“
You can’t hurry love, and you can’t rush puff pastry, either. You can knead too much, and you can be too needy. Always, warmth is what brings pastry to rise. Chemistry creates something amazing; coupled with care and heat, it works some kind of magic to create this satisfying, welcoming, and nourishing thing that is the base of life.
”
”
Kathleen Flinn (The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School)
“
We don't really consider ourselves famous. we're just four dorks who ride around on a bus.
”
”
Big Time Rush
“
There is a commonly held belief that rage produces results; that nothing happens in the world without the adrenaline rush of anger. The iconic figure of the Cuban revolution, Che Guevara, famously said, “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, you are a comrade of mine.” Perhaps that is true. But in rage, you become one with a group; out of rage, you become one with the universe.
”
”
Sadhguru (Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy)
“
I am not so much fun
Anymore;
Couldn’t carry the role of ingenue
In a bucket, you say, laughing.
And I want to punch you.
I was never innocent, but
Thanks to you I know things
I wish I did not remember.
You don’t like it
When I talk to the man myself,
Specifying quantities and
Give him the money
Instead of giving it to you
And letting you take care of it.
You keep asking me,
Where’s the dope?
Until I finally say,
I hid it.
The look you give me is
Pure bile.
Well, fuck you.
This isn’t like Buying somebody a drink.
You don’t leave your stash out
Where I might find it.
Finally I think I’ve made you wait
Long enough,
So I get out the little paper envelope
And hand it to you.
You are still in charge of
This part, so you relax.
Performing your junky ritual with
Your favorite razor blade, until
I ask you how to calculate my dose
So I won’t O.D. when I do this
And you’re not around.
Then you really flip.
You tell me it’s a bad idea
For me to do this with other people.
**
Was it such a good idea
For me to do it with you?
Do you wait for me to turn up
Once every three months
So you can get high?
Is this our version of that famous
Lesbian fight about
Nonmonogamy?
Let me tell you what I don’t like.
I don’t like it when you
Take forever to cut up brown powder
And cook it down and
Suck it up into the needle
And measure it, then take
Three times as much for yourself
AS you give me.
I don’t like it when you
Fuck me
After you’ve taken the needle
Out of my arm.
You talk too much
And spoil my rush.
All I really want to do
Is listen to the tides of blood
Wash around inside my body
Telling me everything is
Fine, fine, fine._
And I certainly don’t want to
Eat you or fuck you
Because it will take forever
To make you come,
If you can come at all,
And by then the smack will have worn off
And there isn’t any more.
I’m trying to remember
What the part is that I do like.
I think this shit likes me
A lot more than I like it.
Now you’re hurt and angry because
I don’t want to see you again
And the truth is,
I would love to see you,
As long as I knew you were holding.
So you tell me
Is this what you want?
I bet it was what you wanted
All along.
”
”
Patrick Califia
“
Sow good seed,
Learn to trust,
In the law of averages
There is no rush
”
”
BJ Klock
“
Malaise invades me as the crowd around me grows. The compromises I have made with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances rush to meet me, swimming towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the illusion of 'being together'. People touch without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never realized; emptiness overcomes us as the density of the crowd grows. The crowd drags me out of myself and installs thousands of little sacrifices in my empty presence.
Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and everything comes into focus, as if by magic.
”
”
Raoul Vaneigem
“
Do not act so friendly, Savannah. You are a celebrity. We will have enough attention drawn to us.
They are our neighbors. Try not to scare them to death, will you? Savannah took his arm, grinning up at him teasingly. "You look as fierce as a member of the Mafia. No wonder our neighbors are staring.People tend to be curious.Wouldn't you be if someone moved in next door to you?"
"I don't abide next-door neighbors. When humans consider building in the vicinity of one of my homes, the neighborhood is suddenly inundated with wolves.It works every time." He sounded menacing.
Savannah laughed at him. "You're such a baby,Gregori. Scared of a little company."
"You scare me to death, woman. Because of you I find myself doing things I know are totally insane. Staying in a house built in a crowded city below sea level.Neighbors on top of us.Human butchers surrounding us."
"Like I'm supposed to believe that would scare you," she said smugly,knowing his only worry was for her safety, not his.They turned a corner and headed toward the famous Bourbon Street.
"Try to look less conspicuous," he instructed.
A dog barked, rushed to the end of its lead,and bared its teeth. Gregori turned his head and hissed, exposing white fangs. The dog stopped its aggression instantly,yelped in alarm, and retreated whining.
"What are you doing?" Savannah demanded, outraged.
"Getting a feel for the place," he said absently, his mind clearly on other matters, his senses tuned to the world around him. "Everyone is crazy here, Savannah.You are going to fit right in." He ruffled her hair affectionately.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Magic (Dark, #4))
“
Inhaling fumes directly from burning foliage, either in a confined space such as a cave or a tent, or scooping up and breathing in the vapors from psychoactive plant materials scattered on a bowl full of hot coals, must be an extremely ancient practice. Herodotus's account from the fifth-century BCE, describing the use of small tents by the Scythians (a northwestern Iranian tribe) for inhaling the smoke of cannabis, is probably the most famous account that confirms the antiquity of the use of cannabis as a ritual intoxicant.
”
”
John Rush (Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience)
“
As I approached the field, I called the tower, identified myself, and said I would like to land and pay my respects to General Patton if that was agreeable and convenient. I was cleared to land. When I parked, there was Georgie in his famous Jeep with the three-star flags flying, his helmet reflecting the sun gloriously and his ivory-handled revolvers at his side. He rushed forward, threw his arms around me, and with great tears streaming down his face, said, "Jimmy, I'm glad to see you. I didn't think anyone would ever call on a mean old son of a bitch like me.
”
”
James H. Doolittle (I Could Never Be So Lucky Again)
“
I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Philadelphia, the city had fallen victim to a fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Water Dancer)
“
Pastry is like people . . . You can't hurry love, and you can't rush puff pastry either. You can knead too much, and you can be too needy. Always, warmth is what brings pastry to rise. Chemistry creates something amazing; coupled with care and heat, it works some kind of magic to create a satisfying, welcoming, and nourishing thing that is the base of life.
”
”
Kathleen Flinn (The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School)
“
There’s nothing to be scared of, right Akhol?”
He said nothing as he stepped toward the rushing water that rolled around a big rock and was swallowed whole by impenetrable darkness.
“Right?” Andrew repeated, his voice swallowed by the sound of rushing water.
Akhol didn’t respond again. He tapped a foot above the water before he stepped in and disappeared beneath the surface in one fluid motion.
”
”
Laura Kreitzer (Abyss (Timeless, #3))
“
But the launching had been a great success and now that the Space Hotel was safely in orbit, there was a tremendous hustle and bustle to send up the first guests. It was rumored that the President of the United States himself was going to be among the first to stay in the hotel, and of course there was a mad rush by all sorts of other people across the world to book rooms. Several kings and queens had cabled the White House in Washington for reservations, and a Texas millionaire called Orson Cart, who was about to marry a Hollywood starlet called Helen Highwater, was offering one hundred thousand dollars a day for the honeymoon suite. But you cannot send guests to a hotel unless there are lots of people there to look after them, and that explains why there was yet another interesting object orbiting the earth at that moment. This was the large Commuter Capsule containing the entire staff for Space Hotel “U.S.A.” There were managers, assistant managers, desk clerks, waitresses, bellhops, chambermaids, pastry chefs and hall porters. The capsule they were traveling in was manned by the three famous astronauts, Shuckworth, Shanks and Showler, all of them handsome, clever and brave. “In exactly one hour,” said Shuckworth,
”
”
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (Charlie Bucket, #2))
“
She saw herself, a fading figure, more than half-way now towards the sunset end, within sight even of the shadowed emptiness that lay beyond the sun's dipping edge.
She had lingered over-long, expecting a dream to confirm a dream; she had been oblivious of the truth that the lane went rushing just the same.
It was now too late. The speed increased. She had waited, waited for nothing. The seller of dreams was a myth.
”
”
Algernon Blackwood (Famous Ghost Stories)
“
From insomnia and as a result of the intense struggle against mounting weakness, something strange is happening to me. In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly. I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I've been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry. It is not easy to live through such moments.
”
”
Anton Chekhov (Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov)
“
George Dantzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved.
”
”
Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: The New Psychology of Success)
“
The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’s theory of relativity (which we will get to in due course). For the moment it is enough to know that we are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be said to be expanding because, as the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg notes, “solar systems and galaxies are not expanding, and space itself is not expanding.” Rather, the galaxies are rushing apart. It is all something of a challenge to intuition. Or as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” The analogy that is usually given for explaining the curvature of space is to try to imagine someone from a universe of flat surfaces, who had never seen a sphere, being brought to Earth. No matter how far he roamed across the planet’s surface, he would never find an edge. He might eventually return to the spot where he had started, and would of course be utterly confounded to explain how that had happened. Well, we are in the same position in space as our puzzled flatlander, only we are flummoxed by a higher dimension.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.
The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.
In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.
Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.
”
”
John Crowley (Novelty: Four Stories)
“
When the aged countrywoman stands at her door in the evening and, in her own words, 'looks at the mountains and thinks of the goodness of God,' God is all the nearer because the pagan powers are not far: because northward in Ben Bulben, famous for hawks, the white square door swings open at sundown, and those wild unchristian riders rush forth upon the fields, while southward the White Lady, who is doubtless Maive herself, wanders under the broad cloud nightcap of Knocknarea.
”
”
W.B. Yeats
“
Newton was a decidedly odd figure – brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone4 as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting. On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
Narrative horror, disgust. That's what drives him mad, I'm sure of it, what obsesses him. I've known other people with the same aversion, or awareness, and they weren't even famous, fame is not a deciding factor, there are many individuals who experience their life as if it were the material of some detailed report, and they inhabit that life pending its hypothetical or future plot. They don't give it much thought, it's just a way of experiencing things, companionable, in a way, as if there were always spectators or permanent witnesses, even of their most trivial goings-on and in the dullest of times. Perhaps it's a substitute for the old idea of the omnipresence of God, who saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, very comforting despite the implicit threat and punishment, and three or four generations aren't enough for Man to accept that his gruelling existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it. And in truth there is always someone: a listener, a reader, a spectator, a witness, who can also double up as simultaneous narrator and actor: the individuals tell their stories to themselves, to each his own, they are the ones who peer in and look at and notice things on a daily basis, from the outside in a way; or, rather, from a false outside, from a generalised narcissism, sometimes known as "consciousness". That's why so few people can withstand mockery, humiliation, ridicule, the rush of blood to the face, a snub, that least of all ... I've known men like that, men who were nobody yet who had that same immense fear of their own history, of what might be told and what, therefore, they might tell too. Of their blotted, ugly history. But, I insist, the determining factor always comes from outside, from something external: all this has little to do with shame, regret, remorse, self-hatred although these might make a fleeting appearance at some point. These individuals only feel obliged to give a true account of their acts or omissions, good or bad, brave, contemptible, cowardly or generous, if other people (the majority, that is) know about them, and those acts or omissions are thus encorporated into what is known about them, that is, into their official portraits. It isn't really a matter of conscience, but of performance, of mirrors. One can easily cast doubt on what is reflected in mirrors, and believe that it was all illusory, wrap it up in a mist of diffuse or faulty memory and decide finally that it didn't happen and that there is no memory of it, because there is no memory of what did not take place. Then it will no longer torment them: some people have an extraordinary ability to convince themselves that what happened didn't happen and what didn't exist did.
”
”
Javier Marías (Fever and Spear (Your Face Tomorrow, #1))
“
In 2002, after the huge success of Who Moved my Cheese? a management manual that sold 1.6million copies in China, there was a rush of books inspired by it.
Titles included Whose Cheese Should I Move?; Can I Move Your Cheese?; Who Dares to Move my Cheese?; I Don’t Bother to Move Your Cheese; Agitating, Alluring Cheese; No One Can Move My Cheese! The New Allegory of Cheese; Make the Cheese by Yourself!; A Piece of Cheese: Reading World Famous Fairy Tales; Management Advice 52 from the Cheese; and No More Cheese!
Finally, there was my personal favorite: Chinese People Eat Cheese? - Who Took My Meat Bun?
”
”
Rachel DeWoskin
“
With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset set instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who? George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved.
”
”
Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential)
“
And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred.
”
”
Ted Kerasote (Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs)
“
In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15
”
”
Henry Wiencek (Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves)
“
All Night, All Night
Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird
Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and
attitudes
The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read,
Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced
On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.
Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish
Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights
Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still
As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle,
Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar --
The bored center of this vision and condition looked and
looked
Down through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking
The seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well
Of the great darkness under the slick glitter,
And he was only one among eight million riders and
readers.
And all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum
Of the long determined passage passed through him
By his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train
Like a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh--
The silent or passive night, pressing and impressing
The patients' foreheads with a tightening-like image
Of the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light
Piercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence
Into a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession.
A bored child went to get a cup of water,
And crushed the cup because the water too was
Boring and merely boredom's struggle.
The child, returning, looked over the shoulder
Of a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder.
A fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops
Drip down the fleece of many dinners.
And the bird flew parallel and parallel flew
The black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified,
At regular intervals, post after post
Of thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees.
And then the bird cried as if to all of us:
0 your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
What will you ever do with your life before death's
knife
Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?
As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,
Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,
An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:
This is the way that night passes by, this
Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable
abyss.
”
”
Delmore Schwartz
“
In the early 1990s, before Japan’s bubble economy burst, a leading newspaper in the U.S. published a large photo taken on a winter’s morning of rush-hour commuters in Shinjuku Station (or possibly Tokyo Station—the same applies to both) heading down the stairs. As if by agreement, all the commuters were gazing downward, their expressions strained and unhappy, looking more like lifeless fish packed in a can than people. The article said, “Japan may be affluent, but most Japanese look like this, heads downcast and unhappy-looking.” The photo became famous. Tsukuru had no idea if most Japanese were, as the article claimed, unhappy. But the real reason that most passengers descending the stairs at Shinjuku Station during their packed morning commute were looking down was less that they were unhappy than that they were concerned about their footing. Don’t slip on the stairs, don’t lose a shoe—these are the major issues on the minds of the commuters in the mammoth station during rush hour. There was no explanation of this, no context for the photograph. Certainly it was hard to view this mass of people, clad in dark overcoats, their heads down, as happy. And of course it’s logical to see a country where people can’t commute in the morning without fear of losing their shoes as an unhappy society.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)
“
home of Elon Simpson. We were right off of Washington Square, a part of the city marked by well-appointed brownstones with shuttered windows and a park hailing back to this country’s birth. Here was the seat of this city’s Quality—and the seat of our dead. I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Pennsylvania, the city had fallen victim to a wave of fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Water Dancer)
“
But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate–For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too–As I'll show–It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism–Says Dave "People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles–Isnt that amazing?give me a little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, "The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?"–The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one–In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip–Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, "Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?"–"Let's go tell him right now!"–"Why of course if we wait another minute...and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!"–We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner.
(Big Sur, Chap. 11)
”
”
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
“
The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell, the man who had found and identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table was the greatest star of the young science of palaeontology. His name was Richard Owen and by this time he had already devoted several productive years to making Gideon Mantell’s life hell. A double-tailed lizard, part of the vast collection of natural wonders and anatomical specimens collected by the Scottish-born surgeon John Hunter in the eighteenth century. After Hunter’s death in 1793, the collection passed to the Royal College of Surgeons. (credit 6.8) Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts from corpses and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once, while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlour. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retrieved the head and rushed out again.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
And, so, what was it that elevated Rubi from dictator's son-in-law to movie star's husband to the sort of man who might capture the hand of the world's wealthiest heiress?
Well, there was his native charm.
People who knew him, even if only casually, even if they were predisposed to be suspicious or resentful of him, came away liking him. He picked up checks; he had courtly manners; he kept the party gay and lively; he was attentive to women but made men feel at ease; he was smoothly quick to rise from his chair when introduced, to open doors, to light a lady's cigarette ("I have the fastest cigarette lighter in the house," he once boasted): the quintessential chivalrous gent of manners.
The encomia, if bland, were universal. "He's a very nice guy," swore gossip columnist Earl Wilson, who stayed with Rubi in Paris. ""I'm fond of him," said John Perona, owner of New York's El Morocco. "Rubi's got a nice personality and is completely masculine," attested a New York clubgoer. "He has a lot of men friends, which, I suppose, is unusual. Aly Khan, for instance, has few male friends. But everyone I know thinks Rubi is a good guy." "He is one of the nicest guys I know," declared that famed chum of famed playboys Peter Lawford. "A really charming man- witty, fun to be with, and a he-man."
There were a few tricks to his trade. A society photographer judged him with a professional eye thus: "He can meet you for a minute and a month later remember you very well." An author who played polo with him put it this way: "He had a trick that never failed. When he spoke with someone, whether man or woman, it seemed as if the rest of the world had lost all interest for him. He could hang on the words of a woman or man who spoke only banalities as if the very future of the world- and his future, especially- depended on those words."
But there was something deeper to his charm, something irresistible in particular when he turned it on women. It didn't reveal itself in photos, and not every woman was susceptible to it, but it was palpable and, when it worked, unforgettable.
Hollywood dirt doyenne Hedda Hoppe declared, "A friend says he has the most perfect manners she has ever encountered. He wraps his charm around your shoulders like a Russian sable coat."
Gossip columnist Shelia Graham was chary when invited to bring her eleven-year-old daughter to a lunch with Rubi in London, and her wariness was transmitted to the girl, who wiped her hand off on her dress after Rubi kissed it in a formal greeting; by the end of lunch, he had won the child over with his enthusiastic, spontaneous manner, full of compliments but never cloying. "All done effortlessly," Graham marveled. "He was probably a charming baby, I am sure that women rushed to coo over him in the cradle."
Elsa Maxwell, yet another gossip, but also a society gadabout and hostess who claimed a key role in at least one of Rubi's famous liaisons, put it thus: "You expect Rubi to be a very dangerous young man who personifies the wolf. Instead, you meet someone who is so unbelievably charming and thoughtful that you are put off-guard before you know it."
But charm would only take a man so far. Rubi was becoming and international legend not because he could fascinate a young girl but because he could intoxicate sophisticated women. p124
”
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Shawn Levy (The Last Playboy : the High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa)
“
It happened because during my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day at one of [Jerzy] Neyman's classes. On the blackboard there were two problems that I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework — the problems seemed to be a little harder than usual. I asked him if he still wanted it. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever. About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o'clock, [my wife] Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: "I've just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication." For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.
A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.
The second of the two problems, however, was not published until after World War II. It happened this way. Around 1950 I received a letter from Abraham Wald enclosing the final galley proofs of a paper of his about to go to press in the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Someone had just pointed out to him that the main result in his paper was the same as the second "homework" problem solved in my thesis. I wrote back suggesting we publish jointly. He simply inserted my name as coauthor into the galley proof.
[interview in the College Mathematics Journal in 1986]
”
”
George Bernard Dantzig
“
Night after night I would speak to Violet in the womb (no matter how strange that may seem to some people) because I was looking forward to the day when I would hold her in my arms, no longer just talking to my wife’s pajamas like a fucking lunatic. When the day finally came, I was nervously packing up the car to go to the hospital when I noticed a huge rainbow overhead, something that happens maybe once every thousand years in Los Angeles. I was immediately calmed. Yes, it sounds nauseatingly romantic, but yes, it’s true, and I took it as a sign. After a long and difficult labor, Violet was born to the sound of the Beatles in the background, and she arrived screaming with a predetermined vocal capacity that made the Foo Fighters sound like the Carpenters. Once she was cleaned up and put under the little Arby’s heat-lamp bed, I put my face close to hers, stared into her gigantic blue eyes, and said, “Hey, Violet, it’s Dad.” She immediately stopped screaming and her eyes locked with mine. She recognized my voice. We stared at each other in silence, our first introduction, and I smiled and talked to her as if I had known her my whole life. I am happy to say that, still to this day, when we lock eyes it’s the same feeling. This was a love I had never experienced before. There is an inevitable insecurity that comes along with being a famous musician that makes you question love. Do they love me? Or do they love “it”? You are showered with superficial love and adoration on a regular basis, giving you something similar to a sugar high, but your heart crashes once the rush dies off. Is it possible for someone to see a musician without the instrument being a part of their identity? Or is that a part of the identity that the other loves? Regardless, it’s a dangerous and slippery slope to question love, but one thing is for certain: there is nothing purer than the unconditional love between a parent and their child.
”
”
Dave Grohl (The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music—A Memoir of Dreams, Music and Legendary Collaborations)
“
It’s okay if you can’t. No worries. Just an idea,” I say quickly, looking away so she won’t see how disappointed I am.
“No—I mean, I want to, but—” Hana sucks in a breath. I hate this, hate how awkward we both are. “I kind of have this party”—she corrects herself quickly—
“this thing I’m supposed to go to with Angelica Marston.”
My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It’s amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. [...]
A rush of hatred overwhelms me. Hatred for my life, for its narrowness and cramped spaces; hatred for Angelica Marston, with her secretive smile and rich parents; hatred for Hana, for being so stupid and careless and stubborn, first and foremost, and for leaving me behind before I was ready to be left; and underneath all those layers something else, too, some white-hot blade of unhappiness flashing in the very deepest part of me. I can’t name it, or even focus on it clearly, but somehow I understand that this—this other thing—makes me the angriest of all. [...]
Despite everything, this gives me pause. In the days after the party at Roaring Brook Farms, snatches of music seemed to follow me everywhere: I heard it winging in and out of the wind, I heard it singing off the ocean and moaning through the walls of the house. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, my heart pounding, with the notes sounding in my ears. But every time I was awake and trying to remember the melodies consciously, hum a few notes or recall any of the chords, I couldn’t.
Hana’s staring at me hopefully, waiting for my response. For a second I actually feel bad for her. I want to make her happy, like I always did, want to see her give a whoop and put her fist in the air and flash me one of her famous smiles. But then I remember she has Angelica Marston now, and something hardens in my throat, and knowing that I’m going to disappoint her gives me a kind of dull satisfaction.
”
”
Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
“
Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” … The word that offends against realism here is “enjoy.” I’m sorry—enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you’re being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error.
But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks?
… Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you’re that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You’ve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you’ll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won’t rescue you. Or suppose you’re that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you’re back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you’ve fucked up big time. Always before you’ve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn’t true, now you know you haven’t the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you’ll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won’t ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame.
So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you’re all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there’s no help coming … But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” fifteen hundred years ago, and it’s still cruel.
”
”
Francis Spufford
“
saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own.
”
”
Stefan Zweig (The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European)
“
In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.
”
”
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
Chicago, Illinois 1896
Opening Night
Wearing her Brünnhilda costume, complete with padding, breastplate, helm, and false blond braids, and holding a spear as if it were a staff, Sophia Maxwell waited in the wings of the Canfield-Pendegast theatre. The bright stage lighting made it difficult to see the audience filling the seats for opening night of Die Walküre, but she could feel their anticipation build as the time drew near for the appearance of the Songbird of Chicago.
She took slow deep breaths, inhaling the smell of the greasepaint she wore on her face. Part of her listened to the music for her cue, and the other part immersed herself in the role of the god Wotan’s favorite daughter. From long practice, Sophia tried to ignore quivers of nervousness. Never before had stage fright made her feel ill. Usually she couldn’t wait to make her appearance. Now, however, nausea churned in her stomach, timpani banged pain-throbs through her head, her muscles ached, and heat made beads of persperation break out on her brow. I feel more like a plucked chicken than a songbird, but I will not let my audience down.
Annoyed with herself, Sophia reached for a towel held by her dresser, Nan, standing at her side. She lifted the helm and blotted her forehead, careful not to streak the greasepaint.
Nan tisked and pulled out a small brush and a tin of powder from one of the caprious pockets of her apron. She dipped the brush into the powder and wisked it across Sophia’s forehead. “You’re too pale. You need more rouge.”
“No time.”
A rhythmic sword motif sounded the prelude to Act ll. Sophia pivoted away from Nan and moved to the edge of the wing, looking out to the scene of a rocky mountain pass. Soon the warrior-maiden Brünnhilda would make an appearance with her famous battle cry.
She allowed the anticpaptory energy of the audience to fill her body. The trills of the high strings and upward rushing passes in the woodwinds introduced Brünnhilda. Right on cue, Sophia made her entrance and struck a pose. She took a deep breath, preparing to hit the opening notes of her battle call.
But as she opened her mouth to sing, nothing came out. Caught off guard, Sophia cleared her throat and tried again. Nothing. Horrified, she glanced around, as if seeking help, her body hot and shaky with shame.
Across the stage in the wings, Sophia could see Judith Deal, her understudy and rival, watching.
The other singer was clad in a similar costume to Sophia’s for her role as the valkerie Gerhilde. A triumphant expression crossed her face.
Warwick Canfield-Pendegast, owner of the theatre, stood next to Judith, his face contorted in fury. He clenched his chubby hands.
A wave of dizziness swept through Sophia. The stage lights dimmed. Her knees buckled. As she crumpled to the ground, one final thought followed her into the darkness. I’ve just lost my position as prima dona of the Canfield-Pendegast Opera Company.
”
”
Debra Holland (Singing Montana Sky (Montana Sky, #7))
Zane Grey (WILD WEST Boxed Set: 150+ Western Classics in One Volume: Cowboy Adventures, Yukon & Oregon Trail Tales, Famous Outlaw Classics, Gold Rush Adventures & ... The Last of the Mohicans, Rimrock Trail…))
Zane Grey (60 WESTERNS: Cowboy Adventures, Yukon & Oregon Trail Tales, Famous Outlaws, Gold Rush Adventures: Riders of the Purple Sage, The Night Horseman, The Last ... of the West, A Texas Cow-Boy, The Prairie…)
“
when he returned he told
”
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Zane Grey (60 WESTERNS: Cowboy Adventures, Yukon & Oregon Trail Tales, Famous Outlaws, Gold Rush Adventures: Riders of the Purple Sage, The Night Horseman, The Last ... of the West, A Texas Cow-Boy, The Prairie…)
“
He smiled and looked at me steadfastly. I stood rooted to the ground, peace rushing like a mighty flood through the gates of my eyes. I was instantaneously healed of a pain in my back, which had troubled me intermittently for years. Renewed, bathed in a sea of luminous joy, I wept no more. After touching the saint’s feet, I sauntered into the jungle, making my way through its tropical tangle until I reached Tarakeswar. There I made a second pilgrimage to the famous shrine and prostrated myself fully before the altar. The round stone enlarged before my inner vision until it became the cosmical spheres, ring within ring, zone after zone, all dowered with divinity. I entrained happily an hour later for Calcutta. My travels ended, not in the lofty mountains, but in the Himalayan presence of my Master.
”
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Paramahansa Yogananda (The Autobiography of a Yogi ("Popular Life Stories"))
“
The sun lost its heat and wore down to the western horizon, where it changed from white to gold and rested like a huge ball about to roll on its golden shadows down the
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Zane Grey (WILD WEST Boxed Set: 150+ Western Classics in One Volume: Cowboy Adventures, Yukon & Oregon Trail Tales, Famous Outlaw Classics, Gold Rush Adventures & ... The Last of the Mohicans, Rimrock Trail…))
“
In accounting for the transformations in ideas and culture that reshaped the last quarter of the twentieth century, three sharply different explanations have been offered. The first posits a shift in the nation's core psyche and character. It was the "me decade," the journalist Tom Wolfe wrote famously in 1976: an age obsessed with self-referentiality. The nation, this line of reasoning argues, was caught up in an "age of greed," a new "culture of narcissism," a collapse of faith in public institutions, a pell-mell, selfish rush into a myriad of private lifestyle communities.
”
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Daniel T. Rodgers (Age of Fracture)
“
During the flight back to Los Angeles from Milwaukee, Lucy became sick and went to bed as soon as the couple got home. Two days later, Desi rushed her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and the conclusion was the same as before. Another miscarriage.
”
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Warren G. Harris (Lucy & Desi: The Legendary Love Story of Television's Most Famous Couple)
“
The first major battle of the Valley Campaign was at Kernstown on March 23, 1862. It was a Sunday, and Jackson, a devoutly Christian man, didn’t want to fight on the Sabbath, but he changed his mind when he saw the lay of the land. Not far off from Pritchard’s Hill was Sandy Ridge, which offered a similarly good view of the Valley. He rushed the Stonewall Brigade, under the command of Brigadier General Richard Garnett, to this ridge, where a stone wall offered them protection. The Union troops saw the opportunity too, and raced to get there first. One
”
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
“
Rachel,” Dad said as I was rushing out the door. I turned, fingers tapping my impatience out against my leg. “There’s no such thing as a boy that’s out of your league. If he doesn’t realize that, he’s not good enough for you in the first place.”
God, dads were so perpetually blind to reality. Still, your dad should believe that. Even if he’s wrong.
“Thanks, Dad.
”
”
Jilly Gagnon (#famous)
“
It tastes like you,” he said.
The heat rushed into my face. “Uh, yeah, my lip balm…same flavor.”
“I think it just became my favorite ice cream.”
Ookaay. So was that an endorsement of my kiss?
“You say that like you’d never tried it before.”
“I hadn’t.”
I stared at him. “It’s one of their most famous. How could you not try it?”
“I’m not into trends. Just because someone else is doing it, doesn’t mean I want to.”
I glanced down at the ice cream melting in the carton. I remembered his taste--root beer. And Mac’s? I really couldn’t say.
It was rare when I didn’t delve into ice cream with gusto. “Earlier you said you and Mac had talked about me. What exactly?”
“Just usual guy stuff.”
“Like what?”
“How much he likes you.”
My insecurities were circling. “Did he like me before Dave and Bubba’s, before Tiffany put me through the extreme makeover?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
He sounded completely baffled, like maybe I’d just asked a Tiffany-style question.
“Okay, look, earlier, when I mentioned being honest, I just wanted to say that it was weird kissing Mac in front of you, because I don’t kiss guys in front of people. So, anyway, I just wanted you to know that.”
“Consider it known.”
“Okay then.”
I got up. “Do you want me to leave this with you?”
“Sure you don’t mind?”
“Nah.” I handed him the carton and spoon. “Enjoy.”
My offer wasn’t totally generous. I took perverse pleasure at the thought he’d think about me with each bite.
I wondered if maybe he might have been my date tonight if he wasn’t living in my house.
Would it be rude to ask him to move out?
”
”
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
“
Interstate 290 cuts past Chicago’s Rush University hospital and then through the city’s near Southwest Side. Adjacent to the expressway, homeless people and others suffering from opioid-use disorders do deals and shoot up, and the highway also provides quick access for affluent people from the suburbs. “They serve you in your car, quick-out in under a minute, and you’re back home in Hinsdale before the kids wake,” Jack Riley, ex–special agent in charge of the DEA’s Chicago office, told Rolling Stone. “That’s why gangsters kill for those corners. They’re the Park Place and Boardwalk of the drug game.” To Chicago residents, 290 is better known as the Eisenhower Expressway or, to many, the Heroin Highway. Chicago’s famously high murder rate, which police say is driven by drug dealing on the West Side, all comes to a head near the Heroin Highway, in drug markets on streets like Independence Boulevard.
”
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Ben Westhoff (Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic)
“
The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new ‘Clean U.S. Party,’ the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers, a surreal union of both Rush L.– and Hillary R.C.–disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile venue), the seemingly LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform’s plank had been Let’s Shoot Our Wastes Into Space, 150 C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years, until—white-gloved finger on the pulse of an increasingly asthmatic and sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American electorate—the C.U.S.P. suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
Newton was a decidedly odd figure – brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting. On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him.
Set atop these odd beliefs and quirky traits, however, was the mind of a supreme genius-though even when working in conventional channels he often showed a tendency to peculiarity. As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no one about it for twenty-seven years. In like manner, he did work in optics that transformed our understanding of light and laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy, and again chose not to share the results for three decades.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
Humphrey famously declared: “My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are one hundred seventy-two years late. To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” It
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
Yuguo fell apart, into a thousand little pieces. He felt it happen, fragments of his mind detaching from the rest, splitting off, becoming their own, being mapped by Nexus. Here was Yuguo’s knowledge of coding, his comprehension of data structures, of objects and methods, of intents and game players, of threads and loops and conditions. Here was football Yuguo, the precise way his left foot grounded into the grass and his hips swiveled and his arm balanced as his right foot shot forward to kick the checked ball at the goal. Here was Yuguo’s shy lust for girls, the patterns his eyes drew over their curves when he saw them, the anxiety that struck him dumb when they were near. Here was Yuguo’s despair that had led him to this room, his quiet dread that his country and the world were getting worse instead of better, that the future was one of slow strangulation at the electronic hands of smiling tame AIs with famous faces, their forked tongues lapping out of the viewscreens to feed saccharine to the masses, the old men who’d always ruled China laughing and holding their leashes. Here were the words a young woman had said to him just minutes ago. “Critical mass. Weak apart, strong together.” Here were her eyes, fiery eyes, hanging in space. Here was her name: Lifen. Then those pieces fell apart, into smaller pieces, which fell apart into fragments even smaller: Yuguo’s sensation of red. Yuguo’s concept of 1 and 0. Yuguo’s left thumb. The sound in Yuguo’s head when he heard the third note of his favorite pop song. Yuguo’s yes. Yuguo’s no. Yuguo’s and. Yuguo’s or. Yuguo’s xor. Yuguo’s now. Yuguo’s future. Yuguo’s past. He could see himself now. He was a golden statue of Yuguo, immobile, one foot in front of the other, standing in a space of white light. But the statue wasn’t solid, it was made of grains, millions of grains, flecks of gold dust, millions of parts of him. And as he watched they were separating, pulling gradually apart, so that he was no longer a single entity but a cloud, a fog, a fog of Yuguo, and if a strong wind came, he would just blow away, and if the pieces split any more he knew there wouldn’t be any such thing as Yuguo left at all. Yuguo’s fear. Yuguo’s end. And then the pieces rushed together, and he was inside that statue, he was that statue, and he was all of it, 1 and 0, yes and no, future and past, sound and sight, football and coding. He was all of it. He was whole. He was a mind. I’m Yuguo, he realized. I’m him. I’m me. I’m Yuguo! His eyes snapped open. He was in his body. His body made of molten gold. No, not gold, flesh and blood.
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Ramez Naam (Apex (Nexus, #3))
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A stampede killed at least 36 people during New Year's Eve celebrations in Shanghai, authorities said, possibly caused by people rushing to pick up fake money thrown from a building overlooking the city's famous Bund waterfront district.
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Anonymous
“
The Horned Master governs the generative powers of the kingdom of the beasts, the raw forces of life, death and renewal which sustains the natural world.” Nigel A Jackson. The Call of the Horned Piper: 38 The Art and Craft of the Witches is found at the crossroad, where this world and the other side meets and all possibility become reality. This simple fact is often forgotten as one rushes to the Sabbath or occupies oneself with formalities of ritual. The cross marks the four quarters, the four elements, the path of Sun, Moon and Stars. The cross was fused or confused with the Greek staurus, meaning ‘rod’, ‘rood’ or ‘pole’. Various forms of phallic worship are simply, veneration for the cosmic point of possibility and becoming. It is at the crossroads we will gain all or lose all and it is natural that it is at the crossroads we gain perspective. The crossroad is a place of choice, the spirit-denizens of the crossroads are said to be tricky and unreliable and it is of course where we find the Devil. One of the most famous legends of recent times concerns the blues-man Robert Johnson (1911– 1938). He claimed that, one night, just before midnight he had gone to the crossroads. He took out his guitar and played, whereupon a big black guy appeared, tuned his guitar, played a song backwards and handed it back.2 This incident altered Johnson’s playing and his finest and most everlasting compositions were the fruit of the few years of life left to him. This legend tells us how he needed to bury himself at the crossroads, offering himself to the powers dwelling there. Business done with the Devil is said to give him the upper hand. The ill omens and malefica associated with such deals is present in Johnson’s story. He got fame and women, but he died less than three years later before he reached thirty. His body was found poisoned at a crossroads, the murderer’s identity a mystery. Around the Mississippi no less than three tombs carry the name of Robert Leroy Johnson. The image of the Devil remains one of threat, blessing, beauty and opportunity. Where we find the Devil we find danger, unpredictability and chaos. If he offers a deal we know we are in for a complicated bargain. The Devil says that change is good, that we need movement in order to progress. His world is about cunning and ordeal entwined like the serpents of past and future on the pole of ascent. It is to the crossroads we go to make decisions. It is at the crossroads we set the course for the journey. It is at the crossroads we confront ourselves and realize our
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Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold (Craft of the Untamed: An inspired vision of Traditional Witchcraft)
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Lacan was famous for his extremely negative statements about romantic love. “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship”. “Men and women don’t exist”. And most dramatically, “Man knows nothing of woman, and woman knows nothing of man.” Lacan was trying to get at an unpopular yet critical fact about romantic relationships. The extent to which we don’t truly comprehend our lovers and simply peg a range of fantasies drawn from childhood experiences to their physical forms. It’s a dark but, in a way, liberating idea. It invites us not to be upset when we don’t feel a perfect rapport with someone who initially seemed like a soulmate. And it recommends that we certainly don’t rush off in search of some more “ideal” partner if we’re feeling less than perfectly understood. The connection we worry that we’ve lost is something we never actually had. Our relationship hasn’t gone wrong through folly, error or bad luck. It’s following ordinary path of love, which is to come to an awareness of its fundamentally illusory nature. With Lacan’s help we can hold on to a more accurate picture of what is normal: to be more or less always alone. This is a foundation upon which we can build more mature and less frustrated relationships.
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Alain de Botton
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There was a gold rush atmosphere in the fledgling days of the internet boom, and indeed it evoked memories of the first California gold rush, which was its own sort of bubble. Exactly a century and a half earlier, gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada by a former carpenter from New Jersey. Hordes of fortune seekers then invaded the state from every corner of the globe, striding into the hills with picks and shovels and pans—and nearly all of them ended up penniless. Yet there were some pioneers whose wealth and success endured, and typically they were the people not especially interested in pulling gold out of the ground. A famous maxim was coined: If you want to get rich during a gold rush, sell shovels.
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Christopher Varelas (How Money Became Dangerous: The Inside Story of Our Turbulent Relationship with Modern Finance)
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European perfumery started in earnest around the turn of the twentieth century, and developed apace with the discovery of aroma chemicals: coumarin, vanillin, cyclamen aldehyde, the great nitro musks.
The Great War left industry and cities largely intact and killed countless males. Many factors then conspired to make the period 1918-1939 the golden age of mass perfumery: working women vying for the remaining men, cheap aroma chemicals, cheap labor to harvest the naturals, flourishing visual arts and music, the obsolescence of prewar bourgeois dignity, replaced by irreverence and optimism.
The WWII destroyed the great engine of European chemistry (Germany). The tail end of German chemistry on the Rhine lay in the neutral Switzerland and was untouched, which is wy today two of the biggest perfumery houses in the world (Firmenich and Givaudan) are Swiss.
Postwar France stank. In 1951, six years after the Liberation, only one household in fifteen had an internal bathroom. The Paris Metro at rush hour was famous for its unwashed stench.
Given cost constraints, French perfumes in those years ('50) had an air de famille, a perfumey feel based on then-cheap drydown materials like sandalwood oil and salicylate esters. Being able to smell someone's fragrance was a sign of intimacy. When a perfume left a trail (called sillage) it was remarked upon, usually unfavourably.
It is a strange coincidence, or perhaps a hint of the existence of God, that skin melanin is a polymer spontaneously formed from phenols, and that the perfumery materials that defined American perfumery were also in good part phenols.
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Luca Turin (Perfumes: The Guide)
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of cherry vanilla Diet Dr Pepper, and their cell phones splayed out on the coffee table. A month ago, Ali had come to school with a brand-new LG flip phone, and the others had rushed out to buy their own that very day. They all had pink leather holsters to match Ali’s, too—well, all except for Aria, whose holster was made of pink mohair. She’d knitted it herself. Aria moved the camera’s lever back and forth to zoom in and out. “And anyway, my face isn’t going to freeze like this. I’m concentrating on setting up this shot. This is for posterity. For when we become famous.” “Well, we all know I’m going to get famous.” Alison thrust back her shoulders and turned her head to the side, revealing her swanlike neck. “Why are you going to be famous?” Spencer challenged, sounding bitchier than she probably meant to. “I’m going to have my own show. I’ll
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Sara Shepard (Perfect (Pretty Little Liars, #3))
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Shortly after the start of the Bear Flag rebellion, Frémont’s soldiers spied a small boat of Californians crossing San Pablo Bay. Frémont sent Kit Carson, the famous scout and Indian fighter who was Frémont’s frequent partner in exploration, and some other men to intercept the boat. According to an eyewitness, Carson asked Frémont, “Captain, shall I take those men prisoner?” According to this same witness, Frémont answered, with a wave of the hand, “I have no room for prisoners.” Carson and the others rode to where the boat had landed and shot three of the Californians dead.
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H.W. Brands (The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (Search and Recover Book 2))
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Thus Plato offers one version of a philosophical poverty, by which wisdom alienates one from conventional ideals and makes one indifferent to worldly concerns. The Cynics philosophized in the same general rubric, though obviously details differ significantly. One notable difference between the two is the value placed upon learning and science. Unlike his Platonic counterpart, the Cynic rejects arithmetic, geometry, dialectic, and the rest as superfluous distractions from the "one big" requirement of self-knowledge. So in the famous anecdote, when Plato and his followers have defined man as the "featherless biped," Diogenes rushes into the Academy with a plucked chicken, crying, "Here is Plato's human being!" For the Cynic, logical exercises, definitionmaking, and the like are not preparatory to the vision of some Good or intuition of eternity. All such talk is a form of pride, a strategy to overawe others, and contributes less to the good life than does a healthy skepticism.
Yet, like Plato, the Cynics also travel along the Eleatic Way of Truth and shun what they ridicule as the Way of Seeming. For what can be said truly? In short, the Cynics are profoundly skeptical about the possibility of almost all knowledge.
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Will Desmond (The Greek Praise of Poverty: Origins of Ancient Cynicism)
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You and your beauty’s world!
They say imagination is always ahead of the dream,
So I imagine about you, your ways, your sweet smile, and then I retire into a dream,
Where you are the imagination, you are the reality,
Where I sleep in the palpable wonder of your beauty,
And whenever I wake up in these endless projections of your beauty,
I feel within me the rush of your beauty and its sanctity,
Then when I have reposed in it for long enough,
I imagine again and indulge in the imaginary bluff,
Where you are cast in the mirror of my life and now you reflect everywhere,
Easily everywhere because in this world there is no here and no there,
It is always everywhere although you are just somewhere,
Because it does not matter as long as your beauty and you are there, just there,
Then who cares whether it is left or right, up or down, East or West,
For me in your presence everything appears to be in a state nothing short of the best,
So it is this world, your world, your beauty’s world where you are installed in every atom and its every element,
And even God wonders what is this new, but such a wonderful element!
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Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
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You may very well not be aware of the sickness, but I guarantee you have got experienced it. The Builder’s Block psychological sickness has affected almost every Minecraft player at least once, which is quite typical. The illness is contagious, but in an odd manner; it is going to force anyone to give you the nausea publicly through a really uninformative and rushed forum thread. Humans are not susceptible to this as being a type of transmission, but, and sometimes are trying to help the victim by replying to the poorly created thread, frequently neglecting to achieve this. Happily, the nausea has perhaps not been proven deadly, nonetheless it is proven to mentally stress players which can be affected. Signs There's a obscure set of symptoms one might expect you'll feel. You might perhaps have Builder’s Block when you've got one thing such as the following: •lack of ideas to help keep you busy in Minecraft •The sudden disinterest of continuing a project in Minecraft •Feeling bored •The urge to hit one’s head against a nearby wall for a few ideas •Uncontrollable urges to press [ESC] and [ALT]+[F4] The illness is famous to alter between players. It is extremely not likely that you will suffer from all of the aforementioned indications, and when you do have problems with them all at one period of time, please avoid calling any health-related doctor as it can cause undesired psychological treatment. Treatment Healing Builder’s Block is generally benign. First, attempt to ‘mine it off’. That is, mine for resources you may/may not want. If you are not willing to invest as much as 3 hours attempting to heal your illness, decide to try one of many following to get motivation: •Bing: Look into random such things as your preferred video gaming level or let’s play person. •Minecraft Forums: Search the forum for other people’s projects and prefer to assist them away. NEVER POST A THREAD; it'll oftimes be ignored or turn for the worst. •Minecraft: Explore. See if something demands a structure or statue. That overhang is screaming at one to become a wonderful hanging city.
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Feud Sigseed (Minecraft Base and City Building Guide: A Complete Handbook - Unofficial)
“
There’s a stone with an iron ring in it here!’ yelled Anne, excitedly. They all rushed over to her. Julian dug about with his spade and uncovered the whole stone. Sure enough, it did have a ring in it – and rings are only set into stones that need to be moved! Surely this stone must be the one that covered the dungeon entrance! All the children took turns at pulling on the iron ring, but the stone did not move. Then Julian tied two or three turns of rope through it and the four children put out their full strength and pulled for all they were worth. The stone moved. The children distinctly felt it stir. ‘All together again!
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Enid Blyton (The Famous Five Collection 1: Books 1-3 (Famous Five, #1-3))
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by refusing to repeat it, much to the despair of their record companies. Both wrote gorgeous sci-fi ballads blatantly inspired by 2001—“Space Oddity” and “After the Gold Rush.” Both did classic songs about imperialism that name-checked Marlon Brando—“China Girl” and “Pocahontas.” Both were prodigiously prolific even when they were trying to eat Peru through their nostrils. They were mutual fans, though they floundered when they tried to copy each other (Trans and Tin Machine). Both sang their fears of losing their youth when they were still basically kids; both aged mysteriously well. Neither ever did anything remotely sane. But there’s a key difference: Bowie liked working with smart people, whereas Young always liked working with . . . well, let’s go ahead and call them “not quite as smart as Neil Young” people. Young made his most famous music with two backing groups—the awesomely inept Crazy Horse and the expensively addled CSN—whose collective IQ barely leaves room temperature. He knows they’re not going to challenge him with ideas of their own, so he knows how to use them—brilliantly in the first case, lucratively in the second. But Bowie never made any of his memorable music that way—he always preferred collaborating with (and stealing from) artists who knew tricks he didn’t know, well educated in musical worlds where he was just a visitor. Just look at the guitarists he worked with: Carlos Alomar from James Brown’s band vs. Robert Fripp from King Crimson. Stevie Ray Vaughan from Texas vs. Mick Ronson from Hull. Adrian Belew from Kentucky vs. Earl Slick from Brooklyn. Nile Rodgers. Peter Frampton. Ricky Gardiner, who played all that fantastic fuzz guitar on Low (and who made the mistake of demanding a raise, which is why he dropped out of the story so fast). Together, Young and Bowie laid claim to a jilted generation left high and dry by the dashed hippie dreams. “The
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Rob Sheffield (On Bowie)
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When Mom told me not to do something, I did it anyway. The thrill of the adventure, the adrenaline rush and the escape trumped all consequences and there were always consequences because no matter how quiet, sneaky and brillant I thought I was, I couldn’t outsmart Mom.
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Vanessa Williams (You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (and Each Other))
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Adams drew from the War of 1812 the disconcerting conclusion that occasional wars are indispensable for the inculcation of civic virtue and hence long-term health of republican government.
Adams to Rush, "Wars at times are as necessary for the preservation and perfection, the prosperity, Liberty, happiness, Virtue, & independence of Nations as Gales of wind to the Saluburity of the Atmosphere, or the agitations of the Ocean to prevent its stagnation and putrefaction."
There is a definite echo here of Jefferson's famous claim that "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical," as well well as Adam's own hope during the Revolution that "the Furnace of Affliction" would help to purify the nation, ridding it of its softness and selfishness."
Adams, "We all regret or affect to regret War...There never was a Republick; no nor any other People, under whatever Government, that could maintain their Independence, much less grow and propser, without it." ...
"What horrid Creatures we Men are," he mused, " that we cannont be virtuous without murdering one another."
Chapter 9, page 139-140
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Dennis C. Rasmussen (Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders)
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As I absorbed natural history knowledge from specialised books and field visits, I started noticing this disconnect between Tata's broad interest in nature and his lack of awareness about the serious problem of wildlife around us being wiped out by hunters. When Tata published his science encyclopedia, Vijanana Prapancha, in the mid-1960s, I recall passionately arguing with him about his averment that wild tigers were so numerous in Malenad that local hunters could never extirpate them. I told him that if a famous writer like him said this in print, his many admirers among the local landed gentry would rush out to finish off the last wild tigers. Tata appeared nonplussed for once, but the book was already out in print.
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Ullas K Karanth (Growing Up Karanth)
“
Maggie rushed away, that her burst of tears, which she felt must come, might not happen till she was safe upstairs. They were very bitter tears; everybody in the world seemed so hard and unkind to Maggie; there was no indulgence, no fondness, such as she imagined when she fashioned the world afresh in her own thoughts. In books there were people who were always agreeable or tender, and delighted to do things that made one happy, and who did not show their kindness by finding fault. The world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt;
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Charles William Eliot (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
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He only stood still at the top of the stairs and said, “Maggie, you’re to come down.” But she rushed to him and clung round his neck, sobbing, “Oh, Tom, please forgive me — I can’t bear it — I will always be good — always remember things — do love me — please, dear Tom!” We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behavior to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilized society. Maggie and Tom were still very much like young animals, and so she could rub her cheek against his, and kiss his ear in a random sobbing way; and there were tender fibres in the lad that had been used to answer to Maggie’s fondling, so that he behaved with a weakness quite inconsistent with his resolution to punish her as much as she deserved. He actually began to kiss her in return, and say — “Don’t cry, then, Magsie; here, eat a bit o’ cake.
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Charles William Eliot (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
“
He only stood still at the top of the stairs and said, “Maggie, you’re to come down.” But she rushed to him and clung round his neck, sobbing, “Oh, Tom, please forgive me — I can’t bear it — I will always be good — always remember things — do love me — please, dear Tom!” We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behavior to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilized society. Maggie and Tom were still very much like young animals, and so she could rub her cheek against his, and kiss his ear in a random sobbing way; and there were tender fibres in the lad that had been used to answer to Maggie’s fondling, so that he behaved with a weakness quite inconsistent with his resolution to punish her as much as she deserved. He actually began to kiss her in return, and say — “Don’t cry, then, Magsie; here, eat a bit o’ cake.” Maggie’s sobs began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other’s cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies.
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Charles William Eliot (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
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He only stood still at the top of the stairs and said, “Maggie, you’re to come down.” But she rushed to him and clung round his neck, sobbing, “Oh, Tom, please forgive me — I can’t bear it — I will always be good — always remember things — do love me — please, dear Tom!
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Charles William Eliot (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
“
I'd have a whole raft of men at my feet again they're such groveling creatures that the most dreadful slob once she's famous they make a wild rush for her.
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Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
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I rush out of the room to find Rowan, only to run headfirst into his chest. He laughs as he readjusts me.
"Why is my bag filled with all my De La Rosa books?" I press a hand against my beating heart.
"Because the famous bodice-ripper author is signing books in New York tonight, and we happen to have tickets to her event.
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Lauren Asher (The Fine Print (Dreamland Billionaires, #1))