Ditch Small Quotes

Isn't that someone we know?" asked Horace. He pointed to where a cloaked figure sat by the side of the road a few hundred meters away, arms wrapped around his knees. Close by him, a small shaggy horse cropped the grass growing at the edge of the drainage ditch that ran beside the road. "So it is," Halt replied. "And he seems to have brought Will with him.

I possessed only a book, which I carried in my small backpack. Suddenly, while I was walking, the book began to burn. Dawn was breaking and almost no cars passed. While throwing the charred backpack in an irrigation ditch I felt my back sting as though I had wings.

His loss. I know a hell of a lot more about headstrong teenage girls than he does.” Colin gave her his most quelling look. “You’re baiting him again.” Ryan studied first one of them and then the other. “What’s going on with you two?” “Nothing.” Unfortunately, they spoke together, automatically making them look like liars. Sugar Beth recovered first and handled the situation in her own way. “Relax, Ryan. Colin’s done his best to get rid of me, but I’m blackmailing him with some unsavory facts I’ve unearthed about his past, which may or may not involve the ritual deaths of small animals, so if my body ends up in a ditch somewhere, tell the police to start their interrogations with him. Plus you might warn everybody to be careful with their cats.

Every spring in the wet meadows and ditches I hear a little shrilling chorus which sounds for all the world like an endlessly reiterated “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here.” And so they are, as frogs, of course. Confident little fellows. I suspect that to some greater ear than ours, man’s optimistic pronouncements about his role and destiny may make a similar little ringing sound that travels a small way out into the night. It is only its nearness that is offensive. From the heights of a mountain, or a marsh at evening, it blends, not too badly, with all the other sleepy voices that, in croaks or chirrups, are saying the same thing.

Here, throw them all away, all the things you’ve ever desired, toss them into the road, into some ditch, the things you used to think. The things you loved. And look how paltry, how measly they were. That man and that mountain. They make a woman want a small life. A runty life like a pretty little pebble. A life that can fit in your pocket. Like a ring, or a hazelnut. They don’t tell a woman she can choose things that aren’t small.

Like That" Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night, with no moon and no town anywhere and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in the ditch. Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty water blurting from the faucet in the kitchen, leaking down through the floorboards to hot cement. Do it without asking, without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery’s shut down and the watchman’s slumped asleep before his small TV showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways, while the thieves slice through the fence with steel clippers. Love me when you can’t find a decent restaurant open anywhere, when you’re alone in a glaring diner with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are greasy and your hash browns underdone. Snick the buttons off the front of my dress and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just beneath the surface, their cold fins waving. Love me on the hood of a truck no one’s driven in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers; and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat, while turtles drag their bellies through slick mud, through the footprints of coots and ducks. Do it when no one’s looking, when the riots begin and the planes open up, when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the pedal sinks to the floor, while someone hurls a plate against the wall and picks up another, love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak, when you don’t believe in anything, listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down with me and close your eyes, the road curves here, I’m cranking up the radio and we’re going, we won’t turn back as long as you love me, as long as you keep on doing it exactly like that.

ROOT CELLAR" Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch, Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, Shoots dangled and drooped, Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates, Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes. And what a congress of stinks!-- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.

A horse was hag-ridden. Its owners filled a bottle with its urine, stopped it with a cork, and buried it: the witch could not piece and died in agony. The air hummed with flies when the travellers approached the cattle - rich odors of dung and hay. They heard an ouzel's ringing tew tew tew; the peasants cupped their ears. Farmers tilled their small fields to the limit. Women carded and combed, clouted and washed, and peeled rushes as in Lynn. One woman became a man when he jumped over an irrigation ditch and his cunt dropped inside out: gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved. His mittens were made of rags.

Tortoises are not well equipped for cross-country navigation. They need longer legs or shallower ditches.

human beings feel more comfortable “playing small.” We cling to comfort, thus continuing to hold our own power hostage.

Big and little they went on together to Molalla, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange-dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.

Freeze happens when the brain assesses the threat and decides you’re too slow to run and too small to fight, and so your best hope for survival is to “play dead” until the threat goes away or someone comes along to help you. Freeze is your last-ditch stress response, reserved for threats that the brain perceives as life-threatening, when fight or flight don’t stand a chance.

She slid a sideways glance in his direction, trying to figure out just what it was that was making her so . . . so painfully self-conscious all of a sudden. He was looking right at her. Grinning. A big, stupid, self-satisfied grin, as if he had been eavesdropping on her all-too-embarrassing thoughts. “What?” She tried to defend herself, wishing she’d never looked his way as she felt her cheeks burning with shame. “What?” she asked again when he just laughed at her. “Were you planning to ditch school today, or should we turn around?” She looked up and realized that she’d just driven past the road that led to the school. “Why didn’t you say something?” she accused as she pulled a quick, and probably illegal, U-turn. The tops of her ears felt they were on fire now. “I just wanted to see where you were heading.” He shrugged. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t skip school. You just have to ask me first.” His new grown-up voice seemed to fill all the space of the small car, and Violet found even that annoying. “Shut up,” she insisted, even though she couldn’t help smiling now too. She couldn’t believe she’d passed the entrance to her own school. “Now we really are going to be late.

ONE SMALL STEP — Name something that stresses you out, and make one fixed decision to make it easier. One, not thirty-seven. And that is the perfect segue into our next Lazy Genius principle: start small.

These days, there are so few pure country people left on the concession roads that we may be in need of a new category of membership, much as sons and daughters of veterans are now allowed to join the Legion. A few simple questions could be asked, a small fee paid and (assuming that the answers are correct) you could be granted the status of an "almost local." Here are some of the questions you might be asked: Do you have just one suit for weddings and funerals? Do you save plastic buckets? Do you leave your car doors unlocked at all times? Do you have an inside dog and an outside dog? Has your outside dog never been to town? When you pass a neighbour in the car, do you wave from the elbow or do you merely raise one finger from the steering wheel? Do you have trouble keeping the car or truck going in a straight line because you are looking at crops or livestock? Do you sometimes find yourself sitting in the car in the middle of a dirt road chatting with a neighbour out the window while other cars take the ditch to get around you? Can you tell whose tractor is going by without looking out the window? Can people recognize you from three hundred yards away by the way you walk or the tilt of your hat? If somebody honks their horn at you, do you automatically smile and wave? Do most of your conversations open with some observation about the weather? Is your most important news source the store in the village? Have you had surgery in the local hospital? If you hear about a death or a fire in the community, does the woman in your house immediately start making sandwiches or a cake? Do you sometimes find yourself referring to a farm in the neighbourhood by the name of someone who owned it more than twenty-five years ago? If you answered yes to all of the above questions, consider it official: you are a local.

mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed, and a small boy was saying, "Here's a dead mongoose.

She was loyal and brave and as smart as a treeful of owls. By explaining her talents and legions of virtues, though, I would not be making my point, which is that the death of my dog hit me harder than the deaths of many people I have known, and this can’t be explained away by saying how good she was. She was. But what I was feeling was something else entirely. I came to realize in the months following Rose’s death, months that I referred to myself as being in the ditch, that there was between me and every person I had ever loved some element of separation, and I had never seen it until now. There had been long periods spent apart from the different people I loved, due to nothing more than circumstances. There had been arguments and disappointments, for the most part small and easily reconciled, but over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgment and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships. Except that I had never broken from Rose. I had never judged her or wanted her to be different, never wished myself free from her for a single day.

The new moral culture of victimhood fosters ‘moral dependence’ and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one's own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims."[56

Dutiful How did I get so dutiful? Was I always that way? Going around as a child with a small broom and dustpan, sweeping up dirt I didn't make, or out into the yard with a stunted rake,, weeding the gardens of others -the dirt blew back, the weeds flourished, despite my efforts- and all the while with a frown of disapproval for other people's fecklessness, and my own slavery. I didn't perform these duties willingly. I wanted to be on the river, or dancing, but something had me by the back of the neck. That's me too, years later, a purple-eyed wreck, because whatever had to be finished wasn't, and I stayed late, grumpy as a snake, on too much coffee, and further on still, those groups composed of mutterings and scoldings, and the set-piece exhortation: somebody ought to do something! That was my hand shooting up. But I've resigned. I've ditched the grip of my echo. I've decided to wear sunglasses, and a necklace adorned with the gold word NO, and eat flowers I didn't grow. Still, why do I feel so responsible for the wailing from shattered houses, for birth defects and unjust wars, and the soft, unbearable sadness filtering down from distant stars?

Lise was on only the first day of what would be a three-day bicycle ride over small back roads “through thick enemy formations” to the combat zone. She slept in ditches when she tired, then picked up her vélo and began traveling again to her headquarters. She was nowhere near a radio when the communiqué from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces, aired for the people of Normandy: The lives of many of you depend on the speed with which you obey. Leave your towns at once—stay off the roads—go on foot and take nothing with you that is difficult to carry. Do not gather in groups which may be mistaken for enemy troops. The largest armada the world had ever known was minutes away from landing on the northern beaches of France. The hour of your liberation is approaching.

In the mountains they saw deer in the headlights and in the headlights the deer were pale as ghosts and as soundless. They turned their red eyes toward this unreckoned sun and sidled and grouped and leapt the bar ditch by ones and twos. A small doe lost her footing on the macadam and scrabbled wildly and sank onto her hindquarters and rose again and vanished with the others into the chaparral beyond the roadside.

Do not settle for living a version of your life designed by another. You are not meant to be gatekeeper or the holder of secrets and shame. You are here to live free and clear and into your own wide open truth. If you are spending too much time around people who expect otherwise you will begin to notice a feeling of constriction. Sometimes the life we create can be come a cage of our own making. Sometimes we stifle our truths to make others comfortable. Do not sacrifice your own comfort and freedom for that of another. The price you pay for this is too high. Define your own space. Remember your own divinity. You have a responsibility to this existence to live in fullness of your truth and art and purpose. Do not be diminished by circumstance or opinion or judgement. Your story is your own; nobody can write it but you. You hold the paper, you choose the pen, and you write your life story the way only you can. So, if someone tries to build you a box, rip that fucker apart and use the wood to build yourself a stage, then ditch your indoor voice and sing it loud. People are not meant to live quietly in small containers no matter how beautiful. A gilded cage is still confinement. You are a wild child – only the open air of freedom will do.

Here they are proposing to us, through various secret pamphlets of foreign manufacture, that we should join ranks and form small groups for the sole purpose of creating mass destruction, under the pretext that since you can’t treat the world, you can’t cure anything, and that if you’re radical enough to cut off a hundred million heads and thereby lighten your burden, you can jump across the ditch more confidently. A beautiful idea, no doubt,

Violent men unknown to me have occupied my mind all my adult life—long before 2007, when I first learned of the offender I would eventually dub the Golden State Killer. The part of the brain reserved for sports statistics or dessert recipes or Shakespeare quotes is, for me, a gallery of harrowing aftermaths: a boy’s BMX bike, its wheels still spinning, abandoned in a ditch along a country road; a tuft of microscopic green fibers collected from the small of a dead girl’s back.

The pyre was a ditch 50 yards long, six yards wide and three yards deep, a welter of burning bodies. SS soldiers, stationed at five-yard intervals along the pathway side of the ditch, awaited their victims. They were holding small caliber arms—six millimeters—used in the KZ for administering a bullet in the back of the neck. At the end of the pathway two Sonderkommando men seized the victims by the arms and dragged them for 15 or 20 yards into position before the SS. Their cries of terror covered the sound of the shots. A shot, then, immediately afterwards, even before he was dead, the victim was hurled into the flames.

Of late I feel a cold blue wind through my life and need to go backwards myself to the outback I once knew so well where there were too many mosquitoes, blackflies, curious bears, flowering berry trees of sugar plum and chokeberry, and where sodden and hot with salty sweat I'd slide into a cold river and drift along until I floated against a warm sandbar, thinking of driving again the gravel backroads of America at thirty-five miles per hour in order to see the ditches and gulleys, the birds in the fields, the mountains and rivers, the skies that hold our 10,000 generations of mothers in the clouds waiting for us to fall back into their arms again.

He whirled,almost violently,and stared at her accusingly. "Damn it, Gennie, I've had my head lopped off." It was her turn to stare.Her fingers went numb against the stoneware. Her pulse seemed to stop long enough to make her head swim before it began to race. The color drained from her face until it was like porcelain against the glowing green of her eyes.On another oath, Grant dragged a hand through his hair. "You're spilling the coffee," he muttered, then stuck his hands in his pockets. "Oh." Gennie looked down foolishly at the tiny twin puddles that were forming on the floor,then set down the mugs. "I'll-I'll wipe it up." "Leave it." Grant grabbed her arm before she could reach for a towel. "Listen,I feel like someone's just given me a solid right straight to the gut-the kind that doubles you over and makes your head ring at the same time.I feel that way too often when I look at you." When she said nothing, he took her other arm and shook. "In the first place I never asked to have you walk into my life and mess up my head. The last thing I wanted was for you to get in my way,but you did.So now I'm in love with you, and I can tell you,I'm not crazy about the idea." Gennie found her voice, though she wasn't quite certain what to do with it. "Well," she managed after a moment, "that certainly puts me in my place." "Oh,she wants to make jokes." Disgusted, Grant released her to storm over to the coffee. Lifting a mug, he drained half the contents, perversely pleased that it scalded his throat. "Well, laugh this off," he suggested as he slammed the mug down again and glared. "You're not going anywhere until I figure out what the hell I'm going to do about you." Struggling against conflicting emotions of amusement,annoyance,and simple wonder, she put her hands on her hips. The movement shifted the too-big robe so that it threatened to slip off one shoulder. "Oh,really? So you're going to figure out what to do about me, like I was an inconvenient head cold." "Damned inconvenient," he muttered. "You may not have noticed, but I'm a grown woman with a mind of my own, accustomed to making my own decisions. You're not going to do anything about me," she told him as her temper began to overtake everything else. She jabbed a finger at him,and the gap in the robe widened. "If you're in love with me, that's your problem. I have one of my own because I'm in love with you." "Terrific!" he shouted at her. "That's just terrific.We'd both have been better off if you'd waited out that storm in a ditch instead of coming here." "You're not telling me anything I don't already know," Gennie retorted, then spun around to leave the room. "Just a minute." Grant had her arm again and backed her into the wall. "You're not going anywhere until this is settled." "It's settled!" Tossing her hair out of her face, she glared at him. "We're in love with each other and I wish you'd go jump off that cliff.If you had any finesse-" "I don't." "Any sensitivty," she continued, "you wouldn't announce that you were in love with someone in the same tone you'd use to frighten small children.

Are you sure you don't remember? Your mind seems to be working just fine to me." "You know what? Just forget it. Whatever it was, I forgive you. Give me my backpack so I can go back to the office. We're about to get busted anyway, just standing here." "If you really do forgive me, then you wouldn't still be going to the office." He tightens his hold on the strap of my backpack. "Ohmysweetgoodness, Galen, why are we even having this conversation? You don't even know me. What do you care if I change my schedule?" I know I'm being rude. The guy offered to carry my things and walk me to class. And depending on which version of the story I believe, he either asked me out on Monday already, or he did it indirectly a few seconds ago. None of it makes any sense. Why me? Without any effort, I can think of at least ten girls who beat me out in looks, personality, and darker foundation. And Galen could pull any of them. "What, you don't have a question for my question?" I ask after a few seconds. "It just seems silly for you to change your schedule over a disagreement about when the Titanic-" I throw my hands up at him. "Don't you see how weird this is for me?" "I'm trying to, Emma. I really am. But I think you've had a tough couple of weeks, and it's taking a toll on you. You said every time you're around me something bad happens. But you can't really know for sure that's true, unless you spend more time with me. You should at least acknowledge that." Something is wrong with me. Those cafeteria doors must have really worked me over. Otherwise, I wouldn't be pushing Galen away like this. Not with him pleading, not with the way he's leaning toward me, not with the way he smells. "See? You're taking it personally, when there's really nothing personal about it," I whisper. "It's personal to me, Emma. It's true, I don't know you well. But there are some things I do know about you. And I'd like to know more." A glass full of ice water wouldn't cool my cheeks. "The only thing you know about me is that I'm life threatening in flip-flops." That I won't meet his eyes obviously bothers him, because he lifts my chin with the crook of his finger. "That's not all I know," he says. "I know your biggest secret." This time, unlike at the beach, I don't swat his hand away. The electric current in my feet prove that we're really standing so close to each other that our toes touch. "I don't have any secrets," I say, mesmerized." He nods. "I finally figured that out. That you don't actually know about your secret." "You're not making any sense." Or I just can't concentrate because I accidentally looked up at his lips. Maybe he did talk me into swimming... The door to the front office swings open, and Galen grabs my arm and ushers me around the corner. He continues to drag me down the hall, toward world history. "That's it?" I say, exasperated. "You're just going to leave it at that?" He stops us in front of the door. "That depends on you," he says. "Come with me to the beach after school, and I'll tell you." He reaches for the knob, but I grab his hand. "Tell me what? I already told you that I don't have any secrets. And I don't swim." He grins and opens the door. "There's plenty to do at the beach besides swim." Then he pulls me by the hand so close I think he's going to kiss me. Instead, he whispers in my ear, "I'll tell you where your eye color comes from." As I gasp, he puts a gentle hand on the small of my back and propels me into the classroom. Then he ditches me.

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year. The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home. He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street. They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then. The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips. Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites. The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra. “Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?” He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him. By the time they freed him, he was a different man.  

Swan had used them to send Sophie messages. He fished out the tiny velvet pouch and Sophie caught herself clutching her allergy remedy necklace. She still kept the silver moonlark pin that Calla had given her attached to the cord—a reminder of the friend she’d lost, and a symbol of the role she needed to figure out how to play. “Looks like we’re good,” Sandor said, handing her the small boobrie pin—a strange black bird with bright yellow tail feathers. “Can’t imagine that means anything important.” Sophie couldn’t either. Especially since the Black Swan had been annoyingly silent. No notes. No clues. No answers during their brief meetings. Apparently they were “regrouping.” And it was taking forever. At least the Council was doing something—setting up goblin patrols and trying to arrange an ogre Peace Summit. The Black Swan should at least be . . . Actually, Sophie didn’t know what they should be doing. That was the problem with having her friend join the enemy. “There you are!” a familiar voice said behind her. “I was starting to think you’d ditched us.” The deep, crisp accent was instantly recognizable. And yet, the teasing words made Sophie wish she’d turn and find a different boy. Fitz looked as cute as ever in his red Level Five uniform, but his perfect smile didn’t reach his trademark teal eyes. The recent revelations had been a huge blow for all of her friends, but Fitz had taken it the hardest. Both his brother and his best friend had run off with the Neverseen. Alvar’s betrayal had made Fitz wary—made him doubt every memory. But Keefe’s?

We needed to drive down the road a couple of miles to meet the rest of the cowboys and gather the cattle from there. “Mom, why don’t you and Ree go ahead in her car and we’ll be right behind you,” Marlboro Man directed. His mother and I walked outside, climbed in the car, and headed down the road. We exchanged pleasant small talk. She was poised and genuine, and I chattered away, relieved that she was so approachable. Then, about a mile into our journey, she casually mentioned, “You might watch that turn up ahead; it’s a little sharp.” “Oh, okay,” I replied, not really listening. Clearly she didn’t know I’d been an L.A. driver for years. Driving was not a problem for me. Almost immediately, I saw a ninety-degree turn right in front of my face, pointing its finger at me and laughing--cackling--at my predicament. I whipped the steering wheel to the left as quickly as I could, skidding on the gravel and stirring up dust. But it was no use--the turn got the better of me, and my car came to rest awkwardly in the ditch, the passenger side a good four feet lower than mine. Marlboro Man’s mother was fine. Lucky for her, there’s really nothing with which to collide on an isolated cattle ranch--no overpasses or concrete dividers or retaining walls or other vehicles. I was fine, too--physically, anyway. My hands were trembling violently. My armpits began to gush perspiration. My car was stuck, the right two tires wedged inextricably in a deep crevice of earth on the side of the road. On the list of the Top Ten Things I’d Want Not to Happen on the First Meeting Between My Boyfriend’s Mother and Me, this would rate about number four. “Oh my word,” I said. “I’m sorry about that.” “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she reassured, looking out the window. “I just hope your car’s okay.” Marlboro Man and his dad pulled up beside us, and they both hopped out of the pickup. Opening my door, Marlboro Man said, “You guys okay?” “We’re fine,” his mother said. “We just got a little busy talking.” I was Lucille Ball. Lucille Ball on steroids and speed and vodka. I was a joke, a caricature, a freak. This couldn’t possibly be happening to me. Not today. Not now. “Okay, I’ll just go home now,” I said, covering my face with my hands. I wanted to be someone else. A normal person, maybe. A good driver, perhaps. Marlboro Man examined my tires, which were completely torn up. “You’re not goin’ anywhere, actually. You guys hop in the pickup.” My car was down for the count.

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Our team’s vision for the facility was a cross between a shooting range and a country club for special forces personnel. Clients would be able to schedule all manner of training courses in advance, and the gear and support personnel would be waiting when they arrived. There’d be seven shooting ranges with high gravel berms to cut down noise and absorb bullets, and we’d carve a grass airstrip, and have a special driving track to practice high-speed chases and real “defensive driving”—the stuff that happens when your convoy is ambushed. There would be a bunkhouse to sleep seventy. And nearby, the main headquarters would have the feel of a hunting lodge, with timber framing and high stone walls, with a large central fireplace where people could gather after a day on the ranges. This was the community I enjoyed; we never intended to send anyone oversees. This chunk of the Tar Heel State was my “Field of Dreams.” I bought thirty-one hundred acres—roughly five square miles of land, plenty of territory to catch even the most wayward bullets—for $900,000. We broke ground in June 1997, and immediately began learning about do-it-yourself entrepreneurship. That land was ugly: Logging the previous year had left a moonscape of tree stumps and tangled roots lorded over by mosquitoes and poisonous creatures. I killed a snake the first twelve times I went to the property. The heat was miserable. While a local construction company carved the shooting ranges and the lake, our small team installed the culverts and forged new roads and planted the Southern pine utility poles to support the electrical wiring. The basic site work was done in about ninety days—and then we had to figure out what to call the place. The leading contender, “Hampton Roads Tactical Shooting Center,” was professional, but pretty uptight. “Tidewater Institute for Tactical Shooting” had legs, but the acronym wouldn’t have helped us much. But then, as we slogged across the property and excavated ditches, an incessant charcoal mud covered our boots and machinery, and we watched as each new hole was swallowed by that relentless peat-stained black water. Blackwater, we agreed, was a name. Meanwhile, within days of being installed, the Southern pine poles had been slashed by massive black bears marking their territory, as the animals had done there since long before the Europeans settled the New World. We were part of this land now, and from that heritage we took our original logo: a bear paw surrounded by the stylized crosshairs of a rifle scope.

Sigtryggr held out a hand to pull me from the ditch. His one eye was bright with the same joy I had seen on Ceaster’s ramparts. ‘I would not want you as an enemy, Lord Uhtred,’ he said. ‘Then don’t come back, Jarl Sigtryggr,’ I said, clasping his forearm as he clasped mine. ‘I will be back,’ he said, ‘because you will want me to come back.’ ‘I will?’ He turned his head to gaze at his ships. One ship was close to the shore, held there by a mooring line tied to a stake. The prow of the ship had a great dragon painted white and in the dragon’s claw was a red axe. The ship waited for Sigtryggr, but close to it, standing where the grass turned to the river bank’s mud, was Stiorra. Her maid, Hella, was already aboard the dragon-ship. Æthelflaed had been watching Eardwulf’s death, but now saw Stiorra by the grounded ship. She frowned, not sure she understood what she saw. ‘Lord Uhtred?’ ‘My lady?’ ‘Your daughter,’ she began, but did not know what to say. ‘I will deal with my daughter,’ I said grimly. ‘Finan?’ My son and Finan were both staring at me, wondering what I would do. ‘Finan?’ I called. ‘Lord?’ ‘Kill that scum,’ I jerked my head towards Eardwulf’s followers, then I took Sigtryggr by the elbow and walked him towards his ship. ‘Lord Uhtred!’ Æthelflaed called again, sharper this time. I waved a dismissive hand, and otherwise ignored her. ‘I thought she disliked you,’ I said to Sigtryggr. ‘We meant you to think that.’ ‘You don’t know her,’ I said. ‘You knew her mother when you met her?’ ‘This is madness,’ I said. ‘And you are famous for your good sense, lord.’ Stiorra waited for us. She was tense. She stared at me defiantly and said nothing. I felt a lump in my throat and a sting in my eyes. I told myself it was the small smoke drifting from the Norsemen’s abandoned campfires. ‘You’re a fool,’ I told her harshly. ‘I saw,’ she said simply, ‘and I was stricken.’ ‘And so was he?’ I asked, and she just nodded. ‘And the last two nights,’ I asked, ‘after the feasting was over?’ I did not finish the question, but she answered it anyway by nodding again. ‘You are your mother’s daughter,’ I said, and I embraced her, holding her close. ‘But it is my choice whom you marry,’ I went on. I felt her stiffen in my arms, ‘And Lord Æthelhelm wants to marry you.’ I thought she was sobbing, but when I pulled back from the embrace I saw she was laughing. ‘Lord Æthelhelm?’ she asked. ‘You’ll be the richest widow in all Britain,’ I promised her. She still held me, looking up into my face. She smiled, that same smile that had been her mother’s. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I swear on my life that I will accept the man you choose to be my husband.’ She knew me. She had seen my tears and knew they were not caused by smoke. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. ‘You will be a peace cow,’ I said, ‘between me and the Norse. And you’re a fool. So am I. And your dowry,’ I spoke louder as I stepped back, ‘is Eardwulf’s money.’ I saw I had smeared her pale linen dress with Eardwulf’s blood. I looked at Sigtryggr. ‘I give her to you,’ I said, ‘so don’t disappoint me.

A good packer is a tough packer. So be shrewd and be robust: if it isn’t going to help you, leave it behind, throw it out. Stay light. We change our beliefs and attitudes inch by inch in the small, everyday things. When you find yourself thinking about someone or something in the same old negative way, just stop yourself. Think. Check. Change. Refresh. Job done. Smile. Move on. Do this enough times and you will change. For the better; for the stronger. The Scouts’ motto is simple: Be prepared. So, if you really want to be prepared for whatever life has to offer, pack light, stay nimble, pack the positive, ditch the negative, and seize your chances when they come along. That is so often how we set ourselves up for great adventures.

Our pop stars and filmmakers have ditched the Hong Kong market in favor of the lucrative billion-strong audience in China, making art for them rather than us; our politicians with vested business interests bow at the feet of new money from the motherland, and continually vote for policies that work against their own people. Hong Kong’s capitalism perpetuates an endless reproduction of wannabe oppressors, and with the help of government policies and Chinese money, we—consumers and residents and small-business owners and future landlords—devour ourselves until there is nothing left.

contained a suture kit, more water purification tablets, Russian aspirin, blood-clotting gauze, an Israeli-style wrap bandage, tweezers, six Russian-style Band-Aids of varying sizes, two antibacterial wipes, a small tube of antiseptic ointment, and an electrolyte drink mix. The fourth and final pouch in the ditch kit was emblazoned with words Harvath didn’t know. Opening it up, he looked inside. As soon as he saw the signal mirror, he knew exactly what this bag was—a SERE kit. In addition to the mirror, there was a compass, a whistle, more stormproof matches, more water purification tablets, a small notebook and pen, a silk scarf printed with panels containing survival instructions, more hextabs, a flint and striker, a packet of sunscreen, and some mosquito wipes. Opening the flare gun case, he examined its contents. In keeping with similar setups from the Soviet days, the kit included the pistol itself and four flares, beneath which was a conversion tube. When inserted into the barrel, it allowed for firing of .45 or .410 ammunition. Two cardboard boxes with five rounds of each

The (Milkweed) plants sat so vulnerable in ditches, the caterpillars never eating fast enough to keep the milkweed small and inconspicuous. It seemed inevitable that the plants would draw the attention of landowners who were oblivious to the architecture of life, and the monarch's habitat would succomb to mowing.

Swift released the bowl in a strong drive. It sped obediently down the green, perfectly reproducing Daisy’s shot, though with more calculated momentum. Hitting Daisy’s bowl cleanly off the grass, it took her place right in front of the jack. “He knocked my bowl into the ditch,” Daisy protested. “Is that legal?” “Oh, yes,” Lord Llandrindon said. “A bit ruthless, but perfectly legal. Now it is properly referred to as a ‘dead bowl.’” “My bowl is dead?” Daisy asked indignantly. Swift returned her scowl with an implacable glance. “Never do an enemy a small injury.” “Only you would quote Machiavelli during lawn bowling,” Daisy said through gritted teeth. “Pardon,” Lord Llandrindon said politely, “but I believe it’s my turn.” Seeing that neither of them were paying attention, he shrugged and went to the delivery line. His bowl careened down the green and ended just beyond the jack. “I always play to win,” Swift said to Daisy. “Good God,” Daisy said in exasperation, “you sound exactly like my father. Have you ever considered the possibility that some people play just for the fun of it? As a pleasant activity to pass the time? Or must everything be brought down to life-and-death conflict?” “If you’re not out to win, the game is pointless.” Seeing that she had completely slipped from Swift’s notice, Cassandra Leighton sought to intervene. “I fancy it’s my shot now, Mr. Swift. Would you please be so kind as to retrieve a bowl for me?” Swift complied with barely a glance at her, his attention riveted on Daisy’s small, tense face. “Here,” he said brusquely, thrusting the bowl into Miss Leighton’s hands. “Perhaps you could advise me…” Miss Leighton began, but her voice faded as Swift and Daisy continued to bicker. “All right, Mr. Swift,” Daisy said coolly. “If you can’t enjoy a simple game of bowls without making it into a war, you’ll have a war. We’ll play for points.” She wasn’t quite certain if she had moved forward or if he had, but suddenly they were standing very close, his head bent over hers. “You can’t beat me,” Swift said in a low voice. “You’re a novice, and a woman besides. It wouldn’t be fair unless I was assigned a handicap.” “Your teammate is Miss Leighton,” she whispered sharply. “In my opinion, that’s enough of a handicap. And are you implying that women can’t bowl as well as men?” “No. I’m saying straight out they can’t.” Daisy felt a rush of outrage, augmented by a fiery desire to pound him into the ground. “War,” she repeated, stalking back to her side of the green.

There was little resistance from the Jews. Russian civilians were co-operative, though there is one recorded act of a local mayor shot for trying ‘to help the Jews’.149 Quite small groups of killers disposed of enormous numbers. In Riga, one officer and twenty-one men killed 10,600 Jews. In Kiev, two small detachments of C killed over 30,000. A second sweep began at the end of 1941 and lasted throughout 1942. This killed over 900,000. Most Jews were murdered by shooting, outside the towns, at ditches turned into graves. During the second sweep, mass graves were dug first. The killers shot the Jews in the back of the neck, the method used by the Soviet secret police, or by the ‘sardine method’. Under this, the first layer stretched themselves at the bottom of the grave and were killed from above. The next layer lay down on top of the first bodies, heads facing the feet. There were five or six layers, then the grave was filled in.

We didn’t go from shopping weekly for everything we need at the grocery store to dealing directly with farms overnight. Think about it this way: every small step helps.

We are as busy as the next family, and we made it work. You can, too. As a friend of mine used to say, 'Life is about choices.' With every meal you consume, you make a choice, and that choice has consequences. If you choose to deal directly with a farmer, the food you put on your table could be sustaining the environment, fostering better health for you and your family, or working to preserve a way of life—the small family farm—that is endangered by the industrial food system. The resources are there for you, but you need to take the initiative and the responsibility.

Brittany has been wary this whole week. She’s waiting for me to play a joke on her, to get her back for tossing my keys into the woods. After school, as I’m at my locker picking books to take home, she storms up to me wearing her sexy pom uniform. “Meet me in the wrestling gym,” she orders. Now I can do two things: meet her like she told me to or leave the school. I take my books and enter the small gym. Brittany is standing, holding out her keychain without keys dangling from it. “Where have my keys magically disappeared to?” she asks. “I’m going to be late for the game if you don’t tell me. Ms. Small will kick me off the squad if I’m not at the game.” “I tossed them somewhere. You know, you should really get a purse that has a zipper. You never know when someone will reach in and grab somethin’.” “Glad to know you’re a klepto. Wanna give me a hint as to where you’ve hidden them?” I lean against the wall of the wrestling gym, thinking about what people would think if they caught us in here together. “It’s in a place that’s wet. Really, really wet,” I say, giving her a clue. “The pool?” I nod. “Creative, huh?” She tries to push me into the wall. “Oh, I’m going to kill you. You better go get them.” If I didn’t know her better, I’d think she was flirting with me. I think she likes this game we have going on. “Mamacita, you should know me better than that. You’re all on your own, like I was when you left me in the library parking lot.” She cocks her head, gives me sad eyes, and pouts. I shouldn’t concentrate on her pouty lips, it’s dangerous. But I can’t help it. “Show me where they are, Alex. Please.” I let her sweat it out a minute before I give in. By now most of the school is deserted. Half of the students are on their way to the football game. The other half is glad they’re not on their way to the football game. We walk to the pool. The lights are off, but sunlight is still shining through the windows. Brittany’s keys are where I threw ‘em--in the middle of the deep end. I point to the shiny pieces of silver under the water. “There they are. Have at it.” Brittany stands with her hands on her short skirt, contemplating how she’s going to get them. She struts over to the long stick hanging on the wall that’s used to pull drowning people from the water. “Piece of cake,” she tells me. But as she sticks the pole into the water, she finds out it’s not a piece of cake. I suppress a laugh as I stand at the edge of the pool and watch her attempt the impossible. “You can always strip and go in naked. I’ll watch to make sure nobody comes in.” She walks up to me, the pole gripped firmly in her fingers. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” “Uh, yeah,” I say, stating the obvious. “I have to warn you, though. If you have granny undies on, you’ll blow my fantasy.” “For your information, they’re pink satin. As long as we’re sharing personal info, are you a boxers or briefs guy?” “Neither. My boys go free, if you know what I mean.” Okay, I don’t let my boys go free. She’ll just have to figure that out herself. “Gross, Alex.” “Don’t knock it till you try it,” I tell her, then walk toward the door. “You’re leaving?” “Uh…yeah.” “Aren’t you going to help me get the keys?” “Uh…nope.” If I stay, I’ll be tempted to ask her to ditch the football game to be with me. I’m definitely not ready to hear the answer to that question. Toying with her I can handle. Showing my true colors like I did the other day made me take my guard down. I’m not about to do that again. I push the door open after taking one last glance at Brittany, wondering if leaving her right now makes me an idiot, a jerk, a coward, or all of the above.

The mother of a student in Europe who was between his junior and senior years of high school called Motto in a frantic state. She had just read somewhere that college admissions offices looked for kids who had spent their summers in enriching ways, ideally doing charity work, and her son was due to be on vacation with the rest of the family in August. “Should we ditch our plans,” she asked Motto, “and have him build dirt roads?” Motto reminded her that she lived in a well-paved European capital. “Where would these dirt roads be?” he said. “India?” she suggested. “Africa?” She hadn’t worked it out. But if Yale might be impressed by an image of her son with a small spade, large shovel, rake or jackhammer in his chafed hands, she was poised to find a third-world setting that would produce that sweaty and ennobling tableau.

I started seeing poetry from a strictly consumerist perspective as poets serving up beverages. Most, maybe like 97 percent or something, serve lemonade. You can consume their work and it will teach you nothing, and it will leave a sticky unpleasant feeling in your mouth and a slight nausea in your stomach. There are all kinds of home-made lemonades, milky lemonade, watery lemonade, some throw pepper in it or even puke in the lemonade, but its still lemonade, just a puky sort. Then there are a few that offer stronger drinks. Some say the secret is the cellar, but I think that's just a propaganda story. If you leave a bottle of lemonade in the cellar for 10 years it won't turn into wine. But some of these fools are doing exactly that. Stinky old lemonade full of dust. And then there's those that think the problem is the Lemonade isn't smooth enough and they start filtering it with a sieve, imagining to be gold-diggers or something. No no no, the secret isn't cellars. The secret is rather a sincere hate for lemonade. As long as you don't hate lemonade with every pore in your body, as long as a part of you accepts the lemonade, then forget about the cellars. But if your soul says 'Fuck the Lemonade' then it starts to search. You will find that a small percentage of poetry offered is like a strong beverage. Most then, again, are like cheap beer or wine. To find a wine that's actually good or even a decent whiskey you have to sift to tuns of poems, and then you find some. There are just a few people. Just a few. I dont know if the secret of the cellar applies here either. It might. It might not. I often suspect all these blokes with distilleries are fooling the hell out of everyone. Think about it. Twenty years on a barrel of whiskey and it will sell like gold. Anyone with a sense of business would want to speed that shit up. And yet they're all flaunting the secret of their cellars, I don't believe a word of it. There's simply too much whiskey in these world and too few cellars. So I sincerely believe that the road to great poetry is to say 'Fuck the Cellars' in your soul, and start to search. There's a minute speck of poems out there that are beverages, but of a different, narcotic kind. They are almost impossible to find or create. Poetry clubs and societies do their utter best to ignore it, ban it, destroy it. These are poems that by nature make the reader say 'Fuck Beverages!' in his soul. I wish i never used this shit. Fucking hell, whats wrong with the guy who made this? That's the sort of poetry I would call a honorable beverage. But you have to ditch Lemonade, Cellars, and Beverages to get there. And you can't do that because you have not enough thirst in your soul. That's what it all starts with: thirst. And the secret of thirst is very simple: it requires a desert in your heart.

We did not know, as yet, which was the better side, right or left, which road led to prison and which to the crematoria. Still, I was happy, I was near my father. Our procession continued slowly to move forward. Another inmate came over to us: “Satisfied?” “Yes,” someone answered. “Poor devils, you are heading for the crematorium.” He seemed to be telling the truth. Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes…children thrown into the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?) So that was where we were going. A little farther on, there was another, larger pit for adults. I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real. A night- mare perhaps…Soon I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding, and find that I was back in the room of my childhood, with my books… My father's voice tore me from my daydreams: “What a shame, a shame that you did not go with your mother…I saw many children your age go with their mothers…” His voice was terribly sad. I understood that he did not wish to see what they would do to me. He did not wish to see his only son go up in flames.

Under the wind ,a wren, in the sunlight among fallen laves in a dry ditch seemed suddenly divine , like a small brown priest in a parish of dead leaves and wintry hedges , devoted till death.

Finally, even after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a small group of Democrats made a last-ditch attempt to save their cherished institution by assassinating Lincoln.

Saffron, how are you?" Logan asks and he sounds genuinely interested. How am I? Small talk, right. I rest my hip on the table and give my back to Logan as I look down at his date. "Would you think it odd for a man to come to a small town and proceed to not speak to you for six months?" Her perfect lips form a grin. "Everyone or just me specifically?" "You, specifically." Her eyes light with humor. "Yes, that is odd." "Odder still for that man to then take you to bed and blow your mind with sex for almost twenty-four hours before ditching you and then staying off the radar for a week?" The humor has left her gaze now, but she answers anyway. "Indeed." "So what would you think when that same man shows up at your place of employment with a beautiful woman and attempts to engage you in small talk?" Her eyes leave mine for Logan's, but I don't miss the emotion in her gaze. She's mad. "Exactly." I turn and give Logan my full attention. "So how am I, Logan?" I pull out the chair next to him and sit down. "I could pretend to be a cool, sophisticated woman and lie to you and say I'm fabulous, but that just isn't me. What I am is hurt and more than a little pissed, so the idea of making small talk with you is repugnant to me, unless that talk is centered on what I'd like to do to you. For example, I'd love to reach for that dull butter knife and stick it in your eye, giving it a hard turn just for good measure. The idea of strapping you to a man-sized lobster trap and throwing you into the ocean holds a great deal of appeal, as does the thought of running your ass over with my car, repeatedly. I could sit here all day making small talk about that, or you could just shut up and order some goddamn lunch.

cuteness— it is, after all, a trap. A trap engineered by nature so that you want to take care of such ittle-bittle-widdle critters, or at least so that you don’t ditch them in a hole somewhere. Small head and big eyes? A ruse. A clever, careful, evolutionary ruse.

None of this matters. I mean, those people—that man and his kids who you just fed—they matter, but no one cares about them. Those kids ar the future if they don't starve to death. But if they manage to grow up, what kind of men will they be?' 'That's what Earthseed was about,' I said. 'I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way things have always been.' 'It is,' Len said. 'It is,' I repeated. 'There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren't, the cycles wouldn't keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfil the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They'll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it's only to begin a new one, a different one. 'Earthseed is about preparing to fulfil the Destiny. It's about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It's about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are. It's...' I glanced at Len, caught a little smile on her face, and wound down. 'It's about a lot more than that,' I said. 'But those are the bones.' 'Makes a strange sermon.' 'I know.

we visited the Cape Coast Castle, one of around forty “slave castles” that had served as prisons for slaves en route to the Americas. We were greeted by a tour guide, who walked Mrs. Trump through many rooms and told stories of how the slave trade had begun. We were shown a room that had held hundreds of men and women, with tiny windows that barely let in light. There was a small ditch dug down the middle of the room, maybe six inches deep and wide, and it was explained to us that it had been used as a bathroom. Each room was horrible, and the tour guide was brilliant in the way he told us the grim and heartbreaking story of the way the people kept there had lived. And when I say brilliant, I mean that he told it in a way that we almost lived it—we felt their pain, their misery, almost understood what it must have been like to be treated as cattle. The thought that human beings were held in such horrific conditions until they were placed on ships in the middle of the night, only to live in even worse conditions until they arrived at their destination, was hard to stomach. There were rooms for the women that were equally as brutal. We stopped at an altar to pay tribute to all those who had lost their lives and those who had lived under such cruel circumstances. I remember feeling distinctly ashamed that that had ever been allowed to happen and about our country’s complicity, since so many of the people had been shipped to the United States. Mrs. Trump felt deeply impacted as well. In conversations later that day she said, “I did not know. The conditions were so horrible. Did you see the rooms? How can people do that? Everyone should see these things, and we should talk about it openly.” We all, of course, knew about and abhorred slavery, but were less familiar with all the details of its brutal origins. The emotional visit concluded with Mrs. Trump walking through the “door of no return,” the door that the people had left through to be loaded onto ships to be taken to the various countries that used slave labor.

The alcoholic has to be in such pain that he is willing to do anything, even get well! He has to be thoroughly disenchanted with alcohol and what it does for him. He has to know that there is no way for him to drink even a small amount of alcohol without going on to the hitter end. He must know every aspect of his enemy. He has to see the whole wasteland alcohol makes for him in daily life. He has to see it so clearly that he sees he is not giving up an old, delightful companion. On the contrary, he is getting rid of a curse. He is ditching a had companion and happy to see the last of it. Getting rid of something we dislike is quite a different thing to us than giving up something we like. This probably stems from the acquisitive, possessive habit we originally had as children. Every parent knows that if you want to take something away from a baby, you have to offer the baby something else with the other hand. It is much the same with us; we resist any kind of surrender if we interpret it as being deprived of a want! But we gladly get rid of a pin that is sticking us! Everything seems to depend on the value judgment we make about a habit. And we can do nothing about a habit unless we change the value judgment and put the habit in another context. It all depends on how you look at it!

Hector (1803-69), French composer; full name Louis-Hector Berlioz. Notable works: Les Troyens (opera, 1856-59), Symphonie fantastique (1830), and La Damnation de Faust (cantata, 1846). berm   n. a flat strip of land, raised bank, or terrace bordering a river or canal.    a path or grass strip beside a road.  an artificial ridge or embankment, e.g., as a defense against tanks.  a narrow space, esp. one between a ditch and the base of a parapet.  early 18th cent. (DENOTING A NARROW SPACE): from French berme, from Dutch berm. Ber·mu·da (also the Ber·mu·das)   a British crown colony made up of about 150 small islands about 650 miles (1,046 km) east of the coast of North Carolina; pop. 58,000; capital, Hamilton. Inhabited since 1609, it now has internal self-government.   Ber·mu·danadj. & n.Ber·mu·di·anadj. & n.  named after a Spanish sailor, Juan Bermúdez, who sighted the islands early in the 16th cent.

She’s Ron’s sister. But she’s ditched Dean! She’s still Ron’s sister. I’m his best mate! That’ll make it worse. If I talked to him first — He’d hit you. What if I don’t care? He’s your best mate! Harry barely noticed that they were climbing through the portrait hole into the sunny common room, and only vaguely registered the small group of seventh years clustered together there, until Hermione cried, “Katie! You’re back! Are you okay?” Harry stared: It was indeed Katie Bell, looking completely healthy and surrounded by her jubilant friends. “I’m really well!” she said happily. “They let me out of St. Mungo’s on Monday, I had a couple of days at home with Mum and Dad and then came back here this morning. Leanne was just telling me about McLaggen

Where else is there?” asked Hermione, cringing as the men on the other side of the road started wolf-whistling at her. “We can hardly book rooms at the Leaky Cauldron, can we? And Grimmauld Place is out if Snape can get in there. . . . I suppose we could try my parents’ house, though I think there’s a chance they might check there. . . . Oh, I wish they’d shut up!” “All right, darling?” the drunkest of the men on the other pavement was yelling. “Fancy a drink? Ditch ginger and come and have a pint!” “Let’s sit down somewhere,” Hermione said hastily as Ron opened his mouth to shout back across the road. “Look, this will do, in here!” It was a small and shabby all-night café. A light layer of grease lay on all the Formica-topped tables, but it was at least empty. Harry slipped into a booth first and Ron sat next to him opposite Hermione, who had her back to the entrance and did not like it: She glanced over her shoulder so frequently she appeared to have a twitch. Harry did not like being stationary; walking had given the illusion that they had a goal. Beneath the Cloak he could feel the last vestiges of Polyjuice leaving him, his hands returning to their usual length and shape. He pulled his glasses out of his pocket and put them on again. After a minute or two, Ron said, “You know, we’re not far from the Leaky Cauldron here, it’s only in Charing Cross —

One night I had been listening to [Goo], downstairs with Espen, we had been smoking hash, and I was lost in the music, literally, I saw it as rooms and corridors, floors and walls, ditches and slopes, small forests between apartment blocks and railway lines, and didn't emerge from it until the song stopped, it was like drawing breath because the next minute a new song started and I was caught again.

TRAIL DESCRIPTION Segment 6 begins on the west side of Kenosha Pass. There are large parking areas on both sides of the highway. After signing in at the trail register at mile 0.0 (9,969 feet), continue into the forest where the trail passes under a power line and reaches a ridge shortly afterward with great views to the west. At mile 1.5 (10,273), cross an old, unused jeep road. After passing through a stand of aspen trees and open meadows, the trail crosses an irrigation ditch at mile 2.8 (9,920) and FS Rd 809 at mile 3.0 (9,852). Just past the road, cross Guernsey Creek, a small stream at mile 3.1 (9,828). There are several good campsites in this area.

Portrait of the Author" The birches are mad with green points the wood's edge is burning with their green, burning, seething—No, no, no. The birches are opening their leaves one by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold and separate, one by one. Slender tassels hang swaying from the delicate branch tips— Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word. Black is split at once into flowers. In every bog and ditch, flares of small fire, white flowers!—Agh, the birches are mad, mad with their green. The world is gone, torn into shreds with this blessing. What have I left undone that I should have undertaken? O my brother, you redfaced, living man ignorant, stupid whose feet are upon this same dirt that I touch—and eat. We are alone in this terror, alone, face to face on this road, you and I, wrapped by this flame! Let the polished plows stay idle, their gloss already on the black soil. But that face of yours—! Answer me. I will clutch you. I will hug you, grip you. I will poke my face into your face and force you to see me. Take me in your arms, tell me the commonest thing that is in your mind to say, say anything. I will understand you—! It is the madness of the birch leaves opening cold, one by one. My rooms will receive me. But my rooms are no longer sweet spaces where comfort is ready to wait on me with its crumbs. A darkness has brushed them. The mass of yellow tulips in the bowl is shrunken. Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed. I am shaken, broken against a might that splits comfort, blows apart my careful partitions, crushes my house and leaves me—with shrinking heart and startled, empty eyes—peering out into a cold world. In the spring I would be drunk! In the spring I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things. Your face! Give me your face, Yang Kue Fei! your hands, your lips to drink! Give me your wrists to drink— I drag you, I am drowned in you, you overwhelm me! Drink! Save me! The shad bush is in the edge of the clearing. The yards in a fury of lilac blossoms are driving me mad with terror. Drink and lie forgetting the world. And coldly the birch leaves are opening one by one. Coldly I observe them and wait for the end. And it ends.

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The nightmare that Greene came across in Phat Diem – including a mother and child dead in a ditch – is described in the opening paragraphs of this book. He was a journalist at a small but very ugly battle that the French did not want the world to know about, so with an offer of him spending a day with the navy they persuaded him to board a boat back upriver to Nam Dinh, where his escort simply abandoned him. But he had seen what he had seen.

If there is anything our culture desperately needs to learn about the morality of food production, it is that carrots can be grown using methods devastatingly destructive and deeply immoral--monoculture, herbicides, insecticides, destruction of habitat by plowing to the ditch banks, fill in the blanks--and beefsteaks can be produced in a way that protects and nurtures the soil and the total fabric of life, a pretty moral thing to do, in my mind.

Morning came slowly in the city. In a driving rain, the sun could only slowly illuminate the dirt streets and brick sidewalks of New Orleans on the morning of January 9. The white spires of the cathedral and tall masts of the ships crowding the harbor topped the center of the city. In the dense neighborhood around the Place d’Armes, small brick houses two or three stories high clustered about grand old Spanish houses. Once a palisade and a ditch ran around the center of the city, forming a parallelogram with the river. Four redoubts stood at the corners to protect the city’s inhabitants—though all but the fort at the entrance of Faubourg Marigny had since been demolished. Since the American acquisition, the ditch had been filled up and planted with trees, leaving a ring of open space between the city and the suburbs. A boulevard called Rue de Rampart ran where the ancient town wall used to stand. Parallel to the river, roads lined with reflecting lamps passed from the center of the city out toward the plantation zone to the northeast. Here the old houses of the present-day Garden District gave way slowly and almost indistinguishably to the rich sugar plantations of the German Coast.