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It has taken me four years to figure this out.
If we live long enough, we all will experience this.
Don’t ever predetermine how you think that you should feel on an anniversary of a tragic event in your life, such as a death of a loved one, or on a holiday after such an event.
Each year starts out with 365 days, and I will be damned if I am giving up even one of them to misery.
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JohnA Passaro
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A hunter-gatherer mother who is shifting camp can carry only one child, along with her few possessions. She cannot afford to bear her next child until the previous toddler can walk fast enough to keep up with the tribe and not hold it back. In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion. By contrast, sedentary people, unconstrained by problems of carrying young children on treks, can bear and raise as many children as they can feed. The birth interval for many farm peoples is around two years, half that of hunter-gatherers. That higher birthrate of food producers, together with their ability to feed more people per acre, lets them achieve much higher population densities than hunter-gatherers.
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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For instance, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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The thing no one tells you, the thing you have to find out on your own through firsthand experience, is that there is never an easy way to talk about suicide. There never was, there will never be. If ever someone asked, I'd tell them the truth: that my aunt was amazing, that she lived widely, that she had the most infectious laugh, that she knew four different languages and had a passport cluttered with so many stamps from different countries that it'd make any world traveler green with envy, and that she had a monster over her shoulder she didn't let anyone else see.
And in turn, that monster didn't let her see all the things she would miss. The birthdays. The anniversaries. The sunsets. The bodega on the corner that had turned into that shiplap furniture store. The monster closed her eyes to all the pain she would give the people she left—the terrible weight of missing her and trying not to blame her in all the same breath. And then you started blaming yourself. Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through? If you loved them more, if you paid more attention, if you were better, if you only asked, if you even knew to ask, if you could just read between the lines and—
If, if, if.
There is no easy way to talk about suicide.
Sometimes the people you love don't leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.
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Ashley Poston (The Seven Year Slip)
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Similarly, hippos, as four ton vegetarians, would be great barnyard animals if they weren’t so dangerous. They kill more people each year than do any other African mammals, including even lions.
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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During the same period Szilard wrote Michael Polanyi he would “stay in England until one year before the war, at which time I would shift my residence to New York City.”896 The letter provoked comment, Szilard enjoyed recalling; it was “very funny, because how can anyone say what he will do one year before the war?” As it turned out, his prognostication was off by only four months: he arrived in the United States on January 2, 1938.
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Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
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Evolved organs, elegant and efficient as they often are, also demonstrate revealing flaws – exactly as you’d expect if they have an evolutionary history, and exactly as you would not expect if they were designed. I have discussed examples in other books: the recurrent laryngeal nerve, for one, which betrays its evolutionary history in a massive and wasteful detour on its way to its destination. Many of our human ailments, from lower back pain to hernias, prolapsed uteruses and our susceptibility to sinus infections, result directly from the fact that we now walk upright with a body that was shaped over hundreds of millions of years to walk on all fours. Our consciousness is also raised by the cruelty and wastefulness of natural selection. Predators seem beautifully ‘designed’ to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully ‘designed’ to escape them. Whose side is God on?
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Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion: 10th Anniversary Edition)
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Germany had been united in empire for only eight years when Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879. He grew up in Munich. He was slow to speak, but he was not, as legend has it, slow in his studies; he consistently earned the highest or next-highest marks in mathematics and Latin in school and Gymnasium. At four or five the “miracle” of a compass his father showed him excited him so much, he remembered, that he “trembled and grew cold.” It seemed to him then that “there had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden.”624 He would look for the something which objects hid, though his particular genius was to discover that there was nothing behind them to hide; that objects, as matter and as energy, were all; that even space and time were not the invisible matrices of the material world but its attributes. “If you will not take the answer too seriously,” he told a clamorous crowd of reporters in New York in 1921 who asked him for a short explanation of relativity, “and consider it only as a kind of joke, then I can explain it as follows. It was formerly believed that if all material things disappeared out of the universe, time and space would be left. According to the relativity theory, however, time and space disappear together with the things.
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Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
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In fifteenth-century France, for example, one out of every four days of the year was an official holiday of some sort, usually dedicated to a mix of religious ceremonies and more or less unsanctioned carryings-on. Weddings, wakes, and other gatherings furnished additional opportunities for conviviality and carousing. Then there were the various local ceremonial occasions, such as the day honoring a village's patron saint or the anniversary of a church's founding ... So, despite the reputation of what are commonly called "the Middle Ages" as a time of misery and fear, the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century can be seen - at least in comparison to the puritanical times that followed - as one long outdoor party, punctuated by bouts of hard labor.
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Barbara Ehrenreich
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It turns out that the eastern U.S. founder crops were four plants domesticated in the period 2500–1500 B.C., a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley domestication in the Fertile Crescent. A local species of squash provided small containers, as well as yielding edible seeds. The remaining three founders were grown solely for their edible seeds (sunflower, a daisy relative called sumpweed, and a distant relative of spinach called goosefoot). But four seed crops and a container fall far short of a complete food production package. For 2,000 years those founder crops served only as minor dietary supplements while eastern U.S. Native Americans continued to depend mainly on wild foods, especially wild mammals and waterbirds, fish, shellfish, and nuts. Farming did not supply a major part of their diet until the period 500–200 B.C., after three more seed crops (knotweed, maygrass, and little barley) had been brought into cultivation. A
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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Big anniversary coming up for you next year.” I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of my life spent in Shawshank State Prison. “Think you’ll ever get out?” “Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling around upstairs.” He smiled a little and then turned his face up into the sun again, his eyes closed. “Feels good.” “I think it always does when you know the damn winter’s almost right on top of you.” He nodded, and we were silent for awhile. “When I get out of here,” Andy said finally, “I’m going where it’s warm all the time.” He spoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he had only a month or so left to serve. “You know where I’m goin, Red?” “Nope.” “Zihuatanejo,” he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. “Down in Mexico. It’s a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway Thirty-seven. It’s a hundred miles northwest of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?” I told him I didn’t. “They say it has no memory. And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.
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Stephen King (Different Seasons: Four Novellas)
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In four years of struggle, this Volk faced off twenty-six states and was only vanquished by betrayal and dishonesty! Had there not been Germans back then to undermine trust in their own regime, England and France would never have won! Had then [in 1918] a certain Adolf Hitler, instead of serving as a German musketeer, been German Reich Chancellor, do you really believe that then the false gods of capitalism and international democracy would have carried the victory?!
When I conjure up all these so-called international statesmen in the democracies, who today talk big in Europe, before my mind’s eye and envision their lives’ achievements, then all I can say is: At home and abroad, I have always had the misfortune of fighting against zeroes. These folk rule over the largest of terrains on this earth and yet are not even capable of eliminating unemployment in their own countries. And these folk speak of the necessity of a new order for Europe. That reminds me of the talk of our own democrats of earlier days who preached the necessity of a new order for Germany. This new order was indeed established-although without them. And a new order will be established in the world-although equally without them! My struggle for the liberty of our Volk was a struggle against Versailles.
Speech for the 20-th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. in the Hofbräuhaus Munich, February 24, 1940
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Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
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two days of pay on the first-year anniversary grew to four weeks of pay by the tenth-year anniversary. Additionally, five-year employment anniversaries were celebrated with a cake, ten years with a monogrammed silver platter with the name Pepperidge Farm and the date inscribed on the bottom, and fifteen years with a monogrammed
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Edith Sparks (Boss Lady: How Three Women Entrepreneurs Built Successful Big Businesses in the Mid-Twentieth Century (The Luther H. Hodges Jr. and Luther H. Hodges Sr. ... Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy))
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Hearing a client say ‘The CEO was quite impressed with your design concepts’ could never compare with the intense pleasure Grace felt hearing a four-year-old say ‘I laughed until forever!
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Liane Moriarty (The Last Anniversary)
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And while seeking out the opinions and perspectives of people like ourselves may lead to a more personal and familiar buying experience, what’s even more amazing is the impact those trusted sources have on conversion rates. B2B sales cycle data from Salesforce demonstrates that, when it comes to lead conversion, the interest that originates from customer and employee referrals converts to deals at rates fifty times higher than email campaigns!9 Furthermore, data from marketing automation giant Marketo indicates that leads originating from referrals convert to opportunities at rates of four times the average, and similar to the next three highest-converting lead sources combined (those being partner, inbound, and marketing-generated).10 My personal experience over the years greatly corroborates these statistics. For example, when I started my own sales practice, Cerebral Selling, I needed to have a logo designed. Around the same time, my friend had recently had a nice logo designed for his business. I asked him who he used, he told me, and I just did the same. No further research or investigation required. A short time later, I wanted to head out of town with my wife for an overnight trip to the beautiful Niagara wine region of Ontario to celebrate our anniversary. I didn’t know where to stay or which restaurant to go to, so instead of sifting through pages of online content and reviews, I asked a friend who runs a vineyard in the region. When he gave me his recommendations, I simply booked the places he told me. No questions asked. Were there better places to stay and eat? Potentially. Were there other creative design shops that could have generated equally if not more spectacular logos? More than likely. Do I care? Absolutely not! I love my logo and had a great anniversary outing, and feel secure in my decisions around both because of the feeling I received by selecting recommendations from people I trust. Both experiences are perfect examples of the prescriptive-led sales cycle we spoke about in chapter 2. This means that when it comes to your selling motion, one of the most unobtrusive, empathetic, and authentic ways to convert prospective buyers is simply to surround them with like-minded customers who love you.
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David Priemer (Sell the Way You Buy: A Modern Approach To Sales That Actually Works (Even On You!))
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They say every year a batch of whiskey goes without being bottled, each year it’s aged, four percent of alcohol evaporates — and that’s the Angel’s share.
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Kandi Steiner (A Love Letter to Whiskey: Fifth Anniversary Edition)
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Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The letter was given to Sharon by Bush to help Sharon justify his unilateral withdrawal of 9,480 Jewish residents and the Israeli Army from Gaza, as part of a ‘peace’ effort to create a new separate Palestinian state, as part of a future ‘two state solution’. Sharon relied on Bush’s letter. In the letter, Bush made four promises to Israel: 1.) The borders of the new Muslim state to be created would not encompass the entire West Bank (referring to Israel as “Judea” and “Samaria,” including Jerusalem), despite Muslim leaders demanding the complete withdrawal from the areas Israel captured when it was invaded in 1967; 2.) Jewish towns and villages in the West Bank would be incorporated into the borders of Israel; 3.) Muslims would have to forego their demand to be given the right to immigrate to Israel; and 4.) Israel’s existence as a Jewish state would be assured. Unfortunately, four years later, in 2008, the Bush administration abandoned these assurances made to Prime Minister Sharon in 2004. Secretary of State Rice told reporters in Israel on the occasion of Israel’s 60th Anniversary as a re-born State that the 2004 letter “talked about realities at that time. And there are realities for both sides…” In an interview in the Oval Office with David Horowitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, President Bush had to be reminded of the letter by his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, who said in briefings that “Israel has tried to overstate the importance of a rather vague letter.” (Jerusalem Post, May 14, 2008).
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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We are grateful for a happy marriage and a glorious future. Four years of a happy marriage! Happy Anniversary my dearest husband, Jeremiah Nii Mama Akita! I love you with all my heart, soul and body.
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Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
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If I’d known back then about the Angel’s tax, I would have laughed. They say every year a batch of whiskey goes without being bottled, each year it’s aged, four percent of alcohol evaporates — and that’s the Angel’s share. It really was funny, then, that I’d neglected to bottle Jamie up for myself and so he’d been stolen by a woman named Angel.
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Kandi Steiner (A Love Letter to Whiskey: Fifth Anniversary Edition)
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MOO Moo. MOO: One morning in 2012, commuters in Rayburn, Pennsylvania, got stuck in a traffic jam when a cow and a bull decided to have “relations” in the middle of a busy intersection. Police tried shooing them away, but, according to reports, “That just got the bull mad and it started to escalate.” Game officials arrived and steered the couple into a private trailer. MOO: In 2012 a cow named Sadhana and her “bullfriend” got married in a lavish wedding ceremony in Guradia, India. More than 1,500 guests attended. Reason for the wedding: Sadhana’s owners were unable to have children, so without a daughter to marry off, the well-to-do couple married off their cow. MOO: An 18-year-old thief wearing a full-body cow costume stole 26 gallons of milk from a Walmart in Garrisonville, Virginia, in 2011. Witnesses recalled seeing him exit the store “on all fours.” Hours later police apprehended the human cow “skipping down the sidewalk” in front of a nearby McDonald’s.
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Bathroom Readers' Institute (Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, #25))
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You know,” I said as we trudged homeward, “this is an important occasion, and not just because of this great discovery. According to my calculations, tomorrow will be our second anniversary on the island “ “Is this really true?” Elizabeth asked. “I can hardly believe so much time has passed.” “It is true, my dear,” I said. Think of all of the adventures that we have had and that we are safe, well-fed and happy. I am going to declare tomorrow a special day of celebration.” “You mean that we are going to have a party?” cried Francis, jumping for joy. “Oh, I can hardly wait!” Actually, Francis did not have long to wait, for when the morning dawned, Elizabeth and I had the entire day’s festivities planned. Greeting my sons on the lawn beneath Falcon’s Nest, I said, “For the past two years, you boys have been practicing wrestling, running, swimming, shooting and horseback riding here on the island. Now, we are going to determine the champions of these feats.” So, the competitions began, with Elizabeth cheering the boys and Turk and Flora running alongside them. Unquestionably, the highlight of the day was the horseback-riding event. Fritz mounted Lightfoot and Ernest rode Grizzle, but they were no match for Jack’s skillful handling of the wild buffalo. A practiced groom could not have managed a thoroughbred horse with more grace and ease. “Jack, my boy,” I boomed, “I hereby declare you the winner of this contest.” “No, Papa.” interrupted Francis. “You haven’t seen what I can do yet.” Francis rode into the arena, mounted on his young buffalo bull, Broumm, which was just four months old. Elizabeth had made a saddle of kangaroo skin and stirrups that adjusted to Francis’s little legs.
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Johann David Wyss (The Swiss Family Robinson)
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June 2021 the papers were cackling over Boris Johnson’s much anticipated biography Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius, which had been announced with some fanfare in 2015 and slated for publication in 2016 to mark the four-hundred-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death but which, five years later, had yet to materialize.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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That’s my best friend, Angel. She’s been with this guy for — what? Maybe four months now? Pining over him for almost a year before that. He was all heartbroken over some chick he tried doing long distance with, but she was determined to break through that shit.
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Kandi Steiner (A Love Letter to Whiskey: Fifth Anniversary Edition)
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How many diners should a man rob before he turns the gun on himself? The question whispered in Richie’s ear as he swallowed the last bite of pancake. He and Alabama had gotten the idea of stealing from diners when they caught Pulp Fiction at a four-year anniversary screening in the New Beverly Cinema in LA last year where they’d gone to shoot dope and drift among the neon haze of Hollywood glitz, thinking Shit, look how in love they are holding up that diner, that could be us. But a dozen diners later the charm had worn off and they’d returned to being just a couple junkie losers stuck in the small-time.
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Philip Elliott (Porno Valley)
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Let us assume that on the first wedding anniversary, before the SOP was put in place, a long-time close friend of Draupadi asks her out of naughty friendly curiosity, which of her five husbands she favoured the most and which the least. Draupadi feigns anger at the question, but in a playful mood, tells her friend that she has a meticulous log of the number of nights she spent with each of her husbands through the year, though she has no intention of sharing the information with her! But as a tease, she is willing to share with her friend, the total number of nights spent by her with four of her husbands in five different combinations. In effect, she presents her friend with the following five equations: y + b + a + n = 304 b + a + n + s = 296 a + n + s + y = 294 n + s + y + b = 280 s + y + b + a = 310 Where y stands for the total number of nights spent with Yudhisthira, b for the number of nights spent with Bhima, a for the number of nights with Arjuna, n for the number of nights with Nakula, and s for the nights spent with Sahadeva.
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V. Raghunathan (Locks, Mahabharata Mathematics: An Exploration of Unexpected Parallels)