“
Never drink diet soda. It shows you have no nerve. Only drink real colas, caffeine-packed energy drinks, or vitamin water. Hate champagne because that’s what everyone expects you to love. Energy drinks are the best party drinks. You never get tired, you never get a hangover, and you can make fun of all the loaded people who think they’re clever but are really acting stupid.
”
”
Paris Hilton
“
believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without ever realizing it.
I don’t want to wait anymore. I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day. I choose to believe that there may be a thousand big moments embedded in this day, waiting to be discovered like tiny shards of gold. The big moments are the daily, tiny moments of courage and forgiveness and hope that we grab on to and extend to one another. That’s the drama of life, swirling all around us, and generally I don’t even see it, because I’m too busy waiting to become whatever it is I think I am about to become. The big moments are in every hour, every conversation, every meal, every meeting.
The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it.
I believe that if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within us and between us, dreams and stories and memories spilling over. The nuances and shades and secrets and intimations of love and friendship and marriage an parenting are action-packed and multicolored, if you know where to look.
Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull of the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted.
Your life, right now, today, is exploding with energy and power and detail and dimension, better than the best movie you have ever seen. You and your family and your friends and your house and your dinner table and your garage have all the makings of a life of epic proportions, a story for the ages. Because they all are. Every life is.
You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural.
You are more than dust and bones.
You are spirit and power and image of God.
And you have been given Today.
”
”
Shauna Niequist (Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life)
“
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished, sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Suddenly she was seeing the buds on the cherry trees around her; she could feel the energy packed within them, a bouquet of fireworks whose fuse had already been lit. She could smell them, too, a subtle essence of pink and lollipops, the sweetness deepened by the scent of the slowly warming earth below them.
”
”
Erica Bauermeister (The Lost Art of Mixing)
“
The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than that it rocks?
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente (Space Opera (Space Opera, #1))
“
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumns trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
“
animals don’t follow unstable pack leaders; only humans promote, follow, and praise instability. Only humans have leaders who can lie and get away with it. Around the world, most of the pack leaders we follow today are not stable. Their followers may not know it, but Mother Nature is far too honest to be fooled by angry, frustrated, jealous, competitive, stubborn, or other negative energy—even if it is masked by a politician’s smile. That
”
”
Cesar Millan (Be the Pack Leader: Use Cesar's Way to Transform Your Dog ... and Your Life)
“
I knew then that the fewer items I was acquiring, dusting, packing, moving, and lugging around in life would free up my energy and time to create...
”
”
Dorothy Breininger
“
What is it that teaching kills? The juice, the sap - the substance of revelation: by making even the insoluble questions & multiple possible answers take on the granite assured stance of dogma. It does not kill this quick of life in students who come, each year, fresh, quick, to be awakened & pass on - but it kills the quick in me by forcing to formula the great visions, the great collocations and cadences of words and meanings. The good teacher, the proper teacher, must be everliving in faith and ever-renewed in creative energy to keep the sap packed in herself, himself, as well as the work. I do not have the energy, or will to use the energy I have, and it would take all, to keep this flame alive.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“
To lose focus means to lose energy. The absolutely wrong thing to attempt when we've lost focus is to rush about struggling to pack it all back together again. Rushing is not the thing to do... Patience, peace and rocking renew ideas. Just holding the idea and the patience to rock it are what some women might call a luxury. Wild Woman says it is a necessity... Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.
”
”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“
then repaired and rebuilt my pack’s broken bodies, washing away burns and fixing fractured energy bases. I could do all of that, fight the phoenix and drown in grief, because I was a woman. We multitasked well.
”
”
Jaymin Eve (Reborn (Shadow Beast Shifter, #3))
“
Ten salespeople, all young, all dressed in generic cotton casual, looked up from their conversations, spotted the money in her hand, and simultaneously stopped breathing-their brains shutting down bodily functions and rerouting the needed energy to calculate the projected commissions contained in Jody's cash. One by one they resumed breathing and marched toward her, a look of dazed hunger in their eyes: a pack of zombies from the perky, youthful version of The Night of the Living Dead. "I wear a size four and I've got a date in fifteen minutes," Jody said. "Dress me." They descended on her like an evil khaki wave.
”
”
Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story, #1))
“
All we really know of the universe is what filters in through our senses, and that isn’t a whole lot. Take the electromagnetic spectrum. It includes virtually every ripple of energy that powers the cosmos, from the long, lazy radio waves we communicate with through microwaves that we cook with all the way up to X-rays and gamma rays, which pack enough punch into their wavelengths to outshine an entire galaxy. All that majesty, all that infinite variety of energy, and all we see is a narrow little slice of it: seven measly colors. It’s like being invited to a royal banquet and then only being allowed to pick the crumbs off one plate.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (InterWorld (Interworld, #1))
“
we are animals—unusual animals, but animals nevertheless. Not only that, but we are pack or tribal animals, like the other apes. For a tribal animal one of the worst pains is banishment, or separation from the tribe. And one of the greatest pleasures is acceptance by the tribe.
”
”
Serge Kahili King (Instant Healing: Mastering the Way of the Hawaiian Shaman Using Words, Images, Touch, and Energy)
“
And I’m not sure why I wasted all that time and energy, because when I think about family—that thing I’d always longed for—it’s never been a Norman Rockwell painting that I picture. It’s me and Mom, on the couch, eating microwaved corn dogs while Dial M for Murder plays on TV. It’s running out from the library at night to her car, a greasy box of Little Caesars pizza in the passenger seat, her joking, I thought we’d do Italian. It’s being pulled away from watching the frost melt on the living room window to make stovetop hot cocoa from a packet, and that last tight hug at the end of the airport security line, and packing up cardboard boxes, knowing I’ll always have what I need, no matter how much I leave behind.
”
”
Emily Henry (Funny Story)
“
Furthermore, because silicon packs on more protons than carbon, it's bulkier, like carbon with fifty extra pounds. Sometimes that's not a big deal. Silicon might substitute adequately for carbon in the Martian equivalent of fats or proteins. But carbon also contorts itself into ringed molecules we call sugars. Rings are states of high-tension- which means they store lots of energy-and silicon just isn't supple enough to bend into the right position to form rings. In a related problem, silicon atoms cannot squeeze their electrons into tight spaces for double bonds, which appear in virtually every complicated biochemical.
”
”
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
“
If we could see souls instead of bodies, what would be beautiful?
What is the first thing people would know about you? What would you be
most afraid of them seeing? Who would you impress? Who would you
love?
What would you adjust as you walked past the mirror? What kind of work
would you be in? What would your goals be, how would you strive to be
better if what you collected in the bank or put on your body or attached next
to your name on a business card no longer affected what people saw?
Would you spend your time in gyms and stores or in libraries and
temples? Who would you let yourself fall in love with? What would your
“type” be? Tall, dark, and handsome or creative, kind, and self-aware?
What would happen if we could see people not as “bad,” but as…
blocked? If we could see the ways they’ve packed away their pain, or how
they hold a belief that keeps them away from being kind to others?
What would happen if we realized our bodies never wanted anything more
than to feel connected, and acted out on nothing more than their false ideas
of being separate, different, exiled, the odd one out, the almost-but-notgood-enough?
What would happen if we embraced our desire to play out and finagle
with our individualism, but eventually returned to the knowing that we are
all just energy fields? And where would we be if we realized that we were
all from the same one? What would happen if we realized we really weren’t
that different at all?
”
”
Brianna Wiest (101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think)
“
let any animal “push your buttons.” Never, ever correct an animal out of anger or frustration. When you try to correct your dog out of anger, you are usually more out of control than your dog is. You are fulfilling your own needs, not the animal’s—and in a profoundly unhealthy way. Trust me, your dog will sense your unstable energy and often escalate her unwanted behavior instead. Remember, your dog is your mirror. The behavior you get back is usually, in some way, a reflection of your own.
”
”
Cesar Millan (Be the Pack Leader: Use Cesar's Way to Transform Your Dog ... and Your Life)
“
I encourage you to try cold therapy yourself, but before you do, let me offer a note of caution: safe cold thermogenesis protocols involve gradually increasing your exposure to cold over time. Start off by simply putting your face in cold water for a few minutes, then if you choose you can graduate to using soft-gel ice packs that won’t freeze your skin, and then sitting in an ice bath for up to an hour.
”
”
Dave Asprey (Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster-in Just Two Weeks)
“
The humans would not be a great loss to the earth. The energy or “electricity” of a being’s spirit was not extinguished by death; it was set free from the flesh. Dust to dust or as a meal for pack rats, the energy of the spirit was never lost. Out of the dust grew the plants; the plants were consumed and became muscle and bone; and all the time, the energy had only been changing form, nothing had been lost or destroyed.
”
”
Leslie Marmon Silko (Almanac of the Dead)
“
After years of loss and reflection, your old deluded decisions click together like the works of a watch packed tight within its case--many tiny, turning, interlocking wheels....the force of every decision transferring gear to gear, wheel to wheel, each one motivating a larger energy going in no direction but steep downward to darkness at an increasing pitch. And then one morning the world resembles Noah's flood, stretching unrecognizable to the horizon and you wonder how you go there. One thing for sure, it wasn't from a bad throw of dice or runes or an unfavorable turn of cards. Blame falls hard and can't be dodged by the guilty.
”
”
Charles Frazier (Varina)
“
The sheer vital energy of the Woolfs always astonishes me when I stop to consider what they accomplished on any given day. Fragile she may have been, living on the edge of psychic disturbance, but think what she managed to do nonetheless -- not only the novels (every one a breakthrough in form), but all those essays and reviews, all the work of the Hogarth Press, not only reading mss. and editing, but, at least at the start, packing the books to go out!
And besides all that, they lived such an intense social life. (When I went there for tea, they were always going out for dinner and often to a party later on.) The gaiety and the fun of it all, the huge sense of life! The long, long walks through London that Elizabeth Bowen told me about. And two houses to keep going! Who of us could accomplish what she did?
There may be a lot of self-involvement in A Writer's Diary, but there is no self-pity (and what has to be remembered is that what Leonard published at that time was only a small part of all the journals, the part that concerned her work, so it had to be self-involved). It is painful that such genius should evoke such mean-spirited response at present. Is genius so common that we can afford to brush it aside? What does it matter if she is major or minor, whether she imitated Joyce (I believe she did not), whether her genius was a limited one, limited by class? What remains true is that one cannot pick up a single one of her books and read a page without feeling more alive. If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?
”
”
May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)
“
Often we can get caught in our own struggles, our own small stories, that we forget our place in the larger story arc – the way that our actions, our choices, our achievements can and will blaze trails for that who come after us, so that they do not have to spend their time and energy re-fighting the same battles.
For sure we walk a spiral path, but for generations of women the spirals were so tightly packed that it seemed they were going round in circles – let us blaze trails so that the path we walk takes in wider and wider sweeps of human experience.
Trail blazing is what we do when we find ourselves in the wilderness, with no path to guide us but our own intuitive understanding of nature and our destination. At times we must walk through the night, guided only by the stars. We know when to sit and rest, to shelter from storms, when to gather water, and what on the trail will sustain us and what will do us harm. We are courageous and cautious in equal measure, but we are driven forward, not only by our own desire to reach our destination, but also by the desire to leave a viable way for others who follow.
Trail blazing is an art-form. It is how we find paths through what before was wilderness. We push aside braches, or cut them back, we tramp down nettles and long grasses, ford rivers and streams, through the inner and outer landscapes.
”
”
Lucy H. Pearce (Burning Woman)
“
A few years ago, it was all the rage in biohacker circles to sit in a tub of ice water for cold therapy. That kind of thinking earned me first-degree ice burns over 15 percent of my body (ouch!), but it turns out that it’s not necessary to pack yourself with ice or for the water to be icy—cold water, about 60°F, is a great stimulus for your mitochondria. It sounds miserable, and it is for about thirty seconds. But after that, something shifts, and it feels really good.
”
”
Dave Asprey (Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster-in Just Two Weeks)
“
The mental energy needed to get dressed each morning is nonexistent. This one decision even spills over into how he does laundry, how and where he stores his clothes, how he packs for a trip, and how he adjusts his clothes based on the weather.
”
”
Kendra Adachi (The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done)
“
Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”
The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.
A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames.
Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid.
Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.
”
”
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“
Leonid Mikhelson, the CEO of the independent Russian company Novatek, was determined to develop LNG export capacity in the north of the Yamal Peninsula. The main inhabitants of this barely populated region are several thousand Nenets, partly nomadic people who move with their reindeer herds, which they supplement by hunting polar bears. In the language of the Nenets, “Yamal” means “end of the land,” and that is what the remote northern part of the peninsula literally is—a harsh, vast, bleak, and treeless land that juts out into the forbidding ice pack of the Arctic Ocean and is underlaid by permafrost.
”
”
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
“
I was never attracted to big things―convertible Porsche's, mansions, fame, and money. I always found those things to be repulsive and energy-draining. Give me the gutters, the junkyards, the bars, the liquor stores, the grimy graffiti-ridden back alleys, the insane asylums, the pimps, the hookers, the preachers, the old, the drunkards, the junkies, the homeless, the madmen, and the madwomen. Wherever the ghetto is, that's where life is. It doesn't matter where you live, United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, you won't find a liveliness like in the ghetto anywhere else. They're the things that refill my energy tank and keep me going. Anything out of that realm is just plain, dull, and boring. Give me the cheap and effortless lifestyle. The factory job, the small one-bedroom apartments, the whores, the Budweiser six-packs, the hand-rolled cigarettes, the Tom Waits vinyls, and the old vintage typewriters. I'll be alright.
”
”
Robert Nemerovski
“
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space.
We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.
But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
”
”
Peter Watts (Blindsight (Firefall, #1))
“
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollows of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flesh of tattered flags kindling in the doom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.
It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.
The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
“
We use the effect of centrifugal forces on matter to offer insight into the rotation rate of extreme cosmic objects. Consider pulsars. With some rotating at upward of a thousand revolutions per second, we know that they cannot be made of household ingredients, or they would spin themselves apart. In fact, if a pulsar rotated any faster, say 4,500 revolutions per second, its equator would be moving at the speed of light, which tells you that this material is unlike any other. To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that’s hard to do, then maybe it’s easier if you imagine stuffing about a hundred million elephants into a Chapstick casing. To reach this density, you must compress all the empty space that atoms enjoy around their nucleus and among their orbiting electrons. Doing so will crush nearly all (negatively charged) electrons into (positively charged) protons, creating a ball of (neutrally charged) neutrons with a crazy-high surface gravity. Under such conditions, a neutron star’s mountain range needn’t be any taller than the thickness of a sheet of paper for you to exert more energy climbing it than a rock climber on Earth would exert ascending a three-thousand-mile-high cliff. In short, where gravity is high, the high places tend to fall, filling in the low places—a phenomenon that sounds almost biblical, in preparing the way for the Lord: “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain” (Isaiah 40:4). That’s a recipe for a sphere if there ever was one. For all these reasons, we expect pulsars to be the most perfectly shaped spheres in the universe.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry)
“
Time is his luxury, and he is prepared to spend any amount that is necessary to get a picture right, which is another paradox, since by nature LF is packed with nervous energy and still apt, for example, to dive into traffic and sprint down the road in pursuit of a taxi. ‘All my patience’, he notes, ‘has gone into my work, leaving none for my life.
”
”
Martin Gayford (Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud)
“
That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.
”
”
James Baldwin (Another Country)
“
The really crazy thing was that it was Oryx leading the pack, not bigger companies like Exxon, Mobil, and Amoco. Those companies had been focused on finding huge pools of oil abroad, not on improving drilling methods and squeezing out more from fields in the United States. Those “major” oil companies had been convinced that “elephant” fields in the United States were extinct. Now some were trying to figure out how to get involved in the Austin Chalk region.
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Frackers: The Inside Story of the New Wildcatters and Their Energy Revolution)
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It's such a simple thing, but we all know the power of gratitude to incite a cycle of reciprocity. If my girls run out the door with lunch in hand without a "Thanks, Mama!" I confess I get to feeling a tad miserly with my time and energy. But when I get a hug of appreciation, I want to stay up late to bake cookies for tomorrow's lunch bag. We know that appreciation begets abundance. Why should it not be so for Mother Earth, who packs us a lunch every single day?
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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The missiles would be packed full of fissionable material, and fission scared her nearly as much as antimatter. It was the dirty, nasty form of nuclear energy. Shut down a fusion reactor, and the only radioactive materials left were those that had been made radioactive by neutron bombardment. Shut down a fission reactor, and you had a deadly, possibly explosive pile of unstable elements with a half-life that meant they would stay hazardous for thousands of years.
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Christopher Paolini (To Sleep in a Sea of Stars)
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You may not like this idea; none of us wants to admit that we are pack animals. But in a complicated world, running with the herd can make sense. Who has time to think through every decision and all the facts behind it? If everybody around you thinks that conserving energy is a good idea—well, maybe it is. So if you are the person designing an incentive scheme, you can use this knowledge to herd people into doing the right thing—even if they’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
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Steven D. Levitt (Think Like a Freak)
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You know what’s masculine? Masculine is taking care of your mind, your body, and your soul. We spend so much time on our body. We want that six-pack. We gotta have big biceps. We take all sorts of pills when we start losing our hair. But what about our mental health? What about our emotional well-being? I go to the gym three, four times a week. Why can’t I put that same effort and same energy into getting mentally strong? If that makes me pussy, then I’m going to stay pussy for the rest of my life.
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Charlamagne Tha God (Shook One: Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me)
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Your body can pack about 400 grams (14 ounces) of glycogen into liver and muscle cells. A gram of carbohydrates — including glucose — has four calories. If you add up all the glucose stored in glycogen to the small amount of glucose in your cells and blood, it equals about 1,800 calories of energy. If your diet provides more carbohydrates than you need to produce this amount of stored calories in the form of glucose and glycogen in your cells, blood, muscles, and liver, the excess will be converted to fat. And that’s how
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Carol Ann Rinzler (Nutrition for Dummies)
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You see, animals don’t follow unstable pack leaders; only humans promote, follow, and praise instability. Only humans have leaders who can lie and get away with it. Around the world, most of the pack leaders we follow today are not stable. Their followers may not know it, but Mother Nature is far too honest to be fooled by angry, frustrated, jealous, competitive, stubborn, or other negative energy—even if it is masked by a politician’s smile. That’s because all animals can evaluate and discern what balanced energy feels like.
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Cesar Millan (Be the Pack Leader: Use Cesar's Way to Transform Your Dog . . . and Your Life)
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A lot of time and energy went into dismantling the dynamic between Arthur and Ben, identifying the leader of the pack. Understanding their motives would bring closure to the community, and the information could prevent a recurrence at another school. The country’s most renowned psychologists examined the evidence collected in the aftermath of the attack on Bradley—Ben’s and Arthur’s journals, their academic records, interviews with neighbors and friends of the family—and every single one arrived at the same conclusion: Arthur called it.
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Jessica Knoll (Luckiest Girl Alive)
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As you willfully struggle to keep these events from passing through your consciousness, the energy first tries to release by manifesting through the mind. This is why the mind becomes so active. When the energy can’t make it through the mind because of conflicts with other thoughts and mental concepts, it then tries to release through the heart. That is what creates all the emotional activity. When you resist even that release, the energy gets packed up and forced into deep storage within the heart. In the yogic tradition, that unfinished energy pattern is called a Samskara
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Michael A. Singer (The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself)
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Getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Not getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Even sleeping makes my heart race! I'm lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It's a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them. For instance, during the day I might have mused, Hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in Bee's lunch. That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes, I'VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN BEE'S LUNCH!!! I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness. I wake up in a sweat so through I sleep with a pitcher of water by the bed or I might die of dehydration.
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Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
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Gregori stepped away from the huddled mass of tourists, putting distance between himself and the guide. He walked completely erect,his head high, his long hair flowing around him. His hands were loose at his sides, and his body was relaxed, rippling with power.
"Hear me now, ancient one." His voice was soft and musical, filling the silence with beauty and purity. "You have lived long in this world, and you weary of the emptiness. I have come in anwer to your call."
"Gregori.The Dark One." The evil voice hissed and growled the words in answer. The ugliness tore at sensitive nerve endings like nails on a chalkboard. Some of the tourists actually covered their ears. "How dare you enter my city and interfere where you have no right?"
"I am justice,evil one. I have come to set your free from the bounaries holding you to this place." Gregori's voice was so soft and hypnotic that those listening edged out from their sanctuaries.It beckoned and pulled, so that none could resist his every desire.
The black shape above their head roiled like a witch's cauldron. A jagged bolt of lightning slammed to earth straight toward the huddled group. Gregori raised a hand and redirected the force of energy away from the tourists and Savannah. A smile edged the cruel set of his mouth. "You think to mock me with display,ancient one? Do not attempt to anger what you do not understand.You came to me.I did not hunt you.You seek to threaten my lifemate and those I count as my friends.I can do no other than carry the justice of our people to you." Gregori's voice was so reasonable, so perfect and pure,drawing obedience from the most recalcitrant of criminals.
The guide made a sound,somewhere between disbelief and fear.Gregori silenced him with a wave of his hand, needing no distractions. But the noise had been enough for the ancient one to break the spell Gregori's voice was weaving around him. The dark stain above their heads thrashed wildly, as if ridding itself ot ever-tightening bonds before slamming a series of lightning strikes at the helpless mortals on the ground.
Screams and moans accompanied the whispered prayers, but Gregori stood his ground, unflinching. He merely redirected the whips of energy and light, sent them streaking back into the black mass above their heads.A hideous snarl,a screech of defiance and hatred,was the only warning before it hailed. Hufe golfball-sized blocks of bright-red ice rained down toward them. It was thick and horrible to see, the shower of frozen blood from the skies. But it stopped abruptly, as if an unseen force held it hovering inches from their heads.
Gregori remained unchanged, impassive, his face a blank mask as he shielded the tourists and sent the hail hurtling back at their attacker.From out of the cemetery a few blocks from them, an army of the dead rose up. Wolves howled and raced along beside the skeletons as they moved to intercept the Carpathian hunter.
Savannah. He said her name once, a soft brush in her mind.
I've got it, she sent back instantly.Gregori had his hands full dealing with the abominations the vampire was throwing at him; he did't need to waste his energy protecting the general public from the apparition. She moved out into the open, a small, fragile figure, concentrating on the incoming threat.
To those dwelling in the houses along the block and those driving in their cars, she masked the pack of wolves as dogs racing down the street.The stick=like skeletons, grotesque and bizarre, were merely a fast-moving group of people. She held the illusion until they were within a few feet of Gregori.Dropping the illusion, she fed every ounce of her energy and power to Gregori so he could meet the attack.
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Christine Feehan (Dark Magic (Dark, #4))
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What is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?” It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts. It’s such a simple thing, but we all know the power of gratitude to incite a cycle of reciprocity. If my girls run out the door with lunch in hand without a “Thanks, Mama!” I confess I get to feeling a tad miserly with my time and energy. But when I get a hug of appreciation, I want to stay up late to bake cookies for tomorrow’s lunch bag. We know that appreciation begets abundance. Why should it not be so for Mother Earth, who packs us a lunch every single day?
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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All we really know of the universe is what filters in through our senses, and that isn’t a whole lot. Take the electromagnetic spectrum. It includes virtually every ripple of energy that powers the cosmos, from the long, lazy radio waves we communicate with through microwaves that we cook with all the way up to X-rays and gamma rays, which pack enough punch into their wavelengths to outshine an entire galaxy. All that majesty, all that infinite variety of energy, and all we see is a narrow little slice of it: seven measly colors. It’s like being invited to a royal banquet and then only being allowed to pick the crumbs off one plate.
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Michael Reaves (The Silver Dream (InterWorld, #2))
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Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?
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Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
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Ironically groups of nuns or lesbians are often mistaken for one another today, since we often travel in female packs oblivious to male attention or needs. Eschewing the cosmetics and costumes of the commercially promoted feminine mystique, both nuns and lesbians are emotionally inaccessible to male coercion. Time and energy which heterosexual women devote to catering to men can be focused on private or communal projects. Despite similarities, a male-defined culture which moralizes about "sins of the flesh" and the pollution and evil of women's carnal desires sees both nuns and lesbians as "unnatural" but at opposite poles on a scale of female virtue.
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Nancy Manahan (Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence)
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To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence. 4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. 5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions? 6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening. 7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The
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Wendell Berry (Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food)
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The New Anthem For thirty days, every morning and every night, find a mirror, stand up straight, and confidently say the following out loud: I, [your name], choose my thoughts. I know that doing my best starts with thinking my best. Like laying a path for an adventure, these thoughts will set the course for my actions. I’m confident that what I think matters. I’m excited to see what happens next. I’m disciplined and dedicated to stick with it. Here are ten things I know: Today is brand-new and tomorrow is too. I’ve got a gift worth giving. The only person standing in my way is me, and I quit doing that yesterday. I am the CEO of me, and I am the best boss. Winning is contagious. When I help others win, I win too. Feeling uncomfortable is just a sign that my old comfort zone is having a hard time keeping up with me. Momentum is messy. Everything is always working out for me. I am my biggest fan. The best response to obstacles is to do it anyway. In the morning I’ve pulled the slingshot back. I’m not leaving this room, I’m launching from it, ready for a day of untold opportunities. I’ve packed honesty, generosity, laughter, and bravery for the road ahead. Watch out, world! It’s time to step up, step out, and step in. In the evening What a day! The best part is I left myself a lot of fun things to work on tomorrow. When my head hits that pillow, I’m off the clock, storing up energy and excitement for a brand-new day.
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Jon Acuff (Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking (Overcome Toxic Thought Patterns and Take Control of Your Mindset))
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Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?
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Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
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From a total of 722 ships in 1846, the fleet declined to 124 by 1886.27 In September 1871, pursuing increasingly wary whales—bowheads—through the Bering Strait into the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s North Slope, thirty-three of some forty whale ships, twenty-two from New Bedford, were trapped in pack ice and had to be abandoned. By then, kerosene derived from petroleum had replaced sperm oil as the fuel of choice for lighting, in America and across the world. Whaling survived, greatly diminished, by shifting its emphasis from oil to whalebone—for corset stays, umbrella ribs, and other uses that today are met with flexible metal or plastic. Sperm oil continued to serve as a refined lubricant—it was the favored lubricant for machine guns during both world wars—until the 1960s, when first jojoba oil and then synthetic ester lubricants replaced it.
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Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
“
if you're reading this, I'm probably gone by now.
I used to reside in your heart, but I had to move out recently. between you and me, it became a little too expensive to live there. it cost me too much happiness, and it cost me so much peace, and these are things I never budgeted for when you asked me to move in. the warmth I felt in the air when I first move in slowly turned cold, and even though I attempted several times to repair the broken windows and fix the energy between us, sometimes situations should be left alone before common ground is found. we've waited and waited, staring at clocks and hoping time can replace everything we've lost, but the only thing I've found is that it's best for me to pack my belongings and go. sleeping in a cold heart every day and hoping that it will warm up is like playing a game of russian roulette with my happiness, and I'm not trying to take any chances. so I moved out and came back to myself, and I can safely say there's no place like home.
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Billy Chapata (Flowers on the Moon)
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Flow is an extremely potent response to external events and requires an extraordinary set of signals. The process includes dopamine, which does more than tune signal-to-noise ratios. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. Evolutionarily, it serves a similar function. Human beings are hardwired for exploration, hardwired to push the envelope: dopamine is largely responsible for that wiring. This neurochemical is released whenever we take a risk or encounter something novel. It rewards exploratory behavior. It also helps us survive that behavior. By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle firing timing in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well. Norepinephrine provides another boost. In the body, it speeds up heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration, and triggers glucose release so we have more energy. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control. In flow, it keeps us locked on target, holding distractions at bay. And as a pleasure-inducer, if dopamine’s drug analog is cocaine, norepinephrine’s is speed, which means this enhancement comes with a hell of a high. Endorphins, our third flow conspirator, also come with a hell of a high. These natural “endogenous” (meaning naturally internal to the body) opiates relieve pain and produce pleasure much like “exogenous” (externally added to the body) opiates like heroin. Potent too. The most commonly produced endorphin is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine. The next neurotransmitter is anandamide, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “bliss”—and for good reason. Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid, and similarly feels like the psychoactive effect found in marijuana. Known to show up in exercise-induced flow states (and suspected in other kinds), this chemical elevates mood, relieves pain, dilates blood vessels and bronchial tubes (aiding respiration), and amplifies lateral thinking (our ability to link disparate ideas together). More critically, anandamide also inhibits our ability to feel fear, even, possibly, according to research done at Duke, facilitates the extinction of long-term fear memories. Lastly, at the tail end of a flow state, it also appears (more research needs to be done) that the brain releases serotonin, the neurochemical now associated with SSRIs like Prozac. “It’s a molecule involved in helping people cope with adversity,” Oxford University’s Philip Cowen told the New York Times, “to not lose it, to keep going and try to sort everything out.” In flow, serotonin is partly responsible for the afterglow effect, and thus the cause of some confusion. “A lot of people associate serotonin directly with flow,” says high performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “but that’s backward. By the time the serotonin has arrived the state has already happened. It’s a signal things are coming to an end, not just beginning.” These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. Alone, each packs a punch, together a wallop.
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Steven Kotler (The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance)
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We entered the grove, and a few yards in, the trees opened to another clearing. In the center was a Sunbeam bread truck, the tires missing, mounted on cinder blocks. It had to have been from the 50s. Little Miss Sunbeam, blond curls framing her face, looking down from the side of the truck with one blue eye. The other missing, replaced by a large spot of rust. Innocent and poised, forever taking a bite out of a piece of buttered white bread. The slogan above her head, Reach for Sunbeam! ENERGY-PACKED! Under Miss Sunbeam the truck was lined and stacked head high with crosses of all sizes, the artificial flowers attached to them faded by the sun. I realized they were roadside crosses, many I recognized that were placed at accident scenes along Death Road and disappeared shortly after. An eighteen-foot four-by-four utility pole and meter leaned dangerously inward toward the truck, anchored by nothing but mud and rocks after the rain. A deep cast iron pot sat a few feet in front of the truck surrounded by ashes, bits of charred wood and odd shaped tree stumps.
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Jan Fink (Tales from a Strange Southern Lady)
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Abel joined hands with Rylie, drawing her into the pack as the energy of the moon swept over them. The huge, silvery sphere hung over the ridges of the mountains, turning the trees into blue shadows and making the waterfall sparkle. “Ready?” Abel asked. Rylie tilted her face toward the moon, drinking in its rays, spreading her energy through the pack. “Yes,” she whispered. She allowed all of her wolves to change at once, drawing their pain away so that they could shift effortlessly into their second skins. Fur blossomed like flowers facing the sun. They were a dozen different shades of gray and brown and gold—huge, beautiful beasts that Rylie could never see as monsters. Rylie and Abel changed last. He was black, and she was gold. Together, they were the sun and the night, yin and yang. She was afraid to face her mother, afraid to see Jessica’s reaction. But she wasn’t going to try to hide from her mom anymore. Rylie turned to her proudly—Alpha of the pack. Jessica’s hands covered her mouth, eyes filled with tears. “You’re beautiful,” she said. Rylie’s heart swelled. Abel rammed his face into hers, as if to say, I told you so. The pack ran into the night, and Rylie was home.
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S.M. Reine (Alpha Moon (Seasons of the Moon: Cain Chronicles, #7))
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The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
* music
* movies
* microcode (software)
* high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Not getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Even sleeping makes my heart race! I’m lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It’s a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them. For instance, during the day I might have mused, Hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in Bee’s lunch. That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes, I’VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN BEE’S LUNCH!!! I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness. I wake up in a sweat so thorough I sleep with a pitcher of water by the bed or I might die of dehydration.
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Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
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The black hole of the galaxy swallows the boiling energy of human fury. Soon my waning fume will be obscured forevermore, all insignia of my ionized essence tucked into the anonymous pleat of the universe’s billowing skirt. Until the coarse earth’s rank mustiness calls for me, can I take comfort living purposefully in the rhythms of an ordinarily life? Can I unabashedly absorb the scintillating jewels in the daily milieu? Can I savor an array of pleasantries with my tongue, ears, nose, eyes, lips, and fingertips? Can I take solace in the tenderness of the nights by singing out songs of love and heartache? Can I devote the dazzle of daylight and the vastness of the night’s starriness to investigate life, make a concerted effort to reduce imbedded ignorance, and penetrate layers of obdurate obliviousness? Can I conduct a rigorous search for wisdom irrespective of wherever this journey takes me? Can I make use of the burly pack of prior personal experiences to increase self-awareness? Can I aspire to go forward in good spirits and cheerfully accept all challenges as they come? Can I skim along the delicate surface of life with a light heart until greeting an endless sleep with a begrudging grin in the coolness of the ebbing light?
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
My neck was messed up and I was about to get my ass kicked by my archnemesis and my ex. It couldn’t get much worse than that. But we were at the worlds, in this huge arena with everyone cheering. We had made it this far, and I was proud of how hard we worked. “You know, let’s just have an awesome time.”
And that was it: I took all this pressure off us. We danced our butts off and I forgot to worry about my neck or Rachael and Evgeni. I was just living in the moment, pulling my energy from the roaring crowd. They were going crazy for their Czech Republic representatives, but I didn’t care. I used their energy to fuel mine. There was such a joy and freedom to my dancing that day. I gave myself permission to just let it all go, and my dancing felt pure and unbridled. We got to the finale--I somehow hung in there--and my neck was so tight and throbbing, I could barely turn it to see where Aneta was. It was kind of like dancing with blinders on; I had tunnel vision. Yet on we danced, till the judges called time. I had made it; we had made it. All I wanted now was a huge ice pack and a nap.
They read the names out from sixth place to first. We were standing backstage behind a huge curtain, and Rachael and Evgeni were right next to us. Swell.
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Derek Hough (Taking the Lead: Lessons from a Life in Motion)
“
Small Change Snack Tips 1. Limit a snack to approximately 200 calories maximum. 2. Turn coffee or a tea into a snack by adding a cup of low-fat milk or soymilk. 3. Do not have a carbohydrate alone (such as an apple or a serving of crackers); you will still be hungry. Instead, pair a carb with a lean protein or healthy fat. Have low-fat cheese with your apple, or some peanut butter on your whole grain crackers. 4. It’s okay to have carbs alone before bed (such as a piece of fruit) because it doesn’t need to keep you full—you’re about to go to sleep. 5. Don’t double dip. For instance, don’t do string cheese and nuts, or string cheese and yogurt. Instead, choose one high-fiber carb and one lean protein or healthy fat; otherwise your calories (and fat) can add up. 6. When you eat straight from the bag, box, or can, you’ll consume more. Preportion items like nuts in resealable snack-size bags. 7. Try to keep snacktime to three hours after you have eaten. If you eat it too close to your last meal, it won’t do its job for the next meal. 8. If buying an energy bar, read the label and look for more fiber and protein, less calories and fat. 9. Just because it’s a “100-calorie pack” doesn’t mean it is a healthy snack. Make sure it offers some fiber and protein or healthy fat—and if not, skip it.
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Keri Gans (The Small Change Diet: 10 Steps to a Thinner, Healthier You)
“
A mover started in on a girl’s bedroom, painted pink with a sign on the door announcing THE PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE. Another took on the disheveled office, packing Resumes for Dummies into a box with a chalkboard counting down the remaining days of school. The eldest child, a seventh-grade boy, tried to help by taking out the trash. His younger sister, the princess, held her two-year-old sister’s hand on the porch. Upstairs, the movers were trying not to step on the toddler’s toys, which when kicked would protest with beeping sounds and flashing lights. As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.
”
”
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
“
Now the muted setting made sense: a neutral setting, soothing light, a book. The deep magic fed the beast within him. It took a monumental effort of will to restrain it. With the flare so close, Curran was a powder keg with a short fuse. I had to be careful not to light that fuse. Nobody outside the Pack, except for Andrea, knew I was here. He could kill me right now and they would never find my body.
We shared a silence for a long moment. Magic blossomed, filling me with giddy energy. The short waves again. They would ebb in a minute, and then I’d be exhausted.
Guilt gnawed at me. He could control himself in my presence, but I apparently couldn’t control myself in his. “Curran, up on the roof . . . That is, my brakes don’t work sometimes.”
He leaned forward, suddenly animated. “Do I smell an apology?”
“Yes. I said things I shouldn’t have. I regret saying them.”
“Does this mean you’re throwing yourself at my feet?”
“No. I pretty much meant that part. I just wish I could’ve put it in less offensive terms.”
I glanced at him and saw a lion. He didn’t change, his face was still fully human, but there was something disturbingly lionlike in the way he sat, completely focused on me, as if ready to pounce. Stalking me without moving a muscle. The primordial urge to freeze shackled my limbs. I just sat there, unable to look away.
A slow, lazy, carnivorous smile touched Curran’s lips. “Not only will you sleep with me, but you will say ‘please.’”
I stared at him, shocked.
The smile widened. “You will say ‘please’ before and ‘thank you’ after.”
Nervous laughter bubbled up. “You’ve gone insane. All that peroxide in your hair finally did your brain in, Goldilocks.
”
”
Ilona Andrews (Magic Burns (Kate Daniels, #2))
“
Fuel your body.
Think about your environment as an ecosystem. If there’s pollution, you’ll feel the toxic side effects; if you’re in the fresh air of the mountains, you’ll feel alive. You’d be surprised at how many of the foods that we eat actually sap our body of fuel. Just look at three quick examples: soda, potato chips, and hamburgers. I’m not a hard-liner who says that you should never consume these things, but this kind of steady diet will make it harder for your body to help you. Instead, look at the foods that are going to give you energy. Choose food that’s water soluble and easier for your body to break down, which gives you maximum nutrition with minimal effort. Look at a cucumber: it’s practically water and it takes no energy to consume, but it’s packed with nutrients. Green for me is the key.
We overeat and undernourish ourselves way too much. When you eat bad food, your body will feel bad and then you will feel bad. It’s all connected. I drink green juice every day and eat huge salads. I am also a big believer in lean protein to feed and fuel the muscles--I might even have a chicken breast for breakfast.
Growing up, because I danced every single day, I would basically eat anything I wanted and I wouldn’t gain any weight. I would eat anything and everything trying to put on a few pounds, but it never worked--and my skin was terrible as a result of it. We’d blame it on the sweat from the dancing, but I never connected it to what I ate. As I got older, I started to educate myself more about food. I learned that I need to alkalize my body. It’s never about how I look. Instead, I go by how I feel. I notice immediately how good, clean food boosts my energy while junk makes me feel lethargic. I’m also a huge believer in hydrating. Forget about eight glasses of water a day; I drink eight glasses before noon!
”
”
Derek Hough (Taking the Lead: Lessons from a Life in Motion)
“
ever. Amen. Thank God for self-help books. No wonder the business is booming. It reminds me of junior high school, where everybody was afraid of the really cool kids because they knew the latest, most potent putdowns, and were not afraid to use them. Dah! But there must be another reason that one of the best-selling books in the history of the world is Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray. Could it be that our culture is oh so eager for a quick fix? What a relief it must be for some people to think “Oh, that’s why we fight like cats and dogs, it is because he’s from Mars and I am from Venus. I thought it was just because we’re messed up in the head.” Can you imagine Calvin Consumer’s excitement and relief to get the video on “The Secret to her Sexual Satisfaction” with Dr. GraySpot, a picture chart, a big pointer, and an X marking the spot. Could that “G” be for “giggle” rather than Dr. “Graffenberg?” Perhaps we are always looking for the secret, the gold mine, the G-spot because we are afraid of the real G-word: Growth—and the energy it requires of us. I am worried that just becoming more educated or well-read is chopping at the leaves of ignorance but is not cutting at the roots. Take my own example: I used to be a lowly busboy at 12 East Restaurant in Florida. One Christmas Eve the manager fired me for eating on the job. As I slunk away I muttered under my breath, “Scrooge!” Years later, after obtaining a Masters Degree in Psychology and getting a California license to practice psychotherapy, I was fired by the clinical director of a psychiatric institute for being unorthodox. This time I knew just what to say. This time I was much more assertive and articulate. As I left I told the director “You obviously have a narcissistic pseudo-neurotic paranoia of anything that does not fit your myopic Procrustean paradigm.” Thank God for higher education. No wonder colleges are packed. What if there was a language designed not to put down or control each other, but nurture and release each other to grow? What if you could develop a consciousness of expressing your feelings and needs fully and completely without having any intention of blaming, attacking, intimidating, begging, punishing, coercing or disrespecting the other person? What if there was a language that kept us focused in the present, and prevented us from speaking like moralistic mini-gods? There is: The name of one such language is Nonviolent Communication. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication provides a wealth of simple principles and effective techniques to maintain a laser focus on the human heart and innocent child within the other person, even when they have lost contact with that part of themselves. You know how it is when you are hurt or scared: suddenly you become cold and critical, or aloof and analytical. Would it not be wonderful if someone could see through the mask, and warmly meet your need for understanding or reassurance? What I am presenting are some tools for staying locked onto the other person’s humanness, even when they have become an alien monster. Remember that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk was turned into a Klingon, and Bones was freaking out? (I felt sorry for Bones because I’ve had friends turn into Cling-ons too.) But then Spock, in his cool, Vulcan way, performed a mind meld to determine that James T. Kirk was trapped inside the alien form. And finally Scotty was able to put some dilithium crystals into his phaser and destroy the alien cloaking device, freeing the captain from his Klingon form. Oh, how I wish that, in my youth or childhood,
”
”
Kelly Bryson (Don't Be Nice, Be Real)
“
You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said, about vampirism being the ultimate oral fixation.” I groaned. “Please, can we give this whole vampire thing a rest?” “I don’t mean vampires as blood suckers or soul suckers. But as oral robbers.” My brow furrowed. “Oral robbers?” “Yes. Those who steal with their mouths—not by way of fangs, but with words.” “I don’t understand,” I said. Grayson turned his back on me and reached back into the cupboard. “What if I told you I was thinking of letting you go, Drex?” My gut fell four inches. “What? Why? What did I do wrong?” He turned back around. “Did you feel an internal shift?” “Internal shift?” I said. “I feel destroyed. Like I want to throw up! Why are you doing this?” “To prove my point.” “What point? That I’m no good?” “No. That in a way, we’re all oral robbers—with our words.” “Huh?” I whined. Grayson studied me clinically. “All I did was utter some particular arrangement of tones through my vocal chords. You interpreted them as words, and applied your own meaning to them.” I was hurt. And on my last nerve with Grayson’s stupid analogies. “Come on, Grayson! Just tell me. Am I fired, or what?” Grayson locked his green eyes on mine. “My words formed images in your mind that sent chemical and hormonal secretions into your bloodstream, causing emotions that shifted your entire world view.” I glared at him. “Fine. I’ll pack my bags and leave with the Triple A guy.” “See?” Grayson said. “Now you’re insecure about your whole future, based on a couple of words that came out of my mouth.” “You’d be undone, too, if you just got fired and had to go back to Point Paradise and work with Earl!” “That’s just it,” Grayson said. “You don’t have to. I didn’t fire you. I only asked you, ‘What if I told you I was thinking of letting you go?’ You did the rest yourself.” I blanched. “So ... I’m not fired?” “No. Like I said before, it was all to prove my point. Every word we say is a psychic vampire, Drex, striking others with the power of suggestion that either drains or boosts the energy of its intended target.” “Oh,” I said, feeling a wave of confused relief wash over me. “In other words, we all live and die by the thoughts and words we chose to believe?
”
”
Margaret Lashley (Oral Robbers (Freaky Florida Mystery Adventures #3))
“
Cesar’s Rules FOR MASTERING THE WALK Leave and enter your house in front of your dog. Position in the pack is important. Don’t let your dog leave the house in an overexcited condition—make sure she is calm-submissive and in waiting mode before you open the door. Make sure you are the one to invite her outside and to trigger the activity. Walk with your dog behind you or next to you, not in front of you (though there is a time and a place for that), and definitely not pulling you or creating any tension on the leash. Make your walk a minimum of thirty minutes for older, lower-energy, or smaller dogs and forty-five minutes for larger or higher-energy dogs. Walk like a pack leader—head up, shoulders back. Your posture is part of the body language that your dog reads when assessing your energy. Keep your arm relaxed and the leash loose, as if you were holding a briefcase or pocketbook. Alternate between the formal, structured walk and short breaks for your dog to pee, sniff, and explore, which may even include short bursts of walking ahead of you. The key is for you to be the one to start and stop the behavior.
”
”
Cesar Millan (Cesar's Rules: Your Way to Train a Well-Behaved Dog)
“
But not quite everyone agreed. Leonid Mikhelson, the CEO of the independent Russian company Novatek, was determined to develop LNG export capacity in the north of the Yamal Peninsula. The main inhabitants of this barely populated region are several thousand Nenets, partly nomadic people who move with their reindeer herds, which they supplement by hunting polar bears. In the language of the Nenets, “Yamal” means “end of the land,” and that is what the remote northern part of the peninsula literally is—a harsh, vast, bleak, and treeless land that juts out into the forbidding ice pack of the Arctic Ocean and is underlaid by permafrost. The region is so far north that it is completely cloaked in darkness in the winter and bathed in perpetual polar sunlight during the summer.
”
”
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
“
In 2016, Chile implemented a set of policies that put marketing restrictions and mandatory black octagonal labels on foods and drinks high in energy, sugar, sodium and saturated fat. These foods were also banned in schools and heavily taxed.46 These policies banned treats from Kinder Surprise eggs and removed cartoon animals, including Tony the Tiger and Cheetos’ Chester Cheetah, from packaging. PepsiCo, the maker of Cheetos, and Kellogg’s, producer of Frosted Flakes (known in the UK as Frosties), have gone to court, arguing that the regulations infringe on their intellectual property, but at the time of writing Tony and Chester are not on the packs.‡
”
”
Chris van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can't Stop Eating Food That Isn't Food)
“
In the beginning, there was a rapid expansion of a Singularity. Around 380,000 years later, there was light. There was also hydrogen and helium and four stable, fundamental forces of physics. Atoms and those forces worked together to birth the first stars from massive clouds of gas, and those stars lived for hundreds of millions of years before they died in explosions that spread their matter across the sky in clouds of gas and dust—now with heavier elements than what existed before. The forces of physics worked together once again to craft new stars now tightly packed into the first galaxies. As the cycle repeated, heavier elements formed planets orbiting those stars, emerging from disks of gas and dust like dust bunnies under your bed. In our universe, planets can exist only because a few generations of stars died and were reborn. The rebirth of stellar matter into planets is how our Earth came to be. This planet, our home, is covered with a film of life unlike any we’ve yet seen anywhere else in the universe. As far as we know today, it is unique. A blue marble floating in the dark. Earth’s life is fed by a process in which carbon from the air and minerals in the soil are attached together by the energy of photons via photosynthesis in plants. In this process, everything on this planet lives by the constant sacrifice of the nearest star. Every blade of grass, every tree, every bush, every microscopic algae on this planet is a resurrected form of the Sun’s energy. I capture that energy by consuming other things that have died. Every time I eat a meal, the dead matter that made those plants and animals literally gives life to my body through digestion and my metabolism. One day, I will die, and in time my atoms will go back to giving life to something else. Much farther along the arrow of time, our own Sun will explode and spread its essence across the sky. Our Sun’s dust will meet with other stars’ remnants and form new stars and planets of their own. The universe itself exists in an eternal pattern of life, death, and resurrection.
”
”
Mike McHargue (Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science)
“
Kids in America is a high-energy, power-packed, ultra-fun 80s cover band paying tribute to the awesome tunes of the 1980s. Kids in America covers all genres from this timeless decade. From new wave, pop, dance, rock, hair metal, and more! Kids in America specializes in recreating the 80s visually and musically by delivering authentic sound with a vivid show for your favorite 80s hits. We encourage crowd participation so our fans have a fun experience at every event.
”
”
Kids in America
“
Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room—for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.
”
”
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
“
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Supplements
“
Yes,” Bryce said tightly. “Before Danika helped to save this city. Where’s the Pack of Devils?” she asked again, voice hitching. Something large growled and shifted in the shadows behind the Under-King, but remained hidden by the mists. Hunt’s lightning zapped at his fingers in warning. “Life is a beautiful ring of growth and decay,” the Under-King said, the words echoing through the Sleeping City around them. “No part left to waste. What we receive upon birth, we give back in death. What is granted to you mortals in the Eternal Lands is merely another step in the cycle. A waypoint along your journey toward the Void.” Hunt growled. “Let me guess: You hail from Hel, too?” “I hail from a place between stars, a place that has no name and never shall. But I know of the Void that the Princes of Hel worship. It birthed me, too.” The star in the center of Bryce’s chest flared. The Under-King smiled, and his horrific face turned ravenous. “I beheld your light across the river, that day. Had I only known when you first came to me—things might have been quite different.” Hunt’s lightning surged, but he reined it in. “What do you want with her?” “What I want from all souls who pass here. What I give back to the Dead Gate, to all of Midgard: energy, life, power. You did not give your power to the Eleusian system; you made the Drop outside of it. Thus, you still possess some firstlight. Raw, nutritious firstlight.” “Nutritious?” Bryce said. The Under-King waved a bony hand. “Can you blame me for sampling the goods as they pass through the Dead Gate?” Hunt’s mouth dried up. “You … you feed on the souls of the dead?
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City, #2))
“
Root Chakra Gemstones • With the utmost care and devotion, BLACK TOURMALINE guards its keeper and her property. It is the mineral-kingdom's most protective stone. Place four pieces at your home or property's four corners to protect your home and land, and keep one piece in your car to prevent theft. • JET is a wood component which is decayed under high pressure and deoxygenated. Though light in weight, when it comes to defense, jet packs a heavy punch, eliminating curses or hexes, and extracting dark magic that originates from past ages or lifetimes. Our ancestors claimed that holding a piece of jet, including the Plague, would help protect them from illness. • ONYX helps empathy by absorbing and transmuting low vibrations in people or places as a working tool. Having the bearer physically powerful and formidable, and gaining good luck and a great harvest, is believed. • RED AVENTURINE purifies and detoxifies energy frequencies to help clear the trauma stored, promoting a deeper connection with energy source. It helps to promote strong body ventilation, remove accumulated toxins, and increase blood flow. • RED JASPER is a battle-stone of resilience and reminds the carrier of her personal strength and ability to overcome challenges. Native Americans claimed red jasper would reinforce warriors going into combat. The red color, because of the protective properties of the stone, reflected the blood they would not have spilled.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
“
the three major sectors (electricity, transportation, and industry) all produce comparable emissions. But they’d be affected very differently by an economy-wide carbon price. For example, coal fueled about one-quarter of US electricity in 2019, and each metric ton of that coal was sold for about $39.7 A carbon price of $40 for each ton of CO2 emitted would effectively double that cost to power plant operators and so be a strong inducement for them to forswear coal. In contrast, that same carbon price would increase the effective price of crude oil by only about 40 percent above $60 per barrel. And if that cost were passed through to the pump, gasoline would increase by only some $0.35 per gallon. Since that’s small compared to how much pump prices have varied historically, consumers wouldn’t have much incentive to move away from gasoline. So reductions in emissions from power (and, as it turns out, heat) are much easier to encourage than reductions from transportation, fundamentally because oil packs a lot more energy per carbon atom than does coal.
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”
Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
“
To start with, we have solid carbon and gaseous oxygen. For an intuitive sense of the entropy of this situation, think of the energy as more densely packed in the solid carbon and more dispersed in the gas. After burning, there’s only the gas, the carbon dioxide. The energy that was concentrated in the solid carbon has become more dispersed. What had started off as a mixture of a low-entropy solid and a high-entropy gas has turned completely into a high-entropy gas. Overall, the entropy of the materials has gone up. And, important, as carbon and oxygen combine, heat is released and flows into its surroundings, into the air around the grate, thus warming it up. This heat then disperses through the air, causing its entropy to go up. The reason carbon burns but carbon dioxide never spontaneously “unburns” is that the burning causes a twofold increase in entropy. First it creates carbon dioxide gas, and second it disperses heat through the air around the grate. All told, it’s an effective way of increasing the entropy of the universe.
”
”
Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
“
There was the ibuprofen in a tiny white bottle. A canteen that was half full and three energy bars. A pack of Band-Aids, two empty plastic bags. A sleeping bag. A poncho. Two pairs of thick, tall socks, and something that looked like a solar phone charger.
”
”
Ally Carter (Not If I Save You First)
“
I’m packin’ on the protein,” Phillips said, indignantly. “That’s what all the bodybuilders do, before they shred off the fat and reveal a six-pack that’s been lurkin’ underneath. I’m carb-loadin’, too, because I’ve got this Dance-Off to think about, and the last thing I need is to run out of energy.
”
”
L.J. Ross (Death Rocks (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #21))
“
To state the obvious, a cow’s muscles were designed by nature to move the cow’s legs. A chicken’s muscles allow the bird to walk and fly (although current breeding and rearing practices are such that these obese birds do not get around very well). A fish’s muscles move the fish’s tail. A muscle is not designed to be a nutritional supplement. It is a biological ratchet system designed for pulling. For that purpose, it is beautifully designed. Strings of protein serve as the ratchet mechanism, with fat in between them. If meat were designed to provide good nutrition, it would have fiber to tame your appetite, complex carbohydrate for energy, and vitamin C to protect your body, among other vital nutrients. But meat has none of these things. It is mainly a mixture of fat and protein (along with the occasional parasite, perhaps). Meat’s fat packs in calories, and it adds to the fat that is collecting inside your cells—the intramyocellular lipid that slows down your metabolism, as we saw in chapter 3.
”
”
Neal D. Barnard (21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health)
“
One random Friday, the president announced that an asteroid was on a collision course for Earth. My world and everyone else’s—the entire planet—fell into chaos. Everything that was capable of collapsing eventually did. My grandfather showed up the next day as stores were being ransacked and riots were erupting in the streets. He begged us to run. Escape to his survival-adapted cabin in the middle of nowhere where he’d stored up years’ worth of food and provisions. My parents finally agreed, but they insisted on taking the time to pack all their favorite possessions while Grandpa and I waited impatiently in his old truck. The delay was a mistake. Large groups of violent looters were already hitting the wealthy neighborhoods in town, plundering houses and killing anyone who resisted. My mom and dad didn’t resist. Neither of them had ever thrown a punch or loaded a gun in their lives. But they were killed anyway, and Grandpa and I barely made it out of there alive. By then the interstates and highways were impossible, clogged with cars and roadblocked by aggressive militia groups whose day had finally arrived. Grandpa took us on smaller back roads, shooting at or running over anyone who tried to stop us, until we reached his remote cabin and left the remains of civilization behind. We stayed there—living off everything he’d stored up and using the self-sustaining energy and plumbing systems he’d installed—for more than eight years. A couple of years ago, as our supplies were running low, we realized we’d finally have to leave the safe isolation of our home long enough to scavenge for food and provisions. This region of the Ozarks was abandoned a long time ago as the protected forests and uncultivated wildland overtook the former pockets of residents, but there are still plenty of abandoned buildings remaining.
”
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Claire Kent (Homestead (Kindled, #7))
“
There are tremendous amounts of energy and information packed into a single image, including your personal story. Your tattoo also contains the emotions, thoughts, and actions that make your story even bigger.
Other energies that we are often do not see, such as color, emotion, shape, and symbology, are also embedded in that image. This data is packed in a
tattoo much like a movie is packed on a DVD,
where that energy can be accessed and released so
that you and others experience it over and over
again.
”
”
Cary G. Weldy (The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know)
“
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt.
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”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
If you pile up enough junk in your closet, one day, when you are least prepared, the door will spring open, and all of what has been packed inside, growing inexorably in the darkness, will bury you, and you may not have enough time or energy left in your life to confront it, sort through it, keep what you need, and discard the rest. This is what it means to be crushed under excess baggage. This is the return of Tiamat, the great Mesopotamian Goddess of Chaos, destroyer of those who act improperly.
”
”
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
“
In 2015, JB Straubel, Tesla’s CTO, developed yet another new line of business for the automaker, selling large battery packs for home and commercial spaces, which appealed to solar customers eager to capture the energy they were creating by day to use at night.
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Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
“
That's a good question," Vessa said with a nod. "And one I'm not entirely certain I can answer, because nothing has exited the portals but a few packs of eaterlings—which probably means that the original inhabitants of those places have been driven off. But one of the portals has suddenly flared with energy, meaning something big might come through. That one I want you to try and deactivate
”
”
Nathan A. Thompson (Anchor Knight (Soulship, #3))
“
Fuel your day with a nutritious and delicious chia seed pudding, packed with fiber, protein, and essential vitamins and minerals. It's the perfect superfood breakfast to give you the energy and nourishment you need to conquer anything that comes your way.
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”
Idongesit Okpombor MD (Chia Seeds: How to Benefit Best from Nature's Superfood)
“
Start your day with a nutrient-packed boost of energy and flavor - a chia seed pudding! Packed with protein, fiber, and omega-3s, this delicious treat will keep you feeling satisfied and nourished all morning long.
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”
Idongesit Okpombor MD (Chia Seeds: How to Benefit Best from Nature's Superfood)
“
Empower yourself with chia seeds - a small but mighty superfood for women, packed with essential nutrients and omega-3s to aid in hormone balance, improve skin health, and boost energy levels. Nourish your body, nurture your soul, and unleash your full potential with chia seeds in your diet.
”
”
Idongesit Okpombor MD (Chia Seeds: How to Benefit Best from Nature's Superfood)
“
The accidental death of Elphinstone from a Venomous Tentacula bite, three years into their marriage, was an enormous sorrow to all who knew the couple. Minerva could not bear to remain alone in their cottage, but packed her things after Elphinstone’s funeral and returned to her sparse stone-floored bedroom in Hogwarts Castle, accessible through a concealed door in the wall of her first-floor study. Always a very brave and private person, she poured all her energies into her work, and few people – except perhaps Albus Dumbledore – ever realised how much she suffered.
”
”
J.K. Rowling (From the Wizarding Archive (Volume 2): Curated Writing from the World of Harry Potter)
“
BARTON CENTRE,
912, 9th Floor,
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Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001
Phone Number
+91 8884400919
Leave on a remarkable excursion with the Bali Tour Package From Bangalore presented by SurfNXT. This thrilling bundle is customized to furnish explorers from Bangalore with an extraordinary and enhancing experience in the outlandish heaven of Bali. From exciting water sports undertakings to social investigations and quiet ocean side excursions, this visit bundle guarantees an ideal mix of unwinding and energy. Go along with us as we dig into the subtleties of this selective Bali visit bundle and find the miracles that look for you in this tropical heaven.
1. Prologue to Bali Visit Bundle from Bangalore
Outline of SurfNXT Bali Visit Bundle
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Surfing and Water Sports Journeys
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Day to day Timetable of Exercises
Prepare for an activity loaded agenda with SurfNXT's Bali Visit Bundle. Every day is loaded up with various exercises to keep you engaged and submerged in Bali's excellence. Whether you're investigating old sanctuaries, loosening up on perfect sea shores, or enjoying flavorful nearby cooking, there will never be a dull second. With SurfNXT, consistently carries new undertakings and encounters to value.
4. Convenience Choices and Considerations
Sorts of Facilities Accessible
SurfNXT offers a scope of convenience choices to suit each voyager's inclinations and financial plan. Whether you lean toward a lavish ocean front estate, a comfortable shop inn, or a beguiling guesthouse settled in the core of Bali, SurfNXT takes care of you. Appreciate agreeable stays, current conveniences, and warm neighborliness during your Bali escape. With SurfNXT, have confidence that your convenience will be an ideal supplement to your Bali adventure.**5. Travel Tips and Fundamental Information**
**Pressing Rundown and Recommendations:**
Okay, we should discuss what to pack for your Bali caper! Sunscreen? Check. Bathing suit? Twofold check. Mosquito repellent? Fundamental. Bali is known for its heat and humidity, so pack light, breathable garments, and remember your flip lemon. You'll likewise need to bring a reusable water contain to remain hydrated as you splash the sun. Goodness, and throw in a movement connector for your gadgets since we wouldn't maintain that you should pass up those Insta-commendable snaps!
**6. Booking Cycle and Pricing**
**The most effective method to Book the Visit Package:**
Prepared to book your Bali Tour Package From Bangalore ? It's basically as simple as tasting a pina colada near the ocean! Just visit the Surfnxt site, select the Bali visit bundle that suits your energy, and follow the simple booking process. Make a point to twofold really look at the valuing and any considerations to keep away from any shocks. Whenever you've affirmed your booking, all that is left is counting during the time until you're tasting coconuts under the Balinese sun.
**7. Client Audits and Testimonials**
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Bali Tour Package From Bangalore
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Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline.
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Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
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bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can’t pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging).
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Marilyn Johnson (Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble)
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Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
Joanna Kellogg, one of Joseph’s sisters, was stumbling.
For Joanna, the world was blurred. Her eyes didn’t focus the way other people’s did. Leaves on trees were green blots against a blue sky. She couldn’t recognize people until they were within a dozen paces. When an Indian brave took Joanna’s hand, she had not seen her mother die and did not know this was the killer.
She was only ten, but her pack was nearly as large as the ones grown men carried. Joanna did not complain or call out. She just walked more and more slowly.
Ruth Catlin lost her temper. She flung the pack she had been given into the snow. She grabbed Joanna by the shoulders and ripped off Joanna’s pack, flinging that into the snow too. She hurled an iron frying pan across the snow and then a whole leg of lamb. Indian and captive alike were mesmerized.
“You savages!” Ruth screamed. “Don’t you even think about hurting Joanna. She’s too little! You are vicious and mean! I hate you!”
She dragged Joanna forward as if the two of them meant to reach Canada first, by God. “Go ahead and kill me!” she yelled, holding out her hair to be scalped. “I dare you!” She made a fist around her own hair, yanked it tight and waved the bristles in Indian faces. Nobody tomahawked Ruth.
She stomped past Indian after Indian, calling them names.
Ruth stormed right up to the front of the line, where the lead Indians were trampling out the path. She could go no farther. The Indians politely stepped back and gestured north, making it clear that Ruth was welcome to lead the way.
Ruth kicked wildly at one of the braves, but he stepped back and Ruth’s burst of energy vanished.
She wanted to lie down on her own soft bed, bury her face in her pillow and weep for the family that had died around her. Even more, she wanted to kill an Indian. Or ten of them. But she had no weapon and as for softness, even the snow was not soft today.
Well, at least she would not give those Indians the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
Glaring, dragging poor Joanna, she marched on.
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Caroline B. Cooney (The Ransom of Mercy Carter)
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Now, just breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth,” Lemon instructed, moving her hands up and down in front of her. “In through your nose…out through your mouth.”
Megan did as she was told. In, out. In, out. In, out.
“Slowly, sweetie! Slowly,” Lemon said. “You’re not running a marathon here.”
Ooh…running a marathon. There’s a happy place, Megan thought.
She envisioned her feet pounding against packed dirt, her own speed blowing back her hair, the burning in her lungs as she pushed herself harder and harder. In her mind’s eye, Megan saw Hailey and Evan running up ahead. She saw herself pass them. Saw the look of shock on Hailey’s face. Saw Evan’s admiration as it finally dawned on him how much better Megan was than Hailey. He tried to ditch Hailey and catch up with Megan, but Megan left him eating dust.
“See? You’re smiling,” Lemon said.
“Yeah. Are we done yet?” Megan asked.
There was no way she was ever going to exorcise the Evan and Hailey demons sitting in a plush chair with goop on her face. She needed to get to soccer practice and work out some of this energy. She had to get out of here, stat.
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Kate Brian (Megan Meade's Guide to the McGowan Boys)
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Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.
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Anton Chekhov (Soviet Six Pack)
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There are other media too [the first being newspapers and control of information] whose basic social role is quite different. It’s diversion. There’s the real mass media, the kinds that are aimed at the guys who… Joe six-pack. That kind. The purpose of those media is just to dull people’s brain. This is an over-simplification, but for the 80 per cent or whatever they are, the main thing for them is to divert them. To get them to watch National Football League, and to worry about the… you know… mother with child with six heads, or whatever the thing you pick up on the supermarket stands, and so on. Or, you know, look at astrology, or get involved in fundamentalist stuff, or something. Just get them away you know. Get them away from things that matter. And for that, it’s important to reduce their capacity to think.
Sports. That’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system in my view. For one thing, because it offers people something to pay attention to that is of no importance. That keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea about doing something about. And in fact, it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in sports. You listen to radio sations where people call in. They have the most exotic information and understanding of all kinds of arcane issues, and the press undoubtedly does a lot with this. I remember in high school I suddenly asked myself at one point: Why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, you know. […] It doesn’t make any sense. But the point is, it does make sense. It’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority. And, you know, group cohesion behind… you know, leadership elements. In fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports. I think, if you look closely at those things, typically, they do have functions, and that’s why energy is devoted to supporting them, and creating basis for them, and advertisers are willing to pay for them.
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Noam Chomsky
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Mystic Moon Dreaming Pillows Sometimes, when we are in need of extra rest, or when we just want to reach a deeper sleep state, we can achieve this by the use of dreaming pillows—small sachet like pillows that we can tuck inside of our pillow cases. Depending on the herbs, the pillows can encourage vivid dreams, astral work, or restful sleep. This recipe is designed to help promote peaceful slumber, since so many of us don’t get enough time in bed in this fast-paced world. You will need: 2 seven-inch squares of sturdy, purple material—linen works well Gold thread and needle or sewing machine Cotton batting 1/2 cup each: dried lavender mugwort rose petals lemon balm chamomile valerian root 3 drops lavender essential oil 3 drops lemon essential oil 2 drops rosemary essential oil Small spike of quartz crystal Mix herbs together in a bowl, focusing on your desire to encourage deep slumber and to work with your Higher Self while asleep. Focus on the nature of dreams, how they can solve problems, and ask that this energy infuse the herbs and bring out their natural magical tendencies. Add drops of essential oil and mix again. Place quartz spike in the middle of the herbs and set aside (in a bottle with a lid if you are going to wait to finish this charm). Place cloth pieces together, wrong sides out, and sew to form a pouch (use a 3/8” seam allowance), leaving on side open. Iron seams open, then reverse so pouch is right side out. Fill halfway with cotton batting. Add herb mixture and crystal, then pack with rest of cotton batting. Sew the end shut. Place this inside your pillowcase at night and, before you go to bed, focus on some thought you’d like to explore in the dream-state, then go to sleep as usual. Write down your dreams when you wake up and eventually, you should see them responding to your requests. You can recharge this pillow by adding two drops each of lavender oil, lemon oil, and rosemary oil when the fragrance starts to fade. Remember: It is up to us to solve our own problems, but we can call on the power of our Higher Self when we need help, or when we seek more information on a subject. Eventually, through focus and determination, we can enter the Dream-Time and learn to hear our inner guidance when we’re awake, not just during our sleep.
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Yasmine Galenorn (Murder Under a Mystic Moon (Chintz 'n China #3))
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But unlike human children, dogs don’t dream about or obsess over past experiences the way we do. They live in the moment. Kane wasn’t spending his days worrying about shiny floors, and he naturally reacted to protect himself when the original accident happened. But since his owner intensified the traumatic experience with her overly excited, emotional energy, then nurtured that fear by giving him affection every time he got near a shiny floor, Kane now saw shiny floors as a very big deal indeed. Whenever an animal isn’t allowed to move through its fear, that fear can become a phobia. What Kane needed was a calm-assertive pack leader to recondition him and show him that
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Cesar Millan (Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems)
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as everyday occurrences. The two girls talked all the way to Brighton, and then on the coach that took them to the school. They stood together in line as the girls all snaked past the teaching staff who were, as school custom dictated, lined up to shake the hand of every girl in the school, and then Francesca, who told Saffron that her family all called her Chessi, showed her around. Both girls now knew that they had at least one person they could always sit next to and at the start of any school term that made all the difference. Leon walked back across Green Park to the Ritz, glad of the chance to stretch his legs. He felt as though he had a lot of nervous energy to work off. By God, I feel like a bloody schoolboy, he thought to himself. Get a grip of yourself, man! Earlier in the day, while Saffron was busy packing, he had sent a messenger round to the Daniel Neal store, with a note addressed to Miss Halfpenny
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Wilbur Smith (War Cry)