Good Crucible Quotes

Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness... and perhaps even Satan - Satan, in spite of himself - somehow serves to work out the will of God.

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!

I made a gift for you, Good Proctor. I had to sit long hours in a chair, and passed the time with sewing." - Mary Warren

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon—such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

Marriage is going to be that happy state in which we get all of the nurturance and care and love and empathy and even good advice that we didn't receive from our families.

...I can. And there's your first marvel, that I can. You have made your magic now, for now I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs. (Elizabeth, in a burst of terror, rushes to him and weeps against his hand.) Give them no tear! Tears pleasure them. Show honor now, show a stony heart and sink them with it!

Parker Palmer observes, "A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

Because loners are born everywhere, we end up living everywhere. We do not, have not, tended to single ourselves out as special, elite, requiring rarefied environments. Too often we have done the opposite; lived where we lived because our jobs were there, or families, or because we'd heard the schools were good there, or that we would love a place with changing seasons. Then, no matter what, we put our noses to the grindstone. We take living there as a fait accompli, a fact. Too often we are miserable somewhere without realizing why. We blame ourselves for not buckling down, settling in, fitting in. The problem is the place, but too often we do not see this, we will not allow ourselves to see this. It's the same old thing: This is a friendly town, so what's your problem? ...To the non-loner, or the self-reproaching loner, the fact of being a loner is not comparable to those other determinants. It is not a matter of life and death, we tell ourselves. It its not a matter of breathing or of execution by stoning. But home is the crucible of living...So how can living not be a matter of life and death?

So? If I die, then I die! The loss to the world won’t be great. Yes, and I’m fairly bored with myself already. I am like a man who is yawning at a ball, whose reason for not going home to bed is only that his carriage hasn’t arrived yet. But the carriage is ready . . . farewell! I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: Why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? . . . There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul . . . But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the baits of passion, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life. Since then, how many times have I played the role of the ax in the hands of fate! Like an instrument of execution, I fell on the head of doomed martyrs, often without malice, always without regret . . . My love never brought anyone happiness, because I never sacrificed anything for those I loved: I loved for myself, for my personal pleasure. I was simply satisfying a strange need of the heart, with greediness, swallowing their feelings, their joys, their suffering—and was never sated. Just as a man, tormented by hunger, goes to sleep in exhaustion and dreams of sumptuous dishes and sparkling wine before him. He devours the airy gifts of his imagination with rapture, and he feels easier. But as soon as he wakes: the dream disappears . . . and all that remains is hunger and despair redoubled! And, maybe, I will die tomorrow! . . . And not one being on this earth will have ever understood me totally. Some thought of me as worse, some as better, than I actually am . . . Some will say “he was a good fellow,” others will say I was a swine. Both one and the other would be wrong. Given this, does it seem worth the effort to live? And yet, you live, out of curiosity, always wanting something new . . . Amusing and vexing!

The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon—such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas. When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regarded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapses; when we see the steady and methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man’s worthlessness—until redeemed—the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church-state.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means, nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in which the superficial elements of personality and civilization were quickly burned away, to reveal the animal underneath. As

Good grief. Does he have to antagonize every god and goddess right from the start? If I make it home after this is all over, I’m switching to a different pantheon of gods. I sigh. “You don’t have to deliberately provoke them.” He says nothing to that.

And yet even from this—from evil—there will finally come good in some way; in some way that we may never understand or even see.” Merrin paused. “Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness,” he brooded. “And perhaps even Satan—Satan, in spite of himself—somehow serves to work out the will of God.

Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness,” he brooded. “And perhaps even Satan—Satan, in spite of himself—somehow serves to work out the will of God.” Merrin

Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness,” he brooded. “And perhaps even Satan—Satan, in spite of himself—somehow serves to work out the will of God.

Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal, “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

In his indispensable book The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen boldly invites us to imagine ourselves not just in the place of the younger son, and then the elder one, but also in the place of the father. Many of Jesus’ parables are waiting for this kind of attention—his shepherds, widows and vineyard owners are not just clues to the true nature and identity of God, but to what we are meant to become by grace. But for us the path to becoming the shepherd requires first recognizing that we are the lost sheep; to become the searching widow, we must understand that we are the coin lost in the cranny; and to become the father requires first coming to terms with ourselves as his equally foolish, equally prodigal children. And that is, in a nutshell, what discipleship is about. In the crucible of discipleship we come to see just how distorted our vision for our own power has been and how small we have become, but we also discover just how lavish our Father’s goodness is and how much glory is waiting for us, how much more we are meant to be.

It’s an heirloom, isn’t it?” ... “I got it from my father.” The tutor ran his hand along the sheathed blade. “This is a remarkable weapon—a knight’s sword—tarnished with time and travel. You don’t use it as often as the others. The bastard and short sword are tools to you, but this—ah—this is something else—something revered. It lays concealed in a paltry sheath, covered in clothes not its own. It doesn’t belong there. This sword belongs to another time and place. It is part of a grand and glorious world where knights were different, loftier—virtuous. It rests in this false scabbard because the proper one has been lost, or perhaps, it waits for a quest yet to be finished. It longs for that single moment when it can shine forth in all its brilliance. When dream and destiny meet on a clear field, then and only then will it find its purpose. When it faces that honorable cause—that one worthy and desperate challenge for which it was forged and on which so much depends—it will find peace in the crucible of struggle. For good or ill, it will ring true or break. But the wandering, the waiting, the hiding will at last be over. This sword waits for the day when it can save the kingdom and win the lady.

good news is that we’re all doomed, and you can give up any sense of control. Resistance is futile. Many things are going to get worse and weaker, especially democracy and the muscles in your upper arms. Most deteriorating conditions, though, will have to do with your family, the family in which you were raised and your current one. A number of the best people will have died, badly, while the worst thrive. The younger middle-aged people struggle with the same financial, substance, and marital crises that their parents did, and the older middle-aged people are, like me, no longer even late-middle-aged. We’re early old age, with failing memories, hearing loss, and gum disease. And also, while I hate to sound pessimistic, there are also new, tiny, defenseless people who are probably doomed, too, to the mental ruin of ceaseless striving. What most of us live by and for is the love of family—blood family, where the damage occurred, and chosen, where a bunch of really nutty people fight back together. But both kinds of families can be as hard and hollow as bone, as mystical and common, as dead and alive, as promising and depleted. And by the same token, only redeeming familial love can save you from this crucible, along with nature and clean sheets. A

We all exhibit our faith commitments by the way we live, and those commitments are oriented around a value or set of values, a belief or set of beliefs, by which we guide our lives. We may posit reason as the highest good. Or pleasure. Or love and kindness. But no foundation is without an act of faith to sustain it.

Unmistakably behind Native Son, although in no way detracting from Wright’s personal achievement in creating the novel, is the tradition of naturalism, especially urban naturalism, in American writing as epitomized before Wright by novelists such as Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell. To such writers, the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in which the superficial elements of personality and civilization were quickly burned away, to reveal the animal underneath.

The Salem tragedy, which is about to begin in these pages, developed from a paradox. It is a paradox in whose grip we still live, and there is no prospect yet that we will discover its resolution. Simply, it was this: for good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies. It was forged for a necessary purpose and accomplished that purpose. But all organization is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition, just as two objects cannot occupy the same space. Evidently the time came in New England when the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organized. The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom.

God has the goodness to put some of our Purgatory into each day; let us accept, embrace the cross which is presented to us. Let us take care not to complain, nor to imagine that suffering is a new invention. A person might easily suppose it was, on seeing our astonishment, and hearing our murmurs. The saints, crushed and ground down by trials of all sorts, seized on suffering as gold from the mine. “See how the gold taken from the earth is cast into a crucible; had the gold thought and speech, it would cry out: I suffer, take me out of this. And yet this gold is purified, and soon it will shine on the brows of kings, and on the altars of the living God. The cross effects the same in our regard; it is our crucible.”—P. De Ravignan.

Rome the crucible, but also the furnace, the boiling metal, the hammer, and the anvil as well, visible proof of the changes and repetitions of history, one place in the world where man will have most passionately lived. The great fire of Troy from which a fugitive had escaped, taking with him his aged father, his young son, and his household goods, had passed down to us that night in this flaming festival. I thought also, with something like awe, of conflagrations to come. These millions of lives past, present, and future, these structures newly arisen from ancient edifices and followed themselves by structures yet to be born, seemed to me to succeed each other in time like waves; by chance it was at my feet that night in this flaming festival.

6. SELF-REVELATION The battle is an intense and painful experience for the hero. This crucible of battle causes the hero to have a major revelation about who he really is. Much of the quality of your story is based on the quality of this self-revelation. For a good self-revelation, you must first be aware that this step, like need, comes in two forms, psychological and moral.

Friendship is a crucible of positive and negative feelings that are in a permanent state of ebullition. There’s an expression: with friends God is watching me, with enemies I watch myself. In the end, an enemy is the fruit of an oversimplification of human complexity: the inimical relationship is always clear, I know that I have to protect myself, I have to attack. On the other hand, God only knows what goes on in the mind of a friend. Absolute trust and strong affections harbor rancor, trickery, and betrayal. Perhaps that’s why, over time, male friendship has developed a rigorous code of conduct. The pious respect for its internal laws and the serious consequences that come from violating them have a long tradition in fiction. Our friendships, on the other hand, are a terra incognita, chiefly to ourselves, a land without fixed rules. Anything and everything can happen to you, nothing is certain. Its exploration in fiction advances arduously, it is a gamble, a strenuous undertaking. And at every step there is above all the risk that a story’s honesty will be clouded by good intentions, hypocritical calculations, or ideologies that exalt sisterhood in ways that are often nauseating.

I still believe that to develop good character a person needs to experience many difficulties before turning thirty. People need to go down into the crucible of despair at the bottom of human existence and experience what that is like. People need to discover new possibilities in the midst of hell. It is only when climbing out of the depths of despair and making a new determination that we can be reborn as people able to pioneer a new future.

[T]he strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.

What had become of the singular ascending ambition that had driven young Roosevelt from his earliest days? What explains his willingness, against the counsel of his most trusted friends, to accept seemingly low-level jobs that traced neither a clear-cut nor a reliably ascending career path? The answer lies in probing what Roosevelt gleaned from his crucible experience. His expectation of and belief in a smooth, upward trajectory, either in life or in politics, was gone forever. He questioned if leadership success could be obtained by attaching oneself to a series of titled positions. If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too “careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.” Thereafter, he would jettison long-term career calculations and focus simply on whatever job opportunity came his way, assuming it might be his last. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are,” he liked to say. In a very real way, Roosevelt had come to see political life as a succession of crucibles—good or bad—able to crush or elevate. He would view each position as a test of character, effort, endurance, and will. He would keep nothing in reserve for some will-o-the-wisp future. Rather, he would regard each job as a pivotal test, a manifestation of his leadership skills.

Even when a marriage is basically good people are not always happy. Marriage is a crucible for becoming a more mature, compassionate person. It offers an unflinchingly up-close-and-personal example of how we treat another human being. We see our minds in action, both our worst tendencies and our best. In this light how can we even judge the viability of our marriages without making sure we've gotten enough sleep, exercised, eaten right, and developed some means of reflection, prayer, or meditation? Our emotions and bodies whip us around, and we're so often mystified as to what's causing a given mood. It's so easy to blame the person at hand, which in marriage, unfortunately is often one's spouse.

One comfort is to be found in a God whose power is in His magnanimity as well as His wisdom. These two traits mean that His divine energies are spent not in precluding chaos but in reordering it, not in preventing suffering but in alchemizing it, not in disallowing error but in transmuting it into goodness. Satan’s unhindered efforts in the garden were simply assimilated into God’s greater purpose. The malice of the biblical Joseph’s brothers became instrumental in their entire household’s salvation. (“The brothers of Joseph could have never done him so much good with their love and favor as they did him with their malice and hatred,” Thomas More noted.17) In the supernal instance of this principle, according to the felix culpa of Christian tradition, the expulsion from the garden was a happy catastrophe, since it brought forth a remedy that more than compensated for the loss of Eden. Christ’s sacrifice, so dazzling in its overflowing grace and mercy, made it possible for us, in leaving Eden, to return Home. p78-9

It is not my job to explain the story or understand the story or reduce it to a phrase or offer it as being a story about any specific person, place, or thing. My job is to have been true enough to the world of my story that I was able to present it as a forceful and convincing drama. Every story is a kind of puzzle. Many have obvious solutions, and some have no solution at all. We write to present questions, sometimes complicated questions, not to offer easy or not-so-easy answers. Do not be misled by the limited vocabulary the American marketplace uses to describe the possibilities for story and drama. If we’re really writing we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate. The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up the crucible of their days and certainly not always—if ever—capable of articulating their condition.

Two years before, the man had ended my reign. I had been the semel of a tribe of werepanthers, leader of the tribe of Menhit, and he had fought me in the pit and won. He could have cut out my heart with his claws, but instead… instead he offered the path to redemption. He opened his home, welcomed me into his tribe and into his life. I was trusted, my counsel heeded, my strength relied upon. It was a gift, the second coming of the friendship we had when we were young. I had worried that I would be consumed by bitterness and would turn on him, catch him unawares, betray him, and then kill him. But I had forgotten about my own heart. I loved Logan. Not like a lover, not with carnal intent, but—and it was so cliché—like the brother I never had. I wanted him back in my life more than I wanted to hurt him. I was a shitty leader: the selfish kind, the vindictive kind, the one everyone wished would just die already so they could get someone better, someone who cared at all. So when he beat me in the pit, absorbed my tribe, and took me in, I simply surrendered. Logan was a force of nature, and I had been so tired of fighting him, fighting his nobility and his ethics and his strength, that I let the bitterness go. No good had come from it. Time, instead, to try something new. Being his maahes, the prince of his tribe, had worked for me. I was easily the second in power. He made the decisions; I carried them out. He navigated; I drove. I was able to be his emissary because I was talking for him, not me. It was so easy. What came as a surprise was that I changed. I shed my anger, my vanity, and all the pain, and I became everything he’d always seen in me. The man’s faith had made me better, his day-to-day belief invested me in the future of the tribe, in the people, in growth and security and the welfare of all. I was different now, and I owed it all to my old friend, my new semel, Logan Church. So when he had gazed at me with his honey-colored eyes and told me he wanted me to reclaim my birthright, I couldn’t argue, because he believed. I could be, he said, not just a semel, but the semel, the semel-aten, the leader of the entire werepanther world. I would be able to lead those who wanted to follow me because of the changes I had experienced myself. I would be able to get through to those werepanthers who had lost their faith and their way. I would be a catalyst for change and restore prodigals to the fold, Logan was certain of it.

Unfailing faith is fortified through prayer. Your heartfelt pleadings are important to Him. Think of the intense and impassioned prayers of the Prophet Joseph Smith during his dreadful days of incarceration in Liberty Jail. The Lord responded by changing the Prophet’s perspective. He said, “Know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.” If we pray with an eternal perspective, we need not wonder if our most tearful and heartfelt pleadings are heard. This promise from the Lord is recorded in section 98 of the Doctrine and Covenants: “Your prayers have entered into the ears of the Lord … and are recorded with this seal and testament—the Lord hath sworn and decreed that they shall be granted. “Therefore, he giveth this promise unto you, with an immutable covenant that they shall be fulfilled; and all things wherewith you have been afflicted shall work together for your good, and to my name’s glory, saith the Lord.” The Lord chose His strongest words to reassure us! Seal! Testament! Sworn! Decreed! Immutable covenant! Brothers and sisters, believe Him! God will heed your sincere and heartfelt prayers, and your faith will be strengthened.

What I have learned in these crucible moments is how I can choose my future. I now choose to do less “stuff,” but to play bigger. To focus on my passions, and be really good at them.

N: I think that I, too, understood that the theater was a place where you can do a whole bunch of different arts. M: I agree. N: You can dance there, you can sing there, you can build scenery there, you can choreograph fights there, but for both of us, apparently, our main thing was, “Let me perform good writing.” That became clear to me. That’s what I wanted to do. When I did Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, I was twenty-five, and that was a very seminal moment. I thought, “If I can just speak writing like this to an audience, that will be a pretty satisfying life.

Lo, Elliott was an artist. No crucible of hardship, no spiritual calling. Art was just something he was good at, therefore something he was praised for, therefore something he kept doing.

Age was no guide then, nor is it now. The old and the young defy their endings, while others go too soon. Neither is it good or evil in the veins that seems to protect them. This is a brief and bitter life, the mere proving crucible for what lies beyond. That is all that makes sense of it, or I would rage at the heavens themselves.

There are circumstances which can only be created and remedied in a crucible of fury, fire, and destruction like the serotinous cones of the Jack Pine and Lodgepole Pine trees. Only after exposed to extreme heat and enormous pressures will the cone open to begin anew and flourish amongst the cleansed but desolate landscape. Also, like the unpredictable restrained power of a dormant volcano storing it's potential energy over long periods of time gives way to this planets most enchanting display of scenic beauty to stark nightmarish backdrops. Egos are like wildfires to me because they start small but uncontrolled they will get out-of-hand and devour without prejudice. However, egotistical people are part of life and the best defense is a good offense with fire breaks dug in advance anticipation and left in place for when the right conditions present themselves where you must decide to fight that fire or be consumed by it.

Do not make circumstances fit your plan. Make your plan fit the circumstances. Good tactics can save the worst strategy. Bad tactics can doom the best strategy.

Humanity wears the cloak of being rational and civilized. It is a sneering veneer developed, built and used to cope with the brutality of others’ agendas. But this is the cycle that destroys. It is a wheel that never stops turning once you get on it. To break this type of wheel—good intention, follow through and deep pauses are the tools of the crucibles in which we must testify against the norms created in this world. The first step is to speak up in the language or the voice that is your given right.

Mahan’s dictum that good men and bad ships make a better navy than bad men and good ships was always near Nimitz’s thoughts.

That was the tribute written to twenty-year-old Chester W. Nimitz by the editors of the Lucky Bag, the Naval Academy yearbook of 1905. The quote, from Wordsworth’s Excursion, was apt: it got at Nimitz’s qualities of serenity, humility, and good-fellowship. He had a pleasant face and an easy manner. He was comfortable in his own skin. He was one of those rare souls who managed to be both supremely confident and genuinely modest.

This part of me, if left as it is, will be no good for anyone.

Jesus came into the world not to run us through the how-to-get-to-heaven crucible, but instead to gather creation under two bloody wings.

It is always strange looking back at a time that has had such a profound impact on one’s life. And when it comes to Everest, I see two very clear things: friendships that were forged in a tough crucible, and a faith that sustained me through the good, the bad, and the ugly. I survived and reached the top of that mountain because of the bonds I had with those beside me. Of that I am in no doubt. Without Mick and Neil, I would have been nothing. Down that dark crevasse, I also learned that sometimes we really need one another. And that is okay. We are not designed to be islands. We are made to be connected. So often life teaches us that we have to achieve everything on our own. But that would be lonely. For me, it is only by thinking about our togetherness that I can begin to make some sense of what happened on that mountain: the highs, the lows, the fatalities, the fear. Such things have to be shared. Looking back, it is the small moments together that I value the most. Like Neil and myself on the South Summit, holding each other’s hands so that we could both stand. It was only because our friendships were honest that, time after time, when we were tired or cold or scared, we were able to pick ourselves up and keep moving. You don’t have to be strong all the time. That was a big lesson to learn. When we show chinks it creates bonds, and where there are bonds there is strength. This is really the heart of why I still climb and expedition today. Simple ties are hard to break. That is what Everest really taught me.

If Joseph initially thought only Mormons had access to truth or goodness, he was abruptly corrected of his misperception a year into the Church's founding. In an 1831 revelation, the Lord told him that most of the world was under sin, "except those which I have reserved unto myself, holy men that ye know not of." The words were a poignant indication that while Joseph might be a true prophet, the Lord's disciples were not limited to those who found themselves in the restored Church. p88

transformative change requires learning to use our own body as a crucible. A good crucible has a certain set of properties. It can withstand a lot of heat without melting; it is strong enough not to break; and it must not chemically interact with what’s in it.

Decision making was part of being an officer, but it was also a terrifying prospect. Lives were on the line, not just his and not just his men's, but others who were depending on him to not just make good calls, but to make the best calls.

After nightfall, when most of the American planes had been taken aboard, a new formation of planes arrived over the task force. First, the drone of their engines could be heard above the cloud cover; then they slipped into view, at about the height of the Lexington’s masts. “These planes were in very good formation,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Stroop. They had their navigation lights on, indicating that they intended to land. But many observers on both carriers and several of the screening vessels noted that something was awry. Captain Sherman of the Lexington counted nine planes, more than could be accounted for among the American planes that were still aloft. They were flying down the Yorktown’s port side, a counterclockwise approach, the reverse of the American landing routine. They were flashing their blinker lights, but none of the Americans could decipher the signal. Electrician’s mate Peter Newberg, stationed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, noticed that the aircraft exhausts were a strange shape and color, and Stroop noted that the running lights were a peculiar shade of red and blue. The TBS (short-range radio circuit) came alive with chatter. One of the nearby destroyers asked, “Have any of our planes got rounded wingtips?” Another voice said, “Damned if those are our planes.” When the first of the strangers made his final turn, he was too low, and the Yorktown’s landing signal officer frantically signaled him to throttle up. “In the last few seconds,” Newberg recalled, “when the pilot was about to plow into the stern under the flight deck, he poured the coal to his engine and pulled up and off to port. The signal light flicked briefly on red circles painted on his wings.” One of the screening destroyers opened fire, and red tracers reached up toward the leading plane. A voice on the Lexington radioed to all ships in the task force, ordering them to hold fire, but the captain of the destroyer replied, “I know Japanese planes when I see them.” Antiaircraft gunners on ships throughout the task force opened fire, and suddenly the night sky lit up as if it was the Fourth of July. But there were friendly planes in the air as well; one of the Yorktown fighter pilots complained: “What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?” On the Yorktown, SBD pilot Harold Buell scrambled out to the port-side catwalk to see what was happening. “In the frenzy of the moment, with gunners firing at both friend and foe, some of us got caught up in the excitement and drew our .45 Colt automatics to join in, blasting away at the red meatballs as they flew past the ship—an offensive gesture about as effective as throwing rocks.” The intruders and the Americans all doused their lights and zoomed back into the cloud cover; none was shot down. It was not the last time in the war that confused Japanese pilots would attempt to land on an American carrier.

Embrace each day with the conviction that today's choices carve the path to your future. Warriors are born not in the ease of comfort, but in the crucible of facing the hard and important, especially when it feels most uncomfortable.

Even so, the Americans had needed more than a few strokes of good luck. The battle had been a near-run thing, and easily might have gone the other way.

For all those who have faced the darkest trauma of their lives and struggled to move through, or move on, and for the peace that may come one day after the crucible, in the light of a path toward acceptance. I have been through a lot and I have suffered a great deal, but I’ve had lots of happy moments, as well. I have come to the conclusion that we must not expect too much from life. We must give to life at least as much as we receive from it. Every moment one lives is different from the other, the good, the bad, the hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love, and happiness are all interwoven into one single indescribable whole that is called life. —JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS, TO MARYAM KHARAZMI, KAYHAN NEWSPAPER, IRAN, MAY 1972

Though he knew the Japanese would attack the Aleutians, he had refused to divert the bulk of his forces from the main event north of Midway. He had been content to concede the loss of the westernmost islands in the Aleutians archipelago, knowing they offered little value as military assets and could be recaptured in good time.

It was in this crucible that Murdock and his team reshaped the culture of O.C. Tanner. “We tweaked it,” he said. “We didn’t want to touch the core values—the integrity, the commitment to continuous improvement, the customer intimacy. Obert believed in truth, goodness, and beauty, and so did the rest of us. But we had to add some new values, like humility and learning. Those came from me because I didn’t know what to do.” Murdock also encouraged a level of debate that hadn’t gone on previously. “We got into a Hegelian dialectic. I wanted forces to clash so that synergy could emerge. Before, bad news would stay down, out of sight. I wanted a war of ideas, and no silos. Anyone could speak to anyone else.

The result is what Unimin markets as Iota quartz, the industry standard of purity. The basic Iota quartz is 99.998 percent pure SiO2. It is used to make things like halogen lamps and photovoltaic cells, but it’s not good enough to make those crucibles in which polysilicon is melted. For that you need Iota 6, or the tip-top of the line, Iota 8, which clocks in at 99.9992 percent purity—meaning for every one billion molecules of SiO2, there are only eighty molecules of impurities.18 Iota 8 sells for up to $10,000 a ton. Regular construction sand, at the other end of the sand scale, can be had for a few dollars per ton.

Resistance is the key difference between management and leadership: Good management is usually met with a grateful response from those whom we manage. Leadership is often met with stubborn resistance from the very people we are called to lead.

of sameness. This is as true of Zion as it is of marriage. The poet Coventry Patmore wrote that the bonds that unite us in community consist “not in similarity, but in dissimilarity; the happiness of love, in which alone happiness resid[es] . . . not in unison, but conjunction, which can only be between spiritual dissimilars.”30 This is why the body of Christ needs its full complement of members—the devout, the wayward, the uncomfortable, the struggling. “It does not mean that a man is not good because he errs in doctrine,” Joseph said of a Mormon rebuked by others for his preaching. “It feels so good not to be trammeled.”31 This is the spirit in which one Church leader recently noted that not only unique backgrounds but “unique talents and perspectives” and “diversity of persons and peoples” are “a strength of this Church.”32

A deep and loving relationship is like weaving a beautiful tapestry. You start with a blank canvas, and with every experience, a new thread is added—each of a different color and thickness. The layers of time continue this process, which includes the good and the troublesome of what life has to offer. The richness of color and strength of fiber intensify, fleshed out over the crucible of a relationship. And in the end, if the kindness and beauty of love have been yours to share, you have woven a work of art.