Entire Paragraph Quotes

To me, merely and pretty were words that had nothing to do with each other. Pretty went with miraculously, and merely belonged in another paragraph entirely.

Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.

This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.

I'd said it before and meant it: Alive or undead, the love of my life was a badass. -Rose, Blood Promise Dimitri:I'd do a lot of things to protect you Roza" Dimitri: "What i say in an entire paragraph you can say in three words" "I set off, off to kill the man I loved" - Rose Hathaway •We try to do what’s right, or rather, what others say is right. But sometimes, when that goes against who we are…you have to choose…. I realized how much you meant to me. It changed everything… And it became useless to try to act like I could ever put any Moroi life above yours. It’s not going to happen, no matter how wrong others say it is. And so I decided that’s something I have to deal with. Once I made that decision … there was nothing to hold us back. – Dimitri •You’re strong-you’re so, so strong. It’s why I love you. – Dimitri

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

At first she thought the writing would be easy. She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath. She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written. She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory. She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.” She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet. And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo. These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense; it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience. She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being. But to write! She discovered that was something else again.

The managing editor shared Bernstein's fondness for doping things out on the basis of sketchy information. At the same time, he was cautious about what eventually went into print. On more than one occasion, he told Bernstein and Woodward to consider delaying a story or, if necessary, to pull it at the last minute if they had any doubts. 'I don't care if it's a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a whole story or an entire series of stories,' he said. 'When in doubt, leave it out.' -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Sometimes there’s a single line in a book, or a sentence, or an entire paragraph that gives you pause, makes you think, makes you open that page over and over just so you see the same few words again and again. Relive them. Rethink them. These are the pages that connect to the part of the spine that has the least amount of ink, the most damage.

You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that's fine, goodness knows you've fallen in love with books that didn't grab you in the first paragraph. But that doesn't stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.

The thought occurred to me that I was in danger of becoming a slave to a tiger as well. Hah! I’d probably like it too. I rolled my eyes at the thought. I disgust myself. I’m so darn weak! I hated the idea that all he’d have to do was crook his finger at me, beckon me to come to him, and I probably would. The fiercely independent side of me flared up. That’s it! No more! I’m going to talk it all out with him when we get back and hope that we can still be friends. This was pretty much my line of thought for the entire trip home. I’d daydream and then stop, lecture myself, and repeat my stubborn mantra. I tried to read, but I kept rereading the same paragraph over and over. Eventually, I gave up and napped a little.

I walked back into the studio pretending to be someone who was amazing at reading her own story. I finished an entire paragraph without interruption. Then I looked up and the producer stared at me and said, “I don’t know what you just did, but keep doing it.” And I said, “I just did a lot of cocaine,” and she looked a bit aghast and so I said, “No, I’m just kidding. I just got some really good advice from a friend.

I delete the last line, and then the entire paragraph. Lies. I am forgetting that this is not an ordinary novel, that I can’t take fictional liberties, can’t provide clues, or lead the readers down a path I didn’t travel.

Sometimes there’s a single line in a book, or a sentence, or an entire paragraph that gives you pause, makes you think, makes you open that page over and over just so you see the same few words again and again. Relive them. Rethink them. These are the pages that connect to the part of the spine that has the least amount of ink, the most damage. I

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. ("Novelty")

Write down what your reader needs, no more, no less. Reading should be textured, but not obscure. Henry James could make an entire paragraph out of a single sentence. The reader is completely sensory deprived of the story until the words show the way. If a reader were practiced, then James’ prose could be followed and appreciated for its economy and elegance.

He had a talismanic obsession with final pages. At school he would near a book's conclusion, whether it was pulp science fiction or The Return of the Native, with one hand firmly clamped over the ultimate paragraph, in case his eye lit on a single word which might rob the entire story of its point, spoil the answer to the riddle of why he was reading it. When he shared this with Genevieve, she admitted to him that she always started a book by reading its final page, that she still did, but she wasn't sure why.

My laboratory is a place where I write. I have become proficient at producing a rare species of prose capable of distilling ten years of work by five people into six published pages, written in a language that very few people can read and that no one ever speaks. This writing relates the details of my work with the precision of a laser scalpel, but its streamlined beauty is a type of artifice, a size-zero mannequin designed to showcase the glory of a dress that would be much less perfect on any real person. My papers do not display the footnotes that they have earned, the table of data that required painstaking months to redo when a graduate student quit, sneering on her way out that she didn’t want a life like mine. The paragraph that took five hours to write while riding on a plane, stunned with grief, flying to a funeral that I couldn’t believe was happening. The early draft that my toddler covered in crayon and applesauce while it was still warm from the printer. Although my publications contain meticulous details of the plants that did grow, the runs that went smoothly, and the data that materialized, they perpetrate a disrespectful amnesia against the entire gardens that rotted in fungus and dismay, the electrical signals that refused to stabilize, and the printer ink cartridges that we secured late at night through nefarious means. I

Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.

The news that she had gone of course now spread rapidly, and by lunch time Riseholme had made up its mind what to do, and that was hermetically to close its lips for ever on the subject of Lucia. You might think what you pleased, for it was a free country, but silence was best. But this counsel of perfection was not easy to practice next day when the evening paper came. There, for all the world to read were two quite long paragraphs, in "Five o'clock Chit-Chat," over the renowned signature of Hermione, entirely about Lucia and 25 Brompton Square, and there for all the world to see was the reproduction of one of her most elegant photographs, in which she gazed dreamily outwards and a little upwards, with her fingers still pressed on the last chord of (probably) the Moonlight Sonata. . . . She had come up, so Hermione told countless readers, from her Elizabethan country seat at Riseholme (where she was a neighbour of Miss Olga Bracely) and was settling for the season in the beautiful little house in Brompton Square, which was the freehold property of her husband, and had just come to him on the death of his aunt. It was a veritable treasure house of exquisite furniture, with a charming music-room where Lucia had given Hermione a cup of tea from her marvellous Worcester tea service. . . . (At this point Daisy, whose hands were trembling with passion, exclaimed in a loud and injured voice, "The very day she arrived!") Mrs. Lucas (one of the Warwickshire Smythes by birth) was, as all the world knew, a most accomplished musician and Shakespearean scholar, and had made Riseholme a centre of culture and art. But nobody would suspect the blue stocking in the brilliant, beautiful and witty hostess whose presence would lend an added gaiety to the London season.

In the third paragraph of the Mandate’s preamble, the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, are described as having a historic connection to Palestine. In the eyes of the drafters, the entire two-thousand-year-old built environment of the country with its villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches, and monuments dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods belonged to no people at all, or only to amorphous religious groups.

I record the events of my life, filling up one notebook after another. Maybe I'm not getting the details exactly right, but it doesn't matter. The strict facts hold no currency here. What counts is the saliva I just spat on this very sheet of paper. The thick gob slowly dissolves a small circle in the text and turns the words translucent. The ink starts to bleed. The fibers loosen. If you run your fingers along this paragraph, you'll find the site where I stabbed my thumb straight through the page. There is an entire world in that hole.

Oh, but it is!" said Dot. "You see, I've taken many, many writing workshops. You'd be surprised how many." No I wouldn't, thought Amy, although she would be surprised if any of the other classes had actually encouraged critical reading. Dot was ideal prey for the sort of writing guru who praised everybody's use of metaphor whenever a metaphor, however exhausted, was actually used. No doubt Dot had been told more than once that her work was publishable, and Dot, hearing identical assurances given to others, had believed in her heart of hearts that she was the only one not being patronized. There was a local industry devoted to Dots: weekend writing conferences, during which the Dots could pay extra to have a real-live literary agent actually read one of their paragraphs; expensive weeklong retreats in Anza-Borrego or Julian or Ensenada, where the Dots could locate their inner voices; and at least three annual fiction-writing contests which the Dots could enter at will, for a hefty fee. Amy was willing to bet that in Dot's living room an entire wall was devoted to framed literary awards, including Third Runner-Up Best Unpublished Romance Manuscript.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title “BREVITY,” the minute began: “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.” He set out four ways for his ministers and their staffs to improve their reports. First, he wrote, reports should “set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.” If the report involved discussion of complicated matters or statistical analysis, this should be placed in an appendix. Often, he observed, a full report could be dispensed with entirely, in favor of an aide-mémoire “consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.” Finally, he attacked the cumbersome prose that so often marked official reports. “Let us have an end to phrases such as these,” he wrote, and quoted two offenders: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…” “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…” He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.” The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.

The spectrum of hatred against “irregardless” might be unmatched. Everyone claims to hate the word “moist,” but the dislike is general and jokey: ew, gross, “moist,” bleh. People’s hatred of “irregardless” is specific and vehemently serious: it cannot mean “without regard to” but must mean “with regard to,” so it’s nonsensical and shouldn’t exist; it’s a double negative and therefore not allowable by anyone with sense and judgment; it’s a redundant blend of “irrespective” and “regardless,” and we don’t need it; it is illogical and therefore not a word; it is a hallmark of uneducated speech and shouldn’t be entered into the dictionary. All of these complaints point in one direction: “irregardless” is evidence that English is going to hell, and you, Merriam-Webster, are skipping down the easy path, merrily swinging the handbasket. The truth is I felt for the complainant. “Irregardless” was just wrong, I thought—I knew this deep down at a molecular level, and no dictionary entry was going to convince me otherwise. But sharing my personal linguistic beef with the world was not part of the job, so I buttoned my yap and answered the correspondence. Yes, it’s entered, I said, but please note that it’s marked “nonstandard” (which is a fancy way of saying it’s not accepted by most educated speakers of English) and we have a very long usage paragraph after the one-word definition that explains you should use “regardless” instead. We are duty-bound to record the language as it is used, I concluded, gritting my teeth and mentally sprinkling scare quotes throughout the entire sentence.

On Friday, August 9, for example, amid a rising tide of urgent war matters, he found time to address a minute to the members of his War Cabinet on a subject dear to him: the length and writing style of the reports that arrived in his black box each day. Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title “BREVITY,” the minute began: “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.” He set out four ways for his ministers and their staffs to improve their reports. First, he wrote, reports should “set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.” If the report involved discussion of complicated matters or statistical analysis, this should be placed in an appendix. Often, he observed, a full report could be dispensed with entirely, in favor of an aide-mémoire “consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.” Finally, he attacked the cumbersome prose that so often marked official reports. “Let us have an end to phrases such as these,” he wrote, and quoted two offenders: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…” “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…” He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.” The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.” That evening, as he had done almost every weekend thus far, he set off for the country.

the ten thousand things To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things. – Eihei Dogen If one is very fortunate indeed, one comes upon – or is found by – the teachings that match one’s disposition and the teachers or mentors whose expression strikes to the heart while teasing the knots from the mind. The Miriam Louisa character came with a tendency towards contrariness and scepticism, which is probably why she gravitated to teachers who displayed like qualities. It was always evident to me that the ‘blink’ required in order to meet life in its naked suchness was not something to be gained in time. Rather, it was clear that it was something to do with understanding what sabotages this direct engagement. So my teachers were those who deconstructed the spiritual search – and with it the seeker – inviting one to “see for oneself.” I realised early on that I wouldn’t find any help within traditional spiritual institutions since their version of awakening is usually a project in time. Anyway, I’m not a joiner by nature. I set out on my via negativa at an early age, trying on all kinds of philosophies and practices with enthusiasm and casting them aside –neti neti – equally enthusiastically. Chögyam Trungpa wised me up to “spiritual materialism” in the 70s; Alan Watts followed on, pointing out that whatever is being experienced is none other than ‘IT’ – the unarguable aliveness that one IS. By then I was perfectly primed for the questions put by Jiddu Krishnamurti – “Is there a thinker separate from thought?” “Is there an observer separate from the observed?” “Can consciousness be separated from its content?” It was while teaching at Brockwood Park that I also had the good fortune to engage with David Bohm in formal dialogues as well as private conversations. (About which I have written elsewhere.) Krishnamurti and Bohm were seminal teachers for me; I also loved the unique style of deconstruction offered by Nisargadatta Maharaj. As it happened though, it took just one tiny paragraph from Wei Wu Wei to land in my brain at exactly the right time for the irreversible ‘blink’ to occur. I mention this rather august lineage because it explains why the writing of Robert Saltzman strikes not just a chord but an entire symphonic movement for me. We are peers; we were probably reading the same books by Watts and Krishnamurti at the same time during the 70s and 80s. Reading his book, The Ten Thousand Things, is, for me, like feeling my way across a tapestry exquisitely woven from the threads of my own life. I’m not sure that I can adequately express my wonderment and appreciation… The candor, lucidity and lack of jargon in Robert’s writing are deeply refreshing. I also relish his way with words. He knows how to write. He also knows how to take astonishingly fine photographs, and these are featured throughout the book. It’s been said that this book will become a classic, which is a pretty good achievement for someone who isn’t claiming to be a teacher and has nothing to gain by its sale. (The book sells for the production price.) He is not peddling enlightenment. He is simply sharing how it feels to be free from all the spiritual fantasies that obscure our seamless engagement with this miraculous thing called life, right now.

In the entire works of the Jewish historian Josephus (37-c. 100 CE), which constitute hundreds of pages, there are only two paragraphs that purport to refer to Jesus. Although much has been made of these 'references,' they have been dismissed by many scholars and even by Christian apologists as forgeries, as have been those referring to John the Baptist and James, 'brother' of Jesus. Bishop Warburton (1698-1779) labeled the Josephus interpolation regarding Jesus as 'a rank forgery, and a very stupid one, too.

Here is a most significant fact-the subconscious mind takes any orders given it in a spirit of absolute FAITH, and acts upon those orders, although the orders often have to be presented over and over again, through repetition, before they are interpreted by the subconscious mind. Following the preceding statement, consider the possibility of playing a perfectly legitimate "trick" on your subconscious mind, by making it believe, because you believe it, that you must have the amount of money you are visualizing, that this money is already awaiting your claim, that the subconscious mind MUST hand over to you practical plans for acquiring the money which is yours. Hand over the thought suggested in the preceding paragraph to your IMAGINATION, and see what your imagination can, or will do, to create practical plans for the accumulation of money through transmutation of your desire. DO NOT WAIT for a definite plan, through which you intend to exchange services or merchandise in return for the money you are visualizing, but begin at once to see yourself in possession of the money, DEMANDING and EXPECTING meanwhile, that your subconscious mind will hand over the plan, or plans you need. Be on the alert for these plans, and when they appear, put them into ACTION IMMEDIATELY. When the plans appear, they will probably "flash" into your mind through the sixth sense, in the form of an "inspiration." This inspiration may be considered a direct "telegram," or message from Infinite Intelligence. Treat it with respect, and act upon it as soon as you receive it. Failure to do this will be FATAL to your success. In the fourth of the six steps, you were instructed to "Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once to put this plan into action." You should follow this instruction in the manner described in the preceding paragraph. Do not trust to your "reason when creating your plan for accumulating money through the transmutation of desire. Your reason is faulty. Moreover, your reasoning faculty maybe lazy, and, if you depend entirely upon it to serve you, it may disappoint you.

Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.

Cizek had used art as the point of entry of his thinking into a whole new world of education—an avenue that had never occurred to me. He realized that children by nature are capable of real, indeed often great, art; that artistic activity is natural for them; and that adult interference in the natural development of children as artists was detrimental to that development. From that starting point, he made a leap into the entire realm of education and child development, concluding that the natural, unhindered growth of children enables them to reach their full potential as human beings, and that adult interference in general is more of a liability than an asset in this process of growth. That leap, from art to all domains of maturation, was an intuitive one for Cizek and his followers. It was not until I read the article referred to in the opening paragraph of this section that I not only gained an understanding of the real basis for Cizek’s intuitive leap, but I also achieved a new and enriching perspective on the nature of education, one that I had hitherto hardly noticed. The key is the observation that certain activities are universal, transcultural, and therefore related to the very essence of being a human. Even more significant and telling—and here once again Cizek hit upon the truth, albeit not consciously—is the fact that these same activities are engaged in by children from the earliest age, and therefore are not, indeed cannot be, the products of sociocultural influences. This places these activities in the realm of biological evolution rather than the realm of cultural history.50 And because these three activities—making music, decorating things, and talking—are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, they must represent in and of themselves an important aspect of the exalted place humans occupy in the natural world. In other words, these activities not only represent the outcome of evolution, but they also represent important features that account for the specific place that the Homo sapiens species occupies in the natural order. To allow children—and indeed adults—to engage in these three activities to their heart’s desire is to allow them to realize their fullest potential as human beings. External interference in their exercise, although perhaps sometimes justifiable for social reasons (man is, after all, a social animal too, another aspect of evolution), always involves some diminishing of their ability to become what they by nature are inclined to be. Once this is realized, it is almost impossible to comprehend the enthusiasm with which educators and child development specialists advocate systems for coercing children, against their clear inclination and will, to curtail these activities in favor of an externally imposed adult agenda. Although there might have been some economic justification for such curtailment in the industrial age, there is no longer the slightest pretext of an advantage gained through the suppression of the natural, evolved behavior of children. In

When an editor reads, he is not just reading but breaking sentences into fragments, worrying if the first half should be replaced with the second, if the middle fragment should be switched with the first. The better editors worry if entire sentences should be switched within paragraphs; great editors keep entire paragraphs—even pages—in their head and worry if these might be switched. Truly great editors can keep an entire book in their head and easily ponder the switching of any word to any place. They’ll remember an echo across three hundred pages. If they’re professional, they’ll be able to keep ten such manuscripts in their head at once. And if you’re the writer, and you call them a year later and ask about a detail, even though they’ve read five thousand manuscripts since then, they’ll remember yours without a pause.

Empirical logic achieved a signal triumph in the Old Testament, where survivals from the early proto-logical stage are very few and far between. With it man reached a point where his best judgments about his relation to God, his fellow men and the world, were in most respects not appreciably inferior to ours. In fundamental ethical and spiritual matters we have not progressed at all beyond the empirico-logical world of the Old Testament or the unrivalled fusion of proto-logical intuition, 64 [see Coomaraswamy, Review of Religion, 1942, p. 138, paragraph 3] empirico-logical wisdom and logical deduction which we find in the New Testament. In fact a very large section of modern religion, literature and art actually represents a pronounced retrogression when compared with the Old Testament. For example, astrology, spiritism and kindred divagations, which have become religion to tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, are only the outgrowth of proto-logical interpretation of nature, fed by empirico-logical data and covered with a spurious shell of Aristotelian logic and scientific induction. Plastic and graphic art has swung violently away from logical perspective and perceptual accuracy, and has plunged into primordial depths of conceptual drawing and intuitive imagery. While it cannot be denied that this swing from classical art to conceptual and impressionistic art has yielded some valuable results, it is also true that it represents a very extreme retrogression into the proto-logical past. Much of the poetry, drama and fiction which has been written during the past half-century is also a reversion from classical and logical standards of morality and beauty into primitive savagery or pathological abnormality. Some of it has reached such paralogical levels of sophistication that it has lost all power to furnish any standards at all to a generation which has deliberately tried to abandon its entire heritage from the past. All systematic attempts to discredit inherited sexual morality, to substitute dream-states for reflection, and to replace logical writing by jargon, are retreats into the jungle from which man emerged through long and painful millennia of disillusionment. With the same brains and affective reactions as those which our ancestors possessed two thousand years ago, increasing sophistication has not been able to teach us any sounder fundamental principles of life than were known at that time. . . . Unless we can continue along the pathway of personal morality and spiritual growth which was marked out for civilized man by the founders of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, more than two thousand years ago, our superior skill in modifying and even in transforming the material world about us can lead only to repeated disasters, each more terrible than its predecessor. (Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 5th Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 31-33.)

We may only be reading from the New Testament one paragraph of Paul, but as we get close to that reading and look not only at it but through it we can see the entire sweep of Paul’s vision, of the biblical narrative focused now on Jesus and his messianic death and resurrection.

Read also the entire introduction and conclusion. Finally, skim through the book and notice items in bold, italics, quotes, and any diagrams or tables. While skimming, read the first and last paragraphs of each chapter.

Dancing should be as natural to you as breathing in and out. It should be like reading a book; not spelling out each individual word, but becoming lost among the sentences and paragraphs and chapters until you are transported to another place entirely.

I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memoy. No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.

On Amazon Kindle, you can simply drag your finger across a sentence or paragraph you like to add a highlight. Then use the share menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes. You can also add comments right alongside the text as you read, which will help you remember what you found interesting about a passage.

speak” (p.1). We create as we speak because words make worlds within us. If you doubt this, try saying the word “waterfall.” What do you see, hear, smell, taste, experience? How do you feel? Now try on the word “supermarket,” or worse, “traffic.” What do you see, hear, and feel now? A single word is powerful enough to create an entire sensory experience in someone who hears, reads, or thinks it. If you were in a laboratory with electrodes attached to your head, a neuroscientist could track your brain’s response. If a single word can do that much, think of the possibilities of a line, a sentence, a paragraph, a page—or a sequence of pages!

ADD may be present. Since everybody will answer “yes” to some number of questions, and since we have not established norms for this questionnaire, it should only be used as an informal gauge. 1. Are you left-handed or ambidextrous? 2. Do you have a family history of drug or alcohol abuse, depression, or manic-depressive illness? 3. Are you moody? 4. Were you considered an underachiever in school? Now? 5. Do you have trouble getting started on things? 6. Do you drum your fingers a lot, tap your feet, fidget, or pace? 7. When you read, do you find that you often have to reread a paragraph or an entire page because you are daydreaming? 8. Do you tune out or space out a lot? 9. Do you have a hard time relaxing? 10. Are you excessively impatient? 11. Do you find that you undertake many projects simultaneously so that your life often resembles a juggler who’s got six more balls in the air than he can handle? 12. Are you impulsive? 13. Are you easily distracted? 14. Even if you are easily distracted, do you find that there are times when your power of concentration is laser-beam intense? 15. Do you procrastinate chronically? 16. Do you often get excited by projects and then not follow through? 17. More than most people, do you feel that it is hard for you to make yourself understood? 18. Is your memory so porous that if you go from one room to the next to get something, by the time you get to the next room you’ve sometimes forgotten what you were looking for? 19. Do you smoke cigarettes? 20. Do you drink too much? 21. If you have ever tried cocaine, did you find that it helped you focus and calmed you down, rather than making you high? 22. Do you change the radio station in your car frequently? 23. Do you wear out your TV remote-control switch by changing stations frequently? 24. Do you feel driven, as if an engine inside you won’t slow down? 25. As a kid, were you called words like, “a daydreamer,” “lazy,” “a spaceshot,” “impulsive,” “disruptive,” “lazy,” or just plain “bad”?

Since the road to publication is usually so arduous, meandering and fraught with unexpected twists, writers have ample time to compose (in their heads or on fettuccini-stained restaurant napkins) dissertation-length monologues befitting that of a Shakespearean lead character, during which they describe—in complex, paragraph-long sentences—how exceedingly indebted they are to everyone they’ve ever met, read a book by or chatted about “Motivation” with online (in their entire lives) for the help given in the writing, acquisition, printing and distribution of their debut novels.

Revelation’s “forehead” and “hand” terminology is actually rooted in the Old Testament. Moses told the Israelites, “You shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes” (Deuteronomy 11:18 , NKJV). What did God mean by this? Did He expect the Israelites to take a ballpoint pen and write tiny paragraphs above their noses? Seriously, how could Israelite faces contain the entire book of Deuteronomy? It has thirty-four chapters! A little bit of enlightened reflection should teach us what this “forehead” and “hand” language really means. Anciently, God wanted His holy words to be on the Israelite’s foreheads. This must mean He wanted them inside their minds. What about His words on their hands? This must apply to their actions. Thus, the forehead represents the mind, and the hand represents the actions. That’s simple enough. Therefore, what the book of Revelation really means when it speaks of a mark in the forehead or in the hand is that someday the masses of humanity will fully yield

There was something about the way this man touched my youngest child that set my teeth on edge. His arm linked through hers as they walked up to the house. His hand stayed at her back as they climbed the stairs. His fingers laced through hers as they walked through the door. Reading back that last paragraph, it all sounds so innocuous, the typical gestures of a man who is making love to a woman, but I must tell you, sweetheart, that there was something so deeply unsettling about the way he touched her. His hand literally never left her body. Not once the entire time they were in front of me. Even when they sat on the couch, Paul held her hand until she was settled, then he threw his arm around her shoulders and spread his legs wide, as if the girth of his testicles had turned his kneecaps into oppositely polarized magnets.

I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past,” the President said in a series of interviews for The New Yorker . “But we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have. But I think our decisions matter.” He added, “At the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.

Do you suppose you could go an entire paragraph without resorting to profanity?” “Maybe,” M supposed, “but why chance it?

Capturing passages from ebooks: Most ebook apps make it very easy to highlight passages as you read. On Amazon Kindle, you can simply drag your finger across a sentence or paragraph you like to add a highlight. Then use the share menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes.

She is just one paragraph; I am the page. I am the chapter and the verse." "A line--a word--can change the meaning of an entire book.

On Amazon Kindle, you can simply drag your finger across a sentence or paragraph you like to add a highlight. Then use the share menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes.

Capturing passages from ebooks: Most ebook apps make it very easy to highlight passages as you read. On Amazon Kindle, you can simply drag your finger across a sentence or paragraph you like to add a highlight. Then use the share menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes. You can also add comments right alongside the text as you read, which will help you remember what you found interesting about a passage. Capturing excerpts from online articles or web pages: When you come across an online article or blog post you want to read, save it to a “read later” app, which is like a digital magazine rack of everything you want to read (or watch or listen to) at some point.

The 1/1/1+ structure is a mechanism you should use for very specific sections within your writing: beginnings and endings. Single sentences are great for calling out individual ideas, statements, or descriptions, and doing so several times in a row can elicit a powerful response in a reader. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is a strong statement. This second sentence builds on, reinforces, or repeats that strong statement. This third sentence builds on, reinforces, or repeats that strong statement. For example, I use this structure to emphasize a length of time in my article, “The 1 Thing I Did That Changed My Entire Life For The Better.” Step 2: Like I said, I did this for 2 years. Two. Years. Not 3 days. Not a few weeks. Two entire years. I started to see how the people I was surrounding myself with weren’t very conducive to who and what I wanted to become. I started to realize I was terrific at coming up with ideas but horrible at seeing them through to completion. I started to understand why I struggled to make friends, and how closed off I was from the world. If you notice, immediately following the 1/1/1/1 structure, I went into a lengthier paragraph. This was deliberate. When you use the 1/1/1+ structure, you are building momentum. You are moving a reader quickly from Point A to Point B. But after a few big steps, the reader is not going to want to run anymore. They’re going to want to take a quick break and settle into the thing you’re talking about. So, crescendo with the 1/1/1+ rhythm, and then decrescendo with a three, four, or even five-sentence paragraph. Then repeat.

About an hour outside of Chicago, as you drive north toward Wisconsin, there is a man sitting in the basement of an old farmhouse, wringing his pale, white hands. In fact, his entire nude body is covered in a white dust, a powder, a singular tear running down his right cheek. His overweight body hangs in folds over the edges of his frame, the tiny, brown stool straining under the weight. There is a singular light bulb overheard, and it is doing a poor job illuminating the cold concrete, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. (Clown Face)

Capturing passages from ebooks: Most ebook apps make it very easy to highlight passages as you read. On Amazon Kindle, you can simply drag your finger across a sentence or paragraph you like to add a highlight. Then use the share menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes. You can also add comments right alongside the text as you read,

Writing a book is a humbling experience because you’ll spend a day reading an entire book just to write one good paragraph

Years ago, Once Upon a Time was Right Now. And eventually, Right Now will become Once Upon a Time. In fact, it just did. Time is funny like that. In most stories time is very important. Not in this one. The story may have horses and not cars, but really it could happen now like it did then. Then being Once Upon a Time, years and years ago. The story is one of passion, and last time I checked, passion was still around. It exists in love, hate, obsession. For instance, I have a passion for pickled herring. I can’t live without it. Every day I have to have some. In my salad, raw, on my sandwiches. It tastes great on hamburgers. However, this story is not about pickled herring, but it does have love, hate, and obsession. I tell you about these things first because it is these things that cause everything else, as we know they are prone to do. And there’s a lot of other things in this story, too: There are monsters and mobbers, heroes and heroines, villains and thieves, power and conquest, murder and mayhem (sounds like politics, doesn’t it?), beasts and battles, and last but not least, pride and honor. Oh, and don’t forget arugula! Arugula is very good, though not as good as pickled herring. Even arugula has a place in the story. And what a magnificent story it is! I give myself great credit for coming-up with it. OK. Slight lie. I didn’t (technically) come-up with it. It was actually told to me over and over again by my grandfather. He didn’t come-up with it either, though. I think he got it from his grandfather. And I’m not exactly sure where his grandfather got it from. Probably from some old folklore or something. But as far as I know, it’s a true story. Anyway, if credit is to be given, I guess you can give it to my grandfather, cause he always told it so well. I’ve done some of what ya might call “editing,” but basically I tried to tell it just like he did (he died some years back). I only hope I can give you what he gave me, even though he didn’t give me this story because this entire paragraph was a complete and utter lie. Either way, I think you’ll enjoy what comes...

In the late seventies, RBG was interviewed for a book called Women Lawyers at Work, which devoted many paragraphs to her work-life balance. The author, Elinor Porter Swiger, seemed eager to find her subject torn or in crisis. Swiger noted that Jane had once rebelliously announced she was going to be a stay-at-home mom like Evelyn Ginsburg. And Swiger pressed RBG for her reaction to a terrifying incident when James was two and a housekeeper found him screaming, with Drano on his lips. RBG vividly described rushing to the hospital: “Deep burns distorted his face, charred lips encircled his mouth—a tiny, burnt-out cavern ravaged by the lye.” Swiger wondered: “How did Ruth feel during this prolonged ordeal? As a working mother, did she agonize with regret that she had not been there when it happened? The answer is a qualified ‘yes.’” Then RBG paused to consider it. She said the real mistake had been “not putting the Drano out of the toddler’s reach.” Swiger wrote, not entirely admiringly, “It is a part of Ruth Ginsburg’s success that she can view this incident in a relatively objective way.

In the last dark age, one can search the inquiries of this era's preserved of thinkers from Augustine to Ockham, and fail to discover a single page of criticism of the established social framework, however rationally insupportable feudal bondage, absolute paternalism, divine right of kings and the rest may be. In the current final order, is it so different? Can we see in any media or even university press a paragraph of clear unmasking of a global regime that condemns a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available? In such a social order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda. Only one doctrine is speakable, and a priest caste of its experts prescribes the necessities and obligations to all. Social consciousness is incarcerated within the role of a kind of ceremonial logic, operating entirely within the received framework of an exhaustively prescribed regulatory apparatus protecting the privileges of the privileged. Methodical censorship triumphs in the guise of scholarly rigor, and the only room left for searching thought becomes the game of competing rationalizations.

when looking at the literature currently available, there seems to be much discussion on practical contemporary issues such as the sharing of resources or personnel, but very little on the history of Global/World relationships. Partnership is only mentioned in brief passages in David Bosch’s Transforming Mission or Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder’s Constants in Context. In J. Andrew Kirk’s What is Mission? an entire chapter is dedicated to this subject (chapter 10— “Sharing in Partnership”); however, only a few paragraphs are dedicated to how partnership has been understood historically. To date, the most complete study on this topic has been done by Lothar Bauerochse in his book Learning to Live Together: Interchurch Partnerships as Ecumenical Communities of Learning. Although Bauerochse’s main focus involves case studies on the relationships between German Protestant churches and their African partners, the first section entails an historical analysis of the term “partnership.” In his analysis, Bauerochse states that “the term partnership is a term of the colonial era . . . It is a formula of the former ‘rulers,’ who with it wished to both signal a relinquishment of power and also to secure their influence in the future. Therefore, the term can also serve both in colonial policy and mission policy to justify continuing rights of the white minority.”5 This understanding then serves as the lens through which he interprets the partnership discourse, reminding the reader that although the term was meant to connote an eventual leveling of power dynamics in relationships, it was also used by those with power to “secure their influence in the future.” This analysis is largely true. As we will see in chapter three, when the term partnership was introduced into the colonial debate, it was closely aligned with the concept of trusteeship. Later, as will be discussed in chapter six, the term partnership was also used in the late colonial period by the British as a way to maintain their colonies while offering the hope of freedom in the future; a step forward from trusteeship, but short of autonomy and independence. During colonial times, once the term partnership was introduced into ecumenical discussions, many arguments identical to those used by colonial powers for the retention of their colonies were used by church and missionary leaders to deny autonomy to the younger churches. Later, when looking at partnership in the post-World War

filling the form in.  She held up the photo and matched it with the wall, a tired, thinlooking girl looking out at her. It was set to the right of Oliver’s. They could have had them taken at the same time. She’d ask Mary.  Grace had said she had only been with Oliver — or at least that’s what the answers suggested. She’d have to ask her to make sure. It wasn’t unknown for homeless people to get into disagreements over love. When you’ve got nothing much to lose, the law doesn’t come into play when you’re asking yourself if you’re prepared to kill for someone.  Grace also admitted to being a regular heroin user and agreed to have an examination. She also said she didn’t have any diseases as far as she knew. She was the same age, too. Eighteen. Had they known each other before they’d become homeless? She’d have to find Grace to know the truth.  She went back to Oliver’s file and checked the date next to his signature. It said the seventh of September. Just under two months ago.  Jamie leafed to the next and only other page in the file. It was another shabbily photocopied sheet. Mary must have been doing them on her printer-scanner at home, creating them on her computer. She really did care. The sheet displayed a pixelated outline of the human body — no doubt an image pulled off the web and then stretched out to fill a page. The resolution was too low to keep any sort of detail, but the shape still came through okay. It was a human with their arms out, feet apart. At the top of the page, in Comic Sans, ‘Examination Sheet’ was written as the title.  In appropriately illegible handwriting for a doctor, notes had been jotted around the body. Parts had been circled with lines being drawn to the corresponding note. She read words like ‘graze’ and ‘lesion’. ‘Rash’ cropped up a few times. But there didn’t look to be anything sinister going on. The crooks of the elbows, as well as the ankles, were all circled several times but nothing was written at the sides. Those areas didn’t need explaining, though underneath, as if encapsulating the entire exam were the words ‘No signs of infection’. So he’d been relatively careful, then. Clean needles, at least. Under that, there was a little paragraph recommending a general blood panel, but overall, Oliver seemed to be in decent health. Nothing had been prescribed, it seemed.  She checked Grace’s and found it to be much the same, complete with triple circles around the elbows and ankles. Though her genital area had also been circled and the word ‘Rash’ had been written. At the bottom, a prescription had been written for azithromycin.  Jamie clicked her teeth together, rummaging in her brain for the name. Was it a gonorrhoea medication or chlamydia? She knew it was for an STD, she just couldn’t remember which. But that meant that where she’d put down ‘1’ for number of

wanting to know about the actions of an entire gene (a paragraph), you actually want to know the precise role of just one letter? After all, that could be the difference between your business card describing you as an ‘interior designer’ or an ‘inferior designer’.

I only hope I can give you what he gave me, even though he didn’t give me this story because this entire paragraph was a complete and utter lie. Either way, I think you’ll enjoy what comes...

Books and Manuals Read the front and back covers. Review the table of contents to get a feel for the organization, and notice if the book is divided into sections or parts. Read chapter headings to get a sense of the topics that will be covered. Next, read samples of the text. If there is a preface, begin there. Read also the entire introduction and conclusion. Finally, skim through the book and notice items in bold, italics, quotes, and any diagrams or tables. While skimming, read the first and last paragraphs of each chapter.