it made me happy. I grew a beard and I did not cut my hair while I was writing this book, and many people thought I was a trifle odd (although not the Swedes, who approved and told me that a king of theirs had done something very similar, only not with a novel). I shaved the beard off at the end of the first draft, and disposed of the unfeasibly long hair shortly after that. The second draft was mostly a process of excavation and clarification. Moments that needed to grow grew and moments that needed to be shorter were trimmed. I wanted it to be a number of things. I wanted to write a book that was big and odd and meandering, and I did and it was. I wanted to write a book that included all the parts of America that obsessed and delighted me, which tended to be the bits that never showed up in the films and television shows. I finished it, eventually, and I handed it in, taking a certain amount of comfort in the old saying that a novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it, and I was fairly sure that I’d written one of those.

Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence... 'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.

And then I saw him speak. Years later, after writing dozens upon dozens of presidential speeches, it would become impossible to listen to rhetoric without editing it in my head. On that historic Iowa evening, Obama began with a proclamation: “They said this day would never come.” Rereading those words today, I have questions. Who were “they,” exactly? Did they really say “never”? Because if they thought an antiwar candidate with a robust fund-raising operation could never win a divided three-way Democratic caucus, particularly with John Edwards eating into Hillary Clinton’s natural base of support among working-class whites, then they didn’t know what they were talking about. All this analysis would come later, though, along with stress-induced insomnia and an account at the Navy Mess. At the time, I was spellbound. The senator continued: “At this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said you couldn’t do.” He spoke like presidents in movies. He looked younger than my dad. I didn’t have time for a second thought, or even a first one. I simply believed. Barack Obama spoke for the next twelve minutes, and except for a brief moment when the landing gear popped out and I thought we were going to die, I was riveted. He told us we were one people. I nodded knowingly at the gentleman in the middle seat. He told us he would expand health care by bringing Democrats and Republicans together. I was certain it would happen as he described. He looked out at a sea of organizers and volunteers. “You did this,” he told them, “because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

another showed him back in Berlin, reviewing a throng of grateful Germans from the balcony of the German chancery. He had led Germany to military glory against all odds. The Third Reich built by his Nazis seemed invincible. Yet the restless erstwhile artist and miracle-working warlord was not finished. In fact, the most ambitious act of Nazi world building was yet to come. In Mein Kampf Hitler had made it abundantly clear that the long-term plan of National Socialism was the elimination of the Jews and the enslavement of the Slavs. Both goals were contingent on the conquest of the Soviet Union. Since a large percentage of European Jewry lived within her borders and those of Poland, a war in the east was necessary. Poland had now fallen, and German military forces were already sweeping through the country rounding up its Jewish citizenry. But the Soviet Union—the heart of “Jewish-Bolshevism”—remained untouched. To overcome the Aryans’ greatest racial enemy and subdue the Slavs, a full-scale invasion was necessary. As 1941 opened, then, Hitler prepared for what came to be known as Operation Barbarossa. Bringing Nazi ideology to fulfillment, it proved to be the greatest invasion in history. Hitler before the Eiffel Tower Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Russia were laid out in a series of meetings and reports during the spring. They were defined by a combination of utopian vision and nihilistic contempt. Gathering his generals before him on March 30, the leader declared that the coming struggle was not merely one of army against army but of culture against culture. It would be a “clash of two ideologies,” he explained. The Communists and Nazis had erected their states on the ruins of Christendom. Both Christianity, with its principle of charity, and humanism, with its celebration of autonomous individual dignity, were bankrupt. Wars in the past, he observed, had accommodated such values. But mercy and chivalry were now dead. Between opposing armies, he declared “we must forget the notion” of sympathy.150 The coming conflict will be “a war of annihilation.”151 Hitler’s generals got the message. One, Erich Hoepner (d. 1944), subsequently declared to his men with a combination of Darwinian objectivity and Nietzschean ruthlessness: The war against Russia is an essential phase in the German nation’s struggle for existence. It is the ancient struggle of the Germanic peoples against Slavdom, the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic tide, the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. That struggle must have as its aim the shattering of present-day Russia and therefore be waged with unprecedented hardness.

As the Princess performs the impossible balancing act which her life requires, she drifts inexorably into obsession, continually discussing her problems. Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew argues it is difficult not to be self-absorbed when the world watches everything she does. “How can you not be self-obsessed when half the world is watching everything you do; the high-pitched laugh when someone is talking to somebody famous must make you very very cynical.” She endlessly debates the problems she faces in dealing with her husband, the royal family, and their system. They remain tantalizingly unresolved, the gulf between thought and action achingly great. Whether she stays or goes, the example of the Duchess of York is a potent source of instability. James Gilbey sums up Diana’s dilemma: “She can never be happy unless she breaks away but she won’t break away unless Prince Charles does it. He won’t do it because of his mother so they are never going to be happy. They will continue under the farcical umbrella of the royal family yet they will both lead completely separate lives.” Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, a sensible sounding-board throughout Diana’s adult life, sees how that fundamental issue has clouded her character. “She is kind, generous, sad and in some ways rather desperate. Yet she has maintained her self-deprecating sense of humour. A very shrewd but immensely sorrowful lady.” Her royal future is by no means well-defined. If she could write her own script the Princess would like to see her husband go off with his Highgrove friends and attempt to discover the happiness he has not found with her, leaving Diana free to groom Prince William for his eventual destiny as the Sovereign. It is an idle pipe-dream as impossible as Prince Charles’s wish to relinquish his regal position and run a farm in Italy. She has other more modest ambitions; to spend a weekend in Paris, take a course in psychology, learn the piano to concert grade and to start painting again. The current pace of her life makes even these hopes seem grandiose, never mind her oft-repeated vision of the future where she see herself one day settling abroad, probably in Italy or France. A more likely avenue is the unfolding vista of charity, community and social work which has given her a sense of self-worth and fulfillment. As her brother says: “She has got a strong character. She does know what she wants and I think that after ten years she has got to a plateau now which she will continue to occupy for many years.” As a child she sensed her special destiny, as an adult she has remained true to her instincts. Diana has continued to carry the burden of public expectations while enduring considerable personal problems. Her achievement has been to find her true self in the face of overwhelming odds. She will continue to tread a different path from her husband, the royal family and their system and yet still conform to their traditions. As she says: “When I go home and turn my light off at night, I know I did my best.

Kissinger’s 1960 recipe for success was to combine massive increases in US foreign aid with assistance in constructing “enlightened political institutions” in the recipient countries. Noting that “economic assistance is a form of intervention,” Kissinger believed that “to offer nothing but bread is to leave the arena to those who are sufficiently dynamic to define their purpose.”39

In her serious way, she'd decided they weren't well suited. He was rich. She was solidly middle class. He was relaxed. She was intense. He defined himself by what mattered to him, people in all their quirky variety, sun and sand and sea, laughter, moments of ease to remember good days and envision better days. Annie epitomized the work ethic, so many tasks to do, so little time in which to do them. He didn't have to work, felt no need to achieve,but to please her he opened Confidential Commissions and, truth to tell, he enjoyed helping people solve odd and unusual problems, the more odd and unusual the better.

Area51. While StackExchange claims Area51 is an incubator for new sites, it’s better imagined as a gladiatorial gauntlet designed to weed out all but the most committed of leaders. In Area51, anyone can propose an idea for a new site, but the odds on any site making it through to launch is slim. The process begins by creating a proposal on the site. This alone requires a reputation score of at least 50, earned through previous contributions to the network. Once the proposal has been submitted, members progress to the definition phase. In this phase, group creators need at least five example questions and five users willing to follow the proposal within three days to avoid being deleted. If the proposal meets this criteria, it then has 90 days to attract 60 followers, 40 questions, and 10 votes. These votes help define what the site will be about. If the proposal survives the moderator chopper (many ideas are also merged or rejected for being too similar to existing sites at this stage), it moves into the commitment phase. In the commitment phase, group creators need to earn a 100% commitment score. This means at least 200 committed members, 100 of whom need to have a reputation score of 200+. A commitment isn’t made lightly; it’s an obligation to ask or answer 10 questions in the private beta phase. A member can only commit to one project at a time and a commitment means a member is putting their own reputation on the line to help someone else. If they fail to follow through (as many do), their reputation score drops. For StackExchange members, whose reputation score often helps them with future job applications, this is a big deal.

MN4, discovered late in 2004 and recently named Apophis, the Greek name for the Egyptian God Apep –the destroyer. At one point, the probability of Apophis striking the Earth on 13 April 2029 was thought to be as high as 1 in 37. Now, to everyone’s relief, those odds have increased to 1 in 8,000. Again, these may sound very long odds, but they are actually only 80 times greater than those offered during summer 2001 for England beating Germany 5–1 at football. A few years ago, scientists came up with an index –known as the Torino Scale –to measure the impact threat, and so far Apophis is the first object to register and sustain a value greater than zero. At present it scores a 1 on the scale –defined as ‘an event meriting careful monitoring’. The object is the focus of considerable attention as efforts continue to better constrain its orbit, and it is perfectly possible –as we find out more –that it could rise to 1 on the Torino Scale, becoming an ‘event meriting concern’. It is very unlikely, however, to go any higher, and let’s hope that many years elapse before we encounter the first category 10 event –defined as ‘a certain collision with global consequences’.

We find the Mayan pantheon peculiar. By our standards, suicide and human sacrifice are unacceptable. We tend not to notice the peculiarities of our own culture. We accept the thousands of children who wear braces to correct their teeth, yet we consider the Maya odd for filing teeth to beautify them. Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.

We’re talking about fundamentals here; the fundamental physical laws pertaining to the day-to-day running of the universe. Physicists call them the fundamental constants—things like the masses of atomic particles, the speed of light, the electric charges of electrons, the strength of gravitational force.… They’re beginning to realize just how finely balanced they are. One flip of a decimal point either way and things would start to go seriously wrong. Matter wouldn’t form, stars wouldn’t twinkle, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist and, if we insist on taking the selfish point of view in the face of such spectacular, epic, almighty destruction, nor would we. The cosmic harmony that made life possible exists at the mercy of what appear, on the face of it, to be unlikely odds. Who or what decided at the time of the Big Bang that the number of particles created would be 1 in 1 billion more than the number of antiparticles, thus rescuing us by the width of a whisker from annihilation long before we even existed (because when matter and antimatter meet, they cancel each other out)? Who or what decided that the number of matter particles left behind after this oversize game of cosmic swapping would be exactly the right number to create a gravitational force that balanced the force of expansion and didn’t collapse the universe like a popped balloon? Who decided that the mass of the neutron should be just enough to make the formation of atoms possible? That the nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together, in the face of their natural electromagnetic desire to repulse each other, should be just strong enough to achieve this, thus enabling the universe to move beyond a state of almost pure hydrogen? Who made the charge on the proton exactly right for the stars to turn into supernovas? Who fine-tuned the nuclear resonance level for carbon to just delicate enough a degree that it could form, making life, all of which is built on a framework of carbon, possible? The list goes on. And on. And as it goes on—as each particularly arrayed and significantly defined property, against all the odds, and in spite of billions of alternative possibilities, combines exquisitely, in the right time sequence, at the right speed, weight, mass, and ratio, and with every mathematical quality precisely equivalent to a stable universe in which life can exist at all—it adds incrementally in the human mind to a growing sense, depending on which of two antithetical philosophies it chooses to follow, of either supreme and buoyant confidence, or humble terror. The first philosophy says this perfect pattern shows that the universe is not random; that it is designed and tuned, from the atom up, by some supreme intelligence, especially for the purpose of supporting life. The other says it’s a one in a trillion coincidence.

If an eighty-year-old wants to skydive, then so be it. If I want to blow soap bubbles in the park, then why not? Why is riding a tricycle good for a three-year-old but looks odd for a thirty-year-old?” He pointed at me, a little more sternly this time. “Don’t let your number define you.” I

It was not my intention - it never was - to invent a character who should speak for me, the author, in person. A character is in a story to fill a role there, and the character's life along with its expression of life is defined by that surrounding - indeed is created by its own story. Yet, it seems to me now, years after I wrote The Golden Apples, that I did bring forth a character with whom I came to feel oddly in touch. She derived from what I already knew for myself, even felt I had always known. What I have put into her is my passion for my own life work, my own art. Exposing yourself to risk is a truth that Mrs. Eckhart and I had in common. What animates and possesses me is what drives Mrs. Eckhart, the love of her art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left. Of course any writer is in part all of his characters. How otherwise would they be known to him, occur to him, become what they are? In the making of her character out of my most inward and most deeply felt self, I would say I have found my voice in my own fiction.

Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that’s incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery.

Martin Luther King’s legacy, as its keepers know, is profoundly at odds with the historic American order, and that is why they can have no rest until the symbols of that order are pulled up root and branch. To say that Dr. King are the cause he really represented are now part of the official American creed, indeed the defining and dominant symbol of that creed – which is what both houses of the United States Congress said in 1983 and what President Ronald Reagan signed into law shortly afterward – is the inauguration of a new order and the things they symbolized can retain neither meaning nor respect, in which they are as mute and dark as the gods of Babylon and Tyre and from whose cold ashes will rise a new god, leveling their rough places, straightening their crookedness, and exalting every valley until the whole earth is flattened beneath his feet and perceives the glory of the new lord.

I define those who have gained fame and fortune not so much by their achievements as by how they got there—the enormous odds they overcame, the dignity and courage they displayed in the process, the way they treated people ethically and fairly along the way.

Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as “the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare on the board.”♦

And the rejection of white working-class voters as desirable partners betrays an ugly elitism that is at odds with what Democrats are supposed to stand for. The disdain was made explicit in 2016 when Hillary Clinton described half of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”84 Although Clinton was certainly right to denounce racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes as deplorable, her comments were troubling on several levels. She changed what is normally an adjective into a noun, suggesting that white working-class people with less education than her were completely defined by their attitudes on race. Clinton used the line while speaking to audiences whom she described as “successful people” at fundraisers in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard, where her audiences knowingly chuckled at America’s benighted white working class.85 And it did not go unnoticed, one journalist remarked, that deplorables is not a term Clinton ever applied to highly educated Wall Street bankers who brought about the Great Recession and threw millions of people out of work.86 In

One of the more peculiar sins in medieval Christendom was curiositas, which St. Augustine defined as “the lust for experience and for knowledge.” As the rite of pilgrimage to places like Rome and Jerusalem became popular during the Middle Ages, church leaders fretted that curiositas might distract pilgrims from the task of religious piety. In the minds of many parish priests, a key danger of pilgrimage was that travel could be mind-expanding and pleasurable, and hence at odds with the prim prescriptions and hierarchies that underpinned their authority.

Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that’s incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact you know it will be filled with misery.

Rather than being defined by consistently applied principles—about the right to a democratically controlled public square, say, and to trustworthy information and privacy—we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time. No, these camps are not morally equivalent, but the more people like Wolf and Bannon focus on very real fears of Big Tech—its power to unilaterally remove speech, to abscond with our data, to make digital doubles of us—the more liberals seem to shrug and sneer and treat the whole package of worries like crazy-people stuff. Once an issue is touched by “them,” it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else. And what mainstream liberals ignore and neglect, this emerging alliance lavishes with attention.

That memory had dominated me for years, but after 130 hours of Hell, it no longer defined me.

She could perfectly remember a picture of him, hanging above the mansion's hearth. But him? That wasn't so easy, though she loved him. That is not so odd an occurrence. A picture is an object, easy to define and contain, while a person is a soul - and therefore neither of those.

having trouble picturing him. She could perfectly remember a picture of him, hanging above the mansion’s hearth. But him? That wasn’t so easy, though she loved him. That is not so odd an occurrence. A picture is an object, easy to define and contain, while a person is a soul—and is therefore neither of those things.

A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based. It has to be that way. System 1 can only do its job of delivering strong conclusions at lightning speed if it never pauses to wonder whether the evidence at hand is flawed or inadequate, or if there is better evidence elsewhere. It must treat the available evidence as reliable and sufficient. These tacit assumptions are so vital to System 1 that Kahneman gave them an ungainly but oddly memorable label: WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is).14

Forgive me for tossing you into the moat so unceremoniously. I’m afraid the cannon took me by surprise, and getting you out of harm’s way had me reacting somewhat irrationally.” Shifting her attention away from the dog in her lap, Lucetta settled it on the man now rising from the moat. As he straightened and shoved a hand through dark hair that was obscuring his face, Lucetta completely forgot what she’d been about to say when she got her first good look at him. Standing before her was the very picture of a dashing pirate come to life, a pirate complete with a charming, yet somewhat roguish smile, and . . . he was wearing a patch over his left eye. Oddly enough, Lucetta found herself feeling a bit more charitable toward the man, perhaps because she’d always been drawn to flawed people, probably because she was fairly flawed as well. Realizing that the patch she was staring at was evidently covering some horrible disfigurement—a disfigurement the poor man undoubtedly didn’t care to have people fixating on—Lucetta dropped her gaze, settling it on a chest covered in a dripping wet shirt made of what appeared to be fine lawn material, and . . . “Goodness,” she whispered past a throat that had taken to constricting the moment her gaze settled on an incredibly well-defined form. Lifting her attention the tiniest bit, she found herself, curiously enough, intrigued with the small bit of skin exposed above the man’s collar. It was lightly tanned, a circumstance that could mean only one thing—the gentleman standing before her obviously spent a great deal of time outside, which would make him . . . the gardener. That notion had her feeling even more charitable to the man who’d tossed her into the moat, especially since there was nothing Lucetta appreciated more than a man who was not afraid to put in a hard day’s work. “I

It's time the world knew what was really discovered at Delphi." says Dr Moses Frank, in The Elena Text. But who is Moses Frank and what was he referring to? The Elena Text is a controversial and provocative thriller set in the world of antiquities and archaeology, based around the untold story of what was really discovered at Delphi in Greece - but has remained a closely-guarded secret since the 1930s. In Moses Frank we have a character who single-handedly defines the extremities of recent times, the stateless survivor, against all the odds, the refugee turned millionaire, the entrepreneur who creates his own rules, a charming and educated artist with a first class degree from the university of life, a thinker but an unashamed money-maker and pleasure-seeker. Moses Frank is a man who can be forgiven almost anything because he is so hugely admired as a dealer, a canny sleuth who has tracked down the world’s greatest missing antiquities. But despite all his gifts and talents, Moses Frank is also a man bristling with self-doubt - searching endlessly for the finest examples of human art, the sensual peaks of female beauty and some thin slivers of meaning in his terribly successful life. I believe Frank is a rich, unpredictable and multi-facetted lead character who will continue to fascinate readers in volumes 2 and 3 of THE MOSES FRANK TRILOGY.

It wasn’t dignified in the least, the way the grown man crouching on the floor played with the child—made a fool of himself to entertain a stranger’s abandoned baby. Not dignified, but it was… oddly endearing. Sophie felt an urge to get up and put some distance between herself and this tomfoolery on the floor, and yet she had to wonder too: if she brushed a lock of her hair over the child’s nose, would the baby take as much delight in it? She sat back. “How is it you know so much about babies?” “My half sisters are a great deal younger than my brother and I. We more or less raised them, and this is part of the drill. He’ll likely nap next, as outings tend to tire them when they’re this young.” He crouched low over the child and used his mouth to make a rude noise on the baby’s belly. The child exploded with glee, grabbing wildly for Mr. Charpentier’s hair and managing to catch his nose. It was quite a handsome nose in the middle of quite a handsome face. She’d noticed this at the coaching inn, in that first instant when he’d offered to help. She’d turned to find the source of the lovely, calm voice and found herself looking up into a face that put elegant masculine bones to the best possible use. His eyes were just the start of it—a true pale blue that suggested Norse ancestry, set under arching blond brows. It was a lean face, with a strong jaw and well-defined chin—Sophie could not abide a weak chin nor the artifices of facial hair men sported to cover one up. But none of that, not even the nose and chin and eyes combined, prepared Sophie for the visceral impact of more than six feet of Wilhelm Charpentier crouched on the floor, entertaining a baby. He smiled at the child as if one small package of humanity merited all the grace and benevolence a human heart could express. He beamed at the child, looked straight into the baby’s eyes, and communicated bottomless approval and affection without saying a word. It was… daunting. It was undignified, and yet Sophie sensed there was a kind of wisdom in the man’s handling of the baby she herself would lack. “He’ll

it seemed, everyone had some defining experience with outsiders. Two of the couples were multinational — Japanese natives with partners who were American and Chinese. Other hosts were Japanese by birth but had lived in other countries or traveled a lot. This appeared to give them a certain renegade perspective, a degree of global cross-pollination and comfort with strangers that seemed to put them at odds with many of the people around them, but also made them more like other Airbnb users internationally.

And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.

let your odds be a point of hope and transformation, let no odds defy you or define you, you have to defy and define it just as you want it to be. So do not be discouraged , keep the encouragement because the journey to your desires comes with expensive lessons that you need to invest in in order to grow

Given his emphasis on human freedom it is no wonder why some champion Kierkegaard as the father of existentialism, a philosophy that prices choice as the central feature of human existence and emphasizes the importance of defining oneself. For Kierkegaard, however, freedom and choice are not radical, as they are for some existentialists, and this can be seen in two ways. First, if humans are created beings, then freedom itself is a condition of being unfree with regard to one's very existence. Second, we often use our freedom in ways that lead, oddly enough, to a loss of that very freedom.

Every time you hop down to a new curve, you have the opportunity to recalibrate the metrics by which you gauge yourself. Just as a business moves from the messiness of start-up life to codifying process in order to scale, as you start to identify the metrics that measure what matters to you deeply, you'll be able to lock and load, then barrel up the y-axis of success. I don't know how you'll define success. Mine is best described by paraphrasing Samuel Johnson: the ultimate result of all ambition is to be happy at home. As you look to tip the odds of success in your favor, beware the undertow of the status quo—current stakeholders in your life and career, including family members, may encourage you to just keep doing what you are doing. The metrics you've always used to measure yourself are comfortable, and so are your established habits; performing well on your current path is practically automatic. You can almost convince yourself that staying put is the right thing. But there really is no such thing as "standing still."14 The "use it or lose it" principle applies to our brain cells just as it does to the muscles in our bodies. Neuroplasticity has a reverse function. Connections recede through lack of activation, while continual stimulation of neural pathways keeps them healthy and active, including—and especially—when you step back, down, or sideways.

Whatever the components of my depression, I’ve never wanted them to define me. I feel that the other parts of me—the part that gets up every day and finds genuine humor in odd places, the part that hungers for community, the part that always strains to reach the end of the story—these are the real parts. So sometimes when I have to acknowledge the dark part, to say that I’m really struggling and ask for help, I feel like I’m talking about the inner workings of a stranger. The sadness is real and it is always around and it is not who I am.

Failure is an inevitable part of the human experience. It's how we respond to failure that ultimately defines us. In the face of failure, it takes everything to stay resilient, to pick ourselves up and try again, even when the odds are stacked against us. It requires perseverance & a refusal to be defined by our mistakes. It demands that we embrace failure as an opportunity for growth, learning, and self-improvement, rather than as a reflection of our worth or abilities. For it is through our failures that we learn the most profound lessons about ourselves and our capacity for greatness.

Human beings have always been infatuated with gambling because it puts us head-to-head against the fates, with no holds barred. We enter this daunting battle because we are convinced that we have a powerful ally: Lady Luck will interpose herself between us and the fates (or the odds) to bring victory to our side. Adam Smith, a masterful student of human nature, defined the motivation: “The overweening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities [and] their absurd presumption in their own good fortune.”1 Although Smith was keenly aware that the human propensity to take risk propelled economic progress, he feared that society would suffer when that propensity ran amuck. So he was careful to balance moral sentiments against the benefits of a free market. A hundred and sixty years later, another great English economist, John Maynard Keynes, agreed: “When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.

Jesus’ passion was the cross—an ancient form of capital punishment. The cross—back then—was similar to our electric chair today. It would be quite odd for us to describe a prisoner’s passion for an electric chair. At first glance, it’s also odd to think that Jesus’ passion was the very instrument that would kill him. However, a deeper look reveals the mystery. The ancients defined passion as: how much you were willing to suffer for something. In other words: the level of passion is based upon the level of chosen suffering. Of course, Jesus’ passion wasn’t a wooden cross. Rather, it bridged the gap between the sin of the world and the love of his Father. His priceless wasn’t the wood, it was the world.

Boone yells, “Terry, don’t!” Yeah, like Terry, don’t! has ever stopped him. Terry, don’t paddle out into that wave. Terry, don’t do another shot. Terry, don’t shoot smack. Terry Maddux has defined his entire life by defying Terry-don’ts and turning them into Terry-dids, and now he’s calculating the odds of running across the tracks in front of a speeding train and putting it between him and his pursuers.

I hit the Monon trail. Steam poured from my nose and mouth as I grunted and slalomed speed-walkers and joggers. Civilians. Their heads turned as I picked up speed and began sprinting, like Rocky in downtown Philly. I ran as fast as I could for as long as I could, from a past that no longer defined me, toward a future undetermined. All I knew was that there would be pain and there would be purpose.

Alone among the community of nations, only Australia and America define any departure from groupthink and conformity as 'un-Australian' and 'un-American'.

It's always seemed odd to me that nonfiction is defined, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not fiction. But then again, it is also not poetry, or technical writing or libretto. It's like defining classical music as nonjazz.

Combat conditioning can be simply defined as "optimizing all physical efforts necessary to increase your odds of survival in combat.

If these analysts are right, then the way people actually function is at odds with the myth of the "good citizen." People are motivated essentially by the attempt to "maximize their outcomes." In social situations involving the fate of other people, this involves the reduction of "social and self distress" at minimum cost to other desired resources (Walster et al., 1976). When the costs are high, the "Rational Man" myth is threatened by the person's use of the "justification" mode of restoring "psychological equity" (Walster & Piliavin, 1972); or, as Schwartz (1975) describes, the "reassessment and redefinition of the situation." These reactions are essentially the irrational defenses based upon "denial of the victim's state of need," "denial of the suitability of norms" which define the victim as someone truly innocent and in a state of "genuine need." *Readers may be more familiar with comparable versions of this material that appeared in Walster, Berscheid and Walster, 1976. 30 CHAPTER 1 What some of our best known theorists have described is that we do not act as "good citizens." On the contrary, we are always trying to make the best deal for ourselves. And when it is the most profitable way to respond, we are not very "rational" in the way we justify our self-interested acts. If they are correct, then it is quite obvious that we must go to great lengths to maintain the belief that we live in a just world. But do we?

Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that’s incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact you know it will be filled with misery. You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines, and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

In a society where mediocrity is too often the standard and too often rewarded,” he said, “there is intense fascination with men who detest mediocrity, who refuse to define themselves in conventional terms, and who seek to transcend traditionally recognized human capabilities. This is exactly the type of person BUD/S is meant to find. The man who finds a way to complete each and every task to the best of his ability. The man who will adapt and overcome any and all obstacles.

It is a striking contrast, an emperor and a slave sharing and loving the same philosophy, the latter figure greatly influencing the former, but it is not a contradiction—nor would it have seemed odd to the ancients. It’s only in our modern reactionary, divisive focus on “privilege” that we have forgotten how much we all have in common as human beings, how we all stand equally naked and defenseless against fate whether we possess worldly power or not. Both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were, to borrow Epictetus’s metaphor, assigned difficult roles by the author of the universe. What defined them was how they managed to play these roles, which neither of them, Marcus especially, would ever have chosen.

High and low define each other; strong and weak, difficult and easy, each relies upon the other. It is only because of evil that we can know righteousness. Thus, no two elements can truly be at odds, rather they complement each other.” [The Great Chief Heavy Horse]

The Buddha famously said that life is suffering. I’m not a Buddhist, but I know what he meant and so do you. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness, and loss. That’s just nature. Each specific life comes with its own personalized portion of pain. It’s coming for you. You can’t stop it. And you know it. In response, most of us are programmed to seek comfort as a way to numb it all out and cushion the blows. We carve out safe spaces. We consume media that confirms our beliefs, we take up hobbies aligned with our talents, we try to spend as little time as possible doing the tasks we fucking loathe, and that makes us soft. We live a life defined by the limits we imagine and desire for ourselves because it’s comfortable as hell in that box. Not just for us, but for our closest family and friends. The limits we create and accept become the lens through which they see us. Through which they love and appreciate us. But for some, those limits start to feel like bondage, and when we least expect it, our imagination jumps those walls and hunts down dreams that in the immediate aftermath feel attainable. Because most dreams are. We are inspired to make changes little by little, and it hurts. Breaking the shackles and stretching beyond our own perceived limits takes hard fucking work—oftentimes physical work—and when you put yourself on the line, self doubt and pain will greet you with a stinging combination that will buckle your knees.

Now, there are other themes arising from our blindness to the Black Swan: We focus on preselected segments of the seen and generalize from it to the unseen: the error of confirmation. We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy. We behave as if the Black Swan does not exist: human nature is not programmed for Black Swans. What we see is not necessarily all that is there. History hides Black Swans from us and gives us a mistaken idea about the odds of these events: this is the distortion of silent evidence. We “tunnel”: that is, we focus on a few well-defined sources of uncertainty, on too specific a list of Black Swans (at the expense of the others that do not easily come to mind).

In real life you do not know the odds; you need to discover them, and the sources of uncertainty are not defined.

A fellow CEO laid this out for me graphically once when we were talking about M&A deals. “Think of M&A as having four quadrants defined by size and risk,” he said. “Big, low-risk deals are the ones everyone wants, but they don’t exist. Small, low-risk deals do exist, but you can’t make much money from them because of their size. Small, hairy deals are the worst quadrant, because the reward is limited and the odds are stacked against you, so why bother? The bingo quadrant is the big, hairy deals. If you can find a big, hairy deal with solvable problems, that’s where the real money is.

In 2013, the Stanford economist Raj Chetty unveiled a detailed map of opportunity that showed how the course of a person’s life was sharply defined by the zip codes in which they happened to grow up. In Salt Lake City, a person born to a family in the bottom fifth of household income had a 10.8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. In Milwaukee, the odds were less than half that. Such a lopsided distribution of wealth was actually hurting the long-term growth of the economy.