“
He looked at the cash siting there "What's that for?" I made myself smile "A good time.
”
”
Kasie West (The Fill-In Boyfriend)
“
Online friends networks and dating sites, like the coffeehouse, are responding to the needs of introverts. We can write, not talk. We can get to the good stuff, and we can press delete as needed.
”
”
Laurie A. Helgoe (Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength)
“
The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
“
The story is about being loyal to the truth as a nation, that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their troops do in war, good or bad.
”
”
Kevin Sites (In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars)
“
One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents
”
”
Angela Y. Davis
“
You think wars get started because some duke gets shot, or someone cuts off one’s ear, or someone’s sited their missiles in the wrong place. It’s not like that. That’s just well, just reasons, which haven’t got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can’t stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all.
”
”
Terry Pratchett
“
Ideas are ultimately worthless unless you activate them with focused and consistent action. The best leaders never leave the site of a good idea without doing something—no matter how small—to breathe some life into it. Lots of people have good ideas. But the masters become masters because they had the courage and conviction to act on ideas.
”
”
Robin S. Sharma (The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in)
“
City of Wizards is normally quite a GOOD thing, since only Good WIZARDS seem able to live together. . . .There have been cities of EVIL Wizards in the past. You will occasionally come across the sites of these, reduced to a glassy slag during the ultimate disagreement.
”
”
Diana Wynne Jones (The Tough Guide to Fantasyland)
“
Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but it’s fragile. While each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth, you’re liable to smash it into a million little pieces if you use too blunt an instrument.
”
”
Rob Fitzpatrick (The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you)
“
Lord
I thank you for creating the world beautiful and various
and for allowing me in Your fathomless goodness to visit places which were not the sites of my daily torments
”
”
Zbigniew Herbert (The Collected Poems, 1956-1998)
“
A fundamental approach to life transformation is using social media for therapy; it forces you to have an opinion, provides intellectual stimulation, increases awareness, boosts self-confidence, and offers the possibility of hope.
”
”
Germany Kent
“
The kind of intelligent book club discussion as now happens on the book sharing site Goodreads might follow the book itself and become more deeply embedded into the book via hyperlinks. So when a person cites a particular passage, a two-way link connects the comment to the passage and the passage to the comment. Even a minor good work could accumulate a wiki-like set of critical comments tightly bound to the actual text.
”
”
Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
“
I circled the site before I came in. If there's anyone within five kilometers, I'll eat my quiver."
Halt regarded him, eyebrow arched once more. "Anyone?"
"Anyone other than Crowley," Will amended, making a dismissive gesture. "I saw him watching me from that hide he always uses about two kilometers out. I assumed he'd be back in here by now."
Halt cleared his throat loudly. "Oh, you saw him, did you?" he said. "I imagine he'll be overjoyed to hear that." Secretly, he was pleased with his former pupil. In spite of his curiosity and obvious excitement, he hadn't forgotten to take the precautions that had been drilled into him. THat augured well for what lay ahead, Halt thought, a sudden grimness settling onto his manner.
Will didn't notice the momentary change of mood. He was loosening Tug
saddle girth. As he spoke, his voice was muffled against the horses's flank. "he's becoming too much a creature of habit," he said. "he's used that hide for the last three Gatherings. It's time he tried something new. Everyone must be onto it by now."
Rangers constantly competed with each other to see before being seen and each year's Gathering was a time of heightened competition. Halt nodded thoughtfully. Crowley had constructed teh virtually invisible observation post some four years previously. Alone among the younger Rangers, Will had tumbled to it after one year. Halt had never mentioned to him that he was the only one who knew of Crowley's hide. The concealed post was the Ranger Commandant's pride and joy.
"Well, perhaps not everyone," he said. Will emerged from behind his horse, grinning at the thought of the head of the Ranger Corps thinking he had remained hidden from sight as he watched Will's approach.
"All the same, perhaps he's getting a bit long in the tooth to be skulking around hiding in the bushes, don't you think?" he said cheerfully. Halt considered the question for a moment.
"Long in the tooth? Well, that's one opinion. Mind you, his silent movement skills are still as good as ever," he said meaningfully.
The grin on Will's face slowly faded. He resisted the temptation to look over his shoulder.
"He's standing behind me, isn't he?" he asked Halt. THe older Ranger nodded.
"He's standing behind me, isn't he?" Will continued and Halt nodded once more.
"Is he...close enough to have heard what I said?" Will finally managed to ask, fearin teh worst. This time, Halt didn't have to answer.
"Oh, good grief no," came a familiar voice from behind him. "he's so old and decrepit these days he's as deaf as a post."
Will's shoulders sagged and he turned to see the sandy-haired Commandant standing a few meters away.
The younger man's eyes dropped.
"Hullo, Crowley," he said, then mumbled, "Ahhh...I'm sorry about that."
Crowley glared at teh young Ranger for a few more seconds, then he couldn't help teh grin breaking out on his face.
"No harm done," he said, adding with a small note of triumph, "It's not often these days I amange to get the better of one of you young ones."
Secretly, he was impressed at teh news that Will had spotted his hiding place. Only the sarpest eyes could have picked it. Crowley had been in the business of seeing without being seen for thirty years or more, and despite what Will believed, he was still an absolute master of camouflage and unseen movement.
”
”
John Flanagan (The Sorcerer in the North (Ranger's Apprentice, #5))
“
This is the explanation I used to have on the site before my page got turned into an author's page.
Don't get butt hurt if I give you a 2 or 3 star rating. That means your book was good. I give very few 4 star ratings cause that means your book is gonna be a reread for me. I don't reread a lot of books. I think I gave less than a handful of 5 stars. 5 stars means that I think the book is a GREAT GREAT. Like a classic that will still be read in a 100 years, at least if I were alive it would be.
As you can see I don't buy into the hoopla that everybody is great. It's not true. Most are average. Some suck. Some are great. If you want a visual go google bell curve.
Life has winners and losers. Not everyone deserves a gold star. Suck it up.
”
”
D.R. Slaten
“
Mámá was fond of saying that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels—an aphorism I was pretty sure she'd cribbed from the thinspiration sites she subscribed to online—but I believed that anyone who said such things had never tasted chili-cheese fries with melted cheddar, fresh ground beef, and Tapatio sauce.
”
”
Nenia Campbell (Locked and Loaded (The IMA, #3))
“
From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that’s bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck: There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees. That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action—I have given enough warnings over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past. For example, there should be no “HTS” [horizontal test stand] or “VTS” [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A “stand” at our test site is obviously a *test* stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with “Tripod,” which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name! The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, eg MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.
”
”
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
“
Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant-y-Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent-trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune’s marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper’s mother returned to Pepper’s surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
This is an essential part of our story. Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it’s almost as if many are holding up signs saying, “Please tell me something horrible about the other side, I’ll believe anything!” Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
“
Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited?
Norman Spinrad: I think it’s a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov’s, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn’t. The supposed dichotomy between “literary fiction” and “popular fiction” is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn’t want to be “popular,” meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were “serious”?
I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. “Genre,” if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. “Westerns” must be set in the Old West. “Mysteries” must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. “Nurse Novels” must have a nurse. And so forth.
In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are “genres.” They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of “genre” in an absolute literary sense.
”
”
Norman Spinrad
“
it, Leo had no idea. Coach Hedge was too miserable to help. He kept pacing the deck with tears in his eyes, pulling at his goatee and slapping the side of his head, muttering, “I should have saved them! I should have blown up more stuff!” Finally Leo told him to go belowdecks and secure everything for departure. He wasn’t doing any good beating himself up. The six demigods gathered on the quarterdeck and gazed at the distant column of dust still rising from the site of the implosion.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
“
Our ability to leave our physical bodies and travel to other places has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments by researchers with good academic credentials. These include Charles Tart at the University of California in Davis, and Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Reesearch Institute. Russell Targ's research of "remote viewing" involves two people. The "viewer" stays in a carefully controlled laboratory environment while a "beacon" person is located somewhere outside that vicinity. A computer then selects a location that is unknown to the viewer.
The beacon person is secretly notified where he or she is to go, based on the computer's random selection of a site. After the beacon person gets to the site, the viewer is asked to describe what the beacon person is seeing. The distance between the beacon person and the viewer appears to have no significant effect on the viewer's ability to accurately describe the site; the distance between them can be a few blocks or many thousand miles. In several successful attempts, a Soviet psychic not only accurately described the location of Targ's associate Keith Harary who acted as a beacon, he also described what Harary would see at the next computer-selected site--even before he got there or knew what he would see!
”
”
Stanislav Grof (The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives)
“
Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
“
Marketing is not a department Do you have a marketing department? If not, good. If you do, don’t think these are the only people responsible for marketing. Accounting is a department. Marketing isn’t. Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365. Just as you cannot not communicate, you cannot not market: Every time you answer the phone, it’s marketing. Every time you send an e-mail, it’s marketing. Every time someone uses your product, it’s marketing. Every word you write on your Web site is marketing. If you build software, every error message is marketing. If you’re in the restaurant business, the after-dinner mint is marketing. If you’re in the retail business, the checkout counter is marketing. If you’re in a service business, your invoice is marketing. Recognize that all of these little things are more important than choosing which piece of swag to throw into a conference goodie bag. Marketing isn’t just a few individual events. It’s the sum total of everything you do.
”
”
Jason Fried (ReWork)
“
Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).41 It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.
”
”
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
“
Instructions for Dad.
I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I got lonely? I promise not to scare you.
I want to be buried in my butterfly dress, my lilac bra and knicker set and my black zip boots (all still in the suitcase that I packed for Sicily). I also want to wear the bracelet Adam gave me.
Don't put make-up on me. It looks stupid on dead people.
I do NOT want to be cremated. Cremations pollute the atmosphere with dioxins,k hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. They also have those spooky curtains in crematoriums.
I want a biodegradable willow coffin and a woodland burial. The people at the Natural Death Centre helped me pick a site not for from where we live, and they'll help you with all the arrangements.
I want a native tree planted on or near my grave. I'd like an oak, but I don't mind a sweet chestnut or even a willow. I want a wooden plaque with my name on. I want wild plants and flowers growing on my grave.
I want the service to be simple. Tell Zoey to bring Lauren (if she's born by then). Invite Philippa and her husband Andy (if he wants to come), also James from the hospital (though he might be busy).
I don't want anyone who doesn't know my saying anything about me. THe Natural Death Centre people will stay with you, but should also stay out of it. I want the people I love to get up and speak about me, and even if you cry it'll be OK. I want you to say honest things. Say I was a monster if you like, say how I made you all run around after me. If you can think of anything good, say that too! Write it down first, because apparently people often forget what they mean to say at funerals.
Don't under any circumstances read that poem by Auden. It's been done to death (ha, ha) and it's too sad. Get someone to read Sonnet 12 by Shakespeare.
Music- "Blackbird" by the Beatles. "Plainsong" by The Cure. "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw. "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufian Stevens. There may not be time for all of them, but make sure you play the last one. Zoey helped me choose them and she's got them all on her iPod (it's got speakers if you need to borrow it).
Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got £260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it-lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding-sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money.
And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream.
Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that.
OK. That's it.
I love you.
Tessa xxx
”
”
Jenny Downham
“
Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.
We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.
And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente
“
If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community.
'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end.
”
”
Michael J. Sandel (Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?)
“
Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their message across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous-as Strunk and White put it, "death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram." Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste, and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land.
Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with." And if that isn't enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are "huge turn-offs." As one client said, "If you're trying to date a woman, I don't expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren't you trying to put your best foot forward?"
Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And as we shall see in the first chapter, this thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin.
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
“
Our identities as people of color should not be defined solely by our struggles. But, as we are perpetually made to feel like others in this country, that’s how we are taught to understand ourselves. There’s so much love in my race. I’ve been trying to think of my race as a site of joy. The feeling I get when I see a South Asian or Muslim person succeeding, like I’ve swallowed a handful of fireflies, lighting up my stomach. I glow into the night. When an older South Asian woman I’ve never met calls me bayti and she transforms into my auntie.
”
”
Nikesh Shukla (The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America)
“
The Internet is a good filter. It’s a good way to find men who share some of your values. However, your friends on message boards and on social networking sites, scattered all over the world, are not going to be there for you when the proverbial shit hits the fan. Spend more time making contact with men who are geographically close to you. If you have close friends in your area, consider moving into the same apartment complex or within a few blocks of one another. Think about the way gangs start in inner cities. Men and boys have lived and died to defend tribes with territories as small as a few blocks. Proximity creates familiarity and shared identity. It creates us. Spreading our alliances across nations and continents keeps us reliant on the power of the State and the global economy. Men who are separated and have no one else to rely on must rely on the State.
”
”
Jack Donovan (The Way of Men)
“
The site of the whale fall turns into a decades-long version of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, a debauched, celebratory party where creatures devour the whale “course by course, one by one.” The whale is the epitome of a postmortem benefactor, part of an arrangement as beautiful as it is sensible—an animal dying and donating its body so that others may thrive. “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious,” the carcass seems to say. The whale, in short, is a valuable necrocitizen.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death)
“
Cities are not ordained; they are wholly existential. To say that a city grew “because” it was located at a good site for trading is, in view of what we can see in the real world, absurd. Few resources in this world are more common than good sites for trading but most of the settlements that form at these good sites do not become cities.
”
”
Jane Jacobs (The Economy of Cities)
“
he released my lips and removed his hand from my panties. “Wha—oh.” He tugged them off and tossed them to the floor somewhere, then his mouth was on me. Right there. Holy crap. I tried to close my legs and squirm away, but he held my thighs open. It was so foreign. But so good. My eyes rolled back, my hips bucking off the bed to meet his roaming tongue. Despite never having done this before, he seemed to know enough, which I chose to be thankful for and ignored the urge to stalk his web history for porn sites.
”
”
Ella Fields (Suddenly Forbidden (Gray Springs University, #1))
“
Are they local enough that they can attend regular meetings, indeed can they be based at desks on my site? If not, have they good electronic links?
”
”
Open University (Choosing a human resources consultant)
“
There have been times recently, since the begining of our troubles, when the site of David awake active, conscious, walking and talking has made me want to retch, so acute is my loathing of him.
”
”
Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)
“
To my astonishment, within minutes, the dogs dragged Chucky’s bed and toys from the porch to the grave site and started to play on the mound of freshly dug earth. Chucky was gone, but they still included him in their game. At that, the floodgates opened. Dennie’s face crumpled. He turned and strode quickly away. In my mind, I heard Mom’s voice: “Have a good cry, Laurie. The more you cry, the less you pee.
”
”
Laurie Zaleski (Funny Farm: My Unexpected Life with 600 Rescue Animals)
“
Companies maintain lively web sites to put their view across but entrepreneur-owners have not stepped forward to do the same to help organize the mass of little owners and to provide a way for them to share views. Sure, there are bloggers writing about anything and everything, but there don’t seem to be shareholder-controlled sites to exchange thoughts and ideas about a company that participants own in common.
”
”
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics)
“
In a real road-construction situation, I would never get out of my car when traffic is backed up, walk over to the foreman of the crew, and ask if I can help make the road so that it all moves more quickly. Yet I found myself doing just that with God in my past when He was trying to repair me. Construction sites have caution cones and broken pavement and heavy equipment I'm not qualified to operate. I must have looked just as out of place trying to make repairs on myself all those years. When I put my trust in Him and have patience in Him as the foreman of my life--the One who is repairing a broken relationship with my mom, building me a stronger and healthier body and assembling healthier friendships and a marriage with a solid foundation--I live a life with much fewer obstructions on my ultimate commute to becoming fearless. And I trust that God has made the plans to finish the good work He has already begun. He will continue constructing the life He knows I'm meant to lead as I travel freely in my journey of "becoming.
”
”
Michelle Aguilar (Becoming Fearless: My Ongoing Journey of Learning to Trust God)
“
There is no good reason that a girl is shamed for sexting while a boy is not, that a woman’s number must be lower than a man’s, that a survivor of sexual assault has her credibility stolen from her along with her bodily integrity. For women to be truly safe, we must eradicate the use of the term “slut.” Only then will female sexuality become transformed from a site of pitfalls to one of positivity and possibility.
”
”
Leora Tanenbaum (I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet)
“
I wasn’t a misogynist when I started this,” Tyler replied. “But you get good and you start sleeping with all these women who have boyfriends, and you stop trusting women.”
A side effect of sarging is that it can lowers one’s opinion of the oppo35D site sex. You see too much betrayal, lying, and infidelity. If a woman has been married three years or more, you come to learn that she’s usually easier to sleep with than a single woman. If a woman has a boyfriend, you learn that you have a better chance of fucking her the night you meet her than getting her to return a phone call later. Women, you eventually realize, are just as bad as men-they’re just better at hiding it.
“I got hurt a lot when I first started picking up,” he continued. “I’d meet an amazing girl I really liked, and we’d talk all night. She’d say she loved me and was so lucky to have met me. But then I’d fail one shit test, and she’d walk away and wouldn’t even talk to me anymore. Everything we’d built up over the last eight hours would just go down the drain. So it hardened me.
”
”
Neil Strauss (The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists)
“
He gestured toward the rice pudding. "I put cinnamon on it. Cancels out the cholesterol. Read about it on the Men's Health Web site."
Her lips twitched. "That's bullshit." She eyed the banana cream pie. "What cheap pop-science justification have you got for that one?"
He contemplated the pie. "Well, bananas are good for you. Lots of potassium, which helps you shed water weight, right? And there's no trans fats in the pie crust. I can promise you that."
"Yeah?" Her lips pursed, suppressing a smile. "So what is in it?"
He grinned wickedly. "Lard," he announced. "Artery clogging, cholesterol-laden pig fat. Hope you're not a vegetarian.
”
”
Shannon McKenna (Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8))
“
The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause. A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally. Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site. When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas. With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something. This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator)
“
I'm afraid they're not very well-designed creatures, dragons."
Vimes listened.
"They would never have survived at all except that their home swamps were isolated and short of predators. Not that a dragon made good eating,
anyway-once you'd taken away the leathery skin and the enormous flight muscles, what was left must have been like biting into a badly-run chemical factory. No wonder dragons were always ill. They relied on permanent stomach trouble for supplies of fuel. Most of their brain power was taken up with controlling the complexities of then-digestion, which could distill flame-producing fuels from the most unlikely ingredients. They could even rearrange their internal plumbing overnight to deal with difficult processes. They lived on a chemical knife-edge the whole time. One misplaced hiccup and they were geography.
And when it came to choosing nesting sites, the females had all the common sense and mothering instinct of a brick."
Vimes wondered why people had been so worried about dragons in the olden days. If there was one in a cave near you, all you had to do was wait until it self-ignited, blew itself up, or died of acute indigestion.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8; City Watch, #1))
“
I co-created the Huffington Post and the Big sites as part of a grander strategy to knock down the false edifice that is the mainstream media, that is built upon the false proposition of “objective” journalism and the grotesque anti-American proposition of political correctness. My mission isn’t to quash debate—it’s to show that the mainstream media aren’t mainstream, that their feigned objectivity isn’t objective, and that open, rigorous debate is a positive good in our society.
”
”
Andrew Breitbart (Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World)
“
And she needed to surf some of the pregnancy websites she'd found when she first realized she was pregnant. Her friends with kids said there was lots of good information available on the sites. But had they meant the slideshow labeled "Poppy seed to pumpkin: how big is your baby? Imagining her unborn child as an ear of corn was odd enough. But would she ever get used to the thought that by the end of this pregnancy, she'd be carrying around something--someone--the size of a small pumpkin?
”
”
Beth K. Vogt (Somebody Like You)
“
You see,’ said Crowley, his voice leaden with fatalistic gloom, ‘it doesn’t really work that simply. You think wars get started because some old duke gets shot, or someone cuts off someone’s ear, or someone’s sited their missiles in the wrong place. It’s not like that. That’s just, well, just reasons, which haven’t got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can’t stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens)
“
...watch out, work’s a bad thing, he told me. You have to get up early, you have to listen to the boss all the time. If there’s no work you don’t eat, if there is work you have to work hard. Work is never good. Work seems good to you because it will let you to go out for pizza, go dancing, go to the movies. But when you have a family you won’t be going out for pizza, you won’t be going dancing. You’ll have to feed your family and then you’ll see how tough work is.
This is why you have to think hard about it. I’m not telling you to go to school or to get a job. I’m only telling you one thing: work is bad, so try to avoid it. I send you to school because I think that’s one way to avoid work. I felt this explanation, that work was a horrible thing, made more sense than what my mother had told me, that I was better. And I began to think that what my friends who’d gone to work in the building sites understood wasn’t true, either: that money equals work, and that therefore work equals happiness. I began to have doubts about my discovery that happiness meant going to work on a building site.
”
”
Nanni Balestrini (Vogliamo tutto)
“
Thanks,’ I managed. ‘If there’s anything I can do.’ ‘OK. Thanks.’ ‘John’s asked me to go back home, in case he turns up there.’ ‘OK. Good idea.’ It was awkward and strange. There’s no protocol for meeting your ex-husband’s new wife at the site where your son’s gone missing. ‘Well,
”
”
Gilly Macmillan (What She Knew)
“
And yet life is transformation: all that is good is transformation and all that is bad as well. For this reason he is in the right who encounters everything as something that will not return. It does not matter whether he then forgets or remembers, as long as he had been fully present only for its duration and been the site, the atmosphere, the world for what happened, as long as it happened within him, in his center, whatever is good and what is bad—then he really has nothing else to fear because something else of renewed significance is always about to happen next.
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke (The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke)
“
We wanted to make a website that would function as a hub, so that if you went online to buy a Jill Phillips CD, her site sent you to The Rabbit Room store with all the other artists she was friends with. Cross-pollination. But it was also books. There are too many good writers out there who are mostly unknown. The Rabbit Room store also carried books by Lewis, Tolkien, Marilynne Robinson, Dorothy Sayers, Flannery O’Connor, Walter Wangerin Jr., Jeffrey Overstreet, George MacDonald, and G. K. Chesterton—authors half of which you probably won’t find in a typical Christian bookstore.
”
”
Andrew Peterson (Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making)
“
...a bad diet will eventually kill our dreams. It's essential that we constantly evaluate the nutritional value of what we are feeding ourselves. It may come down to how many hours of television we're viewing, the quality of the programs we're watching, what music we're listening to, the material we're reading, the conversations we're having, the movies we're seeing, the Web sites we're visiting, the video games we're playing, or the people with whom we're associating. As harmless as these may sometimes seem, excessive consumption of things that induce negative thinking, bad habits, and wrong behavior will thwart our potential.
A good litmus test is to ask yourself if you're giving more airtime to the media, educators, politicians, economists, pop stars, friends, or tradition than you are to God's Word. To see our dreams actualized, God's Word and His will must take precedence over everything else.
”
”
Christine Caine
“
Consistency is everything to YouTube. If you provide consistent content over a period of time, as long as the quality is good, you will find your audience and your place on the site. You may not end up a viral sensation, but if you’re not making money exclusively off of YouTube, that’s no reason to worry.
”
”
L. David Harris (Get Noticed: Social Media Marketing for Entrepreneurs: Market Your Brand Without Being Annoying)
“
During the first couple years I worked for myself, entire weeks would go by without my accomplishing much, for no other reason than that I was anxious and stressed about what I had to do, and it was too easy to put everything off. I quickly learned, though, that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier. If I had to redesign an entire website, I’d force myself to sit down and would say, “Okay, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of the site. And before I knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project. The
”
”
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
“
They had found out.
Before I could panic, I made myself stretch my fingers wide and take a calming breath. You already knew this was bound to happen. At least that’s what I told myself.
The more I thought about it, the more I should have been appreciative that the people at the chapel in Las Vegas hadn’t recognized him. Or that people on the street had been oblivious and hadn’t seen us going in and out of there. Or that the receptionist at the acupuncturist hadn’t snapped a picture on her phone and posted it online.
Because I might not understand all people, much less most of them, but I understood nosey folks. And nosey folks would do something like that without a second thought. Yet, I reminded myself that there was nothing to be embarrassed about.
It would be fine. So, one gossip site posted about us getting married. Whoop-de-do. There was probably a thousand sites just like it.
I briefly thought about Diana hearing about it, but I’d deal with that later. There was no use in getting scared now. She was the only one whose reaction I cared about. My mom and sisters’ opinions and feelings weren’t exactly registering at the top of my list now… or ever. I made myself shove them to the back of my thoughts. I was tired of being mad and upset; it affected my work. Plus, they’d made me sad and mad enough times in my life. I wasn’t going to let them ruin another day.
Picking my phone up again, I quickly texted Aiden back, swallowing my nausea at the same time.
Me: Who told you?
Not even two minutes passed before my phone dinged with a response.
Miranda: Trevor’s blowing up my phone.
Eww. Trevor.
Me: We knew it was going to happen eventually, right? Good luck with Trev. I’m glad he doesn’t have my number.
And I was even gladder there wasn’t a home phone; otherwise, I’m positive he would have been blowing it up too.
I managed to get back to looking at images on the screen for a few more minutes—a bit more distracted than usual—when the phone beeped again.
It was Aiden/Miranda. I should really change his contact name.
Miranda: Good luck? I’m not answering his calls.
What?
Me: That psycho will come visit if you don’t.
Was that me being selfish? Yes. Did I care? No.
Aiden: I know.
Uh.
Me: You’re always at practice…
Aiden: Have fun.
This asshole! I almost laughed, but before I could, he sent me another message.
Aiden: I’ll get back to him in a couple days. Don’t worry.
Snorting, I texted back.
Me: I’m not worried. If he drops by, I’ll set him up in your room.
Aiden: You genuinely scare me.
Me: You don’t know how many times you barely made it through the day alive, for the record.
He didn’t text me back after that
”
”
Mariana Zapata (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me)
“
As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)
It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.
”
”
Daniel Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million)
“
If you see one hundred insects working together toward a common goal, it’s a sure bet they’re siblings. But when you see one hundred people working on a construction site or marching off to war, you’d be astonished if they all turned out to be members of one large family. Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability. We’re really good at holding others accountable for their actions, and we’re really skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own. Phil Tetlock, a leading researcher in the study of accountability, defines accountability as the “explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, or actions to others,” coupled with an expectation that people will reward or punish us based on how well we justify ourselves.8 When nobody is answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
“
You can have it all,
Luxury and wealth,
A lot of friends and a good health,
And own everything on earth.
However, if you have greed,
Jealousy, bitter and want not to see anyone get ahead in life.
A dumping site is better than you because not everything found on a dumping site has no value.
Plastics can be recycled,
And some goods are not too bad to be used again.
”
”
Nomthandazo Tsembeni
“
Why do modern humans love sweets so much? Not because in the early twenty-first century we must gorge on ice cream and chocolate in order to survive. Rather, it is because when our Stone Age ancestors came across sweet fruit or honey, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as much of it as quickly as possible. Why do young men drive recklessly, get involved in violent arguments and hack confidential Internet sites? Because they are following ancient genetic decrees that might be useless and even counterproductive today, but that made good evolutionary sense 70,000 years ago. A young hunter who risked his life chasing a mammoth outshone all his competitors and won the hand of the local beauty, and we are now stuck with his macho genes.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
We’re turning onto Frontage Road headed into Vail Village when she tells me she met someone.
“What’s that?” I ask, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.
She nods and pulls out her phone. “On Facebook. I don’t know why I’m bothering with dating sites when there are guys like this available.” She waves the phone.
Fuck that. I’m available.
“I don’t think you’re ready yet,” I snap. “We’re still practicing your dating skills, remember?”
“Oh.” She frowns. “Are we exclusively practicing? I didn’t know. I thought this guy would be good practice.”
I make a mental note to hack her and alter all the incoming messages from men. Why the hell didn’t I do this the day I met her? When she told me about men sending her photos of their dicks?
”
”
Jana Aston (Trust (Cafe, #3))
“
Suppose someone says, “Unfortunately, the popularity of soccer, the world’s favorite pastime, is starting to decline.” You suspect he is wrong. How do you question the claim? Don’t even think of taking a personal shot like “You’re silly.” That only adds heat, not light. “I don’t think so” only expresses disagreement without delving into why you disagree. “What do you mean?” lowers the emotional temperature with a question but it’s much too vague. Zero in. You might say, “What do you mean by ‘pastime’?” or “What evidence is there that soccer’s popularity is declining? Over what time frame?” The answers to these precise questions won’t settle the matter, but they will reveal the thinking behind the conclusion so it can be probed and tested. Since Socrates, good teachers have practiced precision questioning, but still it’s often not used when it’s needed most. Imagine how events might have gone if the Kennedy team had engaged in precision questioning when planning the Bay of Pigs invasion: “So what happens if they’re attacked and the plan falls apart?” “They retreat into the Escambray Mountains, where they can meet up with other anti-Castro forces and plan guerrilla operations.” “How far is it from the proposed landing site in the Bay of Pigs to the Escambray Mountains?” “Eighty miles.” “And what’s the terrain?” “Mostly swamp and jungle.” “So the guerrillas have been attacked. The plan has fallen apart. They don’t have helicopters or tanks. But they have to cross eighty miles of swamp and jungle before they can begin to look for shelter in the mountains? Is that correct?” I suspect that this conversation would not have concluded “sounds good!” Questioning like that didn’t happen, so Kennedy’s first major decision as president was a fiasco. The lesson was learned, resulting in the robust but respectful debates of the Cuban missile crisis—which exemplified the spirit we encouraged among our forecasters.
”
”
Philip E. Tetlock (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction)
“
So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.
”
”
Mahmood Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror)
“
You think wars get started because some old duke gets shot, or someone cuts off someone’s ear, or someone’s sited their missiles in the wrong place. It’s not like that. That’s just, well, just reasons, which haven’t got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can’t stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
So at my old school,” he said. “There was this kid on the baseball team. People thought, I don’t know. They saw that he went to some website or something.” ... “They made it impossible for him to play. Every day, the found another way to mess with him. Then one Friday after school, they locked him in the storage closet.” He winced, as if remembering and I knew. I knew then. “All night long and the whole next day. A tiny, dark, disgusting airless space. His parents thought he was at the away game and someone told the coaches he was sick, so no one even looked for him. No one knew he was trapped in there.” His chest was heaving and I was remembering how he told me he didn’t used to have claustrophobia and now he did. “He was really good too, probably the best player on the team or could have been. And he didn’t even do anything. The guy just went to these sites and someone saw. Do you get it? Do you get what it would mean for me? The assistant captain? I want to be captain next year so maybe I can graduate early. No scholarship. No nothing. These guys aren’t” - he made finger quotes - “evolved. They’re not from Northern California. They don’t do all-day sits or draw pictures.” The dagger went straight in. “It’s brutal in a locker room.
”
”
Jandy Nelson (I'll Give You the Sun)
“
Tabula Rasa can make you feel like you’ve taken a train to Bizarro world. I remember my very first night here—and this is goin’ on fifteen years ago—I was takin’ a walk downtown, tryin’ to get a feel for the place. And I’m walkin’ through a construction site—and it was all construction sites back then, you understand—and I come across this hole in the ground, ’bout ten feet in diameter. I look down and I can’t see a bottom, so I pull a quarter out of my pocket and toss it down, and listen for a clink or a splash. Nothin’. Coin just tumbles into the darkness and disappears. So now I’m real curious, and I look around for somethin’ else to throw down there. And teeterin’ right on the edge of the hole is an old refrigerator. So, I circle around and I give it a good kick and it tumbles down into the hole. I hear it bang off the side a few times but once again, there’s no crash, no splash, like it just kept fallin’ forever. It was the strangest thing. So I figure this is the first of this city’s many unknowable mysteries and I start to go on about my way. But then I see the second strange thing—this goat, it goes flying past me, in midair. Like it was fired from a cannon. And now I think I’m losin’ my mind, like maybe it’s not just tobacco in my cigar, if you know what I’m sayin’. So I walk along and I come across a guy sittin’ on the curb and I say, ‘Holy cow, partner, did you see that goat?’ And the fella says, ‘Well, that’s my goat.’ And I say, ‘Well, I hate to tell ya, but I think it’s gone. It took off flyin’.’ And the fella says, ‘That’s impossible. I had him chained to a refrigerator.’” Zoey stared for a moment, then snorted a laugh that almost caused her to choke on her sandwich.
”
”
David Wong (Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (Zoey Ashe, #1))
“
Why do young men drive recklessly, get involved in violent arguments and hack confidential Internet sites? Because they are following ancient genetic decrees that might be useless and even counterproductive today, but that made good evolutionary sense 70,000 years ago. A young hunter who risked his life chasing a mammoth outshone all his competitors and won the hand of the local beauty; and we are now stuck with his macho genes.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Drugs and oils work in opposite ways. Drugs toxify. Oils detoxify. Drugs clog and confuse receptor sites. Oils clean receptor sites. Drugs depress the immune system. Oils strengthen the immune system. Antibiotics attack bacteria indiscriminately, killing both the good and the bad. Oils attack only the harmful bacteria, allowing our body’s friendly flora to flourish.” David Stewart, Ph.D., R.A., The Chemistry of Essential Oils, 2005
”
”
Jen O'Sullivan (The Essential Oil Truth: The Facts Without the Hype)
“
And she needed to surf some of the pregnancy websites she'd found when she first realized she was pregnant. Her friends with kids said there was lots of good information available on the sites. But had they meant the slideshow labeled "Poppy seed to pumpkin: how big is your baby"? Imagining her unborn child as an ear of corn was odd enough. But would she ever get used to the thought that by the end of this pregnancy, she'd be carrying around something--someone--the size of a small pumpkin?
”
”
Beth K. Vogt
“
In a city it's impossible to forget we live in places raised and built over time itself. The past is underneath our feet. Every day when I leave the house , I may walk over a place where a king killed a wolf in the Royal Forest of Stocket, one of the medieval hunting forests ,where alder and birch , oak and hazel,willow, cherry and aspen grew. The living trees were cut down , their wood used to fuel the city's growth , it's trade, it's life.The ancient wood ,preserved in peat, was found underneath the city(The site of the killing is fairly well buried -the wolf and the king had their encounter some time around the early years of the eleventh century)It's the same as in any other city, built up and over and round , ancient woodlands cut down , bogs drained , watercourses altered, a landscape rendered almost untraceable, vanished.Here, there's a history of 8,000 years of habitation , the evidence in excavated fish hooks and fish bone reliquaries, in Bronze Age grave-goods of arrowheads and beakers, what's still under the surface, in revenants and ghosts of gardens , of doo'cots and orchards, of middens and piggeries, plague remains and witch-hunts, of Franciscans and Carmelites, their friaries buried , over-taken by time and stone .This is a stonemasons' city , a city of weavers and gardeners and shipwrights and where I walk , there was once a Maison Dieu, a leper house; there was song schools and sewing schools, correction houses and tollboths, hidden under layers of time, still there
”
”
Esther Woolfson (Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary)
“
I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn’t real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they’ve invaded the movies. I’m not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion — that’s good technology. I’m talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They’ve become like horses in a western — they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one.
”
”
David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)
“
United States, Google Versus
A man approached the checkout desk with a request.
MAN: I want to use one of your public computers, but could you please disable Google on it?
ME: Pardon?
MAN: I do not believe in, nor trust, Google. They are taking over the United States.
ME: I see. Well, I can’t disable it, I’m sorry. But you don’t have to visit the site if you don’t want to.
MAN: That’s not good enough.
ME: Come again?
MAN: I refuse to use the computers if Google is on them.
ME: Okay.
MAN: -
ME: -
MAN: -
Me: Enjoy your day!
”
”
Gina Sheridan (I Work at a Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks)
“
World-class chess players, in addition to being considered awesomely smart, are generally assumed to have superhuman memories, and with good reason. Champions routinely put on exhibitions in which they play lesser opponents while blindfolded; they hold the entire chessboard in their heads. Some of these exhibitions strike the rest of us as simply beyond belief. The Czech master Richard Reti once played twenty nine blindfolded games simultaneously. (Afterward he left his briefcase at the exhibition site and commented on what a poor memory he had.)
”
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Geoff Colvin (Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else)
“
She had grown up with they type, science majors with little straight mouths and receding hairlines and those plastic liners in their shirt pockets in case their pens leaked, working away systematically at the problems, with government funds and nice little wives and children to go home to at night. But then she recognized this thought as sheer prejudice left over from her old life, before sheer womanhood had exploded within her and she realized that the world men had systematically made was all dreary poison, good for nothing really but battlefields and waste sites.
”
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John Updike (The Witches of Eastwick)
“
Don’t be surprised if you open up one of these references and find your eyes crossing at the
site of what appears to be a completely separate language: “transformative enculturation
through legitimate peripheral situated participation in a practice community…” It may inspire
you to reject it all outright. But also don’t forget the words of Kurt Lewin: “There’s nothing more
practical than a good theory!” And know that whatever happens in a given educational situation, it’s following someone’s theories and beliefs, conscious or not. Thus, it’s better to think
about it and make sure it makes sense. Then get back to the tinkering.
”
”
Curt Gabrielson (Tinkering: Kids Learn by Making Stuff)
“
Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.
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Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
“
I explained Crime 101 to the kid. “Guns escalate things. They’re only good for crowd control. We’re going in after closing hours, so we don’t need crowd control.” “Yeah,” Augie said, “but what about security? What if they start bustin’ caps?” Bustin’ caps. I wondered how many hip-hop posters he had on his bedroom wall. “Site’s handled by Gold Star Security Northwest,” I explained. “They don’t carry guns, just Tasers and pepper spray. They also make thirteen bucks an hour, and heroics are highly discouraged in their training manual. Their standing orders in case of a burglary are to retreat to safe ground and call the real cops. That gives us plenty of time to bug out if we get spotted and blow it.” “Cool,” Augie said.
”
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Craig Schaefer (A Plain-Dealing Villain (Daniel Faust, #4))
“
In the first place a man never is happy but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal and, when he does it is only to be disappointed: he is mostly shipwrecked in the end and comes into the harbour with masts and riggings gone. And then it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment, always vanishing; and now it is over….We are like lambs playing in the field, while the butcher eyes them and selects first one then the other; for in our good days we do not know what calamity fate at this very moment has in store for us, sickness persecution, impoverishment, mutilation, loss of site, madness, and death.
”
”
Irvin D. Yalom (The Schopenhauer Cure)
“
Pen, you really shouldn’t use the same password for all your accounts. I’ve headed off three hackers in the last week who would’ve gotten into your PayPal, bank, and electric company accounts.” “What?” Penelope was obviously confused at the change in subject, but Cade merely relaxed back in his seat and kept his eyes on Beth as she fidgeted uncomfortably. “Using PenisGod isn’t a good username for things like Amazon and eBay. And you really need to delete your craigslist account because calling yourself a penis god is only attracting weirdos. You probably don’t even remember you had that old ad up when you were trying to sell your bicycle. Well, it’s one of the most clicked-on ads on the site for San Antonio. I’m not exaggerating either. You had four hundred and sixty-nine messages—and I’m not even going to comment on the sixty-nine thing. But three hundred and fourteen of those contained pictures of men’s dicks. Fifty-seven contained marriage proposals, most from overseas; twenty-seven were from women who were interested in a threesome with you, fifty-five were spam, people trying to get you to click on links or buy some crap product, and the remaining sixteen emails were religious in nature, telling you to repent for your soul.” “I should probably be pissed you got into my account, but I trust you, so I’m not. But it’s not penis god!” Penelope exclaimed huffily. “It’s Pen IS God.” Cade burst out laughing. “Seriously, sis? Penis god? Just wait until the guys hear this!
”
”
Susan Stoker (Shelter for Elizabeth (Badge of Honor: Texas Heroes, #5))
“
Pepper’s given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. She had been given them in a naming ceremony in a muddy valley field that contained three sick sheep and a number of leaky polythene teepees. Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant-y-Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent-trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune’s marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper’s mother returned to Pepper’s surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.
”
”
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
“
This book is fiction and all the characters are my own, but it was inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. I first heard of the place in the summer of 2014 and discovered Ben Montgomery’s exhaustive reporting in the Tampa Bay Times. Check out the newspaper’s archive for a firsthand look. Mr. Montgomery’s articles led me to Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her archaeology students at the University of South Florida. Their forensic studies of the grave sites were invaluable and are collected in their Report on the Investigation into the Deaths and Burials at the Former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is available at the university’s website. When Elwood reads the school pamphlet in the infirmary, I quote from their report on the school’s day-to-day functions. Officialwhitehouseboys.org is the website of Dozier survivors, and you can go there for the stories of former students in their own words. I quote White House Boy Jack Townsley in chapter four, when Spencer is describing his attitude toward discipline. Roger Dean Kiser’s memoir, The White House Boys: An American Tragedy, and Robin Gaby Fisher’s The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South (written with Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley) are excellent accounts. Nathaniel Penn’s GQ article “Buried Alive: Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement” contains an interview with an inmate named Danny Johnson in which he says, “The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.” Mr. Johnson spent twenty-seven years in solitary confinement; I have recast that quote in chapter sixteen. Former prison warden Tom Murton wrote about the Arkansas prison system in his book with Joe Hyams called Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal. It provides a ground’s-eye view of prison corruption and was the basis of the movie Brubaker, which you should see if you haven’t. Julianne Hare’s Historic Frenchtown: Heart and Heritage in Tallahassee is a wonderful history of that African-American community over the years. I quote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. a bunch; it was energizing to hear his voice in my head. Elwood cites his “Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools” (1959); the 1962 LP Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, specifically the “Fun Town” section; his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; and his 1962 speech at Cornell College. The “Negroes are Americans” James Baldwin quote is from “Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son. I was trying to see what was on TV on July 3, 1975. The New York Times archive has the TV listings for that night, and I found a good nugget.
”
”
Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys)
“
The little car was soon free of the city, for the smear of suburbia that had once lain along the western highways for miles was gone. During the Plague Years of the eighties, when in some areas not one person in twenty remained alive, the suburbs were not a good place to be. Miles from the supermart, no gas for the car, and all the split-level ranch homes around you full of the dead. No help, no food. Packs of huge status-symbol dogs—Afghans, Alsatians, Great Danes—running wild across the lawns ragged with burdock and plantain. Picture window cracked. Who’ll come and mend the broken glass? People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned. Fireweed, from which bees make the finest honey of all, grew acre after acre over the sites of Kensington Homes West, Sylvan Oak Manor Estates, and Valley Vista Park.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Lathe of Heaven)
“
Something is bothering you. I have sensed it all morning.” He slid his communicator back into his pocket then took her hand in his, linking their fingers together. The action took her off guard, but she welcomed it. The first time she’d held his hand he’d been confused by it, but this was the second time in the last few days he’d initiated it. She loved it.
“Nothing, just… I was hoping that this evening we could talk about something.”
His shoulders stiffened just the slightest fraction. She was getting good at reading the subtle changes in his body language. “What about?”
“Not now. I know you need to get to one of your job sites. Or there’s an emergency at the Samio.”
He raised a dark eyebrow. “How do you know this?”
“Because your communicator has been buzzing like crazy since we…”
Her cheeks heated up and she cleared her throat. It had started going off when she’d been sitting on his face this morning. They’d both ignored it. Then when she got out of the shower she’d found him responding to what seemed like dozens of communications, one buzz after another. The sounds had been maddening. He’d stopped responding when they left his place, but she understood how busy he was and didn’t want to get in the way of that.
“Since we what?” he murmured, leaning closer as they came to a stop in front of another elevator. This one had a shiny, sleek-looking silver door.
“You know what,” she whispered, glancing around.
There were two males waiting at the next elevator and though they weren’t looking in their direction she wasn’t going to talk about that in public.
“I want to hear you say it.”
“That’s because you’re a pervert.”
He gave her one of those grins that made her wonder how she’d ever lived without knowing this male. It still stunned her how much he’d come to mean to her in the past week and a half.
“That’s very true where you’re concerned.” He dropped a kiss on her forehead.
-Con & Leilani
”
”
Savannah Stuart (Claimed by the Warrior (Lumineta, #3))
“
word-of-mouth advertising. This is the Information Age, for Pete’s sake, so provide as much as you can. This can get more interesting if your product or ser vice is more interesting, but every product or ser vice can create a community—even bottled water or shaving cream. And I could go on with a chapter of ideas to expand on the concept, but you’ll do it yourself as you start down the path. Just think of your Web site as a community. Focus on it, not on you, and look to get involved with and serve that community at every turn. A good consumer example of a Web site that builds community is Stonyfield Farms, producer of organic dairy products (yogurt, milk, etc.). Their Web site offers terrific information on organic foods and how to help protect the Earth. They also provide recipes and a multitude of other information on wellness. One thing they could do to improve their community is to prominently promote a subscriber program. As of this writing, they
”
”
Chet Holmes (The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies)
“
I remember a personal experience. Almost in tears from pain (I had terrible sores on my feet from wearing torn shoes), I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. Very cold, bitter winds struck us. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life. What would there be to eat tonight? If a piece of sausage came as extra ration, should I exchange it for a piece of bread? Should I trade my last cigarette, which was left from a bonus I received a fortnight ago, for a bowl of soup? How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment which served as one of my shoelaces? Would I get to our work site in time to join my usual working party or would I have to join another, which might have a brutal foreman? What could I do to get on good terms with the Capo, who could help me to obtain work in camp instead of undertaking this horribly long daily march? I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? —“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
The media environment... has changed in ways that foster [social and cultural] division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national television networks. By the 1990s there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum, and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo-chamber. And then there's the "filter bubble," in which search engines and YouTube algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds. Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
“
I select the right practice gun, the one about the size of a pistol, but bulkier, and offer it to Caleb.
Tris’s fingers slide between mine. Everything comes easily this morning, every smile and every laugh, every word and every motion.
If we succeed in what we attempt tonight, tomorrow Chicago will be safe, the Bureau will be forever changed, and Tris and I will be able to build a new life for ourselves somewhere. Maybe it will even be a place where I trade my guns and knives for more productive tools, screwdrivers and nails and shovels. This morning I feel like I could be so fortunate. I could.
“It doesn’t shoot real bullets,” I say, “but it seems like they designed it so it would be as close as possible to one of the guns you’ll be using. It feels real, anyway.”
Caleb holds the gun with just his fingertips, like he’s afraid it will shatter in his hands.
I laugh. “First lesson: Don’t be afraid of it. Grab it. You’ve held one before, remember? You got us out of the Amity compound with that shot.”
“That was just lucky,” Caleb says, turning the gun over and over to see it from every angle. His tongue pushes into his cheek like he’s solving a problem. “Not the result of skill.”
“Lucky is better than unlucky,” I say. “We can work on skill now.”
I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina.
“Are you here to help or what, Stiff?” I say. I hear myself speaking in the voice I cultivated as an initiation instructor, but this time I use it in jest. “You could use some practice with that right arm, if I recall correctly. You too, Christina.”
Tris makes a face at me, then she and Christina cross the room to get their own weapons.
“Okay, now face the target and turn the safety off,” I say. There is a target across the room, more sophisticated, than the wooden-board target in the Dauntless training rooms. It has three rings in three different colors, green, yellow, and red, so it’s easier to tell where the bullets it. “Let me see how you would naturally shoot.”
He lifts up the gun with one hand, squares off his feet and shoulders to the target like he’s about to lift something heavy, and fires. The gun jerks back and up, firing the bullet near the ceiling. I cover my mouth with my hand to disguise my smile.
“There’s no need to giggle,” Caleb says irritably.
“Book learning doesn’t teach you everything, does it?” Christina says. “You have to hold it with both hands. It doesn’t look as cool, but neither does attacking the ceiling.”
“I wasn’t trying to look cool!”
Christina stands, her legs slightly uneven, and lifts both arms. She stares the target for a moment, then fires. The training bullet hits the outer circle of the target and bounces off, rolling on the floor. It leaves a circle of light on the target, marking the impact site. I wish I’d had this technology during initiation training.
“Oh, good,” I say. “You hit the air around your target’s body. How useful.”
“I’m a little rusty,” Christina admits, grinning.
”
”
Veronica Roth (Allegiant (Divergent, #3))
“
He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which he’d stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any old how.
I helped him.
Then he asked me, straight out, ‘What would you say was the true centre of Paris?’
I was taken aback, wrong-footed. I thought this knowledge was part of a whole body of very rarefied and secret lore. Playing for time, I said, ‘The starting point of France’s roads . . . the brass plate on the parvis of Notre-Dame.’
He gave me a withering look.
‘Do you take for me a sap?’
The centre of Paris, a spiral with four centres, each completely self-contained, independent of the other three. But you don’t reveal this to just anybody. I suppose - I hope - it was in complete good faith that Alexandre Arnoux mentioned the lamp behind the apse of St-Germain-l’Auxerrois. I wouldn’t have created that precedent. My turn now to let the children play with the lock.
‘The centre, as you must be thinking of it, is the well of St-Julien-le-Pauvre. The “Well of Truth” as it’s been known since the eleventh century.’
He was delighted. I’d delivered. He said, ‘You know, you and I could do great things together. It’s a pity I’m already “beyond redemption”, even at this very moment.’
His unhibited display of brotherly affection was of childlike spontaneity. But he was still pursuing his line of thought: he dashed out to the nearby stationery shop and came back with a little basic pair of compasses made of tin.
‘Look. The Vieux-Chene, the Well. The Well, the Arbre-a-Liege On either side of the Seine, adhering closely to the line he’d drawn, the age-old tavern signs were at pretty much the same distance from the magic well.
‘Well, now, you see, it’s always been the case that whenever something bad happens at the Vieux-Chene, a month later — a lunar month, that is, just twenty-eight days — the same thing happens at old La Frite’s place, but less serious. A kind of repeat performance. An echo
Then he listed, and pointed out on the map, the most notable of those key sites whose power he or his friends had experienced.
In conclusion he said, ‘I’m the biggest swindler there is, I’m prepared to be swindled myself, that’s fair enough. But not just anywhere. There are places where, if you lie, or think ill, it’s Paris you disrespect. And that upsets me. That’s when I lose my cool: I hit back. It’s as if that’s what I was there for.
”
”
Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)
“
THE GLOBE | Unlocking the Wealth in Rural Markets Mamta Kapur, Sanjay Dawar, and Vineet R. Ahuja | 151 words In India and other large emerging economies, rural markets hold great promise for boosting corporate earnings. Companies that sell in the countryside, however, face poor infrastructure, widely dispersed customers, and other challenges. To better understand the obstacles and how to overcome them, the authors—researchers with Accenture—conducted extensive surveys and interviews with Indian business leaders in multiple industries. Their three-year study revealed several successful strategies for increasing revenues and profits in rural markets: Start with a good distribution plan. The most effective approaches are multipronged—for example, adding extra layers to existing networks and engaging local partners to create new ones. Mine data to identify prospective customers. Combining site visits, market surveys, and GIS mapping can help companies discover new buyers. Forge tight bonds with channel partners. It pays to spend time and money helping distributors and retailers improve their operations. Create durable ties with customers. Companies can build loyalty by addressing customers’ welfare and winning the trust of community leaders.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Daily work in the field of online advertising, as Jack Goldenberg sees it, is still significantly different from what the trends are propagated by online promotions.
Defining online budget
According to Jack Goldenberg a vast majority of the budget for online advertising does not exceed $2,000 on a monthly basis, depending on the perception of the company as they can bring effects "online adventure", established budgets for online advertising move in value from $200 to $2,000 per month (with highest proportion of $200-$500). This does not mean that a number of companies gives less advertising - but even then it can not be called "creating the campaign." Goldenberg believes that in order to create an online advertising campaign there should be a budget of at least $500 for the use of different types of online advertising.
Goldenberg explains this as: In an environment of such budget is not simply distribute the money "wisely" and that since it has obvious benefits through a variety of online advertising systems.
Jack Goldenberg found out how most companies in the world and USA are oriented towards effects in relation to the funds that are made for advertising. In this type of company, regardless of what everyone knows to be used types of brand advertising (advertising through banners - display advertising) to create recognizable firms in certain target groups, the effects of such advertising are not directly comparable with respect to the effects of (price per click - CPC - Cost per click) with contextual advertising, which for years has given much more efficient (measurable) results in relation to advertising banners, concludes Mr. Goldenberg.
According to Yoel Goldenberg it is good when there is an understanding in companies that brand advertising has a different type of effects in relation to the PPC (contextual) advertising, and that would be it "documented" in a certain way, it is necessary to constantly explore and find those web sites that deliver the best effects for optimum need of assets.
The process of creating an online advertising campaigns, explained by Goldenberg, usually starts (or should start) finding individual Web sites on which to advertise a company could, possibly longer term.
Unfortunately, says Goldenberg, in our country is not in all sectors (industries) simply find diverse Web sites from which to choose "pretenders" for online advertising. An even greater problem is the fact that long-term advertising on a Web site does not bring the desired effect, unless it is constantly not working to the content of advertising often changes with an emphasis on meeting the needs of potential clients.
”
”
Jack Goldenberg (My Secret List of Sites that Pay: Websites that pay you from home (Quick Easy Money))
“
The sacred site thus created is a space that nurtures the sense of the continuum in which we are immersed. Many indigenous cultures still have this sacred relational sense of the world that is nurtured by ceremonies; and many of a variety of cultures in these times of great change seek such a relational sense – and who may identify as being in “recovery from Western civilization” . I have been engaged for decades now, in re-turning to my indigenous religious heritage of Western Europe, re-creating, and re-inventing a ceremonial practice that celebrates the sacred journey around Sun: it has been an intuitive, organic process synthesizing bits that I have learned from good teachers and scholars, and bits that have just shown up within dreams and imagination, as well as academic research. It has been a shamanic journey: that is, I have relied on my direct lived experience for an understanding of the sacred, as opposed to relying on an external authority, external imposed symbol, story or image. It has not been a pre-scriptive journey: I have scripted it myself, self-scribed it, and in cahoots with the many who participated in the storytelling circles, rituals and classes over decades. The pathway was and is made in the walking. It is part of a new fabric of understanding – created by new texts and contexts, both personal and communal - that have been emerging in recent decades, and continue so, at awesome speed in our times.
”
”
Glenys Livingstone (A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her)
“
In addition to all the information about income, education, and looks, men and women on the dating site listed their race. They were also asked to indicate a preference regarding the race of their potential dates. The two preferences were “the same as mine” or “it doesn’t matter.” Like the Weakest Link contestants, the website users were now publicly declaring how they felt about people who didn’t look like them. They would reveal their actual preferences later, in confidential e-mails to the people they wanted to date.
Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men. This means that an Asian man who is good-looking, rich, and well educated will receive fewer than 25 percent as many e-mails from white women as a white man with the same qualifications would receive; similarly, black and Latino men receive about half as many e-mails from white women as they would if they were white.
Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across — especially to potential mates of their own race — as open-minded?
”
”
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
“
Add your typical shower and claw feet
Owners claw foot tub, consider incorporating the most traditional sense of joy in the ease and comfort revolutionary shower, governments are mainly engaged in the race just to check in early for power within very ready. Clawfoot tubs wear’s now includes a shower; there are many strategies to use the shower in the bathroom now. Even if a person must be determined in those particular individual hairs, can be costly and impractical. Although the site has a separate shower grow, keep in mind that you want the products and save more modern maintenance. Value management easier and more efficient to add a shower curtain and bath address.
The information is not expensive, there are some ideas that you can include in the acquired shower. Contractor or plumber can provide ideas and even to make for you. The original can take water heater shower bath in the direction of the feet and the creation of a rod with an en suite shower room, and when the curtain. Shower curtains apartment surrounded significantly reduces splash of water leaks. Another option would be surplus tiles on the long term, the use of H2O "enemy" and shower rod and curtain also furnished, "L" of the aspects described in determining the bath. What will be more expensive and bathroom alone for a long time, some people are afraid of this option.
On the way to the drain in the shower, you could be the cables hidden in the bathroom near the wall. The second course in the HVAC responsible for pre-tube immediately describes the bath to the option in the direction of the traditional classical appearance. There are several different types of decorative lighting and lids which are made in such a way that appears to choose in the hoses pin and presented a lot of good taste on the market.
For those who are willing to deal with their own tasks, traders improving the registered owner of the Depot and Lowe's contain a number of "do it yourself" kits are unique measurements. Such kits are barrels and other containers, as defined above use’s shower built for joint legs. Everything requires a few simple policies and lower resistance to the purchase is detected. This kind of "precursors" of the water, you can judge for yourself in the shower longitudinal shower, shower curtains and thoughts. If you take even more concerned that the easiest only independent bathroom each provider in the health of office workers only in the direction of the support of others and crank implementing rules. Have a good friend or spouse and children of a member who keep an eye on your health, as it is commonly known.
No need for the resolution, that the decision to migrate to an item in the shower of his classic bathroom was somewhat effortlessly came to rise. It goes in the direction of maximizing claw foot tub, or take an impressive ease of use aerosol own desire. Many decisions wonderful shower curtain in the direction of the changes the rest of the room was coming towards a holistic view of their cosmetics, and a lot of fun to drive in the direction of your claw foot tub.
”
”
Elite Shower
“
sighed. “I can’t say that you weren’t expected.” “I’m just going to be walking around here and taking some measurements. It says here… you own eighty acres? That is one of the most gorgeous mansions I have ever seen,” he rambled on. “It must have cost you millions. I could never afford such a beauty. Well, heck, for that matter I couldn’t afford the millions of dollars in taxes a house like this would assess, let alone such a pricey property. Do you have an accountant?” Zo opened her mouth to respond, but he continued, “For an estate this size, I would definitely have one.” “I do have an accountant,” she cut in, with frustration. “Furthermore, I have invested a lot of money bringing this mansion up to speed. You can see my investment is great.” “Of course, it would be. The fact of the matter is, Mrs. Kane, a lot of people are in over their heads in property. You still have to pay up, or we take the place. Well, I’ll get busy now. Pay no mind to me.” He walked on, taking notes. “Clairrrrre!” Zo called as soon as she entered the house. “Bring your cell phone!” Two worry-filled months went by and many calls were made to lawyers, before Zoey finally picked one that made her feel confident. And then the letter came with the totals and the due date. “There is no way we can pay this, Mom, even if we sold off some of our treasures, because a lot of them are contracted to museums anyway. I am feeling awfully poor all of a sudden, and insecure.” “Yes, and I did some research, thinking I’d be forced to sell. It’s unlikely that anyone else around here can afford this place. It looks like they are going to get it all; they aren’t just charging for this year. What we have here is a value about equal to a little country. And all the new construction sites for housing developments suddenly popping up on this side of the river, does not help. Value is going up.” Zo put her head in her hands. “Ohhh, oh, oh, oh!” “Yeah, bring out the ice-cream and cake. I need comforting,” sighed Claire. The cell phone rang. “Yes, tonight? You guys have become pretty good to us, haven’t you?! You know, Bob, Mom and I thought we were just going to pig out on ice cream and cake. We found out we are losing this estate and are going to be poor again and we are bummed out.” There was a long pause. “No, that’s okay, I understand. Yeah, okay, bye.” “Well?” Zo ask dryly. “He was appropriately sorry, and he got off the phone fast, saying he remembered he had other business to take care of. Do you want to cry? I do…” “I’ll get the cake and dish the ice cream. You make our tea and we’ll cry together.” A pitter patter began to drum on the window. “Rain again. It seems softer though, dear.” “I thought you said this was going to be a softer rain!” It started to pour. “At least this is not a thunder storm… What was that?” “Thunder,” replied Claire, unmoved and resigned. An hour had gone by when there was a rapping at the door. “People rarely use the doorbell, ever notice that?” Zo asked on the way to the door. She opened it to reveal two wet guys holding a pizza, salad, soft drink, and giant chocolate chip cookies in a plastic container. In a plastic
”
”
Zoey Kane (The Riddles of Hillgate (Z & C Mysteries #1))
“
My Little Pony Game Helps You Get A Creator
With My Little Pony games, you can enjoy many categories such as Dress Up games, Makeover games, riding games, racing games,...Each game brings you the different sentiments and it depends on your hobby that you can choose the suitable game for your free time. At our website, there are many My Little Pony games with full My Little Pony characters and you can meet them such as Twilight Sparkle, Rarity, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie and Applejack,,They have the good friendship and relations as well. Now, you will go to our new game called My little pony hairstyle. This is a creator game for you that you can get an opportunity to make new hair for Rainbow Dash. As you know, she has a hairstyle attached to her name. Now, you will help her to change Little about her hairstyle. Not difficult to play this game , you just use your mouse and follow step by step instruction that you can find in this game at our website.
I can tell more here to help you play this game easier. In the first game, you will choose a hairstyle in six styles. Then you will choose the color for her hair. You can take one in ten colors in this game such as blue, green, red, purple, yellow, light purple,.. And you mix color as your favorite color. With each my little pony character, you can see the different personality and fashion style. My little pony Rainbow Dash has always the unique hairstyle with the mixing color. This is the creator game because you can show your fashion style about the hair. Besides the dress up game and make up games, we have others games categories such as riding, racing, caring, cooking, fighting,,,All are free here, you can enjoy them at anytime and anywhere. Please recommend our website to your friends as well, you will have the more human counterpart.
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My Little Pony Angry is a puzzle game and your task in this game is to use your mouse to drag and drop the pieces and make a complete My Little Pony pictures. In this game, you will get an opportunity to meet again six main My Little Pony such as Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rarity, and Twilight Sparkle of the cartoon My Little Pony, they are all very aggressive and angry. We think that this way they want to scare off enemies from Ponyville. You know that My Little Pony or Friendship Is Magic has the content that tells about six main My Little Pony and other supporting characters but with My Little Pony, the content focuses primarily on Twilight Sparkle and her friends, they find out the way to rescue Equestria Land. Each My Little Pony game can give you a good lessons about family, friends, relationship...This is a cheap entertainment and designed for everyone. I hope that you can get the perfectime here and we can make the relationship thank to My Little Pony games on our website. Have fun on our site Gamesmylittlepony.com
”
”
Alice Walker
“
In Kafka’s works the family table locks the child into a site where Father presides; it offers one of the prime occasions for paternity to enthrone itself, conducting prescriptive raids on the child’s bearing—invading his plate, entering and altering his body, adjusting his manner of being. The table becomes the metonymy for all law, the place where sovereign exceptionalism asserts itself: Father does not have to obey his own law, he can pick his teeth or clean his ears while the eaters submit to the severity of his rule. The children, in Kafka at least, and in the simulacrum of home in which many others were grown, are consistently downgraded to the status of unshakable refugees, parasites, those who quiver under the thickness of anxiety while laws, like platters, are passed and forced down one’s delicate throat.
Give us this day our daily dread: it is difficult to imagine the Kafka family going out to eat, though that is what it would have taken for the death grip of mealtime to loosen, let go. At home, at the table, little Franz Kafka was eaten alive. By the time of the famous “Letter to Father,” he was vaporized. He says so himself: A good deal of the damage done to the young psyche occurred at table. The neighborhood restaurant might have rerouted the oppressive domesticity of home rule—it might have introduced a hiatus or suspensive regime change that would allow for hunger’s pacing. Part of a spectacle of public generality, the theater of ingestion—possibly also of incorporation—the restaurant causes the hold on the child to slacken, if only because there are witnesses and waiters whose work consists in diminishing the intensities of paternal law and the sacrificial rites that underlie their daily distribution—the daily apportionment of dread.
”
”
Avital Ronell (Loser Sons: Politics and Authority)
“
She shifted gears as they left Worth Avenue, hurtling them along the beach at just sublight speed. “Jesus, Addison, you are so blind,” she finally exploded. “She comes in playing the damsel in distress, and you buy all of it.”
“She did n—”
“‘Oh, Richard, I need your help,’” she mimicked, doing a startlingly good impression of Patricia’s soft, cultured Brit—especially since the two women had barely spoken a total of five words to one another. “’I’ve left Peter, and I so badly want to make a new start, but I just don’t know how to do it on my own. You’re so big and strong and successful, can’t you see it in your heart to help me?’” Samantha canted her eyes at him. “Did it go a little like that?”
Christ. “Maybe,” he hedged. “But—”
“See? She wants you back.”
“Well, she can’t have me. I’m taken. But she asked for my help, and I’m partially the reason she’s in this position.”
“No, she put herself on her back and then you put her in the next position.”
“Even so—”
“You can’t resist putting on your shining armor, can you?” she said more calmly, blowing out her breath. “And if I know it, then she knows it, too.”
“Honestly, Samantha, I think it’s more a matter of Patricia actually being helpless than her acting that way to gain my assistance. I doubt she could find a grocery store on her own, much less the toothpaste aisle.”
“But she’s not after toothpaste.”
As they stopped at a light, Richard leaned over and grabbed Samantha’s face, kissing her hard on her surprised mouth. “Don’t worry about this. You won’t have to deal with her.”
“Maybe not, but you will. And keep in mind that she’s got a subscriber website where she gives advice about how not to get screwed in a divorce.”
“She does?”
“Yes. Interesting stuff. You really need to spend more time surfing the ’net.”
“Shit.” Before Samantha could follow up her smug look with more commentary, he took a breath. “I’ll make dumping the website a condition of my helping her.”
“Great. She won’t need the site, anyway, because she’ll be busy screwing you over in person, instead.”
“No one screws me over, Samantha. Ever.”
“Yet, smart guy. Yet.
”
”
Suzanne Enoch (Don't Look Down (Samantha Jellicoe, #2))
“
One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to the hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had a concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A gas station attendant in a neighboring village, beside the bridge over the highway to Copenhagen, had seen her go the wrong way up the exit and drive at high speed into the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to maneuver around her, but about 200 meters after the junction she collided head-on with a truck. The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 meters before the crash, while the car seemed to actually increase its speed over the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck between the road and the truck's bumper, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived. On arrival at the hospital the woman was in very critical condition, and it was twenty-four hours before she was out of serious danger. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale. Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. She was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen. Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couple's home was an isolated old farmhouse in the woods seven kilometers from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. By the time he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking a lot. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used; he was not questioned further on that point. Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating room into intensive care, her husband was still in the waiting room with the sleeping boy's head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down next to him. Andreas Bark went on staring into the gray morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he was wearing a shabby leather jacket. Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realized he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. Andreas looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke.
”
”
Jens Christian Grøndahl (Lucca)
“
Get acquainted along with a fitness home business.
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Diet program is a thing that people rarely consider fitness business about when having match. What you eat is also necessary relating to fitness. One factor you need to understand is that fitness under no circumstances comes rather simply. You don't constantly must go to the health club for becoming match. It's going to expense funds to setup your business within the fitness niche. You will need help in some aspects on the business enterprise. A fitness enterprise may be simple if you have the suitable assistance. If you do not have the education, consumers won't rely on you with their fitness needs. It really is very important which you have some training in fitness. Fitness is all about expertise and you require to possess the expertise for the online business. A fitness trainer would have no difficulty in starting his personal fitness business. You need to look and really feel fit in order to attract other many people as consumers. A fitness company will take up your time and your dollars to set it up appropriately. It's essential to take various aspects into account for instance the place for the home business. Women are extremely keen to lose weight, as they prefer to look appealing. It's the worry of obesity and the resulting ugliness that makes women and men go in to get a fitness system. Middle aged guys are frequently obese and must make an enormous work to regain fitness. You'll need to invest a whole lot of your time to have the ability to create a foothold in this niche. You could possibly not know it, nevertheless it is feasible to develop a lucrative enterprise in the fitness niche. The idea of fitness is spreading far and wide. People of every age group prefer fitness. Health is much more vital than wealth. It can be vital to acquire fit if you desire to get the perfect out of life. Establishing a online business that is certainly centered on fitness is usually a very good notion. The fitness market holds a great deal of promise for tough functioning business owners.
”
”
Glenn Eichler
“
I put my hand on his forearm, I don't know why I do this, and it's not exactly natural, although it's not unnatural, except that I really want to touch his skin. It's smooth and tan just a little bit and feels like summer, like something familiar and warm and good, like my skin did on the first days aboard 'Fishful Thinking' before it salted and burned and peeled.
'We broke up three years after that.'
I sit back in my chair and give a sly smile. Relationships are complex and sometimes you can't really explain them to an outside party.
'I can't believe I just told you that'
'YES! YOU! ARE! LIVING! YOUR! FULL! LIFE!'
A third time. I am not imagining it.
'There you are.'
This time my heart does skip a beat. I look down at his arm, and we are still touching, and he has made no attempt to retract his arm or retreat. All my surroundings, the red formica table top, the pink yogurt, the blue sky, the green vegetables in the market, they all come alive in vibrant technicolor as the sun peers from behind a cloud. I am living my full life.
'Honesty in all things,' Byron adds, lifting his cup of yogurt for a toast of sorts.
I pull my hand away from him and the instant my hand is back by his side, I miss the warmth of his arm, the warmth of him. Honesty in all things. I should put my hand back, that's where it wants to be, that's Lily's lesson to me. Be present in the moment, give spontaneous affection. I'm suddenly aware I haven't spoken in a bit.
'Did you know that an octopus has three hearts?'
As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I realize I sound like that kid from 'Jerry McGuire.' 'Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?' I hope my question comes off almost a fraction as endearing.
'No,' Byron says with a glint in his eye that reads as curiosity, at least I hope that it does, but even if it doesn't I'm too into the inertia of the trivia to stop it.
'It's true, one heart called the systemic heart that functions much like the left side of the human heart, distributing blood throughout the heart, then two smaller branchial heart with gills that act like the right side of our hearts to pump the blood back.'
'What made you think of that?'
I smile. It may be entirely inappropriate first date conversation, but at least it doesn't bore me in the telling. I look up at the winsome August sky, marred only by the contrails of a passing jet, and a vaguely dachshund shaped cloud above the horizon. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in love at first site. I don't believe in angels. I don't believe in heaven and that our loved ones are looking down on us, but the sun is so warm and the breeze is so cool and the company is so perfect and the whole afternoon so intoxicating, ti's hard not to hear Lily's voice dancing in the gentle wind, 'one! month! is Long! Enough TO! BE! SAD!'
...
'I recently lost someone close to me....I don't know, I feel her here today with us, you, me, her, three hearts, like an octopus,' I shrug.
If I were him, I would run. What a ridiculously creepy thing to say. I would run and I would not stop until I was home in my bed with a gallon of ice cream deleting my profile from every dating site I belonged to. Maybe it's because it's not rehearsed, maybe it's because it's as weird a thing to say as it is genuine, maybe it's because this is finally the man for me.
Byron stands and offers me his hand, 'Let's take a walk and you can tell me about her.'
The gentle untying of a shoe lace.
It takes me a minute to decide if I can do this, and I decide that I can, and I throw our yogurt dishes away, and I put my hand in his, and it's soft and warm, and instead of awkward fumbling, our hands clasp together like magnets and metal, like we've been hand-in-hand all along, and we are touching again.
...
”
”
Steven Rowley (Lily and the Octopus)
“
Dear KDP Author,
Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.
With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.
Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.
Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.
The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.
Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.
Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
”
”
Amazon Kdp