Floppy Quotes

Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.

Isabelle snorted. 'All the boys are gay. In this truck, anyway. Well, not you, Simon.' 'You noticed' said Simon. 'I think of myself as a freewheeling bisexual,' added Magnus. 'Please never say those words in front of my parents,' said Alec. 'Especially my father.' 'I thought your parents were okay with you, you know, coming out,' Simon said, leaning around Isabelle to look at Alec, who was — as he often was — scowling, and pushing his floppy dark hair out of his eyes. Aside from the occasional exchange, Simon had never talked to Alec much. He wasn’t an easy person to get to know. But, Simon admitted to himself, his own recent estrangement from his mother made him more curious about Alec’s answer than he would have been otherwise. 'My mother seems to have accepted it,' Alec said. 'But my father — no, not really. Once he asked me what I thought had turned me gay.' Simon felt Isabelle tense next to him. 'Turned you gay?' She sounded incredulous. 'Alec, you didn’t tell me that.' 'I hope you told him you were bitten by a gay spider,' said Simon. Magnus snorted; Isabelle looked confused. 'I’ve read Magnus’s stash of comics,' said Alec, 'so I actually know what you’re talking about' A small smile played around his mouth. 'So would that give me the proportional gayness of a spider?' 'Only if it was a really gay spider,' said Magnus, and he yelled as Alec punched him in the arm. 'Ow, okay, never mind.

Is this your bedroom?" she asked, and turned to look at him. Myrnin straightened and jammed the big red floppy hat back on his head. The feathers waved back and forth. "Don't get any ideas," he said. "I'm far too young and innocent for that kind of thinking.

When Cindy’s crying slowed to convulsive gasps, she picked up Floppy and they got in bed and she looked at the picture of her and her father at Lake Barkley. “Good night, Daddy. I love you!

It’s always been this way. There were rumors about me even before I was born. It’s why my mother never calls me Sobachka. She says it makes me sound like a mongrel.” My heart gave a little pang at that. I’d been called plenty of names growing up. “I like mongrels,” I said. “They have cute floppy ears.” “My ears are very dignified.

Man wants to be the king o’ the rabbits, he best wear a pair o’ floppy ears.

Claire was struggling through last summer’s diary volume when Myrnin popped in through the portal, wearing a big floppy black hat and a kind of crazy/stylish pimp coat that covered him from neck to ankles, black leather gloves, and a black and silver walking stick with a dragon’s head on it. And, on his lapel was a button that said, If you can read this, thank a teacher.

You're scared?' He shook his head. 'Floppy's scared.' 'What's Floppy scared of?' 'The man in the closet

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.

Oh God, Mae," said Jamie in a hollow voice, descending the stairs. "I will never drink again. I'm only seeing in black and white. My arms feel all floppy, like flightless wings. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I looked like a very sad penguin.

I’d only met him once, at the mall. He was tall, with a big floppy shock of blond hair he was always getting out of his face by jerking his head suddenly to the side, whiplash-style. Rina found this incredibly sexy. It made me nervous. - Caitlin about Jeff

There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, "Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery." This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, "My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket." Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.

Your spikes have gone floppy,

However he'd found his way here, it didn't matter. I knew then that the boy under the tree had to be mine. That floppy hair should be mine to touch. That big, knuckly boy hand should be mine to hold. That gruff voice should be mine to hear, and those ears should be mine to tell all my secrets to. Except for the biggest secret. That I loved him. More than the crush I was dealing with for years. More than I should've loved a best friend. More than he would ever love me back. I was gone for him.

He rushed past the usual fragments of painful memories – his mother smiling down at him, her face illuminated by the sunlight rippling off the Venetian Grand Canal; his sister Bianca laughing as she pulled him across the Mall in Washington, D.C., her green floppy hat shading her eyes and the splash of freckles across her nose. He saw Percy Jackson on a snowy cliff outside Westover Hall, shielding Nico and Bianca from the manticore as Nico clutched a Mythomagic figurine and whispered, I’m scared. He saw Minos, his old ghostly mentor, leading him through the Labyrinth. Minos’s smile was cold and cruel. Don’t worry, son of Hades. You will have your revenge.

Oh…man. She was dressed for love, as far as he was concerned: Flannel pajama bottoms with stars and moons on them. Little white T-shirt. Floppy suede moccasins.

Computers will never take the place of books. You can't stand on a floppy disk to reach a high shelf.

There is no better people-watching than at the airport: the whole world packed into such a tight space, moving fast with all their essentials in their rolling bags. And what caught my attention, as I took a few breaths and lay my eyes on the crowds, were all the imperfections. Everybody had them. Every single person that walked past me had some kind of flaw. Bushy eyebrows, moles, flared nostrils, crooked teeth, crows'-feet, hunched backs, dowagers' humps, double chins, floppy earlobes, nose hairs, potbellies, scars, nicotine stains, upper arm fat, trick knees, saddlebags, collapsed arches, bruises, warts, puffy eyes, pimples. Nobody was perfect. Not even close. And everybody had wrinkles from smiling and squinting and craning their necks. Everybody had marks on their bodies from years of living - a trail of life left on them, evidence of all the adventures and sleepless nights and practical jokes and heartbreaks that had made them who they were. In that moment, I suddenly loved us all the more for our flaws, for being broken and human, for being embarrassed and lonely, for being hopeful or tired or disappointed or sick or brave or angry. For being who we were, for making the world interesting. It was a good reminder that the human condition is imperfection. And that's how it's supposed to be.

Liam’s bunny was one of those things Dragos didn’t understand. The stuffed toy was floppy, super soft and had big, dark eyes. Liam adored it, although Dragos wasn’t quite sure why. In real life, a bunny that size would barely make an appetizer.

Surely the people naming antipsychotics could have come up with something less hurtful. After all, we don’t call Viagra the “floppy-dick pill” and hardly any of us refer to anger-management therapy as “maybe-just-stop-being-such-an-asshole class.” I honestly can’t think of any drug that has more of a stigma than antipsychotics.

I reach for the napkin, and as I do I catch sight of my hands. They are knobby and crooked, thin-skinned, and—like my ruined face—covered with liver spots. My face. I push the porridge aside and open my vanity mirror. I should know better by now, but somehow I still expect to see myself. Instead, I find an Appalachian apple doll, withered and spotty, with dewlaps and bags and long floppy ears. A few strands of white hair spring absurdly from its spotted skull. I try to brush the hairs flat with my hand and freeze at the sight of my old hand on my old head. I lean close and open my eyes very wide, trying to see beyond the sagging flesh. It's no good. Even when I look straight into the milky blue eyes, I can't find myself anymore. When did I stop being me?

Their music was good and fun, yes, but they looked kind. They were attractive, but not in a scary, very masculine way that many young girls find intimidating. They had floppy hair and skinny frames, you know, that sort of thing. Which is very fashionable now, but wasn’t really back then. They gave these girls something very safe to love. Something that would never bite them back. In the sixties, everything would bite you back if you were a girl.

The kitchen was the bivouac of an insurgent army. Every surface had been colonised by objects that had nothing to do with cooking: a rotating globe, illustrations ripped from anatomy textbooks, toy Ambassador taxis from India, an obsolete desktop computer, a shelf of floppy disks, miscellaneous handwritten missives stuffed into folders. Making a cup of coffee was a philosophical manoeuvre. You had to take a position. You had to ask yourself, what is coffee? Why is it consumed? How far would I go for a cup?

He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn’t want to sound too French about it.

Aidan was fascinated by Mr. Stock's hat. Perhaps it had once been a trilby sort of thing. It may once hace even been a definite color. Now it was more like something that had grown - like a fungus - on Mr. Stock's head, so mashed and used and rammed down by earthy hands that you could have thought it was a mushroom that had accidentally grown into a sort of gnome-hat. It had a slightly domed top and a floppy edge. And a definite smell

One minute, I was saying, “Hello, Mr. Bunny!” and smiling at its sweet little face and funny floppy ears. The next, the fucker savaged me.

Look, I don't know what you are, but you're more than a geologist, if you are one at all. I've met lots of geologists on different projects like this, and they're all tiny sunburned men with fetishes for geodes. They wear floppy hats and carry baggies for soil samples around with them. ... And geologists don't make rocks disappear like you did the other night. They keep them and build little shrines to them.

That's not trouble; that's fail. Tell me that isn't all the whites. Like, Michael's and Shane's, too." "All the whites," Claire said, and held up the guilty red sock. "Yours?" "Oh, damn." Eve snatched it out of Claire's fingers and shook the sock like a floppy rattle. "Bad sock! Bad! You are never going anywhere fun ever again!

Often, when I have been feeling lonely, when a book as been thrust aside in boredom [...] I have lain back and stared at the shadows on the ceiling, wondering what life is all about [...] and then, suddenly, there is the echo of the swinging door, and across the carpet, walking with the utmost delicacy and precision, stalks Four or Five or Oscar. He sits down on the floor beside me, regarding my long legs, my old jumper, and my floppy arms, with a purely practical interest. Which part of this large male body will form the most appropriate lap? Usually he settles for the chest. Whereupon he springs up and there is a feeling of cold fur [...] and the tip of an icy nose, thrust against my wrist and a positive tattoo of purrs. And I no longer wonder what life is all about.

Fire and fury! These people didn’t appreciate my art, laughed at my clothes, my looks, and made fun of my protruding ears. ‘Floppy,’ they called me. And the teachers and principals let it all happen. They didn’t give a shit. Whatever got them through the day without conflict or controversy worked for the teachers, but where were the parents? They taught their kids to be elitist snobs. These deaths are on you, assholes!

Her eyes are wide and steady beneath the brim of her floppy cap. How far out of infancy do we lose this gaze, with its utter absence of expectation or prejudice? What is it like to simply see what is before you, without the skew of context? p 342

They pictured themselves dashing around Manhattan, latte in one hand, cell phone in the other, adorably breaking a designer heel while hailing a cab, and falling into the arms of a charming, disarming soul mate with winningly floppy hair.

The goat gave a high, questioning bleat. It was staked out in the middle of the boneyard. It was a brown-and-white-spotted goat with those strange yellow eyes they sometimes have. It had floppy white ears and seemed to like having the tope of its head scratched. Larry had petted it in the Jeep on the drive over. Always a bad idea. Never get friendly with the sacrifices. Makes it hard to kill them. I had not petted the goat. I knew better. This was Larry's first goat. He'd learn. Hard or easy, he'd learn. There were two more goats at the bottom of the hill. One of them was even smaller and cuter than this one.

With technology and everything, compact discs are going to be, like, vintage soon, right? The way vinyl is now. Like, if I ever have kids, they’re going to look at CDs and think, ‘What is this crap, geez, how clunky.’ By then everyone will have the fiftieth edition of iPods—or maybe they’ll just have music downloaded directly into their brains, like with microchips, or something. And I’ll be the old lady in the corner going, ‘Back when I was a kid, we had mix tapes, and floppy disks, and gas didn’t cost twenty bucks a gallon, and oh, yeah, MTV actually played music videos, if you can believe it.’ And they’ll probably say, ‘Oh, Mom, you and your stories, we’re jetting to the oxygen bar, see you later,’ and take off in their flying cars. You know there’ll be flying cars, it’s only a matter of time.

He has no interest in comics. He doesn’t understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats.

I jammed a floppy blue teddy bear under my head, then felt guilty and returned him to the foot of the bed. One should have allegiance to one's childhood things.

Now that I know he’s Ezra’s new maybe-special friend, I pay a little more attention to him than I would have before. He kind of reminds me of a golden retriever, with his floppy blond hair and blue eyes. The first time I saw him in acrylics class, I kind of immediately hated the guy. He’s the sort of person the world adores, just based on the way he looks, a little like the way people obsess over men like Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans and Chris Pine and all the other famous Chrises, plus Ryan Gosling, claiming that they’re liberal and that they aren’t racist and that they’re feminists, but not really thinking about why they’re so obsessed with white men, and why they don’t love any people of color the same way.

I was thrilled. I had never met a famous writer before. I examined him closely as he sat in my office. What astonished me was that he looked so ordinary. There was nothing in the least unusual about him. His face, his conversation, his eyes behind the spectacles, even his clothes were all exceedingly normal. And yet here was a writer of stories who was famous the world over. His books had been read by millions of people. I expected sparks to be shooting out of his head, or at the very least, he should have been wearing a long green cloak and a floppy hat with a wide brim. But no.

I did my best Shirley Booth this morning, floppy slippers, housecoat, curlers, can of Little Friskies; "Come back, Little Sheba, come back..." To no avail. Le chat, elle ne reviendra jamais, jamais...

How often in those days did I think of Odysseus’ smiling child? I tried his trick, along with all the rest. Held my son’s floppy body up into the air, promised him he was safe. He only screamed louder. Whatever made the prince Telemachus so sweet, I thought, it must have come from Penelope. This was the child I deserved.

A small white rabbit with floppy ears and a twitching pink nose bounded out from the thick forest brush. Fingers twitching at his side, James stepped toward the small animal, a nervous giddiness creeping up inside of him.

Ah now, that’s manners for you,” said the little figure, who wore a large, floppy hat and a large, flappy overcoat. “Is there more? he says, as if it were poached quail’s eggs and smoked gazelle and truffles, not just a mushrump, what tastes more or less like something what’s been dead for a week and a cat wouldn’t touch. Manners.

Then Mr. Daddy Long-legs And Mr. Floppy Fly Rushed downward to the foamy sea With one sponge-taneous cry; And there they found a little boat, Whose sails were pink and gray; And off they sailed among the waves, Far, and far away.

Bring it on, Legs.” “Still don’t get the legs thing,” she mutters. “Because every time I see them I imagine them wrapped around my head.” She chokes down the phone, and then the line goes eerily quiet. “Mia?” “I’m here. Just hitting pause on that mental image and saving it for later.” “Jesus, woman. Warn a guy before you throw out the Viagra lines.” “What?” she says, with a knowing giggle. “Those kind of words take a man from floppy to stabby in zero-point-five seconds.

I read an analogy of depression,’ Meg said, as they steadied, wiping under her eyes with a floppy cuff. ‘About how killing yourself is like jumping out of a tall building when it’s on fire. You don’t want to jump out, but bit by bit, it becomes impossible not to because you’re so scared and in so much pain. No one thinks anyone jumping out of a building on fire wants to do it.

It was Nurse Caroline who introduced Homer to young Dr. Harlow, who was in the throes of growing out his bangs; a cowlick persisted in making his forehead look meager; a floppy shelf of straw-colored hair gave Dr. Harlow’s eyes the constant anxiousness of someone peering from under the brim of a hat. ‘Oh yes, Wells – our ether expert,’ Dr. Harlow said snidely. ‘I grew up in an orphanage,’ said Homer Wells. ‘I did a lot of helping out around the hospital.’ ‘But surely you never administered any ether?’ said Dr. Harlow. ‘Surely not,’ lied Homer Wells. As Dr. Larch had discovered with the board of trustees, it was especially gratifying to lie to unlikable people.

When John took those naked pictures, the most popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door. I drop the rag in the bucket and smoke some more, ashing into the sink,. A tiny piece of the movie from the naked time plays on my eyeball: A psychotic killer is blowing up amusement parks. At the head of the crowd clamoring to ride the roller coaster is a slim, lovely man with long blond hair and floppy clothes and big, beautiful eyes fixed on a tiny strip of light that only he can see.

It looked a little bit like a monkey, but bigger and not quite so hairy, apart from a patch of floppy brown fur on top of its head. It had nimble little paws, which were holding something that it was gazing at intently. Parts of it were wrapped in something like a cocoon made of jaguar fur and deep red silk.

Maybe she’s a natural beauty, an untouched beauty. The sales pitch for every powder, cream, procedure. But there’s always a consequence, some side effect that keeps away the promised miracle. Acne from pore-clogging foundation. Asymmetry from filler injected willy-nilly. Body dysmorphia from the asymmetry caused by the filler, which even when dissolved leaves your skin stretched out and floppy. It’s the same with pills: Vicodin cuts the pain, but then you can’t shit;

The sooner you get another job, babe, the better.’ 'It’s all of twenty-four hours since I lost the last one. Am I allowed to just be a bit miserable and floppy? You know, just for today?’ ‘But you’ve got to look at the positive side. You knew you couldn’t stay at that place forever. You want to move upwards, onwards.

Athena examined the diskette in her hand. It was a shiny black 3.5 inch high density floppy, with no label to give a hint of what wonders it might hold. But she knew Mr. Madison well enough to know that it must be something very special. "Those diskettes contain a key - a key that will unlock the secrets of the Internet" he said.

With current technology it is possible to put four floppy disk drives in a personal computer. It is just that doing so would be pointless.

Life is full of Floppy Flips... You have to know when to Flip your Flop that counts!

But Dad! It really did happen! I was transported to a Laboratory in an old stone castle and there was a wizard in blue robes with a floppy hat and...

She had breasts like deflated balloons, and nipples like the wrinkled and floppy part you put your mouth on to blow them up.

I have that floppy calm that follows a cry.

Oh, the pretty penises. Not flaccid ones of course, because they’re just floppy, wrinkly, and gross. But the erect ones? Wow. Beautiful. Magnificent. Incredibly sexy.

You’re very floppy.” I rest my head against his firm, muscled chest. “You’re very hard,” I counter. A rich, dark laugh slips from his mouth. “You’ve no idea.

You’re very floppy.”  I rest my head against his firm, muscled chest. “You’re very hard,” I counter.  A rich, dark laugh slips from his mouth. “You’ve no idea.

Percy, you are dismissed from my service." "Me? Why, my lord?" "Why? Because, Percy, far from being a fit consort for a prince of the realm, you would bore the leggings off a village idiot. You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. Your brain would make a grain of sand look large and ungainly, and the part of you that can't be mentioned, I am reliably informed by women around the court, wouldn't be worth mentioning even if it could be. If you put on a floppy hat and a funny codpiece, you might just get by as a fool, but since you wouldn't know a joke if it got up and gave you a haircut, I doubt it. That's why you're dismissed." "Oh, I see." "And as for you, Baldrick..." "Yes." "You're out, too.

Amir, you look hideous.” My fiancée, Samirah al-Abbas, stared at my outfit in horrified disbelief. “Really?” I looked down at myself. “But it’s a tux!” “A baby-blue tux!” “With a matching ruffled shirt and floppy bow tie,” I said defensively. “My uncle loaned it to me. I think it’ll impress your grandparents, don’t you?” “It’s Jid and Bibi’s fiftieth wedding anniversary!” Sam sputtered. “You can’t wear—” “Samirah.” My father emerged from the kitchen. “He is pulling your leg.” Sam’s reddish-brown eyes blazed dangerously, and I suddenly realized that playing a practical joke on a Valkyrie might not be the best idea I ever had.

This task was given to Shigeru Miyamoto, a floppy-haired first-time game designer who idealistically believed that videogames should be treated with the same respect given to books, movies, and television shows.

Dogs in My Nose -- When I woke up that morning, it didn't take me long to realize there were dogs in my nose. I could hear their muffled barks; I could feel their playful vibrations. It's not dangerous to have dogs in your nose, in fact, it's quite all right to leave them in there for an hour or so. But in this case, because they got in there without permission, I decided to expel them immediately, coaxing them out with a piece of hamburger. The dogs popped out and landed on the floor. They shook their little floppy ears and bounded off, and I was amused at the prospect of some other weary traveler awakening to find he had dogs in his nose.

In a sec.......let's see if this will help. Once there was a bunny that was very sad cause his ears were long and floppy and he stepped on them all the time." "Like my shoelaces?" "Yep, just like that. One day a beautiful fairy,,,,,,,," "The shoelace fairy?" "Yep. She landed on the bunny's head and.........." "Didn't that hurt? Does she have a wand?" "Nope. She lifted up the bunny's ears and crossed them over like an x." "I can cross my eyes.........look." "Lovely. She put one ear through the bottom of the x and she pulled." "She pulled the bunny's ears..........bad fairy." "No, she was trying to tie his.........." "Dan," Jordan laughed, "Stop. That is the worst thing I've ever heard." "Well, it's better than the teepees and the arrows and crap," Danny huffed. "Can I go see Andy now?" "Yes, go see Andy and his Velcro sneakers," Jordan snickered. "We give up.

The large male penis is a product of female choice in evolution. If it were not, males would never have bothered to evolve such a large, floppy, blood-hungry organ. Ancestral females made males evolve such penises because they liked them.

Aaaand we have a winnerrrrr!" a man shouts into the mic in a singsong carnival voice as I lick the last of Patrick's ice cream from my fingers. "Pick out a prize for the beautiful girl." "For you," Patrick says, kneeling in front of me with a moose in his outstretched hands. I pull the stuffed animal to my chest. "Thank you. I shall love him always. I shall call him Holden Caulfield." "From the book?" "Yes, from the book. You were reading it when I saw you my first day here." "You remember that?" "It's one of my favorite books," I say. "You were totally checking me out." "Patrick! Not in front of Holden Caulfield!" I cover the moose's floppy ears with my hands, hoping neither he nor Patrick sees the red flooding my cheeks.

Once you have an image of what the inside of your drawers will look like, you can begin folding. The goal is to fold each piece of clothing into a simple, smooth rectangle. First, fold each lengthwise side of the garment toward the center (such as the left-hand, then right-hand, sides of a shirt) and tuck the sleeves in to make a long rectangular shape. It doesn’t matter how you fold the sleeves. Next, pick up one short end of the rectangle and fold it toward the other short end. Then fold again, in the same manner, in halves or in thirds. The number of folds should be adjusted so that the folded clothing when standing on edge fits the height of the drawer. This is the basic principle that will ultimately allow your clothes to be stacked on edge, side by side, so that when you pull open your drawer you can see the edge of every item inside. If you find that the end result is the right shape but too loose and floppy to stand up, it’s a sign that your way of folding doesn’t match the type of clothing.

Love is love, no matter what the form takes. Even if you're a guy that looks like a lady, or a lady that looks like a guy, or a bear that has the spirit of a gay man inside of him also his big, veiny, flippy, floppy ding-dong muscle and a super-computer.

Eve returned to her lip-gloss application. "Biology. Ms Whittier," she said, not bothering to look at Luke. "Cool. Me too. Can I borrow that?" He reached around her and plucked her lip glaze out of her fingers. She still held the wand. He held out his hand for it. "What? No," Eve said. "Come on, it's my first day. I want to make a good impression. And clearly biology can't be understood without lipstick," Luke joked. "Funny." Eve grabbed the lip glaze back. "This stuff is really good for you." Luke raised his eyebrows. They disappeared into his floppy blond hair. He didn't have expressive dark brows like Mal. "It has green tea antioxidants," Eve continued. "And macadamia extract and aloe vera for healing." "Oh. That's different then," Luke said. "Carry on.

When Eve explained this aspect to Imogen, she had to stop herself from asking what exactly had happened to the floppy disk. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen one and yet she didn’t understand exactly what had replaced it or when. The floppy disk was something she could wrap her head around. It was a tangible thing you could touch and smell, just like the pages of a magazine. The Internet and the tiny computers they worked on these days made less sense to her. You couldn’t touch the new Glossy.com—the app or digital

surfing, writing, composing, and programming deep into the night, like it's the early 1980s with the hue of poison-green CRT illuminating the room, Nike running shoes on the floor, hair metal poster on the door, and everything is infinite, made of fibre optics and floppy disks . . .

Donkeys...I've decided that donkeys are universally cute. Really cute. So cute that donkeys defy any arguments of preferences being relative. When you pet their noses, they blink their eyes and bashfully look away as if embarrassed. And when donkeys hee-haw, they have their mouths and lips curled up as if they are smiling. Boyfriend and girlfriend donkeys rest their heads on each other's rumpt and fan each other's faces with their tails. And kid donkeys, the size of an average dog, trot around with big smiles on their faces and floppy, dangly, long donkey ears. Too cute.

And it was this location that provides my second memory. (It must come after the first because in it I am now standing up.) I was bitten by a rabbit. Or rather, I was nibbled by a rabbit, but, because I was such a weedy, namby-pamby little pansy, I reacted as though I’d lost a limb. It was the sheer unfairness of it all that so upset me. One minute, I was saying, ‘Hello, Mr Bunny!’ and smiling at its sweet little face and funny floppy ears. The next, the fucker savaged me. It seemed so gratuitous. What, I asked myself, had I done to the rabbit to deserve this psychotic response?

Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face.

It never occurred to him that the faded news clipping might actually be a treasured memento of the plump, middle-aged woman who stood glaring before him, looking ever-so-silly in her huge, pink-tinted glasses, dangly starfish earrings and graying, strawberry-gold hair stuffed under an outlandish, floppy pink hat.

on November 6: in the rapidity and confusion of the advance, Douglas MacArthur, commanding an infantry brigade, was taken prisoner by his own side. Thinking he was a German officer, vigilant American sentries brought him in at pistol point. The mistake was quickly discovered, once MacArthur had taken off his unusual floppy hat and long scarf.

Mostly, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can't you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor's birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.

Just let me grab my thinking cap,” she told him, heading for her locker. The long floppy hat was required during midterms, designed to restrict Telepaths and preserve the integrity of the tests—not that anything could block Sophie’s enhanced abilities. But after the exams, the hats became present sacks, and everyone filled them with treats and trinkets and treasures. “I’ll need to inspect your presents before you open them,” Sandor warned as he helped Sophie lift her overstuffed hat. “That’s perfect,” Fitz said. “While he does that, you can open mine.” He pulled a small box from the pocket of his waist-length cape and handed it to Sophie. The opalescent wrapping paper had flecks of teal glitter dusted across it, and he’d tied it with a silky teal bow, making her wonder if he’d guessed her favorite color. She really hoped he couldn’t guess why. . . . “Hopefully I did better this year,” Fitz said. “Biana claimed the riddler was a total fail.” The riddle-writing pen he’d given her last time had been a disappointment, but . . . “I’m sure I’ll love it,” Sophie promised. “Besides. My gift is boring.” Sandor had declared an Atlantis shopping trip to be far too risky, so Sophie had spent the previous day baking her friends’ presents. She handed Fitz a round silver tin and he popped the lid off immediately. “Ripplefluffs?” he asked, smiling his first real smile in days. The silver-wrapped treats were what might happen if a brownie and a cupcake had a fudgey, buttery baby, with a candy surprise sunken into the center. Sophie’s adoptive mother, Edaline, had taught her the recipe

You're the only rag dolls I've seen in Dream Town," I comment, seeing myself reflected back in the features of their faces--something I've never known until now. The seams of Albert's mouth lift into a half smile. "There are a few others. Rag dolls like us, and also several Teddy Bears and Floppy-Eared Rabbits. They are all sleep-weavers, but they spend most of their time in the human world, helping lull children to sleep.

It becomes more and more difficult to credit Lisa with being a quarter Russian. Somewhere and within and behind this quintessentially middle-class middle- England figure in her Jaeger suit and floppy-bowed silk shirt and her neat polished shoes lies the most tormented people in the history of the world. Somewhere in Lisa's soul, though she knows little of it and cares less, are whispers of St Petersburg, of the Crimea, of Pushkin, of Turgenev, of million upon million enduring peasants, of relentless winters and parched summers, of the most glorious language ever spoken, of samovars and droshkys and the sad sloe-eyed faces of a thousand icons. Lisa carried in her spirit matters she knows not of. I look at Lisa and wolves howl across the steppe, the blood flows at Borodino, Irina sighs for Moscow. All derivative, all in the mind - the confection of fact and fantasy that is how we know the world.

She moved her finger on the screen to the third row, the second man. Dark curly hair, a long slit of a mouth. Hair slicked and parted down the middle. A skinny, floppy bow tie. What had been so special about hm? Fiona didn't know what she'd expected, but something more than this. Ranko Novak was worth seventy years of devotion. Ranko Novak was irreplaceable, a hole at the center of Nora's universe. And this was it? A face, two eyes, two ears. Well, try telling that to someone in love.

I stop struggling long enough to watch the remaining masked figures blur past us on the outside of our bubble force field. And then my eyes snag on one with floppy, dark curls. Him. His mask clings to his face like a second skin, and when his gaze meets mine, I take a slow breath. He halts, watching me as I watch him. He’s one of them. And he recognizes me. The note. The meeting place. The leather. Sure enough, each of them is engulfed in leather vests and masks. Armor. He was making armor for them.

Suddenly, Rachel stopped. “Kirsty, look over there!” Rachel pointed to the big pen in the corner set up for rabbits. It held a small, brown rabbit, a black-and-white rabbit with floppy ears, and a fluffy, white rabbit. The white rabbit was sparkling with fairy magic! “Do you think it could be the Easter Bunny?” Kirsty whispered. “May I help you, girls?” asked a voice behind them. The girls spun around and gasped. They knew that voice! “Jack Frost! What are you doing here?” Rachel asked bravely. Jack Frost grinned.

Jon Rubinstein, who was in charge of hardware, adapted the microprocessor and guts of the PowerMac G3, Apple’s high-end professional computer, for use in the proposed new machine. It would have a hard drive and a tray for compact disks, but in a rather bold move, Jobs and Rubinstein decided not to include the usual floppy disk drive. Jobs quoted the hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s maxim, “Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” He was a bit ahead of his time, but eventually most computers eliminated floppy disks.

I've been watching Buffy on my laptop. I'm at the end of season two where the instructions for restoring Angel's soul have been saved onto a floppy disk, but Willow's lost the floppy disk down the side of a desk, so Angel's not going to get his soul back in time and Buffy will end up having to kill him. It's such a dumb reason for a vampire to have to die---just a stupid yellow floppy disk, and the fact that a desk and a cabinet aren't pushed close enough together. If it were today, the instructions would have worked out fine.

Arnie Brewer hitched his baggy pants up over the loose skin of his gut, which used to hold the substantial potbelly that he could have rested a beer can on while he watched TV. Now his midsection was floppy and weird, all the fat sucked out of it, but the skin was still there, hanging off of him like a deflated balloon. He had to position the waistband of his pants in the right spot—slightly low on his hips—so that it pinned the folds of loose skin to his crotch. Otherwise, if he ran, it would constantly flail around and smack him repeatedly in his groin.

I was thrilled. I had never met a famous writer before. I examined him closely as he sat in my office. What astonished me was that he looked so ordinary. There was nothing in the least unusual about him. His face, his conversation, his eyes behind the spectacles, even his clothes were all exceedingly normal. And yet here was a writer of stories who was famous the world over. His books had been read by millions of people. I expected sparks to be shooting out of his head, or at the very least, he should have been wearing a long green cloak and a floppy hat with a wide brim.

Well – she’s busy. She has a passion of sorts that defines her day. So each day would have purpose, and she has friends who live in the same way who sort of plan things and then relax together, so she certainly would have good times, where she would feel safe and sort of mellow. I hope. A bit floppy, maybe, like when you’ve worked really hard and look forward to a lovely rest. But I wonder if it gets her down that she doesn’t use her talents more, isn’t able to express herself in that way, because she’s clever and she could really do something amazing if she . . . Hard to say. Hard to say I suppose what makes a happy life.

In downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere.

They really haven’t told you anything about the future, have they? This is my phone.” “A phone. You use it as a phone. You carry around a device that’s the size of a deck of cards and is more powerful than a Cray supercomputer, and you use it as a phone?” “I also play games on it, and watch a movie occasionally.” “You can watch movies on that?” “Not many. I mean, I only have a sixteen-gig memory card in it.” Phillip muttered, almost to himself, “My Commodore has sixty-four kilobytes of memory and a floppy drive that stores one hundred and seventy K. You can double that, but you have to cut a notch in the disk.” Then, loud and clear, Phillip said, “I kind of hate you right now.

The absolute success of these two movements is such that at this stage, "indie" and "yuppie" are meaningless designators. The yuppie aesthetic of connoisseurship has infiltrated everywhere and now there is only--for many of us--either luxury gelato or food made of chemical waste. Ikea, Martha Stewart, and Whole Foods make yuppiedom no longer a chic and extravagant choice but an enforced mode. It's either that or eat at a toxic toilet such as McDonald's. The indie aesthetic is likewise de rigueur. H&M, Urban Outfitters, and American Apparel sell the floppy "Brit on a holiday" look to all Americans. Radiohead and Arcade Fire music is blasted from speakers at stadiums. For many poor souls, there is no alternative to the alternative.

It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction-extreme self-centredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again. Според мен много и много хора по широкия свят, хора на различна възраст, с различна култура и различни заложби гледат с особен възторг и дори понякога величаят онези художници и поети, които освен дето са си спечелили име с голямото си или добро изкуство имат нещо шантаво в себе си: нетърпими недостатъци в характера или в гражданското поведение, любовна страст или скръб, изключителен егоцентризъм, извънбрачна връзка, глухота, слепота, неутолима жажда, смъртоносна кашлица, слабост към проститутки, склонност към чудовищни прелюбодеяния или кръвосмешение, документирана или недокументирана страст към опиума или содомията и прочее — пази боже, самотните копелета. Макар самоубийството да не стои на първо място в списъка на задължителните за твореца недостатъци, не можем да не забележим, че самоубилият се поет или художник винаги се радва на много голямо, завидно внимание, нерядко само по чисто сантиментални причини, сякаш е (ще се изразя по-ужасно, отколкото ми се ще) клепоухото недорасло кутре от кучилото. Тази мисъл — това е последно — много пъти не ми е давала мира по цели нощи и сигурно пак ще върши същото.

How rude of me, we haven’t even introduced ourselves. We’re the Andersons. I’m Evan, the lovely size-zero lass in the floppy sun hat is my wife Amy, and these are our best friends/children, Evan and Amy Jr. As you can see, we’re very fit and active. You know what our family’s average percentage of body fat is? Three. Yes, really. We got it tested last year when we all became organ donors. You may have noticed that I’m carrying Amy on my back. We do that a lot. At least once a day, and not just when we’re in fields like this; we do it on beaches and in urban environments as well. That’s what happens when your love is deep and playful like ours. You should also know that we also dab frosting on each other’s noses every single time we eat cupcakes, which is both mischievous and very us. Do you guys even eat cupcakes?

I'm sure we'll need some- oof!" She was never to finish the thoughts she was startled by a creature that came bounding swiftly around the side of the carriage. A glimpse of floppy ears and jolly brown eyes filled her vision before the enthusiastic canine pounced so eagerly that she toppled backward from her squatting position. She landed on her rump, the impact knocking her hat to the ground. A swath of hair came loose and slid over her face, while a young tan-and black retriever leapt around her as if he were on springs. She felt a huff of dog breath on at her ear and the swipe of a tongue on her cheek. "Ajax, no," she heard Ivo exclaim. Realizing what a mess she'd become, all in a matter of seconds, Pandora experienced a moment of despair, followed by resignation. Of course this would happen. Of course she would have to meet the duke and duchess after tumbling on the drive like a half-witted carnival performer. It was so dreadful that she began to giggle, while the dog nudged his head against hers. In the next moment, Pandora was lifted to her feet and caught firmly against a hard surface. The momentum threw her off balance, and she clung to St. Vincent dizzily. He kept her anchored securely against him with an arm around her back. "Down, idiot," St. Vincent commanded. The dog subsided, panting happily. "He must have slipped past the front door," Ivo said. St. Vincent smoothed Pandora's hair back from her face. "Are you hurt?" His gaze ran over her swiftly. "No... no." Helpless giggles kept bubbling up as her nervous tension released. She tried to smother the giddy sounds against his shoulder. "I was... trying so hard to be ladylike..." A brief chuckle escaped him, and his hand moved over her upper back in a calming circle. "I would imagine it's not easy to be ladylike in the midst of a dog mauling.

She speaks reverently of her summers here. This is her favorite place in the world, she tells him, and he understands that this landscape, the water of this particular lake in which she first learned to swim, is an essential part of her, even more so than the house in Chelsea. This was where she lost her virginity, she confesses, when she was fourteen years old, in a boathouse, with a boy whose family once summered here. He thinks of himself at fourteen, his life nothing like it is now... He realizes that this is a place that will always be here for her. It makes it easy to imagine her past, and her future, to picture her growing old. He sees her with streaks of gray in her hair, her face still beautiful, her long body slightly widened and slack, sitting on a beach chair with a floppy hat on her head. He sees her returning here, grieving, to bury her parents, teaching her children to swim in the lake, leading them with two hands into the water, showing them how to dive cleanly off the dock.

Well . . .” I mined my mind for something disturbing. All I could recall were the plots of the terrible movies I’d recently seen. “I had this one nightmare where I moved to Las Vegas and met a seamstress and gave lap dances. Then I ran into an old friend who gave me a floppy disk full of government secrets and I became a suspect in a murder case and the NSA chased me, and instead of getting a Porsche for Christmas, a football team left me stranded in the desert.” Dr. Tuttle scribbled dutifully, then lifted her head, waiting for more. “So I started eating sand to try to kill myself instead of dying of dehydration. It was awful.” “Very troubling,” Dr. Tuttle murmured. I wobbled against the bookshelf. It was difficult to stay upright—two months of sleep had made my muscles wither. And I could still feel the trazodone I’d taken that morning. “Try to sleep on your side when possible. There was recently a study in Australia that said that when you sleep on your back, you’re more likely to have nightmares about drowning. It’s not conclusive, of course, since they’re on the opposite side of the Earth. So actually, you might want to try sleeping on your stomach instead, and see what that does.

Because I wanted to seem a certain way to you, I guess.” “It’s so funny you should say this, because if you were one of my students, you’d be wearing your pain like a badge of honor. This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them. I sound like I’m making fun, and I am a little, but I don’t mean to be. They’re so different from us, really. Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless. I hate people who talk about generational differences like it’s an actual thing, and here I am, doing it. It doesn’t make sense. How alike were you to anyone we grew up with, you know?” “If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?” Sam asked. “I don’t think they do. Or maybe they don’t have to, I don’t know.” Sadie paused. “Since I’ve been teaching, I keep thinking about how lucky we were,” she said. “We were lucky to be born when we were.” “How so?” “Well, if we’d been born a little bit earlier, we wouldn’t have been able to make our games so easily. Access to computers would have been harder. We would have been part of the generation who was putting floppy disks in Ziploc bags and driving

Of course he wept at the funeral and knew how colossal this thing was that, without warning, had been taken away. When the minister read, along with the biblical stuff, a selection from Julius Caesar out of his father's cherished volume of Shakespeare's plays —the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel —the son felt his father's majesty as never before: the grandeur of both his rise and his fall, the grandeur that, as a college freshman away for barely a month from the tiny enclosure of his East Orange home, Coleman had begun faintly to discern for what it was. "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come." The word "valiant," as the preacher intoned it, stripped away Coleman's manly effort at sober, stoical self-control and laid bare a child's longing for that man closest to him that he'd never see again, the mammoth, secretly suffering father who talked so easily, so sweepingly, who with just his powers of speech had inadvertently taught Coleman to want to be stupendous. Coleman wept with the most fundamental and copious of all emotions, reduced helplessly to everything he could not bear. As an adolescent complaining about his father to his friends, he would characterize him with far more scorn than he felt or had the capacity to feel—pretending to an impersonal way of judging his own father was one more method he'd devised to invent and claim impregnability. But to be no longer circumscribed and defined by his father was like finding that all the clocks wherever he looked had stopped, and all the watches, and that there was no way of knowing what time it was. Down to the day he arrived in Washington and entered Howard, it was, like it or not, his father who had been making up Coleman's story for him; now he would have to make it up himself, and the prospect was terrifying.

It’s so funny you should say this, because if you were one of my students, you’d be wearing your pain like a badge of honor. This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them. I sound like I’m making fun, and I am a little, but I don’t mean to be. They’re so different from us, really. Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless. I hate people who talk about generational differences like it’s an actual thing, and here I am, doing it. It doesn’t make sense. How alike were you to anyone we grew up with, you know?” “If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?” Sam asked. “I don’t think they do. Or maybe they don’t have to, I don’t know.” Sadie paused. “Since I’ve been teaching, I keep thinking about how lucky we were,” she said. “We were lucky to be born when we were.” “How so?” “Well, if we’d been born a little bit earlier, we wouldn’t have been able to make our games so easily. Access to computers would have been harder. We would have been part of the generation who was putting floppy disks in Ziploc bags and driving the games to stores. And if we’d been born a little bit later, there would have been even greater access to the internet and certain tools, but honestly, the games got so much more complicated; the industry got so professional. We couldn’t have done as much as we did on our own. We could never have made a game that we could sell to a company like Opus on the resources we had. We wouldn’t have made Ichigo Japanese, because we would have worried about the fact that we weren’t Japanese. And I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.

Jackaby was still engrossed in his examination when I came back inside. “Books. Books. Just books,” he was muttering. Jenny was hovering by the window. I joined her. “How did you manage it, by the way?” I asked. “All those Bibles, all across town? It is a remarkable feat.” “It looks more impressive than it is,” she said, still not meeting my eyes. “I borrowed Jackaby’s special satchel, the one that holds anything. The whole pile took just one trip. The real trick was keeping myself solid all the way home. That’s the bit I’m really proud of—” She turned to face me. “Oh, Abigail, it was amazing. People saw me!” “People saw you?” “I was in disguise, of course. I wore my long coat and gloves, and I had that floppy white hat on, so they didn’t see much, but still—people saw me and they didn’t gasp or make a scene. Someone even mumbled Good day to me as I was crossing the footbridge! It was exhilarating! I have never been so excited to have somebody see me—actually see me—and not care at all!” She glanced at Jackaby. “Although you would think I would be used to it by now.” “Jenny, that is absolutely amazing!” I said. “It is, isn’t it?” she said wistfully. “Just a little bit, at least? Oh, Abigail, I’m exhausted, I’m not ashamed to tell you. I had planned on setting my spoils out in nice triumphant rows when I got back, but it was all I could do to hold myself intact by then. Solidity is sort of like flexing a muscle, except the muscle is in your mind, and your mind is really just an abstract concept. I was basically flexing my entire body into existence the whole way home. But did it merit so much as a Good job, Jenny from that infuriating man?” Jackaby surfaced from his perusal and looked up at last. His cloud gray eyes found focus on Jenny. From his expression, I couldn’t tell if he had been following our conversation or not. “Completely unexceptional,” he said. “Nothing at all in this batch. We will need to scrutinize them more closely, of course, just to be sure. Oh, and Miss Cavanaugh . . .” She raised an eyebrow skeptically. “You performed . . . quite adequately,” he said, “despite expectations.” Jenny opened her mouth to reply, but then closed it again. Her face fluttered through a series of potential reactions. Finally she just threw up her hands and vanished from sight with a muffled whuph of air closing into the space where she suddenly wasn’t. “What in heaven’s name was all that?” said Jackaby. “Exquisite frustration, I believe, sir.” “Ah. Right.” He slumped into the desk chair and began to fidget absently with the spine of one of the Bibles. “Miss Cavanaugh is a singular and exceptional spirit, you know.” “Only a suggestion, sir, but that is precisely the sort of thing you might consider saying when she is still present and corporeal.