Geographical Love Quotes

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Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.
Ian McEwan (The Children Act)
Isn’t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn’t going to be room to bury anyone anymore? For my ninth birthday last year, Grandma gave me a subscription to National Geographic, which she calls “the National Geographic.” She also gave me a white blazer, because I only wear white clothes, and it’s too big to wear so it will last me a long time. She also gave me Grandpa’s camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn’t take it with him when he left her. She said, “Maybe he wanted you to have it.” I said, “But I was negative-thirty years old.” She said, “Still.” Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!
Jonathan Safran Foer
There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical but whose growth is based on industry, jobs. Detroit has its natural attractions: lakes all over the place, an abundance of trees and four distinct seasons for those who like variety in their weather, everything but hurricanes and earth-quakes. But it’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.
Elmore Leonard
Words form the sinew and muscle that hold societies upright, he argued. Consider the Koran, the Bible, the American Constitution, but also letters from fathers to sons, last wills, blessings, curses. Thousands upon thousands of words infused with the full spectrum of emotions fill in the nooks and corners of human life.
National Geographic Society
Family is about love and affection but about friction and separation, too. Yet, with work and luck, the distances—geographic and emotional—can be shrunk, even made to vanish.
Jeffery Deaver (XO (Kathryn Dance #3))
This is it, the geographical limit of how far I'll go for Ossie. We are learning longitude and latitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision.
Karen Russell (St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves)
We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Strength to Love)
A.E.Housman' No one, not even Cambridge was to blame (Blame if you like the human situation): Heart-injured in North London, he became The Latin Scholar of his generation. Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust, Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer; Food was his public love, his private lust Something to do with violence and the poor. In savage foot-notes on unjust editions He timidly attacked the life he led, And put the money of his feelings on The uncritical relations of the dead, Where only geographical divisions Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.
W.H. Auden
But if I've learned one thing during our descent into dog rescue lunacy, it's that dogs bridge gaps between people. they smooth over the human condition, and they provide an extraordinarily valuable function. They take people of all political persuasions, religious faiths, and geographical locations and represent something that everyone can love.
David Rosenfelt (Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, And 3 RVs On Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure)
The call to “take the land” ...is not a call to a new political, cultural or geographical dominance. It is Kingdom of God territory. It is the will of the Eternal God being done on earth, as it is in heaven.
Ken Baker
Whenever you see redwoods in the National Geographic, or fog, or watch Shamu on TV, you'll be seeing me. Whenever you smell pine and spruce and day-old socks, that's me. Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that's me, and whenever you taste crab and wine and Brie, that's me, and whenever the wind blows your hat off or you get under a cold shower, that's me. Whenever you read about an earthquake, that's me, sure as gun's iron. Whenever you smell wet dog, that's Curtis and me, and whenever you see a Rattus rattus, that's Forrest, and I'm right behind him. Never see me again? You'll never not see me. And I'll never not see you . . .Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.
Anne Rivers Siddons (Fault Lines)
I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.
Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)
what is the expression which the age demands? the age demands no expression whatever. we have seen photographs of bereaved asian mothers. we are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. there is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. do not even try. you will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. we have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. you are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. this should make you very quiet. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. everyone knows you are in pain. you cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. you have nothing to teach them. you are not more beautiful than they are. you are not wiser. do not shout at them. do not force a dry entry. that is bad sex. if you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. and remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. what is our need? to be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. the bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. they have also destroyed the stage. did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? there is no more stage. there are no more footlights. you are among the people. then be modest. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. be by yourself. be in your own room. do not put yourself on. do not act out words. never act out words. never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. if you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. if ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material. this is an interior landscape. it is inside. it is private. respect the privacy of the material. these pieces were written in silence. the courage of the play is to speak them. the discipline of the play is not to violate them. let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. be good whores. the poem is not a slogan. it cannot advertise you. it cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. you are students of discipline. do not act out the words. the words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. the poem is nothing but information. it is the constitution of the inner country. if you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. you are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. think of the words as science, not as art. they are a report. you are speaking before a meeting of the explorers' club of the national geographic society. these people know all the risks of mountain climbing. they honour you by taking this for granted. if you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. do not work the audience for gasps ans sighs. if you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. it will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence. avoid the flourish. do not be afraid to be weak. do not be ashamed to be tired. you look good when you're tired. you look like you could go on forever. now come into my arms. you are the image of my beauty.
Leonard Cohen (Death of a Lady's Man)
The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving.
Leonard Sweet (From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed)
The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving. Martin Luther was right. Theology is table talk.[38] Jesus didn’t sell the food of his Father. He issued invitations to the table. In fact, Jesus’ favorite image for the kingdom of God is a banquet where everyone is sitting around a table.
Leonard Sweet (From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed)
But what I liked – indeed, loved – about this man was that he was a passionate supporter of the Somerset county cricket team. Now, to conjure up genuine enthusiasm for the antics of such a comprehensively hopeless bunch of underdogs and ne’er-do-wells was hard enough for someone born and brought up in Somerset; but to choose them voluntarily, when there was absolutely no kind of geographical loyalty involved, was an act of such utter pointlessness that I felt rather in awe of Nick. I had been reading about existentialism; here was someone living it, someone who accepted the concept of an act of Free Will in a Meaningless Universe, and was taking it to a new level.
John Cleese (So, Anyway...: The Autobiography)
We make something sacramental when we make it like the kingdom. Marriage is sacramental when it is characterized by mutual love and submission. A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility.
Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
We all may be living in different countries, geographical areas, and time zones but one thing which unites us all is that we all belong to one race which is humanity!
Avijeet Das
Delirious as it can be, sex is only one kind of intimacy, and yet has become the cultural catchment area for all kinds of needs because our understanding of intimacy is so poor. Brutal work schedules, related geographic isolation, and the concomitant fracturing of families has meant that there is little time for intimacy, and even less to teach the necessary skills. But intimacy, the axis of romance, is slow, based on the sharing of a life rather than show. In terms of intimacy, folding laundry together or sharing the feeding of a child can have more impact than the most extravagant bouquet.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke (Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love)
Men should continue to fight, but they should fight for things worthwhile, not for imaginary geographical lines, racial prejudices, and private greed draped in the colors of patriotism. Their arms should be weapons of the spirit, not shrapnel and tanks. Think of what a world we could build if the power unleashed in war were applied to constructive tasks! One tenth of the energy that the various belligerent spent in the World War, a fraction of the money they exploded in hand grenades and poison gas, would suffice to raise the standard of living in every country and avert the economic catastrophe of worldwide unemployment. Nothing that I can do or say will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice, I can help the greatest of all causes-goodwill among men and peace on earth
Albert Einstein
So that’s why when I buy a new house—and there have been many (never underestimate a geographic)—it has to have a view. I want the sense that I can look down on safety, on someplace where someone is thinking of me, at a place where love is. Down there, somewhere in that valley, or in that vast ocean out there beyond the Pacific Coast Highway, on the gleaming primaries of the red-tail’s wings, that’s where parenting is.
Matthew Perry (Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing)
Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.
Peter Hessler (Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China)
Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous. For a while, the case had left her numb, caring less, feeling less, going about her business, telling no one. But she became squeamish about bodies, barely able to look at her own or Jack’s without feeling repelled. How was she to talk about this? Hardly plausible, to have told him that at this stage of a legal career, this one case among so many others, its sadness, its visceral
Ian McEwan (The Children Act)
perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.
Ian McEwan (The Children Act)
Solomon's suitors for myrrh and frankincense; Zeu's children in a royal hunt for the seat of the sun-god of the Nile; scouts and emissaries from Genghis Khan; Arab geographers and also hunters for slaves and ivory; soul and gold merchants from Gaul and from Bismark's Germany; land-pirates and human game-hunters from Victorian and Edwardian England: they had all passed here bound for a kingdom of plenty, driven sometimes by holy zeal, sometimes by genuine thirst for knowledge and the quest for the spot where the first man's umbilical cord was buried, but more often by mercenary commercial greed and love of the wanton destruction of those with a slightly different complexion from theirs.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Petals of Blood)
A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.
Ian McEwan (The Children Act)
I missed it all, over a century of the best of New York, thanks to two uncontrollable facts of my birth: its year and geographic location. But we cannot choose our time or place, and i hurried to the city as soon as I could, unaware that the early 1990s was quite possibly the worst moment to get attached to New York. It was like falling crazily in love with a ninety-three year-old, too blind to see that she was fading. I was Harold and New York my Maude.
Jeremiah Moss (Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul)
Certainty is an unrealistic and unattainable ideal. We need to have pastors who are schooled in apologetics and engaged intellectually with our culture so as to shepherd their flock amidst the wolves. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, and of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true. God could not possibly have intended that reason should be the faculty to lead us to faith, for faith cannot hang indefinitely in suspense while reason cautiously weighs and reweighs arguments. The Scriptures teach, on the contrary, that the way to God is by means of the heart, not by means of the intellect. When a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. unbelief is at root a spiritual, not an intellectual, problem. Sometimes an unbeliever will throw up an intellectual smoke screen so that he can avoid personal, existential involvement with the gospel. In such a case, further argumentation may be futile and counterproductive, and we need to be sensitive to moments when apologetics is and is not appropriate. A person who knows that Christianity is true on the basis of the witness of the Spirit may also have a sound apologetic which reinforces or confirms for him the Spirit’s witness, but it does not serve as the basis of his belief. As long as reason is a minister of the Christian faith, Christians should employ it. It should not surprise us if most people find our apologetic unconvincing. But that does not mean that our apologetic is ineffective; it may only mean that many people are closed-minded. Without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong. No atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his worldview. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose without an adequate basis. It is our job to discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless. We are witnesses to a mighty struggle for the mind and soul of America in our day, and Christians cannot be indifferent to it. If moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible apprehension of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm. God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed. Because of the need for instruction and personal devotion, these writings must have been copied many times, which increases the chances of preserving the original text. In fact, no other ancient work is available in so many copies and languages, and yet all these various versions agree in content. The text has also remained unmarred by heretical additions. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been transmitted with only trifling discrepancies.
William Lane Craig (Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics)
So that’s why when I buy a new house—and there have been many (never underestimate a geographic)—it has to have a view. I want the sense that I can look down on safety, on someplace where someone is thinking of me, at a place where love is. Down there, somewhere in that valley, or in that vast ocean out there beyond the Pacific Coast Highway, on the gleaming primaries of the red-tail’s wings, that’s where parenting is. That’s where love is. That’s where home is. I can feel safe now.
Matthew Perry (Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing)
(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion." Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying.
Howard Kerr (The Haunted dusk: American supernatural fiction, 1820-1920)
The reason we haven’t solved the race problem in America after hundreds of years is that people apart from God are trying to create unity, while people under God who already have unity are not living out the unity we possess. The result of both of these conditions is disastrous for America. Our failure to find cultural unity as a nation is directly related to the church’s failure to preserve our spiritual unity. The church has already been given unity because we’ve been made part of the same family. An interesting point to note about family is that you don’t have to get family to be family. A family already is a family. But sometimes you do have to get family to act like family. In the family of God, this is done through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. A perfect example of spiritual unity came on the Day of Pentecost when God’s people spoke with other tongues (Acts 2:4). When the Holy Spirit showed up, people spoke in languages they didn’t know so that people from a variety of backgrounds could unite under the cross of Jesus Christ. The people who heard the apostles speak on the Day of Pentecost were from all over the world, representing at least sixteen different geographical areas, racial categories, or ethnic groups (Acts 2:8–11). But in spite of the great diversity, they found true oneness in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual oneness always and only comes to those who are under God’s authority because in that reality He enables them with the power of His Spirit.
John M. Perkins (One Blood: Parting Words to the Church on Race and Love)
What he had loved most about carving was the SEEING part, which happened even before you began. Sometimes you saw a car or a truck. Sometimes a dog or cat. Once, he remembered, it had been the face of an idol--one of the spooky Easter Island monoliths he had seen in an issue of National Geographic at school. That had turned out to be a good one. The game was to find out how much of that thing you could get out of the wood without breaking it. You could never get it all, but if you were very careful, you could sometimes get quite a lot.
Stephen King (The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, #3))
A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility. In this sense, church gives us the chance to riff on Jesus’ description of the kingdom, to add a few new metaphors of our own. We might say the kingdom is like St. Lydia’s in Brooklyn where strangers come together and remember Jesus when they eat. The kingdom is like the Refuge in Denver, where addicts and academics, single moms and suburban housewives come together to tell each other the truth. The kingdom is like Thistle Farms where women heal from abuse by helping to heal others. The kingdom is like the church that would rather die than cast two of its own out the doors because they are gay. The kingdom is like St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee, where you are loved just for showing up. And even still, the kingdom remains a mystery just beyond our grasp. It is here, and not yet, present and still to come. Consummation, whatever that means, awaits us. Until then, all we have are metaphors. All we have are almosts and not quites and wayside shrines. All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way. All we have is this church—this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church—which, by God’s grace, is enough.
Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
A THOUGHT AWAY Distance does not separate us. We're not so far away. Take in a breath and blow it out. Say what you want to say. We hear you as you sit and breathe And contemplate the light, For deep inside is where we live Not far away and out of sight. Our world is yours; it's not distinct, Just varying vibrations, Not divided by false borders Like geographic nations. To join the two just close your eyes And loving thoughts bring to your mind, And there our worlds meet on the breath Like two hearts intertwined A thought away, that's all we are, So keep us close at hand. For now you cannot touch us But at your side is where we stand.
Suzanne Giesemann (In the Silence: 365 Days of Inspiration from Spirit)
When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and—possibly—the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires. We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)
Marcelo Figueras (Kamchatka)
I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town—not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place. The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I’d had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I’d been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who’d gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die.
Clifford D. Simak (All Flesh Is Grass)
Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that "Quiet City" made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasure: the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art - Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise - yourself a strong defense. There were times you were worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in a t a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How luck we are, when we've spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!
Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
I love football. I love the aesthetics of football. I love the athleticism of football. I love the movement of the players, the antics of the coaches. I love the dynamism of the fans. I love their passion for their badge and the colour of their team and their country. I love the noise and the buzz and the electricity in the stadium. I love the songs. I love the way the ball moves and then it flows and the way a teams fortune rises and falls through a game and through a season. But what I love about football is that it brings people together across religious divides, geographic divides, political divides. I love the fact that for ninety minutes in a rectangular piece of grass, people can forget hopefully, whatever might be going on in their life, and rejoice in this communal celebration of humanity. The biggest diverse, invasive or pervasive culture that human kinds knows is football and I love the fact that at the altar of football human kind can come worship and celebrate.
Andy Harper
Africa’s coastline? great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America. There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa, and that despite having a head start as the place where Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago. As that most lucid of writers, Jared Diamond, put it in a brilliant National Geographic article in 2005, ‘It’s the opposite of what one would expect from the runner first off the block.’ However, the first runners became separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
I didn’t want you to apply just because I’m going to be in New York. Or hell, even worse, not apply because I’m going to be there. I was going to tell you in person. And then the scout shows up at the game tonight, and what was I supposed to do? My mom is freaking out; you’re freaking out.” He throws his hands in the air in frustration. “I’ve totally fucked this up.” It hits me then, the truth of the situation. He made his decision about Columbia on his own, and he wanted me to be able to do the same. Of course. Hell, if it hadn’t been for the storm bringing us together like it did, I probably would have turned down NYU rather than risk going off to New York with him, and that’s the truth. I drop my gaze to the ground and take a deep breath, cursing myself for being such an idiot. “No, you haven’t,” I say at last, raising my eyes to meet his confused ones. “Haven’t what?” “Fucked it up.” I take a tentative step toward him. “I get it now. God, Ryder. Why do you have to be so perfect?” “Perfect? I’ve been in love with you for so long now, and I’ve never managed to get it right, not once.” I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning. “News flash--I think you’ve finally got it this time.” His smile makes my heart leap. “Do you have any idea what was going through my head when you first told me about NYU? I couldn’t believe it. It was like…like a gift fell right into my lap. Like winning the lottery. All this time I thought going off to New York would mean leaving you behind. And now--” “Now we both better get in,” I finish for him, though it probably wasn’t what he was going to say. I mean, he’s a shoo-in for Columbia. Perfect grades, high SATs, and a superstar quarterback the likes of which the Ivy League rarely sees. He’s every college admissions director’s dream. But me? If I get into NYU, it’ll be by the skin of my teeth. Because they want geographic diversity or something lame like that. I’m nothing special. “Where will you go if you don’t get into NYU?” he asks. “Where else?” I say. “Ole Miss, with Lucy and Morgan.” “Then Ole Miss is my backup too. Here’s the thing, Jem. I’m going wherever you’re going--whether it’s New York or Oxford. I’m not missing my chance this time.
Kristi Cook (Magnolia (Magnolia Branch, #1))
I get it now. God, Ryder. Why do you have to be so perfect?” “Perfect? I’ve been in love with you for so long now, and I’ve never managed to get it right, not once.” I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning. “News flash--I think you’ve finally got it this time.” His smile makes my heart leap. “Do you have any idea what was going through my head when you first told me about NYU? I couldn’t believe it. It was like…like a gift fell right into my lap. Like winning the lottery. All this time I thought going off to New York would mean leaving you behind. And now--” “Now we both better get in,” I finish for him, though it probably wasn’t what he was going to say. I mean, he’s a shoo-in for Columbia. Perfect grades, high SATs, and a superstar quarterback the likes of which the Ivy League rarely sees. He’s every college admissions director’s dream. But me? If I get into NYU, it’ll be by the skin of my teeth. Because they want geographic diversity or something lame like that. I’m nothing special. “Where will you go if you don’t get into NYU?” he asks. “Where else?” I say. “Ole Miss, with Lucy and Morgan.” “Then Ole Miss is my backup too. Here’s the thing, Jem. I’m going wherever you’re going--whether it’s New York or Oxford. I’m not missing my chance this time.
Kristi Cook (Magnolia (Magnolia Branch, #1))
During the Second World War there was an interrogator for Army Counter-Intelligence by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Oreste Pinto. It was his task to break the cover of enemy spies, and he’s one of my weirder heroes. In 1942 Pinto had a man at the other side of his desk who instinct told him had to be an enemy agent. Before arriving at the Colonel’s office (just off The Strand in central London), this suspect had been through many searing investigations and survived them all. Notwithstanding that, the authorities continued to harbour suspicions; but nobody could break him. So what did Pinto think? Pinto interrogated his man over a period of days. The suspect had an impeccable Oxford accent, excellent socio-geographic knowledge, backed up by documentation that was as good as it gets. Down to the last little parochial nuance, he had an answer for everything, and seemed totally and utterly kosher. Even so, Pinto was convinced he was dealing with an exceptionally talented spy whose true provenance was Berlin. But he couldn’t crack him, so he invited him out to lunch. Ten minutes later they were walking up The Strand, about to cross it to go to the chosen restaurant when, as they stepped off the kerb, Pinto screamed, ‘Look out!’ – and he got his German because the bastard looked the wrong way. ‘We drive on the left in England, old boy.
Bruce Robinson (They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper)
The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or “willingness to yield to authority,” was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as “assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention.” Other studies on identical twins continued to deepen the effect of genes on human personality and behavior. Novelty seeking and impulsiveness were found to have striking degrees of correlation. Experiences that one might have imagined as intensely personal were, in fact, shared between twins. “Empathy, altruism, sense of equity, love, trust, music, economic behavior, and even politics are partially hardwired.” As one startled observer wrote, “A surprisingly high genetic component was found in the ability to be enthralled by an esthetic experience such as listening to a symphonic concert.” Separated by geographic and economic continents, when two brothers, estranged at birth, were brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne at night, they seemed to be responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
Having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural forms, his language, his food habits, his sexual behavior, his way of sitting down, of resting, of laughing, of enjoying himself, the oppressed flings himself upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a drowning man. Developing his technical knowledge in contact with more and more perfected machines, entering into the dynamic circuit of industrial production, meeting men from remote regions in the framework of the concentration of capital, that is to say, on the job, discovering the assembly line, the team, production �time,� in other words yield per hour, the oppressed is shocked to find that he continues to be the object of racism and contempt. It is at this level that racism is treated as a question of persons. �There are a few hopeless racists, but you must admit that on the whole the population likes….� �With time all this will disappear.� �This is the country where there is the least amount of race prejudice.� �At the United Nations there is a commission to fight race prejudice.� Films on race prejudice, poems on race prejudice, messages on race prejudice. Spectacular and futile condemnations of race prejudice. In reality, a colonial country is a racist country. If in England, in Belgium, or in France, despite the democratic principles affirmed by these respective nations, there are still racists, it is these racists who, in their opposition to the country as a whole, are logically consistent. It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization. The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal. He has achieved a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology. The idea that one forms of man, to be sure, is never totally dependent on economic relations, in other words—and this must not be forgotten—on relations existing historically and geographically among men and groups. An ever greater number of members belonging to racist societies are taking a position. They are dedicating themselves to a world in which racism would be impossible. But everyone is not up to this kind of objectivity, this abstraction, this solemn commitment. One cannot with impunity require of a man that he be against �the prejudices of his group.� And, we repeat, every colonialist group is racist. �Acculturized� and deculturized at one and the same time, the oppressed continues to come up against racism. He finds this sequel illogical, what be has left behind him inexplicable, without motive, incorrect. His knowledge, the appropriation of precise and complicated techniques, sometimes his intellectual superiority as compared to a great number of racists, lead him to qualify the racist world as passion-charged. He perceives that the racist atmosphere impregnates all the elements of the social life. The sense of an overwhelming injustice is correspondingly very strong. Forgetting racism as a consequence, one concentrates on racism as cause. Campaigns of deintoxication are launched. Appeal is made to the sense of humanity, to love, to respect for the supreme values.
Frantz Fanon (Toward the African Revolution)
… The most important contribution you can make now is taking pride in your treasured home state. Because nobody else is. Study and cherish her history, even if you have to do it on your own time. I did. Don’t know what they’re teaching today, but when I was a kid, American history was the exact same every year: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Sons of Liberty, tea party. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we have to start somewhere— we’ll get to Florida soon enough.’…Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere, the North Church, ‘Redcoats are coming,’ one if by land, two if by sea, three makes a crowd, and I’m sitting in a tiny desk, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. Hello! Did we order the wrong books? Were these supposed to go to Massachusetts?…Then things showed hope, moving south now: Washington crosses the Delaware, down through original colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Finally! Here we go! Florida’s next! Wait. What’s this? No more pages in the book. School’s out? Then I had to wait all summer, and the first day back the next grade: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock…Know who the first modern Floridians were? Seminoles! Only unconquered group in the country! These are your peeps, the rugged stock you come from. Not genetically descended, but bound by geographical experience like a subtropical Ellis Island. Because who’s really from Florida? Not the flamingos, or even the Seminoles for that matter. They arrived when the government began rounding up tribes, but the Seminoles said, ‘Naw, we prefer waterfront,’ and the white man chased them but got freaked out in the Everglades and let ’em have slot machines…I see you glancing over at the cupcakes and ice cream, so I’ll limit my remaining remarks to distilled wisdom: “Respect your parents. And respect them even more after you find out they were wrong about a bunch of stuff. Their love and hard work got you to the point where you could realize this. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must. “If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say. “Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger. “Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind. “Don’t follow the leader. “Don’t try to be different—that will make you different. “Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush. “Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything. “When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise. “Go fly a kite—seriously. “Always say ‘thank you,’ don’t forget to floss, put the lime in the coconut. “Each new year of school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to— and talk to him. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. “Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion. “Remember that a smile is your umbrella. It’s also your sixteen-in-one reversible ratchet set. “ ‘I am rubber, you are glue’ carries no weight in a knife fight. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keep looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!
Tim Dorsey (Gator A-Go-Go (Serge Storms Mystery, #12))
I developed an interest in major league baseball and the 1960s were, as far as I’m concerned (with a nod to the Babe Ruth era of the 1920s), the Golden Age of Baseball. Like most people in the valley, I was a diehard Yankees fan and, in a pinch, a Mets fan. They were New York teams, and most New Englanders rooted for the Boston Red Sox, but our end of Connecticut was geographically and culturally closer to New York than Boston, and that’s where our loyalties went. And what was not to love? The Yankees ruled the earth in those days. The great Roger Maris set one Major League record after another and even he was almost always one hit shy of Mickey Mantle, God on High of the Green Diamond.
John William Tuohy (No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care)
Peter Allison is a safari guide who has spent much of the last twelve years leading wildlife-viewing and ecotourism trips in Africa, mostly Botswana. His love of animals led him to train as a safari guide in the early 1990s and soon thereafter he was hired by southern Africa’s largest operator to train all of their safari experts. Safaris he has led have been featured in magazines such as Vogue and Condé Nast Traveler. He has assisted National Geographic photographers and appeared on television shows such as Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures. Peter is also active with the Athena Foundation, a nonprofit conservation group. He is on the board of the Athena Foundation’s youth program, whose mission is to inspire young people to develop their interest in conservation. Originally born and raised in Sydney, Australia, he currently divides his time between Australia, California, and Botswana.
Peter Allison (Whatever You Do, Don't Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide)
I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I’ll go for Ossie. We are learning latitude and longitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision.
Karen Russell (St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves)
There is a certain kind of love that's forever. It's not marked by a marital vow, or social custom, or gender identity, or the age of the parties involved. It's a love that doesn't even need to be declared. Its presence in your life is as factual as the sun rising in the morning. You do not argue in its defense or try to explain or justify it to others. The other part mixes into your heart and remains with you the rest of your days. The bond is never broken, any more than you can separate yourself from your body or soul. [we} became one person, unable to enjoy pleasure without the presence of the other. The changes in our lives, the geographical separations, the pull of the earth on our bodies, none of these things ever affected the contract and bond that took place in our youth; over the years neither of us ever suffered a tragedy or bore a burden or celebrated a success without the involvement of the other. I could not draw breath without feeling that [he] was at my side.
James Lee Burke (The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga, #2))
Exhausted by war, and with safety ‘guaranteed’ by the American military, the Europeans embarked on an astonishing experiment. They were asked to trust each other. What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. It has worked brilliantly and created a huge geographical space now encompassing the biggest economy in the world.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography)
CHAPTER ONE The Entrance into Jerusalem and the Cleansing of the Temple 1. The Entrance into Jerusalem Saint John’s Gospel speaks of three Passover feasts celebrated by Jesus in the course of his public ministry: the first, which is linked to the cleansing of the Temple (2:13-25), the Passover of the multiplication of the loaves (6:4), and finally the Passover of his death and Resurrection (for example, 12:1, 13:1), which became “his” great Passover, the basis for the Christian celebration of Easter, the Christian Passover. The Synoptics contain just one Passover feast—that of the Cross and Resurrection; indeed, in Saint Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ path is presented as a single pilgrim ascent from Galilee to Jerusalem. To begin with, it is an “ascent” in a geographical sense: the Sea of Galilee is situated about 690 feet below sea level, whereas Jerusalem is on average 2500 feet above. The Synoptics each contain three prophecies of Jesus’ Passion as steps in this ascent, steps that at the same time point to the inner ascent that is accomplished in the outward climb: going up to the Temple as the place where God wished “his name [to] dwell”, in the words of the Book of Deuteronomy (12:11, 14:23). The ultimate goal of Jesus’ “ascent” is his self-offering on the Cross, which supplants the old sacrifices; it is the ascent that the Letter to the Hebrews describes as going up, not to a sanctuary made by human hands, but to heaven itself, into the presence of God (9:24). This ascent into God’s presence leads via the Cross—it is the ascent toward “loving to the end” (cf. Jn 13:1), which is the real mountain of God. The immediate goal of Jesus’ pilgrim journey is, of course, Jerusalem, the Holy City with its Temple, and the “Passover of the Jews”, as John calls it (2:13).
Pope Benedict XVI (Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection)
I’ve had motherland-born African family tell me I don’t have a right to my Africanness because my ancestors were sold. I have had multi-generation African American family tell me I don’t have a right to my Americanness although I was born and raised on Black soil in the U.S. of A. I have had Guyanese family tell me I don’t have a right to the culture that birthed my parents, grandparents, and their great-grandparents because I am a “Yankee.” For all these folks, I am an orphan. But that’s their problem, because only I get to define me, and I own all of my spiritual, cultural, geographical, and genetic DNA.
Abiola Abrams (African Goddess Initiation: Sacred Rituals for Self-Love, Prosperity, and Joy)
Biblical writers are neither geographers nor astronomers—they are theologians. They describe with profound accuracy the relation between God and persons like you and me, a relationship between the Creator and the creature; they coordinate our knowledge of the God who loves us with our experience of being loved;
Eugene H. Peterson (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (The IVP Signature Collection))
In place of the State, we propose the self-organized community. We advocate that local people affected by decisions should be the ones making them. For larger geographic coordination, say at the regional or continental level, local assemblies can confederate, sending accountable and immediately recallable delegates to present the positions of local communities. All policy would be made by the people in a directly democratic fashion, with the administration of that policy carried out by accountable and recallable bodies to serve various functions. Various experts, those who know how to build bridges, for example, or design alternative energy technologies, would inform the decisions of the assemblies. But ultimately it is the people who decide, not the experts. This way of organizing society would be one part of an overall redistribution of wealth and power, which would fundamentally change our relations to each other. Of course this direct, democratic form of self-governance runs the risk of evolving into a new State, alienated from and above the majority of people; thus constant vigilance and flexibility will be required to prevent the emergence of new elites and an alienated administrative apparatus.
Roy San Filippo (A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation)
Michael Halahan is a student that wants to have a successful career. He loves a close-knit family and wishes to find an active faith community. While he participated in a foreign language club during high school, Michael also played tennis and golf. Today, he enjoys reading National Geographic pieces about history and nature. Michael Halahan also occasionally reads fictional novels by authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy.
Michael Halahan
There are no ancestral spirits waiting to be pacified by us. If the spirit is enlightened it merges with the infinite energy. If not, it gets reborn within three kṣanas, three moments. Hell and heaven are in our minds. They are psychological spaces, not geographical places. We are in hell when we are depressed, guilty, and in suffering and incompletion. We are in heaven when we are in completion and feel and express love, joy and gratitude.
Nithyananda Paramashiva
Poetically if not geographically, the Kuria Murias belong to the same harmonious archipelago as Serendip, the Celebes, Tahiti and Taprobane, Andaman and Nicobar, the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Dogs. I had fallen in love with the name years before, in the atlas.
Tim Mackintosh-Smith (Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah)
My great grandfather used to buy plots of land in Russia and sell them in America. He had gold and silver mines in Australia, Japan and Malaysia. He took advantage of geographic arbitrage to buy low and sell high. You can do this right now. The current hot spot is the Philippines. Labour is their number one export, and they have great English.
James Schramko (Work Less, Make More: The counter-intuitive approach to building a profitable business, and a life you actually love)
Though continental division and shifting in the days of Peleg appears feasible from a superficial reading of Genesis 10:25 in isolation, this concept has some major problems associated with it: 1. When Genesis 10:25 is read within the context of the whole of Genesis 10, the four other verses (5, 18, 20, and 32) speaking of the division clearly emphasize that this was a linguistic and family division of all post-Flood people into different lands (geographical locations). 2. Had the division of continents occurred during the days of Peleg, then the associated catastrophism would have resulted in another worldwide Flood, in violation of God's specific promise to Noah. 3. Had the division of continents occurred during the days of Peleg, then the ark (with Peleg's ancestors) would have had no place to land, as the mountains of Ararat produced by continental collisions would not have yet existed. 4. There is tremendous fossil and geologic evidence for continental division having occurred only during the Flood. We, therefore, gently and lovingly encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ to refrain from claiming the division of continents occurred during the days of Peleg. The phrase "for in his days the earth was divided" in Genesis 10:25 needs to be kept and read within its context of Genesis 10 to give the statement its correct meaning.
Bodie Hodge (Tower of Babel)
In the afternoons he might walk in the garden and practice his knife throwing, before reading or flipping through magazines. He had piles of magazines in every room: Gun Tests, Gun World, Gun Digest, American Survival Guide, Knife, UFO Universe, Soldier of Fortune, subscription copies of National Geographic and the International Herald Tribune, which Bill always read in London and Paris, and the Weekly World News, a fictional news tabloid sold at the supermarket that Bill loved to read that specialized in alien abductions, mutants, “world’s fattest” stories, urban legends, Elvis sightings, and the revelation in 1994 that twelve U.S. senators were aliens from other planets. (...) His collection kept changing, but he normally had seven or eight handguns, two or three shotguns, and three or four rifles. (...) There was also the matter of his small cock. “My cock is four and one-half inches and large cocks bring on my xenophobia.” Ginsberg thought that Bill’s small penis accounted for his obsession with guns, a subject that many academics have mulled over.
Barry Miles (Call Me Burroughs: A Life)
It doesn’t matter how much you try to avoid that painful past: how far away you physically move (“the geographical cure,” as psychologist Dr. Froma Walsh calls it) or whether you fully cut yourself off from a harmful family member. There is an internal resolution that must happen if you’re going to heal, and that internal resolution requires an understanding and awareness of the origin wounds that have a tight grip on you.
Vienna Pharaon (The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love)
Haitians...have learned and lived with the notion that home is more than a geographical entity. We create home by walking, by living, by dancing, by eating, and by making love and giving birth in new lands. We make home by dying here and accepting that it is impossible to go back... This thought alone is devastating, but that is the reality....We are forever scattered. We will never rest.
Ronald Charles
Playlist You’re Mine - Phantogram Animal - Caroline Rose Journal of Ardency - Class Actress Hurts Like Hell - Fleurie So Good - Warpaint Mad About You – Hooverphonic Daft Pretty Boys – Bad Suns Blue Obsession – Geographer Fight or Flight Club – Madge Bending Back – Art School Girlfriend Fall In Love – Phantogram Golden Boy – Bryce Fox American Money – BØRNS Want You So Bad – The Vaccines Swoon – Beach Weather The Love Club – Lorde Affection – BETWEEN FRIENDS striptease – carwash Guilty Pleasures – Georgi Kay Mistakes Like This – Prelow Electric Love – BØRNS The Fool You Need – Son Lux iloveyou – BETWEEN FRIENDS
Aurora Reed (Spearcrest Knight (Spearcrest Kings #1))
Some say that Dian’s relationship with the gorillas, her feeling of oneness with them, bespoke a kind of psychological sickness. “A lot, I think, of her inexplicable sourness and unhappiness was accelerated [by the fact that] all the touchy-feely stuff with the gorillas was a need to substitute gorillas for the people in her life,” said one American conservation official who knew her. Again the voice of the skeptic: Dian had lost touch with reality, the world of people, rather than attaining a new reality, the world of nonhuman minds. “I think she entertained the thought that gorillas cared for her and were more worth her love than human beings were,” this person said. “The gorillas certainly tolerated her, but they certainly had no positive emotions with her. They were complete in their gorillahood, they had their own relationships. They had no need for her. They didn’t need her.” Another scientist, one of Dian’s former students, said, “Some of the gorillas may have real affection for us; nonetheless they don’t like us as much as we like them, and they don’t understand us as well as we understand them.” But perhaps, in a world “older and more complete” than ours, there is a love that does not demand a reciprocal debt of need. Certainly Dian needed the gorillas. But perhaps the gorillas understood Dian better than any human ever did. Ian Redmond told a story at the National Geographic memorial benefit for Dian. He hadn’t planned to tell it; it was prompted by a question: how did the gorillas react to Dian’s death? “This goes beyond the bounds of strict science,” Ian said. “Just after Dian’s death, three gorilla groups who had been at some distance from Visoke suddenly homed in on the mountain. One group traveled almost continually for two days to arrive in the vicinity.” Ian is a scientist and would not want to volunteer the interpretation implicit in the gorillas’ sudden, purposeful movement toward the mountain that was Dian’s home: that they had come, in her hour of death, to be near to her.
Sy Montgomery (Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas)
From Genesis 3 onwards there have existed in the world what Augustine famously called two cities, the city of God and the earthly city.22 He distinguishes between the cities not in terms of distinct geographical locations, nor in terms of “higher” spiritual and “lower” earthly realities, but in terms of two loves. The greatest love of the heavenly city is the love of God, and the greatest love of the earthly city is the love of self.
Christopher Watkin (Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture)
Every nation, it can be the best, has its lees and its yeast. Our German people, which in the course of three centuries again has grown out of the remnant of 4 million that remained after the 30 Years’ War, also has a lees. It is certainly not greater than that of other peoples. It is sometimes particularly dangerous for us as a people of such high standing, because it is particularly out of the ordinary. It is understandable and explicable, because through this wonderful country, which is so incredibly beautiful in terms of its landscape, and in which you are now in one of the most beautiful parts, through this country, which is so beautiful, but which is so unfortunate geographically, geopolitically and in terms of defence policy, with its open borders to the east and to the west, peoples and races of all kinds from Asia, from the east and from the west have passed through it over the centuries. Again and again, out of the otherwise healthy womb of our people, in the course of heredity and in the enigma of the course of heredity and the game of love; again and again, once, a dark germ will rise and becom a human being. This realisation need not sadden us.
Heinrich Himmler
Silver linings abound: I always knew I loved my son, but you certainly get a “perspective-check” when you go through a parting like that. His despair is tough to bear witness to, but reinforces how dearly he loves me. It strengthens my already tough resolve to remain as a positive influence in his life, despite the geographic distance between us.
Rob Kozak (Finding Fatherhood)
As two former empires, both with distinct identities and a strong sense of national pride, there is an island mentality in Iran that feels strangely familiar, a perverse pleasure to be found in going it alone, not being bossed around. Neither nation is particularly comfortable with the idea of mucking in with its neighbours – Britain with its scepticism towards Europe and inflated sense of importance in the world; Iran, an island of Shi-ite Muslims surrounded by Sunnis, geographically in the Middle East but definitely not Arabs – always, defiantly, neither East nor West. But there were gentler similarities too; an appreciation of the absurd and a sense of humour that celebrates the subversive and the silly, a love of the outdoors and an illustrious history of mountaineering and climbing, the national penchant for picnics and a profound appreciation of nature. Even the strange formalised politeness of ta’arof reminded me of our own British rituals of insistence and refusal when passing through a doorway or our habit of apologising when bumped into by a stranger. And, of course, our mutual inability to do anything without a cup of tea.
Lois Pryce (Revolutionary Ride: On the Road to Shiraz, the Heart of Iran)
Once upon a time, oh, it seems a long while ago now, I dreamed of a natural haven, of paradise winking down upon a tranquil blue sea. I had pictured friends and family at ease in my Garden of Eden, sharing, and at peace, a place where artists worked and lovers loved. But it had been a vague sketch, a dream without lines between the dots, until I met Michel. Then it began to gain wattage, to take on a shape, develop light and shade, rhythm, sinew. Together we have breathed life into those blurred images. Together we have discovered how to live a new life. Even more, what has blossomed out of those dreams surpasses any bricks or mortar, or even the loveliest of pearly terraced olive groves. Our paradise lies in the depth of our love. What geographical points our traveling takes us no longer matters.... We began this enterprise on a shoestring. Love and tenacity have held it together. We can do it again if we have to. And in the discovery of all this, I have shed skins—driving ambition, materialism, a need to control my life. I am learning to let go and am empowered. My heart has found heart.
Carol Drinkwater (The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Olive Oil in the South of France)
Epidemiologic theory. As a phrase, it sounds at once dry and arcane.Yet, in reality, it is vital and engaging. Epidemiologic theory is about explaining the people’s health. It is about life and death. It is about biology and society. It is about ecology and the economy. It is about how the myriad activities and meanings of people’s lives—involving work, dignity, desire, love, play, confl ict, discrimination, and injustice—become literally incorporated into our bodies—that is, embodied—and manifest in our health status, individually and collectively. It is about why rates of disease and death change over time and vary geographically. It is about why different societies—and within societies, why different societal groups—have better or worse health than others. And it is about essential knowledge critical for improving the people’s health and minimizing inequitable burdens of disease, disability, and death
Anonymous
• buying him clothes to improve his self-image • finding a therapist for him and begging him to go • financing expensive hobbies to help him use his time better • going through disruptive geographic relocations because “he’s not happy here” • giving him half or all of our property and possessions so he won’t feel inferior to us • providing him with a place to live so that he can feel secure
Robin Norwood (Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He'll Change)
Whoever had thought to instate a watering hole in this spot could not have been a woman. It was impossible to linger here without feeling observed. The goblin barrens rose up on either side of the path ahead; bulbous gnomons; knotted terraces; wedge-headed hoodoos, each a narrows into some otherworld. Eastern dudes were known to pay good money to be brought through here and stand around in their frills, trying to guess where, in this maze of stone, some outlaw or another had laired in the old days... --------------------- All of her boys had augured themselves in this valley. Rob -- her son through and through, bullheaded and quick-tempered, beloved abroad and withdrawn at home -- was a wild and unheeding child of the silver camps. In the eerie, misshapen stones of this valley, he had recognized what he most loved of the world. Today, this rock might resemble the Green River railhead; tomorrow, a buffalo -- shapes he had pursued through dime novels... --------------------- Where Rob saw abstractions of the world, Dolan saw facts, the plain passionless truth of things: stone carved by water and wind, and nothing more. He dismantled Rob's visions accordingly; of a geographic depression resembling a woman's skirts, he had once said, "That's just a bajada, you idiot -- can't you see?... --------------------- And then there was Toby, of course -- a man apart. Where the goblins were concerned, he went in for the old prospectors' stories: the stones were maidens, usually, endungeoned or cursed with immobility, awaiting some providential intercession... This one makes me sad Mama, he'd once said of a caravan of knotty lumps. Why lamb? It's a lost remuda, and they're trying to get home. And they never will. It makes me sad.
Téa Obreht (Inland)
Did you know that when you hold up a compass and the arrow points north, it’s not really pointing to the North Pole? The North Pole is the geographic top of the earth. It’s a fixed position that never changes. That’s why it is called “true north.” And it is from this fixed position that mapmakers draw their maps. Your compass, on the other hand, does not point to True North. Rather, it points to a magnetic field that is roughly 1,300 miles away from the North Pole. This is called “Magnetic North.
David Boehi (Preparing for Marriage: Discover God's Plan for a Lifetime of Love)
Le Nègre selon National Geographic
Dany Laferrière (How to Make Love to a Negro)
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Landscaping Lehi
Do you want to be a professor too?” He shrugs. “Maybe one day. I’d like to travel more first though, work on dig sites in places like Greece or Central America. Ancient civilizations are buried everywhere. It’s, like, no matter where you walk, you never know what could be under your feet. I want a job that lets me see all the things I want to see before I get stuck behind a desk.” “I know what you mean. I can’t wait to see the world and document it, photojournalist style.” An image of the two of us traveling together pops into my mind: him digging up the world and me taking pictures of it. I squash those butterflies too. “Yeah?” he asks, his smile finally revealing teeth. “I can see you doing that, like for National Geographic or something.” “You haven’t even seen any of my pictures,” I scoff. “ Besides, can you imagine how competitive a job that would be? Those photographers are incredible. They have years of experience under their belts. I’m not even eighteen years old yet.” “Doesn’t matter. You’ve got time,” he says. “You know what someone said to me once? Figure out what you love doing, then figure out how to make money doing it.” I turn the thought over in my head. “I like that.” He smiles, plunging his hands into his pockets. “So tell me about you. Who is Pippa, in the broad scheme of things?” He winks. I return the smile. “Well, I’m an only child, born and raised in Chicago--” “Ah, Chicago. That’s the accent.” “I told you before, I don’t have an accent.” “To your ears you don’t.” He laughs. “But it’s definitely there to the rest of us.” “Is that a bad thing?” “No,” he says. “It’s cute.” Oh, I might die. A boy used the word “cute.” And when describing something about me. I can’t look at him.
Kristin Rae (Wish You Were Italian (If Only . . . #2))
Being an introvert doesn’t mean you’re shy. It means you enjoy being alone. Not just enjoy it—you need it. If you’re a true introvert, other people are basically energy vampires. You don’t hate them; you just have to be strategic about when you expose yourself to them—like the sun. They give you life, sure, but they can also burn you and you will get that wrinkly Long Island cleavage I’ve always been afraid of getting and that I know I now have. For me, meditation and headphones on the subway have been my sunscreen, protecting me from the hell that is other people. There’s a National Geographic photo I love of a young brown bear.
Amy Schumer (The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo)
January 2013 Andy’s Message   Hi Young, I’m home after two weeks in Tasmania. My rowing team was the runner-up at the Lindisfarne annual rowing competition. Since you were so forthright with your OBSS experiences, I’ll reciprocate with a tale of my own from the Philippines.☺               The Canadian GLBT rowing club had organised a fun excursion to Palawan Island back in 1977. This remote island was filled with an abundance of wildlife, forested mountains and beautiful pristine beaches.               It is rated by the National Geographic Traveller magazine as the best island destination in East and South-East Asia and ranked the thirteenth-best island in the world. In those days, this locale was vastly uninhabited, except by a handful of residents who were fishermen or local business owners.               We stayed in a series of huts, built above the ocean on stilts. These did not have shower or toilet facilities; lodgers had to wade through knee-deep waters or swim to shore to do their business. This place was a marvellous retreat for self-discovery and rejuvenation. I was glad I didn’t have to room with my travelling buddies and had a hut to myself.               I had a great time frolicking on the clear aquiline waters where virgin corals and unperturbed sea-life thrived without tourist intrusions. When we travelled into Lungsodng Puerto Princesa (City of Puerto Princesa) for food and a shower, the locals gawked at us - six Caucasian men and two women - as if we had descended from another planet. For a few pesos, a family-run eatery agreed to let us use their outdoor shower facility. A waist-high wooden wall, loosely constructed, separated the bather from a forest at the rear of the house. In the midst of my shower, I noticed a local adolescent peeping from behind a tree in the woods. I pretended not to notice as he watched me lathe and played with himself. I was turned on by this lascivious display of sexual gratification. The further I soaped, the more aroused I became. Through the gaps of the wooden planks, the boy caught glimpses of my erection – like a peep show in a sex shop, I titillated the teenager. His eyes were glued to my every move, so much so that he wasn’t aware that his friend had creeped up from behind. When he felt an extra hand on his throbbing hardness, he let out a yelp of astonishment. Before long, the boys were masturbating each other. They stroked one another without mortification, as if they had done this before, while watching my exhibitionistic performance carefully. This concupiscent carnality excited me tremendously. Unfortunately, my imminent release was punctured by a fellow member hollering for me to vacate the space for his turn, since I’d been showering for quite a while. I finished my performance with an anticlimactic final, leaving the boys to their own devices. But this was not the end of our chance encounter. There is more to ‘cum’ in my next correspondence!               Much love and kisses,               Andy
Young (Turpitude (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 4))
I know it difficult to teach of 6 billion people to love each others... But atleast some can give up hate... Just trail of thoughts for you.. The beings on the planet came to existance. Somehow.. Not willing to debate about the source being God or Science.. Then they started evolving and adapting with the natural srrounding.. Some went to Africa the nature burnt their skins and raised the melanin content in their bodies and made them "Blacks".. Some went to Europe the same malanin was washed away as wasnt required and they became "Whites".. And the most fortunate like us came to Southern Asia and became "Browns" Similar was the case with adaptation to the fooding habits too... These habits took ages to settle in and were forced by nature... With passage of time humans gathered some wisdom and wanted too move away from the natural coarse of life designed by nature for them. In most of the ancient paintings found people have been shown killing or exploiting others.. In most of the recorded history maximum elaboration is about Battles and Wars. Where winners were always HEROES and losers were VILLAINS.. In recorded history very few VILLAINS actually won final wars. People started choosing the Victorious as heroes out of fear. The victorious could define and dictate terms to the society. This continues for ages till further evolution of human brains started. The evolution of human brains led to disloyalty towards the victorious and powerful rulers. Their brains taught them the power of togetherness clubbed with conspiracy could uproot the rulers. They started resisting the powerful. May be this is the time when something called religions came to existence to tame the behaviour of Man from the fear of unknown... i.e. Heaven and Hell. They held the societies together got in rules and regulations but again these were based on hating others and protecting community, cities or co-followers. Unfortunately now These Fears of Unknown from different geographical locations are confronting each other stating my fear is bigger than your fear.. But eventually every one has some path i.e. Birth to Death ... During this lengthy thoughts i have understood that its not the fault of a Black to be black and there is no contribution of a White in being born a white... So being Brown is Great... Eternal life is fro the people who did things for generations to remember that's what heaven and hellz all about. - A Black can show supremacy by being Nelson Mandella - A White can help and heal people to Become Mother Teressa - A Brown can liberate and fight for Kids and become Kailash Satyarthi At this point you must also know that Thousands of Years have Gone.. and one thing that remains constant after "CHANGE" is "HATE" Can we change or let it be as was written on the WALL...
Talees Rizvi (21 Day Target and Achievement Planner [Use Only Printed Work Book: LIFE IS SIMPLE HENCE SIMPLE WORKBOOK (Life Changing Workbooks 1))
ক্যাঙারু , ভাই ক্যাঙারু! তুমি অস্ট্রেলিয়ার আত্মা এই ব্যর্থতা থেকে পরিত্রাণ এই নির্জনতার সঙ্গী তোমারই জন্যে তৈরি হয়েছে পৃথিবীর এই পঞ্চম, ঘন মহাদেশ, যেন নতুন জন্ম হলো তার, যেন আদিযুগে সে তো ছিল না, (গোড়ার কাজটা ভালো লেগেছিল, সেই প্রেরণায় ঈশ্বর, তাঁর আপন সৃষ্টি আশীর্বাদ করেছেন) প্রথম পাপেই উঠে এল এই মহাদেশ, সেই অভিশাপ থেকে আজ এ-বন্ধ্যা জঙ্গল! ক্যাঙারু, ভাই ক্যাঙারু! একনজরে তো অসংগতিই দেখেছি পরমুহূর্তে গোলমাল মিটে
Barron Field (Geographical Memoirs On New South Wales: By Various Hands...Together With Other Papers On the Aborigines, the Geology, the Botany, the Timber, the ... of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land)
All in all there has always been only one teaching expressed through various traditions, cultures, religious set ups, doctrines at various times and at different geographical locations. Throughout ages it has been the same; the elixir, the alchemy, even for the believers and non-believers, it remains the same. It is called Love
Rabb Jyot (The Freedom of Being Human)
Maybe the migratory tribes left for some other reason that had nothing to do with novelty-seeking. Maybe they left because of conflict, or perhaps they were hunting migratory animals. There could have been many reasons unrelated to dopamine, but the question remains: Under these circumstances, why would the migratory population end up with lots of 7R alleles among its members? The answer is that maybe the 7R allele didn’t set off the migration, but once it began, the allele gave its carriers a survival advantage. One advantage provided by the 7R allele is that it drove its carriers to explore the new environment in which they found themselves in order to seek out opportunities to maximize resources. In other words, it promoted novelty-seeking. For example, a tribe might have started out in a geographical area where there was a consistent climate, and the same type of food was available all year round. However, after moving to a new location, the members of the migratory tribe may have experienced rainy and dry seasons, and they needed to learn how to switch food sources as the seasons changed. Figuring out how to do that involved risk-taking and experimentation.
Daniel Z. Lieberman (The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race)
This happened one afternoon after I had set out some old National Geographic magazines for the Pirahãs to thumb through. They love pictures of animals and peoples, whether from the Amazon or other parts of the world. Xiooitaóhoagí (i-owi-taO-hoa-gI) sat on the floor, looking through the magazine, with her baby suckling at her breast. Her legs straight out in front of her, dress pulled down to her knees, in the normal Pirahã manner, she was humming rhythmically to the child on her lap as he nursed energetically. I watched for a bit before I realized that what she was humming was a description of the whale and Eskimos whose pictures she was examining. The boy would look away from her breast to the picture from time to time, and she would point and hum louder.
Daniel L. Everett (Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle)
Those that form the nucleus of our friendships and family bonds, at any given point in our lives, do not necessarily remain with us through time. There may be a variety of reasons for this. The relationships themselves may be fragile or their world may only ever have been intended to collide with ours for a short span of time. Ambition and love draw people in different directions, work lives can create nomadic pathways and loves journeys can take us on geographically diverse paths. Death may also arrive to cause its ultimate diversion or, as so often is the case these days, our mental health may become mental illness.
Calvin Wade (Living On A Rainbow)
Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote. Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods. In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park. A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir
Will Harlan (Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island)
It is a testament to Delphi’s unparalleled tenacity and ability to survive that Heliodorus wrote his novel about the love affair at Delphi and about Delphi’s crucial place at the center of a connected Mediterranean society not in the hey-day of the classical world, but in the third or fourth centuries AD, on the cusp of the Mediterranean world’s gradual conversion to Christianity and the end of pagan sanctuaries like the one at Delphi.⁵ And yet, even in this twilight, Delphi’s description glows bright. More tellingly, Heliodorus’s description echoes that of another ancient writer, the geographer Strabo, who labeled Delphi, above all, as a theatron: a theater.⁶ It was a space in which most of the moments that mattered in the history of the ancient world were played out, reflected on, or altered. As a result, an understanding of the ancient world and, I would argue, of humankind itself, is incomplete without an understanding of Delphi.
Michael Scott (Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World)
Can I have your sperm?” “Umm, no,” says my very handsome friend. He’s standing in the doorway of his stunning Upper East Side townhouse, wearing a completely bewildered expression. Who can blame him? It’s 10 p.m. and I’m in my pajamas, my bunned-up hair hanging askew off my head. “Before you say no, hear me out––” “No,” he repeats as if I haven’t just given him instructions. He eyeballs my pjs with the pigs with wings pattern on them. A joke gift Delia bought me when she told me she sleeps naked and I said I would do that when pigs fly. They’re very comfy. “Are you in your pajamas?” “Yes.” I push past him to get inside. “I’m prepared to assume all cost,” I rush to say, my voice high and marked with desperation. “You know my financial situation. You know I don’t need help in that regard. And you can participate as little or as much as you want in raising our child––” “Slow down, Stella––” “Jeff said no...” I walk directly into his living room and come to an abrupt stop. Stacks of cardboard boxes are everywhere. “Are you moving?” “Yes.” Ethan brushes a hand over his gorgeous face. “Where’s this coming from?” “I want a baby and the gays said I was too structured. And we’re friends, right? We respect each other, right?” “Wait? What gays?” “The architect, and the professor of economics at Columbia. Keep up, will you.” Ethan chuckles and I glare back. This wasn’t supposed to be this hard. And it’s poking at all my sore spots. “I really liked the professor. He’s the one that said I was too structured. The architect said he found a more geographically suitable candidate, but I’m pretty sure he was lying because I would’ve moved uptown if that was the only issue.” “Okay––” he says, taking a deep breath, his hands on his hips. “You want a baby.” “Yes.” “So go to a sperm bank.” “Too anonymous.” “I’m not giving you my sperm, Stella. I’m moving to Los Angeles in less than two weeks and I’m getting married. I don’t think she’d be too keen on me handing over my sperm.” Stunned, I rock back on my heels. “What?! To who?” “To a woman I’m in love with.” He smiles then, the sweetest of smiles, and I know he’s serious. “Camilla’s friend.” At my blank response he continues, “The actress––we haven’t talked in months.” “I called.” “To tell me my investments are up thirteen percent.” “You’re up fourteen for the year now. And you said you were too busy for a drink.” “You canceled the last time.” Totally dejected, I slump down on the armrest of his couch. “You were the last name on my list.” I can’t keep the disappointment out of my voice. I’m so bummed I may start to cry and I am not a crier. Ethan chuckles softly. “Wow, thanks.” “You know what I mean.” “Why not a sperm bank?” “I want my kid to know his or her father. I don’t want to tell them I bought their father.
P. Dangelico (Baby Maker (It Takes Two, #1))
What makes Chinatown so uniquely disturbing as an American metaphor is that it is so unlike the whiteness of Ahab’s whale or the greenness of Gatsby’s light. However illusory, these are totems of aspiration, of possibility. Futility and fate, by contrast, are concepts that defy the capitalist’s dream of agency and advancement, the (graying) Protestant work ethic that assured pre-Watergate Americans that life was linear, not cyclical, and the game wasn’t rigged against them. It is no wonder, then, that Towne’s metaphor should borrow its desolation from Polanski, a European. “The American has not yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his own geographical frontier,” wrote the philosopher William Barrett in 1962. “His spiritual horizon is still the limitless play of human possibilities, and as yet he has not lived through the crucial experience of human finitude.” A decade after this writing, that spiritual horizon reached its finitude in Vietnam and Watergate, and symbolically in Los Angeles, the geographic end of America. As Towne foresaw, the only place left to go was up—up to The Sting, to “Happy Days,” Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, to “a mix of nostalgia and parody,” Kael wrote, the mass denial of the terrible truths Gittes was powerless to undo.
Sam Wasson (The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood)
...no geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject. Baldwin's pedigree didn't gift him "The Jimmy." Only interest, knowledge and love will do that...
Zadie Smith (Feel Free: Essays)
The grandfather had died, Low undoubtedly loved him, but he was not as wealthy, or such a philanthropist, as his grandson made out. Neither was Low himself so charitable; the Jynwel Foundation had done little through 2012, while Low was busy raiding the 1MDB fund, even during his own cancer scare. It was true that the Jynwel Foundation had pledged more than $100 million to charities, although it had actually paid out only a fraction of that amount. Its activity began to pick up only in late 2013, just as negative media stories about Low were snowballing, and more so in 2014. In order to change the narrative, Edelman counseled Low to publicize his charitable endeavors, including pledges of tens of millions of dollars to National Geographic’s Pristine Seas endeavor and to the United Nations to save its news service from closure. Low was even planning to donate to his alma mater. At his request, an architect drew up plans for a new building at Wharton to be called the Jynwel Institute for Sustainable Business. Low was planning to make a $150 million commitment to build and operate the institute over thirty years, a munificent gesture, redolent of a Rockefeller or a Carnegie.
Bradley Hope (Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World)
the circuits that engage you — for example when you're having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love. So you're trying to structure the world around you, jointly, to create a habitable space that you both can exist within. You're using the same circuits — the abstracted version — that our archaic ancestors would have used when they went out into the unknown itself to encounter beasts and predators and geographical unknowns.
Jordan B. Peterson
In that Alaska speech, Kennedy had declared that the New Frontier did not suggest a geographical boundary line, but rather, a spirit of mind that had built the country, a people who did not ask for things to be done for them, but wanted to take action themselves. “This is the call of the New Frontier. It is not what I promise I will do; it is what I ask you to join me in doing.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s)
It occurs to me that one also has to love despite the geographical violence of colonialism. I want to love in a way that has geographical consequences.
Billy-Ray Belcourt (Coexistence: Stories)