Fixture Quotes

I was now in a situation where I didn't have to prove myself, because the one person that fully accepted me, my best friend, was now a permanent fixture in my life.

You're a permanent fixture in my life. You're not going anywhere.

I'd made water shoot out of the bathroom fixtures. I didn't understand how. But the toilets responded to me. I had become one with the plumbing.

Frustration is an interesting emotional state, because it tends to bring out the worst in whoever is frustrated. Frustrated babies tend to throw food and make a mess. Frustrated citizens tend to execute kings and queens and make a democracy. And frustrated moths tend to bang up against lightbulbs and make light fixtures all dusty.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I’ll go take a hot bath.' I meditate in the bath.The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck. I remember the ceiling over every bathtub I’ve stretched out in. I remember the texture of the ceilings and the cracks and the colors and the damp spots and the light fixtures. I remember the tubs, too: the antique griffin-legged tubs, and the modern coffin-shaped tubs, and the fancy pink marble tubs overlooking indoor lily ponds, and I remember the shapes and sizes of the water taps and the different sorts of soap holders. I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books...They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables...I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.

One of them hung a pink bra from our lighting fixture. I left it there. It was a nice bra

This is my problem. I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It’s depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture I bc my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back. You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t I say those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

They say you can’t go home again, but of course you can. It’s just that when you get there, somebody may have repainted and changed the fixtures around.

White and scrubbed, antique brass fixtures and a skylight letting in a flood of sunshine. Wow. You could get a tan standing around in the shower, for Christ's sake.

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organise anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a winter Saturday afternoon.

As that fucking chandelier twinkled overhead, Blay said roughly, "I'm still in love with him." Saxton dropped his eyes and brushed a the top of his thigh, as if there might have been a tiny piece of lint there. "I know. You thought you weren't?" As if that were rather stupid of him. "I'm so fucking tired of it. I really am." "That I believe." "Im so fucking..." God, those sounds, that muted pounding , that audible confirmation of what he had been ignoring for the past year-- On a sudden wave of violence, he pitched the brandy snifter at the marble fireplace, shattering the thing. "Fuck, Fuck!" If he'd been able to, he'd have jumped up and torn that goddamn cocksucking light fixture off the goddamn cocksucking ceiling.

I love you more than I ever thought it was possible to love someone. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I need you to be a part of my life, Lottie. I need you to be a permanent fixture. Which is why I came up with this contract.” I

I think you're beautiful," an old man at the counter - one of our Sunday night fixtures - says. ... "You passed the Earl test," she says as she pours him a fresh cup. "Ma, he says that to anyone who still has their own teeth. No offense, Earl." "None taken," he says. "But you got your own hair too, so you're twice as pretty.

Some fictions become fixtures in the real city. Their stories are so powerful that they leap off the page on to the streets, irreversibly altering the place where they were set.

I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow.

Belief in such things was widespread in America and Britain at the start of the twentieth century, when an Ouija board was a regular fixture in drawing rooms, to be brought out after dinner for impromptu séances.

Attachment. A secure attachment is the ability to bond; to develop a secure and safe base; an unbreakable or perceivable inability to shatter to bond between primary parental caregiver(s) and child; a quest for familiarity; an unspoken language and knowledge that a caregiver will be a permanent fixture.

How ... how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is ... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened? unless it's one unshaven man alone in a boat, changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a boat, in all this ... all this ... Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures, moving toward you, you'll see. Like a man going into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear of a table corner, and ... Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you've broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it's just ... sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.

Believe me when I say: 'Out of all those around, she’s the best locksmith in town.' Her stethoscope ears know when the dials of your heart click into place. She’s been cutting keys for years. You don’t stand a chance with that flimsy case. Alas, no matter how you lock your heart— bolt, fixture, and key— she’s got nimble fingers that pick locks for free. Padlocks and deadbolts are all in vain. Why do you even bother with that chain? She’s way too smart. Along with ours, she’ll have your heart. And you will see that the best locksmith in town is she.

Formerly, a fixture of the summer, formerly a rather minor component to a hot July, but throughout his life, a man beloved by the children, and therefore a most important man.

What stage of love was it when another person became a habit? How quickly had the mere background hum of another person's life become such an essential fixture of the house that its absence felt like a robbery? Like their home had been gutted and he was left drifting around the remains...

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.

The library would've cheered me up, most days. I loved the heavy oaken tables, the high walls stacked with books to the ceiling, the musty smell of old pages and the heavy brass fixtures that had gone dark with age and wear.

Watchmen were quiet drinkers on the whole. They just went from vertical to horizontal with the minimum amount of fuss, without starting major fights, and without damaging the fixtures overmuch

If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.

I am something of a connoisseur of the country pile and I must say {he} had done himself remarkably well. At a guess I would say it was from the reign of Queen Anne and had been bunged up by some bewigged ancestor awash with loot from the War of the Spanish Succession or some such lucrative away fixture.

Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was. This futility had let's call it a flavor.

I have a pesky little critic in the back of my mind. He's a permanent fixture and passes judgment on everything I write. In order to placate him, especially when I'm endeavoring to write anything as ambitious as a novel, I have to constantly mutter, 'I'm not writing a masterpiece, I'm not writing a masterpiece.' This mantra lulls him into a kind of stupor so that he pays no attention to what I'm doing, because after all, I'm not claiming it's any good. Slowly, and secretly, one page at a time, I write my story. I know I've succeeded when he grudgingly admits, 'That's pretty good.' And if I'm lucky, every once in a while, I blow him away.

Pain is a lifelong fixture in a broken world, girl. All of us need strength from God to face hurts from inside.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.

Thought I’d send this with Pig anyway. Harry stared at the word “Pig,” then looked up at the tiny owl now zooming around the light fixture on the ceiling. He had never seen anything that looked less like a pig. Maybe he couldn’t read Ron’s writing.

The moving parts of the house were all silent, its surfaces smooth. The closet doors had no handles. None of the woodwork had fixtures. Drawers had gentle indents. The kitchen cabinets pushed open and shut with a click. Franklin, the whole house was on Zoloft. You

What I feel is the momentary shock of realizing that most of the wood, metal and plastic fixtures, the sinks, lampshades, the shower stall, and even the drinking cups will all outlive me if my body follows the same progression that this tiny invisible-to-the-eye virus has initiated.

Whatever we do, let’s not imagine that the Israelites were ancient versions of ourselves, maybe less well groomed, who were “nice,” read their Bibles daily, the kind you could invite to church and want to marry your daughter, who would vote Republican or drive a hybrid. We respect these biblical stories most when we try to understand what the writers did and why, not when we place false expectations on them, like seeing them as a timeless script or a permanent fixture for how to think about God.

He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition.

He had, in fact, already begun to sink into that creeping dry rot of pedagogy which is the worst and ultimate pitfall of the profession; giving the same lessons year after year had formed a groove into which the other affairs of his life adjusted themselves with insidious ease. He worked well; he was conscientious; he was a fixture that gave service, satisfaction, confidence, everything except inspiration.

Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president or representative, your children’s future, your way and view of life.

Coming out of sleep, I had the advantage of two worlds, the layered firmament of dream and the temporal fixtures of the mind awake. I stretched luxuriously—a good and tingling sensation. It's as though the skin has shrunk in the night and one must push it out to daytime size by bulging the muscles, and there's an a itching pleasure in it.

Even if there are no new Mighty Atom manga or films created, the Mighty Atom character has become a permanent fixture of both Japanese and global pop culture.

Dust coated the long-dark light fixtures on the ceiling, at least half of them busted, jagged glass screwed into rusty holes.

It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as those kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high school.

CLEAN THE LAMPS AND FIXTURES GENTLY, AS IF YOU ARE POLISHING YOUR HEART AND SOUL TO MAKE THEM SHINE THEIR BRIGHTEST.

One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approaching of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn't matter if you're rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn't change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable for ever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.

He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition. Around the dry lips sprouted clumps of whiskers like so many weeds. So, I thought, even after so much of his life force had been lost, a man's beard continued to grow.

Sometimes it felt like I could disappear and no one would really care. It felt like I was a temporary fixture in someone's life until they moved on. But with LJ I felt like I mattered-always.

The daylight was sliced thinner and thinner until it disappeared completely, leaving us with nothing but the dim glow of electric bulbs, in fixtures slung from the rafters high above our heads.

me, the inside wires that connect to my physical body are sort of like the ones inside that fixture. They’re pretty much fried. But the wires to my brain—ah! Absolutely, exceptionally excellent!

So you take her to the pictures, trying to become a fixture. Inch by inch trying to reach her, all the way through the second feature. Worrying about your physical fitness, tell me how you got this sickness?

She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

Loisail was as important as the air that she breathed. It was her city. She was in the society pages every other week, a constant fixture at the most lavish parties. The boulevards might as well have been named after her.

A single room on the west side, which I really thought was just fine even though it didn’t quite pass my suicide visualization test. Could I picture shooting myself here? Definitely I could. Hanging myself? Sure. Some nights, I could even see the noose swinging from the light fixture on the ceiling. But I figured with a few well-placed posters, I might mute the sound of my own future death cry that would sometimes flood my ears upon entering this single room with galley kitchen.

The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.

Our little town seemed different as it passed by, or maybe it was me that wasn’t the same. I wasn’t sure if it was being a married man that made me feel a little more relaxed—laid-back, even—or if I had finally settled into my own skin. I was now in a situation where I didn’t have to prove myself, because the one person that fully accepted me, my best friend, was now a permanent fixture in my life.

I grimace, debating how much more to divulge. This is my problem. I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It’s depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture in my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back.

You think you are reading proof, whereas you are merely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes & vacancies but you don't know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along. Sometimes--but not often enough--the printer's proof-reader saves you--& offends you--with this cold sign in the margin: (?) & you search the passage & find that the insulter is right--it doesn't say what you thought it did: the gas-fixtures are there, but you didn't light the jets

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. Where do you think that I have been?” “A fixture also.” “On the contrary, I have been to Devonshire.” “In spirit?” “Exactly. My body has remained in this arm-chair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.

Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!

A martyr to a barburous realm equipped with gas fixtures, a flower that took on strange new colours because its roots had been dipped in poison. Baudelaire on Edgar Allen Poe

she’d been a fixture, a rare constant in my life.

There’s a real Isle Esme feel to the decor (if you know, you know), with carved bamboo, recycled teak, jellyfish light fixtures, and a massive canopy bed.

My tiara continues its reign as a permanent fixture on my head. Before long, no one asks me about it anymore.

Honor didn’t know it yet, but she was about to become a fixture in my life.

Great game mechanics can even create achievement out of nothing. Airlines turned loyalty into a status symbol. Foursquare made it a mark of distinction to be a fixture at the corner bar. And by encouraging players to post their achievements on Facebook, online game makers have managed to convince people to proclaim loudly—even boast—that they spend hours playing computer games every day.

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man supposed himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzed. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

YESTERDAY afternoon set in misty and cold. I had half a mind to spend it by my study fire, instead of wading through heath and mud to Wuthering Heights. On coming up from dinner, however, (N.B. - I dine between twelve and one o'clock; the housekeeper, a matronly lady, taken as a fixture along with the house, could not, or would not, comprehend my request that I might be served at five) - on mounting the stairs with this lazy intention, and stepping into the room, I saw a servant-girl on her knees surrounded by brushes and coal-scuttles, and raising an infernal dust as she extinguished the flames with heaps of cinders. This spectacle drove me back immediately; I took my hat, and, after a four-miles' walk, arrived at Heathcliff's garden-gate just in time to escape the first feathery flakes of a snow-shower.

...Violet followed her friend into the massive kitchen with its Restoration Hardware fixture and faux-weathered, farmhouse-style cabinets. Its perplexed Violet, the way people tried to make the insides of new homes look old.

Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of far more African Americans.

Summer’s closet is clearly a magical portal. She entered it wearing Lululemon pants, wool socks, and one of my hockey hoodies. She exits it looking like a goddess. A slinky silver dress is plastered to her body, hugging every tantalizing curve. A slit goes up to her thigh, revealing one long, tanned leg, and her silver stilettos add about another four inches to her already tall frame. Her golden hair is up in an elegant twist held together by an ornate clip that sparkles under the light fixture overhead. It takes me a moment to realize that her hairclip is sparkling because it’s encrusted with diamonds. Summer notes my expression. Her makeup is subtle except for her bright red lips, which curve into a smile. It’s really fucking hot.

Tigris,” she says. “We need help.” Tigris. Deep in my brain, the name rings a bell. She was a fixture — a younger, less disturbing version of herself — in the earliest Hunger Games I can remember. A stylist, I think. I don’t remember for which district.

I stare up at my cracked ceiling. The water stains that look like jaw-baring beasts seem to have spread since the last time I was here. The yellow light fixture has filled with more moth carcasses, so now there is more moth than light. The towers of books stacked against the walls are all in various stages of collapse, and the walls themselves, thin and piss colored, which are all that separate me from a perverted giant on one side and a sallow-faced girl on the other, appear to have crept even closer together.

When I was 10, a man who worked with my father called for him on the house phone. When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’ The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. Rather, that there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out our words, nor our lamp-fixtures, gods, nor our names –where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador.

Arthur Pendragon, purportedly Arthur’s relative many times removed, was such a fixture of his father’s lectures that if he’d fallen through time and encountered the man, Arthur’s primary inclination would have been to kick him right in his damned round table.

Clevedon told the dressmakers that the previous tenants (a husband and wife) had fallen into dire financial difficulties within months of opening the place. They’d absconded in the dead of night mere days ago, owing three months’ back rent. They must have borrowed or stolen a cart, because they’d taken away most of the shop’s contents and fixtures. This was a complete lie. The truth was, Varley had bribed them to move and sweetened the offer by allowing them to take with them everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Sunday Justice, the courthouse cat- his back black, his face white with a black mask around green eyes- stretched out in a puddle of sunlight in one of the deep windowsills. A courthouse fixture for years, he cleared the basement of rats and the courtroom of mice, earning his place.

My existence threatens you." He shoved me back. hard. I crashed into the hall table, knocking it over, smashing the jar of old marbles I had collected. Glass balls skipped and bounced along the corridor. I landed on my back, my head banging down on the hardwood floor. I lay there for a second, blinking up at the lighting fixture, taking in the years of dust and dead moths gathered in the etched-glass globe. The silence that followed was more startling than the collision of me and the table and the floor. I heard Jake's harsh breathing and a marble rolling away down the hall — which seemed pretty damned appropriate, since I'd apparently lost all of mine.

Billy was displayed there in the zoo in a simulated Earthling habitat. Most of the furnishings had been stolen from the Sears & Roebuck warehouse in Iowa City, Iowa. There was a color television set and a couch that could be converted into a bed. There were end tables with lamps and ashtrays on them by the couch. There was a home bar and two stools. There was a little pool table. There was wall-to-wall carpeting in federal gold, except in the kitchen and bathroom areas and over the iron manhole cover in the center of the floor. There were magazines arranged in a fan on the coffee table in front of the couch. There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The television didn't. There was a picture of one cowboy shooting another one pasted to the television tube. So it goes. There were no wall in the dome, nor place for Billy to hide. The mint green bathroom fixtures were right out in the open. Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild.

Then she put on a big Charity Harris smile, opening the door. She would disappear inside herself, inside these empty homes where nobody actually lived. As the room filled with strangers, she always found her mark, guiding a couple through the kitchen, pointing out the light fixtures, backsplash, high ceilings. “Imagine your life here,” she said. “Imagine who you could be.

He imagined a town called A. Around the communal fire they’re shaping arrowheads and carving tributes o the god of the hunt. One day some guys with spears come over the ridge, perform all kinds of meanness, take over, and the new guys rename the town B. Whereupon they hang around the communal fire sharpening arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. Some climatic tragedy occurs — not carving the correct tributary figurines probably — and the people of B move farther south, where word is there’s good fishing, at least according to those who wander to B just before being cooked for dinner. Another tribe of unlucky souls stops for the night in the emptied village, looks around at the natural defenses provided by the landscape, and decides to stay awhile. It’s a while lot better than their last digs — what with the lack of roving tigers and such — plus it comes with all the original fixtures. they call the place C, after their elder, who has learned that pretending to talk to spirits is a fun gag that gets you stuff. Time passes. More invasions, more recaptures, D, E, F, and G. H stands as it is for a while. That ridge provides some protection from the spring floods, and if you keep a sentry up there you can see the enemy coming for miles. Who wouldn’t want to park themselves in that real estate? The citizens of H leave behind cool totems eventually toppled by the people of I, whose lack of aesthetic sense if made up for by military acumen. J, K, L, adventures in thatched roofing, some guys with funny religions from the eastern plains, long-haired freaks from colder climes, the town is burned to the ground and rebuilt by still more fugitives. This is the march of history. And conquest and false hope. M falls to plague, N to natural disaster — same climatic tragedy as before, apparently it’s cyclical. Mineral wealth makes it happen for the O people, and the P people are renowned for their basket weaving. No one ever — ever — mentions Q. The dictator names the city after himself; his name starts with the letter R. When the socialists come to power they spend a lot of time painting over his face, which is everywhere. They don’t last. Nobody lasts because there’s always somebody else. They all thought they owned it because they named it and that was their undoing. They should have kept the place nameless. They should have been glad for their good fortune, and left it at that. X, Y, Z.

December 8, 1986 Hello John: Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place. You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.” And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does. As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?” They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds. Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: “I put in 35 years…” “It ain’t right…” “I don’t know what to do…” They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait? I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!” One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life. So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die. To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. Your boy, Hank

IN THE PRESIDENTIAL race of 1968, Richard Nixon defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had stepped forward to run when LBJ shocked the country by declining to seek reelection. Nixon carried thirty-two states and more than three hundred electoral votes. He took his oath of office on January 20, 1969. An hour later, LBJ departed the nation’s capital, where he had been a fixture since his election to Congress in 1937. He left with few friends.

Clarisse’s friends were all laughing, and I was trying to find the strength I’d used to fight the Minotaur, but it just wasn’t there. “Like he’s ‘Big Three’ material,” Clarisse said as she pushed me toward one of the toilets. “Yeah, right. Minotaur probably fell over laughing, he was so stupid looking.” Her friends snickered. Annabeth stood in the corner, watching through her fingers. Clarisse bent me over on my knees and started pushing my head toward the toilet bowl. It reeked like rusted pipes and, well, like what goes into toilets. I strained to keep my head up. I was looking at the scummy water, thinking, I will not go into that. I won’t. Then something happened. I felt a tug in the pit of my stomach. I heard the plumbing rumble, the pipes shudder. Clarisse’s grip on my hair loosened. Water shot out of the toilet, making an arc straight over my head, and the next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the bathroom tiles with Clarisse screaming behind me. I turned just as water blasted out of the toilet again, hitting Clarisse straight in the face so hard it pushed her down onto her butt. The water stayed on her like the spray from a fire hose, pushing her backward into a shower stall. She struggled, gasping, and her friends started coming toward her. But then the other toilets exploded, too, and six more streams of toilet water blasted them back. The showers acted up, too, and together all the fixtures sprayed the camouflage girls right out of the bathroom, spinning them around like pieces of garbage being washed away. As soon as they were out the door, I felt the tug in my gut lessen, and the water shut off as quickly as it had started. The entire bathroom was flooded. Annabeth hadn’t been spared. She was dripping wet, but she hadn’t been pushed out the door. She was standing in exactly the same place, staring at me in shock.

In Florida, her father had once said at dinner: "I like Negroes, yessir. I think everyone should own one". She had stormed from the table and stayed in her room for two days. Her dinner was slid under the door. Well, not slid under. Handed around the doorknob. Seventeen and about to go off to college. "Tell Daddy I'm not coming out until he apologizes". And he did. Clomped up the curving staircase. Held her in his big round southern arms and called her modern. Modern. Like a fixture. A painting. A Miró.

Cooper enjoyed being alone. Even if Park was in the house, Cooper might choose to spend time by himself. But knowing Park was there, that Cooper could debrief the day, hear his opinions, intersect his orbit at whim, was, well, something he’d come to depend on. What stage of love was it when another person became a habit? How quickly had the mere background hum of another person’s life become such an essential fixture of the house that its absence felt like a robbery? Like their home had been gutted and he was left drifting around the remains with the non-valuables like giant, ostentatious floor vases?

Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent.

Hillary Clinton, the longtime fixture of the Boomer establishment, viewed her nomination in the same way that seniors view Social Security, as an entitlement to be realized whatever the risk. Donald Trump, the Section 8 scion, a bully whose quantum of thought is no greater than a tweet, decided to prove that the lowest common denominator could be found further down than anyone in the commentariat thought possible. That Clinton and Trump were the two most unpopular presidential candidates in decades, if not since the Civil War, deterred the Boomer machine not a whit, because they all agreed on what mattered. Thus,

I hated the idea of such a glorious creature beating itself to death in pursuit of something it could never have. It was, after all, just a light. The moth had no idea why it wanted it, only that it did. I paused at the window. “You’re just like them you know. You want the light so bad because you think it’s wonderful, and power-ful, and the answer to all of your little moth dreams, but in reality it is just a deadly desire. No matter what you do, no matter how bad you want it, you can never have it. Don’t you see? The light will bring you nothing but death.” Slowly, I opened my hand again. “Now, go, live your life. Find another moth and make little moth babies, and stop chasing light fixtures,” I instructed, raising my hand toward the stars. Once again, the moth watched me, then fluttered its wings and took off. This time, it flew away, disappearing into the dark. I leaned my head against the window frame, watching, think-ing, wondering if the little critter would ever find happiness. It didn’t take long to get an answer. There, on the other side of the parking lot, was the moth, buzzing wildly against a street light. I began to cry. “I know how you feel, little one,” I sobbed. “No matter what happens, no matter how wrong it is, my heart wants what it wants. I’m just like you, and they are my light.

The Men’s Wearhouse where the boys were measured for their suits was holy; the T.J. Maxx where the girls texted each other pictures from their respective dressing rooms was holy; the Shoe Carnival where they staggered up and down the aisles almost laughing; the Michael’s where they chose posterboards for collages; the florist where they pointed at baby’s breath; the bakery where they deliberated over tea cookies; the Clinique counter where they bought waterproof mascara; the Cheesecake Factory where they ate bang-bang shrimp after it all and were very very kind to each other was holy, and the light fixtures she always made fun of seemed to bloom the whole time on their stems.

American Heritage Dictionary: “The only rationale for condemning the construction is based on a false analogy with Latin. . . . In general, the Usage Panel accepts the split infinitive.” Merriam-Webster Unabridged online dictionary: “Even though there has never been a rational basis for objecting to the split infinitive, the subject has become a fixture of folk belief about grammar. . . . Modern commentators . . . usually say it’s all right to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity. Since clarity is the usual reason for splitting, this advice means merely that you can split them whenever you need to.” Encarta World English Dictionary: “There is no grammatical basis for rejecting split infinitives.

The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European society–mortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasn’t unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husband’s children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husband’s children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? [...] Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fear–fed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban class–that fed the stories. We see this also with the stories passed around in France–fairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves can’t do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales. Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture.

That is a strange way to run a business.” They both turned slowly. Blue’s arms had been lifted for so long they felt rubbery when she lowered them. The owner of the voice stood in the doorway to the front hall, his hands in his pockets. He was not old, maybe mid-twenties, with a shock of black hair. He was handsome in a way that required a bit of work from the viewer. All of his facial features seemed just a little too large for his face. Maura glanced at Blue, an eyebrow lifted. Blue lifted one shoulder in response. He didn’t seem like he was here to murder them or steal any portable electronics. “And that,” her mother said, releasing the beleaguered light fixture, “is a very strange way to enter someone’s home.” “I’m sorry,” the young man said. “There is a sign out front saying this is a place of business.

There was once a stonecutter, who was dissatisfied with himself and with his position in life. One day, he passed a wealthy merchant's house, and through the open gateway, saw many fine possessions and important visitors. "How powerful that merchant must be!" thought the stonecutter. He became very envious, and wished that he could be like the merchant. Then he would no longer have to live the life of a mere stonecutter. To his great surprise, he suddenly became the merchant, enjoying more luxuries and power than he had ever dreamed of, envied and detested by those less wealthy than himself. But soon a high official passed by, carried in a sedan chair, accompanied by attendants, and escorted by soldiers beating gongs. Everyone, no matter how wealthy, had to bow low before the procession. "How powerful that official is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a high official!" Then he became the high official, carried everywhere in his embroidered sedan chair, feared and hated by the people all around, who had to bow down before him as he passed. It was a hot summer day, and the official felt very uncomfortable in the sticky sedan chair. He looked up at the sun. It shone proudly in the sky, unaffected by his presence. "How powerful the sun is!" he thought "I wish that I could be the sun!" Then he became the sun, shining fiercely down on everyone, scorching the fields, cursed by the farmers and laborers. But a huge black cloud moved between him and the earth, so that his light could no longer shine on everything below. "How powerful that storm cloud is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a cloud!" Then he became the cloud, flooding the fields and villages, shouted at by everyone. But soon he found that he was being pushed away by some great force, and realized that it was the wind. "How powerful it is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be the wind!" Then he became the wind, blowing tiles off the roofs of houses, uprooting trees, hated and feared by all below him. But after a while, he ran up against something that would not move, no matter how forcefully he blew against it--a huge, towering stone "How powerful that stone is”" he thought. I wish that I could be a stone!" Then he became the stone, more powerful than anything else on earth. But as he stood there, he heard the sound of a hammer pounding a chisel into the solid rock, and felt himself being changed. "What could be more powerful than I, the stone?" he thought. He looked down and saw far below him the fixture of a stonecutter.

The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its lobby, for one thing, was little more than a wide corridor, with two drably upholstered wing chairs propped against a wall and, between them, a glass table upon which rested an elaborate but unaesthetic arrangement of silk flowers. The light in the corridor was greenish, dim and lavatorial, barely illuminating the shallowly carved figures that marched, in pseudo-Egyptian fashion, along the pink stone tiles as far as the elevator. The floor, incongruously, was of a black and white parquet, upon which all but the softest slippers echoed ominously. And the elevator itself—paneled, with brass fixtures and a single tiny red velvet stool, presumably for its operator’s comfort—seemed again of a different, though no less ancient, era.

The problem, Augustine came to believe, is that if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride. What is pride? These days the word “pride” has positive connotations. It means feeling good about yourself and the things associated with you. When we use it negatively, we think of the arrogant person, someone who is puffed up and egotistical, boasting and strutting about. But that is not really the core of pride. That is just one way the disease of pride presents itself. By another definition, pride is building your happiness around your accomplishments, using your work as the measure of your worth. It is believing that you can arrive at fulfillment on your own, driven by your own individual efforts. Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven’t lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don’t associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it’s just that they are giving themselves a D– rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way. One key paradox of pride is that it often combines extreme self-confidence with extreme anxiety. The proud person often appears self-sufficient and egotistical but is really touchy and unstable. The proud person tries to establish self-worth by winning a great reputation, but of course this makes him utterly dependent on the gossipy and unstable crowd for his own identity. The proud person is competitive. But there are always other people who might do better. The most ruthlessly competitive person in the contest sets the standard that all else must meet or get left behind. Everybody else has to be just as monomaniacally driven to success. One can never be secure. As Dante put it, the “ardor to outshine / Burned in my bosom with a kind of rage.” Hungry for exaltation, the proud person has a tendency to make himself ridiculous. Proud people have an amazing tendency to turn themselves into buffoons, with a comb-over that fools nobody, with golden bathroom fixtures that impress nobody, with name-dropping stories that inspire nobody. Every proud man, Augustine writes, “heeds himself, and he who pleases himself seems great to himself. But he who pleases himself pleases a fool, for he himself is a fool when he is pleasing himself.”16 Pride, the minister and writer Tim Keller has observed, is unstable because other people are absentmindedly or intentionally treating the proud man’s ego with less reverence than he thinks it deserves. He continually finds that his feelings are hurt. He is perpetually putting up a front. The self-cultivator spends more energy trying to display the fact that he is happy—posting highlight reel Facebook photos and all the rest—than he does actually being happy. Augustine suddenly came to realize that the solution to his problem would come only after a transformation more fundamental than any he had previously entertained, a renunciation of the very idea that he could be the source of his own solution.

It hit me,then,while he stared down at me with a slight frown.I was standing almost chest to chest with Alex Bainbridge in a very small space. I backed up a step and bumped into the toilet. "I should go," I said, a little shakily. "I should go home." "Right." Always polite, he let me walk out first. "Next week....Next week, we can have our tutoring session in here. We'll discuss art. Or bathroom fixtures. You can sit up there"- he pointed to the counter- "next to the Willing." Now,out of the bathroom, and a few feet away from him, I could laugh- "Okay. Before you start to think that I am obsessive and insane, there has to be something,the sight of something, that would make you go all goofy." He didn't miss a beat. "Mademoiselle Winslow in a tutu. No..." He looked a little goofy when he said, "Spider-Man versus Doctor Octopus. July 1963." "That's a comic book, right?" He sighed. "Oh,Ella." Then, "Come on. I'll drive you home." "You don't have to-" "Yeah,I do.

He meant business; I could hear it in his voice. Marlboro Man was talking about Chicago, about my imminent move. I’d told him my plans the first time we’d ever spoken on the phone, and he’d mentioned it once or twice during our two wonderful weeks together. But the more time we’d spent together, the less it had come up. Leaving was the last thing I wanted to talk about while I was with him. I couldn’t respond. I had no idea what to say. “You there?” Marlboro Man asked. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.” That was all I could manage. “Well…I just wanted to say good night,” he said quietly. “I’m glad you did,” I replied. I was an idiot. “Good night,” he whispered. “Good night.” I woke up the next morning with puffy, swollen eyes. I’d slept like a rock, having dreamed about Marlboro Man all night long. They’d been vivid dreams, crazy dreams, dreams of us talking and playing chess and shooting each other with Silly String. He’d already become such a permanent fixture in my consciousness, I dreamed about him nightly…effortlessly.

In due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged. I dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone. I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner in California; next, a reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England. In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilot-house.

For most people moving is a tiring experience. When on the verge of moving out to a new home or into a new office, it's only natural to focus on your new place and forget about the one you’re leaving. Actually, the last thing you would even think about is embarking on a heavy duty move out clean. However, you can be certain that agents, landlords and all the potential renters or buyers of your old home will most definitely notice if it's being cleaned, therefore getting the place cleaned up is something that you need to consider. The process of cleaning will basically depend to things; how dirty your property and the size of the home. If you leave the property in good condition, you'll have a higher the chance of getting back your bond deposit or if you're selling, attracting a potential buyer. Below are the steps you need to consider before moving out. You should start with cleaning. Remove all screws and nails from the walls and the ceilings, fill up all holes and dust all ledges. Large holes should be patched and the entire wall checked the major marks. Remove all the cobwebs from the walls and ceilings, taking care to wash or vacuum the vents. They can get quite dusty. Clean all doors and door knobs, wipe down all the switches, electrical outlets, vacuum/wipe down the drapes, clean the blinds and remove all the light covers from light fixtures and clean them thoroughly as they may contain dead insects. Also, replace all the burnt out light bulbs and empty all cupboards when you clean them. Clean all windows, window sills and tracks. Vacuum all carpets or get them professionally cleaned which quite often is stipulated in the rental agreement. After you've finished the general cleaning, you can now embark on the more specific areas. When cleaning the bathroom, wash off the soap scum and remove mould (if any) from the bathroom tiles. This can be done by pre-spraying the tile grout with bleach and letting it sit for at least half an hour. Clean all the inside drawers and vanity units thoroughly. Clean the toilet/sink, vanity unit and replace anything that you've damaged. Wash all shower curtains and shower doors plus all other enclosures. Polish the mirrors and make sure the exhaust fan is free of dust. You can generally vacuum these quite easily. Finally, clean the bathroom floors by vacuuming and mopping. In the kitchen, clean all the cabinets and liners and wash the cupboards inside out. Clean the counter-tops and shine the facet and sink. If the fridge is staying give it a good clean. You can do this by removing all shelves and wash them individually. Thoroughly degrease the oven inside and out. It's best to use and oven cleaner from your supermarket, just take care to use gloves and a mask as they can be quite toxic. Clean the kitchen floor well by giving it a good vacuum and mop . Sometimes the kitchen floor may need to be degreased. Dust the bedrooms and living room, vacuum throughout then mop. If you have a garage give it a good sweep. Also cut the grass, pull out all weeds and remove all items that may be lying or hanging around. Remember to put your garbage bins out for collection even if collection is a week away as in our experience the bins will be full to the brim from all the rubbish during the moving process. If this all looks too hard then you can always hire a bond cleaner to tackle the job for you or if you're on a tight budget you can download an end of lease cleaning checklist or have one sent to you from your local agent. Just make sure you give yourself at least a day or to take on the job. Its best not to rush through the job, just make sure everything is cleaned thoroughly, so it passes the inspection in order for you to get your bond back in full.

A Typical Description of an NDE (Near Death Experience) I asked Ring to describe for me a typical NDE. He told me: The first thing is a tremendous feeling of peace, like nothing else you have experienced. Most people say like never before and never again. People say [that it is] the peace that passes all understanding. Then there is the sense of bodily separation and sometimes the sense of actually being out of the body. There are studies that show that people can sometimes report veridically what is in their physical environment, e.g., the lint on the light fixtures above themselves. They could see in a three-hundred-sixty-degree panoramic vision. They had extraordinary acuity. Often when they went further into the experience, they went to a dark place that is sometimes described as a tunnel, but not always. They usually feel that there is a sense of motion; that they are moving through something that is vast almost beyond imagination. And yet they feel they don't have the freedom to go anywhere. They feel as if they were being propelled. The extreme sense of motion often seems to be one of acceleration. Some describe that they have felt as if they were moving a the speed of light or faster. One NDEr described this as superluminal-moving beyond the speed of light with tremendous accelerated motion through a kind of cylindrical vortex, and then, in the distance, the person describes a dot of light that suddenly grows larger, more brilliant, and all encompassing. Ring continued: At this stage of the experience there is an encounter with light. It seems to be a living light exuding pure love, complete acceptance, and total understanding. The individual feels that he is made of that light, that he has always been there, and that he has stepped out of time and stepped into eternity. This feeling is accompanied by a sense of absolute perfection. Being out of time introduces another aspect of the experience: a sense of destiny. Ring explained: Then there is a panoramic light review in which you see everything that has ever happened to you in your life. Not [only] just what you have done but the effects of your actions on others, the effects of your thoughts on others. The whole thing is laid out for you without being judged but with a complete understanding of why things were the way they were in your life. The best metaphor I can suggest for this is: as if you were the character in someone else's novel. There would be one moment outside of time where you would have the perspective of the author of that novel, and you have a sense of omniscience about that character. Why he did the things that he did, why he had affected others, and so on. It is a profound moment outside of time when this realization occurs. You see the whole raison d'etre of your life. You may also see scenes or fragments of scenes of your life if you choose to go back to your body. In other words, it is not only that you have flashbacks but you also seem to have flash-forwards of events that will occur almost at though there is a kind of blueprint for your life. And it is up to you at that moment. You have free choice because it is often left to you whether to go back to your life or to leave it behind. The people we talk with of course always make the choice to go back or sometimes are sent back.