Drainage Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Drainage. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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.
John Flanagan (Halt's Peril (Ranger's Apprentice, #9))
The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.
Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have)
No dead people beyond this door,' " he read aloud from beyond the door. " 'And, yes, if you suddenly have the ability to walk through walls, you're dead. You're not lying somewhere in a drainage ditch waiting to wake up. Get over it, and stay the hell out of my bathroom.
Darynda Jones (First Grave on the Right (Charley Davidson, #1))
There was nothing the matter with them except they were dead tired. It was not the dead-tiredness that comes through brief and excessive effort, from which recovery is a matter of hours; but it was the dead-tiredness that comes through the slow and prolonged strength drainage of months of toil.
Jack London (The Call of the Wild)
Christ. No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.
Stephen King (Pet Sematary)
What was she thinking?” muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania. “She was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,” Ina said. “She gave the doctor a liter of blood for you—” “Where did she get it from?” “Herself, of course.” Ina smiled. “Lucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.” Of course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut. Ina continued. “The doctor told her she couldn’t give any more, and she said a liter wasn’t enough, and he said, ‘Yes, but you don’t have more to give,’ and she said, ‘I’ll make more,’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.” Alexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound. He was barely breathing. “The doctor told her, ‘Tania, you’re wasting your time. Look at his burn. It’s going to get infected.’ There wasn’t enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was so low.” Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. “So I’m making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She’s sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to a catheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won’t believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV.” Ina’s eyes bulged. “I watch her draining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re siphoning blood from yourself into him?’ She said to me in her calm, I-won’t-stand-for-any-argument voice, ‘Ina, if I don’t, he will die.’ I yelled at her. I said, ‘There are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don’t you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine.’ Can you believe it, Major? But that’s what she said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to her. ‘Fine, die yourself. I don’t care.’ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn’t following procedure, told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her.” Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. “We found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, ‘Maybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?’ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment out of you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage, to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That’s when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, ‘Tania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,’ and she said, ‘You think so?’ ” Ina tutted again. Paused. “Are you all right, Major? Why are you crying?
Paullina Simons (The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman, #1))
By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.
Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island)
Oil the saw, sharpen axes, Learn the names of all the peaks you see and which is highest- there are hundreds- Learn by heart the drainages between Go find a shallow pool of snowmelt on a good day, bathe in the lukewarm water.
Gary Snyder
I don't have that many days left," he said as we sat together in the library. "Why would I want to spend them on matters of drainage and overdue accounts? I must husband my hours and spend every one of them wisely. I regret that I didn't come to this realization until I reached fifty years of age. Calpurnia, you would do well to adopt such an attitude at an earlier age. Spend each of your allotted hours with care.
Jacqueline Kelly (The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (Calpurnia Tate, #1))
Destruction is easily reversed, Brain drainage howbeit is a civilization killer
A.M.M Alusi
PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug—that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust.
Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)
Common to the many theories about the birth trauma is the assumption that the feelings produced by this event were recorded and reside in some form in the brain. This assumption is supported by the great number of repetitious dreams of the “drainage pipe” variety
Thomas A. Harris (I'm OK, You're OK)
They went around the room telling stories about how they'd gotten here. No two were exactly the same, but there was always a certain family resemblance. Somebody went looking for a lost ball in an alley, or a stray goat in a drainage ditch, or fallowed an inexplicable extra cable in the high school computer room which led to a server closet that had never been there before.
Lev Grossman (The Magicians (The Magicians, #1))
if you suddenly have the ability to walk through walls, you’re dead. You’re not lying somewhere in a drainage ditch waiting to wake up. Get over it,
Darynda Jones (First Grave on the Right (Charley Davidson, #1))
Harper had had enough of the porcupine and enough of the drainage pipe. She scooped the stick right under his rear end and shoved him along ahead of her. She felt this had the makings of a new Olympic sport: porcupine curling. The
Joe Hill (The Fireman)
Things seem to be returning to normal, he thought, but couldn’t stop himself from laughing out loud when he realized he was crawling through a secret passage dirt tunnel toward a drainage pipe where an army of rats awaited to accompany him home. Normal indeed.
Nathan M. Wrann (Dark Matter Heart (Cor Griffin Bloodsuckers, #1))
Once, when I was young, I believed in democracy. When I was a little older, I believed in oligarchy, government by the enlightened few; after that, in monarchy, the rule of the philosopher-king. Now I believe only in drainage, public sanitation and clean water.
Tom Holt (Alexander At The World's End)
Now,” he said, snapping the black blade open, “we have destroyed the teeth, crushed the face, and obliterated the fingerprints. And we have not been caught. We can therefore proceed with the first stage of carcass disposal. Fluid drainage.” Amanda placed her hands together so quickly that they almost clapped. “Ooh,” she said.
Warren Ellis (Dead Pig Collector (Kindle Single))
These haymeadow days were the Arcadian age for marsh dwellers. Man and beast, plant and soil lived on and with each other in mutual toleration, to the mutual benefit of all. The marsh might have kept on producing hay and prairie chickens, deer and muskrat, crane-music and cranberries forever. The new overlords did not understand this. They did not include soil, plants, or birds in their ideas of mutuality. The dividends of such a balanced economy were too modest. They envisaged farms not only around, but in the marsh. An epidemic of ditch-digging and land-booming set in. The marsh was gridironed with drainage canals, speckled with new fields and farmsteads.
Aldo Leopold (Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology (Library of America, #238))
Twins are just two nearly identical drainage solutions. They are just a couple of septic systems.
Jarod Kintz (Powdered Saxophone Music)
My mind is a flooded field of words. Some escape through the drainage ditch but most drown in a pool of forgetfulness.
Raven White (Bad Can Be Broken: A Story of Cancer, Karma, and Courage)
For its own sake, a civilized community could no more disregard equity than it dare tolerate an imperfect drainage system.
Jerome K. Jerome (Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome)
His overactive charm poured out like a lone drainage pipe after a flash flood.
Lida Sideris (Murder and Other Unnatural Disasters (Southern California Mysteries, #1))
Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous—that is, paying too much attention to fear—creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous - that is, paying too much attention to fear - creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong direction.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Buying a home is always an impulse buy. It's an impossible thing for your brain to absorb fully: to warp your whole emotional and financial life around the shape of this absurd physical thing, this new collection of problems and regrets, ants and undiscovered mold, bad drainage, and cracked foundations that will be your burden until you sell it or it kills you. A thirty-year mortgage is hilarious when you are young and you don't even remember what day it is; it's a grim thing when you are older and see that this debt is a bright, un-ignorable line from the now of your life to its addled decline.
John Hodgman (Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches)
And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way.
Aspen Matis (Girl in the Woods: A Memoir)
What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry. The houses are all of one size and built to the same plan, suggesting a kind of genial commune rather than a conventional tribal hierarchy. Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area—dubbed “the marketplace” by early archaeologists—where tasks could be done in a social setting.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities (Bantam Classics))
The vast southern city they lived in was rich in land, poor in everything else—no bodies of water, no drainage, no hills, no topographical variety of any sort, no public transportation or even the awareness of the lack of such a thing.
Susan Choi (Trust Exercise)
Workers collected crude turpentine, the liquid resin of the longleaf pine, by “boxing”: cutting a large, chevron-shaped drainage into a tree with a deep notch below it that collected the liquid, which was then scooped out and barreled.
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
Whereas in many Greek houses the bathroom was connected to the kitchen area, in Kerkouane many were situated off the entrance vestibule or passageway leading from the street into the house. Although there were pragmatic reasons for such a location, such as the availability of drainage and water, the choice also suggests that in the Punic world the washing of the body was seen as an important ritual act of purification that marked the transition from the public sphere outside the house to the private space of the family.
Richard Miles (Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization)
The feathery palms that lined the drainage canals, the acacia thorns and sycamores, all glistened with the sheen of new, pale-green leaves, and in Khaemwaset’s gardens the vivid clusters of flowers had begun to bloom with an abandon that assaulted the eyes and filled the nostrils with delight.
Pauline Gedge (Scroll of Saqqara)
frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk. Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous—that is, paying too much attention to fear—creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
--Gardens, not buildings-- Great projects start out feeling like buildings. There are architects, materials, staff, rigid timelines, permits, engineers, a structure. It works or it doesn't. Build something that doesn't fall down. On time. But in fact, great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again. Perfection and polish aren't nearly as important as good light, good drainage and a passionate gardener. By all means, build. But don't finish. Don't walk away. Here we grow.
Seth Godin
Everything was so cheap that the necessities of life were free, provided as a public service by the community, as roads, water, street lighting, and drainage had once been. A man could travel anywhere he pleased, eat whatever food he fancied—without handing over any money. He had earned the right to do this by being a productive member of the community.
Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End)
They’re telling me that grief naturally pools as rainwater does,” I said. “If we have good drainage it moves through us; it fills up and drains away. But if we don’t have energy moving through us it can pool up and get swampy and heavy. All we see is this pool of grief and we begin to stare into it as Narcissus did. It can become a little bit self-indulgent. We’re not honoring the people we’re missing, the times of our lives that have changed, or the future that’s waiting for us.” None of the spirit people suggested Crystal bury or deny her grief, but rather that she find a way to move through it. Knowing she would be honoring them more by expressing her grief and letting it pass, rather than keeping it alive as a memorial, Crystal felt refreshed and optimistic about letting her usually cheerful nature surface once more.
Priscilla A. Keresey (Nobody Gets Out Of This Alive: More Messages From Our Loved Ones In The Spirit World)
Imagine a single survivor, a lonely fugitive at large on mainland Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century. Imagine this fugitive as a female. She would have been bulky and flightless and befuddled—but resourceful enough to have escaped and endured when the other birds didn’t. Or else she was lucky. Maybe she had spent all her years in the Bambous Mountains along the southeastern coast, where the various forms of human-brought menace were slow to penetrate. Or she might have lurked in a creek drainage of the Black River Gorges. Time and trouble had finally caught up with her. Imagine that her last hatchling had been snarfed by a [invasive] feral pig. That her last fertile egg had been eaten by a [invasive] monkey. That her mate was dead, clubbed by a hungry Dutch sailor, and that she had no hope of finding another. During the past halfdozen years, longer than a bird could remember, she had not even set eyes on a member of her own species. Raphus cucullatus had become rare unto death. But this one flesh-and-blood individual still lived. Imagine that she was thirty years old, or thirty-five, an ancient age for most sorts of bird but not impossible for a member of such a large-bodied species. She no longer ran, she waddled. Lately she was going blind. Her digestive system was balky. In the dark of an early morning in 1667, say, during a rainstorm, she took cover beneath a cold stone ledge at the base of one of the Black River cliffs. She drew her head down against her body, fluffed her feathers for warmth, squinted in patient misery. She waited. She didn't know it, nor did anyone else, but she was the only dodo on Earth. When the storm passed, she never opened her eyes. This is extinction.
David Quammen (The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction)
Back then I took up flying with the sense of coming to something I had been meant to do all my life. Many people who fly feel this way and I think it has more to do with some kind of treetop or clifftop gene than with any sense of unbounded freedom or metaphors of the soaring spirit. The way the earth below resolves. The way the landscape falls into place around the drainages, the capillaries and arteries of falling water: mountain slopes bunched and wrinkled, wringing themselves into the furrows of couloir and creek , draw and chasm, the low places defining the spurs and ridges and foothills the way creases define the planes of a face, lower down the canyon cuts, and then the swales and valleys of the lowest slopes, the sinuous rivers and the dry beds where water used to run seeming to hold the hills the waves of the high plains all together and not the other way around… but what I loved the most from the first training flight was the neatness, the sense of everything in its place. The farms in their squared sections, the quartering county roads oriented to the cardinal compass points, the round bales and scattered cattle and horses as perfect in their patterns as sprays of stars and holding the same ruddy sun on their flanks…the immortal stillness of a landscape painting.
Peter Heller (The Dog Stars)
to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura)—which balcony means that
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
The hardest challenge of early coal mining was drainage. Rainwater flows through rills and streams into brooks and brooks into rivers, drawn always downward by gravity to the sea. About a third of any rainfall soaks into the soil and percolates downward into the earth. Eventually it encounters impermeable layers of rock. There it spreads out and flows along the rock layer until it finds cracks or permeable rock, when it continues percolating down to the next impermeable layer.
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
This is what is often called the problem of environmental justice; a sharper, less gauzy phrase would be “climate caste system.” The problem is acute within countries, even wealthy ones, where the poorest are those who live in the marshes, the swamps, the floodplains, the inadequately irrigated places with the most vulnerable infrastructure—altogether an unwitting environmental apartheid. Just in Texas, 500,000 poor Latinos live in shantytowns called “colonias” with no drainage systems to deal with increased flooding.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
I'm a shreddermouf, aren't I?' 'I was afraid of that,' said Tansy. He was going to keep her in his larder until he was hungy again, and then he was going to rip her apart. 'Dis is my lair', said the shreddermouth proudly. 'It's de best lair in Tiratattle.' 'Is it?' said Tansy. 'Oh yes. It's a drainage tunnel. Goes right up to de surface, it does. Lots of storage space. My name's Gulp.' 'Tansy,' said Tansy, deciding not to ask him what he kept in his storage space and wondering whether introductions were quite the thing.
Elizabeth Kay (The Divide (The Divide, #1))
Madam, My sincere thanks for your offer to speak to the tenants regarding the drainage issues. However, since you are already burdened with many demands, I have sent my brother, Weston, to handle the problem. He will arrive at Eversby Priory on Wednesday, and stay for a fortnight. I have lectured him at length about gentlemanly conduct. If he causes you a moment’s distress, wire me and it will be resolved immediately. My brother will arrive at the Alton rail station at noon on Saturday. I do hope you’ll send someone to collect him, since I feel certain no one else will want him. Trenear P.S. Did you really dye the shawl black? My Lord, Amid the daily tumult of construction, which is louder than an army corps of drums, your brother’s presence will likely go unnoticed. We will fetch him on Wednesday. Lady Trenear P.S. Why did you send me a shawl so obviously unsuitable for mourning? In response to Kathleen’s letter, a telegram was delivered from the village post office on the morning of West’s scheduled arrival. Madam, You won’t be in mourning forever. Trenear
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
A landscape is a memory surface. The contours of the surface offer an accumulated memory trace of the water that has fallen upon it. The rainfall forms little rivulets which combine into streams and then into rivers. Once the pattern of drainage has been formed then it tends to become ever more permanent since the rain is collected into the drainage channels and tends to make them deeper. It is the rainfall that is doing the sculpting and yet it is the response of the surface to the rainfall that is organizing how the rainfall will do its sculpting.
Edward de Bono (Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step)
Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley - for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, "planned" communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. ("Family")
Joyce Carol Oates (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now)
You alone decided to take on the burden of the estate. You made the decisions that led to the lease deal and the discovery of the iron deposits. Has it occurred to you that if any of the previous earls had bothered to make the land improvements they should have, the hematite bed would have been discovered decades ago? You certainly would have found it when you ordered the drainage trenches dug for the tenant farms. You see, Eversby Priory is in good hands: yours. You’ve changed hundreds of lives for the better, including mine. Whatever the word is for a man who’s done all that…it’s not ‘scapegrace.’” West paused. “My God, I can feel sincerity rising in my chest like a digestive disorder. I have to stop.
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
Dear Kathleen, I have just returned from the Lufton farm after inquiring about the welfare of their newest resident. Please convey to all concerned parties that Hamlet is thoroughly content with his pen, which, I might add, has been constructed to the highest porcine standards. He seems enthused about keeping company with his own harem of sows. I would venture to say that a pig of simple pleasures could ask for nothing more. All other news from the estate pertains to drainage trenches and plumbing mishaps, none of it agreeable to relate I am anxious to know how you are taking the engagement between Helen and Winterborne. In the spirit of brotherly concern, I beg you to write soon, at least to tell me if murder is being planned. Affectionately yours, West
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
My Lord, In your concern for the downtrodden masses, it appears to have escaped your mind to inform me that you had arranged for a battalion of workmen to invade Eversby Priory. Even as I write, plumbers and carpenters wander freely throughout the house, tearing apart walls and floors and claiming that it is all by your leave. The expense of plumbing is extravagant and unnecessary. The noise and lack of decorum is unwelcome, especially in a house of mourning. I insist that this work discontinue at once. Lady Trenear Madam, Every man has his limits. Mine happen to be drawn at outdoor privies. The plumbing will continue. Trenear My lord, With so many improvements that are desperately needed on your lands, including repairs to laborers’ cottages, farm buildings, drainage systems, and enclosures, one must ask if your personal bodily comfort really outweighs all other considerations. Lady Trenear Madam, In reply to your question, Yes. Trenear
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
Beneath the bed of the river, below silts almost a storey thick, rested the remains of almost sixteen thousand citizens of Letheras. Their bones filled ancient wells that had been drilled before the river’s arrival – before the drainage course from the far eastern mountains changed cataclysmically, making the serpent lash its tail, the torrent carving a new channel, one that inundated a nascent city countless millennia ago. Letherii engineers centuries past had stumbled upon these submerged constructs, wondering at the humped corridors and the domed chambers, wondering at the huge, deep wells with their clear, cold water. And baffled to explain how such tunnels remained more or less dry, the cut channels seeming to absorb water like runners of sponge. No records existed any more recounting these discoveries – the tunnels and chambers and wells were lost knowledge to all but a chosen few. And of the existence of parallel passages, the hidden doors in the walls of corridors, and the hundreds of lesser tombs, not even those few were aware. Certain secrets belonged exclusively to the gods.
Steven Erikson (Reaper's Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #7))
So what really happened, and what became of them? The basement entry, while dangerous, wasn’t quite as dramatic as modern myth would have you believe. The pressure suppression pool drainage valves couldn’t be reached because most watertight basement corridors and surrounding rooms were full of water. The solution required a team of highly trained firemen wearing respirators and rubber suits to charge their fire engines and the Chemical Troops’ protective armoured vehicles into a loading bay beneath the reactor. There, they placed four special, ultra-long hoses into the water before retreating to the safety of Bryukhanov’s bunker beneath the administration building. After three hours of almost zero water movement, the dejected firemen came to the crushing realisation that one of the armoured vehicles must have driven over and severed their hoses. A fresh team brought twenty new hoses and re-entered the reactor building. They emerged an hour later, feeling exhausted and nauseous but triumphant; the replacement hoses were in place, the remaining radioactive water could finally be drained.201
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
My lord, With so many improvements that are desperately needed on your lands, including repairs to laborers’ cottages, farm buildings, drainage systems, and enclosures, one must ask if your personal bodily comfort really outweighs all other considerations. Lady Trenear Madam, In reply to your question, Yes. Trenear “Oh, how I despise him,” Kathleen cried, slamming the letter onto the library table. Helen and the twins, who were poring over books of deportment and etiquette, all looked up at her quizzically. “Trenear,” she explained with a scowl. “I informed him of the chaos he has caused, with all these workmen tramping up and down the staircases, and hammering and sawing at all hours of the day. But he doesn’t give a fig for anyone else’s comfort save his own.” “I don’t mind the noise, actually,” Cassandra said. “It feels as if the house has come alive again.” “I’m looking forward to the indoor water closets,” Pandora confessed sheepishly. “Don’t tell me your loyalty has been bought for the price of a privy?” Kathleen demanded. “Not just one privy,” Pandora said. “One for every floor, including the servants.
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
Why is the forest such an effective agent in the prevention of soil erosion and in feeding the springs and rivers? The forest does two things: (1) the trees and undergrowth break up the rainfall into fine spray and the litter on the ground protects the soil from erosion; (2) the residues of the trees and animal life met with in all woodlands are converted into humus, which is then absorbed by the soil underneath, increasing its porosity and waterholding power. The soil cover and the soil humus together prevent erosion and at the same time store large volumes of water. These factors -- soil protection, soil porosity, and water retention -- conferred by the living forest cover, provide the key to the solution of the soil erosion problem. All other purely mechanical remedies such as terracing and drainage are secondary matters, although of course important in their proper place. The soil must have as much cover as possible; it must be well stocked with humus so that it can drink in and retain the rainfall. It follows, therefore, that in the absence of trees there must be a grass cover, some cover-crop, and ample provision for keeping up the supply of humus." (An Agricultural Testament)
Albert Howard
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.  
Gary Haynes (State of Honour)
language . . . what exactly was it, and how did it happen? Celeste shrugged. “Some people think it was just business as usual—mutation, adaptation, selection, mutation, adaptation, selection, a slow continuity kind of thing, for hundreds of thousands of years. But other people think it happened incredibly fast, within about forty thousand years. And that this capacity that made it possible—this built-in capacity for the operation that lets us merge expressible things into other expressible things to make more and more complex expressible things—appeared in an instant! Which makes complete sense, even though it could not be more bizarre. One tiny molecular irregularity in one tiny fetus, in a very small population of humans somewhere in Africa! One instant! A universe-altering mutation!” “But what about . . . ,” he began, but ran aground. “What about the other stuff? The stuff we can’t manage to think?” “Yeah,” he said. “Or . . . well, I mean, yeah.” “Uh-huh, that’s a problem. Actually, Friedlander was pretty interested in that. In his opinion, language developed as a way for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand things, so then we can just go ahead and do stuff that’s more ruthless than what any other animal does. According to him, we can formulate like a fraction of what’s inside our heads and that what’s inside our heads is mostly . . . drainage, basically, sloshing around, that doesn’t have too much to do with what’s actually out there . . .” They looked at each other, and vague shapes, like amoebas, rose, morphed, blended, and faded between them. “But at least it’s all ours,” she said. “It’s the main unique thing we’ve got. It’s our gift.
Deborah Eisenberg (Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories)
The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest. As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years. Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.
Lee Sandlin (Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild)
The belief in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony against “selflessness” belong to noble morality, just as much as an easy contempt and caution before feelings of pity and the “warm heart.” Powerful men are the ones who understand how to honour; that is their art, their realm of invention. The profound reverence for age and for ancestral tradition — all justice stands on this double reverence — the belief and the prejudice favouring forefathers and working against newcomers are typical in the morality of the powerful, and when, by contrast, the men of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future” and increasingly lack any respect for age, then in that attitude the ignoble origin of these “ideas” already reveals itself well enough. However, a morality of the rulers is most alien and embarrassing to present taste because of the severity of its basic principle that man has duties only with respect to those like him, that man should act towards those beings of lower rank, towards everything foreign, at his own discretion, or “as his heart dictates,” and, in any case, “beyond good and evil.” Here pity and things like that may belong. The capacity for and obligation to a long gratitude and a long revenge — both only within the circle of one’s peers — the sophistication in paying back again, the refined idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies (as, so to speak, drainage ditches for the feelings of envy, quarrelsomeness, and high spirits — basically in order to be capable of being a good friend): all those are typical characteristics of a noble morality, which, as indicated, is not the morality of “modern ideas” and which is thus nowadays difficult to sympathize with, as well as difficult to dig up and expose.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
Undoubtedly, my dear Dick. Just note the progress of events: consider the migrations of races, and you will arrive at the same conclusion assuredly. Asia was the first nurse of the world, was she not? For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil where the golden harvests sung by Homer had flourished, her children abandoned her exhausted and barren bosom. You next see them precipitating themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to die out; her productive powers are diminishing every day. Those new diseases that annually attack the products of the soil, those defective crops, those insufficient resources, are all signs of a vitality that is rapidly wearing out and of an approaching exhaustion. Thus, we already see the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America, as a source of help, not inexhaustible indeed, but not yet exhausted. In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through having too fully produced what had been demanded of it. Where two harvests bloomed every year, hardly one will be gathered from a soil completely drained of its strength. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast. Those climates now so fatal to strangers will be purified by cultivation and by drainage of the soil, and those scattered water supplies will be gathered into one common bed to form an artery of navigation. Then this country over which we are now passing, more fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest, will become some grand realm where more astonishing discoveries than steam and electricity will be brought to light.
Jules Verne (Jules Verne: The Extraordinary Voyages Collection (The Greatest Writers of All Time Book 42))
The City of México, situated on a lake that had been gradually drying for a thousand years, had begun to experience serious flooding as early as the administration of the first Velasco. The problem was that the Spanish had deforested the ocote- and cypress-covered slopes of the three central lakes, Xaltocán, Texcoco, and Zumpango; now water cascaded off the mountains and soil erosion began to silt up the lakes. The lakes in Anáhuac had never drained to any sea; and during seasons of unusually heavy rains the water level lapping against the capital rose dangerously. After an inundation in the 1550s, the viceroy had rebuilt the old Mexica dikes; by 1604 no dams or levees could hold off the rising water. The second Velasco set the engineer Enrico Martínez to solving the problem. Martínez dug a tunnel four miles through the encircling mountains to drain off the excess water. Many thousands of local indios were dragooned into this task and driven harshly to complete the job within a year. The task was done in eleven months, at an enormous cost in Amerindian hardship and lives. Unfortunately, while the idea was sound, the construction was shaky. The tunnel tended to cave in, and it was not large enough to handle a serious flood. For some twenty years, huge numbers of indios were kept laboring to clear the tunnel and shore it up; then, in 1629, a simultaneous rise in all the lakes choked the tunnel. The destruction was enormous, and some parts of the city remained flooded for four years. The engineer Martínez was again called upon. Now, he converted his disastrous tunnel into an open ditch about thirteen miles long and about two hundred feet deep. This ditch, called the Tajo de Nochistongo, required ten years to put in operation, and work continued on it for more than a century. The draining of the Valley occupied a whole series of viceroys, used up most of their revenues, and laid terrible burdens on the surviving Anáhuac Indians. Nor was the drainage problem really solved, though the Capital was kept out of the mire. Drainage, and the subsequent sinking and shifting of the porous lake-bottom soil is still a monstrous engineering, architectural, and financial problem for México.
T.R. Fehrenbach (Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico)
It was awful. It was three in the morning. And I finally said, “Chip, I’m not sleeping in this house.” We were broke. We couldn’t go to a hotel. There was no way we were gonna go knock on one of our parents’ doors at that time of night. That’s when I got an idea. We happened to have Chip’s parents’ old RV parked in a vacant lot a few blocks down. We had some of our things in there and had been using it basically as a storage unit until we moved in. “Let’s get in the RV. We’ll go find somewhere to plug it in, and we’ll have AC,” I said. As we stepped outside, the skies opened up. It started pouring rain. When we finally got into the RV, soaking wet, we pulled down the road a ways and Chip said, “I know where we can go.” It was raining so hard we could barely see through the windshield, and all of a sudden Chip turned the RV into a cemetery. “Why are you pulling in to a cemetery?” I asked him. “We’re not going to the cemetery,” Chip said. “It’s just next to a cemetery. There’s an RV park back here.” “Are you kidding me? Could this get any worse?” “Oh, quit it. You’re going to love it once I get this AC fired up.” Chip decided to go flying through the median between the two rows of RV parking, not realizing it was set up like a culvert for drainage and rain runoff. That RV bounced so hard that, had it not been for our seat belts, we would’ve both been catapulted through the roof of that vehicle. “What was that?!” “I don’t know,” Chip said. I tried to put it in reverse, and then forward, and then reverse again, and the thing just wouldn’t move. I hopped out to take a look and couldn’t believe it. There was a movie a few years ago where the main character gets his RV caught on this fulcrum and it’s sitting there teetering with both sets of wheels up in the air. Well, we sort of did the opposite. We went across this valley, and because the RV was so long, the butt end of it got stuck on the little hill behind us, and the front end got stuck on the little hill in front of us, and the wheels were just sort of hanging there in between. I crawled back into the RV soaking wet and gave Jo the bad news. We had no place to go, no place to plug in so we could run the AC; it was pouring rain so we couldn’t really walk anywhere to get help. And at that point I was just done. We wound up toughing it out and spending the first night after our honeymoon in a hot, old RV packed full of our belongings, suspended between two bumps in the road.
Joanna Gaines (The Magnolia Story)
Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.
Ashim Shanker (Inward and Toward (Migrations, #3))
You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.
James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
I don’t think the Library could’ve come to life if it hadn’t found an accepting climate, a moral willingness to latch on to . . . We’ll skip over the widespread tendency of many citizens to confide their worries in newspaper agony aunts and talk radio hosts . . . It’s certain that from those media, things passed into a slimy subsoil, a drainage basin where anyone could tip anything they wanted, all the gunk they kept inside themselves. Have you ever seen something spawned from a garbage dump?” “To be honest, no, I haven’t,” I replied. “But isn’t it possible that the Library did reach one of its goals? To bring people closer together?” “Oh, it reached goals! Quite a lot of goals!” he said with a dash of sarcasm. “But certainly not the goals you’re talking about! Even those infamous contributions, those dialogues across the ether that were later purged by the Library, helped break that cycle of loneliness in which our citizens were confined. Or rather they helped to furnish the illusion of a relationship with the outside world: a dismal cop-out nourished and centralized by a scornful power bent only on keeping people in their state of continuous isolation. The inventors of the Library knew their trade well!
Giorgio De Maria (The Twenty Days of Turin)
In time, the “war on malaria” further expanded its mission to target working conditions, wages, housing, land drainage, and environmental sanitation, including the control and removal of impounded water on farmsteads.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
From Gary Snyder: I heard a Crow elder say: “You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough-even white people- the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land.” Bioregional awareness teaches us in specific ways. It is not enough just to “love nature” or want to be “in harmony with Gaia.” Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience. This is so unexceptional a kind of knowledge that everyone in Europe, Asia and Africa used to take for granted… Knowing a bit about the flora we could enjoy questions like: where do Alaska and Mexico meet? It would be somewhere on the north coast of California, where Canada Jay and Sitka Spruce lace together with manzanita and Blue Oak. But instead of northern California, let’s call it “Shasta Bioregion.” The present state of California (the old Alta California territory) falls into at least three natural divisions, and the northern third looks, as the Douglas Fir example, well to the north. East of the watershed divide to the west near Sacramento, is the Great Basin, north of Shasta is the Cascadia/Colombia region, and then farther north is what we call Ish River country, the drainages of Puget Sound. Why should we do this kind of visualization? It prepares us to begin to be at home in this landscape. There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans to be sure have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land, they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into “native americans.” For the non-Native Americans to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island.
David Landis Barnhill (At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology)
You remember the big south Iceland earthquake on the seventeenth of June 2000?’ she said, and they nodded. ‘About five seconds afterwards a large earthquake also struck Kleifarvatn, which doubled the natural rate of drainage from it. When the lake started to shrink people at first thought it was because of unusually low precipitation, but it turned out that the water was pouring down through fissures that run across the bed of the lake and have been there for ages. Apparently they opened up in the earthquake. The lake measured ten square kilometres but now it’s only about eight. The water level has fallen by at least four metres.
Arnaldur Indriðason (The Draining Lake (Inspector Erlendur #6))
In a broad reach of savanna, the Beni’s original inhabitants built raised fields—artificial platforms of soil that lift crops above the floodwaters. Like the raised beds in temperate-zone gardens, they promote drainage and increase the amount of topsoil available to plants. The few carbon dates available suggest that the fields date from about three thousand years ago to about five hundred years ago—roughly the time the conquistadors arrived, bringing European diseases.
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous—that is, paying too much attention to fear—creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions. It makes a terrified junior doctor think about nuclear war when he should be treating hypothermia, and it makes whole populations focus on earthquakes and crashing planes and invisible substances when millions are dying from diarrhea and seafloors are becoming underwater deserts. I would like my fear to be focused on the mega dangers of today, and not the dangers from our evolutionary past.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Usually, there are one or two key culprits for energy drainage in our life, and when we figure out how to plug those up, all of the other areas of our life improve dramatically as well. The different areas of your life are not silos. They’re all interconnected, and as much as the patriarchal working world would have us compartmentalize everything and pretend that all the parts of our life don’t affect one another, they do. We’re integrated. We just are.
Kate Northrup (Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Busy Moms)
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TCM Draincare
Our metrics are probably more like “I don’t want to work a job for a boss I hate,” or “I’d like to earn enough money to send my kid to a good school,” or “I’d be happy to not wake up in a drainage ditch.” And by these metrics, Mustaine is wildly, unimaginably successful. But by his metric, “Be more popular and successful than Metallica,
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
Aye,” Richard grumbled, “but it ruins the eeling, and there’ll be not so many birds. We live well enough now, with no drainage done, a goose to the table whenever we wish, eels and pike for the eating or the market, and our patches of crop land no tax gatherer can find. If the fens be drained, strangers will come in. Wild and lawless they say we be, and that we stink of our fens, but we are free men and better it is to remain so. “Once the gentry ken how rich is the land they’ll have it from us by hook or crook, or they’ll come on with their laws to interfere with the hunting, the digging of peat, or the cutting of thatch. They’d have us bound out to labor on their farms instead of us living free.
Louis L'Amour (The Sacketts Volume One 5-Book Bundle: Sackett's Land, To the Far Blue Mountains, The Warrior's Path, Jubal Sackett, Ride the River)
With the notable exception of the Jews, almost no one in the pre-Christian Roman Empire questioned the widespread practice of killing unwanted infants, either directly or by abandoning them on a roadside or a rubbish dump, or tossing them into a drainage well or down a ravine. When early Christians began rescuing these children and caring for them, it was a scandal to the Romans, for whom babies, like slaves, were not fully human and therefore not entitled to protection or consideration. (Under Roman law, slaves were property, and babies had to develop and mature before they were considered full human beings.)
John Daniel Davidson (Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come)
If you had lived as a new Christian convert during the rule of the Roman Empire, one of your biggest challenges would have been dealing with the pagan philosophical propaganda that surrounded you. I call it paganosophy. In a Greco-Roman city, most statues depicted partial or total nudity. In the gymnasiums, male athletes worked out naked. In fact, the word gymnasium dates back to the Greek word gymnasion, which literally was a “school for training naked.” Pagan Greeks and Romans insisted there was nothing wrong with showing off a well chiseled body. This is an example of what Paul was speaking of when he wrote, “They worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25). Roman bathhouses were a popular place for men and women in the city to gather. There were times in history when men and women would occupy the same rooms in the bathhouse. At other times, cities would make decrees prohibiting it. We uploaded a highly viewed YouTube video that we taped in Beit She’an, Israel at the excavated ruins of this Roman city that was destroyed by an earthquake in the ninth century. The city’s ancient public toilets (latrines) had been unearthed. In Roman times there were public latrines in different cities for the benefit of the citizens, since only the wealthy could afford private latrines. The toilet seats, made of stone, were a couple feet long, with one end connected to the wall and the stones resting upon a base with water running beneath for drainage. There was enough space to allow a person to sit between each stone. No archaeological evidence indicated that dividers were used, and as people sat side by side on stones in a public latrine, they discussed business. Deals and contracts were made at the public toilet. Some of the terms we hear today were coined at the Roman toilet. When a person says they have to “do their business,” they’re using a term that originated from men who literally conducted business at the toilet. The signage at the Beit She’an site indicates that men and women shared the same large room, with men on one side of the room and women on the other. Today, we find ourselves returning to trends from the Roman Empire, where men are allowed to use women’s facilities, if they claim to identify as a woman that day. Attacks against women in their own facilities confirm that many of these males are there to take advantage of a ludicrous idea being promoted by the same spirits of the ancient Roman Empire.
Perry Stone (Artificial Intelligence Versus God: The Final Battle for Humanity)
From this high part of the pasture they could see in all directions through the barren woodlands. The topography of the farm came clear: the steep, high reach of mountains behind, the narrow drainage of the valley below. It occurred to her how much was obscured in summer by the leaves. With all those reassuring walls of green, a person could not see to the end of anything. Summer was the season of denial.
Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behavior)
My blue plastic chair and I shot out of a drainage pipe, tumbled down a rocky slope, and splashed into a creek.
Rick Riordan (The Chalice of the Gods (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Senior Year Adventures, #1))
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to be discovered during the initial excavation of Knossos was the so-called Throne Room. It was a modestly-sized room, but what was so special about it was the gypsum throne built into the north wall. The throne had a high back and was surrounded by stone benches on either side. Opposite the throne were steps down to a recessed area, most likely a type of bathtub or water tank. Sir Arthur Evans, who oversaw the initial excavation, believed it was used for ritual purification, although a lack of drainage calls that interpretation into question. Some modern scholars believe it may have been an aquarium, water storage container, or even a menstrual pit. The walls behind the throne were decorated with what is known as the Griffin Fresco. It depicted two recumbent—lying down—griffins facing the throne with one on either side of it. Griffins were considered important mythological creatures, and they were often depicted attending a deity. Behind the griffins was a landscape in
Hourly History (Minoan Civilization: A History from Beginning to End (Ancient Civilizations))
THE NATION’S twenty-seventh birthday, July 4, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, in the pages of the Washington, D.C., National Intelligencer, that the United States had just purchased from Napoleon “Louisiana.” It was not only New Orleans, but all the country drained from the west by the Mississippi River, most especially all the Missouri River drainage. That was 825,000 square miles, doubling the size of the country for a price of about fifteen million dollars—the best land bargain ever made.
Stephen E. Ambrose (Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West)
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Inversions, aka being upside down, are anti-aging. They improve lymphatic drainage, up your energy and mental stamina, and lift your mood. Going upside down shifts organs a bit and reverses blood flow, which increases circulation to spots that normally don’t get as much “nourishment,” including the brain. Inversions also improve digestion and can relieve pain in the extremities. And they make you feel fantastic—high in the best, most natural way. You don’t necessarily need props to help you invert; any position where your head is lower than your heart counts (standing and touching your toes, for example). But props make inversions more fun and make it easier to stay upside down for longer.
Frank Lipman (The New Rules of Aging Well: A Simple Program for Immune Resilience, Strength, and Vitality)
indoor toilet flushed by a drainage channel.
Amanda H. Podany (Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East)
Music, art, writing ... it’s like some magical psychic drainage. A way of tapping into the bigger picture of all it is to be human.
Lou Rhodes (The Phlunk)
water, barriers, drainage, trail
Nora Roberts (The Search)
psychic poverty (defined, in the case of the latter, as the involuntary drainage of energy
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean)
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Drainage tubes ran out of his belly and side, and there was a catheter the size of a pencil coming out his penis. Nothing particularly hurt, so he had to assume he was on pretty nearly all the narcotics there were.
James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1))
Broward had been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assautl on the everglades, but he was considered a staunch conversvationist in his day. he supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and envelopment. Brossard never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. The conservationist John Giford dedicated his book of Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is the proverbial public benefactor, bu the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.” Broward was also a progressive- an anti railroad, anti corporation, anti-Flagler populist. His crusade for Everglades drainage was not just a fight for man against nature; it was a fight for ordinary Floridians angst’s the “seductive and enslaving power of corporate interests” who monopolized state lands without improving them. Flagler and other railroad barons, he complained, were “draining the people instead of the swamps” At a time when the richest one percent of Americans owned halfthe nation’s wealth, when forty-two corporate trusts controlled at least 70 percent of their industries, Broward wanted to turn the Everglades into a place where ordinary people could deprive their lot in life through hard work. That’s what he had done.
Michael Grunwald (The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise)
It’s the most beautiful day I can imagine. The sky is perfectly blue, the winds that threatened the heli not visible to the naked eye. The mountains stretch endless around us. We’re more or less below the tree line, down by the drainage basin for one of the area’s sparkling-clear rivers. Snow-shrouded pines cluster in snowy bowls and are scattered sparser over the slopes. The powder is waist deep after the last few days’ snowfall, soft as down and white as confetti.
Harper Dallas (Ride (The Wild Sequence, #1))
Like all Roman roads, the Appian Way (Via Appia) was a marvel of both engineering and propaganda. Construction began on the roads by digging deeply into the soil to lay a foundation of rock, covering this in turn with gravel for drainage, and finally paving with virtually indestructible flagstones over which commerce rolled and armies marched. Unlike the earlier muddy tracks around much of the Mediterranean, Roman roads were meant to endure and rarely yielded to the vagaries of topography. Unless prevented by impassable mountains or impregnable swamps, the Romans built their roads straight as an arrow across the landscape. They were in fact a sermon in stone to the world—Romans do not yield.
Philip Freeman (Julius Caesar (Gift for History Buffs))
In ordinary times the Jhelum river flows gently between high stable banks of deep soil, and until the stream shrinks in November, navigation, in spite of the absence of a proper tow-path, is easy. But in the winter the river above Sriiiagar is blocked by shoals, and the boatmen often have to dig out a channel for the heavy grain barges. In times of flood the river overtops its natural banks, and when the flood is high the water pours over the artificial embankments which have been constructed on either side of the river. Great damage is then caused to the crops of maize and linseed, and sometimes stacks of wheat, barley, and rape-seed are swept away. The loss caused by floods is always greatest below Srinagar, as the fall of the country is slight and the flood-water remains on the land rotting the crops. Above Srinagar the fall of the river and the slope of the country cause the flood-water to run down quickly and the crops often recover. In former times the villages lying along the river were obliged to keep the artificial embankments in repair, and flood-gates existed which let out the water of the mountain streams, and protected the country against the floods of the Jhelum. For many years this obligation had not been enforced, and under my supervision the embankments below Srinagar were repaired, and the normal floods of 1892 were kept in check. Above Srinagar the question of repairing embankments is complicated by the presence of the city, the safety of which must not be endangered. It is unfortunate that Srinagar should have been built on its present site. It is not only exposed to constant danger from floods, but is itself the cause of floods, because it checks the drainage of the country. The old Hindus were wise for they chose high land for their cities, and ancient Srinagar stood on ground secure from floods. Akbar, the first of the Mughal rulers, selected the slopes of the Hari-Parbat for his city Nagar, but his successors, without thought for the future, closed the Dal lake to the floods of the Jhelum, and thereby robbed the river of one of the escapes for its flood-water. Later the Pathans built their palace on the left bank of the Jhelum and prevented the river from escaping to the west, and now all the flood-water from the south of the valley must pass through the narrow waterway of Srinagar. There the channel of the river is narrowed by stone embankments, by the piles of encroaching city magnates, and the flow is further
Anonymous
Avoid Calcutta’s un- healthy monsoon. From June until the end of September over a meter and a half of rain bombards the city. Outhouses overflow and contaminate water used for drinking, bathing, and washing cooking utensils. Many of the eight thousand annual deaths caused by cholera and gastrointestinal diseases occur during the rains. Antiquated, silt-clogged sewage pipes drain only a quarter inch of rainwater per hour. Manhole covers are removed to facilitate drainage, and in nonstop rains (more than thirty centimeters, or a foot, in twenty-four hours), open sewers, hidden under water, become booby traps as pedestrians inadvertently plunge into them and drown.
James O'Reilly (Travelers' Tales India: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides))
Soil drainage is particularly important, but even that can be corrected, either with tiling or raised beds.
Maggie Oster (10 Steps to Beautiful Roses: Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-110)
Soil drainage is particularly important, but even that can be corrected, either with tiling or raised beds. To check drainage, dig a hole 18 inches deep
Maggie Oster (10 Steps to Beautiful Roses: Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-110)
wide. Containers should have drainage holes. Use a soil-less potting mix and feed and water frequently. In cold climates, container-grown plants
Maggie Oster (10 Steps to Beautiful Roses: Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-110)
At one point, the drainage of gold became so serious that Roman Emperor Vespasian was forced to discourage the import of Indian luxury goods and ban the export of gold to India.
Sanjeev Sanyal (Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography)
On Staten Island, instead of sewers, an innovative Bluebelt program repurposed the borough’s ponds and creeks as natural drainage corridors for runoff coming from nearby streets, reducing the burden for sewage treatment plants. The
Sergey Kadinsky (Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs)