Excise Quotes

Sometimes you gotta excise a wound before it can heal.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

Sincerity is an easy target, but I don’t want to excise sincerity from my life – that’s a lonely way to live.

And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are: Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.

This felt cosmic, like a piece of me was being excised so it could take up residence in you

Sometimes when really bad things happen, you put them in a box and never look at them again because they’ll cost you the rest of your life. Some wounds never heal. You excise the savaged flesh and become the next thing.

As always, Adam was reminded of how Ronan belonged in this place. Something about the familiar way he stood as he searched for ripe fruit implied that he had done it many times before. It made it easy to understand that Ronan had grown up here and would grow old here. Easy to see how to exile him was to excise his soul.

Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

I do not wish to criticize any system that can nourish people’s spirits, but I find that a lot of New Age writing cherry-picks the attractive bits from the ancient traditions and makes collages of them; it usually excises the ascetic dimension. In general it is not rigorously thought out, but is what I would call “soft” thinking.

I want to disappear. I’m almost desperate to find a way to absent myself easily from the situation, like cutting around my outline with a craft knife and cleanly excising myself from the record.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

…the cardinal labor of composition, which is excision…

It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason - from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of secual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values. The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

This is my life, I thought...I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised--fully extirpated--absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary!

War is our time. Sevro thought he could escape it. I thought I could end it. But our enemy is like the Hydra. Cut off one head, two more sprout. They will not sue for peace. They will not surrender. Their heart must be excised, their will to fight ground to the finest dust.

I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.” The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor. A

Suddenly, someone who was at the center of your life is gone, excised as quickly as an apple is cored, a sharp spike driven down the center of your world, then a cruel flick of the wrist and the almost surgical extraction of your very heart.

I lay in my bed a few minutes later, resigned as the pain finally made its appearance. It was a crippling thing, this sensation that a huge hole had been pushed through my chest, excising my most vital organs and leaving ragged, unhealed gashes around the edges that continued to throb and bleed despite the passage of time. Rationally, I knew my lungs must still be intact, yet I gasped for air and my head spun like my efforts yielded me nothing. My heart must have been beating, too, but I couldn't hear the sound of my pulse in my ears; my hands felt blue with cold. I curled inward, hugging my ribs to hold myself together. I scrambled for my numbness, my denial, but it evaded me. And yet, I found I could survive. I was alert, I felt the pain--the aching loss that radiated out from my chest, sending wracking waves of hurt through my limbs and head--but it was managable. I could live through it. It didn't feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I'd grown strong enough to bear it.

How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt the westerner but excite no disapproval when it is performed on little boys. Consensus on the point seems absolute. But ask your interlocutor to think about the validity of this surgical procedure, which consists of removing a healthy part of a nonconsenting child’s body on nonmedical grounds – the legal definition of… mutilation.

This time I will cut it out, excise that fragile and anemic part of me, let it ooze heavy as iron from me, smother it in dirt. I have not learned how to be obedient, only to hurt myself as much as you.

Youth is not a curse, but a fleeting blessing. Youth enables us to cavort freely unconcerned with the larger issues in life. Aging and the accompanying responsibilities that come with added maturity is what augments, vexes, and then excises us. Maturation represents the accumulation of supplanting changes happening in a person over time including physical, mental, and social growth and development. Growing old gracefully entails submission to biological alterations and witnessing unsettling changes in cultural and societal conventions.

Each of us plunges through our own existence, punching me-shaped holes through days, through weeks, through conversations. We're none of us one thing or the other; we're legion. There's a different Yaz inside your skull for everyday of your life. We deceive others. We deceive ourselves. We keep secrets that even we don't know and hold beliefs we don't understand. And in that state of profound, fundamental, primal ignorance, we still think we can sculpt the clay of our own selves. We think we know what to cut away, that we understand the consequences of excising greed.

Still, the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year of 1948

Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me. The excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead, it cleared the way for me to rebuild.

That story Noam wove last night about their future had sunk deep into his bones, and he couldn’t excise it. Dara wanted that. For the first time in years, Dara wanted to live. The Electric Heir

Could one really concentrate on one’s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?

The symbolic evidence of women’s invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even in language. Women are subsumed, excised, erased by male pronouns, by male terminology, by male prayers about brotherhood and brethren, even and always by exclusively male images of God. The tradition that will call God spirit, rock, key door, wind, and bird will never ever call God mother. So much for the creative womb of God; so much for “I am who am.” So much for “Let us make human beings in our own image, male and female, let us make them.” What kind of spirituality is that? To take the position that using two pronouns for the human race is not important in a culture that has thirty words for car, multiple words for flowers, and dozens of words for dog breeds is to say that women are not important.

I had great plans to surgically excise the quaking, complaining teenager within someday. If I could just get rid of her and her thousands upon thousands of issues - Do I look fat? Am I ugly? Will anyone ever love me? Will I always be alone? Is she fatter than me? How ugly am I? Are they making fun of me? - I was convinced I would immediately become the sort of casual and laid back adult person who was forever smiling and was genuinely unconcerned with the size and/or shape of her body. I wasn't holding my breath.

But can you ever excise a bad parent? Though you might come to terms with all that they have psychologically bequeathed you, they can never really be expunged. They're the stubborn, permanent stain that will never entirely vanish in the wash.

The reader, knowing nothing about the ‘dark continent,’ filled in the blanks. Pictured Stone in a tent, kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another.

You are sure that I would not be well advised to make certain excisions and eliminations? You do not think it would be a good thing to cut, to prune? I might, for example, delete the rather exhaustive excursus into the family life of the early Assyrians?

Excision of my genitals didn’t eliminate the human sex drive, and neither did the fear of hellfire. Repression only led to hypocrisy and lying, strategies that corrupt the human individual, and it failed to protect people from unwanted pregnancy and disease. The

Diogenes’s central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence to the contrary.

Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.

It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replaced elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.

The Church combats the passions with excision in every sense of the word: its practice, its ‘cure’ is castration. It never asks: ‘How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire?’ – it has at all times laid the emphasis of its discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of lust for power, of avarice, of revengefulness). – But to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life…

Nicky scrambled to his feet. "That's what I wanted, but I didn't really think you'd get it, especially not on the first try. I just knew you were my best shot at getting Andrew to listen. You're amazing, you know that?" He yanked Neil into a fierce hug before Neil thought to dodge. "Oh, you just might be the best thing to happen to the Foxes." "I doubt that." "I don't." Nicky beamed as he let go of Neil. "How did you do it?" Neil neatly excised ninety percent of the truth and said, "I asked." "Yeah, right. Do you know what would have happened to me if I asked? Violence, Neil. Extreme and uncalled-for violence.

This is my life, I thought, as my taxi slogged through heavy traffic and inched through the tunnel to Logan Airport. I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and just become the master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.

However, the most striking evidence of Brahmanical hostility towards Buddhism comes in the form of silence: the way in which India’s Buddhist history, extending over large parts of the country and lasting for many centuries, was excised from the historical record.

How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.

Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me. The excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead, it cleared the way for me to rebuild. Because now came the hard part: replacing them. Many believe that in order to heal from C-PTSD, we must receive kind and compassionate parenting. If we can’t receive that from our own parents, then we must find a new parent to do the job.

Thomas Paine, who had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect model when he anonymously published Common Sense. The onetime corset maker and excise officer issued a resounding call for American independence that sold a stupendous 120,000 copies by year’s end.

We are now exposed to more images in a day than anyone in the 14th century would have known in a lifetime. [...] Most of it is garbage. Most of it needs excising. Even if we’re fearful that we might be missing something. We are probably not. We have to discard. We have to throw things away, cleanse the doors of our perception and work out what is worth looking at, what is worth remembering, what are the images that matter, what will we retain.

I'm proud of you, and I love you," Blay said yet again, that old, familiar voice cutting through all of those years of rejection and judgement, giving him not just a rope of acceptance to hang onto, but a flesh-and-blood hand to lead him out of the darkness of his past... And into a future that didn't require lies or excises, because of what he was, and what they were, was both extraordinary--and nothing out of the ordinary. Love, after all, was universal.

I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.

Shame was one of those things that had to be excised like a cancer, but it was a hard thing to remove when it was wrapped around your heart.

Ten kings met once a year to decide about water sharing, fixing customs, excise, and toll rates, port levies, and to exchange musicians and artisans. An

productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul.

He fell into sleep so cavernous it felt less like rest than an excision of memory.

while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised a part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another.

Sincerity is an easy target, but I don’t want to excise sincerity from my life—that’s a lonely way to live. I

She understood what perhaps they are only just learning. That if you attempt to clean the messiness of life you end up scrubbing the life away from living. We can't excise joy from pain.

I was taught that punishment and shame were the logical and necessary reactions to screwing up. The benefit of punishment was that it would keep my wild and terrible natural tendencies in line. It would shame me into being better. “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain. Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more. The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing. Locked in this prison, he couldn’t hear what his daughter needed. He couldn’t give her what she was asking for. There was blame and pain in spades. But all of this actively prevented him from making amends, from healing his relationship with his daughter. Punishment did not ease Willow or Jeremy or the other children at Mott Haven back into their circles of friends. Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community. I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

There are persons who can speak no more, whose very names have vanished. Yet a name excised from the verge where it once lived still casts its sound on all who sleep there and enters their throats.

The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very definitions of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. We must destroy completely and for all time the personality structures “dominant-active, or male” and “submissive-passive, or female. ” We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial, useless. We must destroy the very structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws; we must eradicate from consciousness and memory all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets that turn men into rapists by definition and women into victims by definition. Until we do, rape will remain our primary sexual model and women will be raped by men.

To ask God to redeem Jerusalem but not cast sin outside the city walls is like asking a doctor to heal your body without excising the disease. Like asking the light to arise without casting out the darkness. Like asking for restoration to come and destruction to remain. It is to ask for a contradiction. God excludes sin from his kingdom because of his goodness, not in opposition to or in spite of it.

It's Friday night the city is a heart that beats alone,despite the millions of blood cells that race through its dog-legged arteries, oblivious to each other yet performing a life sustaining dance. [...] You're tired of being part of this blood dance. The immune system has been trying to excise you as diseased for as long you can remember, but you've been tenacious,clinging to the walls and floors as the torrent pushes you around.

But why?" Gabriel asks. "Why do they wish to cause such pain to another human?" "Why does the Spanish Inquisition do what it does?" I ask. "Why does our own Church burn witches at the stake? Why did our own crusaders punish the Moors so exquisitely?" Gabriel thinks about this. He knows I don't beg answers for these questions. "Of course it's easy to say that we mete out punishment to those who are an abomination in God's eyes," I say. "But it's more than that, isn't it? I think we don't just allow torturers but condone them as a way to excise the fear we all have of death. To torture someone is to take control of death, to be the master of it, even for a short time.

both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between values. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with the material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook.

Of the myriad lies that people often tell themselves, two of the most common, potent and destructive are “We really love our children” and “Our parents really loved us.” It may be that our parents did love us and we do love our children, but when it is not the case, people often go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the realization. I frequently refer to psychotherapy as the “truth game” or the “honesty game” because its business is among other things to help patients confront such lies. One of the roots of mental illness is invariably an interlocking system of lies we have been told and lies we have told ourselves. These roots can be uncovered and excised only in an atmosphere of utter honesty. To create this atmosphere it is essential for therapists to bring to their relationships with patients a total capacity for openness and truthfulness. How can a patient be expected to endure the pain of confronting reality unless we bear the same pain? We can lead only insofar as we go before.

The real core of the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel if you will, has to do with the abolition of all sex roles - that is, an absolute transformation of human sexuality and the institutions derived from it. In this work, no part of the male sexual model can possibly apply. Equality within the framework of the male sexual model, however that model is reformed or modified, can only perpetuate the model itself and the injustice and bondage which are its intrinsic consequences. I suggest to you that transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and "love" begins where there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest; that it begins in what we do know about female sexuality as distinct from male - clitoral touch and sensitivity, multiple orgasms, erotic sensitivity all over the body (which needn't - and shouldn't - be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect and in absolute mutual respect. For men I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread - that is, in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together. I am saying that men will have to renounce their phallocentric personalities, and the privileges and powers given to them at birth as a consequence of their anatomy, that they will have to excise everything in them that they now value as distinctively "male." No reform, or matching of orgasms, will accomplish this.

girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy—the excision of the clitoris—and infibulation—the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and menstruation. If the malnourished little girls didn’t bleed to death from the procedure itself, they often died from resulting infections or debilitating anemia. In others, scar tissue trapped urine or menstrual fluid, causing pelvic infections. Women with scar-constricted birth canals suffered dangerous and agonizing childbirth. Sometimes

I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people's lives? (which really meant, Do you actually think anything you could write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight thought experiment in which I asked the interviewer to imagine the sort of person he might be if all of the literature he'd read in his life were somehow excised from his mind, his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated this nuclear winter I sat back with a self-satisfied smile, saved again from facing the truth.

In December 1790, with other options foreclosed, Hamilton revived a proposal he had floated in his Report on Public Credit: an excise tax on whiskey and other domestic spirits. He knew the measure would be loathed in rural areas that thrived on moonshine, but he thought this might be more palatable to farmers than a land tax. Hamilton confessed to Washington an ulterior political motive for this liquor tax: he wanted to lay “hold of so valuable a resource of revenue before it was generally preoccupied by the state governments.” As with assumption, he wanted to starve the states of revenue and shore up the federal government. Jefferson did not exaggerate Hamilton’s canny capacity to clothe political objectives in technical garb. There were hidden agendas buried inside Hamilton’s economic program, agendas that he tended to share with high-level colleagues but not always with the public.

--she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward's museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren't allowed to touch.

I realise suddenly how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia. I am afraid of being doubted, and I’m afraid of being found out. I am wondering what all those other people, whom I used to see every day, are thinking of me. Are they gossiping, or has some moribund discretion fallen over my name? I’m not sure which is worse. I’m feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can’t imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that’s not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone else to understand. Most of all, I want to disappear. I’m almost desperate to find a way to absent myself easily from the situation, like cutting around my outline with a craft knife and cleanly excising myself from the record. But that, I know, would only leave a human-shaped hole. I imagine everybody gazing into the space where I ought to be.

All the women in me are tired.

Customs inspectors could not stop the export of software through telephone lines; labour inspectors could not stop software engineers from talking to customers in America at night; excise inspectors could not harass the IT firms because the government did not levy tax on services. Much like Gurgaon, India’s knowledge economy literally grew at night when the government slept.

Just as girls are pressured to yield that half of their human potential consonant with assertive action, just as they have been systematically discouraged from developing and celebrating the self-concepts and skills that belong to the public world, so are boys pressured to yield attributes of dependency, expressiveness, affiliation—all the self-concepts and skills that belong to the relational, emotive world. These wholesale excisions are equally damaging to the healthy development of both girls and boys. The price for traditional socialization of girls is oppression, as Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan put it, “the tyranny of the kind and nice.” The price of traditional socialization for boys is disconnection—from themselves, from their mothers, from those around them.

Three centuries of early Christian and Jewish documentation, not to mention the nearly unanimous opinion of contemporary scholars, recognize James the brother of Jesus as the head of the first Christian community.... Why then has James been almost wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of most modern Christians?

I used to believe there was a part of the human brain we couldn’t quite excise, and its sole purpose was to encourage self-destruction. Someday, I thought, the guys working on the BRAIN Initiative would push aside a contour in the gray matter and find a pulsing, jet-black spot. They’d insert a probe into the patient’s head to press the nodule and the patient’s immediate response would be to shout out, “FUCK IT! WHY NOT?

With a painful slice, I cut off what I pretended to know about what lies beyond me. I excise myself from the cunning interpretative loops that I gave to what lies beyond me. And my knife cuts even deeper and separates me from the meaning that I conferred upon myself. I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am without knowing what I am.

Having fled to the New World, but with the scars of the Old World still etched in their skin, they had burned casks of pitch and herbs in the streets to drive away the tainted pestilential air while carrying their dead in sinister processions to be burned on pyres, all the while spreading the disease by excising their infected buboes. And here their descendants were driven one by one into the Hudson on a winter morning, never to be found.

psychopathy of surgeons; the most audacious and godlike healers, who were also the only group of people encouraged to slice open human bodies, saw off limbs, cut out flesh, remove organs and excise brain tissue, operating at the edge of paralysis, stroke and haemorrhage. It was a profession that seemed to fuse compassion and brutality, without having to reveal which was the dominant impulse, as long as both were accompanied by a high degree of precision.

it was England that shone as Hamilton’s true lodestar in public finance. Back in the 1690s, the British had set up the Bank of England, enacted an excise tax on spirits, and funded its public debt—that is, pledged specific revenues to insure repayment of its debt. During the eighteenth century, it had vastly expanded that public debt. Far from weakening the country, it had produced manifold benefits. Public credit had enabled England to build up the Royal Navy, to prosecute wars around the world, to maintain a global commercial empire. At the same time, government bonds issued to pay for the debt galvanized the economy, since creditors could use them as collateral for loans. By imitating British practice, Hamilton did not intend to make America subservient to the former mother country, as critics claimed. His objective was to promote American prosperity and self-sufficiency and make the country ultimately less reliant on British capital. Hamilton wanted to use British methods to defeat Britain economically.

There were two dished metal tables set in the center of the room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of formaldehyde.

He is engaged in barter and no nonsense. He pays taxes he can’t evade and doesn’t care whether they are called “excise” or “king’s pence” or “squeeze” or straight-out bribes. It is the other kid’s bat and ball and backyard, so you play by his rules—nothing to get in a sweat about. Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter. Women know this instinctively; that’s why they are all smugglers. Men often believe—or pretend—that the “Law” is something sacred, or at least a science—an unfounded assumption very convenient to governments.

A number of other studies have been conducted on the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers and all have found comparable outcomes. For example: 60 people with limb-threatening diabetic infections were split into three groups: 1) full-thickness skin ulcer; 2) deep-tissue infection and osteomyelitis; 3) gangrenous lesions. All ulcers in group 1 healed and 92 percent of those in group 2 healed. All people in group 3 healed after surgical excision, debridement of necrotic tissue, and treatment with honey ointment (which also included royal jelly).

You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.

Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I? Acknowledgments I owe huge thanks to the amazing Darley Anderson and everyone at the agency, especially Mary, Emma, Pippa, Rosanna and Kristina; Andrea Schulz, my wonderful editor, whose enormous skill, patience and wisdom have made this book so much better than I thought it could be; Ben Petrone, who is just plain great, and everyone at Viking; Susanne Halbleib and everyone at Fischer Verlage; Katy Loftus, for her faith in this book and for putting her finger on the one thing that would make the most difference; my brother, Alex French, for the computer bits and for sending me the link to the case of Bella in the Wych Elm; Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for the medical bits; Ellen at ancestrysisters.com, for genealogy help; Dave Walsh, for his enormous help with the intricacies of police procedure; Ciara Considine, Clare Ferraro and Sue Fletcher,

A witch needs only the right look, the right stuff, the right feelings. I look at the part: like a Hollywood witch, dark-haired and pale-skinned (because of my European ancestry). And I'm into the Instagram-witch lifestyle: black dresses, lavender baths, affirmations about being worthy of things. But I don't like calling myself a witch. I don't want to be seen as following a fad, and I don't want the white witches I resemble to take my presence in their spaces as permission for theft. Really, I just want a version of the occult that isn't built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excise the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left.

The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution. But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England’s way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.

My mother had been baking more often in general, but she took plates of desserts to the carpentry studio, where her boss, thank God, had a sweet tooth. He just loved the cheesecake, she'd tell me, shining. He ate all of my oatmeal cookies. Some charmed combination of the woodwork, and the studio people, and the splinter excising time with her son kept her going back to Silver Lake even when she hit her usual limits, and every night, tucked into bed, I would send out a thank-you prayer to the carpentry boss for taking in what I could not. But this morning I was the only one, and it was the weekend, and carpentry rested, and the whole kitchen smelled of hometown America, of Atlanta's orchards and Oregon's berry bushes, of England's pie legacy, packed with the Puritans over the Mayflower.

One day the Dalai Lama received a visit from a monk arriving from Tibet after spending twenty-five years in Chinese labor camps. His torturers had brought him to the brink of death several times. The Dalai Lama talked at length with the monk, deeply moved to find him so serene after so much suffering. He asked him if he had ever been afraid. The monk answered: “I was often afraid of hating my torturers, for in so doing I would have destroyed myself.” A few months before she died at Auschwitz, Etty Hillesum wrote: “I can see no way around it. Each of us must look inside himself and excise and destroy everything he finds there which he believes should be excised and destroyed in others. We may be quite certain that the least iota of hatred that we bring into the world will make it even more inhospitable to us than it already is.

Neurotic suffering indicates inner conflict. Each side of the conflict is likely to be a composite of many partial forces, each one of which has been structured into behavior, attitude, perception, value. Each component asserts itself, claims priority, insists that something else yield, accommodates. The conflict therefore is fixed, stubborn, enduring. It may be impugned and dismissed without effect, imprecations and remorse are of no avail, strenuous acts of will may be futile; it causes - yet survives and continues to cause - the most intense suffering, humiliation, rending of flesh. Such a conflict is not to be uprooted or excised. It is not an ailment, it is the patient himself. The suffering will not disappear without a change in the conflict, and a change in the conflict amounts to a change in what one is and how one lives, feels, reacts.

But the best reward from that meditation center was a familiar face I could access every time I sat down to meditate. For a couple of minutes, I basked in the sun and breathed, and then I summoned an older version of myself, a year into the future. I imagined she was sitting behind me, enveloping me in a big-spoon hug. She had a few more wrinkles. A couple more freckles. She was wearing baggy, soft clothing. 'Hi,' I said. 'Hi,' she said. 'I’m sad today,' I admitted. 'It’s okay to be sad. You won’t be sad a week from now. I love you, and you are doing your best,' she said, and I knew she was right. I leaned back into her belly. I could almost feel it pushing back against me, a solid pressure, telling me I was not alone. She silenced my mother’s voice in my head. Excised her not just in body but in mind. She did it because, as my third parent, that is her right.

Once again the resistance the visual cortex displayed toward surgical excision suggested that, like memory, vision was also distributed, and after Pribram became aware of holography he began to wonder if it, too, was holographic. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram certainly seemed to explain how so much of the visual cortex could be removed without affecting the ability to perform visual tasks. If the brain was processing images by employing some kind of internal hologram, even a very small piece of the hologram could still reconstruct the whole of what the eyes were seeing. It also explained the lack of any one-to-one correspondence between the external world and the brain's electrical activity. Again, if the brain was using holographic principles to process visual information, there would be no more one-to-one correspondence between electrical activity and images seen than there was between the meaningless swirl of interference patterns on a piece of holographic film and the image the film encoded.

Like the musician's portrait, the person who has become a real part of your life is not located in one part of you, and can never be neatly excised. To really lose the notion of them... Well, how would you? You couldn't lose the picture without destroying the room. In time, however, the furniture will be rearranged and will come to represent other people and places. But the old shapes linger, haunt the room. If you look from a certain angle, you can still see them there. But you move on, your perspective shifts. New friends walk beside you through the streets of Belfast. You practise and perform new routines until, eventually, you can't quite remember how the room used to look or how the streets used to feel when walked in the days of love. That is perhaps the saddest loss of all, and why we want to linger for a while at the end of grief. We don't want to lose the notion. There is no real forgetting. Everything leaves a mark, whether you remember it, whether you bring it to mind or not. There is no subtraction in mind. Only and.

Insurance Adjuster Tom We have studied your case and we have decided the policy applies. That means you’re entitled to a settlement of $13,600. I see. How did you reach that figure? That’s how much we decided the car was worth. I understand, but what standard did you use to determine that amount? Do you know where I can buy a comparable car for that much? How much are you asking for? Whatever I’m entitled to under the policy. I found a secondhand car just about like it for $17,700. Adding the sales and excise tax, it would come to about $19,000. $19,000! That’s too much! I’m not asking for $19,000 or $18,000 or $20,000, but for fair compensation. Do you agree that it’s only fair I get enough to replace the car? OK, I’ll offer you $15,000. That’s the highest I can go. Company policy. How does the company figure that? Look, $15,000 is all you’ll get. Take it or leave it. $15,000 may be fair. I don’t know. I certainly understand your position if you’re bound by company policy. But unless you can state objectively why that amount is what I’m entitled to, I think I’ll do better in court. Why don’t we study the matter and talk again? Is Wednesday at eleven a good time to talk? . . .

Senator Hill has done me the honor to take me as the antitype of his political methods and political views, and has singled me out for attack in connection with the Excise Law. Senator Hill’s complaint is that I honestly enforce the law which he and Tammany put on the statute books … [His] assault upon that honest enforcement is the admission, in the first place, that it never has been honestly enforced before, and, in the next place, that he never expected it to be … It is but natural that he and Tammany should grow wild with anger at the honest enforcement of the law, for it was a law which was intended to be the most potent weapon in keeping the saloons subservient allies to Tammany Hall. With a law such as this, enforced only against the poor or the honest man and violated with impunity by every rich scoundrel and every corrupt politician, the machine did indeed seem to have its yoke on the neck of the people. But we throw off that yoke, and no special pleading of Senator Hill can avail to make us put it on … Where justice is bought, where favor is the price of money or political influence, the rich man held his own and the poor man went to the wall. Now all are treated exactly alike.107

The Savior came and is coming again, but our healing is in his hands, not our own. If our Savior chose to enter the human story in a human body, then we should enter one another’s places of suffering remembering we carry and extend the presence of Christ. Sin is any Christian’s response to pain, poverty, and weakness that assumes they are individual problems to solve rather than places to patiently embody the solidarity of Jesus. When we reduce pain to an individual problem, we don’t know what to do with ourselves and our stories. In an increasingly individualistic society, where the space between self, tradition, and our embodied connection to each other feels wide, suffering can be a massive assault to our sense of self and our ability to hope. We become lost in a chasm of overspiritualized pain and undervalued physicality, not knowing where our lives fit alongside a Christianity glittering with the veneer of abundance. Already exhausted, we sink under the weight of existing as an aberration of the abundant life our Christian friends and families want us to project. Defeated and lonely, many of us subconsciously attempt to detach from the grief in our bodies, excising it from our minds to feel accepted in the community of the able and successful. We push pain away with effort, pretending to be okay among the shiny, smiling faces at church or work. For if we were honest about how sad or sick or hopeless we really feel, would we be accepted at all?

Most people don't know how to starve... I guess that's a weird thing to say, but it's true. It's something you learn. People think that they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn, or whatever. Either you are or you aren't. That sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing. But it's not true. You can be taught to want, you can be taught to crave, and you can also learn to starve. The issue is when you eventually get fed... prosperity is anguish. The body adjusts, but the mind doesn't. You can't erase history, you can't just excise the wanting and worse, you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and you can't go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue, that's a lesson. For some people its lifelong. For others, it's developmental if they're lucky and then eventually it fades. But still, you never forget it, how to starve, how to watch others with envy, how to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn't it? The mind still hungers, even when the body adjusts. There's tension, always. Survival only requires so much, but existence? Completion? That becomes insatiable. The longer you starve, the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you've learned to starve when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder, you hoard., and technically that's the same as having, but it isn't, not really. Starvation continues, you still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can't learn how to have... the excess is a poison. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic.

As an anology, consider the word structure. In bacteria, the gene is embedded in the genome in precisely that format, structure, with no breaks, stuffers, interpositions, or interruptions. In the human genome, in contrast, the word is interrupted by intermediate stretches of DNA: s...tru...ct...ur...e. The long stretches of DNA marked by the ellipses (...) do not contain any protein-encoding information. When such an interrupted gene is used to generate a message-i.e., when DNA is used to build RNA-the stuffer frragments are excised from the RNA message, and the RNA is stitched together again with the intervening pieces removed: s...tru...ct...ur...e became simplified to structure. Roberts and Sharp later coined a phrase for the process: gene splicing or RNA splicing (since the RNA message of the gene was "spliced" to removed the stuffer fragments). At first, this split structure of genes seemed puzzling: Why would an animal genome waste such long stretches of DNA splitting genes into bits and pieces, only to stitch them back into a continuous message? But the inner logic of split genes soon became evident: by splitting genes into modules, a cell could generate bewildering combinations of messages out of a single gene. The word s...tru...c...t...ur...e can be spliced to yield cure and true and so forth, thereby creating vast numbers of variant messages-called isoforms-out of a single gene. From g...e...n...om...e you can use splicing to generate gene, gnome, and om. And modular genes also had an evolutionary advantage: the individual modules from different genes could be mixed and matched to build entirely new kinds of genes (c...om...e...t). Wally Gilbert, the Harvard geneticist, created a new word for these modules; he called them exons. The inbetween stuffer fragments were termed introns.

Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra. Silence. “I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.” Silence. “The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and then eventually it fades. But you never really forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you’ve learned to starve, when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal.

Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra. Silence. “I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.” Silence. “The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and then eventually it fades. But you never really forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you’ve learned to starve, when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal. “ Silence. “Being magic is even worse,” said Ezra. “Your body doesn’t want to die, it has too much inside it. So you want more powerfully. You starve more quickly. Your capacity to have nothing is abysmal, cataclysmic. There isn’t a medeian on earth capable of casting themselves down into ordinariness, much less to dust. We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly. They take in small amounts, in survivable doses. We’re immunizing ourselves to something— against something. Everything we manage to have successfully becomes a vaccine over time, but the illness is always much larger. We’re still naturally susceptible. We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually. We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes. “What does?” asked Atlas. Ezra smiled, closing his eyes to the sun. “Power,” he said. “A little at a time until we break.

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.