Episode 1 Quotes

When you can't win the fight, you get bigger guns." - Episode 14, "Better Space Than Never

It’s four o’clock, guys. I’m going up to watch Oprah. Unless the shop catches fire or we’re under massive zombie invasion, I don’t exist for the next hour. On second thought, don’t bother me if it’s zombies – I’ll deal with them later. Today’s a special episode on how to make peace with people who piss you off. And I definitely need to find my Zen. (Bubba) Your Zen’s shooting stuff, Bubba. Embrace your inner violence. (Mark) Fine, then. My inner violence says I’ll cut your throat if you bother me until Oprah ends, so sod off. (Bubba)

The three of us, working together to save the world. Me, my ex-girlfriend, and the guy she dumped me for.” His mouth twisted into a half smile. “This has to be the most screwed up situation three teenagers have ever found themselves in.” “I think I saw an episode of Gossip Girl like that once,” I offered.

It's going to be legen...wait for it...and I hope you're not lactose-intolerant cause the second half of that word is...dairy!

We understand the lights. We understand the lights above the Arby’s. We understand so much. But the sky behind those lights, mostly void, partially stars, that sky reminds us: We don’t understand even more.

Believe it or not, I was not always as awesome as I am today

Krista asks,"What is it about society that disappoints you so much?" Elliot thinks, "Oh I don't know, is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit; the world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck Society." "Mr. Robot" season 1 episode 1, 'ohellofriend.mov

Cross!" I called. I just couldn't bring myself to say "Archer" out loud. I'd have felt like I was in an episode of Masterpiece Theatre: "Archer! Let us fetch a spot of tea, old boy!

Every year the hunters shot cows and horses and family pets and each other. And unbelievably, they sometimes shot themselves, perhaps in a psychotic episode where they mistook themselves for dinner

If you added up all the really significant episodes in your life they'd probably come to less than sixty minutes.

In my case, intelligence was a disease that had led to a psychotic episode.

Lucien shook Magnus off, who came over to Caia to make sure she was OK. She nodded numbly at her uncle but kept her eyes on the two males who looked ready to battle it out. And over her. Oh goddess it was like an episode of The Vampire Diaries, she groaned.

Dude.. where's your suit? Just once, when I say "suit up" I wish you'd put on a suit.

Silence is golden. Words are vibrations. Thoughts are magic.

Some days the weather happens and we never look up or go outside and that’s okay too.

Without love, it cannot be seen.

That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious).

Bartimaeus: "A small piece of advice," I said "it isn't wise to be rude to someone bigger than you, especially when they've just trapped you under a boulder." Imp: "You can stick your advice up...." "This brief pause replaces a short, censored episode, characterized by bad language and some sadly necessary violence. When we pick up the story again, everything is as before, except that I am perspiring slightly and the contrite imp is the model of cooperation." Bartimaeus: "I'll ask again: who is Rupert Deveraeux?" Imp: "He's the British Prime Minister, oh Most Bounteous and Merciful one.

We are not history yet. We are happening now. How miraculous is that?

Don’t worry. Don’t worry. All is as it was meant to be. It was meant to be lonely and terrifying and unfair and fleeting. Don’t worry.

But here is the truth of nostalgia: We don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us but that we didn’t take.

Your existence is not impossible, but it’s also not very likely.

Condoms aren’t a hundred percent you know,” he reminds me calmly. My mind flashes to a certain episode of Friends, and I suddenly feel like yelling out that they should put that on the outside of the box.

He was acting like one of those crazy sons of bitches that you see on an episode of Hoarders. You know, the one who can’t let go of an old sock because their dog gave birth on it.” --Rod

No one. The room was empty. Cassie stood there, blinking back tears.

I don't like seeing myself on camera." But that's not it--that sounds shallow, like I'm worried I'll look fat or something. "It's like somebody is walking on my grave. TV immortalizes you. The episodes are what my family would watch if I died.

Remember: If you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.

History is us squinting into the past, mistaking millions of tiny vibrations in all directions for unified, unidirectional movements by entire civilizations.

Everything is exciting, particularly existence. Existence is the most thrilling fact of all.

Wednesday has been canceled due to a scheduling error.

Shadow had noticed that you only ever catch one episode of shows you don't watch, over and over, years apart: he thought it must be some kind of cosmic law.

I've watched every episode of Poirot and Midsomer Murders on TV. I never guess the ending and I can't wait for the moment when the detective gathers all the suspects in the room and, like a magician conjuring silk scarves out of the air, makes the whole thing make sense.

And night falls on you too. You have survived, survived everything up to this moment. Grip tight, hum, laugh, cry. Forget nothing and think many things of it. Goodnight. Goodnight. Goodnight.

melted

Valentine's Day is a disaster. Any day that is designed to perfectly encapsulate something as messy and personal as two people in a romantic relationship would have to be. But in Night Vale it also kills people. This is called satire.

It was a shitshow of emotional carnage, just pure tear-soaked chaos worse than any Grey’s Anatomy episode.

I cocked an ear, but there was nothing much to hear. A girl was on the phone next door, complaining about some guy to a girlfriend, and someone down a floor was either talking to his cat or having a psychotic episode, but both voices were clearer than the soft noises coming from the living room. The vamps were presumably cleaning the wounds better than I’d been able to do at the bar, and bandaging him up. I knew nobody was planning a snack– it would be like offering people used to Beluga caviar and Dom Perignon a sack of stale Fritos and a flat Coke. Sloppy seconds weren’t likely to appeal.

Newsflash she already has body image issues.  It's an intrinsic part of being a woman. Every woman in the world has some part of herself that she absolutely hates.  Her hands are too small, her feet are too big, her hair is too straight, too curly, her ears stick out, her bums too flat, her nose is too big and, you know, nothing you can say will change how we feel.  What men don't understand is, the right clothes, the right shoes, the right makeup it just... It, it hides the flaws we think we have.  They make us look beautiful to ourselves.  That's what makes us look beautiful to others. Used to be all she needed to feel beautiful was a pink tutu and a plastic tiara. And we spend our whole lives trying to feel that way again.

Remember, this is America. Vote correctly or never see your loved ones again.

In breaking news, the sky. The earth. Life. Existence as an unchanging plain with horizons of birth and death in the faint distance.

Fiddling with damp tarragon left me so intensely irritated that when I was done I had to stick the ramekin/mise en place bowls back in the fridge and go watch both the episode where Xander is possessed by a demon and the one where Giles regresses to his outrageously sexy teen self and has sex with Buffy’s mom, just to get over it.

Today is the last day of your life up to this point.

Walking to the subway, Aomame kept thinking about the strangeness of the world. If, as the dowager had said, we were nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose – to transmit DNA – be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives? … how could it possibly profit the genes to have such people existing in this world? Did the genes merely enjoy such deformed episodes as colorful entertainment, or were these episodes utilized by them for some greater purpose?

At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history every published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but not recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.

Along those lines, to get personal for a moment, I think the best way to die would be swallowed by a giant snake. Going feet first and whole into a slimy maw would give your life perfect symmetry.

Caroline, I, Jesus, how do I say this without sounding like an episode of Dawson’s Creek?” He stumbled the words while talking into my neck. I couldn’t help it, I chuckled a little as Pacey flashed into my head, and that brought him back. I pulled away a bit so I could see him, and he smiled ruefully.

ONE DAY, YOU WILL DISCOVER YOUR PURPOSE, AND THEN YOU WILL TELL NO ONE. AND THEN YOU WILL DIE.

Some mysteries aren’t questions to be answered but just a kind of opaque fact, a thing which exists to be not known.

Pain is just weakness leaving the body, and then being replaced by pain. Lots of pain.

Where are you supposed to stay?” He ground out... “Hendrix, are you kidding me?” “By me, Reagan. Always, by me,” he answered, ignoring my sarcasm.

If you say guns kill people one more time, I will shoot you with a gun, and you will, coincidentally, die.

I... Furudo Erika... have DUCT TAPE!!

Whoever you are now, you are home.

Sitting alone in the dark, watching the show on my laptop, I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family. That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious).

If he were cast in my Zombie version of Vampire Diaries, he so would have been Stefan, the very brother I wanted to watch die of something grotesque and gruesome. Team Daemon every single day.

Weird at last. Weird at last. God Almighty, weird at last.

Could of, should of, would of....... didn't

We've grown into a whole - we're not just tiny episodes of good and bad.

life was to be measured by the color and variety of its episodes,

I can't believe she tricked me into spending another day with her. I have a life, I want to tell her. I have four episodes of Myth Busters to catch up on. Okay, I don't have a life.

Each day the sun rises and sets. The moon pulls the tides. Our hearts beat. Our loved ones love us back. And we share our inhales and exhales with the great organism that is our tiny planet.

There always seems to be something upsetting you. You should relax more. It’s not that there’ s nothing coming to get you, there’s everything coming to get you…but relax anyway, just on principle.

Unbelievable! You are unbelievable! First you ruin my life and then you blame it on my period!

Looking for a snack? Try wheat or a wheat by-product. Dinner? Wheat &/or its by-product. Trying to patch a leaky roof? We have just the thing for you, and we also have its by-product.

My father then said, ‘Mike, I’ve told you how dinosaurs went extinct. An asteroid crashed into the Earth. The world first became a sea of fire, and then sank into a prolonged period of darkness and coldness.… One night, you woke from a nightmare, saying that you had dreamt that you were back in that terrifying age. Let me tell you now what I wanted to tell you that night: If you really lived during the Cretaceous Period, you’d be fortunate. The period we live in now is far more frightening. Right now, species on Earth are going extinct far faster than during the late Cretaceous. Now is truly the age of mass extinctions! So, my child, what you’re seeing is nothing. This is only an insignificant episode in a much vaster process. We can have no sea birds, but we can’t be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil? Your last birthday, I gave you that lovely Ferrari and promised you that you could drive it after you turned fifteen. But without oil, it would be a pile of junk metal and you’d never drive it. Right now, if you want to visit your grandfather, you can get there on my personal jet and cross the ocean in a dozen hours or so. But without oil, you’d have to tumble in a sailboat for more than a month.… These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.

Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue. Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive. You could say I covered all the bases. I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single one of their films, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC

For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of “world” history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in his “world” history are epoch-making.

PROVERB: Eating meat is a difficult moral decision, because it’s stolen, that meat. You should apologize.

forget about it; if today never becomes a yesterday, at least you can make peace with today. What already happened we can't change, but we can change what happens next!

I wanted to indulge in him, to taste skin and sin and sweetness and make time stop. (Emma)

Decisions to start a war always come down to what is in the best interests of the powerful few.

Now, there is some concern about the fact that, given we are in the middle of a desert, there is no actual water at the waterfront. And that is a definite drawback, I agree.

It reminded me of seeing a preview for a new soap opera episode; not matter how off-the-wall my theories were, the show's writers always came up with something unexpected.

Your perpetual loop of teen angst? Or as you put it, your own personal episode of 'Dawson's Creek' playing over and over, like a demented 'Groundhog Day'?

[Reggie] had a way of picking the bad ideas, which is why we should’ve just said no. (from GAMELAND Episode 1: Deep into the Game)

What is happening? This is just like that episode of Cops I watched where the guy ate some bath salts and then stole Funyuns from the gas station. It’s crazy!

Together they made cold cuts and wine and spent the rest of the night on the couch watching old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.

The sun goes down, but it always comes up again. No matter how dark, no night lasts forever, so I'll start again one step at a time. -Tohru Honda (Season 3, Episode 1.)

Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the tabletop, and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid, single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held. It is impossible, no matter how blessed you are by luck or the government or some remote, invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind, it is impossible not to feel a little sad looking at that bit of wax, that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take. ... ... But then you remember, I remember, that we are even now in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment and it is still falling, still volatile, and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now, where we never can know what shape the next moment will take. Stay tune fore... well, let's just find out together, shall we?

What are you doing?' If I texted back too soon, he would think I wasn't doing anything and then he would probably try to come over. I watched another episode before texting him again: 'Watching Kim K. shop for a dress. You?' He texted back: 'Standing outside your door'. Shit!

America, is there lipstick on my teeth?" Zoe asked. I turned to my left and found her smiling maniacally, exposing all her pearly whites. "No, you're good," I answered, seeing out of the corner of my eye that Marlee was nodding in confirmation. "Thanks. How is he so calm?" Zoe asked, pointing over at Maxon, who was talking to a member of the crew. She then bent down and put her head between her legs and started doing controlled breathing. Marlee and I looked at each other, eyes wide with amusement, and tried not to laugh. It was hard if we looked at Zoe, so we surveyed the room and chatted about what others were wearing. There were several girls in seductive reds and lively greens, but no one else in blue. Olivia had gone so far as to wear orange. I'd admit that I didn't know that much about fashion, but Marlee and I both agreed that someone should have intervened on her behalf. The color made her skin look kind of green. Two minutes before the cameras turned on, we realized it wasn't the dress making her look green. Olivia vomited into the closest trash can very loudly and collapsed on the floor. Silvia swooped in, and a fuss was made to wipe the sweat off her and get her into a seat. She was placed in the back row with a small receptacle at her feet, just in case. Bariel was in the seat in front of her. I couldn't hear what she muttered to the poor girl from where I was, but it looked like Bariel was prepared to injure Olivia should she have another episode near her. I guessed that Maxon had seen or heard some of the commotion, and I looked over to see if he was having any sort of reaction to it all. But he wasn't looking toward the disturbance; he was looking at me. Quickly-so quickly it would look like nothing but scratching an itch to anyone else-Maxon reached up and tugged on his ear. I repeated the action back, and we both turned away. I was excited to know that tonight, after dinner, Maxon would be stopping by my room.

Settling in to be another clear night and pretty evening here in Night Vale. I hope all of you out there have someone to sleep through it with. Or, at least, good memories of when you did.

You know, they always say, “If you’re trying to meet someone, you may never find them. But it’s when you’re not looking, that’s when they find you.” I’ve always heard this in reference to government agents, but I think it applies to dating as well.

Art3mis also ran her own vidfeed channel, Art3mivision, and I always kept one of my monitors tuned to it. Right now, she was airing her usual Monday evening fare: an episode of Square Pegs. After that would

A King Charles spaniel named Camilla Parker Bowles. Fucking Americans. Black, Tasha (2014-12-22). Fate of the Alpha: Episode 1: A Tarker's Hollow Serial (Kindle Location 1321). 13th Story Press. Kindle Edition.

Olivia’s head rests against my arm the whole ride back to her place. Our legs are aligned and pressing, our hands entwined on top of my thigh. I turn my head just slightly and inhale the addictive jasmine scent of her hair. There’s a cable show, My Strange Addiction—one of the most insane things I ever saw, one episode was about a wanker who was obsessed with sniffing women’s hair. I’m sorry I judged you, wanker. I get it now.

the hospital treated 11,602 patients, sixty-four a day, for injuries and ailments that suggest that the mundane sufferings of people have not changed very much over the ages. The list included: 820 cases of diarrhea; 154, constipation; 21, hemorrhoids; 434, indigestion; 365, foreign bodies in the eyes; 364, severe headaches; 594 episodes of fainting, syncope , and exhaustion; 1 case of extreme flatulence; and 169 involving teeth that hurt like hell.

I took a walk on the cool sand dunes, brittle grass overgrown, and above me, in the night sky, above me, I saw. Bitter taste of unripe peaches and a smell I could not place, nor could I escape. I remembered other times that I could not escape. I remembered other smells. The moon slunk like a wounded animal. The world spun like it had lost control. Concentrate only on breathing and let go of ideas you had about nutrition and alarm clocks. I took a walk on the cool sand dunes, brittle grass overgrown, and above me, in the night sky, above me, I saw. This message brought to you by Coca-Cola.

Words are an unnecessary trouble. Expression is time wasting away. Any communication is just a yelp in the darkness.

If you looked at any single word in the English language close enough, you would see within the great glowing coils of the universe unwinding.

Adulthood is just a number.

We have no form, therefore we fear it and because we are formless, we revere it, thus we are slain

It was a war, and in a war there are always casualties. Never winners, but always plenty of casualties." -- Nenya, The Water Warrior

I think a fantasy is what the heart whispers to silence a busy mind. (Caleb)

I’d never been handcuffed or spanked, but when he spoke, when his gaze traveled over my body, I felt like he was doing both, with his mouth…with his eyes.

Please, don't be afraid of being happy. Becoming happy isn't the same thing as accepting your current misfortune. It means creating a new happiness out of your current misfortune.

Backward glances are not encouraged.

One death has already been attributed to the Glow Cloud. But listen, it's probably nothing. If we had to shut down the town for every mysterious event that at least one death could be attributed to, we'd never have time to do anything, right?

During its sixteen years in the field, it achieved a series of seemingly impossible tasks, culminating with the destruction of a 488-year-old vampire who had been secretly controlling the wheat industry for 252 of those years. Keep in mind that in an episode that occurred in 1980, it took forty-five soldiers to kill a sixty-four-year-old vampire. Gestalt is tough.

La prochaine fois que vous faites venir un barde, je lui ouvre le bide de là à là, j'lui sors les boyaux et je file sa langue à bouffer aux chiens. C'est clair, ça ? (Arthur à Guenièvre)

The Night Vale Medical Board has issued a new study indicating that you have a spider somewhere on your body at all times but especially now. The study said that further research would be needed to determine exactly where on your body this spider is and what its intentions are, only that it is definitely there and is statistically likely to be one of the really ugly ones.

The problem with your generation,” the professor preached, sticking his hands into his pockets, “is a bloated sense of entitlement. You feel owed everything, and you want it now. Why suffer the sweet agony of watching a television series just to find out the big reveal you’ve waited years to discover when you can just wait for the entire series to appear on Netflix and watch all fifty episodes in three days, right?” “Exactly!” a guy on the other side of the room blurted out. “Work smarter, not harder.

Writing episodically meant that when I finished one episode I had no idea about what the next one would contain. When, in the twists and turns of the plot, some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things that had gone before, I was as surprised as anyone else.

Episodic memories get stored in the hippocampus as our stories—our interpretation of events with our emotional responses attached to them. These are memories that are tied to serious emotional reactions. If something happened in your life that was really significant to you, the emotions tied to that memory become attached like cat hair or static cling. So when we have an emotional response in the future, the amygdala immediately pulls this EAM file in order to decide how to respond. What fires together, wires together.

You don’t remember?” Hendrix asked with narrowed eyes. “Then we’ll talk about it later. I’ll help you remember.” His voice was smooth sex appeal as it washed over my body and I shivered involuntarily.

She said if good-hearted families travel to Night Vale only to find their subconsciouses besieged with unforgettable revelations, horrors buried so deep as to be completely indescribable, revealing wholly unbearable new truths, then we certainly can't expect these people to return, let alone leave good Yelp ratings for local businesses.

But it appears that I am willing to put up with many things for the sake of Jamie Watson. He is fond of watching old episodes of The X-Files, which is, to the best of my understanding, a show about a rather appallingly dumb man who is nevertheless very attractive, and aliens.

Told you," said Mick. "Things comin' together. We set off lookin' for the Utz kids an' find a tree full o' everybody. That's magic, too." "It's like a story." "Same thing. The universe don't like plot. Story is magic's way o' telling the universe to sod off." "That's good then, right?" said Scott. After this episode with Emily, he was ready for some optimism. "Magic wants us all to live happily ever after." "Not necessarily," Mick answered. "Magic likes a good tragedy, too.

The study found widespread dissatisfaction with our town's public library, and, when considering the facts, it's easy to see why. The public computers for Internet use are outdated and slow. The lending period of fourteen days is not nearly long enough to read lengthier books, given the busy schedule of all our lives. The fatality rate is also well above the national average for public libraries.

Medical conditions: (1) Sleep problems, possibly inherited from grandfather. (2) Hospital phobia. (3) Bookworm disease. (4) Possible addiction to watching old Columbo, Midsomer Murders, and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries episodes. Personality traits: Shy but curious. Occasionally cowardly. Excellent with details. Good observer.

We all want to live forever, right? Wrong! Think about watching your family die as you selfishly carry on. Your children aging and passing, your grandchildren, and so on. Think of all of the friends you’ll make but eventually lose. You don’t want that! No! You know the earth is eventually going to be swallowed by the sun, right? And one day you would be present for this greatest of all apocalypses. As fascinating as this event would be, scientifically speaking, this excitement would fade as the pain of thousand-degree flames engulfed your tender body and your aged mind would be so alone in this interminable torture. Does this sound like something you want? We didn't think so. Immortality is stupid. Think before you wish. This message brought to you by DIRECTV.

You are sauntering along the back streets of Avallon; you step into a tavern for a cup of wine. A great lummox claims that you have molested his wife; he takes up his cutlass and comes at you. So now! With your knife! Draw and throw! All in a single movement! You advance, pull your knife from the villain's neck, wipe it on his sleeve. If in fact you have molested the dead churl's wife, bid her begone! The episode has quite dampened your spirit. But you are attacked from another side by another husband. Quick!

We have survived all the way from birth to this very moment, and we look at each other, and some of us start laughing, and others start weeping, and one or two of us break out into a wordless humming song. And all of us mean the exact same thing. Look at us! Look at us out in the honey light of the finished day! Look at us and rejoice in our sheer being!

EVERYTHING YOU DO MATTERS EXCEPT YOUR LIFE. DEATH WILL BE THE LAST ACTION YOU UNDERTAKE.

Many find it difficult to breathe without the atmosphere but we knew how. We just stopped breathing.

I’m highly contagious, quarantined to another body I’ve since infected. I will seep into you if you hold me too tightly.

Sunday morning the Night Vale PTA will be holding a raffle. Tickets are only $2 each, and the winner, as usual, will never be heard from again.

Women need to recognize their worth. Stop blaming themselves, and take it as a lesson learned, and move

doing good required taking risks.

The one truth he knew above all else was that faith had no power unless it was chosen freely.

It was the freedom to experiment that made this experiment called Freedom possible.

And that meant STDs. Why? Because men would always be sluts. Always.

Give me the Black Death over a Victorian prude any day. At least the dying screw like it's their last day on earth.

this creature?” Elias went on, in

Looks like you’ve got a case of misogynitis. The only cure I can offer you is to surgically remove that thumb up your ass and for you to start treating her like a person. Got it?

My body, my soul and my mind, simultaneously response to good music.

You turn to me and ask, “Do you ever think about suicide?” I look away from you and close my eyes, eat the raspberries to confuse the blood in my mouth.

One murder kit - check. One body disposal kit - check. Escape car gassed up - check. I feel like a well-prepared criminal.

Oblivion was increasingly attractive, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking could even begin to solve the problem?

You must unlearn what you have learned.1 —YODA, IN STAR WARS: EPISODE V—THE EMPIRE STRIKES

If life were a Star Trek episode - and how awesome would that be? - slipping would be the equivalent of beaming up, minus the cheesy sound effects and assistance from Scotty.

We have big dreams - sometimes scary, unforgettable dreams that repeat on the same date every year and are shared by every person in town - but we make those big dreams come true. Remember the clock tower? It took eight years and $23 million to build, and despite its invisibility and constant teleportation, it is a lovely structure that keeps impeccable time.

When Provine studied 1,200 episodes of laughter overheard in public settings, his biggest surprise was finding that speakers laugh more than listeners—about 50 percent more, in fact.

But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end.

Stories become great by hacking your brain. Nothing that happens in fiction matters. The people in fiction are fictional so their triumphs and tragedies have literally no consequence. The death of the yogurt you doomed to a fiery death in your gut acid this morning is finitely more tragic than the "deaths" of Romeo and Juliet. The yogurt was alive and then it died. Romeo and Juliet never lived in the first place.

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts—manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story.

Her name is Lilliana Atwater. Mid-twenties, dyed red hair, was last seen in a yellow raincoat. Any reports or injuries or anything in your neck of the woods?” “Nope,” Joy said, “can’t say that it rings a bell. Have you tried Springton?” Gee, no, I didn’t try the town NEXT to Tarker’s Hollow. Black, Tasha (2014-12-22). Fate of the Alpha: Episode 1: A Tarker's Hollow Serial (Kindle Locations 1666-1668). 13th Story Press. Kindle Edition.

Teaser from the soon to be released: Redemption of Fire; My Demon Master Book 2. (with Reference to the character, Cain, from Dormant Desires, Book 4; CAIN. In the oddest, surreal moment, I look out and see one lone face. It’s Cain, the chimera by curse and not birth. He’s been welcomed into Demon-kind as one of them. Almost a treasured being for all his uniqueness. In all reality, he is the most divine among us. The product of an angel and a Neanderthal. A very son of the first Eve. It is he alone who is not prostrate before me. Our eyes lock and my vision goes wonky. I can see details and colors and etched outlines like I never imagined. I see Cain’s magnificent aura as it embraces him like a full-body halo. He is watching the spectacle that is me with detached interest. It’s as if he has truly seen everything there is too see and this is nothing more than a repeat of some long forgotten original episode. He is unafraid. I can feel how calm he is. Before he drops his eyes, surrendering to the dominance of my dragon, he gives me a slightly amused expression and a small nod of encouragement.

Having adventures,” I replied. “Episode III of ‘The Perils of Pamela.’ ” I told her the whole story. She gave vent to a deep sigh when I finished. “Why do these things always happen to you?” she demanded plaintively. “Why does no one gag me and bind me hand and foot?” “You wouldn’t like it if they did,” I assured her. “To tell you the truth, I’m not nearly so keen on having adventures myself as I was. A little of that sort of thing goes a long way.

It is very easy to destroy something. And very difficult to repair it again. Magic is much the same way. Magic that destroys and kills is very simple to master. Weak witches who fall victim to the temptations of easy power, therefore, grow lax in their study of true magic. The true magic is the ability to repair. The power to revive. That which calls back joy that has been shattered. That which brings back warmth to love gone cold. […] The world of humanity is full of separation, loss, and mourning. Everyone lives their lives seeking the means to evade or bear that sadness. But for a witch with the power to endlessly regenerate, any concept of destruction or decay no longer applies. The Endless Witch is free of all worldly suffering, certain of eternal bliss.

The beautiful thing about Kevin - besides Kevin himself - is how his voice is so different from Cecil's. It worked perfectly for the duality in this episode. Cecil's voice is deep, dark, serious. Kevin's is bright, light, and smiling. So much smiling. He appears only briefly in this part of the episode, but the first time I heard the audio file, it really did bring tears to my eyes. Kevin's character is so utterly horrifying and with such a chipper, sunny voice. I didn't know whether I was laughing or crying.

Ah, it says that the City Council believes the reason for the violent reaction of the Shape Formerly in Grove Park that No One Acknowledges or Speaks about is because I have been acknowledging and speaking about it, which has made it angry. They urge me to stop speaking of it, and never do it again, and in exchange they'll move it somewhere else so we can get our front loading zone back.

mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll.

He smiled and as his lips parted, little bits of solid waste fell from them. Hellelujah, we can only be what we are, I thought and wondered if I was as repulsive to him as he was to me. I don't think so, because even though he literally wore a shit-eating grin, I sensed he was genuinely happy to see me

But, as you watch the sun rise again tomorrow morning, think to yourself: past performance is not a predictor of future results. And then force a smile, drink another cup of coffee, and try not to look down as you walk across the soil that will eventually fill your lifeless lungs and repurpose your corpse.

- What's going on here? Hannah jumps when the coach enters in the shower room. - Hi Coach. That's not what you believe. He does not look happy. - What I believe is that you shower in front of your girlfriend. In my locker room. - In that case, that's what you believe. But I swear to you that it's innocent. It's not going to be anything sexual, I said, smiling. I'm trying to win her back. The coach opens his mouth, then closes it, then he reopens it. I can not tell if he's amused, pissed off, or just wants to forget the entire episode. He ends up shaking his head and choosing the third option. - Go on, he said.

recent research that has introduced a distinction between two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self, which do not have the same interests. For example, we can expose people to two painful experiences. One of these experiences is strictly worse than the other, because it is longer. But the automatic formation of memories—a feature of System 1—has its rules, which we can exploit so that the worse episode leaves a better memory. When people later choose which episode to repeat, they are, naturally, guided by their remembering self and expose themselves (their experiencing self) to unnecessary pain.

Ahem," a voice said behind me. I didn't need to turn around to know it was Judith, my once human, but now poltergeist mother-in-law. I had once joked with Bella that if anyone hated me enough to come back from the dead to haunt me, it would have been her mom. Seems the joke was on me, because that's exactly what she did.

And yet when you get right down to it, we’re all the same—rich, poor, old, young, fat, skinny, white, brown, or purple—pick your costume, none of it really matters too much. What does matter is whether or not we take offense when we think we’ve been wronged, regardless of who we think we are or what costume we’re wearing.

CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)

The road climbed steeply and then they were looking down at the village of Lovacott: a group of houses clustered around a small square, which was hardly more than the main street widened. A shop that seemed to sell everything, a pub. There was nothing picturesque here. No thatch. It would never have featured in an episode of Midsomer Murders.

The mission of Night Vale has always been to make the mundane terrifying and the terrifying mundane.

You must be Lilith,” “You have got to be fucking with me.

The library will be under a sort of renovation. It is not important what kind of renovation.

I guess it’s true what they say, people can be so smart their actions prove their really stupid.

I refuse to give Calvin and Trina anymore of me. Like Jazz said, I will love them from a distance.

They’d left Texas right after the last day of school.

og

Diamodia

Typical. Lemonade turned back into lemons, then into piss.

I'm not an if at first you don't succeed kind of a girl. When it comes to marriage I'm more of a one and done type.

All right, then. As strange an order as it may seem, take us to the hideout, Commander,” Nathan ordered.

Casey, "I know where I want to be in ten years, do you?" Cappie, "I wanna be with you.

it’s not about being right and knowing all the answers. It’s about making the call.

For those who don’t remember their history, are doomed to repeat it.

And in that moment, the gravity of the situation hit Cassandra like a grand piano. She thrust her arms around Tammy and sobbed into her shoulder.

comfort of having a good friend took away the unease she had at other new activities. By

Qu'est-ce que c'est, le Graal? Vous savez pas vraiment! Et moi non plus! Et j'en ai rien à cirer! Regardez-nous: y'en a pas deux qui ont le même âge, pas deux qui viennent du même endroit! Des seigneurs, des chevaliers errants, des riches, des pauvres! Mais, à la table ronde, pour la première fois dans toute l'histoire du peuple breton, nous cherchons tous la même chose: le Graal! C'est le Graal qui fait de vous des chevaliers, des hommes civilisés, qui nous différencie des tribus barbares. Le Graal, c'est notre union. Le Graal c'est notre grandeur.

Like a lot of my creative decisions (and important life decisions, come to think of it), I don’t have any sort of rational account of my reasoning. It just felt right and I went with it.

Online dating,” he mumbled dryly. “Oh, like before? That makes sense then. It’s actually kind of sweet you still have each other through all this craziness.” It was like an ah-ha moment. They were gay. “I was kidding,” his eyes snapped up to mine again and flashed with annoyance. “I’m not judging you,” I quickly said. “I think it’s great. Seriously!” “We’re not gay,” he growled. “We’re brothers.

This was a eureka moment: I realized that the tasks we had chosen for study were exceptionally effortful. An image came to mind: mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll.

Dani’s mild eating disorder was definitely the most annoying thing about her. One Christmas break I’d gained ten pounds and went up two cup-sizes—a post episode binge that finally made me look normal, like a woman. I would have killed to hold onto that version of me and all Dani did was count calories and complain about her non-existent cellulite. She was lucky. Most people were, they just couldn’t see it.

We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains.

Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they are happening, they feel like the only thing that matters, and you can hardly imagine that there’s a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the Glow Cloud moves on, and you move on, and the event is behind you. And you may find, as time passes, that you remember it less and less. Or absolutely not at all, in my case. And you are left with nothing but a powerful wonder at the fleeting nature of even the most important moments in life, and the faint but pretty smell of vanilla. Finally

People are particularly stupid today. I can’t talk to any more of them.”-Michel, Pilot (Season 1, Episode 1) This year has been a hard one. People have taken sides on every issue under the sun, armed themselves with opinions and rights and offenses and wrongs, and proceeded to hurl word grenades at each other, one after another, until the air has become so thick with anger and frustration that we can barely see who we’re fighting.

she knew she couldn’t say that. “The people are nice,” she said. She tacked a big smile on to the end of the sentence, hoping Ms. Buckley would buy it. “That’s right,” Danelle said, nodding. “The nicest people ever here.” *~*

I just... I want to fit in somewhere. Me. All of me and not just the parts I show everyone. I want someone to love me, all of me. Or at least see all of me. I do a good job keeping up appearances, convincing everyone I have my act together, that everything is okay. And, mostly, everything is okay. I'm not having an episode. I'm not struggling to drag myself out of bed. I'm not thinking about hurting myself. I am not happy, not exactly, but I'm okay.

Plus, not casting white people in roles for people of color is the correct thing to do. It’s not a noble or laudable thing to do. It is what you are supposed to do, so we corrected this, by casting a person of color in the role.

Mr. Jones surprised the family with a dog and cat from the local animal shelter to christen the house. The kids were delighted and named the cat Baby Blue, because she was a Siamese with big blue eyes. The dog they named Pioneer.

Utah ranks number one in incidents of depression and suicides, nationwide. One study reported: “In Utah, 14 percent of adults and adolescents reported experiencing severe psychological distress, and 10 percent said they’d had a major depressive episode in the past year. Bad mental health days come three times a month for those living in Utah.”i Incidentally, Utah leads the nation in fraud (see “God is Not a Good Investment Advisor,” chapter 8) and pornography consumptionii

Il n'était pas prêt à lui dire qu'il essayerait de tout son être d'être assez bien pour l'aider à élever un enfant. Il n'était pas prêt à lui dire qu'il était absolument terrifié à l'idée de reproduire les erreurs de son père et pas prêt à admettre qu'il avait peur d'échouer.Il ne connaissait pas les mots qui lui permettraient de lui dire qu'il ne voulait pas rentrer à la maison bourré et que ses enfants le fuient pour se cacher de lui comme lui l'avait fait avec son propre père. Il voulait l'épouser, passer sa vie à ses côtés, se vautrer dans sa bonté. Il ne pouvait s'imaginer de vie sans elle et il essayait de trouver un moyen de le lui dire, de lui montrer qu'il pouvait vraiment changer et qu'il pouvait être digne d'elle.

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

synagogue and read from Isaiah 61:1–2, which He said meant Himself, Jesus then referred to this very episode in the life of Elijah: “I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon.” Luke 4:25–26 Why did Jesus speak those words at that particular time? It was an unsubtle hint that His ministry would be shared with and welcomed by Gentiles.

Stacy said, “Baby, remember that you must love yourself first. It hurt me like crazy to know that I would never see Pam or my daughter again; so bad that I fell into a state of depression, and I wanted to give up on life.” Stacy wiped the tears from her eyes.  “I almost did… but God.” Stacy paused; she had to take a breather to get herself together. Jazz was on the other end drying her tears also.  Stacy continued, “When I gave up on me, he kept me. When I did not know which way to turn, he guided me. When I was at my lowest point he was there to show me that I am strong and I can get through all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me!!! That setback not only showed me that God loves me, but it showed me that others love and care about me also.” She looked at Pastor G and whispered, “Thank you for being a friend.” 

The girl with the short strawberry-blond hair was in front of her. She cast a glance back at Cassie and faced the front again. Cassie wanted to say hi, but the thought of speaking out loud when no one had called on her made her throat go dry. Instead she planned what she would say

Milch had a bigger cast, a bigger set (on the Melody Ranch studio, where Gene Autry had filmed very different Westerns decades earlier), and more creative freedom than he’d ever had before. There were no advertisers to answer to, and HBO was far more hands-off than the executives at NBC or ABC had been. And as a result, there was even less pretense of planning than there had been on NYPD Blue, and more improvisation. There were scripts for the first four episodes of Season 1, and after that, most of the series was written on the fly, with the cast and crew often not learning what they would be doing until the day before (if that). As Jody Worth recalls, the Deadwood writers would gather each morning for a long conversation: “We would talk about where we were going in the episode, and a lot of talk that had nothing to do with anything, a lot of Professor Milch talk, all over the map talk, which I enjoyed.” Out of those daily conversations came the decisions on what scenes to write that day, to be filmed the day after. There was no system to it, no order, and the actors would be given scenes completely out of context from the rest of the episode.

Here’s the truth of nostalgia: we don’t feel it for who we were but who we weren’t, we feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us but that we didn’t take. Time is like wax dripping from a candle flame. In the moment it is molten and falling with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes and the wax hits the table top and solidifies into the shape it will always be; it becomes the past, a solid single record of what happened still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held. It is impossible no matter how blessed you are by luck or the government or some remote invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind, it is impossible not to feel a little sad looking at that bit of wax; that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take.

This is the first time a guy on Date-Match has told the truth. I think it’s a sign.” “It’s not.” I shook my head. “And the model? How did you get someone to take all those pictures?” “It wasn’t a model. It was my roommate.” Her eyes widened as I stood up. “Wait a second! All the things I said to you on the phone were absolutely true. I am interested in politics, and I do love studying the law and keeping up with high profile cases.” “What law school did you go to?” “Law school?” She raised her eyebrow. “No, not law school type of law. Law like, I’ve watched every episode of SVU and I’ve read all of John Grisham’s books.

...a reminder that history is not just made up of the things we remember a hundred years later, but all the little things we forget a week after they happen. History is us squinting into the past, mistaking millions of tiny vibrations in all directions for a unified, unidirectional movements by entire civilizations.

I wished Adam weren’t jumping in for his turn. Because watching Adam wakeboard was not relaxing. He wasn’t careful when wakeboarding. Or in general. He was the opposite of careful. His life was one big episode of Jackass. He would do anything on a dare, so the older boys dared him a lot. My role in this game was to run and tell their mom. If I’d been able to run faster when we were kids, I might have saved Adam from a broken arm, several cracked ribs, and a couple of snake bites. Knowing this, it might not make a lot of sense that Mr. Vader let us wakeboard for the marina. But we’d come to wakeboarding only gradually. When we first started out, it was more like, Look at the very young children on water skis! How adorable. One time the local newspaper ran a photo of me and Adam waterskiing double, each of us holding up an American flag. It’s okay for you to gag now. I can take it. But Mr. Vader was no fool. He understood things changed. After the second time Adam broke his collarbone, Mr. Vader put us under strict orders not to get hurt, because it was bad for business. Customers might not be so eager to buy a wakeboard and all the equipment if they witnessed our watery death. To enforce this rule, the punishment for bleeding in the boat was that we had to clean the boat. Adam cleaned the boat a lot last summer.

Don’t you believe any man who makes you feel like you were just a one-time thing.” His arms tighten around me and his words tickle my ear, “You could never be any man’s forgettable moment.” He holds me away from him and I feel ridiculously like I could melt in the dark pools of his eyes. “You are a force to be remembered, Dacie Mae.

Chris ordered Greek Chicken, no butter no salt, and I decided to splurge on a hamburger. To which my mama took the opportunity to point out that I could eat whatever I wanted and not get fat. She never believed me when I said I watched what I ate and exercised on the regular. “Her daddy was the same way. Straight up and down. Course she got the tits that he ain’t have.

My father,' I replied, 'I am fond of action. I like to succour the afflicted, and make people happy. Command that there be built for me a tower, from whose top I can see the whole earth, and thus discover the places where my help would be of most avai1.' 'To do good, without ceasing, to mankind, a race at once flighty and ungrateful, is a more painful task than you imagine,' said Asfendarmod. ------ After saying these words, my father motioned to us to retire; and immediately I found myself in a tower, built on the summit of Mount Caf - a tower whose outer walls were lined with numberless mirrors that reflected, though hazily and as in a kind of dream, a thousand varied scenes then being enacted on the earth. Asfendarmod's power had indeed annihilated space, and brought me not only within sight of all the beings thus reflected in the mirrors, but also within sound of their voices and of the very words they uttered. (“The Story of The Peri Homaiouna”)

BARRY: Phwoar! This stuff shouldn’t be available on the internet where anybody can see it. GLENDA: Barry, what are you looking at? BARRY: Philosophy. You should see some of the ideas floating around here. GLENDA: As long as it’s only philosophy. BARRY: Only?! They come out with stuff that makes your hair stand on end. Look out there. What do you see? GLENDA: I can see it’s time to paint the fence. BARRY: What fence? GLENDA: Our fence. I don’t expect you to paint next door’s. BARRY: There is no fence out there. We just think there is. GLENDA: And I think it still needs painting. BARRY: It’s all in here. It’s only the way we see things that makes them look as if they’re out there. Actually everything is in our heads. GLENDA: Barry, if you can go out there with a pot of paint and paint it, then it’s out there. BARRY: I hate it when you do that. GLENDA: What? BARRY: Make more sense than philosophy. “The Second Stag Night of Doggy Wilkinson”, Last of the Summer Wine”, season 28 episode 1.

All 250 + episodes to date can be found at tim.blog/ podcast and itunes.com/ timferriss Jamie Foxx on Workout Routines, Success Habits, and Untold Hollywood Stories (# 124)—tim.blog/ jamie The Scariest Navy SEAL I’ve Ever Met . . . and What He Taught Me (# 107)—tim.blog/ jocko Arnold Schwarzenegger on Psychological Warfare (and Much More) (# 60)—tim.blog/ arnold Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer (# 117)—tim.blog/ dom2 Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (# 37)—tim.blog/ tony How to Design a Life—Debbie Millman (# 214)—tim.blog/ debbie Tony Robbins—On Achievement Versus Fulfillment (# 178)—tim.blog/ tony2 Kevin Rose (# 1)—tim.blog/ kevinrose [If you want to hear how bad a first episode can be, this delivers. Drunkenness didn’t help matters.] Charles Poliquin on Strength Training, Shredding Body Fat, and Increasing Testosterone and Sex Drive (# 91)—tim.blog/ charles Mr. Money Mustache—Living Beautifully on $ 25–27K Per Year (# 221)—tim.blog/ mustache Lessons from Warren Buffett, Bobby Fischer, and Other Outliers (# 219)—tim.blog/ buffett Exploring Smart Drugs, Fasting, and Fat Loss—Dr. Rhonda Patrick (# 237)—tim.blog/ rhonda 5 Morning Rituals That Help Me Win the Day (# 105)—tim.blog/ rituals David Heinemeier Hansson: The Power of Being Outspoken (# 195)—tim.blog/ dhh Lessons from Geniuses, Billionaires, and Tinkerers (# 173)—tim.blog/ chrisyoung The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training (# 158)—tim.blog/ gst Becoming the Best Version of You (# 210)—tim.blog/ best The Science of Strength and Simplicity with Pavel Tsatsouline (# 55)—tim.blog/ pavel Tony Robbins (Part 2) on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (# 38)—tim.blog/ tony How Seth Godin Manages His Life—Rules, Principles, and Obsessions (# 138)—tim.blog/ seth The Relationship Episode: Sex, Love, Polyamory, Marriage, and More (with Esther Perel) (# 241)—tim.blog/ esther The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency—Nick Szabo (# 244)—tim.blog/ crypto Joshua Waitzkin (# 2)—tim.blog/ josh The Benevolent Dictator of the Internet, Matt Mullenweg (# 61)—tim.blog/ matt Ricardo Semler—The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules (# 229)—tim.blog/ ricardo

Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion 1. Maya Angelou begins her autobiography with a moment of public humiliation in church. Why do you think she chose this scene in particular? Do themes in this scene reappear throughout the memoir? 2. To Marguerite, her mother seems alternately charming elusive, unreliable, and strong. Which episodes in the novel illuminate her character? Do you think she was a good mother? 3. Mrs. Flowers “encouraged [Marguerite] to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations” (this page). What are some of the maxims that Angelou remembers hearing from Momma and Mother? Did any of these maxims strike a particular chord with you? Are there examples of “mother wit” that you remember from your own childhood, or pass on to those around you? 4. Angelou describes Marguerite as “superstitious” (this page). Can you find some examples of Marguerite's superstition? 5. How does Angelou describe her molestation and later her rape at the hands of Mr. Freeman? Were you surprised by her emotions? Was this terrible experience the defining moment of the novel or of Angelou's childhood? Why or why not? 6.

I told you we should have put her in the second-class carriage with Sutton,” he said to Kathleen. In the week since the episode in the morning room, they had both taken care to avoid each other as much as possible. When they were together, as now, they retreated into mutual and scrupulous politeness. “I thought she would feel safer with us,” Kathleen replied. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that Clara was sleeping with her head tilted back and her mouth half open. “She seems to be faring better after a nip of brandy.” “Nip?” He gave her a dark glance. “She’s had at least a half pint by now. Pandora’s been dosing her with it for the past half hour.” “What? Why didn’t you say anything?” “Because it kept her quiet.” Kathleen jumped up and hurried to retrieve the decanter from Pandora. “Darling, what are you doing with this?” The girl stared at her owlishly. “I’ve been helping Clara.” “That was very kind, but she’s had enough. Don’t give her any more.” “I don’t know why it’s made her so sleepy. I’ve had almost as much medicine as she’s had, and I’m not a bit tired.” “You drank some of the brandy?” West had asked from the other side of the railway carriage, his brows lifting. Pandora stood and made her way to the opposite window to view a Celtic hill fort and a meadow with grazing cattle. “Yes, when we were crossing the bridge over the water, I felt a bit nervous. But then I dosed myself, and it was quite relaxing.” “Indeed,” West said, glancing at the half-empty bottle in Kathleen’s hand before returning his gaze to Pandora. “Come sit with me, darling. You’ll be as stewed as Clara by the time we reach London.” “Don’t be silly.” Dropping into the empty seat next to him, Pandora argued and giggled profusely, until she dropped her head to his shoulder and began to snore.

Suddenly a violent noise leaped at them from no source that he could identify. He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves. “Shush!” said Ford. “Listen, it might be important.” “Im … important?” “It’s the Vogon captain making an announcement on the tannoy.” “You mean that’s how the Vogons talk?” “Listen!” “But I can’t speak Vogon!” “You don’t need to. Just put this fish in your ear.” Ford, with a lightning movement, clapped his hand to Arthur’s ear, and he had the sudden sickening sensation of the fish slithering deep into his aural tract. Gasping with horror he scrabbled at his ear for a second or so, but then slowly turned goggle-eyed with wonder. He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of colored dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses. He was still listening to the howling gargles, he knew that, only now it had somehow taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward English. This is what he heard … * Ford Prefect’s original name is only pronounceable in an obscure Betel-geusian dialect, now virtually extinct since the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758 which wiped out all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford’s father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able satisfactorily to explain. The whole episode is shrouded in deep mystery: in fact no one ever knew what a Hrung was nor why it had chosen to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven particularly. Ford’s father, magnanimously waving aside the clouds of suspicion that had inevitably settled around him, came to live on Betelgeuse Five, where he both fathered and uncled Ford; in memory of his now dead race he christened him in the ancient Praxibetel tongue. Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy. The other kids at school nicknamed him Ix, which in the language of Betelgeuse Five translates as “boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven.

Several teams of German psychologists that have studied the RAT in recent years have come up with remarkable discoveries about cognitive ease. One of the teams raised two questions: Can people feel that a triad of words has a solution before they know what the solution is? How does mood influence performance in this task? To find out, they first made some of their subjects happy and others sad, by asking them to think for several minutes about happy or sad episodes in their lives. Then they presented these subjects with a series of triads, half of them linked (such as dive, light, rocket) and half unlinked (such as dream, ball, book), and instructed them to press one of two keys very quickly to indicate their guess about whether the triad was linked. The time allowed for this guess, 2 seconds, was much too short for the actual solution to come to anyone’s mind. The first surprise is that people’s guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. The role of cognitive ease in the judgment was confirmed experimentally by another German team: manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked. Another remarkable discovery is the powerful effect of mood on this intuitive performance. The experimenters computed an “intuition index” to measure accuracy. They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. Here again, as in the mere exposure effect, the connection makes biological sense. A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required. Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.

I couldn’t wait to follow through. I couldn’t wait to end this. “Your revenge?” Matthias laughed. “You’re revenge? What could you possibly do that would make any difference to me?” I looked up at Kane and he looked down at me. I smiled at him sweetly and he smiled back. I leaned in and he mirrored me. I tilted my face up to kiss him and he gladly reciprocated. Then I pulled back and swiveled my gaze to Matthias. “I will take your family away. Just like you took mine. I will pluck them from you one by one and make them suffer until they beg for death. Or, I will simply rescue them and give them a better life than you ever could.” Matthias barked out a louder laugh. “That’s sweet. It sounds like you’ve put thought into all that, but you can’t. It’s just not possible. “Sure it is,” I told him. “I’ve already gotten two of your children. Tyler isn’t here.” I gestured at Tyler. “Tyler will never be here. Unless you count that. Which being a self-respecting person, I wouldn’t. But who knows about you. And Miller isn’t here either. Miller is worse than Tyler. Look! You got Tyler to come to breakfast, but I seem to have forgotten Miller’s excuse. Could you remind me?” He stayed quiet. Which was a miracle in itself. So I continued, “I’m waiting for the right opportunity for Linley. I’ve been waiting for it for a while now. I’ve been watching her and watching her and just waiting. I cannot wait until I get her alone. I cannot wait until it’s just the two of us. It will be so fun. It’s what helps get me through these long days. Just thoughts of Linley. Just thoughts of what I will do to her and how slowly I will make those last painful moments last. And Kane? I could take him in a second. I could rip him out of your hands so fast you would blink and he would be gone. He might deny that if you ask him. But I know better. I hear everything else he says. I feel everything else he means. Kane is mine. You’re a smart man, Matthias, so don’t think for a second he isn’t. Right?” I turned to Kane. He leaned down again and kissed me. Point proved. I relaxed into Kane and let my threats soothe my soul and settle over the man I wanted to watch burn in hell. His reply was an arrogant smirk and hard eyes. “Little girl, you just asked for trouble, I’m-” “Do it,” I hissed. “Do whatever it is you want to do and see if I’m bluffing. Try me! Hurt someone I love. Hurt me. Take something away from me and see how painfully and how permanently I take something away from you.” I stood up and pushed aggressively away from the table. I stared him down the entire time. Kane let me go without even an attempt to restrain me. I was beyond that. I was beyond all of this. I was leaving. Today. Because without a doubt I would follow through with every single one of my threats. I stomped from the warehouse. I could feel Kane behind me, but he still didn’t try to slow me down. And I knew he wouldn’t. He really was mine. Matthias, Hendrix, nobody could take him from me. And he would do whatever I wanted as long as he thought we could survive. I hoped both of us could survive what I was about to ask him to do.