Fragments Of The Lost Important Quotes

The thing is to sift out the important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bring hints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil for the life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake the fragment for the sentence.

Her head hurt and her chest felt hollowed out, as if she’d lost more than just her memories. For a second the agony was so deep and so brutal, she clutched her heart, half expecting to find a jagged hole. But there was no wound. Her heart was still there; she could feel it beating. Yet for a devastating moment, Evangeline imagined that it shouldn’t have been, that her heart was supposed to be as broken as she felt. Then it hit her, not a feeling but a thought—a sharp, fragmented one. She had something important to tell someone.

It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man’s deep and hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit’s evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination; with the result that such attitudes, and these alone are of importance in indicating character, are the most apt to leave us in perplexity.

he found himself losing his mind. His grip on reality, already tenuous from sustained isolation in a city of scholars, became even more fragmented. Hours of revision had interfered with his processing of signs and symbols, his belief in what was real and what was not. The abstract was factual and important; daily exigencies like porridge and eggs were suspect. Everyday dialogue became a chore; small talk was a horror, and he lost his grip on what basic salutations meant. When the porter asked him if he’d had a good one, he stood still and mute for a good thirty seconds, unable to process what was meant by ‘good’, or indeed, ‘one’.

Third, the idea that venture capitalists get into deals on the strength of their brands can be exaggerated. A deal seen by a partner at Sequoia will also be seen by rivals at other firms: in a fragmented cottage industry, there is no lack of competition. Often, winning the deal depends on skill as much as brand: it’s about understanding the business model well enough to impress the entrepreneur; it’s about judging what valuation might be reasonable. One careful tally concluded that new or emerging venture partnerships capture around half the gains in the top deals, and there are myriad examples of famous VCs having a chance to invest and then flubbing it.[6] Andreessen Horowitz passed on Uber. Its brand could not save it. Peter Thiel was an early investor in Stripe. He lacked the conviction to invest as much as Sequoia. As to the idea that branded venture partnerships have the “privilege” of participating in supposedly less risky late-stage investment rounds, this depends from deal to deal. A unicorn’s momentum usually translates into an extremely high price for its shares. In the cases of Uber and especially WeWork, some late-stage investors lost millions. Fourth, the anti-skill thesis underplays venture capitalists’ contributions to portfolio companies. Admittedly, these contributions can be difficult to pin down. Starting with Arthur Rock, who chaired the board of Intel for thirty-three years, most venture capitalists have avoided the limelight. They are the coaches, not the athletes. But this book has excavated multiple cases in which VC coaching made all the difference. Don Valentine rescued Atari and then Cisco from chaos. Peter Barris of NEA saw how UUNET could become the new GE Information Services. John Doerr persuaded the Googlers to work with Eric Schmidt. Ben Horowitz steered Nicira and Okta through their formative moments. To be sure, stories of venture capitalists guiding portfolio companies may exaggerate VCs’ importance: in at least some of these cases, the founders might have solved their own problems without advice from their investors. But quantitative research suggests that venture capitalists do make a positive impact: studies repeatedly find that startups backed by high-quality VCs are more likely to succeed than others.[7] A quirky contribution to this literature looks at what happens when airline routes make it easier for a venture capitalist to visit a startup. When the trip becomes simpler, the startup performs better.[8]

You could remove her memories, Gregori suggested, clearly not understanding why Mikhail did not do the obvious. She would not like such a thing. She would not know. Gregori put a small edge in his tone. He sighed when Mikhail did not respond. Allow me to heal her, then. She is important to all of us, Mikhail. She suffers needlessly. She would want to do this on her own. Mikhail was well aware that Gregori thought he had lost his mind, but he knew Raven. She had her own courage, and her own ideas of right and wrong. She would not thank him if at some later date she learned he had removed her memories. There could be no untruths between lifemates, and Mikhail was determined to give her time to come to terms with what they had endured together. Mikhail found the rose-petal-soft skin of her face, traced her delicate cheekbones with gentle fingers. “You were right, little one. We will build our home together, stronger than ever. We will pick a place, deep within the forest, and fill it with so much love, it will spill over to our wolves.” Her blue-violet gaze flickered with sudden awareness, jumping to Mikhail’s face. The tip of her tongue touched her full lower lip. She managed a tentative smile. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a Carpathian.” Her voice was a mere thread of sound. “You are everything a Carpathian woman should be,” Gregori said gallantly, his tone low and melodious, a soothing, healing cadence. Both Mikhail and Jacques found themselves listening intently to the compelling pitch. “You are fit to be the lifemate of our prince, and I give you freely my allegiance and my protection, as I have given it to Mikhail.” His voice deliberately was pitched low, so that it seeped into her fragmented mind like a soothing balm. Raven’s shattered gaze swung to Gregori. Her long lashes fluttered, her eyes so dark they were nearly purple. “You helped us.” Her fingers sought and found Mikhail’s, entwined with his, yet her gaze never left Gregori’s face. “You were so far away. The sun was out, yet you knew we were in trouble, and you were able to help us. It was difficult for you. I felt it even as you reached for me to take away what I could not endure.

The importance of divination does not mean, however, that the oracular system was never mocked in Greek culture. The consultation of oracles was lampooned in Greek comedy: in Aristophanes’ Knights and Birds, for example, oracle sellers are figures of fun. The strength of their connection with the divine too could be questioned. Euripides, in a fragment of an otherwise lost play (Frag. 973N), wrote “the best seer is the one who guessed right.” Sometimes too their usefulness could be questioned. Xenophon, in the fourth century BC, argued that divination became useful only when human capacity ended.⁵¹ We shall see in the coming chapters instances wherein even the oracle of Apollo at Delphi was said to have been bribed and to have become biased, or was treated with circumspection by even its most loyal consultants. But all these instances represent an aberration from the norm, an aberration that did not in the long term shake belief in the system as a whole, a system that continued to speak of divination as a useful and real connection to the gods.