Disappeared Without A Trace Quotes

We don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.

Studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn't relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one's looking, and words don't leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That's what makes them so powerful. That's what makes them so important. That's what makes them hurt so much.

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

Why do people so often keep on speaking without ever saying anything? Words so often disappear furtively, as if they had never existed. They don’t stir any strings in our minds or thrill our emotions. They leave no trace in our memory and vanish simply like birds in the airy void of the sky. ("Words flew away like birds" )

Absence is worse than death. If you suddenly disappeared without a trace, it's like you had never lived.

We do not disappear without a trace. We leave a wake that never quite disappears, a gash in time that we so laboriously leave behind us.

Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important. That’s what makes them hurt so much.

what good is safety if she has to grow up in a world where people disappear without a trace because they pray to a different God?

INTERVIEWER Do you believe in God? ECO Why does one love a certain person one day and discover the next day that the love is gone? Feelings, alas, disappear without justification, and often without a trace. INTERVIEWER If you don’t believe in God, then why have you written at such great length about religion? ECO Because I do believe in religion. Human beings are religious animals, and such a characteristic feature of human behavior cannot be ignored or dismissed.

By telling stories I...wanted to show...that that which is lost does not have to disappear without a trace. (Nobel Lecture 1999)

I don’t know the right thing to do anymore. I want to protect Sophie and keep her safe, but what good is safety if she has to grow up in a world where people disappear without a trace because they pray to a different God?

Everything was related. This was what nobody seemed to understand. That although some corn-fed family in Iowa might not feel the loss of the Philippines now, they would someday, they would have to, because ecosystems were connected, because life mattered, because nothing in this world could disappear without a trace

The steady Shen Jue, the calm Shen Jue, and the strategizing Shen Jue had all disappeared without a trace. He was Xie Jinglan, and he was going to find the bookboy he waited for and searched for ten years, Xiahou Lian.

I read, I daydreamed, I wandered the city so ardently in part because it was a means of wandering in my thoughts, and my thoughts were runaways, constantly taking me away in the midst of the conversation, the meal, the class, the work, the play, the dance, the party. They were a place I wanted to be, thinking, musing, analyzing, imagining, hoping, tracing connections, integrating new ideas, but they grabbed me and ran with me from the situations at hand over and over. I disappeared in the middle of conversations, sometimes because I was bored but just as often because someone said something so interesting that my mind chased after the idea they offered and lost track of the rest of what they said. I lived in a long reverie for years, went days without much interruption to it, which was one of the gifts of solitude.

We disappear as stars do, soundless, without a trace.

For minutes on end he could not tell whether he was really hearing howls of pain, or whether it was simply that his years of long, exhausting work had rendered him incapable of distinguishing between the general noise and ancient prehistoric screams that were somehow preserved in time ('the evidence of suffering does not disappear without a trace,' he hopefully remarked) and now were being raised by the rain, like dust.

Who else can walk around in a suit like that and then disappear without a trace?” “That’s easy,” Granuaile replied. “Keyser Söze.” She blew on the tips of her fingers. “Poof. He’s gone.

The broken are not always gathered together,of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of "senseless tragedies" but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Childeren are killed. Madamen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessy mourned. loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; Over roads new printed with their foot steps,the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities people with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stuberness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. we can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.

Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock. I close my eyes, I open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds, these things—some with names, some without—disappear without a trace. All that is left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?

We don’t actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace. —T. S. Eliot

Nothing. I have no way of getting in touch with Machiavelli." Virginia produced her wooden flute and spun it in her fingers. "I don't know why you're so worried, Doctor. I can easily lull them to sleep with-" Before she could finish her sentence a green-skinned, green-haired, fish-tailed woman had leapt straight up out of the sea, snatched the flute from Virginia's fingers and splashed back into the water on the opposite side of the boat, leaving her empty-handed. Virginia Dare's scream was hideous. Flinging off her smoke-stained jacket and pulling off her shoes,she launched herself over the side of the boat and disappeared beneath the waves without a trace.

What can the people on this island create?” I went on. “A few kinds of vegetables, cars that constantly break down, heavy, bulky stoves, some half-starved stock animals, oily cosmetics, babies, the occasional simple play, books no one reads…Poor, unreliable things that will never make up for those that are disappearing—and the energy that goes along with them. It’s subtle but it seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out. If it goes on like this and we can’t compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace. Don’t you ever feel that way?

several people have disappeared, without leaving the slightest trace; a dead child was found by the roadside, with no visible or ascertainable cause of death—sheep and other animals have been found in the fields, bleeding from open wounds.

On the eleventh day, it finally stopped raining. Musashi chafed to be out in the open, but it was another week before they were able to return to work under a bright sun. The field they had so arduously carved out of the wilderness had disappeared without a trace; in its place were rocks, and a river where none had been before. The water seemed to mock them just as the villagers had. Iori, seeing no way to reclaim their loss, looked up and said, “This place is beyond hope. Let’s look for better land somewhere else.” “No,” Musashi said firmly. “With the water drained off, this would make excellent farmland. I examined the location from every angle before I chose it.” “What if we have another heavy rain?” “We’ll fix it so the water doesn’t come this way. We’ll lay a dam from here all the way to that hill over there.” ‘That’s an awful lot of work.” “You seem to forget that this is our dōjō. I’m not giving up a foot of this land until I see barley growing on it.” Musashi carried on his stubborn struggle throughout the winter, into the second month of the new year. It took several weeks of strenuous labor to dig ditches, drain the water off, pile dirt for a dike and then cover it with heavy rocks. Three weeks later everything was again washed away. “Look,” Iori said, “we’re wasting our energy on something impossible. Is that the Way of the Sword?” The question struck close to the bone, but Musashi would not give in. Only a month passed before the next disaster, a heavy snowfall followed by a quick thaw. Iori, on his return from trips to the temple for food, inevitably wore a long face, for the people there rode him mercilessly about Musashi’s failure. And finally Musashi himself began to lose heart. For two full days and on into a third, he sat silently brooding and staring at his field. Then it dawned on him suddenly. Unconsciously, he had been trying to create a neat, square field like those common in other parts of the Kanto Plain, but this was not what the terrain called for. Here, despite the general flatness, there were slight variations in the lay of the land and the quality of the soil that argued for an irregular shape. “What a fool I’ve been,” he exclaimed aloud. “I tried to make the water flow where I thought it should and force the dirt to stay where I thought it ought to be. But it didn’t work. How could it? Water’s water, dirt’s dirt. I can’t change their nature. What I’ve got to do is learn to be a servant to the water and a protector of the land.” In his own way, he had submitted to the attitude of the peasants. On that day he became nature’s manservant. He ceased trying to impose his will on nature and let nature lead the way, while at the same time seeking out possibilities beyond the grasp of other inhabitants of the plain. The snow came again, and another thaw; the muddy water oozed slowly over the plain. But Musashi had had time to work out his new approach, and his field remained intact. “The same rules must apply to governing people,” he said to himself. In his notebook, he wrote: “Do not attempt to oppose the way of the universe. But first make sure you know the way of the universe.

It is the prerogative of night, when thoughts, like relentless waves, break on the impressionable sands of the mind. Questions, theories, and suppositions come crashing ashore, and just like waves, they disappear into the grains of the mind without a trace. In this sea of uncertainty, stormed by nocturnal nightmares, the mind slips in and out of consciousness. It is the melting pot where logic and fantasy combine until supposition becomes hypothesis and hypothesis morphs into unsubstantiated fact.

It is merciless, how the world moves on after the death of a person, how they can disappear without a trace, like footprints in the melting snow.

But what good is safety if she has to grow up in a world where people disappear without a trace because they pray to a different God.

Just like a character in a novel, he disappeared suddenly, without leaving the slightest trace behind.

Xinxin Ming or Trust in the Heart The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and heaven and earth are set apart. If you want the truth [of nonduality] to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease. When the Way is not understood, the mind chatters endlessly to no avail. The Perfect Way is vastness without holiness. Like infinite space it contains all and lacks nothing. Because you pick and choose, cling and reject, you can't see its Suchness. Neither be entangled in the world, nor in inner feelings of emptiness. Be serene in the oneness of things, And dualism vanishes of its own accord. Craving the passivity of Oneness you are filled with activity. As long as you tarry in dualism, You will never know Oneness. If you don't trust in the Heart, you fall into assertion or denial. In this world of Suchness there is neither self nor other-than-self. To be in accord with the Way, let go of all self-centered striving. Denying the world [of duality] is the asserting of it; Asserting emptiness [oneness] is the denying of it. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you go. To return to the root [the One] is to find the meaning, But to pursue appearances [the many] is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment there is a going beyond the one and the many. The mind clings to its image of the world; We call it real only because of our ignorance. Do not seek after the truth, merely cease to cherish your opinions. For the mind in harmony with the One, all selfishness disappears. With not even a trace of fear, you can trust the universe completely. All at once you are free, with nothing left to hold on to. All is empty, brilliant, perfect in its own being. In the world of things as they are, there is neither observer nor observed. If you want to describe its essence, the best you can say is "Not-two." Even to have the idea of enlightenment is to go astray. Thoughts that are fettered turn from truth, sink into the unwise habit of "not liking." "Not liking" brings weariness of spirit; estrangements serve no purpose. In this "Not-two" nothing is separate, And nothing in the world is excluded. The enlightened of all times and places have entered into this truth. The One is none other than the All, the All none other than the One. Take your stand on this, and the rest will follow of its accord; To trust in the Heart is the "Not-two," the "Not-two" is to trust in the Heart. There is one reality, not many; Distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant. To seek Mind with the mind is the greatest of all mistakes. I have spoken, but in vain; For what can words say— Of things that have no yesterday, tomorrow, or today. Jianzhi Sengcan (aka Seng-Ts'an, 僧璨, ?-606)

I want to protect Sophie and keep her safe, but what good is safety if she has to grow up in a world where people disappear without a trace because they pray to a different God? If I am arrested …

All the world wants to help Nepal and vast sums of aid have been lavished on the country, yet much of it seems to have disappeared without trace, leaving only faded signs and notice-boards behind.

It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occured to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace.

have we ever heard of any one dynasty ruling endlessly, beyond all bounds of time? Never! Even the illustrious Ishvaku clan, which boasted Lord Rama, died out. The Rettai Mandalathar rose to bring the Chalukya reign to an end. Empires and dynasties do have a habit of rising to tremendous greatness, and crashing to hollow depths; entirely natural, don't you think? There are kingdoms that have ruled for centuries, and disappeared without a trace.

O youth! youth! you have no concerns, you possess, as it were, all the treasures of the universe, even grief is a comfort to you, even sadness suits your looks, you are self-assured and bold, you say: 'Look, I'm the only one alive!' while the very days of your life run away and vanish without a trace and without number and everything in you disappears like wax, like snow in the heat of the sun... And perhaps the entire secret of your charm consists not in the possibility of doing everything, but in the possibility of thinking you can do everything, perhaps it consists precisely in the fact that you want only to scatter on the wind energies that you wouldn't know how to use for anything else, perhaps it consists in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a spendthrift and seriously considers that he has the right to say: 'Oh, the things I could have done if only I hadn't wasted my time!

I have something for you,” she said as she pulled his leather gloves from the sleeve of her prison tunic. He stared at them. “How—” “I got them from the discarded clothes. Before I made the climb.” “Six stories in the dark.” She nodded. She wasn’t going to wait for thanks. Not for the climb, or the gloves, or for anything ever again. He pulled the gloves on slowly, and she watched his pale, vulnerable hands disappear beneath the leather. They were trickster hands—long, graceful fingers made for prying open locks, hiding coins, making things vanish. “When we get back to Ketterdam, I’m taking my share, and I’m leaving the Dregs.” He looked away. “You should. You were always too good for the Barrel.” It was time to go. “Saints’ speed, Kaz.” Kaz snagged her wrist. “Inej.” His gloved thumb moved over her pulse, traced the top of the feather tattoo. “If we don’t make it out, I want you to know…” She waited. She felt hope rustling its wings inside her, ready to take flight at the right words from Kaz. She willed that hope into stillness. Those words would never come. The heart is an arrow. She reached up and touched his cheek. She thought he might flinch again, even knock her hand away. In nearly two years of battling side by side with Kaz, of late-night scheming, impossible heists, clandestine errands, and harried meals of fried potatoes and hutspot gobbled down as they rushed from one place to another, this was the first time she had touched him skin to skin, without the barrier of gloves or coat or shirtsleeve. She let her hand cup his cheek. His skin was cool and damp from the rain. He stayed still, but she saw a tremor pass through him, as if he were waging a war with himself. “If we don’t survive this night, I will die unafraid, Kaz. Can you say the same?” His eyes were nearly black, the pupils dilated. She could see it took every last bit of his terrible will for him to remain still beneath her touch. And yet, he did not pull away. She knew it was the best he could offer. It was not enough. She dropped her hand. He took a deep breath. Kaz had said he didn’t want her prayers and she wouldn’t speak them, but she wished him safe nonetheless. She had her aim now, her heart had direction, and though it hurt to know that path led away from him, she could endure it.

goes on like this and we can’t compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace. Don’t you ever feel that way?

You ever wish that you could die...but without all of the dying? he says. Like, not die, but just cease to exist, disappear, be invisible, every trace of your life, even the memories of you in other people's hearts and minds, all gone.

If it goes on like this and we can’t compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace. Don’t you ever feel that way?

I don’t know the right thing to do anymore. I want to protect Sophie and keep her safe, but what good is safety if she has to grow up in a world where people disappear without a trace because they pray to a different God? If I am arrested …

now? I don’t know the right thing to do anymore. I want to protect Sophie and keep her safe, but what good is safety if she has to grow up in a world where people disappear without a trace because they pray to a different God? If I am arrested . .

Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one’s looking, and words don’t leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important. That’s what makes them hurt so much.

Sienna gave him a solemn shrug. “Robert, speaking from a purely scientific standpoint—all logic, no heart—I can tell you without a doubt that without some kind of drastic change, the end of our species is coming. And it’s coming fast. It won’t be fire, brimstone, apocalypse, or nuclear war … it will be total collapse due to the number of people on the planet. The mathematics is indisputable.” Langdon stiffened. “I’ve studied a fair amount of biology,” she said, “and it’s quite normal for a species to go extinct simply as a result of overpopulating its environment. Picture a colony of surface algae living in a tiny pond in the forest, enjoying the pond’s perfect balance of nutrients. Unchecked, they reproduce so wildly that they quickly cover the pond’s entire surface, blotting out the sun and thereby preventing the growth of the nutrients in the pond. Having sapped everything possible from their environment, the algae quickly die and disappear without a trace.” She gave a heavy sigh. “A similar fate could easily await mankind. Far sooner and faster than any of us imagine.

I watch the disparate fragments float up and disappear, without comment. Pure unpretentious visions. In my mind, however, these simple scenes summon forth a sadness that I can find no words for. Like a ship sailing past a window, they appear only to disappear without a trace.

The minute Molly and Priss disappeared inside, Trace cursed. He actually wanted to hit something, but a tree would break his knuckles, he didn’t want to put another dent in the truck, and Dare would hit back. Chris Chapey, Dare’s longtime best friend and personal assistant, approached with the enormous cat draped over one shoulder so that he could keep an eye on the trailing dogs. The bottom half of Liger filled his arms, and the long tail hung down to the hem of Chris’s shorts. Without even thinking about it, Trace started petting the cat. After a few hours in the truck together, he and Liger had an understanding of sorts. Dare watched him, but said only, “That cat is a beast.” “He’s an armful, that’s for sure.” Chris hefted him a little higher, and got a sweet meow in return. Both dogs barked in excitement, but quited when Liger gave them a level stare. Chris laughed at that. “You want me to head in to keep an eye on things” “That’s why I pay you the big bucks, right?” Dare stared toward the house. “You can tell Trace’s lady—” “She’s not mine.” Both Chris and Dare gave him a certain male-inspired look, a look that said they understood his bullshit and would let it slide—for now.

I was a failure, a failure of the most disgraceful and cowardly kind. The thought was unbearable, and I began to play with the idea of not returning home at all, but of going out into the world, of submerging myself in the darkness somewhere, in some darkness where a man might disappear without trace, without a final cry.

In the mid-1990s, a new employee of Sun Microsystems in California kept disappearing from their database. Every time his details were entered, the system seemed to eat him whole; he would disappear without a trace. No one in HR could work out why poor Steve Null was database kryptonite. The staff in HR were entering the surname as “Null,” but they were blissfully unaware that, in a database, NULL represents a lack of data, so Steve became a non-entry. To computers, his name was Steve Zero or Steve McDoesNotExist. Apparently, it took a while to work out what was going on, as HR would happily reenter his details each time the issue was raised, never stopping to consider why the database was routinely removing him.

The dealership had given him two keys for his new ride, and Andrew was giving the second one to Neil. When Neil took too long to take it from him, Andrew dropped it on the concrete between them. "A man can only have so many issues," Andrew said. "It is just a key." "You're a foster child. You know it isn't," Neil said. He didn't pick the key up but pressed two fingers to it, learning the shape and feel of this newest gift. "I've always had enough cash to live comfortably, but all the decent places ask too many questions. There are background checks and credit checks and references, things I can't provide on my own without leaving too much of a trail. I squatted in Millport. Before that I stayed in decrepit weekly hotels or broke into people's cars or found places that were happy being paid under the table. "It's always been 'go'," Neil said. He turned his hand palm-up and traced a key into his skin with his fingertip. He'd toyed with Andrew's house key so many times he knew every dip and ridge by heart. "It's always been 'lie' and 'hide' and 'disappear'. I've never belonged anywhere or had the right to call anything my own. But Coach gave me keys to the court, and you told me to stay. You gave me a key and called it home." Neil clenched his hand, imagining the bite of metal against his palm, and lifted his gaze to Andrew's face. "I haven't had a home since my parents died." Andrew dug a finger in Neil's cheek and forcibly turned his head away. "Don't look at me like that. I am not your answer, and you sure as fuck aren't mine.

I was surprised to learn from my research, however, that the well-known notion of anger catharsis is poppycock. There’s no evidence for the belief that “letting off steam” is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

For the first time in his life, Midhat wished he were more religious. Of course he prayed, but though that was a private mechanism it sometimes felt like a public act, and the lessons of the Quran were lessons by rote, one was steeped in them, hearing them so often. They were the texture of his world, and yet they did not occupy that central, vital part of his mind, the part that was vibrating at this moment, on this train, rattling forward while he struggled to hold all these pieces. As a child he had felt some of the same curiosity he held for the mysteries of other creeds—for Christianity with its holy fire, the Samaritans with their alphabets—but that feeling had dulled while he was still young, when traditional religion began to seem a worldly thing, a realm of morals and laws and the same old stories and holidays. They were acts, not thoughts. He faced the water now along the coast, steadying his gaze on the slow distance, beyond the blur of trees pushing past the tracks, on the desolate fishing boats hobbling over the waves. He sensed himself tracing the lip of something very large, something black and well-like, a vessel which was at the same time an emptiness, and he thought, without thinking precisely, only feeling with the tender edges of his mind, what the Revelation might have been for in its origin. Why it was so important that they could argue to the sword what it meant if God had hands, and whether He had made the universe. Underneath it all was a living urgency, that original issue of magnitude; the way several hundred miles on foot could be nothing to the mind, Nablus to Cairo, one thought of a day’s journey by train, but placed vertically that same distance in depth exposed the body’s smallness and suddenly one thought of dying. Did one need to face the earth, nose to soil, to feel that distance towering above? There was something of his own mortality in this. Oh then but why, in a moment of someone else’s death, must he think of his own disappearance?

Speculation was now news. News had been confused with fact. Fact had been replaced by expert opinion. People had been replaced by their biographies. Ability had been replaced by disability. Thinking had been replaced by psychology. History had been reduced to story. And while the news media pumped out a new story every week on things that could kill you, Hollywood simultaneously created stories that showed that everything could be prevailed over. Meaning, he said, was so malleable that it could be turned inside out, and no one would know the difference—and it would—and, just like the universe that had expanded to its maximum size, everything that had ever been would happen in reverse and revert back to its original form until existence would disappear without leaving a trace of itself as the Big Bang backfired.

Sometimes, visualize that your heart is a brilliant ball of light. As you breathe out, it radiates rays of white light in all directions, carrying your happiness to all beings. As you breathe in, their suffering, negativity and afflictions come towards you in the form of dense, black light, which is absorbed in your heart and disappears in its brilliant white light without a trace, relieving all beings of their pain and sorrow.

O youth! youth! you have no concerns, you possess, as it were, all the treasures of the universe, even grief is a comfort to you, even sadness suits your looks, you are self-assured and bold, you say: 'Look, I'm the only one alive!' while the very days of your life run away and vanish without a trace and without number and everything in you disappears like wax, like snow in the hear of the sun... And perhaps the entire et of your charm consists not in the possibility of doing everything, but in the possibility of thinking perhaps it consists precisely in the fact that you want only to scatter on the wind energies that you wouldn't know how to use for anything else, perhaps it consists in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a spendthrift and seriously considers that he has the right to say: 'Oh, the things I could have done if only I hadn't wasted my time!

All Latin Americans know about the disappeared. The period of the late 1970s and 1980s was a dark time in South America. It was a time of military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The governments kidnapped civilians and took them to undisclosed locations and tortured and killed them. Their bodies were never found. Their bones were never found. In Argentina, in just seven years’ time, the government disappeared about thirty thousand people. They woke up one morning and went about their days and then they vanished without a trace. So in Argentina, their mothers formed a group called the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They wore white scarves around their heads and marched two by two in front of the presidential palace every Thursday afternoon at 3:30 P.M. holding pictures of their disappeared children. They still do it every Thursday afternoon. These mothers are legendary. They have been marching for forty years.

From the very first time I interviewed him in his office in Trump Tower in 1985, the image I had of Trump was that of a black hole. Whatever goes in quickly disappears without a trace. Nothing sustains. It’s forever uncertain when someone or something will throw Trump off his precarious perch—when his sense of equilibrium will be threatened and he’ll feel an overwhelming compulsion to restore it. Beneath his bluff exterior, I always sensed a hurt, incredibly vulnerable little boy who just wanted to be loved.

The feeling of inner detachment and isolation is not in itself an abnormal phenomenon but is normal in the sense that consciousness has withdrawn from the phenomenal world and got outside time and space. You will find the clearest parallels in Indian philosophy, especially in Yoga. In your case the feeling is reinforced by your psychological studies. The assimilated unconscious apparently disappears in consciousness without trace, but it has the effect of detaching consciousness from its ties to the object. I have described this development in my commentary on the Golden Flower. It is a sort of integration process and an anticipation of consciousness. The cross is an indication of this, since it represents an integration of the 4 (functions). It is perfectly understandable that, when consciousness detaches itself from the object, the feeling arises that one does not know where one stands. Actually one is standing nowhere, because standing has a below and an above. But there one has no below and above at all, because spatiality pertains to the world of the senses, and consciousness possesses spatiality only when it is in participation with that world. It is a not-knowing, which has the same positive character as nirvana in the Buddhist definition, or the wu-wei, not-doing, of the Chinese, which does not mean doing nothing. The profound doubt you seem to be suffering from is quite in order as it simply expresses the detachment of consciousness and the resultant explanation of the objective world as an illusion.

...you will open your hands and feel the sweat on your palms and perhaps you will remember that you were born without lifelines on your hand, without fortune, life, or love: you were born, you will be born with a smooth palm, but all you have to do is be born; after a few hours, that blank surface will be filled with signs, lines, portents. You will die with your dense lines worn out, but all you have to do is die for all trace of your destiny to disappear from your hands after a few hours. Chaos has no plural.

Later, as I reflect on the situation, I realize that if the satellite had in fact hit us, we probably wouldn’t even have known it. When an aircraft flies into a mountain in bad weather, at five hundred miles per hour, there is little left to tell the story of what went wrong: this crash would have taken place at a speed seventy times that. When I used to work on investigations of aircraft mishaps as a Navy test pilot, I would sometimes reflect that a crew might never have known that anything had gone wrong. Misha, Gennady, and I would have gone from grumbling to one another in our cold Soyuz to being blasted in a million directions as diffused atoms, all in the space of a millisecond. Our neurological systems would not even have had time to process the incoming data into conscious thought. The energy involved in a collision between two large objects at 35,000 miles per hour would be similar to that of a nuclear bomb. I think of that time I almost flew an F-14 into the water and would have disappeared without a trace. I don’t know whether this comforts me or disturbs me.

That's what scares me the most, Paul. That I'll just pass through life and all the people I know will just disappear, without a trace, without me ever telling them how much they mean to me, no matter how small the time spent was or how great the friendship was. That they'll be gone and they'll forget me and I'll end up with nothing." I saw in my head Charley laughing, Charley sticking his head out the window and screaming, Charley playing a video game so intensely he was a foot from the screen. Moments flashed before my eyes in a quick, unrelenting sequence. I shook my head. "I know. Believe me, I know.

But then Lalita did something odd. Well, not odd, but beautiful. She shifted the clay pot of water from her right hip to her left. She pushed it up against the curve of her waist, wrapped her arm around the neck of the pot, and disappeared around the bend. Mohan knelt to the ground; he could taste the earthen dampness clinging to her waist. He knew then that he'd been wrong: she wasn't simply happy; happiness could not possibly explain the strange loveliness, the utter seductiveness, of that gesture. No, what Lalita had was something even more audacious than happiness. What was it? Mohan trembled.... Sitting on his bed that afternoon, after lunch, Mohan decided that the clay of the pot and the bronze of Lalita's skin were the only true substances. They were why the rains fell, why the sun rose. His fingers traced them all his life. Then he knew. He knew what Lalita had that the others didn't, that he didn't; she had sex. In fact, he realized, what she had was the opposite of what he had. But what was it that he had? What was the opposite of sex? It seemed like a question without an answer. Like where does reality stop and unreality begin? Or, what goes deeper, the human soul or the human imagination? But this one had an answer. That much Mohan knew. He knew that the opposite of sex was fear. And fear was something he had an abundance of.

It is evident at a glance that God has caught the sickness of Prometheus. For just as Prometheus makes all his passion, his whole libido flow inwards to the soul, to his innermost depths, dedicating himself entirely to his soul’s service, so God pursues his course round and round the pivot of the world and exhausts himself exactly like Prometheus, who is near to self-extinction. All his libido has gone into the unconscious, where an equivalent must be prepared; for libido is energy, and energy cannot disappear without a trace, but must always produce an equivalent. This equivalent is Pandora and the gift she brings to her father: a precious jewel which she wants to give to mankind to ease their sufferings.

People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical. If someone chucks a real stone at you on the playground, it leaves a bruise. Bruises heal. Bruises get people in trouble, too; bruises end with detentions for the rock-throwers, with disapproving parents ushered into private offices for serious conversations about bullying and bad behavior. Words almost never end that way. Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one’s looking, and words don’t leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important. That’s what makes them hurt so much.

a pawn in a very complicated game, a little cog in a huge gear, so little that it should not even be seen: in fact, it was established that I would go through here without leaving any traces; and instead, every minute I spend here I am leaving more traces. I leave traces if I do not speak with anyone, since I stick out as a man who won't open his mouth; I leave traces if I speak with someone because every word spoken is a word that remains and can crop up again later, with quotation marks or without. Perhaps this is why the author piles supposition on supposition in long paragraphs without dialogue, a thick, opaque layer of lead where I may pass unnoticed, disappear. I am not at all the sort of person who attracts attention, I am an anonymous presence against an even more anonymous background.

Eventually, though, my mind begins to quiet. I can feel everything slow down. I lose track of the chimes. I don’t know how many are left, and I don’t care. I focus now on a very modern kind of image: a picture of my own brain, like an fMRI, with thoughts flashing across it in angry red. As my mind slows, the red fades, and as my concentration increases, my brain begins to glow faintly white. Another unbidden thought; another trace of red that recedes like an afterimage. If it goes really well, the glow continues, and I feel the sort of exhilaration that comes when hard effort is paying off—when you reach the end of the steep trail, stand at a peak, and can see miles in every direction. But some part of me is careful not to enjoy it too much or too consciously. If I focus on it, it disappears. To sustain it, I have to just be present with it. Whether

it appears various ancient Mystics had a hard time explaining with their archaic languages lacking the words for detailing “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” the Trinity concept being misunderstood by a good host the Father is the immutable unmoving Godhead from whence the Holy Ghost flows to all widespread the Son, a physical expression in those whose self is dead God can't be received fully if the “me” occupies space the sense of individual selfhood disappears without a trace the higher nature of God is formless unmanifested from it, this changing world of form is emanated everything is God, in God, all-inclusively unending ungraspable by brain-mind and its inferior comprehending people wonder, “okay, but what created God?” contemplate “Eternal” or “Infinite” to see the query flawed All is the Mind of God without exception including your Mind prior to conception formless No-Thing, yet Infinitely Everything yet both, yet neither, for it's beyond expounding

Is war inevitable? Is not war an anachronism? Why should man, able to discover atomic processes, not be able to establish world peace? Those who pose this question do not know what capitalism means. Can there be world peace when in Russia millions of slaves are worked to death in concentration camps, and the entire population lacks freedom? Can there be world peace when in America the kings of capital keep the entire society in subjection and exploitation without being faced by any trace of a fight for social freedom? Where capitalist greed and capitalist exploitation dominate world peace must remain a pious wish. When we say that, hence, war is inseparable from capitalism, that war can only disappear with capitalism itself, this does not mean that war against war is of no use and that we have to wait till capitalism has been destroyed. It means that the fight against war is inseparable from fight against capitalism. War against war can be effective only as part of the workers' class war against capitalism.

[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques. This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory. The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.

When we get down to potential versus reality in relationships, we often see disappointment, not successful achievement. In the Church, if someone creates nuclear fallout in a calling, they are often released or reassigned quickly. Unfortunately, we do not have that luxury when we marry. So many of us have experienced this sad realization in the first weeks of our marriages. For example, we realized that our partner was not going to live up to his/her potential and give generously to the partnership. While fighting the mounting feelings of betrayal, we watched our new spouses claim a right to behave any way they desired, often at our expense. Most of us made the "best" of a truly awful situation but felt like a rat trapped in maze. We raised a family, played our role, and hoped that someday things would change if we did our part. It didn't happen, but we were not allowed the luxury of reassigning or releasing our mates from poor stewardship as a spouse or parent. We were stuck until we lost all hope and reached for the unthinkable: divorce. Reality is simple for some. Those who stay happily married (the key word here is happily are the ones who grew and felt companionship from the first days of marriage. Both had the integrity and dedication to insure its success. For those of us who are divorced, tracing back to those same early days, potential disappeared and reality reared its ugly head. All we could feel, after a sealing for "time and all eternity," was bound in an unholy snare. Take the time to examine the reality of who your sweetheart really is. What do they accomplish by natural instinct and ability? What do you like/dislike about them? Can you live with all the collective weaknesses and create a happy, viable union? Are you both committed to making each other happy? Do you respect each other's agency, and are you both encouraging and eager to see the two of you grow as individuals and as a team? Do you both talk-the-talk and walk-the-walk? Or do you love them and hope they'll change once you're married to them? Chances are that if the answer to any of these questions are "sorta," you are embracing their potential and not their reality. You may also be embracing your own potential to endure issues that may not be appropriate sacrifices at this stage in your life. No one changes without the internal impetus and drive to do so. Not for love or money. . . . We are complex creatures, and although we are trained to see the "good" in everyone, it is to our benefit to embrace realism when it comes to finding our "soul mate." It won't get much better than what you have in your relationship right now.

Like all disappearing forms, art seeks to duplicate itself by means of simulation, but it will nevertheless soon be gone, leaving behind an immense museum of artificial art and abandoning the field completely to advertising. A dizzying eclecticism of form, a dizzying eclecticism of pleasure - such, already, was the agenda of the baroque. For the baroque, however, the vortex of artifice has a fleshly aspect. Like the practitioners of the baroque, we too are irrepressible creators of images, but secretly we are iconoclasts - not in the sense that we destroy images, but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see. Most present-day images - be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images - are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared. The fascination of a monochromatic picture is the marvellous absence of form - the erasure, though still in the form of art, of all aesthetic syntax. Similarly, the fascination of trans sexuality is the erasure - though in the form of spectacle - of sexual difference. These are images that conceal nothing, that reveal nothing - that have a kind of negative intensity. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence. Just as Byzantine icons made it possible to stop asking whether God existed - without, for all that, ceasing to believe in him.

Today there are countless neurotics who are neurotic simply because they do not know why they cannot be happy in their own way—they do not even know that the fault lies with them. Besides these neurotics there are many more normal people, men and women of the better kind, who feel restricted and discontented because they have no symbol which would act as an outlet for their libido. For all these people a reductive analysis down to the primal facts should be undertaken, so that they can become acquainted with their primitive personality and learn how to take due account of it. Only in this way can certain requirements be fulfilled and others rejected as unreasonable because of their infantile character. We like to imagine that our primitive traits have long since disappeared without trace. In this we are cruelly disappointed, for never before has our civilization been so swamped with evil. This gruesome spectacle helps us to understand what Christianity was up against and what it endeavoured to transform. The transforming process took place for the most part unconsciously, at any rate in the later centuries. When I remarked earlier (par. 106) that an unconscious transformation of libido was ethically worthless, and contrasted it with the Christianity of the early Roman period, as a patent example of the immorality and brutalization against which Christians had to fight, I ought to have added that mere faith cannot be counted as an ethical ideal either, because it too is an unconscious transformation of libido. Faith is a charisma for those who possess it, but it is no way for those who need to understand before they can believe. This is a matter of temperament and cannot be discounted as valueless. For, ultimately, even the believer believes that God gave man reason, and for something better than to lie and cheat with. Although we naturally believe in symbols in the first place, we can also understand them, and this is indeed the only viable way for those who have not been granted the charisma of faith.

The earliest commentaries on Scripture had been of this discursive nature, being addresses by word of mouth to the people, which were taken down by secretaries, and so preserved. While the traditionary teaching of the Church still preserved the vigour and vividness of its Apostolical origin, and spoke with an exactness and cogency which impressed an adequate image of it upon the mind of the Christian Expositor, he was able to allow himself free range in handling the sacred text, and to admit into the comment his own particular character of mind, and his spontaneous and individual ideas, in the full security, that, however he might follow the leadings of his own thoughts in unfolding the words of Scripture, his own deeply fixed views of Catholic truth would bring him safe home, without overstepping the limits of truth and sobriety. Accordingly, while the early Fathers manifest a most remarkable agreement in the principles and the substance of their interpretation, they have at the same time a distinctive spirit and manner, by which each may be known from the rest. About the vith or viith century this originality disappears; the oral or traditionary teaching, which allowed scope to the individual teacher, became hardened into a written tradition, and henceforward there is a uniform invariable character as well as substance of Scripture interpretation. Perhaps we should not err in putting Gregory the Great as the last of the original Commentators; for though very numerous commentaries on every book of Scripture continued to be written by the most eminent doctors in their own names, probably not one interpretation of any importance would be found in them which could not be traced to some older source. So that all later comments are in fact Catenas or selections from the earlier Fathers, whether they present themselves expressly in the form of citations from their volumes, or are lections upon the Lesson or Gospel for the day, extempore indeed in form, but as to their materials drawn from the previous studies and stores of the expositor. The latter would be better adapted for the general reader, the former for the purposes of the theologian.

The temple was in a field of graves suddenly a pitiful-looking skeleton appeared and said: A melancholy autumn wind Blows through the world; the pampas grass waves As we drift to the moor, Drift to the sea. What can be done With the mind of a man That should be clear But though he is dressed up in a monk's robe, Just lets life pass him by? Such deep musings Made me uneasy, I could not sleep. Towards dawn I dozed off... I found myself surrounded by a group of skeletons, acting as they had when they were still alive. One skeleton came over to me and said: Memories Flee and Are no more. All are empty dreams Devoid of meaning. Violate the reality of things And babble about 'God' and 'the Buddha' And you will never find the true Way. Still breathing, You feel animated, So a corpse in a field Seems to be something Apart from you. If chunks of rock Can serve as a memento To the dead A better headstone Would be a simple tea-mortar. Humans are indeed frightful things. A single moon Bright and clear In an unclouded sky; Yet we still stumble In the world's darkness. This world Is but A fleeting dream So why be alarmed At its evanescence? The vagaries of life, Though painful, Teach us Not to cling To this floating world. Why do people Lavish decoration On this set of bones, Destined to disappear Without a trace? The original body Must return to Its original place. Do not search For what cannot be found. No one really knows The nature of birth Nor the true dwelling place. We return to the source And turn to dust. Many paths lead from The foot of the mountain, But at the peak We all gaze at the Single bright moon. If at the end of our journey There is no final Resting place, Then we need not fear Losing our Way. No beginning. No end. Our mind Is born and dies; The emptiness of emptiness! Relax, And the mind Runs wild; Control the world And you can cast it aside. Rain, hail, snow, and ice: All are different But when they fall They become to same water As the valley stream. The ways of proclaiming The Mind all vary, But the same heavenly truth Can be seen In each and every one. Cover your path With fallen pine needles So no one will be able To locate your True dwelling place. How vain, The endless funderals at the Cremation grounds of Mount Toribe! Don't the mourner realize That they will be next? 'Life is fleeeting!' We think at the sight Of smoke drifting from Mount Toribe, But when will we realize That we are in the same boat? All is in vain! This morning, A healthy friend; This evening, A wisp of cremation smoke. What a pity! Evening smoke from Mount Toribe Blown violently To and fro By the wind. When burned We become ashes, and earth when buried. Is it only our sins That remain behind? All the sins Committed In the Three Worlds Will fade away Together with me.

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, The True Story of Murder in a Small Town, begins on a steamy August night with two teenagers, brother and sister, on an evil mission deep in a rural Michigan forest. For one desperate moment headlights appear on the lonely access road. Will they be found out? Thus the story of one of state’s strangest criminal cases unfolds. Girl breaks up with boyfriend. He turns violent. She disappears without a trace. Then state police investigators set out on what at first looks like a fool’s journey. The story is colored by a bizarre Ouija board death prophesy and the roles of two psychics, a former practicing witch and a handsome young artist who is suspected of Satanism. The canny and elusive suspect taunts police and seems always to be one step ahead of them. When a key witness is daunted by uncharacteristic injuries, a mysterious medium tells him he is the victim of black magic practiced by the suspect’s grandmother. And when, after eight years, the suspect finally is brought to trial, he is represented by a Roman Catholic priest.

I meditated upon the fact that gods and spirits are nothing but the creations of one’s own mind; and while thinking thus, the so-called spirits disappeared without a trace.

My Dearest Lauren Boyers-Sloan; I have a lot of time to think about your theory on rings. You deserve this and much more. Perhaps the significance of the diamond is that nothing can destroy this precious stone even when it is heated in an oven to a temperature of 1405 degrees Fahrenheit, It will then visually disappear without a trace of ash, after releasing only a small amount of carbon dioxide into a tiny puff of air floating into the atmosphere. Remarkable as it may seem that tiny puff of air will always remain somewhere drifting in the elements.... I now know that nothing can destroy the love I have for you even when I completely disappear from the face of this earth… I do love you still….and always will… Your love will remain in and with me forever… I will never love anyone like I do you… You can keep the gold bands right along with these forever… If you can’t take me back these are yours forever to do whatever you wish with them.… I won’t take them back and they can’t be returned. In the past few years, I certainly haven’t given you the best of me… If I lose you, it will only be because I have been so ill equipped with how to be the best man I could be to you…

Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace.

recently, college girls in Washington State had begun to disappear without a trace.

Self-pity is a weakness. I don't blame them or anybody for not having a normal life. Life isn't easy for anyone.

In the mid-1990s, a new employee of Sun Microsystems in California kept disappearing from their database. Every time his details were entered, the system seemed to eat him whole; he would disappear without a trace. No one in HR could work out why poor Steve Null was database kryptonite. The staff in HR were entering the surname as “Null,” but they were blissfully unaware that, in a database, NULL represents a lack of data, so Steve became a non-entry. To computers, his name was Steve Zero or Steve McDoesNotExist. Apparently, it took a while to work out what was going on, as HR would happily reenter his details each time the issue was raised, never stopping to consider why the database was routinely removing him.

I saw it then, a huge pulsing orb of shadow and trick, the vast, hungry thing he’d described from his dreams, swelling to encompass the bars holding it. Consuming. Shadows poured toward it, each one disappearing inside its blinding light. An origin. A beginning, where the source originated from. It wanted John, wanted him back. It wanted us all back. You can’t have him. He’s mine.

If the Garden has been properly laid out, there need not be a maze in it. For the quest, the puzzlement, the contingency of the place of rest with its bench and rosebushes in the center of it all, the ease of entrance and its welcoming entrapment, the problems of homing, will all have been provided by the Garden itself. And the maze's parable, unrolling beneath the hurrying feet of the last wanderers on a summer evening that now chills and darkens - the parable of how there can be no clarity of truth without puzzlement, no joy without losing one's way - will be propounded by the Garden's final perfection, namely, that in it is no trace of the designer, that no image of him can ever be found. He - you - will have disappeared into the ground of the place that had been made.

This today, just as in earlier times, religious teaching, which is accepted on trust and sustained by external pressure, gradually weakens under the influence of knowledge and experience of life that stands in opposition to the religious doctrines; a person can go on living for a long time imagining that the body of religious instruction imparted to him when he was a child is still there, whereas it has in fact disappeared without leaving a trace.

You would say, on the contrary, that I am doing a job, a pawn in a very complicated game, a little cog in a huge gear, so little that it should not even be seen: in fact it was established that I would go through here without leaving any traces; and instead every minute I spend here I am leaving more traces. I leave traces if I do not speak with anyone, since I stick out as a man who won’t open his mouth. I leave traces if I speak to someone because every word spoken is a word that remains and can crop up again later, with quotation marks or without. Perhaps this is why the author piles supposition on supposition in long paragraphs without dialogue, a thick opaque layer of lead where I may pass unnoticed, disappear. I am not at all the sort of person who attracts attention, I am an anonymous presence against an even more anonymous background.

I don't know the right thing to do anymore. I want to protect Sophie and keep her safe, but what good is safety if she has to grow up in a world where people disappear without a trace because they pray to a different God?

The chances of any individual animal leaving behind fossilised remains are infinitesimal. First, its dead body has to lie in a place where sediment accumulates. That is most commonly in a lake or sea. Bones lying on the surface of the land are much more likely to be destroyed than preserved. Next, the sediment has to cover the bones before they disappear, preferably even before they are disarticulated. After that, the mud-and the bones within it- has to be compressed and turned into stone by the great, infinitely slow, movements that distort and crumple the earth's crust. That has to happen without the total obliteration of any sign of the bones. And finally, those bones have to be located in the tiny proportion of rocks which happen to be sufficiently close to the surface for them to be discovered by a prospecting palaeontologist. Thus not only have the vast majority of individual animals disappeared without a trace but great numbers of species and families have doubtless existed of which we have no knowledge whatsoever.

The steady Shen Jue, the calm Shen Jue, and the strategizing Shen Jue had all disappeared without a trace. He was Xie Jinglan, and he was going to find the bookboy he wated for and searched for ten years, Xiahou Lian.

The steady Shen Jue, the calm Shen Jue, and the strategizing Shen Jue had all disappeared without a trace. He was Xie Jinglan, and he was going to find the bookboy he waited for and searched for ten years, Xiahou Lian

AMELIA EARHART began planning her round-the-world flight in 1936. She would not be the first to circumnavigate the globe—six male pilots had done so before her; however, if she was successful, her equatorial flight route would be in the record books as the longest: 29,000 miles (47,000 km). She never made it. Her achievement, instead, was to become the world’s most-famous missing person after she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, with no trace of her aircraft found.

Mind without heart The leaf had fallen, The branch still stood there intact, It was a gradual event and not at all sudden, The fallen leaf, the still existing branch was an undeniable fact, But why did the branch still hang on, waiting for something? As the leaf from the floor looked at it while time consumed it, Maybe the branch wanted to see the leaf on the floor dying, And with its shadow touch it, and feel it; and whisper to it, “There where you grew you shall grow again next season, I will wait for you here throughout the winter, And to do so, I need no motivation because I have my reason, I have loved you and I do not wish to be a quitter,” And finally there was nothing left of the leaf, the fallen and dead leaf, There was only its trace, a faint impression on the soil, This added to the branch’s anguish and grief, For time had robbed her of its every moment of toil, People passed by and trampled the leaf’s almost fossilised impression, Until there was nothing left of the leaf neither on the branch nor on the soil, The branch chided the fate’s paucity and time’s baseless aggression, For they even erased the leaf’s last impression that was as thin as silver foil, By the time winter entered its prime, The branch stood there waiting for it to pass, Not because it wanted to feel the joys of summer time, But it wanted the leaf to re-appear and re-grow so that it could undo time’s act so crass, Time passed by, spring arrived, the branch was filled with leaves, But that leaf never grew again, the same leaf, the fallen one, So the branch misses him and it continuously grieves, But she shows it to no one, because no leaf compares to her dear leaf, the fallen one, Maybe that is why it is beginning to bend, Though it is converted in thousands of fresh leaves, The branch has been unable to cope with the dear leaf’s premature end, So she keeps peeping into time’s graves, To find the grave of the leaf that she lost prematurely, And lie there beside him, and finally fall, Then be together with him timelessly, And say, “For you I too had to fall afterall!” Today the sun has risen but the branch has fallen forever, Exactly where the leaf had fallen, It is a love of different kind, and the branch is a special lover, Who would never let go of what time from her had stolen, After a year the branch too disappeared from the floor, Now there is neither the branch nor the leaf, Time knows it, fate planned it, but I witnessed it; and this I cannot ignore, But knowing they are somewhere together now, even if that be the graveyard of time, is a relief, Time and fate are never obsequious, Because they neither love nor hate, But they are masquerading and pretentious, And they never know how it feels when the branch lies naked in a leafless state, That is time’s and fate’s irony of which they may never know, But you and I who have minds and hearts, Yet become part of a fake and grotesque show, Where either mind thinks without the heart or the heart from mind’s innocence departs!

How did you explain that people had left you battered and bruised until the person you were had disappeared without a trace?

opposite of what language should do, which is leave a mark. They want the language to be forgettable, familiar, digestible. To enter into the reader and disappear without a trace.

EVERYONE WHO served in the Iraq war knew the stories about the missing American cash. Not long after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the U.S. government secretly flew twelve billion dollars in cash to Baghdad. I know it’s hard to believe, and it sounds like it was made up by one of those wacko left-wing conspiracy-obsessed blogs on the Internet. But it’s a matter of documented fact. Twelve billion dollars in U.S. banknotes was trucked from the Federal Reserve Bank in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where it was put on pallets and loaded on C-130 military transport planes and flown to Baghdad. The idea, I guess, was that this was the only way to pay our contractors working in Iraq and run the puppet government: in stacks of Benjamins. Baghdad was awash in crisp new American banknotes. Gunnysacks full of cash sat around, unguarded, in Iraqi ministry offices. Bureaucrats and soldiers played football with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. And here’s the best part: Somehow, nine billion dollars just disappeared. Vanished. Without a trace.

If you ever took an enema, you'd disappear off the face of this Earth without trace!

Even Peter couldn’t dim his happiness. As he transferred Meena’s hand to Leo, Peter bent his head and in a not-so-quiet whisper said, “Son, if you hurt her, I will eviscerate you. Slowly. Welcome to the family.” Such a heart-warming message. Then again, it went well with the one his new mother-in-law gave him once the ceremony was over and Meena was off giggling with the lionesses and telling them all to call her Mrs. “Leo, darling, you seem like a nice boy, so I’m sure it goes without saying that if you hurt my daughter I will have you disappear, without a trace.” For some reason he asked, “How?” And Meena’s prim and proper mother gave him a smile, a smile to make any big man tremble as she said, “Have you heard about my prize-winning red roses?

What is the scariest thing that can happen? A child can disappear without a trace. A man could follow you at night. Someone could hide behind your bedroom door. There is a small throw rug in the room. There is a wooden chair by the darkening window. There is someone hiding behind my bedroom door.

What is the scariest thing that can happen? A child can disappear without a trace. A man could follow you at night. Someone could hide behind your bedroom door. There is a small throw rug in the room. There is a wooden chair by the darkening window. There is someone hiding behind my bedroom door. Anything solid in my neck snaps, and I’m screaming, looking into this hideous face, like some dark mold, a toxic messy thing. There

Yet I don't think about it now like I didn't get a fair shake or something. Every family goes through their own pain, even though you might not see it on the outside. Self-pity is a weakness. I don't blame them or anybody for not having a normal life. Life isn't easy for anyone.

There’s no evidence for the belief that “letting off steam” is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

Remembering Did you ever feel like you just had to do it? To vanish from your life. To disappear without a trace. Escape to a place where no one knew you. No name. No story. No history. Not somewhere remote, somewhere busy. Full of people who look at you, wondering who you are. Unaware of your past, not aware of your secrets. Unable to judge you, because they know nothing about you. You get to start again. A second chance to discover who you are. To discover who you want to be. To lose inhibitions. To take chances. To learn. To experience. You get to meet new people. Brief encounters or long ones. Give yourself the identity you want from the start. Not be ridiculed for doing something out of the character others have bestowed upon you. Have you ever just wanted to start over. Alone. A chance to do it right first time. I did. It was scary. I was truly alone. No family or friends. But not for long. And I don't regret it for a moment.

Disappeared without trace,' Tishlin confirmed. 'Most damnable thing, too; nobody's ever just lost a sun before, even if it was a dead one.