Drawn And Quartered Quotes

Haven’t you heard of being hung, drawn, and quartered?” Blue asked, “Is it as painful as conversations with Ronan?” Gansey cast a glance over to Ronan, who was a small, indistinct form by the trees. Adam audibly swallowed a laugh. “Depends on if Ronan is sober,” Gansey answered. Adam asked, “What is he doing, anyway?” “Peeing.” “Trust Lynch to deface a place like this five minutes after getting here.” “Deface? Marking his territory.” “He must own more of Virginia than your father, then.” “I don’t think he’s ever used an indoor toilet, now that I consider it.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

You barbarians!' he yelled. 'I'll sue the council for every penny it's got! I'll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled...until...until...until...until you've had enough.' Ford was running after him. Very very fast. 'And then I will do it again!' yelled Arthur, 'And when I've finished I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!

And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime.

While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.

I’ll be damned and drawn and fucking quartered before I watch some devil-eyed goat feel up my boyfriend right in front of me.

I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.

Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. this was the sum of everything I'd been in my life--and more: who I am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons; who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name.

Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

She had been Zoya’s teacher, feared and beloved, powerful beyond measure. “I watched her throw herself from a mountaintop. She sacrificed herself to stop you. Was that her martyrdom?” The Darkling said nothing. Zoya couldn’t stop herself. “Grigori was eaten by a bear. Elizaveta was drawn and quartered. Still, they returned. There are stories whispered in the Elbjen mountains of the Dark Mother. She crowds in when the nights grow long. She steals the heat from kitchen fires.” “Liar.” “Maybe. We all have stories to tell.

Slate was used to, “Can we help you?” translating as, “If you make me get up, I will have you drawn and quartered.” She’d never heard it mean, “I will throw myself off a building if it will make your day better, sir.

Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far

The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

Shyness, inexhaustible source of misfortunes in practical life, is the direct cause, indeed unique, each inner wealth.

In flawed families, a scion appears who dedicates himself to the truth and who ruins himself in its pursuit.

Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. This was the sum of everything I'd been in my life—and more.

But man is a strayed animal, and when he falls victim to doubt, if he should happen to take no further pleasure in attacking others, he turns on himself in order to inflict merciless tortures.

Boredom in the midst of paradise generated our first ancestor’s appetite for the abyss which has won us this procession of centuries whose end we now have in view. That appetite, a veritable nostalgia for hell, would not fail to ravage the race following us and to make it the worthy heir of our misfortunes.

Juliette,” I whisper. “What are you doing here?” I’m half-dressed, getting ready for my day, and it’s too early for visitors. These hours just before the sun rises are my only moments of peace, and no one should be in here. It seems impossible she gained access to my private quarters. Someone should’ve stopped her. Instead, she’s standing in my doorway, staring at me. I’ve seen her so many times, but this is different—it’s causing me physical pain to look at her. But somehow I still find myself drawn to her, wanting to be near her.

If there was a common, even official form of killing oneself, suicide would be much easier and much more frequent. But since to be done with it all we must find our own way, we waste so much time meditating on trifles that we forget what is essential.

This Land is mostly white space on the map...which is how it should be; I'll leave more detailed map making to those graduate students and English teachers who feel that every goose which lays gold must be dissected so that all of its quite ordinary guts can be labelled; to those figurative engineers of the imagination who cannot feel comfortable with the comfortably overgrown (and possible dangerous) literary wilderness until they have built a freeway composed of Cliff's Notes through it - and listen to me, you people: every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff's Notes ought to be dragged out to his or her quad, drawn and quartered, then cut up into tiny pieces, said pieces to be dried and shrunk in the sun and then sold in the college bookstore as bookmarks.

The more power man acquires, the more vulnerable he becomes. What he must fear most is the moment when, creation entirely fleeced, he will celebrate his triumph, that fatal apotheosis, the victory he will not survive.

Ah!" returned the man, with a relish; "he'll be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and then he'll be taken down and sliced before his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, and then his head will be chopped off, and he'll be cut into quarters. That's the sentence.

The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion.

If the waves began to reflect, they would suppose that they were advancing, that they had a goal, that they were making progress, that they were working for the Sea's good, and they would not fail to elaborate a philosophy as stupid as their zeal.

Impartiality is incompatible with the will to affirm oneself or quite simply with the will to exist. To acknowledge another’s merits is an alarming symptom, an act against nature.

To that friend who tells me he is bored because he cannot work, I answer that boredom is a higher state, and that we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.

Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.

While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.

Haven't you heard of being hung, drawn and quartered?" Blue asked, "Is it as painful as conversations with Ronan?

I’ll sue the council for every penny it’s got! I’ll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled . . . until . . . until . . . until you’ve had enough.

I would have drawn and quartered him, and I hope you do," said Richard, his eyes sparkling.

You barbarians!” he yelled. “I’ll sue the council for every penny it’s got! I’ll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled … until … until … until you’ve had enough.” Ford was running after him very fast. Very very fast. “And then I will do it again!” yelled Arthur. “And when I’ve finished I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!

He raked his hand through his hair. 'This is more difficult than I'd anticipated.' Good, she thought. If he was going to break her heart, she didn't want it to be easy for him. 'What I'm trying to say is that I had it all wrong. I don't want a wife who...' 'You don't want a wife?' she choked. 'No!' he practically yelled. Then he continued in a more normal tone, 'I don't want a wife who will look the other way if I stray.' 'You want me to /watch?/ 'No, I want you to be furious.' Ellie was by now on the verge of tears. 'You deliberately want to make me angry? To hurt me?' 'No. Oh, God, you've got it all wrong...I just want you to love me so much that if I did [be unfaithful] - which I'm not going to - you would want to have me drawn and quartered.

It is of no importance to know who I am since some day I shall no longer be”—that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition.

Idly, I wonder what sort of execution Cardan might order. Maybe he'd strap me to some rocks and let the sea do the work. Nicasia would like that. If he's not in the mood, though, there's always beheading, hanging, exsanguination, drawn and quartered, fed whole to a riding toad...

FROM A WILD NIGHT'S BRIDE by Victoria Vane: His gaze glued to the bed, Ned made a mechanical backward retreat to the center of the room where he had a clearer prospect of its crowning glory. His vision rose to the top of the headboard, to the heraldic shield seated betwixt the carved figures of a lion and a unicorn. His gaze slid with dread to the engraved scroll beneath. Dieu Et Mon Driot. God and my right, the motto of the king. His chest seized. The room began to spin. He looked to Phoebe, aware that the blood was draining from his face, and that his voice emerged as a strangled sound. "May the same God save me...for I'm going to be hung, drawn, and quartered for spending last night rutting in the King of England's bed!" coming April 27, 2012 from Breathless Press

The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe. Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds.

Savagery in the quest for power is older than the Bible, but some of my opponents really hate my guts. They don’t just want to run me out of office. They won’t be satisfied unless I’m sent to prison, drawn and quartered, and erased from the history books. Hell, if they had their way, they’d probably burn down my house in North Carolina and spit on my wife’s grave.

Double sentencing wasn’t a new idea, but rather the latest variation on the theme. Before that, a murderer might be hanged and then drawn and quartered, wherein horses were tied to his limbs and spurred off in four directions, the resultant “quarters” being impaled on spikes and publicly displayed, as a colorful reminder to the citizenry of the ill-advisedness of crime.

Let them talk more munitions and airplanes and battleships and tanks and gases why of course we’ve got to have them we can’t get along without them how in the world could we protect the peace if we didn’t have them? Let them form blocs and alliances and mutual assistance pacts and guarantees of neutrality. Let them draft notes and ultimatums and protests and accusations. But before they vote on them before they give the order for all the little guys to start killing each other let the main guy rap his gavel on my case and point down at me and say here gentlemen is the only issue before this house and that is are you for this thing here or are you against it. And if they are against it why goddam them let them stand up like men and vote. And if they are for it let them be hanged and drawn and quartered and paraded through the streets in small chopped up little bits and thrown out into the fields where no clean animal will touch them and let their chunks rot there and may no green thing ever grow where they rot. Take me into your churches your great towering cathedrals that have to be rebuilt every fifty years because they are destroyed by war. Carry me in my glass box down the aisles where kings and priests and brides and children at their confirmation have gone so many times before to kiss a splinter of wood from a true cross on which was nailed the body of a man who was lucky enough to die. Set me high on your altars and call on god to look down upon his murderous little children his dearly beloved little children. Wave over me the incense I can’t smell. Swill down the sacramental wine I can’t taste. Drone out the prayers I can’t hear. Go through the old holy gestures for which I have no legs and no arms. Chorus out the hallelujas I can’t sing. Bring them out loud and strong for me your hallelujas all of them for me because I know the truth and you don’t you fools. You fools you fools you fools…

one of those wild, grotesque songs common among the negroes, in a rich, clear voice, accompanying his singing with many comic evolutions of the hands, feet, and whole body, all in perfect time to the music. “Bravo!” said Haley, throwing him a quarter of an orange. “Now, Jim, walk like old Uncle Cudjoe, when he has the rheumatism,” said his master. Instantly the flexible limbs of the child assumed the appearance of deformity and distortion, as, with his back humped up, and his master’s stick in his hand, he hobbled about the room, his childish face drawn into a doleful pucker, and spitting from right to left, in imitation of an old man. Both gentlemen laughed uproariously.

Arms they had none, nor scarcely any who knew the use of them: but desperate resolution, when every hope is at stake, supplies, for a while, the want of arms. Near where the Prince de Lambesc was drawn up, were large piles of stones collected for building the new bridge, and with these the people attacked the cavalry. A party of the French guards, upon hearing the firing, rushed from their quarters and joined the people; and the night coming on, the cavalry retreated.

That which for all time construction shall determine I have laid out; Away from Eridu, where dry land begins, my quarters shall be, Laarsa will be its name, a place for directing it shall become. On the banks of the Burannu, the River of Deep Waters, will it be located, A twin thereof a city shall in future arise, Lagash I shall name it. Between the two on the plans a line have I drawn, Sixty leagues thereafter a healing city shall come into being, A city of your own it shall be, Shurubak, the Haven City, I shall name it.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.

As I learned the house, and began to read, and began to see more of the Quality, I saw that just as the fields and its workers were the engine of everything, the house itself would have been lost without those who tasked within it. My father, like all the masters, built an entire apparatus to disguise this weakness, to hide how prostrate they truly were. The tunnel, where I first entered the house, was the only entrance that the Tasked were allowed to use, and this was not only for the masters’ exaltation but to hide us, for the tunnel was but one of the many engineering marvels built into Lockless so as to make it appear powered by some imperceptible energy. There were dumbwaiters that made the sumptuous supper appear from nothing, levers that seemed to magically retrieve the right bottle of wine hidden deep in the manor’s bowels, cots in the sleeping quarters, drawn under the canopy bed, because those charged with emptying the chamber-pot must be hidden even more than the chamber-pot itself. The magic wall that slid away from me that first day and opened the gleaming world of the house hid back stairways that led down into the Warrens, the engine-room of Lockless, where no guest would ever visit. And when we did appear in the polite areas of the house, as we did during the soirées, we were made to appear in such appealing dress and grooming so that one could imagine that we were not slaves at all but mystical ornaments, a portion of the manor’s charm. But I now knew the truth—that Maynard’s folly, though more profane, was unoriginal. The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them—we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives. It occurred to me then that even my own intelligence was unexceptional, for you could not set eyes anywhere on Lockless and not see the genius in its makers—genius in the hands that carved out the columns of the portico, genius in the songs that evoked, even in the whites, the deepest of joys and sorrows, genius in the men who made the fiddle strings whine and trill at their dances, genius in the bouquet of flavors served up from the kitchen, genius in all our lost, genius in Big John. Genius in my mother.

A discourse approaches universality when it frees itself from its origins, leaves them behind, disavows them: having reached this point, if it would reinvigorate itself, avoid unreality or sclerosis, it must renounce its own exigencies, break its forms and its models, it must condescend to bad taste.

Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. This was the sum of everything I’d been in my life—and more: who I am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons; who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name.

Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. This was the sum of everything I’d been in my life—and more: who I am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons; who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name. “I called it the San Clemente Syndrome.

There were places in this world that magic avoided, like the bleak lunar planes of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and places it was drawn to, like Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and the French Quarter in New Orleans. New Haven had an extremely high concentration of sites where magic seemed to catch and build, like cotton candy on a spool.

To grant life more importance than it has is the mistake committed in sagging systems; as a consequence, no one is ready to sacrifice himself to defend them, and they collapse under the first blows perpetrated upon them. This is even more true of nations in general. Once they begin to hold life sacred, it abandons them, it ceases to be on their side.

Torture Cuisine by Stewart Stafford Kitchen death growls, Whipping that cream, Beating those eggs, Burning all the toast. Knifing diced cheese, Drawn, quartered ham, Straining tomato sauce, Crushed-down walnuts. Peeling potatoes naked, Then smashing them up, You say purée, I say mash, Turkey and chicken skewers. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

entire apparatus to disguise this weakness, to hide how prostrate they truly were. The tunnel, where I first entered the house, was the only entrance that the Tasked were allowed to use, and this was not only for the masters’ exaltation but to hide us, for the tunnel was but one of the many engineering marvels built into Lockless so as to make it appear powered by some imperceptible energy. There were dumbwaiters that made the sumptuous supper appear from nothing, levers that seemed to magically retrieve the right bottle of wine hidden deep in the manor’s bowels, cots in the sleeping quarters, drawn under the canopy bed, because those charged with emptying the chamber-pot must be hidden even more than the chamber-pot itself.

Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailor who took part in several expeditions to America in the years 1499–1504. Between 1502 and 1504, two texts describing these expeditions were published in Europe. They were attributed to Vespucci. These texts argued that the new lands discovered by Columbus were not islands off the East Asian coast, but rather an entire continent unknown to the Scriptures, classical geographers and contemporary Europeans. In 1507, convinced by these arguments, a respected mapmaker named Martin Waldseemüller published an updated world map, the first to show the place where Europe’s westward-sailing fleets had landed as a separate continent. Having drawn it, Waldseemüller had to give it a name. Erroneously believing that Amerigo Vespucci had been the person who discovered it, Waldseemüller named the continent in his honour – America. The Waldseemüller map became very popular and was copied by many other cartographers, spreading the name he had given the new land. There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, ‘We don’t know.

Witchcraft is part of a living web of species and relationships, a world which we have forgotten to observe, understand or inhabit. Many people reading this paragraph will not know even the current phase of the moon, and if asked for it will not instinctively look up to the current quarter of the sky, but down to their computers. Neither will they be able to name the plants, birds or animals within a metre or mile radius of their door. Witchcraft asks that we do these first things, this is presence. Animism is not embedded in the natural world, it is the natural world. Our witchcraft is that spirit of place, which is made from a convergence of elements and inhabitants. Here I include animals, both living and dead, human and inhuman. Our helpers are mammals, reptiles, fish, birds and insects. Some can be counted allies, others are more ambivalent. Predator and prey are interdependent. These all have the same origin and ancestry, they from from plants, from copper green life. Bones become soil. The plants have been nourished on the minerals drawn up from the bowels of the earth. These are the living tools of the witch's craft. The cycle of the elements and seasons is read in this way. Flux, life and death are part of this, as are extinctions, catastrophe, fire and flood. We avail ourselves of these, and ultimately a balance is sought. Our ritual space is written in starlight, watched over by sun and moon. So this leaves us with a simple question. How can there be any Witchcraft if this is all destroyed? It is not a rhetorical question. Our land, our trees, animals and elements hold spirit. Will we let our familiars, literally our family be destroyed? If we hold any real belief and experience of spirit, then it does not ask, it demands us to fight for it.

Among the early warnings was one in an article appearing in the New York Times Magazine of December 13, 1970, by a black professor named Thomas Sowell: When the failures of many programs become too great to disguise, or to hide under euphemisms and apologetics, the conclusion that will be drawn in many quarters will not be that these were half-baked schemes, but that black people just don’t have it.37 Such conclusions are now part of the “new racism” spreading across college campuses from coast to coast. PATTERNS

In ancient Mesopotamia, one of the great founding kings of that civilization, Sargon of Akkad, carved out a kingdom, built a civilization, and called himself “He Who Rules the Four Quarters.” In ancient thought, not only does the world radiate from a center, but it is geometrically organized into four quarters. It is a circle divided by a cross. The Egyptian pyramids—themselves images of the central Mound—were oriented toward the four compass points, toward “the four quarters.” Ancient maps were drawn schematically with this idea. And all of the ancient Mediterranean, as well as Chinese and other Asian civilizations, had the same view.

March 1898 What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul. They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike! They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic - for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels. I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks... and my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask... and the girl in the next doorway was also masked... and all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring... I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks... when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive. Their vitreous eyes were looking at me... I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile's left eye and Willie's right eye... so that every one of them appeared to be squinting. Am I to be haunted by masks now?

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.

In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women’s faces. The photos were eight by ten inches, and showed women facing the camera or turned in three-quarter profile. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of the women were dilated, and in the other half they were not. The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Remarkably, the men had no insight into their decision making. None of them said, “I noticed her pupils were two millimeters larger in this photo than in this other one.” Instead, they simply felt more drawn toward some women than others, for reasons they couldn’t quite put a finger on.

Decimated but stubborn, they were among those who chose a fugitive life rather than Oklahoma. The illness that swept them now was reminiscent of the one that had killed half their number two hundred years earlier. In between that calamity and this, they had visited George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets, led Oglethorpe through forests, helped Andrew Jackson fight Creek, cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain, been experimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their language, resisted settlers, shot bear and translated scripture. All to no avail. The forced move to the Arkansas River, insisted upon by the same president they fought for against the Creek, destroyed another quarter of their already shattered number.

Consider carefully the merest event: in the best of cases, the positive and negative elements that participate in it balance out; generally the negatives predominate. Which is to say, it would have been preferable that it not take place. We should then have been dispensed from taking part in it, enduring it. What is the good of adding anything at all to what is or seems to be? History, a futile odyssey, has no excuse, and on occasion we are tempted to inculpate art itself, however imperious the need from which it emanates. To produce is accessory; what matters is to draw on one’s own depths, to be oneself in a total fashion, without stooping to any form of expression. To have built great cathedrals derives from the same error as to have waged great battles. Better to try to live in depth than to advance through centuries toward a débâcle.

Well, I saved you today, didn’t I? Just like I saved you before. You walked out of the Bastion free, without a scratch, and if any Cokyrian but me had caught you with that dagger, you might be drawn and quartered by now.” “You didn’t save me from that butcher,” I said irritably. “But you’re right. About today, I mean.” I could sense his satisfaction, which irritated me all the more. “So accept my thanks, but stay away from me. We’re not friends, you know.” I was nearing my neighborhood and didn’t want anyone to see me with him. He stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop. “We’re not friends yet. But you’ve thought about it. And you just thanked me.” “Are you delusional?” “No. You just said thank you to the faceless Cokyrian soldier who arrested you.” “Don’t you ever stop?” I demanded, trying in vain to move around him. “I haven’t even started.” “What does that mean?” There was silence as Saadi glanced up and down the street. “I want to know where you got that dagger. Or at least what story you told.” “Why don’t you ask Commander Narian? The two of you seemed fairly close.” “Quit making jokes.” “I haven’t made a single one.” “Well?” “It was my father’s,” I said, clinging to the lie Queen Alera had provided, whether by mistake or not. “Oh.” This seemed to take Saadi aback. “And now, because of you, I don’t have it anymore.” I knew I was pressing my luck, but I wanted to make him feel bad. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, seeming sincere enough. Thinking I had maybe, finally, succeeded in getting him to leave me alone, I stepped around him. “Shaselle?” I stopped again, without the slightest idea why. “Your father--what was he like?” The question shocked me; I also wasn’t sure I could answer it without crying. But Saadi appeared so genuinely interested that I couldn’t disregard him. “You have no right to ask me that,” I answered out of principle. “But for your information, he was the strongest, bravest, kindest and best-humored man I ever knew. And none of it was because he took what was handed to him.” For the second time, I attempted a dramatic departure. “Shaselle?” “What now?” I incredulously exclaimed. “Do you have plans tomorrow?” “What?” “I have a day off duty. We could--” “No!” I shouted. “What is this? You expect me to spend a day with you, a Cokyrian--a Cokyrian I can’t stand?” “Yes,” he affirmed, despite my outburst. I laughed in disbelief. “I won’t. This is ridiculous. You’re ridiculous. Enjoy your time off duty with your own kind.” Turning, I sprinted down the street, and though he called after me yet again, I ignored him. As I neared my house, I glanced behind once or twice to assure myself he wasn’t following. He was nowhere in sight. I reached the security of my home just in time for dinner, and just in time to cut off Mother’s growing displeasure--the first step in her progression to anger. I smiled at her, hurried to wash, and was a perfect lady throughout the meal. Afterward I retired to my room, picking a book from my shelf to occupy me until my eyes drooped. Instead of words on pages, however, I kept seeing Saadi’s face--his clear blue eyes, that irritating hair, those freckles across his nose that made me lose willpower. What if I had offended him earlier? He had only asked to spend time with me, and I had mocked him. But he was Cokyrian. It was ludicrous for him to be pursuing my company. It was dangerous for me to be in his. And that, I suddenly realized, was part of the reason I very much wanted to be with him. Saadi aggravated me, confused me, scared me, and yet I could no longer deny that he intrigued me in a way no one else ever had.

I was shown a questionnaire drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior, which it was proposed to put to people whom it was deemed desirable to sterilise. At least three-quarters of the questions asked would have defeated my own good mother. One I recall was: "Why does a ship made of steel float in the water?" If this system had been introduced before my birth, I am pretty sure I should never have been born at all! Let us, for God's sake, throw open the windows and let the fresh air blow away nonsense of this nature ! Put the young men into the Army, whence they will return refreshed and cleansed of eight years of scholastic slime ! In the olden days we were an energetic people; but gradually we developed into a people of poets and thinkers. Poets do not matter, for no one takes them seriously ; but the world is greatly overburdened with "thinkers". I keep a bust of Scharnhorst on my table ; it is he who started our people back on the road to sanity. The world at large welcomed this Germany of poetsand thinkers, because it knew how they sapped our virility.

That Thanksgiving has evolved over hundreds of years into a national holiday of eating is rather ironic given the quality of Thanksgiving food. Stuffing and roasting a twenty-pound turkey is, without a doubt, the worst possible way to enjoy a game bird. The whole notion of eating a game bird is to savor those subtleties of flavor that elude the domesticated hen. Partridge, pheasant, quail are all birds that can be prepared in various ways to delight the senses; but a corn-fed turkey that’s big enough to serve a gathering of ten or more is virtually impossible to cook with finesse. The breasts will inevitably become as dry as sawdust by the time the rest of the bird has finished cooking. Stuffing only exacerbates this problem by insulating the inner meat from the effects of heat, thus prolonging the damage. The intrinsic challenge of roasting a turkey has led to all manner of culinary abominations. Cooking the bird upside down, a preparation in which the skin becomes a pale, soggy mess. Spatchcocking, in which the bird is drawn and quartered like a heretic. Deep frying! (Heaven help us.) Give me an unstuffed four-pound chicken any day. Toss a slice of lemon, a sprig of rosemary, and a clove of garlic into the empty cavity, roast it at 425° for sixty minutes or until golden brown, and you will have a perfect dinner time and again. The limitations of choosing a twenty-pound turkey as the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal have only been compounded by the inexplicable tradition of having every member of the family contribute a dish. Relatives who should never be allowed to set foot in a kitchen are suddenly walking through your door with some sort of vegetable casserole in which the “secret ingredient” is mayonnaise. And when cousin Betsy arrives with such a mishap in hand, one can take no comfort from thoughts of the future, for once a single person politely compliments the dish, its presence at Thanksgiving will be deemed sacrosanct. Then not even the death of cousin Betsy can save you from it, because as soon as she’s in the grave, her daughter will proudly pick up the baton. Served at an inconvenient hour, prepared by such an army of chefs that half the dishes are overcooked, half are undercooked,

held out to me a closed fist that seemed three-quarters precious stones in their clawlike settings. In a movement that spoke of great effort, she turned her hand and opened it, as though she had some surprise gift concealed and was about to offer it to me. But there was no gift. The surprise was the hand itself. The flesh of her palm was like no flesh I had seen before. Its whitened ridges and purple furrows bore no relation to the pink mound at the base of my fingers, the pale valley of my palm. Melted by fire, her flesh had cooled into an entirely unrecognizable landscape, like a scene left permanently altered by the passage of a flow of lava. Her fingers did not lie open but were drawn into a claw by the shrunken tightness of the scar tissue. In the heart of her palm, scar within a scar, burn inside burn, was a grotesque mark. It was set very deep in her clutch, so deep that with a sudden nausea I wondered what had happened to the bone that should be there. It made sense of the odd set of the hand at the wrist, the way it seemed to weigh upon her arm as though it had no life of its own. The mark was a circle embedded in her palm, and extending from it, in the direction of the thumb, a short line.

Clouds, unrolling like carpets, spreading, trailing wisps and rag-ends, rushed towards a point near mid-heaven, dampening the dayblue sky to a pearl-gray from which the translucence slowly ebbed, as additional layers were healed above, banking, mounting higher, pressing lower, darkening, dining, hazing the outlines of trees and Rocky heights, transforming the lower figures of men and animals into shifting things a quarter of shadow and going for half, while the rains were yet withheld, the mists rolled and rose, dew came afresh to the grasses, windows were filmed and beaded, moisture collected, ran upon, dripped from leaves, sounds came distorted, as though the entire world had been bedded in cotton, birds flew near to the ground in their courses toward the hills, the wings died down and caressed, small animals paused, raised their muzzles, turned them slowly, shook themselves, cocked their heads, then moved was if seeking some hidden Ark, beyond the foothills, in the mist, above the places the searchers combed, and the thunder held its breath, the lightning stayed its stroke, the rain remained unshed, the temperature slipped downward, cloud feel upon cloud and, super drawn from the spectrum, the colors drained out of the world, leaving behind a newsreel frame or the impression of a cave, shadows sliding on it's farther walls, changing, irregular, wet.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.” ― John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque

In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” to anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.

My mother had a passion for all fruit except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. She named each one of us, on a seeming whim, after a fruit and a recipe- Cassis, for her thick black-currant cake. Framboise, her raspberry liqueur, and Reinette after the reine-claude greengages that grew against the south wall of the house, thick as grapes, syrupy with wasps in midsummer. At one time we had over a hundred trees (apples, pears, plums, gages, cherries, quinces), not to mention the raspberry canes and the fields of strawberries, gooseberries, currants- the fruits of which were dried, stored, made into jams and liqueurs and wonderful cartwheel tarts on pâte brisée and crème pâtissière and almond paste. My memories are flavored with their scents, their colors, their names. My mother tended them as if they were her favorite children. Smudge pots against the frost, which we base every spring. And in summer, to keep the birds away, we would tie shapes cut out of silver paper onto the ends of the branches that would shiver and flick-flack in the wind, moose blowers of string drawn tightly across empty tin cans to make eerie bird-frightening sounds, windmills of colored paper that would spin wildly, so that the orchard was a carnival of baubles and shining ribbons and shrieking wires, like a Christmas party in midsummer. And the trees all had names. Belle Yvonne, my mother would say as she passed a gnarled pear tree. Rose d'Aquitane. Beurre du Roe Henry. Her voice at these times was soft, almost monotone. I could not tell whether she was speaking to me or to herself. Conference. Williams. Ghislane de Penthièvre. This sweetness.

#1. No Escape and feature keys Today’s Apple Event confirmed many of the rumors surrounding the lengthy-awaited refresh of the Macbook Pro line. The Escape and Function keys at the laptops had been deserted in choose of a hint bar that changed relying at the software that is getting used. The last the Macbook Pro got a chief update was a shocking 4 years in the past and many guides are celebrating the brand new design. However, the lack of bodily Escape and Function keys is a disaster for one major set of Apple’s customers — Developers. Let’s test numbers: There are ~ 19 million developers inside the global. And Apple has managed to promote ~19 million Macs over the past four quarters. What a twist of fate! Yes, builders are drawn toward Apple products mainly for software program reasons: the Unix-like running gadget and the proprietary development atmosphere. But builders want to have a useful keyboard to make use of that software and now they don’t. Why Tim Cook, why? This isn’t to say that the contact bar is an inherently awful concept. You should locate it on pinnacle of the Esc and feature keys as opposed to doing away with them completely! Something like this: #2 Power. Almost no improvement for RAM and a processor The 2016 MacBook Pro ships with RAM and processor specifications that are nearly equal to the 2010 model. Deja vu? RAM: At least it appears like that, because the MacBook Pro has had alternatives of as much as 16 GB of RAM in view that 2010. The best difference now's that you pay for the update. Processors: The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz twin-middle processors again in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not absolutely, well… nope.

As the prisoners saw Lucy, they reached their hands out piteously to her, some begging her for food, others merely mouthing their pain, not even realizing that their lips no longer made sounds. When one of them grabbed her arm as she passed, Matthews raised his baron and swiftly brought it down on the prisoner's head. Lucy winced as the prisoner fell back to the floor, blood gushing from his brow. Even as Lucy turned her head from the horror of human misery, another sight caused bile to rise in her throat. She vomited right there in the corridor. Two corpses, beheaded and dismembered, lay strewn about the floor of a small room that led from the corridor. The stench of human flesh and something else violated her nose. She dimly wondered what the sickly, spicy smell could be, and she began to sway. Dimly, she recollected John telling her once how the hangman would boil the heads of men who had been drawn and quartered in a mixture of bay-salt and cumin seed, to keep them from putrefying before their relatives could claim their bodies for burial. Why had he told her that? she wondered dully. Why had she wanted to know?

There is an impressive vein of concrete that winds from the hills of Palos Verdes and ends in Malibu. It ribbons through all the beach cities in between and plays host to anyone who is drawn to the ocean. Josie and Max ambled down Hermosa's portion of that mile-long bike path after they left Faye's place. A quarter of a mile from her own house, Josie stopped. A guy on a fifteen hundred dollar bike whizzed by her, intent on breaking the land speed record to Malibu. The smell of grilling onions filled the air. Lunch was being served up at The Strand Café. Four men with gorgeous bodies played volleyball with a vengeance, yet somehow unable to get their game into a rhythm. Josie could have shown them how it was done, but even a pick up game wouldn't cure what ailed her.

All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.

In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.

Each of us is entitled to claim the forebears who suit him, who explain him in his own eyes. How often have I not changed ancestors!

Indolence saves us from prolixity and thereby from the shamelessness inherent in production.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

The same belief-formation process led hundreds of millions of people to bet the quality and length of their lives on their belief about the merits of a low-fat diet. Led by advice drawn, in part, from research secretly funded by the sugar industry, Americans in one generation cut a quarter of caloric intake from fat, replacing it with carbohydrates.

Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of "at least 12 or 14,000 people.") In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. "The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail," Braudel observed. "They were part of the landscape." Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V.A.C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At that time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.

In my opinion, a great many doctors in this kingdom should be hanged, drawn, and quartered. They are all too likely to hand out dangerous medicines—to women, in particular—without a thought for what it does to the body and spirit.

Vera would rather be drawn and quartered than take ballroom dancing lessons, but she tried to appear excited.

The burpy. Who even invented this shit? They need to be hung, drawn and quartered. No trial, straight up put to death.

For [The Hobbit] is a children’s story. Despite the fact that it had been drawn into his mythology, Tolkien did not allow it to become overwhelmingly serious or even adult in tone, but stuck to his original intention of amusing his own and perhaps other people’s children. Indeed he did this too consciously and deliberately at times in the first draft, which contains a large number of ‘asides’ to juvenile readers, remarks such as ‘Now you know quite enough to go on with’ and ‘As we shall see in the end’. He later removed many of these, but some remain in the published text – to his regret, for he came to dislike them, and even to believe that any deliberate talking down to children is a great mistake in a story. ‘Never mind about the young!’ he once wrote. ‘I am not interested in the “child” as such, modern or otherwise, and certainly have no intention of meeting him/her half way, or a quarter of the way. It is a mistaken thing to do anyway, either useless (when applied to the stupid) or pernicious (when inflicted on the gifted).’ But when he wrote The Hobbit he was still suffering from what he later called ‘the contemporary delusions about “fairy-stories” and children’ – delusions that not long afterwards he made a conscious decision to renounce.

If any of the news coverage had drawn blood, Meta wasn’t going to show it. Zuckerberg told the company’s People Planning team to bring him an aggressive hiring target for 2022. When they brought him an unprecedentedly ambitious plan to bring on 40,000 new staffers that year, Zuckerberg took the one-page document—known as “the napkin”—and then passed it back with a handwritten instruction to hire 8,000 more. “If we don’t hit these targets it’s game over,” Recruiting VP Miranda Kalinowski told the managers on her staff. To handle the deluge of hiring, Meta brought on an additional 1,000 recruiters between the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of the following year. Few of the new staffers would be slated to go into integrity work. Zuckerberg had declared that the company’s existing products were no longer its future, and Haugen’s document breach had solidified a sense that researchers and data scientists working on societal problems contained a potential corporate fifth column.

Maybe she hadn't worked in a restaurant, but anyone who made their cookbooks look like that must have known something. I flipped through a few others. Thai salads, meringue-topped cakes, Carolina barbecue. Then on the bottom shelves, I found a row of cheap black-and-white speckled notebooks. They didn't fit the grown-up vibe of the rest of the room. Everyone has a soft spot, Jay had said. I reached for one. "Cooking Notes," it said in sparkly green pen on the cover. The handwriting was rounder. A kid's. "October 25," I read slowly, trailing my finger along the page. Fish sticks. Cook at 400F for two minutes longer than the box says. Hank likes one tablespoon ketchup and one tablespoon yellow mustard mixed together. Mom likes one tablespoon mayonnaise with juice of a quarter of a lemon and one teaspoon Tabasco. Hank's waffles. Toast Eggos on medium, put on butter and maple syrup, then microwave for ten seconds to melt everything together. I flicked through a year of little Ellie's cooking. A lot of it was her trying to dress up convenience food--- pancakes, ramen. Toward the end of the notebook, she'd started to try random scratch recipes. Ground Turkey Tacos had lots of stars and fireworks drawn around it, while another for zucchini omelets only had "Yuck.

With these uneasy thoughts urging me onward, I hurried toward home, praying I would make it in time for dinner and thereby avoid having to answer to my mother. That was the only way my day could get worse. I was forced to adjust that conclusion, however, when I spotted Saadi loitering nearby. The moment he laid eyes on me, I knew he’d been waiting for me, and I groaned. Why couldn’t he leave me alone? “Shaselle!” he called, coming toward me. I gritted my teeth, knowing I could not escape. The traffic on the thoroughfare had thinned, as was generally the case at this time of day, no longer providing the cover I needed to dart past him. He came abreast of me, but I didn’t slow or acknowledge him. “I’m glad I caught you,” he said, and in my peripheral vision, I could see him smoothing that damn bronze hair forward, an impossible task, for as always it kinked upward at the midpoint of his hairline. “Can’t say the same.” “I didn’t take you to my sister.” He sounded like this small mercy should be eliciting gratitude from me. “I realize that.” Saadi exhaled, baffled and exasperated. “How can you be angry with me?” I halted and stared at him in disbelief. “I’m not! You’re the Cokyrian soldier who arrested me when I broke the law. Our relationship ends there. It would be a waste of my time to be angry with you.” “That’s it?” he said, eyebrows rising, and I was sure I detected disappointment. “I thought…I don’t know. I thought you were angry with me before, for not having mentioned I’m Rava’s brother. Weren’t you?” “No,” I lied. I still didn’t understand why it upset me to know that this annoying tag-along was related to the woman I hated with such intensity that my insides burned. But there was no reason to complicate things by letting him know the truth. “Well, I saved you today, didn’t I? Just like I saved you before. You walked out of the Bastion free, without a scratch, and if any Cokyrian but me had caught you with that dagger, you might be drawn and quartered by now.” “You didn’t save me from that butcher,” I said irritably. “But you’re right. About today, I mean.” I could sense his satisfaction, which irritated me all the more. “So accept my thanks, but stay away from me. We’re not friends, you know.” I was nearing my neighborhood and didn’t want anyone to see me with him. He stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop. “We’re not friends yet. But you’ve thought about it. And you just thanked me.” “Are you delusional?” “No. You just said thank you to the faceless Cokyrian soldier who arrested you.” “Don’t you ever stop?” I demanded, trying in vain to move around him. “I haven’t even started.” “What does that mean?

What was your first kiss like?”he had asked. She answered, “I do not know as I have yet to experience such. Mayhap I should find a willing young man to help teach me how to kiss before I marry. With you being such a worldly and experienced man, mayhap you would want a wife who is just as experienced and worldly?” His response left her laughing almost uncontrollably. “It would bring me much relief to know you have not one grain of experience with kissing. I would hate to think you were comparing my kisses with anyone else’s. Equally important is the fact that I might be drawn and quartered before our wedding day, for gutting any man who dare even think about kissing you. You would, in truth, be saving countless lives by remaining ignorant on the matter.

achieving enlightenment. Enlightenment, for them, was escaping the cycle of rebirth. Reincarnation was a curse to avoid, not some type of immortality.” “Sounds Buddhist,” Samuel said. “It is. Mahavira and Buddha were contemporaries. But they are not the same.” The dead man paused before continuing. “Because of their belief in the cycle of rebirth, Jains also believed every living thing had a soul. Not just intelligent creatures, but the trees, birds, plants. Everything. So the pain man inflicts on other living creatures is really the pain he inflicts on himself. ‘Many times I have been drawn and quartered, torn apart, and skinned, helpless in snares and traps, a deer. An infinite number of times I have been felled, stripped of my bark, cut up and sawn into planks.’” “That’s not possible. You can’t exist without destroying something else that is living,” Samuel said. “I must kill to live. Everything in existence must kill something to stay alive.” “You can if you are not of the living.

@Jenny0989: @RonanFitz Men like you make me sick. You deserve to be hung, drawn, and quartered #manwhore #teambrona @RonanFitz: @Jenny0989 Hang and draw me all you like, but go near my quarters, and we'll have a problem.

As vast tracts of land become parceled, tamed, drawn, mapped, and quartered, we lose that which reminds us of who we are by everything we are not. Identity depends upon other. The world apart, flourishing with no regard to our existence, allows us to define ourselves.

Thursday 10/22 (A Desperate Situation: Jer 14:1-16; Joe 1:13, 14; 2:15-17; 1Th 5:17) “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper; but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” The conditions of obtaining mercy of God are simple and just and reasonable. The Lord does not require us to do some grievous thing, in order that we may have the forgiveness of sin. We need not take long and wearisome pilgrimages, or perform painful penances to commend our souls to the God of Heaven, or to expiate our transgression; but he that confesseth and forsaketh his sin shall have mercy. This is a precious promise given to fallen man to encourage him to trust in the God of love, and to seek for eternal life in his kingdom.… Daniel did not seek to excuse himself or his people before God; but in humility and contrition of soul he confessed the full extent and demerit of their transgressions, and vindicated God’s dealings as just toward a nation that had set at naught his requirements and would not profit by his entreaties. There is great need today of just such sincere heart-felt repentance and confession. Those who have not humbled their souls before God in acknowledging their guilt, have not yet fulfilled the first condition of acceptance. If we have not experienced that repentance not to be repented of, and have not confessed our sin with true humiliation of soul and brokenness of spirit, abhorring our iniquity, we have never sought truly for the forgiveness of sin; and if we have never sought, we have never found the peace of God. The only reason why we may not have remission of sins that are past, is that we are not willing to humble our proud hearts, and comply with the conditions of the word of truth. There is explicit instruction given concerning this matter. Confession of sin, whether public or private, should be heart-felt and freely expressed. It is not to be urged from the sinner. It is not to be made in a flippant and careless way, or forced from those who have no realizing sense of the abhorrent character of sin. The confession that is mingled with tears and sorrow, that is the outpouring of the inmost soul, finds its way to the God of infinite pity. Says the psalmist, “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.” There are too many confessions like Pharaoh when he was suffering the judgments of God. He acknowledged his sin, to escape further punishment, but returned to his defiance of Heaven as soon as the plagues were stayed. Balaam’s confession was of a similar character. Terrified by the angel standing in his pathway with drawn sword, he acknowledged his guilt, lest he should lose his life. There was no genuine repentance for sin, no contrition, no conversion of purpose, no abhorrence of evil, and no worth or virtue in his confession.… The humble and broken heart, subdued by genuine repentance, will appreciate something of the love of God, and the cost of Calvary; and as a son confesses to a loving father, so will the truly penitent bring all his sins before God. [1Jn 1:9 quoted]. -ST 3-16-88 • CC 63-A Bitter Price; BLJ 361-Repentant Souls Hate Sin and Love Righteousness

Why did you become a Bow Street runner? I can’t believe you chose such a profession willingly.” A laugh rustled in his throat. “Oh, I was willing enough, considering the alternative. I made a deal with my brother-in-law, Sir Ross, three years ago. At the time he was chief magistrate of Bow Street, and he had evidence in his possession that would have had me dancing in the wind, had it ever been presented at a trial.” “Dancing in the wind,” Lottie repeated, puzzled by the unfamiliar expression. “Hanging. Dangling at the end of a rope. Believe me, I should have been drawn and quartered for some of the things I did in my underworld career.” Pausing to observe the effect of his words, Gentry smiled slightly at her obvious unease. “In an effort to avoid the uncomfortable position of having to execute his wife’s brother,” he continued, “Sir Ross offered to conceal the damning evidence against me, if I would double-cross my underworld associates and become a runner.” “For how long?” “Indefinitely. Naturally I agreed, as I had no loyalty to my former companions, and I didn’t fancy having my neck stretched.” Lottie frowned. “Why did Sir Ross want you to become a runner?” “I believe he had the mistaken impression that a few years of public service would reform me.” Gentry grinned suddenly. “It hasn’t yet.

Shut your disgusting mouth, mole,” spit Asherah. They stood in the large secret cavern carved out of the rock fifty feet beneath the temple of Dagon. Dagon and Ba’alzebul watched Asherah walk up to the rock wall where they had fastened Mikael’s body. Or rather, where they had fastened the parts of Mikael’s body. When they had ambushed Mikael in the Valley of Hinnom, Ba’alzebul had fallen with him some two hundred feet to the valley floor where all Mikael’s bones had been shattered. Ba’alzebul was also incapacitated in the fall, but because he used Mikael’s body as a cushion, and because he had a much stronger bodily structure, he had healed more quickly and was ready for action. But before Mikael could heal to move at all, they had him drawn and quartered. All four of his limbs were severed from his body, and he was beheaded. As an angel, he could not die, but this was surely a living hell as they pinned all his body parts spread out on the wall so he could look helplessly down upon them and their mockery. Asherah looked into Mikael’s eyes. He could not respond verbally because his head was severed from his voice box and lungs, which were separated from each other by about six feet, like a sick spread-out puzzle. But he could watch her and hear their discussion. Ba’alzebul said, “The only time all of them came together like this was to take back the body of Moses from Mastema.” Molech said, “I think they plan much more than retrieving the prince of Israel here. I think they came to bind us into the earth.” “Of course, you idiot,” said Asherah. “But why do they not hide themselves?” said Dagon. Ba’alzebul said, “They want us to stand and fight.” “And why not?” said Asherah. “We are in our stronghold, we are empowered by the Philistines.” “We are confident,” added Ba’alzebul. “Presumptuous. So we will be reckless.” “Exactly,” said Asherah. “If they can deliver this blow to us now, they will control all of Canaan. Which we cannot allow. So we will run.” “Like cowards?” worried Dagon. “Like insurgents,” said Asherah. “Look at the Amalekites. They were almost wiped out. But their few roaming hordes have become a terror to the Israelites, because they cannot be targeted in a specific location. They hit and they run, and Israel has nowhere to respond or retaliate. In our fortified Philistine cities, the archangels know exactly where we are, and what we are doing in our temples. And they can come get us whenever they want. Because they know where we are. As they do this very moment.” The other gods nodded with understanding. Asherah added, “It is time we become more mobile.

The sight of the table, arranged in a gigantic horseshoe, signalled emphatically that autumn was passing and winter was coming. Game in all possible forms and varieties dominated the delicacies heaped on great serving dishes and platters. There were huge quarters of boar, haunches and saddles of venison, various forcemeats, aspics and pink slices of meat, autumnally garnished with mushrooms, cranberries, plum jam and hawthorn berry sauce. There were autumn fowls–grouse, capercaillie, and pheasant, decoratively served with wings and tails, there was roast guinea fowl, quail, partridge, garganey, snipe, hazel grouse and mistle thrush. There were also genuine dainties, such as fieldfare, roasted whole, without having been drawn, since the juniper berries with which the innards of these small birds are full form a natural stuffing. There was salmon trout from mountain lakes, there was zander, there was burbot

Luke was welcomed by the brothers and drawn in with friendly approval. The conversation quickly turned to missions and commands as they compared notes, trying to figure out if they had mutual friends or had served in common battle arenas at the same time. Then more women began to arrive and Luke watched curiously as the men greeted each one as if she could be a sister or girlfriend. When Paige came out of her quarters with the new baby, the tot was passed around from man to man, each of whom took her close and affectionately, praised her beauty and snuggled her like any fond uncle might. Her son, Christopher, was soon riding on various shoulders while Paige was being embraced. Brie came in from the RV behind the bar, her home until her house was finished, and damned if each one of those men didn’t have his hands all over her belly like he’d been the one to put that baby in there. After a quick feel, they’d compliment Mike on his excellent potency. “You got her cooking a good one here, brother,” Josh said. “Baby, you are more gorgeous than ever!” said Tom. Then came Vanessa and Nikki and the whole process was repeated again, with bone-rattling hugs and sloppy kisses. It was a whole new experience for Luke. Even in his own family of biological brothers, he hadn’t seen anything like it. But it interested him, the way these men behaved toward each other’s women, as though it was expected. As if they idolized each other’s wives as much as their own, treating them with a fondness that was hardly superficial; an intimacy that was at once deep and completely respectful. The trust was implicit; the affection appeared genuine. The security they felt in their relationships was obvious. Luke had never lived in this kind of world. Preacher

Now, we must remember that the use of pseudonyms for clandestine purposes is very Irish. In fact, you might say we invented the practice. One is reminded of the patriot, Robert Emmett, who went by the name of ‘the Drake.’ He was hung, drawn, and quartered. In more recent times, Bobby Sands was both, ‘the Lark,’ and for his writings, he went by ‘Marcella.’ He died on hunger strike in 1981, of course.

When the Mattachine Society of Washington’s founder, Frank Kameny, testified to a congressional committee in 1962, he informed his interrogators that the group’s mailing list had only about a hundred names on it. That was inconceivable to congressmen such as John Dowdy, a Texas Democrat who had assumed that the society was an arm of a “national and international organization” with “up in the millions” of members.79 The committee was puzzled further by the fact that Kameny believed that there were a quarter-million homosexuals in the city—not because they doubted that there were so many, but because he didn’t have each one’s contact information. The investigators assumed, Johnson wrote, “that homosexuals were inherently drawn to the same clique and would somehow all be on the same mailing list.

In that darkness they exchanged rumors: A dozen victims had been drawn and quartered. John Brown had eaten their flesh. Slaves were rising up everywhere, holding secret meetings in an old cemetery at the edge of town. Arden had heard that the first sign of the uprising would be the discovery of all the dogs in Winchester piled in a heap at the edge of town, their throats cut. even families like the Beales who owned no slaves would not be spared. revenge would trade color for color; whites would die for no other crime than being white. At that very moment, John Brown’s disciples were trying to free him from jail before his execution.