Horizontal Quotes

Living is a horizontal fall.

What was up with class today? It was watered-down porn. He practically had you and Patch on top of your lab table, horizontal, minus your clothes, doing the Big Deed.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Is your learning curve a horizontal line?

I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.

There are two kinds of people I don't trust: people who don't drink and people who collect stickers.

If you touch me like that again, Evangeline,” he began in a husky tone, dropping to his seat once more, “in the space of a heartbeat, I will have you off this bike and onto the closest horizontal surface. And I woan be picky, no.

Do you play football?' Brandon asks. 'No.' 'Baseball?' 'Nope.' Brandon is on a roll and won't stop until he's found the answer he's looking for. 'Tennis?' 'That would be a nada' 'Then what sport do you play?' Carlos puts down his food. Oh, no. He's got a rebellious gleam in his eye as he says, 'The horizontal tango.' ...Alex stands and says through chlenched teeth, 'Carlos let's talk. In private. Ahora.' ....Brandon turns to my dad with big, innocent eyes. 'Daddy, do you know how to do the horizontal tango?

In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.

I Am Vertical But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each March I may gleam into leaf, Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, Unknowing I must soon unpetal. Compared with me, a tree is immortal And a flower-head not tall, but more startling, And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring. Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars, The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors. I walk among them, but none of them are noticing. Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping I must most perfectly resemble them-- Thoughts gone dim. It is more natural to me, lying down. Then the sky and I are in open conversation, And I shall be useful when I lie down finally: The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me. "I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961

Donde termina el arco iris, en tu alma o en el horizonte? Where does the rainbow end, in your soul or on the horizon?

My mother told me that life isn't always about pleasing yourself and that sometimes you have to do things for the sole benefit of another human being. I completely agreed with her, but reminded her that that was what blow jobs were for.

The blade sings to me. Faintly, so soft against my ears, its voice calms my worries and tells me that one touch will take it all away. It tells me that I just need to slide a long horizontal cut, and make a clean slice. It tells me the words that I have been begging to hear: this will make it ok.

And then I kiss him for real, and he kisses me back, and his hands fist my hair. And we're kissing like it's breathing. My stomach flutters wildly. And somehow we end up horizontal, his hands curved up around my back. "I like this," I say, and my voice comes out breathless. "We should do this. Every day." "Okay." "Let's never do anything else. No school. No meals. No homework." "I was going to ask you to see a movie," he says, smiling. When he smiles, I smile. "No movies. I hate movies." "Oh, really?" "Really, really. Why would I want to watch other people kissing," I say, "when I could be kissing you?

Daddy, What's the horizontal tango?

My relationship with my father had been on the proverbial fritz since the time I was fifteen and called the police to report him for child molesting. He had never molested me, but I wanted to have a party that weekend and needed him out of the house.

Also, truth be told, he wasn't very good at flying a helicopter, despite several lessons. He seemed to lack the important ability to orient himself vertically as well as horizontally, which led to disagreements involving trees.

I had to feign interest in all this nonsense until I could ask when I could come over and sit on his face. I didn't say that out loud, of course. I never say the things I really want to. If I did, I'd have no friends.

Have you ever experienced a pain so sharp in your heart that it's all you can do to take a breath? It's a pain you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy; you wouldn't want to pass it on to anyone else for fear he or she might not be able to bear it. It's the pain of being betrayed by a person with whom you've fallen in love. It's not as serious as death, but it feels a whole lot like it, and as I've come to learn, pain is pain any way you slice it.

I don't like the word 'alcoholic'. I like to think of myself as an advanced drinker.

La utopía está en el horizonte. Camino dos pasos, ella se aleja dos pasos y el horizonte se corre diez pasos más allá. ¿Entonces para qué sirve la utopía? Para eso, sirve para caminar.

She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes...narrowed them horizontally, not vertically.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.

Ivory's the kind of girl who gets drunk and immediately starts slurring. I have a lot of friends like that, and I think it's because it makes me look 'more together.

I don't know what it is about accents that makes me want to get undressed and high-five myself.

You've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke. There's no point taking it seriously because whatever happens, and I mean whatever the fuck, the punch line is the same: you go out horizontally. You see the point? No fucking point.

Was the line between enemy and friend horizontal or vertical? Was it a great plain to lumber across or was it a high, high wall—either to be scaled or kicked down in one big blow?

We proceeded to make way across the mighty Hooghly River, a monstrous offshoot of the Ganges, where we contemplated for a moment, our thoughts seemingly caught in the roaring southward current; there we gazed, toward where the city transitions into mangrove jungle, and somewhere a bit further to the southwest where all the rivers split infinitely like capillaries, where those famous Bengal tigers trod among the sunderbans. Peering in that direction, Bajju gripped the vertical bars just above the horizontal pedestrian railing, breathing slowly and silently, knees locked, still, despite being on arguably the busiest and loudest bridge in the world.

In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.

When Dani was about 1,000 feet above the ground, her direction changed from vertical to horizontal. She sped east at high speed. She estimated her speed to be many hundreds of kilometers per hour. As she thought about it, if she was going to make this trip in one hour, her speed would have to be about the speed of a jet airline. Yet she felt no wind, nor cold, whatsoever.

I never say the things I really want to. If I did, I'd have no friends.

I’m starting a petition to have Coach fired,” Vee said, coming to my table. “What was up with class today? It was watered-down porn. He practically had you and Patch on top of your lab table, horizontal, minus your clothes, doing the Big Deed—” I nailed her with a look that said, Does it look like I want a replay?

You,that dress, those shoes, that hair, beverages and furniture you can get horizontal on would not be a good combination.

Life is so simple: We walk; we sit; we lie horizontal. That's about it. Everything else is a story about what's going on while we're doing it.

I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

Then what sport do you play?" Carlos puts down his food. Oh, no. He's got a rebellious gleam in his eye as he says, "The horizontal tango." ------------------------------------------- "Dancing really isn't a sport," Brandon tells Carlos, oblivious to the shock at the rest of the table. "It is when I do it," Carlos says. ------------------------------------------- Brandon turns to my dad with big, innocent eyes. "Daddy, do YOU know how to do the horizontal tango?

Our relationship finally ended when he took to waking me up in the wee hours of the morning when he would go surfing. He thought it might be fun to have me come watch. "Fun for who?" I wanted to ask. I had never asked him to come to Happy Hour and watch me drink.

Oh. Wow.' 'What?' He held my hand up between us. 'Look.' I squinted at my hands. 'I don't see anything.' Sighing, he flipped my hand over, and my jaw hit the ground. A faint blue line marked the center of my palm with a smaller line through it. It would've looked like a cross, except the horizontal line was slanted. 'Oh. My. Gods.' I jerked my hand away, scrambling back. 'I have a rune on my hand. It's an Apollyon rune, isn't it.' Seth rested his hands on his knees. 'I think so. I have one like that.' 'But why is it still there? Why is it there at all?' I flipped my palm over several times, shook it, but the faint blue tattoo was still there. 'You can see it, right? Like right now, you can see it?' 'Yes. It hasn't faded.' Seth leaned forward, catching my hand. 'Stop shaking it like it's a damn Etch-A-Sketch. That doesn't make them disappear.

The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore more truly personal it will become.

The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. / That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.

Okay, I think it's time for another distraction" Eight says, disappearing again. He reappears by the outer circle of stones, plants his hands on an upright slab, and pushes hard. All I can do is watch in horror, frozen to the spot. The huge stone wobbles and slowly tips backwards, then the horizontal slab on top falls too, and that's when Eight starts yelling, "Help! Help! The stones are falling over! Stonehenge is falling down!" I will kill him. I clench my fists at my side, which is when I realize I still have a small rock in my hand. I lean down and carefully, pointlessly, return it to its spot.

Lydia was the kind of friend whom people referred to as a 'party favor' -- always fun to be around but she doesn't have any patience for suffering unless it's her own.

the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal,

¡Libros! ¡Libros! Hace aquí una palabra mágica que equivale a decir: "amor, amor", y que debían los pueblos pedir como piden pan o como anhelan la lluvia para sus sementeras. Cuando el insigne escritor ruso Fedor Dostoyevsky, padre de la revolución rusa mucho más que Lenin estaba prisionero en la Siberia, alejado del mundo, entre cuatro paredes y cercado por desoladas llanuras de nieve infinita; y pedía socorro en carta a su lejana familia, sólo decía: "¡Enviadme libros, libros, muchos libros para que mi alma no muera!". Tenía frío y no pedía fuego, tenía terrible sed y no pedía agua pedía libros, es decir, horizontes, es decir, escaleras para subir la cumbre del espíritu y del corazón. Porque la agonía física, biológica, natural, de un cuerpo por hambre, sed o frío, dura poco, muy poco, pero la agonía del alma insatisfecha dura toda la vida. Ya ha dicho el gran Menéndez Pidal, uno de los sabios más verdaderos de Europa, que el lema de la República debe ser: "Cultura". Cultura porque sólo a través de ella se puede resolver los problemas en que hoy se debate el pueblo lleno de fe, pero falto de luz. Medio pan e un libro. Locución de Federico García Lorca al pueblo de Fuente de Vaqueros (Granada)

Ouço-te ciciar amo-te pela primeira vez, e na ténue luminosidade que se recolhe ao horizonte acaba o corpo. Recolho o mel, guardo a alegria, e digo-te baixinho: Apaga as estrelas, vem dormir comigo no esplendor da noite do mundo que nos foge.

I was in a tailspin of confusion I hadn't experienced since the first time I heard George W. Bush speak.

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

I look hot and, most of all, skinny. I love the day after throwing up. I felt like a feather.

I made a tactical error tonight with Wyatt." She paused "Horizontally." Sara laughed. "Again?

I learned that man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal or vertical position. The shadows on the walls, on the faces, are not the same.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.

I pick up the thin, delicate silver chain that has a flat bar that horizontally connects the chain together. I see that the bar is etched with tiny letters that scribe: And though she be but little, she is fierce

Oh, you want me to lie still while you check me out? Damn, Red, if I'd have known that earlier I would've been horizontal already.

You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that a woman is healthy if she lives to grow old; as she thrives, she reacts and speaks and shows emotion, and grows into her face. Lines trace her thought and radiate from the corners of her eyes as she smiles. You could call the lines a network of 'serious lesions' or you could see that in a precise calligraphy, thought has etched marks of concentration between her brows, and drawn across her forehead the horizontal creases of surprise, delight, compassion and good talk. A lifetime of kissing, of speaking and weeping, shows expressively around a mouth scored like a leaf in motion. The skin loosens on her face and throat, giving her features a setting of sensual dignity; her features grow stronger as she does. She has looked around in her life and it shows. When gray and white reflect in her hair, you could call it a dirty secret or you could call it silver or moonlight. Her body fills into itself, taking on gravity like a bather breasting water, growing generous with the rest of her. The darkening under her eyes, the weight of her lids, their minute cross-hatching, reveal that what she has been part of has left in her its complexity and richness. She is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

There are times when we suffer innocently at other people’s hands. When that occurs, we are victims of injustice. But that injustice happens on a horizontal plane. No one ever suffers injustice on the vertical plane. That is, no one ever suffers unjustly in terms of his or her relationship with God. As long as we bear the guilt of sin, we cannot protest that God is unjust in allowing us to suffer.

One of my girlfriends was getting married. This was becoming an annoying pattern.

Poema de beco Que importa a paisagem, a Glória, a baía a linha do horizonte? -O que vejo é o beco.

It's not possible that the problems of this world be resolved by the pesimists and sceptics whose horizons are guided by the obvious realities. We need men and women who think of things that have never been thought of and who dream of things that have never been dreamed of, and who ask, "Why not?" [It sounds better in Spanish] No es posible que los problemas de este mundo sean resueltos por pesamistas y esepticos cuyos horizontes esten guiados por las obvias realidades. Necesitamos hombres y mujeres que piensen en cosas que nunca se hayan pensado y que suenen en cosas que nunca se hayan sonado, y que se pregunten '?porque no?

I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.)

He was all emotion all the time, constantly talking about his feelings and his profound love for her. He was minutes from getting his first period. He wrote poems too. It's my personal belief that if men are writing poems, they're making up for something else like a big hair back, or one ball. Not that one ball is a bad thing. Especially since I don't know any females who are dying to their their hands on a set of balls. The way I see it, the less balls, the better.

Dear designer of questionable intent, Please send me a photo of yourself. Please be wearing the knitted pants that you designed. It's not that I don't believe that there is anyone out there thing enough to wear horizontally stripped trousers knit from chunky wool, it's just that I would like to know whether you are deliberately cruel or whether you are the one woman these would look really great on.

He is only happy when he can maintain himself - mentally and spiritually - at the intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know where he is located every moment, both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses his power.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things...but there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

I don't like to overdose. Call me old-fashioned.

I'm not that shallow, asshole. I don't need money. It's way more important for them to be good-looking.

I had to sit down and explain to [her friend] that AA was for quitters

There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

We got to his place and it looked a lot like his personality. Just a bunch of space filler, nothing to really wow you. It looked like he had bought a lot of stuff from IKEA and then decided to refinish it at home. Everything was neat and tidy, but you wouldn't want any of it for yourself.

I am not an outsider. I am an insider who discovered that everyone else had gone out.

Even if times are tough and you're enduring a terrible heartache, it's important to focus your anger on a vibrator, not another person.

He turned to her. “Didn’t you see the lightning strike the steeple?” She recovered with a sip of tea, then smiled sweetly. “I was listening too devotedly to the sermon.” “Claptrap last week,” Lady D announced. “I think the priest is getting old.” Gareth opened his mouth, but before he could say a word, his grandmother’s cane swung around in a remarkably steady horizontal arc. “Don’t,” she warned, “make a comment beginning with the words, ‘Coming from you…’” “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he demurred. “Of course you would,” she stated. “You wouldn’t be my grandson if you wouldn’t.” She turned to Hyacinth. “Don’t you agree?” To her credit, Hyacinth folded her hands in her lap and said, “Surely there is no right answer to that question.” “Smart girl,” Lady D said approvingly. “I learn from the master.” Lady Danbury beamed.

I look upon ourselves as partners in all of this, and that each of us contributes and does what he can do best. And so I see not a top rung and a bottom rung - I see all this horizontally - and I see this as part of a matrix. And I see every human being as having a purpose, a destiny, if you like - the destiny that exists in each of us - and find ways and means to provide such opportunities for everyone.

Alf pondered his next move. On the one hand, the savages seemed to be responding reasonably well to “How.” On the other hand they really weren’t making much progress. At least they’re not eating us, he thought. Ten seconds went by, then twenty, as Alf looked at the older savage, and the older savage looked at Alf. Finally, out of sheer nervousness, and unable to think of what else to do, Alf raised his right hand again. But this time, just as Alf began to speak, the savage rotated his spear from the vertical to the horizontal, pointing it toward Alf’s chest. Alf stopped in mid “How,” staring at the sharp pink spear tip, inches from his heart. And the savage spoke. Poking his spear tip against Alf’s chest, he said: “Can we move this conversation along, old chap? I’m getting frightfully tired of “How.

Las pequeñas cosas son las que a larga se convierten en las grandes historias. La memoria es esa maravilla que se va formando con retazos de conversaciones, un olor, como el de la panadería, un momento justo, un beso, la súbita aparición del sol en el horizonte; en fin, es como una de esas mantas que se hacen con retazos de tela de diferentes colores que aparentemente no encajan unas con otras y que, sin embargo, acaban resultando de una perfecta armonía.

There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.

In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies. - The French Lieutenant's Woman

Anne of Green Gables was cuddled up next to Huckleberry Finn; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wedged tightly between Heidi and Little Women; and Nicholas Nickleby leaned in a familiar way against A Girl of the Limberlost. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It’s because they’re in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to stamp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round.

Sem a loucura que é o homem Mais que a besta sadia, Cadáver adiado que procria?" O sonho é ver as formas invisíveis Da distância imprecisa, e, com sensíveis Movimentos da esp'rança e da vontade, Buscar na linha fria do horizonte A árvore, a praia, a flor, a ave, a fonte - Os beijos merecidos da Verdade. " (...)Tudo vale a pena Se a alma não é pequena. Quem quere passar além do Bojador Tem que passar além da dor. " Triste de quem é feliz! Vive porque a vida dura. Nada na alma lhe diz Mais que a lição da raiz - Ter por vida a sepultura." Ser descontente é ser homem. " Tenho meus olhos quentes de água. " 'Screvo meu livro à beira-mágoa. " Quando, meu Sonho e meu Senhor?

I wish I'd been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes--and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history. We choose our own lives. It is not simply that we decide on the behaviors that construct our experience; when given our druthers, we elect to be ourselves. Most of us would like to be more successful or more beautiful or wealthier, and most people endure episodes of low self-esteem or even self-hatred. We despair a hundred times a day. But we retain the startling evolutionary imperative for the fact of ourselves, and with that splinter of grandiosity we redeem our flaws. These parents have, by and large, chosen to love their children, and many of them have chosen to value their own lives, even though they carry what much of the world considers an intolerable burden. Children with horizontal identities alter your self painfully; they also illuminate it. They are receptacles for rage and joy-even for salvation. When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined. A follower of the Dalai Lama who had been imprisoned by the Chinese for decades was asked if he had ever been afraid in jail, and he said his fear was that he would lose compassion for his captors. Parents often think that they've captured something small and vulnerable, but the parents I've profiled here have been captured, locked up with their children's madness or genius or deformity, and the quest is never to lose compassion. A Buddhist scholar once explained to me that most Westerners mistakenly think that nirvana is what you arrive at when your suffering is over and only an eternity of happiness stretches ahead. But such bliss would always be shadowed by the sorrow of the past and would therefore be imperfect. Nirvana occurs when you not only look forward to rapture, but also gaze back into the times of anguish and find in them the seeds of your joy. You may not have felt that happiness at the time, but in retrospect it is incontrovertible. For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed that they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they were in fact falling in love with someone they didn't yet know enough to want. As such parents look back, they see how every stage of loving their child has enriched them in ways they never would have conceived, ways that ar incalculably precious. Rumi said that light enters you at the bandaged place. This book's conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.

Jack was mid-jump when I burst into my room. I snatched his ankle,flipping him horizontal.He crashed down hard to my bed and rolled off onto the floor. And laughed. "Let's do that again! But this time I'll jump even higher." "No! No,you won't! What are you going here?" He sat up on the floor and shrugged. "I was bored." "I don't care! I'm not your babysitter!" His blue eyes twinkled.Honestly, whose eyes actually twinkle? Then his face crumpled,his lower lip jutting out.He blinked his ridiculously long eyelashes at me. "I thought we were friends." "Oh,knock it off.

One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage: that contour gave me pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features. Strongly-marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then followed, naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils; then a flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm chin, with a decided cleft down the middle of it: of course, some black whiskers were wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above the forehead. Now for the eyes: I had left them to the last, because they required the most careful working. I drew them large; I shaped them well: the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids lustrous and large. "Good! but not quite the thing," I thought, as I surveyed the effect: "they want more force and spirit;" and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might flash more brilliantly--a happy touch or two secured success. There, I had a friend's face under my gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies turned their backs on me? I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness: I was absorbed and content. Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied: it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester. But what was that to her, or to any one but myself? Georgiana also advanced to look. The other drawings pleased her much, but she called that 'an ugly man.

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before. In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras!They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want. Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.

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.

Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out!

When Your Life Looks Back, When your life looks back-- As it will, at itself, at you--what will it say? Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool. Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from. Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many. Your life will carry you as it did always, With ten fingers and both palms, With horizontal ribs and upright spine, With its filling and emptying heart, That wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return. You gave it. What else could do? Immersed in air or in water. Immersed in hunger or anger. Curious even when bored. Longing even when running away. "What will happen next?"-- the question hinged in your knees, your ankles, in the in-breaths even of weeping. Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in. Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face. No back of the world existed, No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for. This, your life had said, its only pronoun. Here, your life had said, its only house. Let, your life had said, its only order. And did you have a choice in this? You did-- Sleeping and waking, the horses around you, the mountains around you, The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts. Those of your own kind around you-- A few times, you stood on your head. A few times, you chose not to be frightened. A few times, you held another beyond any measure. A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure. Mortal, your life will say, As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy. Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.

We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches--the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small--the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia--life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam.

Über des Propheten Gebein ist jedes Staubkorn ein Pfeiler von Licht, Aufrecht von der Kuppel des Grabes Bis hin zu der Kuppel des Himmels ... Und jene Ehrfurcht, die wie Deine Macht die Stirnen sich neigen läßt zeichnet im Horizont einen höheren Horizont von Händen und Lippen der wogt "Im Namen Gottes", Dein ist das Lob Dein ist der Dank Dein ist der Ruhm Dein ist das Reich Der Du die Wohltat gibst, o Du der alles besitzt! Hier sind wir zu Deinem Dienst, Du der keine Gefährten hat Hier sind wir zu Deinem Dienst, Du der keine Gefährten hat. Keine Glut mehr in unseren Knochen, noch Asche, Kein Schnee, keine Schwärze; Nicht Unglauben mehr, und Anbetung nicht. Erniedrigung ward Gewohnheit, und Schwäche ohne Licht ... O Herr, Du lehrtest uns Liebe, Lehr uns den Willen, der Mauern bricht!

Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not. One reason that people confuse the two concepts is that they sometimes overlap (though psychologists debate to what degree). Some psychologists map the two tendencies on vertical and horizontal axes, with the introvert-extrovert spectrum on the horizontal axis, and the anxious-stable spectrum on the vertical. With this model, you end up with four quadrants of personality types: calm extroverts, anxious (or impulsive) extroverts, calm introverts, and anxious introverts. In other words, you can be a shy extrovert, like Barbra Streisand, who has a larger-than-life personality and paralyzing stage fright; or a non-shy introvert, like Bill Gates, who by all accounts keeps to himself but is unfazed by the opinions of others.

El terror de lo igual alcanza hoy a todos los ámbitos vitales. Viajamos por todas partes sin tener ninguna experiencia. Uno se entera de todo sin adquirir ningún conocimiento. Se ansían vivencias y estímulos con los que, sin embargo, uno se queda siempre igual a sí mismo. Uno acumula amigos y seguidores sin experimentar jamás el encuentro con alguien distinto. Los medios sociales representan un grado nulo de lo social. La interconexión digital total y la comunicación total no facilitan el encuentro con otros. Más bien sirven para encontrar personas iguales y que piensan igual, haciéndonos pasar de largo ante los desconocidos y quienes son distintos, y se encargan de que nuestro horizonte de experiencias se vuelva cada vez más estrecho. No enredan en un inacabable bucle del yo y, en último término, nos llevan a una "autopropaganda que nos adoctrina con nuestras propias nociones".

The written word is an attempt at completeness when there is no one impatiently awaiting you in a dimly lit bedroom--awaiting your tales of the day, as the healing hands of someone who knew turn to you and touch you, and you lose yourself so completely in another that you are momentarily delivered from yourself. Whispering across the pillow comes a kind voice that might tell you how to get out of certain difficulties, from someone who might mercifully detach you from your complications. When there is no matching of lives, and we live on a strict diet of the self, the most intimate bond can be with the words that we write: Oh often have I washed and dressed And what's to show for all my pain? Let me lie abed and rest: Ten thousand times I've done my best And all's to do again. I ask myself if there is an irresponsible aspect in relaying thoughts of pain as inspiration, and I wonder whether Housman actually infected the sensitives further, and pulled them back into additional darkness. Surely it is true that everything in the imagination seems worse then it actually is--especially when one is alone and horizontal (in bed, as in the coffin). Housman was always alone--thinking himself to death, with no matronly wife to signal to the watching world that Alfred Edward was quite alright--for isn't that partly the aim of scoring a partner: to trumpet the mental all-clear to a world where how things seem is far more important than how things are? Now snugly in eternity, Housman still occupies my mind. His best moments were in Art, and not in the cut and thrust of human relationships. Yet he said more about human relationships than those who manage to feast on them. You see you can't have it both ways

ーEscribí algo para ti, ーla corrigió con una sonrisa y comenzó a tocar. Ella escuchó emocionada; comenzó lento, sencillo, su control sobre el arco producía un sonido armónico. La melodía la lleno tan fresca y dulce como el agua, tan esperanzadora y adorable como un amanecer. Miró a sus dedos fascinada por el movimiento tan exquisito que hacia que las notas salieran del violín. El sonido se volvió mas profundo conforme el arco se movía mas rápido, el antebrazo de Jem se desplazaba hacia adelante y atrás, su delgado cuerpo parecía difuminarse con el movimiento de su hombro. Sus dedos se deslizaban cuidadosamente arriba y abajo, el tono de la música profundizó, como nubes de tormenta reuniéndose en un horizonte brillante, un río que se convertía en torrente. Las notas se estrellaban a sus pies aumentando el sonido, el cuerpo entero de Jem parecía moverse en sintonía con los sonidos que emanaban del instrumento, a pesar de que ella sabia que sus pies se encontraban firmes en el suelo. Su corazón encontró la paz con la música, los ojos de Jem estaban cerrados, las comisuras de sus labios mostraban un gesto de dolor. Una parte de ella quería correr a sus pies, rodearlo con sus brazos; la otra otra parte no quería que se detuviera la música, el hermoso sonido de él. Era como si él hubiera tomado su arco utilizándolo como un pincel para pintar, creando un lienzo en el cual su alma se muestra claramente. Cuando las ultimas notas se alzaron más y más alto, llegando a tocar el paraíso, Tessa estuvo consciente de que su rostro estaba húmedo, pero no fue hasta que la ultima nota dejo de sonar y él bajo el violín cuando se dio que estaba llorando.

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations… It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm… Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings. —Benedict Anderson

Girl Without Hands Walking through the ruins on your way to work that do not look like ruins with the sunlight pouring over the seen world like hail or melted silver, that bright and magnificent, each leaf and stone quickened and specific in it, and you can't hold it, you can't hold any of it. Distance surrounds you, marked out by the ends of your arms when they are stretched to their fullest. You can go no farther than this, you think, walking forward, pushing the distance in front of you like a metal cart on wheels with its barriers and horizontals. Appearance melts away from you, the offices and pyramids on the horizon shimmer and cease. No one can enter that circle you have made, that clean circle of dead space you have made and stay inside, mourning because it is clean. Then there's the girl, in the white dress, meaning purity, or the failure to be any colour. She has no hands, it's true. The scream that happened to the air when they were taken off surrounds her now like an aureole of hot sand, of no sound. Everything has bled out of her. Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you. If she were here she would reach out her arms towards you now, and touch you with her absent hands and you would feel nothing, but you would be touched all the same.

It was Valentine's Day and I had spent the day in bed with my life partner, Ketel One. The two of us watched a romance movie marathon on TBS Superstation that made me wonder how people who write romantic comedies can sleep at night. At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall all-the-time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer. Then, within the two hour time frame of the movie, the couple meet, fall in love, fall out of love, break up, and then just before the end of the movie, they happen to bump into each other by "coincidence" somewhere absolutely absurd, like by the river. This never happens in real life. The last time I bumped into an ex-boyfriend was at three o'clock in the morning at Rite Aid. I was ringing up Gas-X and corn removers.

War -- is a last ditch moral nightmare. People begin worshiping a mysterious slouching beast, following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero; and worse. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life; that roughshod trek of war and warmakers throughout the world, hand in hand with death. Long live death! They wouldn't worship it if they weren't in love. Or if they weren't in fear. The second being a state of devouring, at least, as the first. I think the clue is the second masquerading as the first -- just as the beast is the ape of god; to do some thing successfully, you have to, above all, hide what your up to. In this way fear can ape love. Death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God. Such reflections are of course ill at ease by some: those to whom the state is a given, the church is a given, Western culture a given, war a given, consumerism a given, paying taxes a given. All the neat slots of existence into which one fits, birth to death and every point in between. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. One is carried along, a zonked spectator... Every nation-state tends towards the imperial -- that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police propaganda courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.

It's not the concept of marriage I have a problem with. I'd like to get married too. A couple times. It's the actual wedding that pisses me off. The problem is that everyone who gets married seems to think that they are the first person in the entire universe to do it, and that the year leading up to the event revolves entirely around them. You have to throw them showers, bachelorette weekends, buy a bridesmaid dress, and then buy a ticket to some godforsaken town wherever they decide to drag you. If you're really unlucky, they'll ask you to recite a poem at their wedding. That's just what I want to do- monitor my drinking until I'm done with my public service announcement. And what do we get out of it, you ask? A dry piece of chicken and a roll in the hay with their hillbilly cousin. I could get that at home, thanks. Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out! I always want to remind the person that absolutely no thought went into typing in a name and having a salad bowl come up.