Enunciation Quotes

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Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense.
Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)
Now that number was gone, covered up by the jet-black image of a chess piece. Neil's knowledge of chess was hazy at best, but he knew for sure that wasn't a king. "You did it," Neil said, too stunned to manage anything else. "Let Riko be King," Kevin said, with the exaggerated enunciation of the thoroughly sloshed. "Most coveted, most protected. He'll sacrifice every piece he has to protect his throne. Whatever. Me?" Kevin gestured again, meaning to indicate himself but too drunk to get his hand higher than his waist. "I'm going to be the deadliest piece on the board." "Queen," Andrew said somewhere behind Neil.
Nora Sakavic (The King's Men (All for the Game, #3))
I am not a piece of property, damn it!" "But you are in my possession." She enunciated, "I think you are a lunatic." "Since you are too, that works well enough." His mouth curled into a smile.
Thea Harrison (Dragon Bound (Elder Races, #1))
If you don’t go after Luke,” Clary said, enunciating very clearly, “I, personally, will kill you.” For a moment Jocelyn looked astonished. Then she smiled. “Well,” she said, “if you put it like that.
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
Do. You. Still. Love. Me?” I enunciate every word and lean right into his space just to prove that I’m not intimidated by him. He cups the back of my neck and pulls me within inches of his face—close enough to kiss. “I could reach the rank of Maven, lead armies of dark wielders against everyone we care for, and watch every vein in my body turn red as I channel all the power in the Continent, and I would still love you. What I did doesn’t change that. I’m not sure anything can.
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
Wolf," said Ran, enunciating it very carefully. "What an unusual name. Did your parents give it to you?" "Does it matter?" said Wolf, tossing away his bone. "I'm only making conversation." "I'd prefer silence," Wolf said, a growl in his tone.
Marissa Meyer (Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, #2))
Let Riko be King," Kevin said, with the exaggerated enunciation of the thoroughly sloshed. "Most coveted, most protected. He'll sacrifice every piece he has to protect his throne. Whatever. Me?" Kevin gestured again, meaning to indicate himself but too drunk to get his hand higher than his waist. "I'm going to be the deadliest piece on the board.
Nora Sakavic (The King's Men (All for the Game, #3))
She is trying to convince me that she never does this and is not that type of girl. It was difficult for me to understand. Her enunciation wasn’t very good with my dick in her mouth.
Tucker Max (I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (Tucker Max, #1))
Yes, peasants,” he repeated slowly. “The lowliest of the low among humans.” Then he enunciated, “Exceedingly backward and vulgar hillbillies.” “Been called worse, mister.” At his raised brows, she exhaled impatiently. “Bootlegger, moonshiner, Elly May Clampett, mountain mama, redneck, backwoods Bessie, hick, trailer trash, yokel, and, more recently, death-row con.” “No references to mining? I’m disappointed.
Kresley Cole (Lothaire (Immortals After Dark, #11))
Um, tequila please?” I asked questioningly, enunciating each word as best as my drunken mouth would allow. So really, it came out as “Uff, shakira pea?
Tara Sivec (Seduction and Snacks (Chocolate Lovers, #1))
You're trying to be cool now, Leif? Seriously?" "I am the shit, home slice, straight up," he replied. "No. I mean, don't get me wrong, this is a great effort, but you still need to use more contractions. And your tone is so formal, it's like you're complimenting the pudding at a duke's dinner party." "Fucking H!" the vampire shouted, shaking his free left fist. He enunciated the g very clearly and projected his voice from his diaphragm, like a trained opera singer. "It's fuckin' A, not H, but yeah Leif, go ahead, let's throw down.
Kevin Hearne (Hexed (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #2))
You're Nephilim," he said. "The Clave owes us protection in these circumstances." ... "I dont see anything you need protecting from here," said the boy. "Except some bad décor and a possible mold problem. But you can usually clear that up with bleach." "There's a dead body outside this bar's front door," said Bat, enunciating carefully. "Dont you think-" "I think it's a little too late for him to need protection," said the boy, "if he's already dead." -Freaky Pete, Jace, & Bat, pg.35 & 36-
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself. It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no enunciation to prove it so.
Thomas Hardy (Far From the Madding Crowd)
The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality
Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
The theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity. It is the inbetween space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture, and by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.
Homi K. Bhabha (The Location of Culture)
I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth.
Mat Johnson (Loving Day)
As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.
A.N. Wilson
With his immaculately coiffured blond locks and his impeccable cut-glass accent, he looks, and sounds, like a dab hand. 'People are as nice as you make them,' he enunciates. 'Which gives you a heck of a lot of power over them, of course.
Kevin Dutton (The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success)
Yeah, I get it; you're a vampire," she said. "Creepy. And okay, a little hot, I admit." "You don't mean that." "Come on. I still like you, you know, even if you... crave plasma." Michael blinked and looked at her as if he had never seen her before. "You what?" "Like. You." Eve enunciated slowly, as if Michael might not know the words. "Idiot. I always have. What, you didn't know?" Eve sounded cool and grown-up about it, but Claire saw the hectic color in her cheeks, under the makeup. "How clueless are you? Does it come with the fangs?" "I guess I... I just thought... Hell. I just didn't think... You're kind of intimidating, you know." "I'm intimidating? Me? I run like a rabbit from trouble, mostly," Eve said. "It's all show and makeup. You're the one who's intimidating. I mean, come on. All that talent, and you look... Well, you know how you look." " How do I look?" He sounded fascinated now, and he'd actually moved a little closer to Eve on the couch. She laughed. "Oh come on. You're a total model-babe." "You're kidding." "You don't think you are?" He shook his head. "Then you're kind of an idiot, Glass. Smart, but and idiot." Eve crossed her arms. “So? What exactly do you think about me, except that I’m intimidating?” “I think you’re…you’re…ah, interesting?” Michael was amazingly bad at this, Claire thought, but then he saved it by looking away and continuing. “I think you’re beautiful. And really, really strange.” Eve smiled and looked down, and that looked like a real blush, under the rice powder. “Thanks for that, “ she said, “I never thought you knew I existed, or if you did, that you thought I was anything but Shane’s bratty freak friend.” “Well, to be fair, you are Shane’s bratty freak friend.” “Hey!” “You can be bratty and beautiful,” Michael said. “I think it’s interesting.
Rachel Caine (Ghost Town (The Morganville Vampires, #9))
The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.
Julia Kristeva (Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art)
Jesus was certainly not a mere enunciator of permanent truths, like the modern liberal preacher; on the contrary He was conscious of standing at the turning-point of the ages, when what had never been was now to come to be.
J. Gresham Machen (Christianity and Liberalism)
No enunciation of the Truth will ever be complete, no method of training will ever be suitable for all temperaments, no one can do more than mark out the little plot of infinity which he intends to cultivate, and thrust in the spade, trusting that the soil may eventually be fruitful and free from weeds so far as the bounds he has set himself extend....
Dion Fortune (Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate)
Tell me,' asked Stas, 'what is a wicked deed?' 'If anyone takes away Kali's cow,' he answered after a brief reflection, 'that then is a wicked deed.' 'Excellent!' exclaimed Stas, 'and what is a good one?' This time the answer came without any reflection: 'If Kali takes away the cow of somebody else, that is a good deed.' Stas was too young to perceive that similar views of evil and good deeds were enunciated in Europe not only by politicians but by whole nations.
Henryk Sienkiewicz (In Desert and Wilderness)
The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'.
Walter E. Williams
Change, development and progress, according to the Islamic viewpoint, refer to the return to the genuine Islam enunciated and practised by the Holy Prophet (may God bless and give him Peace!) and his noble Companions and their Followers (blessing and peace be upon them all!) and the faith and practice of genuine Muslims after them; and they also refer to the self and mean its return to its original nature and religion (Islam).
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (Islam: The Concept of Religion and The Foundation of Ethics and Morality)
From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be - Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity - to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
Bertrand Russell
But I assure you those are the correct lyrics that Robert Palmer sings.” “No. It’s addicted to love, Ships. Addicted to love,” he enunciates while fighting back the laugh. “Not a dick with a glove.” “Hmpf.
K. Bromberg (Sweet Cheeks)
There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.
William F. Buckley Jr.
It seems thus possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.
Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life)
Onoshobishobi Ingelosi. . . shobi. . . shobi. . . Ingelosi, the piano notes enunciated as clearly as if the people themselves were singing it.
Bryce Courtenay (The Power of One)
Abigail,’ he says. ‘I thought it was you.’ ‘Hi!’ I say loudly. ‘Mark!’ ‘Who?’ says Robert. Fuck, he doesn’t know his real name. Why do I give everyone stupid nicknames? ‘I almost don’t recognise you out of your SKINNY JEANS,’ I enunciate carefully. He’s wearing grey flannel trousers and a pink T-Shirt with leather Converses. He speaks clothes exceptionally confidently for a straight man. I wonder if he’d take me shopping. ‘Oh, right. Got it.’ ‘That’s odd,’ says Skinny Jeans. ‘Since I was wearing nothing at all when you left my room without saying goodbye . . . let’s see, seven weeks ago?’ ‘Um, yes. Well, you know . . .’ I trail off. Come on, Robert, I think desperately. ‘I’m sorry, were you planning on making me breakfast in bed?’ says Robert. Yes! Make a joke! ‘I’m sorry, were you planning on making me breakfast in bed?’ I say. Skinny Jeans grins. ‘Scrambled eggs? Toast? On a little tray?’ ‘Scrambled eggs? Toast? On a little tray with a rose on it?’ I say. ‘Don’t fuck with my script,’ says Robert, which makes me grin slightly more broadly
Gemma Burgess
Sorry I overheard that, but I'm glad he's staying," Luke's sister said. "Not just because he'll be near me but because it gives him a chance to get over you." Jocelyn sounded defensive. "Amatis-" "It's been a long time, Jocelyn," Amatis said. "If you don't love him, you ought to let him go." Jocelyn was silent. Clary wished she could see her mother's expression- did she looked sad? Angry? Resigned? Amatis gave a little gasp. "Unless- you do love him?" "Amatis, I can't-" "You do! you do!" There was a sharp sound, as if Amatis had clapped her hands together. "I knew you did! I always knew it!" "It doesn't matter." Jocelyn sounded tired. "It wouldn't be fair to Luke." "I don't want to hear it." There was a rustling noise, and Jocelyn made a sound of protest. Clary wondered if Amatis had actually grabbed hold of her mother. "If you love him, you go right now and tell him. Right now, before he goes to the Council." "But they want him to be their Council member! And he wants to-" "All Lucian wants," said Amatis firmly, "is you. You and Clary. That's all he ever wanted. Now go." Before Clary had a chance to move, Jocelyn dashed out into the hallway. She headed toward the door- and saw Clary, flattened against the wall. Halting, she opened her mouth in surprise. "Clary!" She sounded as if she were trying to make her voice bright and cheerful, and failed miserably. "I didn't realize you were here." Clary stepped away from the wall, grabbed hold of the doorknob, and threw the door wide open. Bright sunlight poured into the hall. Jocelyn stood blinking in the harsh illumination, her eyes on her daughter. "If you don't go after Luke," Clary said, enunciating very clearly, "I, personally, will kill you." For a moment Jocelyn looked astonished. Then she smiled. "Well," she said, "if you put it like that." A moment later she was out of the house, hurrying down the canal path toward the Accords Hall. Clary shut the door behind her and leaned against it. Amatis, emerging from the living room, darted past her to lean on the window sill, glancing aniously out through the pane. "Do you think she'll catch him before he gets to the Hall?" "My mom's spent her whole life chasing me around," Clary said. "She moves fast.
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
3. Blame. Whenever things don’t turn out as planned, blame yourself or others. Blame is another defensive cover-up for shame. Blame maintains the balance in a dysfunctional system when control has broken down. 4. Denial of the Five Freedoms. The five freedoms, first enunciated by Virginia Satir, describe full personal functionality. Each freedom has to do with a basic human power: the power to perceive, to think and interpret, to feel, to want and choose, and the power to imagine. In shame-based families, the perfectionist rule prohibits the full expression of these powers. It says you shouldn’t perceive, think, feel, desire or imagine the way you do. You should do these the way the perfec-tionistic ideal demands.
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
Let me get this straight.Your lunchroom speech went a little something like this." I put my hands out on front of me like I was a Roman Orator enunciating for the crowd. "I, Nick Krieger,defender of women, would never denounce the crotch. I am above the crotch.
Jennifer Echols (The Ex Games)
With the aid of the baluster-rail and Mr Goring's stalwart arm she arrived, panting but triumphant, on the first floor, and paused to take breath. Observing that Lybster was about to throw open the door into the drawing room she stopped him by the simple expedient of grasping his sleeve. Affronted, he gazed at her with much hauteur, and said in freezing accents: "Madam?" "Looby!" enunciated Mrs Floore, between gasps. "You wait! Trying to push me in - like a landed salmon!
Georgette Heyer (Bath Tangle)
Some officers of his acquaintance had barked and yelled and shouted. He had always found it more effective to speak low and quiet, enunciating clearly and precisely as if to an idiot child, bearing down with an icy stare. That way he had found the implied menace to be unmistakable.
Lee Child (Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher, #12))
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.
G.K. Chesterton (What I Saw in America (Anthem Travel Classics))
Absolutely pathetic.” I make a Jeopardy! buzzer sound. “Who is Joshua Templeman?” “Lucinda flirting with couriers. Pathetic.” Joshua is hammering away on his keyboard. He certainly is an impressive touch typist. I stroll past his desk and am gratified by his frustrated backspacing. “I’m nice to him.” “You? Nice?” I’m surprised by how hurt I feel. “I’m lovely. Ask anyone.” “Okay. Josh, is she lovely?” he asks himself aloud. “Hmm, let me think.” He picks up his tin of mints, opens the lid, checks them, closes it, and looks at me. I open my mouth and lift my tongue like a mental patient at the medication window. “She’s got a few lovely things about her, I suppose.” I raise a finger and enunciate the words crisply: “Human resources.” He sits up straighter but the corner of his mouth moves. I wish I could use my thumbs to pull his mouth into a huge deranged grin. As the police drag me out in handcuffs I’ll be screeching, Smile, goddamn you. We need to get even, because it’s not fair. He’s gotten one of my smiles, and seen me smile at countless other people. I have never seen him smile, nor have I seen his face look anything but blank, bored, surly, suspicious, watchful, resentful. Occasionally he has another look on his face, after we’ve been arguing. His Serial Killer expression.
Sally Thorne (The Hating Game)
Honestly. He sometimes felt that humans simply had to be deliberately obtuse. What was so difficult about understanding civilized and excellently enunciated speech?
Jim Butcher (The Aeronaut's Windlass (The Cinder Spires, #1))
Education for freedom must begin by stating facts and enunciating values, and must go on to develop appropriate techniques for realizing the values and for combating those who, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the facts or deny the values.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain,” said Lord Byron, enunciating a basic Romantic idea and, perhaps, hoping that goblins, ghosts, and demons provided some necessary release
Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)
She frowned. “God, that’s sad. You want to be with her but the sex part—” I shuddered. “Ewg. You are far too young to say that word.” The girl’s eyes shone. “What word? Sex?” I put my hands over my ears. “Gah.” Molly grinned and enunciated. “But the bleep part would make her lose control.” I coughed uncomfortably, lowering my hands. “Basically. Yeah.” “Why don’t you tie her up?
Jim Butcher (Death Masks (The Dresden Files, #5))
Who would have thought a fine lady like Eden Spencer would ever look twice at a coarse ironmonger like him? Yet even now with his face a patchwork of green, yellow, and deep purple, her beautiful mossy eyes glowed with an inner light that exuded love. For him. A convicted felon. A man with neither wealth nor reputation. A man who couldn’t even properly enunciate her entire name. A man who returned her love a hundredfold.
Karen Witemeyer (To Win Her Heart)
Yelling louder does not help me understand you any better! Don't be afraid of me. Come closer to me. Bring me your gentle spirit. Speak more slowly. Enunciate more clearly. Again! Please, try again. S-l-o-w down. Be kind to me. Be a safe place for me. See that I am a wounded animal, not a stupid animal. I am vulnerable and confused. Whatever my age, whatever my credentials, reach for me. Respect me. I am in here. Come find me.
Jill Bolte Taylor (My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey)
As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.
G.K. Chesterton (Heretics)
Language has been mobilised and sent into battle; it directs the human carnage of conflict with its enunciation of emotion, stimulating souls to abandon peace.
Daniel S. Fletcher (Jackboot Britain)
Tough,” he enunciated, “titty!
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
am the general manager. Can I help you?” he said slowly, over-enunciating every word. “Yes, good evening, we have a reservation,” the woman replied in perfect English. Ormsby peered at her
Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy Book 1))
I muttered, "In the Rita skeych, you were a little hard to understand. Can you just enunciate a little more?" Stallone was unfazed. "Youcannunnastanme? Youneeme nanaunciate maw? Okay."He couldn't have been more easygoing about it. My guess is that this was not the first time in his career he had been given that note.
Tina Fey (Bossypants)
She shut her eyes: the sweet word "promiscuity" came to her mind and suffused her; she enunciated silently to herself: "promiscuity of ideas." How could such contradictory attitudes follow after one another in a single head like two mistresses in the same bed? In the past that nearly infuriated her, but today it entrances her: for she knows that the contract between what Leroy used to say and what he's professing today doesn't matter in the slightest. Because one idea is as good as another. Because all statements and positions carry the same value, can rub against one another, nestle, snuggle, fondle, mingle, diddle, cuddle, couple.
Milan Kundera
It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward.
Hart Crane (The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose)
The restaurant, Bongiorno's, was bad and didn't know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren't savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter's strained enunciation of a long list of specials.
Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)
asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m.
Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
You. Are. The. Worst,” I enunciate, pointing at her. “What’s so hard about your life? Oh, boo-hoo, you’re missing a fashion show. Oh no, your parents want you to have a good and interesting education. What a shame, you have two of them, and they both care about you.
Rachel Hawkins (Her Royal Highness (Royals, #2))
Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe: to say "the tiger" is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time.
Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings)
Thus were first enunciated what would become recurring themes of jihad literature throughout the centuries to today: piety in Islam will bring military victory. Allah will send angels to fight with the believing Muslims, such that they will conquer even against overwhelming odds.
Robert Spencer (The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS)
Then all at once he´d hear his own voice enunciating clearly and firmly, feel its reverberance along the walls and ceiling, feel ears growing tense, men and women leaning forward in their chairs, see the rows of faces quite clearly, the groups of people who couldn´t find seats crowding at the doors. Phrases like `protest, massaction, united working-class of this country and the world, revolution´, would light up the eyes and faces under him like the glare of a bonfire.
John Dos Passos (1919 (U.S.A., #2))
Can you make a house of cards?" she asked. "Yes," Violet said, and went on looking. This way Violet had of seizing first not the most obvious sense of what people said to her but some other, interior echo or reverse side of it was a thing that baffled and frustrated her husband, who sought in her sybilline responses to ordinary questions some truth he was sure Violet knew but couldn't quite enunciate. With his father-in-law's help, he had filled volumes with his searchings. Her children, though, hardly noticed it. Nora shifted from foot to foot for a moment waiting for the promised structure, and when it didn't appear forgot it. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed.
John Crowley (Little, Big)
What better weapon than the human brain? The human brain was Mrs Twartski's and Wiezenslowski's domain. The children who were used were the castaways of the United States government, like dogs abandoned and a vet's office. Mrs. Twartski read the letter out loud, slowly and carefully enunciating every word in her thick Polish accent. The German scientists were looking for children who could learn quickly, were between ages four and twelve, and could withstand being famished without dying. Deutschland were paying dollar $50,000 per subject. Everyone in living room exactly Mrs. Twartski and all my aunts let out a huge "Ahhh". My sister's and my eyes grew wide because we had no idea what this meant or why the adults were so excited. Then my sister's eyes narrowed as if she knew something that I didn't yet, as if she had just figured something out.
Wendy Hoffman (The Enslaved Queen: A Memoir About Electricity and Mind Control (The Karnac Library))
I resent you—” Robespierre said. His words were lost. “The People,” he shouted, “are everywhere good, and if they obstruct the Revolution—even, for example, at Toulon—we must blame their leaders.” “What are you going on about this for?” Danton asked him. Fabre launched himself from the wall. “He is trying to enunciate a doctrine,” he shrieked. “He thinks the time has come for a bloody sermon." “If only,” Robespierre yelled, “there were more vertu.” “More what?” “Vertu. Love of one’s country. Self-sacrifice. Civic spirit.” “One appreciates your sense of humor, of course.” Danton jerked his thumb in the direction of the noise. “The only vertu those bastards understand is the kind I demonstrate every night to my wife.
Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety)
The two of them might have met on that high place deliberately for public celebration of some rite or sacrifice. At first neither said a word. That seemed an age. At last Dr Trelawney took the initiative. Raising his right arm slightly, he spoke in a low clear voice, almost in the accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates that English is not his native tongue.
Anthony Powell (The Kindly Ones (A Dance to the Music of Time, #6))
May we do it again? She sounds remarkably bright and cheerful. 'And I didn't bleed. My mother said I would experience great agony.' 'Half an hour.' 'I beg your pardon? Your mumbling.' Eyes closed, I attempt to enunciate a little more clearly. 'In half an hour or so. Probably. And your mother was misinformed.' 'What am I suppose to do in the meantime?' 'Oh. Read a Sermon. Embroider something
Janet Mullany (Improper Relations (Lord Shad, #1))
This one is bigger than the other by at least a quarter,” he said. “That’s perspective,” Will replied stubbornly. “The left one is closer, so it looks bigger.” “If it’s perspective, and it’s that much bigger, your handcart would have to be about five meters wide,” Horace told him. “Is that what you’re planning?” Again, Will studied the drawing critically. “No. I thought maybe two meters. And three meters long.” He quickly sketched in a smaller version of the left wheel, scrubbing over the first attempt as he did so. “Is that better?” “Could be rounder,” Horace said. “You’d never get a wheel that shape to roll. It’s sort of pointy at one end.” Will’s temper flared as he decided his friend was simply being obtuse for the sake of it. He slammed the charcoal down on the table. “Well, you try drawing a perfect circle freehand!” he said angrily. “See how well you do! This is a concept drawing, that’s all. It doesn’t have to be perfect!” Malcolm chose that moment to enter the room. He had been outside, checking on MacHaddish, making sure the general was still securely fastened to the massive log that held him prisoner. He glanced now at the sketch as he passed by the table. “What’s that?” he asked. “It’s a walking cart,” Horace told him. “You get under it, so the spears won’t hit you, and go for a walk.” Will glared at Horace and decided to ignore him. He turned his attention to Malcolm. “Do you think some of your people could build me something like this?” he asked. The healer frowned thoughtfully. “Might be tricky,” he said. “We’ve got a few cart wheels, but they’re all the same size. Did you want this one so much bigger than the other?” Now Will switched his glare to Malcolm. Horace put a hand up to his face to cover the grin that was breaking out there. “It’s perspective. Good artists draw using perspective,” Will said, enunciating very clearly. “Oh. Is it? Well, if you say so.” Malcolm studied the sketch for a few more seconds. “And did you want them this squashed-up shape? Our wheels tend to be sort of round. I don’t think these ones would roll too easily, if at all.” Truth be told, Malcolm had been listening outside the house for several minutes and knew what the two friends had been discussing. Horace gave vent to a huge, indelicate snort that set his nose running. His shoulders were shaking, and Malcolm couldn’t maintain his own straight face any longer. He joined in, and the two of them laughed uncontrollably. Will eyed them coldly. “Oh, yes. Extremely amusing,” he said.
John Flanagan (The Siege of Macindaw (Ranger's Apprentice, #6))
Is this what you needed?” I grit out, enunciating my words with a sharp thrust. “You needed me to fuck this sweet little pussy, didn’t you?” “Ungg, yes!” she pants, nodding her head like a bobblehead. “Is this what you fantasized about every time you touched your pussy, wishing it was me?” Another garbled ‘yes’ comes from her throat. “But it feels so much better,” she gasps. “You feel so fucking perfect, baby,” I groan.
H.D. Carlton (Shallow River)
How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home? How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although my engagement with them has been fiece, fitful, and constantly (I think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and pollitically unresolved.
Toni Morrison (The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations)
Bankrupt when Hamilton took office, the United States now enjoyed a credit rating equal to that of any European nation. He had laid the groundwork for both liberal democracy and capitalism and helped to transform the role of the president from passive administrator to active policy maker, creating the institutional scaffolding for America’s future emergence as a great power. He had demonstrated the creative uses of government and helped to weld the states irreversibly into one nation. He had also defended Washington’s administration more brilliantly than anyone else, articulating its constitutional underpinnings and enunciating key tenets of foreign policy. “We look in vain for a man who, in an equal space of time, has produced such direct and lasting effects upon our institutions and history,” Henry Cabot Lodge was to contend. 62 Hamilton’s achievements were never matched because he was present at the government’s inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
There’s no such thing as karma,” I say, enunciating every syllable like I want to crush them with my teeth. “Or, if it does exist, it sure doesn’t give a shit about people like me. Some of us were born to be used and discarded. We can’t afford to simply go along with the flow of life, because nothing in this world has been created, built, or set up in our favor. If we want something, we have to push back against everything around us and take it by force.
Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow (Iron Widow #1))
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. One the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…) Another justice, another movement, another space-time.
Gilles Deleuze
Fucking H!” the vampire shouted, shaking his free left fist. He enunciated the g very clearly and projected his voice from his diaphragm, like a trained opera singer. “It’s fuckin’ A, not H, but yeah, Leif, go ahead, let’s throw down.” Leif paused and frowned. “Do you not mean we should throw up?” “No. See, when you throw up you’re vomiting, but when you throw down you’re starting a fight, as in throwing down the gauntlet.” “Ohhhh,” he said. “I thought you were speaking literally.
Kevin Hearne (Hexed (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #2))
And let me tell you something else, my friend," she said in the precise enunciation of a trained nurse talking to a worried patient. "It is all very easy for a man to talk about living in the present. Much more so than for a woman, who is liable to get knocked up higher than a kite every time the man enjoys himself in the present. Thats one thing I dont have to worry about, thank God. But there are a lot of others: such as what I am going to do when my husband kicks me out and then my lover throws me over when he has to support me, and me not being trained for anything but to be somebody's wife and having to do all my politicking and achieving and gain what little success I can by getting behind some stupid man and pushing him.
James Jones (From Here to Eternity)
You have lost your mind,” her mother said slowly, enunciating each word precisely. “You can’t be gay. You have a son.” Madison laughed. “Oh my God, I’m the first lesbian to get married and have a child,” she said sarcastically. “Call the newspaper!
Gerii Hill
[986a] [1] they assumed the elements of numbers to be the elements of everything, and the whole universe to be a proportion1 or number. Whatever analogues to the processes and parts of the heavens and to the whole order of the universe they could exhibit in numbers and proportions, these they collected and correlated;and if there was any deficiency anywhere, they made haste to supply it, in order to make their system a connected whole. For example, since the decad is considered to be a complete thing and to comprise the whole essential nature of the numerical system, they assert that the bodies which revolve in the heavens are ten; and there being only nine2 that are visible, they make the "antichthon"3 the tenth.We have treated this subject in greater detail elsewhere4; but the object of our present review is to discover from these thinkers too what causes they assume and how these coincide with our list of causes.Well, it is obvious that these thinkers too consider number to be a first principle, both as the material5 of things and as constituting their properties and states.6 The elements of number, according to them, are the Even and the Odd. Of these the former is limited and the latter unlimited; Unity consists of both [20] (since it is both odd and even)7; number is derived from Unity; and numbers, as we have said, compose the whole sensible universe.Others8 of this same school hold that there are ten principles, which they enunciate in a series of corresponding pairs: (1.) Limit and the Unlimited; (2.) Odd and Even; (3.) Unity and Plurality; (4.) Right and Left; (5.) Male and Female; (6.) Rest and Motion; (7.) Straight and Crooked; (8.) Light and Darkness; (9.) Good and Evil; (10.) Square and Oblong.
Aristotle (Metaphysics)
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.
Terry Eagleton (Literary Theory: An Introduction)
The reality that the West currently enjoys far more wealth and temporal power than any nation under Islam is viewed by devout Muslims as a diabolical perversity, and this situation will always stand as an open invitation for jihad. Insofar as a person is Muslim—that is, insofar as he believes that Islam constitutes the only viable path to God and that the Koran enunciates it perfectly—he will feel contempt for any man or woman who doubts the truth of his beliefs. What is more, he will feel that the eternal happiness of his children is put in peril by the mere presence of such unbelievers in the world. If such people happen to be making the policies under which he and his children must live, the potential for violence imposed by his beliefs seems unlikely to dissipate.
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
Wow.You two seem to be right as rain again," Cole said from behind us. I could hear the undercurrent of rage beneath his voice. "I hate to interrupt this sudden case of the touchy-feelies, but with the three of us standing here, it almost feels like that spring day so long ago.Almost as if Jack hand't left for camp.Almost as if Jack had nothing to do with you going under,Nik." Jack winced, but he kept his eyes on me. "You should've seen her.Did you know that when she left your dorm that night, she came straight to me? Begged to go with me. Barely able to breathe for the pain." He enunciated each word. I studied Jack's face and shook my head. Jack dropped his arm from my shoulders. "You never let me explain. I ran to you,but you drove off.You didn't trust me." There was silence for a few long moments. "Would either of you care to know my opinion?" Cole said. "Shut up," we replied at the same time. Cole shrugged. "You know where to find me." He turned and walked across the parking lot to the sidewalk that led around the corner of the post office. I watched him until he disappeared, than I faced Jack again. Jack rougly ran both of his hands through his hair. "This is a mess." It sounded like he was talking to himself, not to me. "I know how it looked, but you should've let me explain. I hated you for leaving." He looked up at the sky. "I hated you." Jack took a step backward, away from me, and as he did,a voice called out to us. "Don't let him drive you apart!" We both turned toward the sound. Mary was sitting on a bench under the shelter of the bus stop. I hadn t noticed her before.She'd been watching us. She stood and came over. "That's what he wants. He's scared of anchors. I told you I have a theory about anchors.
Brodi Ashton (Everneath (Everneath, #1))
One summer day when I was about ten, I sat on a stoop, chatting with a group of girls my age. We were all in pigtails and shorts and basically just killing time. What were we discussing? It could have been anything—school, our older brothers, an anthill on the ground. At one point, one of the girls, a second, third, or fourth cousin of mine, gave me a sideways look and said, just a touch hotly, “How come you talk like a white girl?” The question was pointed, meant as an insult or at least a challenge, but it also came from an earnest place. It held a kernel of something that was confusing for both of us. We seemed to be related but of two different worlds. “I don’t,” I said, looking scandalized that she’d even suggest it and mortified by the way the other girls were now staring at me. But I knew what she was getting at. There was no denying it, even if I just had. I did speak differently than some of my relatives, and so did Craig. Our parents had drilled into us the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin’ ” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t.” We were taught to finish off our words. They bought us a dictionary and a full Encyclopaedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we had a question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books. Dandy, too, was an influence, meticulously correcting our grammar or admonishing us to enunciate our words when we went over for dinner. The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness—to inhabit it with pride—and this filtered down to how we spoke.
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
A fourth cause of confusion has been dividedness of mind. When people have to write from a point of view which is not really their own, they are apt to betray this by hedging, blustering, an uneasy choice of words, a syntactical looseness. We mean, for example, Cabinet Ministers expressing the view of a Cabinet from which they have often considered resigning; priests, assailed by honest doubt, who must continue to enunciate church dogma; Communists uneasily following the party-line; officials relaying to the public some order from headquarters of which they disapprove; critics borrowing aesthetic standards not properly understood.
Robert Graves (The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose)
Liev Andropoulous!” the boy shouted. “You are under arrest for racketeering, slavery, and murder! You are not required to participate in questioning without the presence of an attorney or union representative!” Tiny flecks of spittle dotted the inside of the face shield. The boy’s wide eyes were almost jittering with fear. Liev sighed. “Ask me,” he said slowly, enunciating very clearly, “if I understand.” “What?” the boy shouted. “You’ve told me the charges and made the questioning statement. Now you have to ask me if I understand.” “Do you understand?” the boy barked, and Liev nodded. “Good. Better,” Liev said. “Now go fuck yourself.
James S.A. Corey (The Churn (Expanse, #0.2))
What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the whole universe… . I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously… . A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all language can embrace are the poor and ambitious human words, all, world, universe… . Then there occurred what I cannot forget nor communicate. There occurred the union with the divinity, with the universe (I do not know whether these words differ in meaning). Ecstasy does not repeat its symbols; God has been seen in a blazing light, in a sword or in the circles of a rose. I saw an exceedingly high Wheel, which was not before my eyes, nor behind me, nor to the sides, but every place at one time. That wheel was made of water, but also of fire, and it was (although the edge could be seen) infinite. Interlinked, all things that are, were, and shall be formed it, and I was one of the fibers of that total fabric… .I saw the universe and I saw the intimate designs of the universe; … I saw the faceless god concealed behind the other gods. I saw infinite processes that formed one single felicity and, understanding all, I was able to understand the script of the tiger.
Jorge Luis Borges
To love him who makes one happy, is to a reflective mind an inadequate definition of what love is; to love him who made one unhappy out of malice, is virtue; but to love him who out of love, though by a misunderstanding, yet out of love, made one unhappy – that is the formula never yet enunciated, so far as I know, but nevertheless the normal formula in reflection for what it is to love.
Søren Kierkegaard (The Point of View)
This sweetness scooped like some bright fruit plum peach apricot watermelon perhaps from myself this sweetness It is a whimsical touch, which surprises and troubles me. That this stony and prosaic woman should in her secret moments harbor such thoughts. For she was sealed from us- from everyone- with such fierceness that I had thought her incapable of yielding. I never saw her cry. She rarely smiled, and then only in the kitchen with her palette of flavors at her fingertips, talking to herself (so I thought) in the same toneless mutter, enunciating the names of herbs and spices- cinnamon, thyme, peppermint, coriander, saffron, basil, lovage- running a monotonous commentary. See the tile. Has to be the right heat. Too low, the pancake is soggy. Too high, the butter fries black, smokes, the pancake crisps. I understood because I saw in our kitchen seminars the one way in which I might win a little of her approval, and because every good war needs the occasional amnesty. Country recipes from her native Brittany were her favorites; the buckwheat pancakes we ate with everything, the far breton and kouign amann and galette bretonne that we sold in downriver Angers with our goat's cheeses and our sausage and fruit.
Joanne Harris (Five Quarters of the Orange)
Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave. The laugh that is a little too loud; the enunciation a little too round; the gesture a little too generous. They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry, about the edges of their hair.
Toni Morrison
The ordinary logic is also jealous of the explanation of negation as relation, because seeming to take away the principle of contradiction. Plato, as far as we know, is the first philosopher who distinctly enunciated this principle; and though we need not suppose him to have been always consistent with himself, there is no real inconsistency between his explanation of the negative and the principle of contradiction. Neither the Platonic notion of the negative as the principle of difference, nor the Hegelian identity of Being and Not-being, at all touch the principle of contradiction. For what is asserted about Being and Not-Being only relates to our most abstract notions, and in no way interferes with the principle of contradiction employed in the concrete. Because Not-being is identified with Other, or Being with Not-being, this does not make the proposition 'Some have not eaten' any the less a contradiction of 'All have eaten.
Plato (The Complete Works of Plato)
When you are better rested, I’ll expect you to help with the chores.” Her head whipped around so quickly that hair like copper silk lashed his arm. “What makes you think I will be here long enough for that?” “I am paying you the compliment of assuming you are intelligent.” Before she could conceal her wary surprise, he added, “Or if not, that you have at least enough common sense to realize that you would not get very far.” Ominously, he added, “If I have to go after you again, I will put aside any concern I have about why you are concealing your identity and take you straight to the authorities. Is that clear?” She paled slightly, making him twinge with guilt, but he ignored that. The threat was as much for her own good as for his peace of mind. When she murmured under her breath, he bent closer. “What was that?” Their eyes were level. Hers blazed. “I said,” she repeated, enunciating very clearly, “You’ll have to catch me first.
Josie Litton (Come Back to Me (Viking & Saxon, #3))
This is how we understand depressive psychosis today: as a bogging down in the demands of others-family job, the narrow horizon of daily duties. In such a bogging down the individual does not feel or see that he has alternatives, cannot imagine any choices or alternate ways of life, cannot release himself from the network of obligations even though these obligations no longer give him a sense of self-esteem, of primary value, of being a heroic contributor to world life even by doing his daily family and job duties. As I once speculated, the schizophrenic is not enough built into his world-what Kierkegaard has called the sickness of infinitude; the depressive, on the other hand, is built into his world too solidly, too overwhelmingly. Kierkegaard put it this way: But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by "the others." By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself...does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd. This is a superb characterization of the "culturally normal" man, the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties. Again, too, this kind of characterization must be understood as being on a continuum, at the extreme end of which we find depressive psychosis. The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid. He cannot seem to understand the situation he is in, cannot see beyond his own fears, cannot grasp why he has bogged down. Kierkegaard phrases it beautifully: If one will compare the tendency to run wild in possibility with the efforts of a child to enunciate words, the lack of possibility is like being dumb...for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath. This is precisely the condition of depression, that one can hardly breath or move. One of the unconscious tactics that the depressed person resorts to, to try to make sense out of his situation, is to see himself as immensely worthless and guilty. This is a marvelous "invention" really, because it allows him to move out of his condition of dumbness, and make some kind of conceptualization of his situation, some kind of sense out of it-even if he has to take full blame as the culprit who is causing so much needless misery to others. Could Kierkegaard have been referring to just such an imaginative tactic when he casually observed: Sometimes the inventiveness of the human imagination suffices to procure possibility....
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements. According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative. What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him.
William Lane Craig
Goethe (I don’t know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in my critical moments) said: “Man must experience his own destiny” - not a factual destiny forced on him by History, but the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. At the time of the French Revolution and also of the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. He could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the battlefield, he knew that what was then being consummated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a “personal destiny;” there are only statistical probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal destiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictatorship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgment on a society. This is why I must go somewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for me to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece of data in a category.
Sándor Márai (Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948)
Pity. I might have been willing to listen to some paltry excuses.” She looked at the clock on the mantel. “Pack your clothes and get the hell out. Right now.” They blinked. “What?” Tern said. “Pack your clothes,” she said, enunciating each word. “Get the hell out. Right now.” “This is our home,” Harding said. “Not anymore.” She picked at her nails. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Master,” she purred, and the man cringed at the attention. “I own this house and everything in it. Tern, Harding, and Mullin haven’t yet paid back their debts to poor Arobynn, so I own everything they have here—even their clothes. I’m feeling generous, so I’ll let them keep those, since their taste is shit-awful anyway. But their weapons, their client lists, the Guild … All of that is mine. I get to decide who’s in and who’s out. And since these three saw fit to accuse me of murdering my master, I say they’re out. If they try to work again in this city, on this continent, then by law and by the laws of the Guild, I have the right to hunt them down and chop them into itty-bitty pieces.” She batted her eyelashes. “Or am I wrong?” The Master’s gulp was audible. “You are correct.
Sarah J. Maas (Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass, #4))
On this particular day her father, the vicar of a parish on the sea-swept outskirts of Lower Wessex, and a widower, was suffering from an attack of gout. After finishing her household supervision Elfride became restless, and several times left the room, ascended the staircase, and knocked at her father's chamber-door. 'Come in!' was always answered in a heart out-of-door voice from the inside. 'Papa,' she said on one occasion to the fine, red-faced, handsome man of forty, who, puffing and fizzing like a bursting bottle, lay on the bed wrapped in a dressing-gown, and every now and then enunciating, in spite of himself, about one letter of some word or words that were almost oaths; 'papa, will you not come downstairs this evening?' She spoke distinctly: he was rather deaf. 'Afraid not - eh-h-h! - very much afraid I shall not, Elfride. Piph-ph-ph! I can't bear even a handkerchief upon this deuced toe of mine, much less a stocking or slipper - piph-ph-ph! There 'tis again! No, I shan't get up till tomorrow.' 'Then I hope this London man won't come; for I don't know what I should do, papa.' 'Well, it would be awkward, certainly.' 'I should hardly think he would come today.' 'Why?' 'Because the wind blows so.' 'Wind! What ideas you have, Elfride! Who ever heard of wind stopping a man from doing his business? The idea of this toe of mine coming on so suddenly!... If he should come, you must send him up to me, I suppose, and then give him some food and put him to bed in some way. Dear me, what a nuisance all this is!' 'Must he have dinner?' 'Too heavy for a tired man at the end of a tedious journey.' 'Tea, then?' 'Not substantial enough.' 'High tea, then? There is cold fowl, rabbit-pie, some pasties, and things of that kind.' 'Yes, high tea.' 'Must I pour out his tea, papa?' 'Of course; you are the mistress of the house.' 'What! sit there all the time with a stranger, just as if I knew him, and not anybody to introduce us?' 'Nonsense, child, about introducing; you know better than that. A practical professional man, tired and hungry, who has been travelling ever since daylight this morning, will hardly be inclined to talk and air courtesies tonight. He wants food and shelter, and you must see that he has it, simply because I am suddenly laid up and cannot. There is nothing so dreadful in that, I hope? You get all kinds of stuff into your head from reading so many of those novels.
Thomas Hardy (A Pair of Blue Eyes)
And the principal tenet of Pasternak’s thought—that Nature and History do not belong to two different orders but form a continuum in which human lives find themselves immersed and by which they are determined—can be articulated better through narration than through theoretical propositions. In this way these reflections become one with the broad canvas of all the humanity and nature in the novel, they do not dominate or suffocate it. The result is that, as happens with all genuine storytellers, the book’s meaning is not to be sought in the sum of the ideas enunciated but in the totality of its images and sensations, in the flavour of life, in its silences. And all the ideological proliferations, these discussions which constantly flare up and die down, about nature and history, the individual and politics, religion and poetry, as though resuming old conversations with friends long gone, create a deep echo chamber for the strictly humble events the characters undergo, and come forth (to adopt a beautiful image used by Pasternak for the revolution) ‘like a sigh which has been held back too long’. Pasternak has breathed into his whole novel a desire for the kind of novel which no longer exists.
Italo Calvino (Why Read the Classics?)
In every era, the way people raise their children is a window into their conception of human nature. When parents believed in children’s innate depravity, they beat them when they sneezed; when they believed in innate innocence, they banned the game of dodgeball. The other day when I was riding on my bicycle, I was reminded of the latest fashion in human nature when I passed a mother and her two preschoolers strolling on the side of the road. One was fussing and crying, and the other was being admonished by his mother. As I overtook the trio, I heard a stern Mommy voice enunciating one word: “EMPATHY!
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
The distinction, in God, between a trans-ontological and transpersonal Essence on the one hand, and an already relative auto-determination on the other--this last is Being or the Person--marks the whole difference between the strictly metaphysical or sapiential perspective on the one hand and cataphatic and ontologistic theories in so far as they are explicit on the other. Let us remember at this point that the Intellect--which is precisely what makes evident to us the absoluteness of the Self and the relativity of 'objectivations'--is only 'human' to the extent that it is accessible to us, but it is not so in itself; it is essentially *increatus et increabile* (Eckhart), although 'accidentally' created by virtue of its reverberations in the macrocosm and in microcosms; geometrically speaking, the Intellect is a ray rather than a circle, it 'emanates' from God rather than 'reflecting' Him. 'Allah is known to Himself alone' say the Sufis; this saying, while it apparently excludes man from a direct and total knowledge, in reality enunciates the essential and mysterious divinity of pure Intellect; formulae of this kind are only fully understandable in the light of the often quoted hadith: 'He who knows his soul knows his Lord.
Frithjof Schuon (Light on the Ancient Worlds: A New Translation with Selected Letters (Library of Perennial Philosophy))
A perfect birthday poem called ‘When You Are Old.’” Everyone chortled, and Eoin looked confused. “Are you old, Mother?” he asked. “No, darling boy. I’m ageless,” I answered. Everyone laughed again, but the O’Toole sisters urged Thomas on, pleading for the poem. Thomas stood, and with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slightly hunched, he began. “When you are old and grey and full of sleep . . .” Thomas enunciated “old and grey,” and everyone tittered again, but I knew the poem well, knew every word, and my heart had turned to liquid in my chest. “When you are old and grey and full of sleep,” he repeated over the chuckling, “and nodding by the fire, take down this book, and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; how many loved your moments of glad grace, and loved your beauty with love false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face.” The room had grown quiet, and Maggie’s lips trembled, the soft sweetness of memory gleaming in her eyes. It was the kind of poem that made old women remember how it felt to be young. As he spoke, Thomas looked at everyone in turn, but the poem was for me; I was the pilgrim soul with a changing face. He finished, reflecting on how love fled and “paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” Everyone clapped and stamped their feet, and Thomas bowed jauntily, accepting the praise. But he met my gaze before taking his seat. When I dragged my eyes away, I found Brigid
Amy Harmon (What the Wind Knows)
Stalin was the most audible and powerful spokesman in the campaign against what he contemptuously called uravnilovka (leveling). His hostility - voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms - was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin's anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as "fashionable leftists", "blockheads", "petty bourgeois nonsense" and "silly chatter," thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic, and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audience.
Richard Stites
The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.
Ashim Shanker (Don't Forget to Breathe (Migrations, Volume I))
At eight-thirty that night Ian stood on the steps outside Elizabeth’s uncle’s town house suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to murder Elizabeth’s butler, who seemed to be inexplicably fighting down the impulse to do bodily injury to Ian. “I will ask you again, in case you misunderstood me the last time,” Ian enunciated in a silky, ominous tone that made ordinary men blanch. “Where is your mistress?” Bentner didn’t change color by so much as a shade. “Out!” he informed the man who’d ruined his young mistress’s life and had now appeared on her doorstep, unexpected and uninvited, no doubt to try to ruin it again, when she was at this very moment attending her first ball in years and trying bravely to live down the gossip he had caused. “She is out, but you do not know where she is?” “I did not say so, did I?” “Then where is she?” “That is for me to know and you to ponder.” In the last several days Ian had been forced to do a great many unpleasant things, including riding across half of England, dealing with Christina’s irate father, and finally dealing with Elizabeth’s repugnant uncle, who had driven a bargain that still infuriated him. Ian had magnanimously declined her dowry as soon as the discussion began. Her uncle, however, had the finely honed bargaining instincts of a camel trader, and he immediately sensed Ian’s determination to do whatever was necessary to get Julius’s name on a betrothal contract. As a result, Ian was the first man to his knowledge who had ever been put in the position of purchasing his future wife for a ransom of $150,000. Once he’d finished that repugnant ordeal he’d ridden off to Montmayne, where he’d sopped only long enough to switch his horse for a coach and get his valet out of bed. Then he’d charged off to London, stopped at his town house to bathe and change, and gone straight to the address Julius Cameron had given him. Now, after all that, Ian was not only confronted by Elizabeth’s absence, he was confronted by the most insolent servant he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. In angry silence he turned and walked down the steps. Behind him the door slammed shut with a thundering crash, and Ian paused a moment to turn back and contemplate the pleasure he was going to have when he sacked the butler tomorrow.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
For we conceive it as the aim of a philosopher, as such, to do somewhat more than define and formulate the common normal opinions of mankind. His function is to tell men what they ought to think, rather than what they do think: he is expected to transcend Common Sense in his premises, and is allowed a certain divergence from Common Sense in his conclusions. It is true that the limits of this deviation are firmly, though indefinitely, fixed: the truth of a philosopher's premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions: if in any important point he be found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method is likely to be declared invalid. Still, though he is expected to establish and concatenate at least the main part of the commonly accepted moral rules, he is not necessarily bound to take them as the basis on which his own system is constructed. Rather, we should expect that the history of Moral Philosophy--so far at least as those whom we may call orthodox thinkers are concerned--would be a history of attempts to enunciate, in full breadth and clearness, those primary intuitions of Reason, by the scientific application of which the common moral thought of mankind may be at once systematized and corrected.
Henry Sidgwick (The Methods of Ethics, 7th Edition (Hackett Classics))
There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence under the sea; No cries announcing birth, No sounds declaring death. There is silence when the milt is laid on the spawn in the weeds and fungus of the rock-clefts; And silence in the growth and struggle for life. The bonitoes pounce upon the mackerel, And are themselves caught by the barracudas, The sharks kill the barracudas And the great molluscs rend the sharks, And all noiselessly-- Though swift be the action and final the conflict, The drama is silent. There is no fury upon the earth like the fury under the sea. For growl and cough and snarl are the tokens of spendthrifts who know not the ultimate economy of rage. Moreover, the pace of the blood is too fast. But under the waves the blood is sluggard and has the same temperature as that of the sea. There is something pre-reptilian about a silent kill. Two men may end their hostilities just with their battle-cries, 'The devil take you,' says one. 'I'll see you in hell,' says the other. And these introductory salutes followed by a hail of gutturals and sibilants are often the beginning of friendship, for who would not prefer to be lustily damned than to be half-heartedly blessed? No one need fear oaths that are properly enunciated, for they belong to the inheritance of just men made perfect, and, for all we know, of such may be the Kingdom of Heaven. But let silent hate be put away for it feeds upon the heart of the hater. Today I watched two pairs of eyes. One pair was black and the other grey. And while the owners thereof, for the space of five seconds, walked past each other, the grey snapped at the black and the black riddled the grey. One looked to say--'The cat,' And the other--'The cur.' But no words were spoken; Not so much as a hiss or a murmur came through the perfect enamel of the teeth; not so much as a gesture of enmity. If the right upper lip curled over the canine, it went unnoticed. The lashes veiled the eyes not for an instant in the passing. And as between the two in respect to candour of intention or eternity of wish, there was no choice, for the stare was mutual and absolute. A word would have dulled the exquisite edge of the feeling. An oath would have flawed the crystallization of the hate. For only such culture could grow in a climate of silence-- Away back before emergence of fur or feather, back to the unvocal sea and down deep where the darkness spills its wash on the threshold of light, where the lids never close upon the eyes, where the inhabitants slay in silence and are as silently slain.
E.J. Pratt
If the symbolic father is often lurking behind the boss--which is why one speaks of 'paternalism' in various kinds of enterprises--there also often is, in a most concrete fashion, a boss or hierarchic superior behind the real father. In the unconscious, paternal functions are inseparable from the socio-professional and cultural involvements which sustain them. Behind the mother, whether real or symbolic, a certain type of feminine condition exists, in a socially defined imaginary context. Must I point out that children do not grow up cut off from the world, even within the family womb? The family is permeable to environmental forces and exterior influences. Collective infrastructures, like the media and advertising, never cease to interfere with the most intimate levels of subjective life. The unconscious is not something that exists by itself to be gotten hold of through intimate discourse. In fact, it is only a rhizome of machinic interactions, a link to power systems and power relations that surround us. As such, unconscious processes cannot be analyzed in terms of specific content or structural syntax, but rather in terms of enunciation, of collective enunciative arrangements, which, by definition, correspond neither to biological individuals nor to structural paradigms... The customary psychoanalytical family-based reductions of the unconscious are not 'errors.' They correspond to a particular kind of collective enunciative arrangement. In relation to unconscious formation, they proceed from the particular micropolitics of capitalistic societal organization. An overly diversified, overly creative machinic unconscious would exceed the limits of 'good behavior' within the relations of production founded upon social exploitation and segregation. This is why our societies grant a special position to those who specialize in recentering the unconscious onto the individuated subject, onto partially reified objects, where methods of containment prevent its expansion beyond dominant realities and significations. The impact of the scientific aspirations of techniques like psychoanalysis and family therapy should be considered as a gigantic industry for the normalization, adaption and organized division of the socius. The workings of the social division of labor, the assignment of individuals to particular productive tasks, no longer depend solely on means of direct coercion, or capitalistic systems of semiotization (the monetary remuneration based on profit, etc.). They depend just as fundamentally on techniques modeling the unconscious through social infrastructures, the mass media, and different psychological and behavioral devices...Even the outcome of the class struggle of the oppressed--the fact that they constantly risk being sucked into relations of domination--appears to be linked to such a perspective.
Félix Guattari (Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977)