Genius Baby Quotes

Baby," I said, "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.

Baby," I said, "I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me." She looked down at me. "Get up off the floor you damn fool and get me a drink.

What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.

Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

So we travel to one end – whoosh – and all the people seeing us fly by are like, oh my stars, look at that totally amazing ship, what genius tech patched together such a thing, and I’m like, oh, that’s me, Kizzy Shao, you can all name your babies after me – whooosh – and then we get to our start point.

An educated mind is nothing but the God-given mind of a child after his parents’ and his grandparents’ generation have got through molding it. We can’t help teaching you; you will ask that of us; but we are prone to teach you what we know, and I am going, now and again, to warn you: Remember we really don’t know anything. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don’t know. That is your playground, bare and graveled, safe and unbreakable.

Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that aborting horror you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to say anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer.

Peabody waved her PPC triumphantly. “It’s the Kirk thing, The Enterprise thing. It reminded me I’d hit this name that made me snicker when I was running the van—the Cargo. Here it is. Tony Stark.” “Oh, baby.” McNab blew her a double-handed kiss. “Good call.” “It’s gotta be, right?” Peabody said to McNab. “It’s his style.” “Who the hell is Tony Stark?” Eve demanded. “Iron Man,” Roarke told her. “Superhero, genius, innovative engineer, and billionaire playboy.” “Iron Man? You’re talking about a comic book guy?” “Graphic novel,” Roarke and McNab said together.

I am one beautiful and powerful son of a bitch,' he told himself. 'Smart as a whip, respected, prosperous, beloved and valuable. I have the right to be healthy, happy and rich, for I am the baddest player in this arena or any other. I love myself more than I love money and pretty women and fine clothes. I love myself more than I love neat gardens and healthy babies and a good gospel choir. I love myself as I love The Law. I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant I love myself doing the books or sitting down to a good game of poker. I love myself making love expertly, or tenderly and shyly, or clumsily and inept. I love myself as I love The Master's Mind,' he continued his litany, having long ago stumbled upon the prime principle as a player--that self-love produces the gods and the gods are genius. It took genius to run the Southwest Community Infirmary. So he made the rounds of his hospital the way he used to make the rounds of his houses to keep the tops spinning, reciting declarations of self-love.

Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better. Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing. Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever. Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions. Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them. Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides. Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not. Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to. Real women have ovaries. Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed. Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above. Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced. Real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise. Doesn’t make them any less real. There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla: There is no wrong way to have a body. I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body. And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap. You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real. Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me

Sometimes I thought about my future, because Lynn said I should. She said it was hard to tell at this point, but someday, if I didn't go to Africa to study animals, I might be a beautiful genius tennis player. I didn't worry about it one way or another. I didn't care if I was a genius or if I was pretty or if I was good in sports. I just liked to listen to Lynn and to talk to Bera-Bera and to eat rice candies. The lady who used to live down the street could take all of her top teeth out of her mouth. She wasn't allowed to eat chewy candy. I could eat any kind of candy I wanted because I still had my baby teeth. If they rotted, I would simply grow more teeth. That was pretty great.

(...) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

People ask what the hardest thing is about having an autistic child, and for me the answer is easy. What mom doesn’t want to hear her baby tell her that he loves her or to feel his arms around her?

The genius in Christmas is that it changes the trajectory of everything through a baby who was born into nothing. And if we have any shred of genius in us at all, it will be evidenced by our willingness to embrace that ‘everything’ out of our ‘nothing.

Men are born poets. By the time of their confirmation, they’ve taken on the inescapable role of being geniuses. It doesn’t matter whether they write books or not. Women, on the other hand, grapple with puberty and have babies, which prevents them from being able to write.

Councillor: But – I thought you said the new Heterodyne was a girl? Vanamonde von Mekkhan: She is. That’s just the boyfriend. Councillor: That’s – we’re … we’re going to have to break out those little iron cages for their children, aren’t we? Vanamonde von Mekkhan: Uh-huh.

The idea was to help women produce babies of genius by giving them the very best sperm modern science could provide. Some two hundred children were born as a result of the bank’s efforts, though none, it seems, proved to be an outstanding genius or even an accomplished eyeglass engineer.

I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary. I acknowledge freely the great power of education and social influences in developing the active powers of the mind, just as I acknowledge the effect of use in developing the muscles of a blacksmith's arm, and no further. Let the blacksmith labour as he will, he will find there are certain feats beyond his power that are well within the strength of a man of herculean make, even although the latter may have led a sedentary life.

Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?

Gil: Wait. This is Castle Heterodyne. Maybe it's supposed to be on fire. Castle: FIRE?! AAHHH! PUT IT OUT! SAVE MEEEE! Tarvek: ... apparently not.

Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.

Oh I could be out, rollicking in the ripeness of my flesh and others’, could be drinking things and eating things and rubbing mine against theirs, speculating about this person or that, waving, indicating hello with a sudden upward jutting of my chin, sitting in the backseat of someone else’s car, bumping up and down the San Francisco hills, south of Market, seeing people attacking their instruments, afterward stopping at a bodega, parking, carrying the bottles in a paper bag, the glass clinking, all our faces bright, glowing under streetlamps, down the sidewalk to this or that apartment party, hi, hi, putting the bottles in the fridge, removing one for now, hating the apartment, checking the view, sitting on the arm of a couch and being told not to, and then waiting for the bathroom, staring idly at that ubiquitous Ansel Adams print, Yosemite, talking to a short-haired girl while waiting in the hallway, talking about teeth, no reason really, the train of thought unclear, asking to see her fillings, no, really, I’ll show you mine first, ha ha, then no, you go ahead, I’ll go after you, then, after using the bathroom she is still there, still in the hallway, she was waiting not just for the bathroom but for me, and so eventually we’ll go home together, her apartment, where she lives alone, in a wide, immaculate railroad type place, newly painted, decorated with her mother, then sleeping in her oversized, oversoft white bed, eating breakfast in her light-filled nook, then maybe to the beach for a few hours with the Sunday paper, then wandering home whenever, never- Fuck. We don't even have a baby-sitter.

am inclined to babies and bed and brilliant friends and a magnificent stimulating home where geniuses drink gin in the kitchen after a delectable dinner and read their own novels and tell about why the stock market is the way it will be

some bloody genius decides to install those motion sensors in the toilet with the baby-changing facilities at the shopping centre. So that the lights go out after we’ve been in there for thirty seconds. So, here we are. You and I. And the poop. In the dark.

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes,” said Bob. “Correction,” I said. “A mad genius.” “This is extremely bright,” said Zeb. “I wonder if ….” Zeb slowly extended his arm and placed his hand into the beam of light. He kept it there for a moment until … it burst into flame!

You know the answer to that, baby genius. Because it was the only way I could help you. And you don’t just mean something to me. You mean everything. Understand? Every goddamn thing.” As if he didn’t just shatter my world and put it back together, he heads upstairs.

There is a safety mechanism in place [to ensure the perambulator doesn't turn back into a purse with a baby in it] : if anything weighing more than a pound and a half-about the weight of a three-volume novel-is in the carriage of the perambulator, it will not transform.

Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.

Where is this place our baby bodies sprinted towards even when we were holding still for as long as possible? Flight gave birth to birth. Fragment genius comes down to this                    heaven of ass thwack, the miracle of taking it the miracle of sweet good girl best girl good girl finally made it               made it home We don’t always know where this place is. We stumble looking for the light switch, the exit sign.

I think we're all just doing our best to survive the inevitable pain and suffering that walks alongside us through life. Long ago, it was wild animals and deadly poxes and harsh terrain. I learned about it playing The Oregon Trail on an old IBM in my computer class in the fourth grade. The nature of the trail has changed, but we keep trekking along. We trek through the death of a sibling, a child, a parent, a partner, a spouse; the failed marriage, the crippling debt, the necessary abortion, the paralyzing infertility, the permanent disability, the job you can't seem to land; the assault, the robbery, the break-in, the accident, the flood, the fire; the sickness, the anxiety, the depression, the loneliness, the betrayal, the disappointment, and the heartbreak. There are these moments in life where you change instantly. In one moment, you're the way you were, and in the next, you're someone else. Like becoming a parent: you're adding, of course, instead of subtracting, as it is when someone dies, and the tone of the occasion is obviously different, but the principal is the same. Birth is an inciting incident, a point of no return, that changes one's circumstances forever. The second that beautiful baby onto whom you have projected all your hopes and dreams comes out of your body, you will never again do anything for yourself. It changes you suddenly and entirely. Birth and death are the same in that way.

24. The Rutles, “Cheese and Onions” (1978) A legend to last a lunchtime. The Rutles were the perfect Beatle parody, starring Monty Python’s Eric Idle and the Bonzos’ Neil Innes in their classic mock-doc All You Need Is Cash, with scene-stealing turns by George Harrison, Mick Jagger, and Paul Simon. (Interviewer: “Did the Rutles influence you at all?” Simon: “No.” Interviewer: “Did they influence Art Garfunkel?” Simon: “Who?”) “Cheese and Onions” is a psychedelic ersatz Lennon piano ballad so gorgeous, it eventually got bootlegged as a purported Beatle rarity. Innes captures that tone of benignly befuddled pomposity—“I have always thought in the back of my mind / Cheese and onions”—along with the boyish vulnerability that makes it moving. Hell, he even chews gum exactly like John. The Beatles’ psychedelic phase has always been ripe for parody. Witness the 1967 single “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” by the genius Brit comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, from Beyond the Fringe and the BBC series Not Only . . . ​But Also, starring John Lennon in a cameo as a men’s room attendant. “The L.S. Bumble Bee” sounds like the ultimate Pepper parody—“Freak out, baby, the Bee is coming!”—but it came out months before Pepper, as if the comedy team was reeling from Pet Sounds and wondering how the Beatles might respond. Cook and Moore are a secret presence in Pepper—when the audience laughs in the theme song, it’s taken from a live recording of Beyond the Fringe, produced by George Martin.

Ass up is our best position No one could have told us              we never would’ve believed that someday we would kneel in this place, worshipped We use each other’s raw bodies to remind ourselves how to pray.   Where is this place our baby bodies sprinted towards even when we were holding still for as long as possible? Flight gave birth to birth. Fragment genius comes down to this                    heaven of ass thwack, the miracle of taking it the miracle of sweet good girl best girl good girl finally made it               made it home We don’t always know where this place is. We stumble looking for the light switch, the exit sign. Can we really just relax? When does this get pulled away? Did we finally make it home? Queer grief is a blueprint. We got this shit wired tight.

Anyway, there is an essential difference in gender that isn't politically correct to mention these days. Women are the ones to bear the children after all. They are the ones to nurse. They are the ones, traditionally, who care for the infants. That takes a huge amount of time.' He smiled, waiting for the applause, but something had gone wrong. There was a cold silence from the crowd... 'Did you just say that women aren't creative geniuses because they have babies?' 'No," he said, 'No. Not because. I wouldn't say that. I love women, and not all women have babies. My wife, for one, at least not yet. But listen, we're all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we;re given a finite amount of life, and if a woman continues to spend hers creating actual life and not imaginary life, that's a glorious choice. When a woman has a baby, she's creating so much more than just a world on the page, she's creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. No matter what Shakespeare did, it's so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. Those babies were our ancestors, necessary to make everyone here today, and no one could seriously argue that any play is worth a single human wife. I mean the history of the stage supports me here. If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it's because they're making their creations internal, spending the energies on life itself. It's a kind of bodily genius. You can't tell me that isn't at least as worthy as genius of imagination. I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men, better in many ways. But the reason for the disparity in creation, is because women have turned their creative energies inward not outward.

Mr Tanner rolled his eyes and pushed past Dexter. ‘Oh yes, we’ve all heard about you. The so-called “genius” with sixty-four A levels.’D142 His voice was really dreary, like a can of brown paint had somehow learned how to speak. ‘We didn’t agree with you being in that school, I must say,’ joined in Mrs Tanner, whose voice sounded more like a car alarm than a human. ‘It was unfair on the other children. You’re not normal. You should have been in a lab instead, being investigated by scientists.’ Dexter suddenly felt winded. Like he’d been hit in the chest by a football. He was working out how to reply to such a horrible comment when Toby suddenly began to cry like a baby. ‘Mummy! Daddy! Thank goodness you’re here!’ he screamed. ‘This doctor was so cruel to me! He said I deserved to be in deathly, agonizing pain forever and ever and that he hoped that my foot would fall off. Waaah!

some point over the next few hours, she left some food and water for her children in their room and opened their bedroom window. She wrote out the name of her doctor, with a telephone number, and stuck it to the baby carriage in the hallway. Then she took towels, dishcloths, and tape and sealed the kitchen door. She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, placed her head inside the oven, and took her own life. 2. Poets die young. That is not just a cliché. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and nonfiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.

crazy touches. She loves art and sometimes makes herself jewelry, especially big earrings. (Claudia, of course, has pierced ears, which Mal and I want desperately but are not allowed to have yet. All we’re going to get is braces on our teeth.) Anyway, Claudia doesn’t just love art, she’s a really good artist. Unfortunately, she’s a terrible student. Being a poor student is bad enough, but when you have an older sister who is a genius, like Claudia’s sister, Janine, it’s really tough. Claudia manages, though. She does as well as she can in school, and otherwise concentrates on her art and babysitting. She lives with her parents, her sister, and her grandmother, Mimi. Mary Anne Spier is the club secretary. She’s in charge of keeping the record book in order, except for the money stuff. (That’s Dawn Schafer’s job, since she’s the treasurer.) It’s hard to believe that Mary Anne and Kristy are best friends. This is because in a lot of ways they’re opposites. Oh, they look alike, all right. They’re the two shortest kids in their grade and they both have brown hair and brown eyes, but that’s where the similarities end. Kristy is loud and outgoing, Mary

One of the string theory pioneers, the Italian physicist Daniele Amati, characterized it as "part of the 21st century that fell by chance into the 20th century." Indeed, there is something about the very nature of the theory at present that points to the fact that we are witnessing the theory's baby steps. Recall the lesson learned from all the great ideas since Einstein's relativity-put the symmetry first. Symmetry originates the forces. The equivalence principle-the expectation that all observers, irrespective of their motions, would deduce the same laws-requires the existence of gravity. The gauge symmetries-the fact that the laws do not distinguish color, or electrons from neutrinos-dictate the existence of the messengers of the strong and electroweak forces. Yet supersymmetry is an output of string theory, a consequence of its structure rather than a source for its existence. What does this mean? Many string theorists believe that some underlying grander principle, which will necessitate the existence of string theory, is still to be found. If history is to repeat itself, then this principle may turn out to involve an all-encompassing and even more compelling symmetry, but at the moment no one has a clue what this principle might be. Since, however, we are only at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Amati's characterization may still turn out to be an astonishing prophecy.

The key point is that these patterns, while mostly stable, are not permanent: certain environmental experiences can add or subtract methyls and acetyls, changing those patterns. In effect this etches a memory of what the organism was doing or experiencing into its cells—a crucial first step for any Lamarck-like inheritance. Unfortunately, bad experiences can be etched into cells as easily as good experiences. Intense emotional pain can sometimes flood the mammal brain with neurochemicals that tack methyl groups where they shouldn’t be. Mice that are (however contradictory this sounds) bullied by other mice when they’re pups often have these funny methyl patterns in their brains. As do baby mice (both foster and biological) raised by neglectful mothers, mothers who refuse to lick and cuddle and nurse. These neglected mice fall apart in stressful situations as adults, and their meltdowns can’t be the result of poor genes, since biological and foster children end up equally histrionic. Instead the aberrant methyl patterns were imprinted early on, and as neurons kept dividing and the brain kept growing, these patterns perpetuated themselves. The events of September 11, 2001, might have scarred the brains of unborn humans in similar ways. Some pregnant women in Manhattan developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which can epigenetically activate and deactivate at least a dozen genes, including brain genes. These women, especially the ones affected during the third trimester, ended up having children who felt more anxiety and acute distress than other children when confronted with strange stimuli. Notice that these DNA changes aren’t genetic, because the A-C-G-T string remains the same throughout. But epigenetic changes are de facto mutations; genes might as well not function. And just like mutations, epigenetic changes live on in cells and their descendants. Indeed, each of us accumulates more and more unique epigenetic changes as we age. This explains why the personalities and even physiognomies of identical twins, despite identical DNA, grow more distinct each year. It also means that that detective-story trope of one twin committing a murder and both getting away with it—because DNA tests can’t tell them apart—might not hold up forever. Their epigenomes could condemn them. Of course, all this evidence proves only that body cells can record environmental cues and pass them on to other body cells, a limited form of inheritance. Normally when sperm and egg unite, embryos erase this epigenetic information—allowing you to become you, unencumbered by what your parents did. But other evidence suggests that some epigenetic changes, through mistakes or subterfuge, sometimes get smuggled along to new generations of pups, cubs, chicks, or children—close enough to bona fide Lamarckism to make Cuvier and Darwin grind their molars.

In both proto- and modern birds, on the other hand, the skull maintained its youthful shape as the birds matured, leaving plenty of space for enormous eyes and enlarged brains. “When we look at birds,” says Abzhanov, “we are looking at juvenile dinosaurs.” As it happens, we humans may have pulled just such a Peter Pan–like move. As adults, we share the big head, flat face, small jaw, and patchy body hair of baby primates. Paedomorphosis may have enabled us to develop bigger brains, just as it did in birds.

We like to present a particular appearance to the world, one that highlights our strengths. When in love, however, opposite traits often come to the fore. A person who is normally strong and independent can suddenly become rather helpless, dependent, and hysterical. A nurturing, empathetic person can suddenly become tyrannical, demanding, and self-absorbed. As adults we feel relatively mature and practical, but in love we can suddenly regress to behavior that can only be seen as childish. We experience fears and insecurities that are greatly exaggerated. We feel terror at the thought of being abandoned, like a baby who has been left alone for a few minutes. We have wild mood swings—from love to hate, from trust to paranoia. Normally we like to imagine that we are good judges of other people’s character. Once infatuated or in love, however, we mistake the narcissist for a genius, the suffocator for a nurturer, the slacker for the exciting rebel, the control freak for the protector. Others can often see the truth and try to disabuse us of our fantasies, but we won’t listen. And what is worse, we will often continue to make the same types of mistaken judgments again and again.

A God who intended us to ignore our most basic needs and desires would never have dreamt up over 2,000 species of jellyfish to dazzle us or painted the sunset with the most delicate hues of peach against backdrops of vivid tangerine. We serve a God who created giraffes with their spindly necks, puzzle-piece-patterned bodies, and ludicrously long tongues and called it good. We serve a God who granted newborn babies the most delicious-smelling heads and dreamed up the idea of juicy, sun-warmed strawberries. We serve a God who rejoices over us with singing (Zephaniah 3:17) and thought that the world was incomplete without the contributions of musical geniuses like Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. We do not serve a curmudgeonly or stingy God but a lavish and loving God, one who delights to give us good gifts, starting with his very presence.

On another wall hangs a large painting of baby Shakespeare surrounded by various allegorical figures in a manger-like nativity scene. It is called The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions, by the eighteenth-century artist George Romney. Nature, glowing like the Holy Spirit, hovers over the infant, blessing and beatifying him, infusing him with genius-poet dust.

But Meera wasn't waiting for a Mr. Darcy or a Joe Fox. In fact, she did not want to marry at all. She thought of marriage as a license for two people to have sex and produce babies. Not that she did not believe in love, but the world of matrimony was too small for her. You meet someone, marry him, have a family, and life is over, so she thought.

She transferred the baby and his Tupperware into the playpen for safety, stormed into the well-equipped garage, and searched frantically for a screwdriver. With an exultant cry of victory, she punched the button to the garage door opener and waited impatiently for it to rise. Resolutely, Aggie charged out of the gaping hole left by the door only to return moments later for a ladder. This posed a bigger problem than she’d anticipated. There wasn’t a ladder in sight. She searched corners and behind cabinets. In sheer exasperation, she threw her hands into the air and looked up as if to say, “I can’t take much more, Lord,” but the sight of a ladder hanging horizontally from the rafters halted her internal ranting. Now, she spoke aloud, her voice tinged with disgust. “Who would put a ladder up so high that you need a ladder to get the ladder down in the first place?” After a moment’s pause, she dashed into the kitchen and banged around the room, searching for the step stool. Ian squealed his slobbery encouragement as Aggie dragged the stool through the room, ruffling the few ruddy curls atop his bald little baby head. She teetered on the step stool, barely avoiding a collapse, and finally managed to jerk the ladder from its hooks. Hauling her prize out the garage door, Aggie surveyed the tattered basketball net she had remembered hanging deserted over the garage. The uncooperative ladder fought her at every step. After several frustrating minutes, where every swear word she’d ever heard filled her brain and threatened to overtake her self-control, Aggie realized that the ladder was upside down. Righting it, she climbed to the mounting bracket, the ladder teetering with every step. She eventually managed to unscrew one side of the apparatus and then the other. With a few jerky movements, the backboard lay on the ground beneath the swaying ladder, hardly worse for the fall. Aggie felt like a housekeeping genius as she wobbled through the house carrying her conquest upstairs to the wall above the hamper at the end of the hallway. The backboard was heavy and cumbersome; she found it difficult to hold in place and screw it into the wall at the same time, but several minutes later, she stood back and surveyed the results of her efforts. Though nearly satisfied, the lid on the hamper mocked her brilliant idea. Undaunted, she gave a swift jerk and ripped the cover off the offending hamper. “There. That’ll work,” she muttered as she trudged back downstairs, fighting the compulsion to pick up all the dirty laundry herself.

What happens when a mother is not attuned to her baby?

He headed in the general direction of the treatment room, feeling that familiar wave of energy surge through him. In another minute, he sensed, he would generate enough energy to found a dynasty, lift a truck, start a war, light up the whole of Clayborne for a week. “I am one beautiful and powerful son of a bitch,” he told himself. “Smart as a whip, respected, prosperous, beloved and valuable. I have the right to be healthy, happy and rich, for I am the baddest player in this arena or any other. I love myself more than I love money and pretty women and fine clothes. I love myself more than I love neat gardens and healthy babies and a good gospel choir. I love myself as I love The Law. I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant. I love myself doing the books or sitting down to a good game of poker. I love myself making love expertly, or tenderly and shyly, or clumsily and inept. I love myself as I love The Master’s Mind,” he continued his litany, having long ago stumbled upon the prime principle as a player—that self-love produces the gods and the gods are genius. It took genius to run the Southwest Community Infirmary. So he made the rounds of his hospital the way he used to make the rounds of his houses to keep the tops spinning, reciting declarations of self-love.

As we can learn from every man or woman or child around us when, touched and moved, they tell of something they loved or hated this day, yesterday, or some other day long past. At a given moment, the fuse, after sputtering wetly, flares, and the fireworks begin. Oh, it's limping crude hard work for many, with language in their way. But I have heard farmers tell about their very first wheat crop on their first farm after moving from another state, and if it wasn't Robert Frost talking, it was his cousin, five times removed. I have heard locomotive engineers talk about America in the tones of Thomas Wolfe who rode our country with his style as they ride it in their steel. I have heard mothers tell of the long nights with their firstborn when they were afraid that they and the baby might die. And I have heard my grandmother speak of her first ball when she was seventeen. And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

Her sweet lips find my ear, licking the shell before whispering, “You’re a goddamn genius.” She finally understands my sacrifice, my need to surrender. My reasons for willingly putting myself through the torment and pain. “Nah,” I whisper back, keeping my gaze down. “I just get hard for a dramatic ending.” She smirks before she turns her back to me, straddling me by tossing a leg over the chair. Pressing her back against my bare and bloodied chest, she avoids my lap by squatting above my thighs. “You brought me all my favorites,” she whispers back at me, her hand reaching to cup the back of my neck as her body rolls in those intoxicating waves. “Deliciously sick revenge.” “Fish in a bucket, baby.” I hiss in pain as she rubs against the raw flesh from the oil burns. “You ready to hunt?” “I didn’t come here to hunt.” She stands again, turning to face me. Her leg kicks up and rests on my shoulder, dangling seductively as she grips the hair at the top of my head. Tipping my neck to the side, I wince in delightful pain as she whispers, “I came here to torture.

Callum’s the oldest, the golden child who can do no wrong in my parents’ eyes. His ego is a steamroller, flattening everything in its path. Carter’s the baby. He’s most like our mother, popular and outgoing, always the center of attention. He’s a genius with people and charms them with ease, an incredibly annoying characteristic for those of us who don’t share it.

Callum’s the oldest, the golden child who can do no wrong in my parents’ eyes. His ego is a steamroller, flattening everything in its path. Carter’s the baby. He’s most like our mother, popular and outgoing, always the center of attention. He’s a genius with people and charms them with ease, an incredibly annoying characteristic for those of us who don’t share it. I’m in the middle. Competitive. Risk-taking. Misunderstood.

P.S. All babies have little noses, you jackass.

and Jon Cassir are the finest agents in the business, and it’s an honor to have them watching my back. The entire team at Thomas & Mercer is extraordinary. My FF Alison Dasho performed a masterful edit with a baby in her belly. Alan Turkus expertly took the reins when said baby insisted on coming out. Jacque Ben-Zekry will soon rule the world. Gracie Doyle is the Queen of PR. Danielle Marshall is a mysterious genius. Daphne Durham is unbeatable for

She reached out a hand and touched the hair at his temple. “You’re getting a little gray here.” “Big surprise. I really didn’t know you’d be such a handful.” “I’m the best thing that ever happened to you.” “Yeah,” he said in a breath. He leaned down and kissed her brow. “Yeah, baby. You sure are. And you’re a reproductive genius.” John

It is a basic tenet of all teaching that it should begin with the known and the concrete, progress from this to the new and the unknown, and last of all, to what is abstract. Nothing could be more abstract to the two-year-old brain than the letter b. It is a tribute to the genius of children that they ever learn it. It

What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation

did not take long before I broke through the surface and was nearly blinded by the brightness of the sun. I took a quick peek outside the hole. I had gotten lucky because there were trees and shrubs nearby, so it seemed unlikely anyone would see the hole. Nevertheless, I tossed a couple of cobblestones onto the surface to better conceal the hole from any prying eyes. Then, I turned around and slid down the tunnel I had just mined. When I got back down to the ground, Harold and Bob were dancing in the beam of light. “Bob, you are a genius,” I said.

Then we headed back to the Wilder house, skipping all the way.

Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fuck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?

When the first atomic bomb was exploded successfully, Oppenheimer and Fermi flashed the code word: Baby satisfactorily born. A most befitting yell o triumph for the coming of age of technological civilization and for the death of culture. Since then hundreds of thousands of babies were satisfactorily born with defective genes or died of leukemia brought on by radiation. Compulsive creation, genius, what the hell do you want, clap censorship on science?

Young people need looking after,” she said. “Think of that beautiful boy Galois. People felt there was something secret in his character. They were right. The secret was mathematics. His father a suicide. His own death a horrible farce. Dawn in the fields. Caped and whiskered seconds. Sinister marksman poised to fire.” I need all my courage to die at twenty. “Then there was Abel, not much older, desperately poor, Abel in delirium, hemorrhaging. So often mathematical experience consists of time segments too massive to be contained in the usual frame. Lives overstated. Themes pursued to extreme points. Adventure, romance and tragedy.” I will fight for my life. “Look at Pascal, who rid himself of physical pain by dwelling on mathematics. He was just a bit older than you when he constructed his mystic hexagram. The loveliest aspect of the mystic hexagram is that it is mystic. That’s what’s so lovely about it. It’s able to become its own shadow.” Keep believing it. “The tricky thing about mathematical genius,” she said, “is that its sources are so often buried. Galois for one. Ramanujan for another. No indication anywhere in their backgrounds that these boys would one day display such natural powers. Figures jumping out of sequence. Or completely misplaced.” (...) “Numbers have supernatural harmonies, according to Hermite. They exist beyond human thought. Divine order through number. Number as absolute reality. Someone said of Hermite: ‘The most abstract entities are for him like living creatures.’ That’s what someone said.” “People invented numbers,” he said. “You don’t have numbers without people.” “Good, let’s argue.” “I don’t want to argue.” “Secret lives,” she said. “Dedekind listed as dead twelve years before the fact. Poncelet scratching calculations on the walls of his cell. Lobachevski mopping the floors of an old museum. Sophie Germain using a man’s name. Do I have the order right? Sometimes I get it mixed up or completely backwards. (...) “Tell me about your mathematical dreams.” “Never had one.” “Cardano did, born half dead, his inner life a neon web of treachery and magic. Gambler, astrologer, heretic, court physician. Schemed his way through the algebra wars.” “Can I see the baby?” “Ramanujan had algebraic dreams. Wrote down the results after getting out of bed. Vast intuitive powers but poor education. Taken to Cambridge like a jungle boy. Sonja Kowalewski wasn’t allowed to attend university lectures. We both know why. When her husband died she spent days and days without food, coming out of her room only after she’d restored herself by working on her mathematics. Tell me, was it Kronecker who thought mathematics similar to poetry? I know Hamilton and many others tried their hands at verse. Our superduper Sonja preferred the novel.

Mr.

If God intended for us to draw near to him by consistently denying ourselves the goodness with which he has endowed this world, the we certainly wouldn't have verses like "Taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8). Jesus would never gave transformed water into the tastiest wine at the wedding. Set would be a clinical act of reproduction instead of a pleasurable and unifying act of intimacy inside marriage. A God who intended us to ignore our most basic needs and desires would never have dreamt up over 2,000 species of jellyfish to dazzle us or painted the sunset with the most delicate hues of peach against backdrops of vivid tangerine. We serve a God who created giraffes with their spindly necks, puzzle-piece-patterned bodies, and ludicrously long tongues and called it good. We serve a God who granted newborn babies the most delicious-smelling heads and dreamed up the idea of juicy, sun-warmed strawberries. We serve a God who rejoices over us with singing (Zephaniah 3:17) and thought that the world was incomplete without the contribution of musical geniuses like Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. We do not serve a curmudgeonly or stingy God but a lavish and loving God, one who delights to give us good gifts, starting with his very presence.

Dan Beasley,

I check my email. Once more, nothing from my brother Hayden. My nearly empty glass follows me to my bedroom, and I lie there, half asleep, half woozy from too much alcohol. I run my hand through my hair. I’m back on the Walla Walla. The images are fuzzy, like an old VHS tape. Hayden is asleep, and I gently lift him away, deeper into a nest of paper towels. I turn in the dim light of the ferry bathroom and hold up my hair with one hand. I reach for the scissors and start cutting. Locks fall like autumn leaves over the dingy countertop and into the bottom of the pitted white sink. I cut, and I cut. Tears roll down my cheeks, but I don’t make a sound. I open a box of dye and apply it with the thin plastic gloves that come in the box. I smell the chemicals as my hair eclipses from brown to blond. I rinse in the sink, the acrid odor wafting through the still air of the bathroom. I tear a ream of paper towels to wring out the water and then, in what I think is a brilliant move, I turn on the hand dryer and rotate my head against the hot spray of air. I am in Maui. I am in Tahiti. I’m on the beach and I have a tan. A handsome boy looks at me and I smile. The dryer stops, and I look in the mirror and I see her. Mom. I look just like my mother. It was unintended genius. Hayden, now awake, seems to agree. “I miss Mom. Do you think they found Dad?” I indicate the second box of hair dye. “Your turn, Hayden.” He climbs up on the counter and lays his head in the sink as I wet his hair with lukewarm water. It reminds me of when he was a baby and Mom washed him in the sink instead of the tub. He scrunches his eyes shut as I rub in the dye. When I’m done, he will be transformed. He’ll no longer be the little boy with the shock of blond hair, the one that makes him look like he’s stepped out of the page of a cute kids’ clothing website. I look down at the name on the dye box.

I’d picked up a potty chair in hopes he’d learn, but all it did was collect dust. Sometimes my little smarty pants kid would pour juice in it and show me, like I’d think he used it. What kind of baby genius had I created?

Bono, the lead singer of U2, said: “The idea that there’s a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with…. But the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in…straw and poverty is genius, and brings me to my knees, literally…. I am just in awe of that…. It’s the thing that makes me a believer.

I want to begin my fight for the future of our world with the sharing of a vision. Everyone has, or should have, a vision. This is mine. It is a simple vision, really. It begins with the creation of a single, sane, planetary civilization. That will have to be very much like a utopia. People will deny the possibility of such a dream. They will say that people have always been at each other's throats, that this is just human nature, the way of the world. That we can never change the world. But that is just silly. That is like saying that two battling brothers, children, will never grow up to be the best of friends who watch each other’s backs. Once, a long time ago, people lost their sons and daughters to the claws of big cats. In classic times, the Greeks and the Romans saw slavery as evil, but as a necessary evil that could never go away. Only seventy years ago, Germany and France came to death blows in the greatest war in history; now they share a common currency, open borders, and a stake in the future of Europe. The Scandinavians once terrorized the world as marauding Vikings gripping bloody axes and swords, while now their descendents refrain from spanking their children, and big blond–haired men turn their hands to the care of babies. We all have a sense of what this new civilization must look like: No war. No hunger. No want. No very wealthy using their money to manipulate laws and lawmakers so that they become ever more wealthy while they cast the poor into the gutters like garbage. The wasteland made green again. Oceans once more teeming with life. The human heart finally healed. A new story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and new songs that we sing to our children. The vast resources once mobilized for war and economic supremacy now poured into a true science of survival and technologies of the soul. I want this to be. But how can it be? How will we get from a world on the brink of destruction to this glorious, golden future? I do not know. It is not for any one person to know, for to create the earth anew we will need to call upon the collective genius and the good will of the entire human race. We will need all our knowledge of history, anthropology, religion, and science, and much else. We will need a deep, deep sympathy for human nature, in both its terrible and angelic aspects.

Oh ooh love They'll never break the shape we take Oh ooh Baby let all them voices slip away

An average person has an IQ of 100. An above-average person has an IQ of 120 to 140. A person with an IQ of 150 is considered a genius. Janine’s IQ is 196. Sometimes

On our hall we have one of everything: a resident musician, a genius, a motherly figure, a baby, a village idiot, a prostitute, a drunk, and the mildly insane.

Determined and defiant, looking wild and provoked, Kris kept her gaze locked on April. “Dad knew about this town, its people; the ghosts. Leaving the ghosts would be like leaving your kids behind. Mom and Dad wouldn’t leave kids behind.” “Yeah, they would. They did. They’re dead,” April clucked like one of the tin clickers in the “Jeopardy!” board game she despised, the tsk of her tongue punctuating the obvious. “And we’re trying to figure out the best way forward. And you’re talking about ghosts and who knows what the fuck else. There’s no talking to you because you never make sense.” “That’s because you don’t know how to listen.” Gooch pulled another guest register out from an old melon crate, dismissing his sister’s tirade. “She’s saying our family has deep roots in this town. Deep roots. An attachment. Things we love are here. There is a reason for living. Living here.” “Mona and Baby Lilly. Mom and Dad. Oh-Me-san and Papa-san. We can’t just leave them. The ghosts need us.” Ghosts were never far from Kris’s mind and it was a topic that often drew her out of her shell. For as long as Gooch could remember, Kris talked of ghosts with Gramps whenever she could. “All them ghosts gonna get apocalyptical on us,” Gramps said that day long ago, as Kris wiped silicon on a part where a new gasket would set. “My two. Emma Crawford roamin all over. Them ghosts see things ain’t goin the way they spose to, then go to town on people.” Kris fitted felt over the piece she’d just greased, lining up bolt holes with her popped eye and screwed up face. “Ghosts don’t care what’s going on in the town. They just want to be talked to and treated like everyone else. Not special or anything, just given the time of day.” Gooch was seven when he heard his sister and Gramps talk so openly about ghosts, as though such things were nothing more than chickens in the yard. Kris smeared and fitted, twirling nuts, ratcheting, fingers and wrists working her magic for bringing machines back to life. Her innate ease with the physical and metaphysical was the primary reason he believed her mind existed on some undefined plane beyond normal comprehension. Gooch was certain Kris’s genius placed her within an esteemed place.

Janine is fifteen years old. She’s a genius.

What about your parents? Where are they? Dead or something?” “Yeah.” “Oh my god, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” I hold up a hand to stop her apology. “It’s okay. My mom died of ovarian cancer when I was a baby. I don’t remember her. And I never knew my dad. He didn’t stick around.” Uncle Paul says my dad split 2 seconds after the pregnancy test came back positive, and that it was a good decision for all of us—especially me. Windy’s eyebrows lift high on her face, and her lips turn down. “Lucy, I’m so sorry. You’re like an orphan.” I laugh. “Stop. Please. I’m not an orphan.” I’ve thought of myself as a genius, a savant, and a freak, but never an orphan. Nana has always been there, and Uncle Paul, too. “I’m fine. I don’t need you to collect canned goods for me or give me a coat for winter. I have a family.

I feel like we’re in a pretentious film about tortured geniuses.” “Yes.” “But actually we’re just babies with expensive glassware.” “I actually think these are crystal.

Great things take time, not a day or a month but time in years, your effort or genius not withstanding. You can not have a baby in a month by impregnating 9 women.

He . . . Kollberg, he’s not smarter than you, Hari. Very few people are . . . He just . . . He goes for what he wants, y’know? He’s always shaving the odds, always taking another baby step toward where he wants to go, even when he doesn’t know how it’ll all pull together in the end . . . When you do that long enough, hard enough, eventually things fall into place and . . . and you look like a genius, when you never really planned anything . . .

I think Mallory Pike may secretly like being one of our younger members. That’s because in real life she’s the oldest of — get ready — eight kids. Can you imagine? Her brothers and sisters are Vanessa, Margo, Nicky, the triplets (Adam, Jordan, and Byron), and Claire. No wonder Mal’s favorite pastimes are writing and drawing. They’re things she can do alone. Mal’s dream in life, by the way, is to be a children’s book author and illustrator. Anyway,