“
While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice our local destination. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world.
”
”
John Adams (Thoughts on government applicable to the present state of the American colonies.: Philadelphia, Printed by John Dunlap, M,DCC,LXXXVI.)
“
If a couple has their picture taken at a wedding or other social gathering, and the woman looks hot, her guy could be blinking, chewing, or even mid-sneeze, and she’ll still display it on her desk at work.
”
”
Brian P. Cleary
“
I saw a meme the other day with a picture of Marilyn Manson and Robin Williams. It said about the former, this isn’t the face of depression, and about the latter, this is. This really struck a chord and it’s been on my mind since then. As someone who has continuously dipped in and out of chronic depression and anxiety for close to three decades now, and I’ve never previously spoken about the subject, I finally thought it was time I did.
These days it’s trendy for people to think they’re cool and understanding about mental illness, posting memes and such to indicate so. But the reality is far different to that. It seems most people think if they publicly display such understanding then perhaps a friend will come to them, open up, and calmly discuss their problems. This will not happen. For someone in that seemingly hopeless void of depression and anxiety the last thing they are likely to do is acknowledge it, let alone talk about it. Even if broached by a friend they will probably deny there is a problem and feel even more distanced from the rest of the world.
So nobody can do anything to help, right? No. If right now you suspect one of your friends is suffering like this then you’re probably right. If right now you think that none of your friends are suffering like this then you’re probably wrong. By all means make your public affirmations of understanding, but at least take on board that an attempt to connect on this subject by someone you care about could well be cryptic and indirect.
When we hear of celebrities who suffered and finally took their own lives the message tends to be that so many close friends had no idea. This is woeful, but it’s also great, right? Because by not knowing there was a problem there is no burden of responsibility on anyone else. This is another huge misconception, that by acknowledging an indirect attempt to connect on such a complex issue that somehow you are accepting responsibility to fix it. This is not the case. You don’t have to find a solution. Maybe just listen. Many times over the years I’ve seen people recoil when they suspect that perhaps that is the direct a conversation is about to turn, and they desperately scramble for anything that can immediately change the subject. By acknowledging you’ve heard and understood doesn’t mean you are picking up their burden and carrying it for them.
Anyway, I’ve said my piece. And please don’t think this is me reaching out for help. If this was my current mindset the last thing I’d ever do is write something like this, let alone share it.
”
”
R.D. Ronald
“
A friend of Diagoras pointed out an expensive display of votive gifts and said, 'You think the gods have no care for man? Why, you can see from all these votive pictures here how many people have escaped the fury of storms at sea by praying to the gods who have brought them safe to harbor.'
To which Diagoras replied, 'Yes, indeed, but where are the pictures of all those who suffered shipwreck and perished in the waves?
”
”
Diagoras of Melos
“
If one busies himself with an outer display of scriptural wealth, what time is left for silent inward diving after the priceless pearls?” Sri
”
”
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi: (With Pictures) (Unabridged Start Publishing LLC))
“
Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.
We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?
”
”
Leonard Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
“
Julia had a friend, a man named Dennys, who was as a boy a tremendously gifted artist. They had been friends since they were small, and she once showed me some of the drawings he made when he was ten or twelve: little sketches of birds pecking at the ground, of his face, round and blank, of his father, the local veterinarian, his hand smoothing the fur of a grimacing terrier. Dennys’s father didn’t see the point of drawing lessons, however, and so he was never formally schooled. But when they were older, and Julia went to university, Dennys went to art school to learn how to draw. For the first week, he said, they were allowed to draw whatever they wanted, and it was always Dennys’s sketches that the professor selected to pin up on the wall for praise and critique.
But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence. Week two, they only drew ellipses. Wide ellipses, fat ellipses, skinny ellipses. Week three, they drew circles: three-dimensional circles, two-dimensional circles. Then it was a flower. Then a vase. Then a hand. Then a head. Then a body. And with each week of proper training, Dennys got worse and worse. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to the Führer. If you look closely, you can see a man in the upper right who is different from the others. His face is gentle but unyielding. Modern-day displays of the photograph will often add a helpful red circle around the man or an arrow pointing to him. He is surrounded by fellow citizens caught under the spell of the Nazis. He keeps his arms folded to his chest, as the stiff palms of the others hover just inches from him. He alone is refusing to salute. He is the one man standing against the tide. Looking back from our vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history. Everyone around him is tragically, fatefully, categorically wrong. In that moment, only he could see it. His name is believed to have been August Landmesser. At the time, he could not have known the murderous path the hysteria around him would lead to. But he had already seen enough to reject it.
”
”
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
“
I might as well have offered up my vagina to the Museum of Natural History. Surely, it would be shown in the fossils display. I could already picture it, right beside Tyrannosaurus Rex’s teeth. The Last Virginal Vagina in New York. Georgia Cummings 1990-2080 Died happily in her Chelsea apartment, surrounded by all sixteen of her tabby cats.
”
”
Max Monroe (Tapping the Billionaire (Billionaire Bad Boys, #1))
“
named me. “Psycho’s cute.” I kiss her cheek and she freezes as I take a selfie and then put it as the display picture. “There. Much better. You can ogle this when you miss me.
”
”
Rina Kent (God of Malice (Legacy of Gods, #1))
“
(If you meet a curator, ask them about what they do, then wait for them to explain that their job title comes from curare, a Latin verb meaning ‘to arrange’ or ‘to care for’, and how actually their role is about nurturing or healing collections, not just displaying them – it happens nearly every time.)
”
”
Alice Procter (The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it)
“
Now the journey is ending,
the wind is losing heart.
Into your hands it's falling,
a rickety house of cards.
The cards are backed with pictures
displaying all the world.
You've stacked up all the images
and shuffled them with words.
And how profound the playing
that once again begins!
Stay, the card you're drawing
is the only world you'll win.
”
”
Ingeborg Bachmann
“
The struggle for power had reached a new stage; it was fought with scientific formulas. The weapons vanished in the abyss like fleeting images, like pictures one throws into the fire....
When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades on Red Square in Moscow or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph....
Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubalcain marched past in the parade of phantoms.
”
”
Ernst Jünger (The Glass Bees)
“
if readers have a sincere desire to make life miserable for themselves, they might learn to compare themselves to other people. For those unfamiliar with this practice, he provides a few exercises. The first one displays full-length pictures of a man and a woman who embody ideal physical beauty by contemporary media standards. Readers are instructed to take their own body measurements, compare them to those superimposed on the pictures of the attractive specimens, and dwell on the differences.
”
”
Marshall B. Rosenberg (Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life)
“
Another strike of lightening – now accompanied by the deep-bellied rumble, and the horse reared, incidentally setting Henry very picturesquely against the inconstant moon. Alas, Catherine was deeply engaged in her argument with Old Edric and this missed entirely the melodramatic display. But we may assume that, possessing so strong an imagination, Catherine had often pictured Henry thus...
”
”
Emily C.A. Snyder (Nachtstürm Castle: A Gothic Austen Novel)
“
Sydney's the kind of port that leaves a mark on a sailor," the old man mused.
"Really?" Haakon said, wondering what the man meant.
"It did on me," he said, opening up his shirt to display his chest. It was covered with tattoos! At the top, SYDNEY was printed in elaborate red and blue letters. Beneath that was an enticing selection of names and dates.
"Mary, 1838...Adella, 1840..." The old sailor began laughing. "Beatrice, 1843...Helen, 1846." And then finally, "Mother." There was no date after "Mother."
"Mothers you love forever," he said. Everybody laughed then, including Haakon, though the thought brought some sadness to his heart. He did love his mother forever, and he missed her as well.
”
”
Bonnie Bryant Hiller (Walt Disney Pictures Presents Shipwrecked)
“
What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war sentiments are ever displayed. It's as if war is fun or noble, when actually it's all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there'd be less of it.
I remember seeing a picture of a soldier in Vietnam who was sitting, waiting to die, with his jaw missing. His head now started at the top row of teeth; everything beneath that was gone. They didn't put that on the recruitment posters, did they? But that's what war is to me. And I don't care who we're fighting, I don't hate them enough to do something like that to them.
”
”
Billy Connolly (Billy Connolly's Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip)
“
Brutality is boring. Over and over, hell night after hell night, the same old dumb, tedious, bestial routine: making men crawl; making men groan, hanging men from the bars; shoving men; slapping men; freezing men in the showers; running men into walls; displaying shackled fathers to their sons and sons to their fathers. And if it turned out that you'd been given the wrong man, when you were done making his life unforgettably small and nasty, you allowed him to be your janitor and pick up the other prisoners' trash.
There was always another prisoner, and another. Faceless men under hoods: you stripped them of their clothes, you stripped them of their pride. There wasn't much more you could take away from them, but people are inventive: one night some soldiers took a razor to one of Saddam's former general in Tier 1A and shaved off his eyebrows. He was an old man. "He looked like a grandfather and seemed like a nice guy," Sabrina Harman said, and she had tried to console him, telling him he looked younger and slipping him a few cigarettes. Then she had to make him stand at attention facing a boom box blasting the rapper Eminem, singing about raping his mother, or committing arson, or sneering at suicides, something like that—these were some of the best-selling songs in American history.
"Eminem is pretty much torture all in himself, and if one person's getting tortured, everybody is, because that music's horrible," Harman said. The general maintained his bearing against the onslaught of noise. "He looked so sad," Harman said. "I felt so bad for the guy." In fact, she said, "Out of everything I saw, that's the worst." This seems implausible, or at least illogical, until you think about it. The MI block was a place where a dead guy was just a dead guy. And a guy hanging from a window frame or a guy forced to drag his nakedness over a wet concrete floor—well, how could you relate to that, except maybe to take a picture? But a man who kept his chin up while you blasted him with rape anthems, and old man shorn of his eyebrows whose very presence made you think of his grandkids--you could let that get to you, especially if you had to share in his punishment: "Slut, you think I won't choke no whore / til the vocal cords don't work in her throat no more!..." or whatever the song was.
”
”
Philip Gourevitch (Standard Operating Procedure)
“
... I think for some people the purpose of a memoir is to really display the facts, to share the story exactly how it hapopened. And while I worked to make sure this story was as honest as possible, that was never the point for me. This book was never about sharing memories; it was about sharing a feeling. I don't care what year the competition was it what dress I was actually wearing; I care about how it felt to be there; how it felt to win. And that's why I avoided all memorabilia. It seemed like driving to the rink to take a look of finding the pictures from my childhood iPhone would tell a different story, an external story. I wanted every moment in this book to come from my own head, with all its flaws and inconsistencies.
”
”
Tillie Walden (Spinning)
“
Within the fair’s buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison’s Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla’s body. They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon. Visitors also encountered the latest and arguably most important organizational invention of the century, the vertical file, created by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. Sprinkled among these exhibits were novelties of all kinds. A locomotive made of spooled silk. A suspension bridge built out of Kirk’s Soap. A giant map of the United States made of pickles. Prune makers sent along a full-scale knight on horseback sculpted out of prunes, and the Avery Salt Mines of Louisiana displayed a copy of the Statue of Liberty carved from a block of salt. Visitors dubbed it “Lot’s Wife.
”
”
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
“
To a Japanese, accustomed to simplicity of ornamentation and frequent change of decorative method, a Western interior permanently filled with a vast array of pictures, statuary, and bric-a-brac gives the impression of mere vulgar display of riches. It calls for a mighty wealth of appreciation to enjoy the constant sight of even a masterpiece, and limitless indeed must be the capacity for artistic feeling in those who can exist day after day in the midst of such confusion of color and form as is to be often seen in the homes of Europe and America.
”
”
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
“
The ambassador doesn’t have any authority in and of himself. He has authority only because he represents a king who has authority. Here’s God’s amazing plan. He makes his invisible authority visible by sending visible authority figures as his representatives. This means that every time you exercise authority in the lives of your children, it must be a beautiful picture of the authority of God. In the lives of your children, you are the look of God’s face, you are the touch of his hand, and you are the tone of his voice. You must never exercise authority in an angry, impatient way. You must never exercise authority in an abusive way. You must never exercise authority in a selfish way. Why? Because you have been put into your position as parent to display before your children how beautiful, wise, patient, guiding, protective, rescuing, and forgiving God’s authority is. This
”
”
Paul David Tripp (Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family)
“
Other March law offences included truce-breaking, attacking castles, impeding a Warden, importing wool, and a delightful local custom known as “bauchling and reproaching”. This meant publicly vilifying and upbraiding someone, usually at a day of truce; such abuse might be directed at a man who had broken his word, or had neglected to honour a bond or pay a ransom. The “bauchler” (also known as brangler, bargler, etc.) sometimes made his reproof by carrying a glove on his lance-point, or displaying a picture of his enemy, and by crying out or sounding a horn-blast, indicating that his opponent was a false man and detestable.
”
”
George MacDonald Fraser (The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers)
“
Horse Frightened by a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different situation. Stubbs painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate the nature of the sublime, which was one of his era's most popular philosophical concepts,and its relation to a timelessly riveting feeling: fear. The magnificent horse galloping through a vast wilderness encounters the bottom-up stimulus of a crouching predator and responds with a dramatic display of what psychologists mildly call "negative emotion." The equine superstar's arched neck, dilated eyes, and flared nostrils are in fact the very picture of overwhelming dread. The painting's subject matter reflects he philosopher Edmund Burke's widely circulated Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which asserts that because "terror" is unparalleled in commanding "astonishment," or total, single-pointed,--indeed, rapt--attention, it is "the ruling principle of the sublime.
”
”
Winifred Gallagher
“
Yep, I must have done something wrong in a past life because I was definitely being tested. He wore an aged pair of jeans, faded in all the right spots and hanging low on his hips. The lean muscles of his upper body were on full display in a charcoal long-sleeved shirt. Basically, he looked mouth-watering, panty-drenching good. Crap.
”
”
Elisabeth Grace (Picture Perfect (Limelight, #2))
“
Billy was displayed there in the zoo in a simulated Earthling habitat. Most of the furnishings had been stolen from the Sears & Roebuck warehouse in Iowa City, Iowa. There was a color television set and a couch that could be converted into a bed. There were end tables with lamps and ashtrays on them by the couch. There was a home bar and two stools. There was a little pool table. There was wall-to-wall carpeting in federal gold, except in the kitchen and bathroom areas and over the iron manhole cover in the
center of the floor. There were magazines arranged in a fan on the coffee table in front of the couch.
There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The television didn't. There was a picture of one cowboy shooting another one pasted to the television tube. So it goes.
There were no wall in the dome, nor place for Billy to hide. The mint green bathroom fixtures were right out in the open. Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
Choosing is hard, but not choosing is, in my view, much more debilitating. Sitting in limbo – not fully in your marriage and not out of it, looking at piles of pictures sitting on the floor rather than displaying them on a wall, letting time pass in a job you don’t love but are reluctant to leave – and the non-choices are what will eat away at you.
”
”
Karen Wright (The Accidental Alpha Woman: The Guide to Thriving When Life Feels Overwhelming)
“
My heart sank within me to behold that stately mansion in the midst of its expansive grounds — the park as beautiful now, in its wintry garb, as it could be in its summer glory; the majestic sweep, the undulating swell and fall, displayed to full advantage in that robe of dazzling purity, stainless and printless — save one long, winding track left by the trooping deer — the stately timber-trees with their heavy laden branches gleaming white against the full, grey sky; the deep, encircling woods; the broad expanse of water sleeping in frozen quiet; and the weeping ash and willow drooping their snowclad boughs above it — all presented a picture, striking, indeed, and pleasing to an unencumbered mind, but by no means encouraging to me.
”
”
Anne Brontë (Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
“
Let people see how glorious God is by letting them see your failures. When you are transparent about your failures, you promote God’s glory. Our failures allow God to display his faithful and merciful love. Failures allow God’s power to be put on display. Failures allow God to prove that he is as forgiving as he says he is. So consider being open and transparent about your failures in order to show God’s glory.
”
”
Amy Baker (Picture Perfect: When Life Doesn't Line Up)
“
As beautiful as you are my lady,
You sick answers to why love is never by your side
Your heart wonders around trying to find your ideal love
But yet nothing is completing your need.
You’re a women of strength and resemble power within,
Filled with joy on your angelic face, yet no good man appreciates it
A laughter that one can capture for a lifetime, too bad that all the men you seem to meet erase it all
You display Emotions that one can wish to dwell in and feel the energy you hold within.
Take a stand my lady, no rose ever dies without growing back again,
You need no tears to fall for a man who sees less in you
You need no sad feeling to crush that happy self, he’ll never be worth the joy in you
Show him no sad emotions, you’re too strong to give in now.
As a flower you bloomed gracefully and a beautiful lady rose up from that seed the Lord God planted
As a pillar you balanced yourself against all negative forces of life and that was your strength
As an ocean you cried your tears out but that never hindered the ocean from being full again
As a beautiful picture frame you lit up the room and no soul will ever take that away from you.
Let yourself love you, is the greatest love one can ever behold,
I’m done seeing you cry!!!
”
”
Molemo Sylence
“
what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings! The young gentlemen are fond, you see, of turning down their shirt-collars and cultivating their whiskers, especially under the chin; but they cannot approach the ladies in their dress or bearing, being, to say the truth, humanity of quite another sort.
”
”
Charles Dickens (American Notes and Pictures from Italy)
“
Her Instagram feed filled up with gorgeous photos of her creations displayed alongside books, some of their links tenuous at best. Double chocolate cookies made with huge chunks of Valrhona chocolate found their American-Parisian mash-up reference in Alcott's Little Women. Currant cinnamon rolls as big as a baby's head were paired with The Secret Garden. Her lemon-blueberry muffins posed alongside a favorite childhood picture book, Blueberries For Sal.
”
”
Carla Laureano (Brunch at Bittersweet Café (The Saturday Night Supper Club, #2))
“
On Easter Monday there was a great display of fireworks from the Castle of St. Angelo. We hired a room in an opposite house, and made our way, to our places, in good time, through a dense mob of people choking up the square in front, and all the avenues leading to it; and so loading the bridge by which the castle is approached, that it seemed ready to sink into the rapid Tiber below. There are statues on this bridge (execrable works), and, among them, great vessels full of burning tow were placed: glaring strangely on the faces of the crowd, and not less strangely on the stone counterfeits above them. The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour, size, and speed: while rockets streamed into the sky, not by ones or twos, or scores, but hundreds at a time. The concluding burst - the Girandola - was like the blowing up into the air of the whole massive castle, without smoke or dust. In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had dispersed; the moon was looking calmly down upon her wrinkled image in the river; and half - a - dozen men and boys with bits of lighted candle in their hands: moving here and there, in search of anything worth having, that might have been dropped in the press: had the whole scene to themselves.
”
”
Charles Dickens
“
When it came to "getting away from it all," there really weren’t many places quite like the top of the tallest mountain in the world. He glanced around the summit, noting the other reason why he enjoyed coming up here. It was tradition for every expedition to the top of Everest to leave something behind—a small token or marker indicating their successful climb to the famous peak. Each one was different and each one seemed to reflect the personality of the party it represented: small flags and banners with the hand-written names of climbers past, a used oxygen canister, a spare glove, even a small metal lunchbox with (Clark noted with a small smile) a picture of Superman on the cover. To Clark, each of these markers indicated the pinnacle of human achievement, the fulfilled promise of the best the human race had to offer. And today, it represented something else as well: man’s ability to conquer the harsh reality of nature… a point in stark contrast to the previous night’s activities.
This set were Sherpa prayer flags, each displaying a symbol, not of a distant god or mythological beast, but denoting some aspect of the enlightened human mind: compassion, perfect action, fearlessness. His thoughts turned to another example of the peak of human achievement, of what one man with drive, desire and dedication could accomplish without the benefit of superpowers or metagene enhancement. One that held a much more personal meaning to Clark.
Bruce.
”
”
Chris Dee (World's Finest: Red Cape, Big City)
“
Keeping my goals in plain sight. It’s easy to focus on your goals when you’re fired up or excited about a new project, but focusing becomes harder when life interferes with your direct access to keep working on it. So pin up your dream somewhere you can see it. I’m a big fan of displaying visuals inside my closet door to remind me every single day of what my aim is. Currently taped to my door: the cover of Forbes featuring self-made female CEOs, a vacation house in Hawaii . . . and a picture of Beyoncé, obvi.
”
”
Rachel Hollis (Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be (Girl, Wash Your Face Series))
“
The reader is requested to note a seeming contradiction in the two views which have been given of Graham Bretton—the public and private—the out-door and the in-door view. In the first, the public, he is shown oblivious of self; as modest in the display of his energies, as earnest in their exercise. In the second, the fireside picture, there is expressed consciousness of what he has and what he is; pleasure in homage, some recklessness in exciting, some vanity in receiving the same. Both portraits are correct.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Villette)
“
One Autumn night, in Sudbury town,
Across the meadows bare and brown,
The windows of the wayside inn
Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves
Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves
Their crimson curtains rent and thin.”
“As ancient is this hostelry
As any in the land may be,
Built in the old Colonial day,
When men lived in a grander way,
With ampler hospitality;
A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall,
Now somewhat fallen to decay,
With weather-stains upon the wall,
And stairways worn, and crazy doors,
And creaking and uneven floors,
And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall.
A region of repose it seems,
A place of slumber and of dreams,
Remote among the wooded hills!
For there no noisy railway speeds,
Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds;
But noon and night, the panting teams
Stop under the great oaks, that throw
Tangles of light and shade below,
On roofs and doors and window-sills.
Across the road the barns display
Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay,
Through the wide doors the breezes blow,
The wattled cocks strut to and fro,
And, half effaced by rain and shine,
The Red Horse prances on the sign.
Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode
Deep silence reigned, save when a gust
Went rushing down the county road,
And skeletons of leaves, and dust,
A moment quickened by its breath,
Shuddered and danced their dance of death,
And through the ancient oaks o'erhead
Mysterious voices moaned and fled.
These are the tales those merry guests
Told to each other, well or ill;
Like summer birds that lift their crests
Above the borders of their nests
And twitter, and again are still.
These are the tales, or new or old,
In idle moments idly told;
Flowers of the field with petals thin,
Lilies that neither toil nor spin,
And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse
Hung in the parlor of the inn
Beneath the sign of the Red Horse.
Uprose the sun; and every guest,
Uprisen, was soon equipped and dressed
For journeying home and city-ward;
The old stage-coach was at the door,
With horses harnessed, long before
The sunshine reached the withered sward
Beneath the oaks, whose branches hoar
Murmured: "Farewell forevermore.
Where are they now? What lands and skies
Paint pictures in their friendly eyes?
What hope deludes, what promise cheers,
What pleasant voices fill their ears?
Two are beyond the salt sea waves,
And three already in their graves.
Perchance the living still may look
Into the pages of this book,
And see the days of long ago
Floating and fleeting to and fro,
As in the well-remembered brook
They saw the inverted landscape gleam,
And their own faces like a dream
Look up upon them from below.
”
”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“
A bang rattled the otherwise sturdy fence right before Wick saw small hands grasp the thankfully pointless top. Following that display of persistence came a kid flying through the air and hurrying to meet the ground. "Damn, superboy! Tuck and roll, tuck and roll," Wick hollered as the kid landed on his side with a thick thud. He hit send on his text message then quickly raised his phone and snapped a picture of one very pissed off looking kid. "That was awesome, all you need is the big S on your shirt and you'd be legit.
”
”
Havan Fellows (Wicked's Way Collection)
“
Impressing the ladies is an arduous task ', as the narrator is always saying on Animal Planet...'Perhaps no creature has a more elaborate courtship display than the bower bird'. No creature? That's a joke, right? You can't think of one? Clue: as part of its elaborate courtship displays this creature has invented telephones, moving pictures, cars, music, money, organized warfare, tigerskin rugs, alcohol, mood-lighting, speedboats, mink coats, cities and poetry. So, please, no sniggering at the bower birds' attempts to get laid.
”
”
James Lever (Me Cheeta: The Autobiography)
“
The enemy of my soul didn't want me painting that day. To create meant that I would look a little bit like my Creator. To overcome the terrifying angst of the blank canvas meant I would forever have more compassion for other artists. You better believe as I placed the first blue and gray strokes onto the white emptiness before me, the "not good enough" statement was pulsing through my head in almost deafening tones...
This parlaying lie is one of his favorite tactics to keep you disillusioned by disappointments. Walls go up, emotions run high, we get guarded, defensive, demotivated, and paralyzed by the endless ways we feel doomed to fail. This is when we quit. This is when we settle for the ease of facebook.... This is when we get a job to simply make money instead of pursuing our calling to make a difference. This is when we put the paintbrush down and don't even try.
So there I was. Standing before my painted blue boat, making a choice of which voice to listen to.
I'm convinced God was smiling. Pleased. Asking me to find delight in what is right. Wanting me to have compassion for myself by focusing on that part of my painting that expressed something beautiful. To just be eager to give that beauty to whoever dared to look at my boat. To create to love others. Not to beg them for validation.
But the enemy was perverting all that. Perfection mocked my boat. The bow was too high, the details too elementary, the reflection on the water too abrupt, and the back of the boat too off-center. Disappointment demanded I hyper-focused on what didn't look quite right.
It was my choice which narrative to hold on to: "Not good enough" or "Find delight in what is right." Each perspective swirled, begging me to declare it as truth.
I was struggling to make peace with my painting creation, because I was struggling to make make peace with myself as God's creation. Anytime we feel not good enough we deny the powerful truth that we are a glorious work of God in progress.
We are imperfect because we are unfinished.
So, as unfinished creations, of course everything we attempt will have imperfections. Everything we accomplish will have imperfections. And that's when it hit me: I expect a perfection in me and in others that not even God Himself expects. If God is patient with the process, why can't I be?
How many times have I let imperfections cause me to be too hard on myself and too harsh with others?
I force myself to send a picture of my boat to at least 20 friends. I was determined to not not be held back by the enemy's accusations that my artwork wasn't good enough to be considered "real art". This wasn't for validation but rather confirmation that I could see the imperfections in my painting but not deem it worthless. I could see the imperfections in me and not deem myself worthless. It was an act of self-compassion.
I now knew to stand before each painting with nothing but love, amazement, and delight. I refused to demand anything more from the artist. I just wanted to show up for every single piece she was so brave to put on display..
Might I just be courageous enough to stand before her work and require myself to find everything about it I love? Release my clenched fist and pouty disappointments, and trade my "live up" mentality for a "show up" one? It is so much more freeing to simply show up and be a finder of the good. Break from the secret disappointments. Let my brain venture down the tiny little opening of love..
And I realized what makes paintings so delightful. It's there imperfections. That's what makes it art. It's been touched by a human. It's been created by someone whose hands sweat and who can't possibly transfer divine perfection from what her eyes see to what her fingertips can create. It will be flawed.
”
”
Lysa TerKeurst (It's Not Supposed to Be This Way: Finding Unexpected Strength When Disappointments Leave You Shattered)
“
...her own restless coveting of his love and the slow but sure ebullience of her desire for him; then the Nawab's martydom and her spiritual homelessness and physical loneliness; there was so much, so many portraits and landscapes, like the bright pages of an album of words and pictures. They filled her heart overflowing with the tangy, coppery taste of blood that flows from failure, and pricked her soul with nostalgia, for what was and what could have been. She had never thought that happy memories could come accompanied with so much regret, so much pain, so much repining, and discontent. If you plucked a rose without due care, its thorn pricked you to protest the thoughtlessness and the inconsiderateness you had displayed in taking away its crowning glory. Here, it was nothing else but the rose which was the thorn: its each and every petal was saturated with the scents of the past but it stung like the scorpion plant. But was it possible not to touch those memories? For their scents traveled in and out of your being like breath, and their colours were inside every blink of your eye.
”
”
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (The Mirror of Beauty)
“
Gilberte had still not come back to the Champs-Élysées. Yet I very much needed to set eyes on her, as I could not even remember her face. When we look at the person we love, our inquisitive, anxious, demanding gaze, our expectation of the words which will make us hope for (or despair of) another meeting tomorrow and, until those words are spoken, our obsession fluctuating between possible joy and sorrow, or imagining both of these together, all this distracts our tremulous attention and prevents it from getting a clear picture of the loved one. Also, it may be that this simultaneous activity of all the senses, striving to discover through the unaided eyes something that is out of their reach, is too mindful of the countless forms, all the savours and movements of the living person, all those things which, in a person with whom we are not in love, we immobilize. But the beloved model keeps moving; and the only snapshots we can take are always out of focus. I could not really say what the features of Gilberte’s face were like, except at those heavenly moments when she was there, displaying them to me.
”
”
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
“
Did feminism identify some valid problems? Yes. Did it propose some helpful changes? It likely did. Can feminism be embraced along with our Christian faith? Absolutely not. Why not? Because it introduces a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) distortion into the way we approach gender and male-female relationships. It contains truth, but it also contains some powerful and destructive lies. And in so doing, it strikes at the very image of God and at an important earthly picture He chose to display the redemptive story. At its core, feminist philosophy is antithetical to the gospel.
”
”
Mary A. Kassian (True Woman 101: Divine Design: An Eight-Week Study on Biblical Womanhood (True Woman))
“
No previous games had seen such a spectacular organization nor such a lavish display of entertainment. Goering, Ribbentrop and Goebbels gave dazzling parties for the foreign visitors—the Propaganda Minister’s “Italian Night” on the Pfaueninsel near Wannsee gathered more than a thousand guests at dinner in a scene that resembled the Arabian Nights. The visitors, especially those from England and America, were greatly impressed by what they saw: apparently a happy, healthy, friendly people united under Hitler—a far different picture, they said, than they had got from reading the newspaper dispatches from Berlin.
”
”
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
“
We probably won’t arrive home in time for your wedding.”
She pictured the wedding gown hanging in her closet. The veil. The shoes. Even the strands of pearls, all laid out awaiting her return. Return. The heavy word weighed on her as Ira continued to snore and Oscar continued to study her in a way that made her feel captivating and beautiful.
Camille stood up, not sure if she’d been inching toward him. His lips had certainly seemed to be getting closer.
“Randall will understand, I’m sure. He’s a very reasonable person,” she said, her voice rapid.
Oscar started to stand. “Where are you going?”
“No, please, sit,” she said. “I…I just need to, um, use the trees.” Camille jiggled her nearly empty canteen to strengthen her excuse. She turned in a circle until she spotted a copse of trees. She had to be somewhere other than hidden in the flowers with Oscar, somewhere she could try and convince herself that Randall might one day be able to look at her with the same intensity Oscar had just displayed.
Oscar sat back down, and Camille trampled the grass on the way to the safety of the trees. Another attack of guilt snuck up on her as she glanced back at Oscar, who was watching her walk away. Camille would miss her own wedding-and she didn’t care one bit.
”
”
Angie Frazier (Everlasting (Everlasting, #1))
“
One Autumn night, in Sudbury town,
Across the meadows bare and brown,
The windows of the wayside inn
Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves
Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves
Their crimson curtains rent and thin.
As ancient is this hostelry
As any in the land may be,
Built in the old Colonial day,
When men lived in a grander way,
With ampler hospitality;
A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall,
Now somewhat fallen to decay,
With weather-stains upon the wall,
And stairways worn, and crazy doors,
And creaking and uneven floors,
And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall.
A region of repose it seems,
A place of slumber and of dreams,
Remote among the wooded hills!
For there no noisy railway speeds,
Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds;
But noon and night, the panting teams
Stop under the great oaks, that throw
Tangles of light and shade below,
On roofs and doors and window-sills.
Across the road the barns display
Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay,
Through the wide doors the breezes blow,
The wattled cocks strut to and fro,
And, half effaced by rain and shine,
The Red Horse prances on the sign.
Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode
Deep silence reigned, save when a gust
Went rushing down the county road,
And skeletons of leaves, and dust,
A moment quickened by its breath,
Shuddered and danced their dance of death,
And through the ancient oaks o'erhead
Mysterious voices moaned and fled.
These are the tales those merry guests
Told to each other, well or ill;
Like summer birds that lift their crests
Above the borders of their nests
And twitter, and again are still.
These are the tales, or new or old,
In idle moments idly told;
Flowers of the field with petals thin,
Lilies that neither toil nor spin,
And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse
Hung in the parlor of the inn
Beneath the sign of the Red Horse.
Uprose the sun; and every guest,
Uprisen, was soon equipped and dressed
For journeying home and city-ward;
The old stage-coach was at the door,
With horses harnessed,long before
The sunshine reached the withered sward
Beneath the oaks, whose branches hoar
Murmured: "Farewell forevermore.
Where are they now? What lands and skies
Paint pictures in their friendly eyes?
What hope deludes, what promise cheers,
What pleasant voices fill their ears?
Two are beyond the salt sea waves,
And three already in their graves.
Perchance the living still may look
Into the pages of this book,
And see the days of long ago
Floating and fleeting to and fro,
As in the well-remembered brook
They saw the inverted landscape gleam,
And their own faces like a dream
Look up upon them from below.
”
”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“
Farragut's first visitor was his wife. He was raking leaves in yard Y when the PA said that 734-508-32 had a visitor. He jogged up the road past the firehouse and into the tunnel. It was four flights up to cellblock F. "Visitor," he said to Walton, who let him into his cell. He kept his white shirt prepared for visits. It was dusty. He washed his face and combed his hair with water. "Don't take nuttin but a handkerchief," said the guard. "I know, I know, I know...." Down he went to the door of the visitor's room, where he was frisked. Through the glass he saw that his visitor was Marcia.
There were no bars in the visitor's room, but the glass windows were chicken-wired and open only at the top. A skinny cat couldn't get in or out, but the sounds of the prison moved in freely on the breeze. She would, he knew, have passed three sets of bars - clang, clang, clang - and waited in an anteroom where there were pews or benches, soft-drink engines and a display of the convict's art with prices stuck in the frames. None of the cons could paint, but you could always count on some wet-brain to buy a vase of roses or a marine sunset if he had been told that the artist was a lifer. There were no pictures on the walls of the visitor's room but there were four signs that said: NO SMOKING, NO WRITING, NO EXCHANGE OF OBJECTS, VISITORS ARE ALLOWED ONE KISS.
”
”
John Cheever (Falconer)
“
As soon as Ben had been set down and the lorry driver had plodded off to unload the next waxwork, Ben darted off down the corridor. He needed to find the scene of the crime, to see if there were any clues the police had missed. Eventually, after passing the waxworks of presidents and popes and pop stars, but strangely no plumbers, he found the room where the figures of the British royal family were on display. As the theft had been in the news, the room was full of tourists eager to catch a glimpse of the empty space where the waxwork of the Queen had stood. Some were even taking pictures of… well, nothing. Ben looked around the ornate red-and-gold room, decorated to look like the
”
”
David Walliams (Gangsta Granny Strikes Again!)
“
Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person’s emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person’s head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons’ minds.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence. Week two, they only drew ellipses. Wide ellipses, fat ellipses, skinny ellipses. Week three, they drew circles: three-dimensional circles, two-dimensional circles. Then it was a flower. Then a vase. Then a hand. Then a head. Then a body. And with each week of proper training, Dennys got worse and worse. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
He has no friends that I know of, and his few neighbours consider him a bit of a weirdo, but I like to think of him as my friend as he will sometimes leave buckets of compost outside my house, as a gift for my garden. The oldest tree on my property is a lemon, a sprawling mass of twigs with a heavy bow. The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?
”
”
Benjamín Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World)
“
Stupid, infuriating, overgrown ass!” I hiss as I slam the back door behind me and stomp my foot for good measure. I’m home, I think to myself. I can finally throw a satisfying fit all by myself. Fuming, I stomp both of my feet on the kitchen floor again and again, picturing my cousin’s face each time I bring my feet down. He is the most infuriating oaf on the face of the planet, and I want nothing more than to punch him. I’m still muttering to myself when I hear chuckling and jump in response.
Whirling around, I look up and find Flint standing by the coffee pot watching my display of temper and shaking his head. “I certainly hope you’re not talking about me.”
I scowl at him. “For once, no. You may be an infuriating ass, but I’ve never considered you stupid. Looks like sparking my temper isn’t an exclusive ability of yours, after all.
”
”
Allana Kephart (Resistance (The Dolan Prophecies Series, #1))
“
The scientific world-picture vouchsafe a very complete understanding of all that happens—it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clock-work, which for all that science knows could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavour, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it—though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this, that, for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it it gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.
In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific world-view contains of itself no ethical values, no aesthetical values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please. Whence came I, whither go I?
Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
Science, we believe, can, in principle, describe in full detail all that happens in the latter case in our sensorium and 'motorium' from the moment the waves of compression and dilation reach our ear to the moment when certain glands secrete a salty fluid that emerges from our eyes. But of the feelings of delight and sorrow that accompany the process science is completely ignorant—and therefore reticent.
Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity—the One of Parmenides—of which we all somehow form part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God—with a capital 'G'. Science is, very usually, branded as being atheistic. After what we said, this is not astonishing. If its world-picture does not even contain blue, yellow, bitter, sweet—beauty, delight and sorrow—, if personality is cut out of it by agreement, how should it contain the most sublime idea that presents itself to human mind?
”
”
Erwin Schrödinger ('Nature and the Greeks' and 'Science and Humanism')
“
In the window were displayed the covers of several pornographic videos.
“The Story of O-Positive,” Armod said aloud. “I don’t understand. Is that like HIV positive?”
“Idiot,” Mordr said, slapping Armod lightly upside the head.
“Ah, but I am in the mood for good literature,” Ivak said with a grin. “How about these? A Tale of Two Vampyres. The Stakes of Wrath. Or that one.” He pointed to the left. “Great Neckspectations.”
“I still don’t understand.” Armod was frowning, although his white skin did color when he craned his head from side to side and realized what one of the pictures depicted.
“Now me, I always did like a good classic mystery movie,” Sigurd added, also grinning. “A Tomb with a View.”
Vikar worried that they were embarrassing Alex, but then she said, “My favorite is Vlad Really Did Impale Her.”
His brothers glanced at him, then Alex, and burst out laughing.
“Mayhap I will not kill her after all,” Mordr declared, giving Alex a wink that did not sit well with Vikar. Not one bit.
“Can we buy some?” Armod asked.
”
”
Sandra Hill (Kiss of Pride (Deadly Angels, #1))
“
The deeply flushed midsummer sunlight, the strong, clear alcohol filling a dirty glass, a goat tethered with a rope, the enormous sides of a glitteringly white modern building, the solemn melody of the national orchestra, the slender-necked actress who was performing on the stage, the arc of a rainbow which, after a sudden shower, fell to the earth like an arrow from between the clouds, a sheepdog pressed flat under the wheel of a car, a herd of stubborn goats bobbing their heads with profound indifference, blue cloth fluttering in the wind, designating something sacred, a swarthy woman looking down on the street below from a first-floor window, her exposed chest leaning out over the wooden frame, cat-sized rats threading their way around the legs of market stalls, unlit signs and display windows, a sombrely lit butcher’s fridge, each dark red carcass still buttressed with the animal’s skeleton, Banchi’s printing shop, on the ground floor of a temple on the main street in the city centre, there Banchi makes picture postcards featuring his own translations of Indian sutras.
”
”
Bae Suah (Recitation)
“
Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.
”
”
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
“
No one has ever offered a better diagnosis of Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe than she does in her concluding paragraph: “Its not to much fun to know yourself to well or think you do—everyone needs a little conciet to carry them through & past the falls.” Most of us carry with us some kind of illusion about who we are and what we can accomplish. Certainly this is true in my case. I can think of many writing projects that I would not have completed if I had known, from the start, how much trouble they would entail. So imagine the life of a young woman who did anticipate trouble, who could not help but observe herself, and who chose a profession in which she was on display all the time. Her self-consciousness could be paralyzing and was relieved only by moments of acting when she could embody another being. What a relief it would be to act unconsciously and ultimately, to be unconscious, no longer obliged to carry the burden of self, a burden already shouldered by Norma Jeane when she was still three years away from her first appearance in a motion picture. To carry that same burden as Marilyn Monroe was all the more deadly.
”
”
Carl Rollyson (Confessions of a Serial Biographer)
“
She gazed at the man across from her. Her lover. His powerful shoulders worked beneath his shirt as he pulled on the oars. The display of strength and agility, set to a steady rhythm…memories of their lovemaking assailed her with quiet force.
In some other place, under some other circumstance, they might have been a courting couple. Rowing across a placid lake, caressed by a glowing sunset. From a distance, this could have been the picture of romance.
But the reality was confusion, and resentment, and pain. Did she feel sorry for misleading him? Sophia considered. She was not sure she could. By his own admission, he would not have made love to her had she not. And she could not regret that exquisite pleasure; nor could she regret sharing it with him. She looked at the handsome, strong, charismatic, passionate, exhausted man across from her. Selfish and wicked though she might be, she could not feel sorry that he was now bound to her-that for good or ill, he had not left her behind.
Sophia was, however, unequivocally sorry for one thing.
“Gray,” she said, “I’m so sorry I’ve hurt you.”
His eyes flashed, and there was a slight hitch in his stroke.
”
”
Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
“
On the other hand, what I myself called “thinking of Albertine” was in fact thinking of ways of getting her to return, of meeting up with her, of finding out what she was doing. So that if, during these hours of unremitting torture, my suffering could have been displayed in graphic form, it would have shown images of the Orsay railway station,16 the banknotes offered to Mme Bontemps, Saint-Loup leaning over a post-office counter filling in a form to send me a telegram, but never a picture of Albertine. In the same way that during the course of our lives we, in our egoism, constantly see before our eyes the goals which our selves find valuable, but do not perceive the “I” itself which never ceases to scrutinize them, so the desire that directs our actions swoops down upon them, but never looks back on itself, either because it is too utilitarian and, spurning knowledge, prefers to rush into action, or because we search out the future in order to compensate for the disappointments of the present, or even because the indolence of the mind tempts it to slide down the slippery slope of the imagination rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
“
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
”
”
George Orwell
“
You seem surprised to find us here,’ the man said.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.’
‘We are everywhere,’ the man said. ‘We are all over the country.’
‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. Who do you mean by we?’
‘Jewish refugees.’
[...]
‘Is this your land?’ I asked him.
‘Not yet,’ he said.
‘You mean you are hoping to buy it?’
He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food.’
‘So where do you go from here?’ I asked him. ‘You and all your orphans?’
‘We don’t go anywhere,’ he said, smiling through his black beard. ‘We stay here.’
‘Then you will all become Palestinians,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps you are that already.’
He smiled again, presumably at the naïvety of my questions.
‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do not think we will become Palestinians.’
‘Then what will you do?’
‘You are a young man who is flying aeroplanes,’ he said, ‘and I do not expect you to understand our problems.’
‘What problems?’ I asked him. The young woman put two mugs of coffee on the table as well as a tin of condensed milk that had two holes punctured in the top. The man dripped some milk from the tin into my mug and stirred it for me with the only spoon. He did the same for his own coffee and then took a sip.
‘You have a country to live in and it is called England,’ he said. ‘Therefore you have no problems.’
‘No problems!’ I cried. ‘England is fighting for her life all by herself against virtually the whole of Europe! We’re even fighting the Vichy French and that’s why we’re in Palestine right now! Oh, we’ve got problems all right!’ I was getting rather worked up. I resented the fact that this man sitting in his fig grove said that I had no problems when I was getting shot at every day. ‘I’ve got problems myself’, I said, ‘in just trying to stay alive.’
‘That is a very small problem,’ the man said. ‘Ours is much bigger.’
I was flabbergasted by what he was saying. He didn’t seem to care one bit about the war we were fighting. He appeared to be totally absorbed in something he called ‘his problem’ and I couldn’t for the life of me make it out. ‘Don’t you care whether we beat Hitler or not?’ I asked him.
‘Of course I care. It is essential that Hitler be defeated. But that is only a matter of months and years. Historically, it will be a very short battle. Also it happens to be England’s battle. It is not mine. My battle is one that has been going on since the time of Christ.’
‘I am not with you at all,’ I said. I was beginning to wonder whether he was some sort of a nut. He seemed to have a war of his own going on which was quite different to ours.
I still have a very clear picture of the inside of that hut and of the bearded man with the bright fiery eyes who kept talking to me in riddles. ‘We need a homeland,’ the man was saying. ‘We need a country of our own. Even the Zulus have Zululand. But we have nothing.’
‘You mean the Jews have no country?’
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ he said. ‘It’s time we had one.’
‘But how in the world are you going to get yourselves a country?’ I asked him. ‘They are all occupied. Norway belongs to the Norwegians and Nicaragua belongs to the Nicaraguans. It’s the same all over.’
‘We shall see,’ the man said, sipping his coffee. The dark-haired woman was washing up some plates in a basin of water on another small table and she had her back to us.
‘You could have Germany,’ I said brightly. ‘When we have beaten Hitler then perhaps England would give you Germany.’
‘We don’t want Germany,’ the man said.
‘Then which country did you have in mind?’ I asked him, displaying more ignorance than ever.
‘If you want something badly enough,’ he said, ‘and if you need something badly enough, you can always get it.’ [...]‘You have a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘But you are a good boy. You are fighting for freedom. So am I.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Going Solo (Roald Dahl's Autobiography, #2))
“
Cooking’s a more popular hobby than fencing.”
“They don’t have a Great British Fence-Off,” muttered Dante.
There was a thoughtful pause.
“Oh, that sounds like such a good show,” Nicholas murmured.
“I like your idea for a television show as well,” Seiji told Dante. “Why do you picture it being British specifically?”
Dante’s mouth opened and closed. No sound came out.
“Could be because of the European history of dueling?” Nicholas suggested, and looked to Seiji. “Like in the book you let me borrow. Did you know that if you killed someone in a duel back in the old days, you could run away to France, because in France, dueling was still a totally cool and legal way to kill someone you had beef with?”
Seiji nodded, pointing at Nicholas for emphasis. “I did know that, but clearly not everybody does. You’re right; the show would be educational for many people. Perhaps they could hold fencing displays in old manor houses and castles and châteaux? And, of course, in colleges such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Trinity, where the legacy of fencing students is so illustrious.”
Breakfast conversation was so awesome now that Seiji had joined them! Nicholas bet nobody else had as much fun as they did.
Dante had clearly given up on talking and was giving Bobby a silent, pleading look. Nicholas guessed Dante was shy. Seiji was pretty famous, so maybe Dante was overwhelmed.
”
”
Sarah Rees Brennan (Striking Distance (Fence, #1))
“
It seems to Marithe that her life has undergone two changes: one, when her father left. And two, about a year ago, when she turned thirteen, when her life and the way she felt about it and the way she viewed it suddenly tilted; like the deck of a ship in a storm.
At first it seemed to her that her house, her family, her dogs, her accordion, her books, her room with its geology samples, its display of feathers, its pictures of foxes and wolves, all took on an unreal aspect. Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalisation: and so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You're picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home?
[...]
And her body! Some mornings she woke and it was as if lead weights had been attached to her limbs by some ill-meaning fairy. Even if she had the urge to walk across the paddock to feed the neighbours' horses -- which she hardly ever did any more, she didn't know why -- she wouldn't have the energy, the sap in her to do it.
She wanted it returned to her, Marithe did, that sense of security in her life, of certainty, of knowing who she was and what she was about. Would it ever come back?
”
”
Maggie O'Farrell (This Must Be the Place)
“
I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn. Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the Bs when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy. It was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had been released in 1965. I already owned Rubber Soul. I had owned Rubber Soul on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played Rubber Soul from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy Rubber Soul for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to Rubber Soul for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving Rubber Soul on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair. I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends—impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds—were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy?
”
”
Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour)
“
Turing was offered a choice: imprisonment or probation contingent on receiving hormone treatments via injections of a synthetic estrogen designed to curb his sexual desires, as if he were a chemically controlled machine. He chose the latter, which he endured for a year. Turing at first seemed to take it all in stride, but on June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by biting into an apple he had laced with cyanide. His friends noted that he had always been fascinated by the scene in Snow White in which the Wicked Queen dips an apple into a poisonous brew. He was found in his bed with froth around his mouth, cyanide in his system, and a half-eaten apple by his side. Was that something a machine would have done? I. Stirling’s formula, which approximates the value of the factorial of a number. II. The display and explanations of the Mark I at Harvard’s science center made no mention of Grace Hopper nor pictured any women until 2014, when the display was revised to highlight her role and that of the programmers. III. Von Neumann was successful in this. The plutonium implosion design would result in the first detonation of an atomic device, the Trinity test, in July 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and it would be used for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days after the uranium bomb was used on Hiroshima. With his hatred of both the Nazis and the Russian-backed communists, von Neumann became a vocal proponent of atomic weaponry.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
“
Joanne Sanders, a broad woman in her forties, posed with friends, family, and Snowball in photographs displayed on the mantel of the fake fireplace. She had shoulder-length brown hair and bangs teased high above her brow. I could picture her behind ten inches of bulletproof glass sneering at me with gloss-encased lips for filling out my deposit slip incorrectly. I fed Snowball half a cup of kibble and a spoonful of wet food as my envelope of information directed. She ate it quickly while making funny little squeaking noises. Once she had licked her bowl to a bright sheen, we headed out for my first walk as a dog-walker. I steered us off of East End Avenue and onto the esplanade that runs along the river. The water reflected the sun in bright silver glints. I smelled oil and brine. We reached Carl Schurz Park and turned into the dog run for small dogs. The gate leading into the run reached only to my knees, as did the rest of the fence designed to keep small dogs in and big ones out. A sign on the gate read, "Dogs over 25 pounds not permitted." Ten dogs under 25 pounds, and one who was probably a little over, played together in the pen. Their owners, in groups of three or four, sat on worn wooden benches and talked about dogs. Snowball ran to join a poodle growling at a puppy. They intimidated it behind its owner's calves. Then the poodle, a miniature gray curly thing with long ears, mounted Snowball. I turned to the river and watched a giant barge inch by.
”
”
Emily Kimelman (Unleashed (Sydney Rye, #1))
“
To the delight of visiting American sailors, the British still had a military base there, Changi, and shared it with those stout lads from Down Under, the Australians, who naturally came supplied with Down Under lassies. Australian women were the glory of Singapore. These tall, lithe creatures with tanned, muscular legs and striking white teeth that were forever being displayed in dazzling smiles somehow completed the picture, made it whole. You ran into them at Raffles, the old hotel downtown with ceiling fans and rattan chairs and doddery old gentlemen in white suits sipping gin. You ran into them in the lobbies and restaurants of the new western hotels and in the bazaars and emporiums. You saw them strolling the boulevards and haggling with small Chinese women in baggy trousers for sapphires and opals. You saw them everywhere, young, tan, enjoying life, the center of attention wherever they were. It helped that their colorful tropical frocks contrasted so vividly with the drab trousers and white shirts that seemed to be the Singaporean national costume. They were like songbirds surrounded by sparrows. “If Qantas didn’t bring them here, the United Nations should supply them as a gesture of good will to all human kind.” Flap Le Beau stated this conclusion positively to Jake Grafton and the Real McCoy as they stood outside Raffles Hotel surveying the human parade on the sidewalk. “I think I’m in love,” the Real McCoy told his companions. “I want one of those for my very own.
”
”
Stephen Coonts (The Intruders (Jake Grafton #2))
“
..."facts" properly speaking are always and never more than interpretations of the data... the Gospel accounts are themselves such data or, if you like, hard facts. But the events to which the Gospels refer are not themselves "hard facts"; they are facts only in the sense that we interpret the text, together with such other data as we have, to reach a conclusion regarding the events as best we are able. They are facts in the same way that the verdict of a jury establishes the facts of the case, the interpretation of the evidence that results in the verdict delivered. Here it is as well to remember that historical methodology can only produce probabilities, the probability that some event took place in such circumstances being greater or smaller, depending on the quality of the data and the perspective of the historical enquirer. The jury which decides what is beyond reasonable doubt is determining that the probability is sufficiently high for a clear-cut verdict to be delivered. Those who like "certainty" in matters of faith will always find this uncomfortable. But faith is not knowledge of "hard facts"...; it is rather confidence, assurance, trust in the reliability of the data and in the integrity of the interpretations derived from that data...
It does seem important to me that those who speak for evangelical Christians grasp this nettle firmly, even if it stings! – it is important for the intellectual integrity of evangelicals. Of course any Christian (and particularly evangelical Christians) will want to get as close as possible to the Jesus who ministered in Galilee in the late 20s of the first century. If, as they believe, God spoke in and through that man, more definitively and finally than at any other time and by any other medium, then of course Christians will want to hear as clearly as possible what he said, and to see as clearly as possible what he did, to come as close as possible to being an eyewitness and earwitness for themselves. If God revealed himself most definitively in the historical particularity of a Galilean Jew in the earliest decades of the Common Era, then naturally those who believe this will want to inquire as closely into the historical particularity and actuality of that life and of Jesus’ mission. The possibility that later faith has in some degree covered over that historical actuality cannot be dismissed as out of the question. So a genuinely critical historical inquiry is necessary if we are to get as close to the historical actuality as possible. Critical here, and this is the point, should not be taken to mean negatively critical, hermeneutical suspicion, dismissal of any material that has overtones of Easter faith. It means, more straightforwardly, a careful scrutiny of all the relevant data to gain as accurate or as historically responsible a picture as possible.
In a day when evangelical, and even Christian, is often identified with a strongly right-wing, conservative and even fundamentalist attitude to the Bible, it is important that responsible evangelical scholars defend and advocate such critical historical inquiry and that their work display its positive outcome and benefits. These include believers growing in maturity
• to recognize gray areas and questions to which no clear-cut answer can be given (‘we see in a mirror dimly/a poor reflection’),
• to discern what really matters and distinguish them from issues that matter little,
• and be able to engage in genuine dialogue with those who share or respect a faith inquiring after truth and seeking deeper understanding.
In that way we may hope that evangelical (not to mention Christian) can again become a label that men and women of integrity and good will can respect and hope to learn from more than most seem to do today.
”
”
James D.G. Dunn (The Historical Jesus: Five Views)
“
Say I decide that it would be a good thing to insert pictures here demonstrating cultural relativism, displaying an act that is commonsensical in one culture but deeply distressing in another. I know, I think, I'll get some pictures of a Southeast Asian dog meat market. Like me, most readers will likely resonate with dogs. Good plan! On to Google Images and the result is that I spend hours transfixed, unable to stop, torturing myself with picture after picture of dogs being carted off to market. Dogs being butchered, cooked and sold. Pictures of humans going about their day's work in a market indifferent to a crate stuffed to the top with suffering dogs. I imagine the fear those dogs feel. How they are hot, thirsty, in pain. I think, what if these dogs had come to trust humans? I think of their fear and confusion. I think, what if one of the dogs whom I've loved had to experience that? What if this happened to a dog my children loved? And with my heart racing, I realize that I hate these people. Hate! Every last one of them and despise their culture. And it takes a locomotive's worth of effort for me to admit that I can't justify that hatred and contempt. That mine is a mere moral intuition. That there are things that I do that would evoke the same response in some distant person whose morality and humanity are certainly no less than mine. And that but for the randomness of where I happen to have been born, I could have readily had their views instead. The thing that makes the tragedy of commonsense morality so tragic, is the intensity with which you just know that They are deeply wrong. In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions, religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit, bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds, facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations, but they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
If I had lied to the CIA, perhaps I might have passed a test. Instead of writing a book about the White House, I’d be poisoning a drug kingpin with a dart gun concealed inside a slightly larger dart gun, or making love to a breathy supermodel in the interest of national security. I’ll never know. I confessed to smoking pot two months before. The sunniness vanished from my interviewer’s voice. “Normally we like people who break the rules,” Skipper told me, “but we can’t consider anyone who’s used illegal substances in the past twelve months.” Just like that, my career as a terrorist hunter was over. I thought my yearning for higher purpose would vanish with my CIA dreams, the way a Styrofoam container follows last night’s Chinese food into the trash. To my surprise, it stuck around. In the weeks that followed, I pictured myself in all sorts of identities: hipster, world traveler, banker, white guy who plays blues guitar. But these personas were like jeans a half size too small. Trying them on gave me an uncomfortable gut feeling and put my flaws on full display. My search for replacement selves began in November. By New Year’s Eve I was mired in the kind of existential funk that leads people to find Jesus, or the Paleo diet, or Ayn Rand. Instead, on January 3, I found a candidate. I was on an airplane when I discovered him, preparing for our initial descent into JFK. This was during the early days of live in-flight television, and I was halfway between the Home Shopping Network and one of the lesser ESPNs when I stumbled across coverage of a campaign rally in Iowa. Apparently, a caucus had just finished. Speeches were about to begin. With nothing better to occupy my time, I confirmed that my seat belt was fully fastened. I made sure my tray table was locked. Then, with the arena shrunk to fit my tiny seatback screen, I watched a two-inch-tall guy declare victory. It’s not like I hadn’t heard about Barack Obama. I had heard his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His presidential campaign had energized my more earnest friends. But I was far too mature to take them seriously. They supported someone with the middle name Hussein to be president of the United States. While they were at it, why not cast a ballot for the Tooth Fairy? Why not nominate Whoopi Goldberg for pope?
”
”
David Litt (Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years)
“
They came in to look. I watched them. Most people go through museums like they do Macy's: eyes sweeping the display, stopping only if something really grabs their attention. These two looked at everything. They both clearly liked the bicycle picture. Yup, Dutch, I decided.
He was a few steps ahead when he got to my favorite painting there. Diana and the Moon. It was-surprise surprise-of Diana, framed by a big open window, the moon dominating the sky outside. She was perched on the windowsill, dressed in a gauzy wrap that could have been nightclothes or a nod to her goddess namesake. She looked beautiful, of course, and happy, but if you looked for more than a second, you could see that her smile had a teasing curve to it and one of her hands was actually wrapped around the outside frame. I thought she looked like she might swing her legs over the sill and jump, turning into a moth or owl or breath of wind even before she was completely out of the room. I thought she looked, too, like she was daring the viewer to come along. Or at least to try.
The Dutch guy didn't say anything. He just reached out a hand. His girlfriend stepped in, folding herself into the circle of his outsretched arm. They stood like that, in front of the painting, for a full minute. Then he sneezed.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue.He took in and, without letting go of her, did a surprisingly graceful one-handed blow. Then he crumpled the tissue and looked around for a trash can. There wasn't one in sight. She held out her free hand; he passed over the tissue, and she stuck it right back into her pocket. I wanted to be grossed out. Instead, I had the surprising thought that I really really wanted someone who would do that: put my used Kleenex in his pocket. It seemed like a declaration of something pretty big.
Finally,they finished their examination of Diana and moved on.There wasn't much else, just the arrogant Willings and the overblown sunrise. They came over to examine the bronzes.
She saw my book. "Excuse me. You know this artist?"
Intimately just didn't seem as true anymore. "Pretty well," I answered.
"He is famous here?"
"Not very."
"I like him." she said thoughtfully. "He has...oh, the word...personism?"
"Personality?" I offered.
"Yes!" she said, delighted. "Personality." She reached behind her without looking. Her boyfriend immediately twined his fingers with hers. They left, unfolding the map again as they went, she chattering cheerfully. I think she was telling him he had personality. They might as well have had exhibit information plaques on their backs: "COUPLE." CONTEMPORARY DUTCH. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LOVE, FOR THE VIEWING PLEASURE (OR NOT) OF ANYONE AND EVERYONE.
”
”
Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of Truth or Dare)
“
Many other inhabitants of the city were similarly afflicted. Every day, more and more people took to saving time, and the more they did so, the more they were copied by others - even by those who had no real desire to join in but felt obligated to. Radio, television, and newspapers daily advertised and extolled the merits of new, time saving gadgets that would one day leave people free to live the 'right' kind of life. Walls and billboards were plastered with posters depicting scenes of happiness and prosperity. The real picture, however, was very different. Admittedly, timesavers were better dressed than the people who lived near the old amphitheater. They earned more money and had more to spend, but they looked tired, disgruntled and sour, and there was an unfriendly light in their eyes. They'd never heard the phrase, "Why not go and see Momo?' nor did they have anyone to listen to them in a way that would make them reasonable or conciliatory, let alone happy. Even had they known such a person, they would have been highly unlikely to pay him or her a visit unless the whole affair could be dealt with in five minutes flat, or they would have considered it a waste of time. In their view, even leisure time had to be used to the full, so as to extract the maximum of entertainment and relaxation with the minimum amount of delay. Whatever the occasion, whether solemn or joyous, timesavers could no longer celebrate it properly. Daydreaming they regarded almost as a criminal offense. What they could endure least of all, however, was silence, for when silence fell they became terrified by the realization of what was happening to their lives. And so, whenever silence threatened to descend, they made a noise. It wasn't a happy sound, of course, like the hubbub in a children's playground, but an angry ill tempered din that grew louder every day. It had ceased to matter that people should enjoy their work and take pride in it; on the contrary, enjoyment merely slowed them down. All that mattered was to get through as much work as possible in the shortest possible time, so notices to the effect were prominently displayed in every factory and office building. They read: TIME IS PRECIOUS - DON'T WASTE IT! or: TIME IS MONEY - SAVE IT! Last but not least, the appearance of the city itself changed more and more. Old buildings were pulled down and replaced with modern ones devoid of all the things that were now through superfluous. No architect troubled to design houses that suited the people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper, and above all, more time saving to make them identical. Huge modern housing developments sprang up on the city's outskirts - endless rows of multi-storied tenements as indistinguishable as peas in a pod. And because all the buildings looked alike, so of course, did the streets. [.....] People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming even poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.
”
”
Michael Ende, Momo
“
transition into some examples that put HTML5 in action: A graphing calculator to display algebraic equations on the Canvas A children’s finger-painting application for drawing pictures on the page A geolocated work of fiction customized with details about the reader’s current location An audio-enabled glossary that lets you click to hear the pronunciation of each term Embedded video content within instructional text to supplement a lesson
”
”
Sanders Kleinfeld (HTML5 for Publishers)
“
Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.
”
”
Sarah Lewis (The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery)
“
But for pragmatists on both sides of the debate, this very reductive picture of an economic migrant is ultimately not a particularly useful one. For a start, people who travel for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers. Ironically, they instead display qualities that would be prized in indigenous Europeans – the kind of on-yer-bike resourcefulness that conservatives wish was intrinsic to every native jobseeker.
”
”
Patrick Kingsley (The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis)
“
The 50-inch TCL Roku TV balances picture quality and value for money. And this is also what happens when America’s top TV brand and the world’s most popular streaming services content instantly and from one single place. You have everything on the Roku from live TV to game console or if you wish choose from over 1500 streaming channels. This is also the widest selection any smart TV has ever had. Find that perfect movie or TV show easily across top streaming channels by title, actor or director with the acclaimed Roku ‘Search’ feature.
On the Roku, you will find more than 200,000 streaming movies and shows that you can choose from. The Remote is simple and puts control into the users’ hands and lets you instantly choose your preferred content from anywhere. Use the Roku Mobile app on your smartphone or tablet to control your Roku TV. Cast your personal media, videos and photos and even music to the big screen. With a 120 Hz refresh rate, the TV displays images at 1080p. It has a built-in wireless and not one, but three HDMI ports that provide a high definition multimedia interface. Wired calls the TCL Roku TV ‘The First Smart TV worth using’.
The TCL TV has a Roku box built into it. It is a smart TV that includes the Roku operating system, which is also the favorite OS for most users. The OS is considered as one of the best compared to all the other products and definitely better than any other smart TVs.
Recently, the Roku TV was displayed at the prestigious CES 2018 with a brand new OS. We all know a lot about Roku and there are lots of Roku fans across the United States. The recently released series of Roku OS 8 comes with some new and improved features.
All Roku TVs have a ‘Tuner’ input that enables you to plug into an antenna and look for channels.
In the new Roku TV, the ‘Tuner’ input is available on the Home screen itself; which makes it very easy to navigate to it without fumbling
Once you select the ‘Tuner’ input it takes you to the last tuned channel
You will also get a preview of what is playing right now
The Roku OS 8 also comes with a Smart Guide where you will get a 14-day preview of what is available on all the channels that the Roku TV has scanned for
Scroll through the Smart Guide to find out your next programming on the list
The experience is fluid with no judder or lag; users will be able to scan through the Smart Guide very easily
All you have to do is use the HD antenna and the Roku TV will pop up all the entertainment information
In addition to the Smart Guide, there is also a new feature called ‘More Ways to Watch’
Anytime Roku identifies a content that is on the Smart Guide, which is also available on other Roku channels it is marked with a ‘*’. This indicates that there are more ways to watch a single programming content
You also don’t have to wait to watch your favorite programming
Wherever you see the ‘*’at any time on the Smart Guide, hit the ‘Ok’ button on your remote and watch it on another Roku channel instantly
The pricing for the channel or programming is also displayed
If you have a Roku set top box that is connected to a different TV (other than the Roku), there is a new feature in the ‘Search’ where Roku will tell you the channel on which a particular programming is available with the precise timing.
The Roku OS 8 has already been pushed out to all the players and TVs. The same OS 8 version is available for Roku Set top boxes as well.
If any problem in Roku setup, please call us @+1-877-302-5260
”
”
Mike Scott
“
Kimbanguism is an extremely peace-loving religion, yet brimming with military allusions. Those symbols were not originally part of the religion, but were copied in the 1930s from the Salvation Army, a Christian denomination that, unlike theirs, was not banned at that time. The faithful believed that the S on the Christian soldiers’ uniform stood not for “Salvation” but for “Simon,” and became enamored of the army’s military liturgy. Today, green is still the color of Kimbanguism, and the hours of prayer are brightened up several times a day by military brass bands. Those bands, by the way, are truly impressive. It is a quiet Monday evening when I find myself on the square. While the martial music rolls on and on, played first by the brass section, then by flutes, the faithful shuffle forward to be blessed by the spiritual leader. In groups of four or five, they kneel before the throne. The spiritual leader himself is standing. He wears a gray, short-sleeved suit and gray socks. He is not wearing shoes. In his hand he holds a plastic bottle filled with holy water from the “Jordan,” a local stream. The believers kneel and let themselves be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Children open their mouths to catch a spurt of holy water. A young deaf man asks for water to be splashed on his ears. And old woman who can hardly see has her eyes sprinkled. The crippled display their aching ankles. Fathers come by with pieces of clothing belonging to their sick children. Mothers show pictures of their family, so the leader can brush them with his fingers. The line goes on and on. Nkamba has an average population of two to three thousand, plus a great many pilgrims and believers on retreat. People come from Kinshasa and Brazzaville, as well as from Brussels or London. Thousands of people come pouring in, each evening anew. For an outsider this may seem like a bizarre ceremony, but in essence it is no different from the long procession of believers who have been filing past a cave at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees for more than a century. There too, people come from far and near to a spot where tradition says unique events took place, there too people long for healing and for miracles, there too people place all their hope in a bottle of spring water. This is about mass devotion and that usually says more about the despair of the masses than about the mercy of the divine. After the ceremony, during a simple meal, I talk to an extremely dignified woman who once fled Congo as a refugee and has been working for years as a psychiatric nurse in Sweden. She loves Sweden, but she also loves her faith. If at all possible, she comes to Nkamba each year on retreat, especially now that she is having problems with her adolescent son. She has brought him along. “I always return to Sweden feeling renewed,” she says.
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David Van Reybrouck (Congo: The Epic History of a People)
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Now then,” Falco started as he tucked the canvases back beneath the long table. “Have I proven myself, Signorina Cassandra? May I paint you?”
Cass looked down at her long legs protruding from the ruffled skirt. She willed back the images of Aunt Agnese and Luca that threatened to overwhelm her. “You’re not going to display it, are you?” she asked.
“I thought I’d hang it by the entrance to the Grand Canal. Call it Signorina Cassandra Caravello in Her Undergarments. What do you think?”
“Very funny.”
“I thought so.” Falco dragged the wooden stool and easel to the center of the room. He gestured for Cass to take her place on the divan. “Please.” He pulled a pair of lamps close, murmuring something about the insufficient lighting.
“Under normal circumstances,” Falco said, “I would ask you to sit during the daytime. It’s the only way to get a clear picture. But it isn’t often I have the place to myself.” He grinned. “And you are certainly not a normal circumstance.”
Cass felt herself blushing; she was sure he would have to paint her complexion a mottled red.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he said. “Right now it looks as though you’re sitting on a pincushion.”
Cass tried a new pose and Falco laughed. “Let me,” he said, and, reaching out, set about readjusting her. He gently eased her onto her left hip, letting the right leg fall forward in front of her. He pulled part of her hair over her shoulder so it twisted and curled around her neck. Cass sipped her drink nervously, hoping the alcohol might relax her. Each of Falco’s touches generated a tiny bolt of lightning inside her. The charge was starting to build up to dangerous levels.
“Are your legs cold?” Falco asked.
Cass managed to choke out a no. Her whole body was racing with heat, and she felt about two touches away from spontaneous combustion. She was seized by a fleeting impulse to run away; at the same time, she wished he would touch her forever. The costume, the posing, the mysterious alcohol that was dissolving her inhibitions. Cass felt wild and alive, even more so than she had the night they went to the brothels. That night she had been someone else, but tonight she was posing as herself, and she loved it.
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Fiona Paul (Venom (Secrets of the Eternal Rose, #1))
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Embed your picture in your e-mails.
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Daymond John (The Brand Within: The Power of Branding from Birth to the Boardroom (Display of Power Series))
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When you project a picture of your product to the clients, make sure the picture is pictured effectively in the consumer’s mind. Many products die due to our inability to look at the bigger picture that is to estimate the viewers response towards the displayed picture.
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Shahenshah Hafeez Khan
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Did you ever realize that it is possible to read in your face and manner the record of your thoughts; that your face is a bulletin hoard upon which is advertised what has been going on in your mind for years? It was a saying of Swedenborg that “a man writes his life in his physique; and thus the angels discover his autobiography in his structure.” There is a picture of your greed, revenge, selfishness, jealousy a record of your dominant passion, which the world can read. You may have supposed that your thoughts were secret; but the fact is that they are all displayed upon your face bulletin. In reality, we can hide nothing, for we radiate the truth of ourselves. What we think is written on the countenance. Our faces are covered with the scars, the wounds, which our boomerang thoughts have made, for every vicious thought is a boomerang. If we throw a jealous or an envious or revengeful thought to another, it by an inexorable law comes back and wounds the thrower.
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Orison Swett Marden (7 Books on Prosperity & Success)
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Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.) Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
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Are you Mr. Bronson? We've come to teach you your manners.” Zachary flashed a grin at Holly. “I didn't realize when we struck our bargain that I was getting two of you.” Cautiously Rose reached up for her mother's gloved hand. “Is this where we're going to live, Mama? Is there a room for me?” Zachary sat on his haunches and stared into the little girl's face with a smile. “I believe a room right next to your mother's has been prepared for you,” he told her. His gaze fell to the mass of sparkling objects in Rose's hands. “What is that, Miss Rose?” “My button string.” The child let some of the length fall to the ground, displaying a line of carefully strung buttons… picture buttons etched with flowers, fruit or butterflies, ones made of molded black glass and a few of painted enamel and paper. “This one is my perfume button,” Rose said proudly, fingering a large one with velvet backing. She lifted it to her nose and inhaled deeply. “Mama puts her perfume on it for me, to make it smell nice.” As Rose extended it toward him, Zachary ducked his head and detected a faint flowery fragrance that he recognized instantly. “Yes,” he said softly, glancing up at Lady Holly's blushing face. “That smells just like your mama.” “Rose,” Holly said, clearly perturbed, “come with me—ladies do not remain talking on the drive-” “I don't have any buttons like that,” Rose told Zachary, ignoring her mother's words as she stared at one of the large solid gold buttons that adorned his coat. Gazing in the direction of the child's dainty finger, Zachary saw that a miniature hunting landscape was engraved on the surface of his top button. He had never looked closely enough to notice before. “Allow me the honor of adding to your collection, Miss Rose,” he said, reaching inside his coat to extract a small silver folding knife. Deftly he cut the threads holding the button to his coat and handed the object to the excited little girl. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Bronson,” Rose exclaimed. “Thank you!
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Lisa Kleypas (Where Dreams Begin)
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June 17: A letter from Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison (probably written by John F. Wharton) suggests that an article in Motion Picture by Hedda Hopper is libelous, according to Sam Silverman, a libel expert in Wharton’s firm. “I shall only say that bringing a libel suit might result in giving Miss Hopper a greater opportunity to display her venom. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t bring the suit if you wish us to.” Marilyn did not wish to.
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Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
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We used to joke that the ideal Amazon site would not show a search box, navigation links, or lists of things you could buy. Instead, it would just display a giant picture of one book, the next book you want to buy. —Greg
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Richard L. Brandt (One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com)
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HIDDEN POLYTHEISM: MAKING A DISPLAY OF PRAYERS The second kind of polytheism is hidden polytheism, such as making a display of our prayers or other forms of obedience to Allah. The difference between this polytheism and polytheism in prayers is that in the case of polytheism in prayers we associate some other thing or being with Allah. If someone directs his attention towards anything other than Allah, in the ritual prayer, or if, by the suggestion of shaitan, he has a picture of a false deity in his mind, or if his guide is the center of his attention, then he is a polytheist. Nothing except Allah, should be the object of attention in our worship. The Prophet said that if someone does a good deed and makes someone else a partner with Allah in it, then his whole deed is for the partner. Allah hates that action as well as its doer. It has also been reported that the Holy Prophet said that if someone offers the ritual prayer, observes a fast, or performs the Pilgrimage and has the idea that by his doing so the people will praise him, "then verily, he has made a partner with Allah in his action.
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Sultanu'l-Wa'izin Shirazi (Peshawar Nights: Shia Islam in Sunni Traditions)
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Yeah, well, I--” He stops and his eyes shift behind me, wide in amusement.
I turn my head to find a couple straight out of the 1980s at the end of the gelato line. They’re both sporting mullets and faded jeans. White sneakers. When I notice the matching red fanny packs, I have to look away.
“You should take a picture of that,” he says, resting his forearms on the table.
“What?” I lean in closer and speak just above a whisper. “No way.”
“Do it!” he insists. “Five euros.” He digs into his pocket and clanks down five coins.
I sneak a peek at the unsuspecting couple. The man is wiping sweat off his face with a hanky. They’re too close. I’d never get away with it.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Pansy.”
With a grunt, I switch my camera on and set it to automatic. I raise it to my face and start to twist my upper body.
“No, wait!” he says. “You’re doing it wrong.”
I drop the camera to my lap and face him. “What?”
“You’re too obvious. You need stealth. Watch and learn.” He retrieves a small point-and-shoot camera from his pocket and aims it toward me. “Say cheese!” he says so loudly that I’m sure everyone around us is looking.
“Uh…cheese?”
“Done.” He hits a few buttons and shows me the display screen.
There they are. Looked right at him too. Clever. But I can’t let him win.
“Wow. That’s pretty pixelated. What kind of setting do you have that on?”
He frowns. “It’s just zoomed in.”
“Oh.” I reach to zoom out, but he pulls it away too fast. “What? Why can’t I see? Did you actually take a picture of me or something?”
“Stealth.” He shrugs and my cheeks turn pink. “Guess these are my winnings.” The coins scrape across the table as he scoops them up to put in his pocket.
“You didn’t even give me a chance to redeem myself,” I defend.
“Excuses, excuses. Just admit I’m the better photographer.” He laughs, standing to shoot his empty cup in the trash. “Finished?”
I nod and he tosses mine too. “Braver maybe, but better? Your camera doesn’t have enough buttons.
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Kristin Rae (Wish You Were Italian (If Only . . . #2))
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He remembered taking a class in information theory as a third-year student in college. The professor had put up two pictures: One was the famous Song Dynasty painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival, full of fine, rich details; the other was a photograph of the sky on a sunny day, the deep blue expanse broken only by a wisp of cloud that one couldn’t even be sure was there. The professor asked the class which picture contained more information. The answer was that the photograph’s information content—its entropy—exceeded the painting’s by one or two orders of magnitude.
Three Body was the same. Its enormous information content was hidden deep. Wang could feel it, but he could not articulate it. He suddenly understood that the makers of Three Body took the exact opposite of the approach taken by designers of other games. Normally, game designers tried to display as much information as possible to increase the sense of realism. But Three Body’s designers worked to compress the information content to disguise a more complex reality, just like that seemingly empty photograph of the sky.
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Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1))
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I am a solider in my mind
Dodging venom time after time
You spat at me for helping the blue
Perhaps try walking a mile in their shoes
Before casting judgment, picture their days
Constantly threatened for a badge they display
We are strong
The sisters in blue
Sticking to what is just like glue
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Brittany Benko (Poetic Poems and Prose)
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He was steps away from the revolving doors when he came to a stop. He hadn't looked at window displays the other times he'd been to the store. Not once. But here were crowds of people admiring them, pointing, taking pictures and raving. Children rushed from one window to another. They jumped up and down. There was so much joy and happiness around him. You could feel it in the air. For a moment, he allowed himself to simply soak it up. To drink it in. He'd been missing out on this because he'd decided as a young boy that it wasn't meant for him. (Chapter 12).
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Karen Booth (A Christmas Temptation (The Eden Empire, #1))
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No picture could have more aptly described the feeling of transcendent peace that I felt that day. I was beginning to grow fond of these little love nudges that God kept sending in my direction. I used to be completely incapable of seeing these things, but I was starting to see signs like these more often. Each time I did, I felt like God was winking at me. Not in an attempt to get my attention, but as a reminder that He was near, that He would remain faithful even if I were not. I wondered how many times He’d displayed acts like this before to a blind audience?
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Michael J Heil (Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose)
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Nothing is properly on display, yet every guy here has by now pictured her naked.
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Nova Flynn (My Boyfriend's Daddy)
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I seriously wondered, for example, whether Lisa McElhaney had ever been to Leningrad, or Ulster, or North Waghi. Then again, I couldn’t even figure out what she really died of. Her seventeen-year-old body was found in a plastic bag in Columbus, Ohio, in April 1987. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother had tried to get an abortion when pregnant with Lisa, but couldn’t afford it. Lisa was raped as a child, became pregnant and miscarried at age fifteen, was thrown out by her family, became addicted to drugs, and worked in pornography and prostitution to support her habit. Each time she ran afoul of the law and was incarcerated in a home for delinquents, social workers noted on her file that she displayed an eagerness for relationships and was “‘starved for affection.”’ But the system was set up to rehabilitate, not to provide relationships or affection, so Lisa withdrew and “would sit for hours and hours, staring into space.”’ When photographs of her performing sexual acts were discovered by the police, she was subpoenaed to testify in a child-pornography case against Larry Miller, the pornographer. Although Miller was a suspect in her murder, police believed the killer was a client of hers, Rob Roy Baker, a thirty-four-year-old truck driver who had been linked to similar attacks on other prostitutes. When police came to question him, Baker shot himself to death in a house filled with pictures of nude women cut from pornographic magazines.
So I would ask myself, did Lisa die of assault? Which assault? The lack of affordable abortion for her mother? The beating from her john? Did she die of the disease called "family" or the disease called "rehabilitation," of poverty or drugs or pornography, of economics or sexual slavery or a broken body? Or a broken spirit? When she stared into space for hours was it because she knew she was in here but had no way of trying to reach anyone in the neighboring cell?
Perhaps she died on unknown causes.
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Robin Morgan (The Demon Lover)
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I knew what was supposed to be fun and what wasn't. I made sure to smile and laugh for pictures, showing the world a mask of joy and engagement. This front I put on was for people to see a more appealing side of me, displaying mirth and contentment.
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Lilith Fury (In the darkness we share)
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English and half Nigerian, Stacey had never set foot outside the United Kingdom. Her tight black hair was cut short and close to her head following the removal of her last weave. The smooth caramel skin suited the haircut well. Stacey’s work area was organised and clear. Anything not in the labelled trays was stacked in meticulous piles along the top edge of her desk. Not far behind was Detective Sergeant Bryant who mumbled a ‘Morning, Guv,’ as he glanced into The Bowl. His six foot frame looked immaculate, as though he had been dressed for Sunday school by his mother. Immediately the suit jacket landed on the back of his chair. By the end of the day his tie would have dropped a couple of floors, the top button of his shirt would be open and his shirt sleeves would be rolled up just below his elbows. She saw him glance at her desk, seeking evidence of a coffee mug. When he saw that she already had coffee he filled the mug labelled ‘World’s Best Taxi Driver’, a present from his nineteen-year-old daughter. His filing was not a system that anyone else understood but Kim had yet to request any piece of paper that was not in her hands within a few seconds. At the top of his desk was a framed picture of himself and his wife taken at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. A picture of his daughter snuggled in his wallet. DS Kevin Dawson, the third member of her team, didn’t keep a photo of anyone special on his desk. Had he wanted to display a picture of the person for whom he felt most affection he would have been greeted by his own likeness throughout his working day. ‘Sorry I’m late, Guv,’ Dawson called as he slid into his seat opposite Wood and completed her team. He wasn’t officially late. The shift didn’t start until eight a.m. but she liked them all in early for a briefing, especially at the beginning of a new case. Kim didn’t like to stick to a roster and people who did lasted a very short time on her team. ‘Hey, Stacey, you gonna get me a coffee or what?’ Dawson asked, checking his mobile phone. ‘Of course, Kev, how’d yer like it: milk, two sugars and in yer lap?’ she asked sweetly, in her strong Black Country accent.
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Angela Marsons (Silent Scream (DI Kim Stone, #1))
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These cues can take many forms. Here are some examples keyed to particular problem situations: ✓ A sign you put on the margin of your computer monitor or on your desk within your visual field reminding you not to start surfing the web instead of doing your work. Or try a picture of your boss on which you have printed “Get to Work!” Or, do as Homer Simpson did in one memorable episode when he displayed a picture of his young daughter, Lisa, with the statement “Do it for her!” beneath it.
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Russell A. Barkley (Taking Charge of Adult ADHD: Proven Strategies to Succeed at Work, at Home, and in Relationships)
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It seemed to me that the precision required to play good golf demanded much greater mental discipline than was necessary for good tennis. The reason for the low margin of error was not hard to discover: the speed of the club head that is necessary to hit the ball a long distance. The speed of the golfer’s arms on the downswing is not much greater than the speed of the tennis player’s arm on the serve, but because of the greater length and flexibility of the golf club, the club-head speed is much greater than that of a racket. If a club head traveling over 100 mph contacts the ball with a face open a mere degree or two, the ball can be sent off target many tens of yards. With those odds, it’s amazing that the ball ever does go exactly where we want it to. In tennis, the serve is the only shot in which the player initiates the action, whereas in golf he does so on every shot. It is interesting to note that if you miss your first serve in tennis, you get another try. Golf is not so forgiving! Further, in tennis a much larger surface hits a much larger ball a much shorter distance. Moving from tennis to golf was definitely going to require some fine-tuning of my concentration. The greater precision required in golf is also reflected in the manner in which the player addresses the ball. A tennis player can be pretty casual, or even a little flamboyant, as he sets up the service line, bounces the ball a few times, and serves. Most professional golfers display much more self-discipline. They seem to approach the ball in the same controlled, almost ritualistic way every time. Even their dress seems more meticulous. (I’ve often felt I could pick out the golfers from the tennis players at a cocktail party.) Meticulousness has never been my strong suit. There isn’t a family picture of me as a boy in which at least one shoe wasn’t untied. I could usually solve
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W. Timothy Gallwey (The Inner Game of Golf)
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Celestial was a tricky woman to figure out; she almost didn’t marry me, although I never doubted her love. For one thing, I made a couple of procedural errors with my proposal, but more than that, I don’t think she planned on getting married at all. She kept this display she called a “vision board,” basically a corkboard where she tacked up words like prosperity, creativity, passion! There were also magazine pictures that showed what she wanted out of life. Her dream was for her artworks to be part of the Smithsonian, but there was also a cottage on Amelia Island and an image of the earth as seen from the moon. No wedding dress or engagement ring factored into this little collage. It didn’t bother me, but it bothered me.
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Tayari Jones (An American Marriage)
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The last time she had been in the Roosevelt Room, President Trump had spent the entire briefing glowering at a picture of Teddy Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize on display, unable to concentrate. “Trump hated it,” Hill thought. Did he think it was unfair? Did he think he deserved his own?
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Bob Woodward (War)
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Young children with anxiety often respond well to visual sequences of events. Small pictures of daily events may be drawn out on felt, and arranged on a larger piece of felt. Children and parents can arrange the felt pictures in an order of events, displaying what will happen for that day or the next day. Children who seem to expect abandonment can see that in the morning Mom is there, or see and talk about what it feels like when Mom picks them up at day care. A difficulty common with younger, anxious children is that they tend to stop processing information when they come to the part of a daily sequencing that involves separation. This visual aid helps them to get to the other side of the sequence in which there is reunion. This is a good aid for children with permanent auditory processing problems or emotionally produced auditory processing problems.
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Deborah D. Gray (Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents)