I Am Not Impressed Quotes

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would've been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say "this guy", because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man. No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he's at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn't give a shit. Doesn't give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

I'll not deny I am impressed by your mastery of six warrens, Quick Ben. In retrospect, you should have held back on at least half of what you command." The man made to rise. "But, Bauchelain," the wizard replied, "I did.

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.

I am not impressed with what people own. But I’m impressed with what they achieve. I’m proud to be a physician. Always strive to be the best in your field…. Don’t chase money. If you are the best in your field, money will find you.

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

Linh Cinder. Such a pleasure. My master has spoken so highly of you.” Cinder paused and studied her again. “Who are you?” “I’m called Darla. I am Captain Thorne’s mistress.” Cinder blinked. “Excuse me?” “He asked me to stay and keep watch over the vehicle,” she said. “He’s just gone inside to be heroic. I’m sure he’ll be glad to know you’re here. I believe he’s under the impression that you’re out in space somewhere.

I can get my head turned by a good-looking guy as much as the next girl. But sexy doesn't impress me. Smart impresses me, strength of character impresses me. But most of all, I am impressed by kindness. Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks. When I see that in someone, it fills me with admiration.

As one who sees in dreams and wakes to find the emotional impression of his vision still powerful while its parts fade from his mind - Just such am I, having lost nearly all the vision itself, while in my heart I feel the sweetness of it yet distill and fall.

I warn you," the boy went on. "I am a magician of great power. I control many terrifying entities. This being you see before you" - here I rolled my shoulders back and puffed my chest up menacingly - "is but the meanest and least impressive of my slaves." (Here I slumped my shoulders and stuck my stomach out.)

I really am impressed that you have been shot so often. Really.” “Getting hit’s not really that impressive,” Wayne noted. “It don’t take much skill to get shot. It’s avoiding the bullets that’s tough.

I was under the impression that I warned you that in London country ways will not do, Frederica!” “You did!” she retorted. “And although I can’t say that I paid much heed to your advice it so happens that I am accompanied today by my aunt!” “Who adds invisibility to her other accomplishments!

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: 'If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.' It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

And then we're kissing. His lips are soft and leave mine tingling. I close my eyes, and in the darkness behind them I see beautiful blooming things, flowers spinning like snowflakes, and hummingbirds beating the same rhythm as my heart. I'm gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it's a good feeling - like soaring, like being totally free. His other hand pushes my hair from my face, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment - however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days - while he's saying my name into my mouth and I"m breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I've ever been kissed.

Alex- Alec, if I had given you the impression I had accepted the idea of your death, I can only apologize. I tried to, I thought I had- and yet still I pictured having you for fifty, sixty more years. I thought I might be ready to let you go. But it's you, and I realize now that I won't be any more ready to lose you than I am right now. Which is not at all.

I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with 'expressing' myself with obscure creative impressions.

I AM wealthy, poor, healthy, sick, free, confined were first of all impressions or conditions felt before they became visible expressions. Your world is your consciousness objectified. Waste no time trying to change the outside; change the within or the impression; and the without or expression will take care of itself. When the truth of this statement dawns upon you, you will know that you have found the lost word or the key to every door. I AM (your consciousness) is the magical lost word which was made flesh in the likeness of that which you are conscious of being.

Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria: 1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable ... They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don't make a scandal when they leave. (...) 2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. (...) 3) They respect other people's property, and therefore pay their debts. 4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don't tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don't put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don't show off to impress their juniors. (...) 5) They don't run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don't play on other people's heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted ... that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it's vulgar, old hat and false. (...) 6) They are not vain. They don't waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar ... They regard prases like 'I am a representative of the Press!!' -- the sort of thing one only hears from [very minor journalists] -- as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing's work they don't pass it off as if it were 100 roubles' by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don't boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren't allowed in (...) True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight ... As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. (...) 7) If they do possess talent, they value it ... They take pride in it ... they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others] rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. (...) 8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility ... Civilized people don't simply obey their baser instincts ... they require mens sana in corpore sano. And so on. That's what civilized people are like ... Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings. [From a letter to Nikolay Chekhov, March 1886]

People can always say I don't look impressive enough, but they can't argue over how strong I am once I punch them in the face.

Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

I wonder if you know how special you are; I wonder if you know how precious you are; I wonder if you know how lucky I am to have you in my life; I love you so much.

there was an assumption that I was personally attacking Sarah Palin by impersonating her on TV. No one ever said it was 'mean' when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford falling down all the time. No one ever accused Dana Carvey or Darrell Hammond or Dan Aykroyd of 'going too far' in their political impressions. You see what I'm getting at here. I am not mean and Mrs. Palin is not fragile. To imply otherwise is a disservice to us both.

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris- ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of par- ents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have termi- nated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on mat- ters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously some- times of their religion insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?

I’ll take you home whenever you want,” he says. “But if you want to stay, and you wake up screaming, it’s okay. I’ll make sure you’re okay. And if you want to stay, and then change your mind, I don’t mind driving you back at four a.m.” I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imagining these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences. Looking into Charlie’s face, I understand it. The way a crush of feeling and feathery impressions can move through your body, bypassing your mind. How a person can know there’s something worth saying but have no concept of what exactly that is. I’m not thinking in words.

Yet you told him you loved him?" "Yes, I did." Bridgid was clearly impressed. "You're more courageous than I am. The fear of being rejected pains me to even think about, yet you boldly told Brodick how you felt, even though he hadn't spoken his feelings." "Actually, he told me I loved him.

Why are we bringing him along, again?" Will inquired, of the world in general as well as his sister. Cecily put her hands on her hips. "Why are you bringing Tessa?" "Because Tessa and I are going to be married," Will said, and Tessa smiled; the way that Will's little sister could ruffle his feathers like no one else was still amusing to her. "Well, Gabriel and I might well be married," Cecily said. "Someday." Gabriel made a choking noise, and turned an alarming shade of purple. Will threw up his hands. "You can't be married Cecily! You're only fifteen! When I get married, I'll be eighteen! An adult!" Cecily did not look impressed. "We may have a long engagement," she said. "But I cannot see why you are counseling me to marry a man my parents have never met." Will sputtered. "I am not counseling you to marry a man your parents have never met!" "Then we are in agreement. Gabriel must meet Mam and Dad.

I've demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician, he is also a child place before natural phenomenon, which impress him like a fairy tale.

High society here turns me off and I feel a bit of rage against all these rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here, it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger... Although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development of the United States, I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste. They live as if in an enormous chicken coop that is dirty and uncomfortable. The houses look like bread ovens and all the comfort that they talk about is a myth.

You’ve seen me at my worst. Maybe you should see me at my best.” My words hang between us, heavy and charged, and I don’t know what the fuck I am doing. “When are you at your best?” she asks hesitantly. And I can see from the determined look on her face that she is trying hard not to feel intimidated. I’m impressed. She’s like a kitten standing up to a lion. “In bed.

As Patron-Sponser, I am charged with..."-he pasued and consulted the notes-"adding a sense of royal cachet to proceedings today." He waited while a ripple of conversation ran around the room. Nobody was quite sure what adding a sense of royal cachet really meant. But everyone agreed that it sounded impressive indeed. Lady Pauline's mouth twitched in a smile and she looked down at the table. Halt found something of vast interest in the ceiling beams high above. Duncan continued. My second duty is..."-again he consulted his notes to make sure he had the wording correct-"to provide an extremly expensive present to the bride and groom..." Lady Pualine's head jerked at that. She leaned forward and turned to make eye contact with Lord Anthony. The Chamberlain met her gaze, his face completely devoid of expression. Then, very slowly, one eyelid slid down in a wink. He liked Lady Pauline and Halt a great deal and he'd added that duty without consulting them.

Most of the arguments to which I am party fall somewhat short of being impressive, owing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about.

But I am not impressed with America’s progress. I am not impressed that slavery was abolished or that Jim Crow ended. I feel no need to pat America on its back for these “achievements.” This is how it always should have been. Many call it progress, but I do not consider it praiseworthy that only within the last generation did America reach the baseline for human decency. As comedian Chris Rock says, I suppose these things were progress for white people, but damn. I hope there is progress I can sincerely applaud on the horizon. Because the extrajudicial killing of Black people is still too familiar. Because the racist rhetoric that Black people are lazier, more criminal, more undeserving than white people is still too familiar. Because the locking up of a disproportionate number of Black bodies is still too familiar. Because the beating of Black people in the streets is still too familiar. History is collapsing on itself once again.

Beati bellicosi. Blessed are the warriors.” “Good organization,” said Magnus. “I knew the man who founded it, back in the 1800s. Woolsey Scott. Respectable old werewolf family.” Alec made an ugly sound in the back of his throat. “Did you sleep with him, too?” Magnus’s cat eyes widened. “Alexander!” “Well, I don’t know anything about your past, do I?” Alec demanded. “You won’t tell me anything; you just say it doesn’t matter.” Magnus’s face was expressionless, but there was a dark tinge of anger to his voice. “Does this mean every time I mention anyone I’ve ever met, you’re going to ask me if I had an affair with them?” Alec’s expression was stubborn, but Simon couldn’t help having a flash of sympathy; the hurt behind his blue eyes was clear. “Maybe.” “I met Napoleon once,” said Magnus. “We didn’t have an affair, though. He was shockingly prudish for a Frenchman.” “You met Napoleon?” Jordan, who appeared to be missing most of the conversation, looked impressed. “So it’s true what they said about warlocks, then?” Alec gave him a very unpleasant look. “What’s true?” “Alexander,” said Magnus coldly, and Clary met Simon’s eyes across the table. Hers were wide, green, and full of an expression that said Uh-oh. “You can’t be rude to everyone who talks to me.” Alec made a wide, sweeping gesture. “And why not? Cramping your style, am I? I mean, maybe you were hoping to flirt with werewolf boy here. He’s pretty attractive, if you like the messy-haired, broad-shouldered, chiseled-good looks type.” “Hey, now,” said Jordan mildly. Magnus put his head in his hands. “Or there are plenty of pretty girls here, since apparently your taste goes both ways. Is there anything you aren’t into?” “Mermaids,” said Magnus into his fingers. “They always smell like seaweed.” “It’s not funny,” Alec said savagely, and kicking back his chair, he got up from the table and stalked off into the crowd.

I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently — they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I’ve read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don’t remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else —simply nothingness.

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.

I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by. Women I wish to see again, to see them smile and laugh and say, It was all as it should have been.

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

I am sure that God has given all his time in making you, the remaining human race has been created in haste.

If mankind's greatest achievement is to produce more spaces for mankind to live in, I do not think I am so impressed.

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their distances from men.

I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.

Hospitality, however, seeks to minister. It says, "This home is not mine. It is truly a gift from my Master. I am His servant and I use it as He desires." Hospitality does not try to impress, but to serve.

It is simply a confession that with all that I've seen in the last few years, all the events I've been invited to, and all the people whom I've met, I am less and less impressed by "impressive" things or people who are presented as having things figured out. I am impressed by people who are honest and kind. I am inspired by moments of vulnerability, moments of confession and compassion, moments where someone makes it clear that they are a person in need of other people and someone else makes it clear that the first person is not alone.

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do... I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. ...Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now. [Columbian Magazine interview]

The last time you were feeling heartbroken, you took shots at a chandelier with a mundane gun and nearly drowned yourself in the Serpentine.” said Matthew. “I wasn’t trying to drown myself,” James pointed out. “Besides, Magnus Bane saved me.” “Don’t mention that,” said Matthew, as James uncapped the flask. “You know how angry I am about that. I idolize Magnus Bane, you had one chance to meet him, and you embarrassed us all.” “I’m quite sure I never mentioned any of you to him,” said James, and tipped the flask back. He choked. It was blue ruin: the cheapest, harshest kind of gin. It went down like lightning. He coughed and thrust the flask away. “Even worse,” said Matthew. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful parabatai.

For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. I am continually impressed by how difficult it is for people who have gone through the unspeakable to convey the essence of their experience. It is so much easier for them to talk about what has been done to them—to tell a story of victimization and revenge—than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience. Our scans had revealed how their dread persisted and could be triggered by multiple aspects of daily experience. They had not integrated their experience into the ongoing stream of their life. They continued to be “there” and did not know how to be “here”—fully alive in the present.

Where am I?" Magnus croaked. "Nazca." "Oh, so we went on a little trip." "You broke into a man's house," Catarina said. "You stole a carpet and enchanted it to fly. Then you sped off into the night air. We pursued you on foot." "Ah," said Magnus. "You were shouting some things." "What things?" "I prefer not to repeat them," Catarina said. "I also prefer not to remember the time we spent in the desert. It is a mammoth desert, Magnus. Ordinary deserts are quite large. Mammoth deserts are so called because they are larger than ordinary deserts." "Thank you for that interesting and enlightening information," Magnus croaked. "You told us to leave you in the desert, because you planned to start a new life as a cactus," Catarina said, her voice flat. "Then you conjured up tiny needles and threw them at us. With pinpoint accuracy." "Well," he said with dignity. "Considering my highly intoxicated state, you must have been impressed with my aim." "'Impressed' is not the word to use to describe how I felt last night, Magnus." "I thank you for stopping me there," Magnus said. "It was for the best. You are a true friend. No harm done. Let's say no more about it. Could you possibly fetch me - " "Oh, we couldn't stop you," Catarina interrupted. "We tried, but you giggled, leaped onto the carpet, and flew away again. You kept saying that you wanted to go to Moquegua." "What did I do in Moquegua?" "You never got there," Catarina said. "But you were flying about and yelling and trying to, ahem, write messages for us with your carpet in the sky." "We then stopped for a meal," Catarina said. "You were most insistent that we try a local specialty that you called cuy. We actually had a very pleasant meal, even though you were still very drunk." "I'm sure I must have been sobering up at that point," Magnus argued. "Magnus, you were trying to flirt with your own plate." "I'm a very open-minded sort of fellow!" "Ragnor is not," Catarina said. "When he found out that you were feeding us guinea pigs, he hit you over the head with your plate. It broke." "So ended our love," Magnus said. "Ah, well. It would never have worked between me and the plate anyway. I'm sure the food did me good, Catarina, and you were very good to feed me and put me to bed - " Catarina shook her head."You fell down on the floor. Honestly, we thought it best to leave you sleeping on the ground. We thought you would remain there for some time, but we took our eyes off you for one minute, and then you scuttled off. Ragnor claims he saw you making for the carpet, crawling like a huge demented crab.

Um … I am Annwyl.” “Annwyl. Annwyl. I do not know an Annwyl. So, are you my dinner?” “No.” It took a step back. “No. I’m not dinner. Let’s never say that again. I am Annwyl of the Dark Plains.” The queen stared at it. “Annwyl of Garbhán Isle?” Still nothing. It sighed. “Annwyl the Bloody.” “You are Annwyl the Bloody?” It looked slightly defeated. “Yes.” “You are awfully tiny to be Annwyl the Bloody.” “I’m taller than most men.” “That simply does not impress me.

In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.

I am not impressed by the White House!” my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she’d said “the White House” for the fifteenth time. “I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.

It’s sexy, but don’t ever feel like you need to impress me. I already am.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate & special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the suposition that every child is an idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself...

by now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.

You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.

Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.

If I could describe myself, I'd say that I am a poetic gerd. (A geek and nerd combo) I love Shakespeare and romance, but sci-fi and action have a big slice of my heart. When I meet a man who can quote some Hitchcock out of thin air, do a perfect ''Timey Whimey'' impression, play me some classic rock when I'm sad and can give a 'Gone with the Wind' kiss, I will have my soul mate.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

It is quite possible that I may be altogether wrong in this idea. My own impression, however, is, that I am right.

First and foremost, I am me. I'm real. I don't write to impress. I write to express.

I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain," said he. "Results without causes are much more impressive.

And what’s that about?” he asked, nodding toward the wolf that now had the collar of Carter’s coat between its teeth and was trying to drag him away. It wasn’t going so well for the timber wolf, seeing as Kelly had burst out of the bar with an impressive battle cry, grabbed his brother’s leg, and was pulling him in the opposite direction. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you.” “Kelly!” Carter shouted. “Save me!” “I am,” Kelly yelled back.

Aaron dipped his head, his voice dropping too. “Are you trying to impress me with sports lingo, Catalina?” The way he had said my name was new. I couldn’t explain how, but it had been different from any other time he had voiced those four syllables. And it sent a shiver dancing down my arms. “It’s sexy, but don’t ever feel like you need to impress me. I already am.” My lips parted. I thought my breath had hitched too.

You are kind,” she said softly. “I am not kind,” Kjell scoffed. “And you are good,” she added. “I am not good!” he laughed. “I have never known a man like you.” “You were a slave in Quondoon! The men you knew were not trying to impress you.” “Neither are you, Captain. Yet I am still impressed.” “Then you have a lot to learn.” She

... Like having to be able to say to yourself, ‘I am pretending to sit here reading Albert Camus’s The Fall for the Literature of Alienation midterm, but actually I’m really concentrating on listening to Steve try to impress this girl over the phone, and I am feeling embarrassment and contempt for him, and am thinking he’s a poser, and at the same time I am also uncomfortably aware of times that I’ve also tried to project the idea of myself as hip and cynical so as to impress someone, meaning that not only do I sort of dislike Steve, which in all honesty I do, but part of the reason I dislike him is that when I listen to him on the phone it makes me see similarities and realize things about myself that embarrass me, but I don’t know how to quit doing them—like, if I quit trying to seem nihilistic, even just to myself, then what would happen, what would I be like?

I am an author, and I, for one, am deeply offended by the notion that my "waywardness, peevishness, Irascibility, misanthropy, and murky passions" are caused by a "derangement of bodily health," even as I am impressed by a nineteenth-century magazine's ability to absolutely nail my personality.

I'm gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it's a good feeling - like soaring, like being totally free, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment - however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days - while he's saying my name into my mouth and I'm breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I've ever been kissed in my life.

Coming down off the trail, I am lost in my own thoughts and unprepared when a bear chugs across the path just before it gives out on the gravel road. I am so distracted that I keep walking towards the bear. I only stop when it rears, stands on hind legs, and stares at me, sensitive nose pressed into the air, weak eyes searching. I have never been this close to a wild bear before, but I am not frightened. There is no menace in its stance; it is not even curious. The bear seems to know who or what I am. The bear is not impressed.

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen. Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty. I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it. Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution. Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine. ...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession. In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

And when I look around the apartment where I now am,—when I see Charlotte’s apparel lying before me, and Albert’s writings, and all those articles of furniture which are so familiar to me, even to the very inkstand which I am using,—when I think what I am to this family—everything. My friends esteem me; I often contribute to their happiness, and my heart seems as if it could not beat without them; and yet—if I were to die, if I were to be summoned from the midst of this circle, would they feel—or how long would they feel—the void which my loss would make in their existence? How long! Yes, such is the frailty of man, that even there, where he has the greatest consciousness of his own being, where he makes the strongest and most forcible impression, even in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish,—vanish,—and that quickly. I could tear open my bosom with vexation to think how little we are capable of influencing the feelings of each other. No one can communicate to me those sensations of love, joy, rapture, and delight which I do not naturally possess; and though my heart may glow with the most lively affection, I cannot make the happiness of one in whom the same warmth is not inherent. Sometimes I don’t understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her! I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing. One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. Do not children touch everything they see? And I! Witness, Heaven, how often I lie down in my bed with a wish, and even a hope, that I may never awaken again! And in the morning, when I open my eyes, I behold the sun once more, and am wretched. If I were whimsical, I might blame the weather, or an acquaintance, or some personal disappointment, for my discontented mind; and then this insupportable load of trouble would not rest entirely upon myself. But, alas! I feel it too sadly; I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not? Truly, my own bosom contains the source of all my pleasure. Am I not the same being who once enjoyed an excess of happiness, who at every step saw paradise open before him, and whose heart was ever expanded towards the whole world? And this heart is now dead; no sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry; and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life: that active, sacred power which created worlds around me,—it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills, and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists, and illuminating the country around, which is still wrapped in silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows, which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to extract one tear of joy from my withered heart,—I feel that in such a moment I stand like a reprobate before heaven, hardened, insensible, and unmoved. Oftentimes do I then bend my knee to the earth, and implore God for the blessing of tears, as the desponding labourer in some scorching climate prays for the dews of heaven to moisten his parched corn.

Soft and small voice communications with our associates make priceless friendships possible. I am appreciative of people who find no need to raise their voices as they try to impress or convince. It seems most people who argue and shout have ceased listening to what the small voice could powerfully contribute.

I have to say that I am much less impressed by crucifixion now that I am in childbirth. It is really not possible that anything could hurt more than this. I grieve for the suffering of Our Lord, of course. But if He had tried a bad birth He would know what pain is.

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them that everything be easy. And I don t think that s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we re becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen s animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O Brien s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because frankly I could have gotten someone a passerby on the street who could have gotten the same effect if you d given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver s seat and I think it s a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination.

Once or twice a week I would set my alarm for six A.M. so I could get up and plug in Hot Stix...I would study the curls in the mirror, impressed with both the appliance and my newfound ability to use it. Then, without fail, at the last second before leaving for school, I would ask myself, "Am I supposed to brush it out or leave it?" Why could I never remember" That feeling of "I'm pretty sure this next step is wrong, but I'm just gonna do it anyway" is part of the same set of instincts that makes me such a great cook.

A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now. When, while the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me: when I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty, who formed us in his own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the form of a beloved mistress, then I often think with longing, Oh, would I could describe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so full and warm within me, that it might be the mirror of my soul, as my soul is the mirror of the infinite God! O my friend — but it is too much for my strength — I sink under the weight of the splendour of these visions!

I must have made a pitiful, indeed pitiable impression on an observer, though there was none – unless I'm going to say that I am an observer of myself, which is stupid, since I am my own observer anyway: I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists only of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself. But all the time I ask myself what I have to save myself from?

Some evenings I have the impression that Grandpapa Noirtier patrols our corridors in a century-old wheelchair sadly in need of a drop of oil. To foil the decrees of fate, I am now planning a vast saga in which the key witness is not a paralytic but a runner. You never know. Perhaps it will work.

Xie Lian whipped his head over, and a biting chill flashed before his face. He straightened and stated solemnly: “You ask who I am? LISTEN WELL! ——I, AM THE EMINENT HIGHNESS THE CROWN PRINCE! You riotous radicals, BOW DOWN BEFORE ME!” His voice boomed like thunder in clear skies. There were actually a few who almost dropped to their knees, and didn’t snap out of it until their companions pulled them up. “What are you doing? Are you actually kneeling?” “Th-that’s weird, I did it before I realized it…” Xie Lian proclaimed sharply: “I, AM OVER EIGHT HUNDRED. OLDER THAN ALL OF YOU COMBINED. I’VE CROSSED MORE BRIDGES THAN ALL THE ROADS YOU’VE WALKED. “I, POSSESS SHRINES AND TEMPLES ACROSS THIS LAND; MY DEVOTEES AND WORSHIPPERS ARE SPREAD TO ALL FOUR SEAS. IF YOU DON’T KNOW MY NAME, IT’S BECAUSE YOU ARE IGNORANT AND UNLEARNED OF THE WORLD! “I, DO NOT WORSHIP GODS. “I, AM GOD!” When the mob heard this speech, that was so shameless yet spoken with an incomparably impressive air, they were all stunned, and dropped their jaws. “…HUH???” Xie Lian made up all that nonsense because he was waiting for this very moment. He flung that plate in his hand, and all those little white meatballs shot out through the air like iron pellets, scattering in all directions. Without any misses, they were hurled right into the open mouths of all those people in shock. Then he wiped away his sweat. “Will everyone please forget everything I just said? I’m actually only just a scrap collector!

Stil snorted. “I am not in love with Angelique. I’m in love with you,” he said, scooting closer. Gemma pushed her chair away. “Well, that’s not proper.” “Why not?” Stil asked, butting his chair up against Gemma’s. “Because of the age difference.” “Age difference?” “Of course. Surely you can’t be a day younger than fifty or sixty,” Gemma said in surprise. Stil’s jaw dropped. “You think I’m an OLD MAN?!” Stil thundered. “Most magic users are not the age they physically appear to be,” Gemma said.“And it is well known that they age much more slowly.” “You think I’m an OLD MAN?!” he repeated, his voice even louder. “I’m not even twenty-five yet, you mean-spirited mule, and my clothes are fashionable among mages!” Stil said. “This whole time you’ve thought I am OLD?” “I get the impression that offends you.” “IT DOES.” Gemma only lifted her eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to apologize?” Stil asked. “For what?” “For thinking I’m OLD!” Gemma shrugged. “It seems you have only yourself to blame for that misunderstanding.” Stil glowered

It’s not really impressive when there isn’t another option. What am I supposed to do, be all ‘woe is me’ for the rest of my life? I still get access to the same sunrises everyone else does, the same 24 hours in a day. And if I don’t take advantage of those things, it’s my own fault.

you always feared god-born achilles the most of all your fellows. his divinity wove him taller, better, quicker, stronger. well here's a secret for you: my father was a swan, and the monthly blood on my thighs is two-parts ichor. you think achilles was of impressive descent? touch me one more time. maybe it's time we found out what the daughter of the mightiest god can do. look to your kingdoms. i am coming for them all.

I am going to give the wrong impression, wearing this." "You mean a good impression?" "Yes, exactly.

All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.

I had a dream about you. It's been a while since I could remember any of my dreams, and still, this one has left me with such strong impression. Even now, when I am fully awake, your face flashes before my eyes. It's a face I can totally relate to, as if it wasn't any more yours than it is mine. Terrifying thing, you know? I can't say I've felt that sort of intimacy with anyone. For a moment you knew all my secrets, without me even having to tell them. For a moment I even knew them myself… While I was looking into your eyes, I suddenly started to realize things about myself that were unspoken for years, like fragments of my inner life that were deeply repressed. It’s hard to distinguish if they were buried inside because dealing with them was such a dirty work, or if leaving them unnamed meant that it was not possible to define them precisely enough, so they would keep their true meaning. Perhaps, all this life that I've known so far was in fact no more but a dream about living. The only thing that has kept me in touch with reality was you… I know it comes as a surprise, and you may be wondering why it took me so long to come clean. You also may be wondering how come you've never noticed before. I've tricked you on purpose, yes, and you must realize it really has nothing to do with you. It’s always been me. This is why, seeing you in my dream like that, came out as a shock. You also must forgive me. You must forgive me because I know how it looks like, that everything we ever shared was a lie, and it wasn't… I am more of an illusionist that a deceiver, but it all comes from being in fact, a very private person. Even if it was true that you knew me better than anyone, I’d never admit it. I’d rather dig my own heart out, with a rotten spoon, than admitting it. I may let people in my own little world occasionally, but I would never let them be aware of it. I don’t throw my intimacy in front of others, especially when I care. The more I care, the less I give away, and this is something for you to understand, and grant me your forgiveness. I didn't play my tricks on you in order to deceive you, but rather to save myself, and maybe even deceive myself as well. I’ve had hidden my feelings for you so deeply that I've learned to live with them, as if any other casualty. I have done wrong to myself as much as I did to you, and I don’t know if I can forgive myself. So now I wonder, could you forgive me without feeling sorry for me? I certainly don’t deserve your pity. Especially not now that I am awake.

I begin to shed my Martha-like anxiety about many things. Washable slipcovers, faded and old—I hardly see them; I don’t worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride.

I am from the Kilburn branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation," said Hifan proudly. Irie inhaled. Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation," repeated Millat, impressed. "That's a wicked name. It's got a wicked kung-fu arse sound to it." Irie frowned. "KEVIN?" We are aware," said Hifan solemnly, pointing to the spot underneath the cupped flame where the initials were minutely embroidered, "that we have an acronym problem.

But you invite ...” “I invite a bit of military nonsense.” “That’s what I ...” “Duncan, I am a teacher. Remember that. By repetition, I impress the lesson.” “What lesson?” “The ultimately suicidal nature of military foolishness.

I have never tried to be a good person, or to appear to be a good person. What I do and what I have done is merely a side effect of my desire to become me. I have only wanted to be me; if people think I'm good, then so be it. If people think I'm bad, then so be it. But if anything, my greatest struggle is to not come across as so good. I always find myself asking, "Why do I keep on giving off this immense impression of goodness?" Can I ask the world, am I not simply allowed to be me; without needing to be classified as either good or bad? Being known as good has its own prison just as much as being bad has its jail bars. I am so tired of the need to classify people. I am me.

The virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people’s greed rather than their benevolence, but there is no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment (the reader can easily see that, aside from very few exceptions like George Soros, I am not impressed by people with money).

Of course, I reject atheism because I believe Christianity to be true. But I also reject it because I am a scientist. How could I be impressed with a worldview that undermines the very rationality we need to do science? Science and God mix very well. It is science and atheism that do not mix.

We make loving people a lot more complicated than Jesus did. Every time I try to protect myself by telling somebody about one of my opinions, God whispers to me and asks about my heart. Why are you so afraid? Who are you trying to impress? Am I really so insecure that I surround myself only with people who agree with me? When people are flat wrong, why do I appoint myself the sheriff to straighten them out? Burning down others’ opinions doesn’t make us right. It makes us arsonists.

I am one pair of roses away from the grave,” I told the midget with the twelve-inch erection. It wasn’t his—he was just holding it for a friend (that impressive penis belonged to a much taller man). Ah, but that’s life, no?

But if I lack respect for and enjoyment of who I am, I have very little to give—except my unfilled needs. In my emotional impoverishment, I tend to see other people essentially as sources of approval or disapproval. I do not appreciate them for who they are in their own right. I see only what they can or cannot do for me. I am not looking for people whom I can admire and with whom I can share the excitement and adventure of life. I am looking for people who will not condemn me—and perhaps will be impressed by my persona, the face I present to the world. My ability to love remains undeveloped. This is one of the reasons why attempts at relationships so often fail—not because the vision of passionate or romantic love is intrinsically irrational, but because the self-esteem needed to support it is absent.

I promise you, Lieutenant Embry Moore, I’ll let you fuck me someday.” “When?” I asked, my eyes raking along the thick, hard lines of his naked body. Even sated and asleep his cock was heavy and impressive, curved along his thigh. “When you’ve earned it.” “Am I close to earning it?” He smiled. “Not even.” Well, shit.

So we get a karaoke machine. On the first night, the year tens stage a competition, insisting that every member of the House has to be involved, so we clear the year-seven and -eight dorms and wait for our turn. Raffy is on second and does an impressive job of "I Can''t Live, If Living Means Without You" but then one of the seniors points out to her that she's chosen a dependency song and Raffy spends the whole night neuroticising about it. "I just worked out that I don't have ambition," she says while one of the year eights sings tearfully, "Am I Not Pretty Enough?" I start compiling a list of all the kids I should be recommending to the school counsellor, based on their song choices. "I think she's reading a little to much into it, Raf." "No she isn't. Because do you know what my second and third choices were? 'Don't Leave Me This Way' and 'I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself.'" "Mary Grace chose 'Brown-eyed Girl' and she's got blue eyes and Serina sang 'It's Raining Men' and she's a lesbian. You're taking this way too seriously. Let it go.

Are you calling into question my honor, ma’am?” he demanded in terse ducal tones his grandfather would have been impressed by. The woman snorted. “I expect if you cannot tell that I am, then I should also call into question your intelligence.

Journaling is a way to ask tough questions: Where am I standing in my own way? What’s the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? Why am I so worked up about this? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people? What is the harder choice I’m avoiding? Do I rule my fears, or do they rule me? How will today’s difficulties reveal my character?*

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

It seems that a whole lot of people, both Christians and non-Christians, are under the impression that you can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat, you can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution, you can’t be a Christian and be gay, you can’t be a Christian and have questions about the Bible, you can’t be a Christian and be tolerant of other religions, you can’t be a Christian and be a feminist, you can’t be a Christian and drink or smoke, you can’t be a Christian and read the New York Times, you can’t be a Christian and support gay rights, you can’t be a Christian and get depressed, you can’t be a Christian and doubt. In fact, I am convinced that what drives most people away from Christianity is not the cost of discipleship but rather the cost of false fundamentals. False fundamentals make it impossible for faith to adapt to change. The longer the list of requirements and contingencies and prerequisites, the more vulnerable faith becomes to shifting environments and the more likely it is to fade slowly into extinction. When the gospel gets all entangled with extras, dangerous ultimatums threaten to take it down with them. The yoke gets too heavy and we stumble beneath it.

He's beginning to like me. I am a better and better audience as I get numbed, and although I've played this game of Impress You (and won it, too--though I don't like either of the prizes; winning is too much like losing) I'm too tired to go on playing tonight.

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me. Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.

She is…” Death turned her head, considering. “She is like a party dress I wear when I want to impress visiting dignitaries. Like your friend Betsy, I too am a Terrible Engine. I too have occasional need of awe. But between us, I think, there is no need of finery.

Millions are impressed by the victories of power and take it for the sign of strength. To be sure, power over people is an expression of superior strength in a purely material sense. If I have the power over another person to kill him, I am "stronger" than he is. But in a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.

I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes" here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you ... we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of us-- excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground." [The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop here.]

A Note From the Beach Hello. I am the beach. I am created by waves and currents. I am made of eroded rocks. I exist next to the sea. I have been around for millions of years. I was around at the dawn of life itself. And I have to tell you something. I don’t care about your body. I am a beach. I literally don’t give a fuck. I am entirely indifferent to your body mass index. I am not impressed that your abdominal muscles are visible to the naked eye. I am oblivious. You are one of 200,000 generations of human beings. I have seen them all. I will see all the generations that come after you, too. It won’t be as many. I’m sorry. I hear the whispers the sea tells me. (The sea hates you. The poisoners. That’s what it calls you. A bit melodramatic, I know. But that’s the sea for you. All drama.) And I have to tell you something else. Even the other people on the beach don’t care about your body. They don’t. They are staring at the sea, or they are obsessed with their own appearance. And if they are thinking about you, why do you care? Why do you humans worry so much about a stranger’s opinion? Why don’t you do what I do? Let it wash all over you. Allow yourself just to be as you are. Just be. Just beach.

was starting to raise my hand in a thumbs-down gesture, so he said, “Okay, okay! If we don’t drink blood, we look really pale. Regardless of our ethnicity or geographic location or exposure to the sun. And we feel cold to the touch.” He paused and looked down at me in exasperation. “I am seriously trying here. Every instinct I have is telling me to use polysyllabic words to impress you.

What makes you think you have to turn your life around before you can completely commit your life to God? What makes you think you have to impress God with your obedience before He will impart His grace to you? What makes you think you have to do things to get God to like you, much less love you? What makes you think you have to be the perfect spouse or parent before God will perfectly love you? Many Christians spend a lifetime trying to achieve something that Jesus already achieved for them. God’s acceptance isn’t based on performance. It wasn’t for Jesus. And because of what He did for you, it isn’t for you either. The acceptance He had, you have. The love He unconditionally received, you unconditionally receive. Yes, Jesus was the Son of God. But through Him, you are a child of God with the same privileges.1 That includes the privilege of having God look at you and say, “I am well pleased.

Absolutely pathetic.” I make a Jeopardy! buzzer sound. “Who is Joshua Templeman?” “Lucinda flirting with couriers. Pathetic.” Joshua is hammering away on his keyboard. He certainly is an impressive touch typist. I stroll past his desk and am gratified by his frustrated backspacing. “I’m nice to him.” “You? Nice?” I’m surprised by how hurt I feel. “I’m lovely. Ask anyone.” “Okay. Josh, is she lovely?” he asks himself aloud. “Hmm, let me think.” He picks up his tin of mints, opens the lid, checks them, closes it, and looks at me. I open my mouth and lift my tongue like a mental patient at the medication window. “She’s got a few lovely things about her, I suppose.” I raise a finger and enunciate the words crisply: “Human resources.” He sits up straighter but the corner of his mouth moves. I wish I could use my thumbs to pull his mouth into a huge deranged grin. As the police drag me out in handcuffs I’ll be screeching, Smile, goddamn you. We need to get even, because it’s not fair. He’s gotten one of my smiles, and seen me smile at countless other people. I have never seen him smile, nor have I seen his face look anything but blank, bored, surly, suspicious, watchful, resentful. Occasionally he has another look on his face, after we’ve been arguing. His Serial Killer expression.

One semester later I did, indeed, graduate with a 4.0. I had done it. And after that, my GPA did . . . Nothing. I never planned on going to graduate school. I wasn’t applying for jobs that used grades as a measurement. I didn’t need that GPA for any single reason other than to SAY I had it and impress people. I could turn this into an argument for “Let’s reward a high GPA after college in LIFE! Can we get priority seating on Southwest? A free monthly refill at Starbucks? SOMETHING to make four years of my life chasing this arbitrary number WORTH it?!” (Great idea. Never gonna happen.) Or I could argue that if I’d been easier on myself and gotten 10 percent worse grades I could have had 50 percent more friendships and fun. If someone’s takeaway from this story is “Felicia Day said don’t study!,” I’ll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don’t chase perfection for perfection’s sake, or for anyone else’s sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it’s for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you’ll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up. Being perfect . . . not so much.

In any case, though, I believe that I have no been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply. In doing so, however, I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself just as deeply. I say this not as an excuse or means of self-justification but because it's true. If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound, but mine as well. So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that I would really go to pieces. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. I don't know for a fact that you are really like that, but sometimes you give me that impression. I often envy that in you, which may be why I led you around in circles so much.

I am somebody. I was somebody when I came. I'll be a better somebody when I leave. I am powerful, and I am strong. ...I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go. ...You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you.

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.

I am always impressed by the fact that even the tiniest amount of being listened to, the barest suggestion of the possibility of kind treatment, can bring such an immediate rush of emotion. I think this is because we are almost never really listened to. In my work as a psychologist, I am reminded every day of how infrequently we are heard, any of us, or our actions even marginally understood. And one of the ironies of my "listening profession" is its lesson that, in many ways, each of us ultimately remains a mystery to everyone else.

Here there comes a practical question which has often troubled me. Whenever I go into a foreign country or a prison or any similar place they always ask me what is my religion. I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist". It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods. None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof. Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.

Nearly every person you will read about is deeply flawed. Some have tried to murder other people, and a few were successful. Some have abused their children, physically or emotionally. Many abused (and still abuse) drugs. But I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people so portrayed. For there are no villains in this story. There's just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way - both for their sake and, by the grace of God, for mine.

Sweet Grace amazes me The way that she can see Beyond the man I am To the man that I could be She's bringing out my best While she covers all the rest Some say her love is blind But I say her love forgets She don't like it when I try so hard to impress her ‘Cause when I do that, it's a lie that makes her love look the lesser The truth is I know I'll never be, I'll never be good enough I'll never deserve her love I'll never be, I'll never be good enough for Grace But she takes me anyway I am the cheatin' kind But she's changing my mind The way she takes me back Though I fail her every time She's got friends who tell her that she Is much too good for me Well, I've told her that myself But she refuses to leave I'd like to think my strength won her affection But the truth is it was my weakness that caught her attention I'm grateful to know When my tears fall down like rain She wipes them from my face She tells me that I'm lovely And if I am, it's all because of Grace This love turns my inside out And my world upside down Grace is changing me

Mr. Rochester continued to be blind the first two years of our union; perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near -- that knit us so very close; for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw nature -- he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of the field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam -- of the landscape before us; of the weather around us -- and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary conducting him where he wished to go; of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad -- because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance; he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. 'If I am the wisest man,' said Socrates, 'it is because I alone know that I know nothing.' The implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal. Alas, none of this was new to me. (There is very little that is new to me; I wish my correspondents would realize this.) This particular theme was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who specialized in irritating me. He also told me that all theories are proven wrong in time. My answer to him was, 'John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

STEVE CARELL IS NICE BUT IT IS SCARY It has been said many times, but it is true: Steve Carell is a very nice guy. His niceness manifests itself mostly in the fact that he never complains. You could screw up a handful of takes outside in 104-degree smog-choked Panorama City heat, and Steve Carell’s final words before collapsing of heat stroke would be a friendly and hopeful “Hey, you think you have that shot yet?” I’ve always found Steve gentlemanly and private, like a Jane Austen character. The one notable thing about Steve’s niceness is that he is also very smart, and that kind of niceness has always made me nervous. When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things. Steve could never be as funny as he is, or as darkly observational an actor, without having an extremely acute sense of human flaws. As a result, I’m always trying to impress him, in the hope that he’ll go home and tell his wife, Nancy, “Mindy was so funny and cool on set today. She just gets it.” Getting Steve to talk shit was one of the most difficult seven-year challenges, but I was determined to do it. A circle of actors could be in a fun, excoriating conversation about, say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and you’d shoot Steve an encouraging look that said, “Hey, come over here; we’ve made a space for you! We’re trashing Dominique Strauss-Kahn to build cast rapport!” and the best he might offer is “Wow. If all they say about him is true, that is nuts,” and then politely excuse himself to go to his trailer. That’s it. That’s all you’d get. Can you believe that? He just would not engage. That is some willpower there. I, on the other hand, hear someone briefly mentioning Rainn, and I’ll immediately launch into “Oh my god, Rainn’s so horrible.” But Carell is just one of those infuriating, classy Jane Austen guys. Later I would privately theorize that he never involved himself in gossip because—and I am 99 percent sure of this—he is secretly Perez Hilton.

Yes, the man said, I've often wondered why I impress people as being altogether sad, and yet I insist I am not sad, and that they are quite wrong about me, and yet when I look in the mirror it turns out to be something really true, my face is sad, my face is actually sad, I become convinced (and he smiled at her, because it was four o'clock, and the day was ending and she was a very pretty girl, it was astonishing how gradually she had become prettier) that they are right after all, and I am sad, sadder than I know.

People say I have created things. I have never created anything. I get impressions from the Universe at large and work them out, but I am only a plate on a record or a receiving apparatus — what you will. Thoughts are really impressions that we get from outside.

Sarek looked up with something like hope in his eyes. “I must say,” he said, “I am impressed. You are quite a detective, Doctor.” “All doctors are detectives. All the ones worth their salt, anyway. . . .” “I will get you as much salt as you want, Doctor,” Sarek said,

As long term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. [...] Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression – and this is valid for South America – is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government.

A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one’s audience with one’s mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it—suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers’ days by forcing ’em to witness a grotesqueness. So I’ll make a thick turban from several towels to muffle the shot and soak up the blood, and do it in the bathtub, so it shouldn’t stain any carpets. Last night I left a letter under the manager’s day-office door—he’ll find it at eight A.M. tomorrow—informing him of the change in my existential status, so with luck an innocent chambermaid will be spared an unpleasant surprise. See, I do think of the little people

What a thing it is to live in New York City. To move here and not know a soul. A clean slate, a chance to walk away from the past and start anew...I will feign coolness. I will slowly learn the art of not showing that I am surprised or impressed or moved. I will feel the elation that comes from anonymity. I will feel the comfortable loneliness of wandering the avenues in the rush of humanity, the side streets by myself.

But I don't want to be a different girl," said Emily decidedly. She had no intention of lowering the Starr flag to Aunt Ruth. "I wouldn't want to be anybody but myself even if I am plain. Besides," she added impressively as she turned to go out of the room, "though I may not be very good-looking now, when I go to heaven I believe I'll be very beautiful.

You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow.

Were you ever going to tell me?” “About the Grail?” He returned to the couch and handed her a glass. “I wasn’t planning on it.” She knocked back the rum and swallowed, setting the empty glass on the table. Impressive. She met his eyes. “So even if we had slept together last night, you were going to keep telling me you were descended from a pirate, not an actual pirate.” He took a swig, his gaze locked on hers. “Would you have believed me?” “No.” She shrugged. “Just wondering how long you would have lied to me.” “I could ask you the same thing.” She rolled her eyes. “I played you. There’s a difference.” She shrugged. “Besides that, was before our no lies between us deal.” “I see this as more of an omission.” He finished off his drink and placed the glass beside hers. “In my defense, I’ve never told anyone who I really am. You’re the first.” She raised a brow. “Are you saying I should feel…special?” “Aye.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve never taken a bullet for anyone either, not even my crew.” “Thanks for that.” A reluctant smile curved her lips as she met his eyes. “Pretty heroic for a pirate.” He chuckled. “It’s less heroic when you’re certain you won’t die.” “But you knew it would hurt.” He nodded slowly. “True.” She pinched her fingertips close together in the air. “It might’ve been a tiny bit heroic.” Her dark eyes sparkled with the mischief he was growing much too fond of. “Not bad for a pirate.” He admitted.

I fantasize about killing people all the time. I think about how easy it would be. What if I just started showing up to Kitan rallies with an I-beam? Knock down the capitol building, force them to pass Universal Health Care, stuff aevery Ayn Rand fanatic into a big mason jar and hurl them into the sun. I could do it, you know. I really could. And then there's these people with their fucking sneers going 'You're a monster! You're a thug! You kill people!' No fucking shit I kill people!! I put holes in mountains! I break shit constantly without even trying! I saved the world on no less than seven fucking occasions, and guess what, super-accuracy is not one of my anomalies! Am I supposed to be impressed that you've never killed anybody? What a bold moral choice from a person who's terrified of violence and scared shitless of going to jail! It's like, have you ever had the option of murdering a bunch of people!? Okay, then why the fuck am I listening to your opinion on the matter!? Every day I don't kill a thousand fucking people, they should throw me a god-damned tickertape parade!

In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the only external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great help--exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. I have not said all this to justify myself .... But, no! I am lying. I did want to justify myself. I make that little observation for my own benefit, gentlemen. I don't want to lie. I vowed to myself I would not.

All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. Favourable presentation I trust. My head will be the last to die. Haul in your hands. I can't. The render rent. My story ended I'll be living yet. Promising lag. That is the end of me. I shall say I no more.

The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as people who can not yet afford to be honest. When they can be they will either blossom into a marvel or sink into decay. What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope. I think that in America there are certain kinds of problems and in Russia there are certain kinds of problems, but basically, when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different. I wonder how similar human problems will be solved. But I am not always convinced that human beings are at the core here, either, although there is more lip service done to that idea than in the U.S.

Contemplations on the belly When pregnant with our first, Dean and I attended a child birth class. There were about 15 other couples, all 6-8 months pregnant, just like us. As an introduction, the teacher asked us to each share what had been our favorite part of pregnancy and least favorite part. I was surprised by how many of the men and women there couldn't name a favorite part. When it was my turn, I said, "My least favorite has been the nausea, and my favorite is the belly." We were sitting in the back of the room, so it was noticeable when several heads turned to get a look at me. Dean then spoke. "Yeah, my least favorite is that she was sick, and my favorite is the belly too." Now nearly every head turned to gander incredulously at the freaky couple who actually liked the belly. Dean and I laughed about it later, but we were sincere. The belly is cool. It is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, an unmistakable sign of what's going on inside, the wigwam for our little squirmer, the mark of my undeniable superpower of baby-making. I loved the belly and its freaky awesomeness, and especially the flutters, kicks, and bumps from within. Twins belly is a whole new species. I marvel at the amazing uterus within and skin without with their unceasing ability to stretch (Reed Richards would be impressed). I still have great admiration for the belly, but I also fear it. Sometimes I wonder if I should build a shrine to it, light some incense, offer up gifts in an attempt both to honor it and avoid its wrath. It does seem more like a mythic monstrosity you'd be wise not to awaken than a bulbous appendage. It had NEEDS. It has DEMANDS. It will not be taken lightly (believe me, there's nothing light about it). I must give it its own throne, lying sideways atop a cushion, or it will CRUSH MY ORGANS. This belly is its own creature, is subject to different laws of growth and gravity. No, it's not a cute belly, not a benevolent belly. It would have tea with Fin Fang Foom; it would shake hands with Cthulhu. It's no wonder I'm so restless at night, having to sleep with one eye open. Nevertheless, I honor you, belly, and the work you do to protect and grow my two precious daughters inside. Truly, they must be even more powerful than you to keep you enslaved to their needs. It's quite clear that out of all of us, I'm certainly not the one in control. I am here to do your bidding, belly and babies. I am your humble servant.

When I was thirteen I spent a lot of time pretending to like dance music because everyone at my school seemed to love it. If only I'd known it was OK to have different tastes to others and that one day my mind would be blown open by an older man who would introduce me to The Smiths, The Cure, Buzzcocks, Talking Heads and almost every other band I adore to this day. I also wish I'd been reassured that one day, yes, a boy would actually fancy me in spite and potentially, deliberately, FOR my zero boob/skinny legs combo. But mainly I wish I'd listened to my mother when she said learning to play the piano might come in handy in the future and would actually be something I would thank her for forcing me to do. Every Wednesday we would drive to Mrs Batten's house listening to The ArchersI, with me in the passenger seat trying desperately to think up excuses for why I hadn't practiced that week. Though it seemed very unlikely at the time, I am thankful for those piano lessons every time I manage to impress a boy by hammering out some Chopin when drunk (swot up, kids!).

Since I was a small child, I have always tried to maintain my dignity in every situation. At work now, I strive to maintain my professional dignity. At home, with Thomas, I strive to maintain a certain parental dignity, to protect him from overhearing anything that might upset him, or anything untoward. Therefore, because it feels undignified, I have never enjoyed the feeling of anyone else worrying about me or being concerned for my well-being, preferring instead to give the impression that I am always fine, and that I have everything under control. Largely, I believe this image to be an honest one.

Of all the intoxicants you can find on the road (including a "national beer" for nearly every country in the world), marijuana deserves a particular mention here, primarily because it's so popular with travelers. Much of this popularity is due to the fact that marijuana is a relatively harmless diversion (again, provided you don't get caught with it) that can intensify certain impressions and sensations of travel. The problem with marijuana, however, is that it's the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn't force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life. "The drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life," wrote Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. "Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the 'I' from the true experience of the 'One.'" Moreover, chemical highs have a way of distracting you from the utterly stoning natural high of travel itself. After all, roasting a bowl might spice up a random afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, but is it really all that necessary along the Sumatran shores of Lake Toba, the mountain basins of Nepal, or the desert plateaus of Patagonia? As Salvador Dali quipped, "I never took drugs because I am drugs." With this in mind, strive to be drugs as you travel, to patiently embrace the raw, personal sensation of unmediated reality--an experience for more affecting than any intoxicant can promise.

It’s not what you think, Z. Turn on those god powers and use them. I am not responsible for her knowledge of nothing.” – Sundown “Impressively screwed-up syntax there, Cowboy. Glad I could follow it…Sort of. As for the powers, don’t really have time to scan her and I really don’t give a shit. Rather kill her and save myself the expended energy for something I might actually enjoy…like picking my pose.” – Zarek ‘Ew. Someone was socially awkward.’ – Abigail

Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to seem them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.

What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked. She looked nervously down at the papers in her hand even though I knew for a fact she had memorized every word. “When I was eleven I thought I knew the answer to that question. That was when the recruiters came to see me. They showed me brochures and told me they were impressed by my test scores and asked if I was ready to be challenged. And I said yes. Because that was what a Gallagher Girl was to me then, a student at the toughest school in the world.” She took a deep breath and talked on. “What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked again. “When I was thirteen I thought I knew the answer to that question. That was when Dr. Fibs allowed me to start doing my own experiments in the lab. I could go anywhere—make anything. Do anything my mind could dream up. Because I was a Gallagher Girl. And, to me, that meant I was the future.” Liz took another deep breath. “What is a Gallagher Girl?” This time, when Liz asked it, her voice cracked. “When I was seventeen I stood on a dark street in Washington, D.C., and watched one Gallagher Girl literally jump in front of a bullet to save the life of another. I saw a group of women gather around a girl whom they had never met, telling the world that if any harm was to come to their sister, it had to go through them first.” Liz straightened. She no longer had to look down at her paper as she said, “What is a Gallagher Girl? I’m eighteen now, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I don’t really know the answer to that question. Maybe she is destined to be our first international graduate and take her rightful place among Her Majesty’s Secret Service with MI6.” I glanced to my right and, call me crazy, but I could have sworn Rebecca Baxter was crying. “Maybe she is someone who chooses to give back, to serve her life protecting others just as someone once protected her.” Macey smirked but didn’t cry. I got the feeling that Macey McHenry might never cry again. “Who knows?” Liz asked. “Maybe she’s an undercover journalist.” I glanced at Tina Walters. “An FBI agent.” Eva Alvarez beamed. “A code breaker.” Kim Lee smiled. “A queen.” I thought of little Amirah and knew somehow that she’d be okay. “Maybe she’s even a college student.” Liz looked right at me. “Or maybe she’s so much more.” Then Liz went quiet for a moment. She too looked up at the place where the mansion used to stand. “You know, there was a time when I thought that the Gallagher Academy was made of stone and wood, Grand Halls and high-tech labs. When I thought it was bulletproof, hack-proof, and…yes…fireproof. And I stand before you today happy for the reminder that none of those things are true. Yes, I really am. Because I know now that a Gallagher Girl is not someone who draws her power from that building. I know now with scientific certainty that it is the other way around.” A hushed awe descended over the already quiet crowd as she said this. Maybe it was the gravity of her words and what they meant, but for me personally, I like to think it was Gilly looking down, smiling at us all. “What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked one final time. “She’s a genius, a scientist, a heroine, a spy. And now we are at the end of our time at school, and the one thing I know for certain is this: A Gallagher Girl is whatever she wants to be.” Thunderous, raucous applause filled the student section. Liz smiled and wiped her eyes. She leaned close to the microphone. “And, most of all, she is my sister.

With regard to any such disquisition, review or introduction, trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a “new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work. These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!” .

Very good, brother. I am impressed. You have gotten stronger, but you are not strong enough.” Brother? The word made Mina’s knees weak with relief. It couldn’t be—could it? He said he would never come. That he couldn’t come. She couldn’t help herself; she yelled out his name. “Jared!” The giant’s head turned to her, his eyes looking very human and every ounce Jared. He had one hand over a deep wound in his side, and he was slowly falling to his knees. She heard him call out her name—“Meehna!”—and then he fell forward onto the marble. But when he finally crashed into the ground, he was completely human and injured.

Jordana is in the umpire's highchair. I walk under the rugby posts and on to the tennis courts, stopping a few metres in front of her, in the service box. Her legs are crossed. I wait for her to speak. 'I have two special skills,' she says. She pulls a sheaf of papers from under her bum. I recognize the font and the text boxes. It's my pamphlet. 'Blackmail,' she says. She holds up her Zippo in the other hand. I can tell that she has been practising this. 'And pyromania.' I am impressed that Jordana knows this word. 'Right,' I say. 'I'm going to blackmail you, Ol.' I feel powerless. She is in a throne. 'Okay,' I say.

Really?” he whispers as the flight attendant walks past us. “Excuse me, can we have two more champagnes, please?” he asks her. “Of course, sir.” His eyes come back to meet mine. “Well, do tell. What was your first impression of me?” I pretend to look around for Jessica the flight attendant. “You may need something stronger to drink to hear this, Jim. You’re not going to like it.” He laughs out loud, and I find myself smiling broadly as I watch him. “What’s funny?” I ask. “You are.” “Why am I funny?” I frown. “This sense of righteousness that you have.” “Oh, like you don’t have that too . . . Mr. I’ll Have Two Champagnes.” Our drinks arrive, and he smiles as he passes mine to me. His eyes linger on my face as he takes a sip.

If I am in a state of becoming, it has no endpoint. I imagine replacing the memories of everyone I've ever spoken to with the impression that they have only ever seen me as a being clothed in light. In the early part of the twentieth century, homophobes and eugenicists joined forces to study what they called inversion, an early term for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and transness. They believed they could read and police queerness on the body. Maybe this is why I don't want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless.

the things that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally, on pain of death. I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives. It is a terrible thing to say, but I am afraid that for a very long time the troubles of white people failed to impress me as being real trouble. They put me in mind of children crying because the breast has been taken away. Time and love have modified my tough-boy lack of charity, but the attitude sketched above was my first attitude and I am sure that there is a great deal of it left.

The Pranksters were now out among them, and it was exhilarating--look at the mothers staring!--and there was going to be holy terror in the land. But there would also be people who would look up out of their work-a-daddy lives in some town, some old guy, somebody's stenographer, and see this bus and register...delight, or just pure open-invitation wonder. Either way, the Intrepid Travelers figured, there was hope for these people. They weren't totally turned off...the citizens were suitably startled, outraged, delighted, nonplused, and would wheel around and start or else try to keep their cool by sidling glances like they weren't going to be impressed by any weird shit--and a few smiled in a frank way as if to say, I am with you--if only I could be with you!

I was a timid child. For all that, I am sure I was also obstinate, as children are. I am sure that Mother spoiled me too, but I cannot believe I was particularly difficult to manage; I cannot believe that a kindly word, a quiet taking by the hand, a friendly look, could not have got me to do anything that was wanted of me. Now you are, after all, basically a charitable and kindhearted person (what follows will not be in contradiction to this, I am speaking only of the impression you made on the child), but not every child has the endurance and fearlessness to go on searching until it comes to the kindliness that lies beneath the surface. You can treat a child only in the way you yourself are constituted, with vigor, noise, and hot temper, and in this case such behavior seemed to you to be also most appropriate because you wanted to bring me up to be a strong, brave boy.

I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose's guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting. It wasn't thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn't know from the writing that he'd never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone's yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn't bad either: To Natalie, You're a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned.

I had no thought, that night—none, I am quite sure—of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since, that when we had stopped at the garden gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then, and there, that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with that spot and time, and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill.

Want to know when I first fell a little in love with you?” “When I didn’t faint from fright after meeting Secmis?” She’d come close, practically falling into Brishen’s arms when they escaped the throne room. “That was impressive. No cowering subject before her, but no.” He tugged the blanket over her shoulder where it had fallen away. “It was when you ate the scarpatine and declared it tasted nothing like chicken.” She sniffed. “Then you’re easily impressed. I don’t think I fell in love with you just because you choked down a potato. Granted, you didn’t have to engage it in battle before you ate it.” ‘You’re hard to please.” She thumped his chest above his sternum. “I am not.” “Ouch.” He rubbed the injured spot.

If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently dictated. And, similarly, a demonstration by the absurd is achieved by comparing the consequences of such a reasoning with the logical reality one wants to set up. In all these cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it.

Son, you've got this. You think Helena and I would have invited just anybody into our home? You're our family too. Helena loved you, and you know I do, too. Come back safe. Because you know there's no way I can handle Kady all on my own. I'll be on the radio the whole time, baby girl I'll be with Yulin in engineering. I have to say, when we used to have talk about your future, commanding a battle fleet isn't quite what I imagined, but I know you can do this. I'll be with you every step. I'll be in touch every minute, Ella. There's no way I'm letting anything happen to you, and I demand a rematch when this is over. If you think I'm letting a 15 year old beat me at cards you've got another thing coming. Nik, you are what your actions make you. Not what other people say you are. You've decided who you are, in the face of a world that wanted to tell you otherwise. I get the impression maybe nobody's ever told you they're proud of you. I am, Nik. I'm proud to know you. You have this, Hanna. Your father would be so damn proud of you right now. He knew exactly how incredible you were. We used to talk about it, late at night, these women we were raising. Just how far and fast our daughters would exceed us. He loved that.

They wanted to wow us, maybe?” Lopen said. “Perhaps they thought we’d be so distracted by the riches that we’d be stunned and confused. They did not know that I am accustomed to such incredible sights, for I experience something even more impressive each morning after I awake.” “Is that so?” “When I look in the mirror.” “And you wonder why you’re still single.” “Oh, I don’t wonder,” he said. “I’m fully aware that so much of me is difficult for any one woman to handle. My majesty confuses them. It’s the only explanation for why they often run away.” He gave her a grin.

When you don the pelt of a particular animal--snake, beaver, marmoset--the effect on the viewer is dramatic [...]. You will instantly and shockingly be perceived as having the same traits as your chosen varmint. [...] The wearing of moleskin says, "I am soft and velvety and mysterious and like to hide underground." A mink coat says, "I'm a tough cookie. Though I may not have the wherewithal to actually kill you, please expect to be nipped on a regular basis." The pelts of predators always give the impression that you are a man-stealing, window-smashing home wrecker. This also applies to animal-printed fabric. The message of a leopard-print jumpsuit is clear, "I am a huntress who delights in eating the offal of her prey.

Inside the church, the bondsmaids were walking slowly down the aisle, with the little petal girls. Trinity turned to give Mimi her last words of motherly advice: 'Walk straight. Don't slouch. And for heavens's sake, smile! It's your bonding!?' Then she too walked through the door and down the aisle. The door shut behind her, leaving Mimi alone. Finally, Mimi heard the orchestra play the first strains of the 'Wedding March.' Wagner. Then the ushers opened the doors and Mimi moved to the threshold. There was an appreciative gasp from the crowd as they took in the sight of Mimi in her fantastic dress. But instead of acknowledging her triumph as New York?s most beautiful bride, Mimi looked straight ahead, at Jack, who was standing so tall and straight at the altar. He met her eyes and did not smile. 'Let's just get this over with.' His words were like an ice pick to the heart. He doesn't love me. He has never loved me. Not the way he loves Schuyler. Not the way he loved Allegra. He has come to every bonding with this darkness. With this regret and hesitation, doubt and despair. She couldn't deny it. She knew her twin, and she knew what he was feeling, and it wasn't joy or even relief. What am I doing? "Ready" Forsyth Llewellyn suddenly appeared by her side. Oh, right, she remembered, she had said yes when Forsyth had offered to walk her down the aisle. Here goes nothing. As if in a daze, Mimi took his arm, Jack's words still echoing in her head. She walked, zombie-like, down the aisle, not even noticing the flashing cameras or the murmurs of approval from the hard-to-impress crowd.

I always instruct my students to write a great deal. Write a journal. Take notes. Write when you are feeling wretched, when your mind is about to break down...who knows what will float up to the surface? I am an unashamed believer in the magical powers of dreams; dreams enhance us. Even nightmares may be marketable -- there is something to be said for the conscious, calculating exorcism of nightmares, if they give to us such works as those of Dostoyevsky, Celine,and Kafka. So the most important thing is to write, and to write nearly every day, in sickness and in health. In a while, in a few weeks or a few years, you can always make sense of that jumble of impressions...or perhaps it will suddenly reveal its sense to you.

It’s just that you came right after he left.It’s just that your words were warm and comforting.And it felt like the safest hideout,holding up the door behind my pain.It’s just that your jokes sounded alike.So much that I could hear his laughter when you cracked them.It’s just that you loved iced coffee and rain.It’s just that you parted your hair to the right and preferred window seats. It’s just that it’s always been him.It’s just that he is still crying inside me.Wanting to be remembered.For a really long time.It’s just that I don’t love you,but his impressions that you carry. || I’m so sorry that I am not ready to love you.

Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression. The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion. This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man. Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective. His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy. Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind -- exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.

He grabbed the back of my parka,but I got the distinct impression he was not trying to be a gentleman by helping me out of it.He just wanted his parka back. "When you feel cornered,you'll just fling whatever you've got at people, and you don't care who gets hurt with what." "I am not scared." I slid down from the truck seat into Liz's stepdad's galoshes, then turned to face Nick one last time. "I am not scared of boarding or you,and I will prove it to you tomorrow.If you think I'm going easy on you in the comp just because you have a debilitating injury from yesterday-" "That's what you think," he snarked. "I've been going yoga." "-you have another think coming.You will buy me those Poser tickets. And I'm not even taking you.You will hand the tickets over to me,and I'll take someone else." "Who? Your little brother's friends?" "No,Everett Walsh." I closed the door softly behind me so as not to alarm sleeping adults,because I was that mature. Even through the door and the rolled up window,I could clearly hear every filthy work Nick uttered, ending with, "Everett [cuss word] Walsh." I opened the passenger door. "Ask not for whom the fire-crotch burns;it burns for thee!" I'd meant this to be an insult.Then I realized it sounded like I wanted Nick.Or like I had a feminine problem.

I have sometimes thought that if ever I return home, I shall get more grief than joy from my impressions there. I have not lived your life, and much in it is unknown to me, and indeed, no one can really know exactly his fellow-mortal's life; still, human feeling is common to us all, and it seems to me that everyone who has been banished must live all his past grief over again in consciousness and memory, on his return home. It is like a balance, by which one can test the true gravity of what one has endured, gone through, and lost. God grant you a long life ! I have heard from many people that you are very religious. But not because you are religious, but because I myself have learnt it and gone through it, I want to say to you that in such moments, one does, " like dry grass," thirst after faith, and that one finds it in the end, solely and simply because one sees the truth more clearly when one is unhappy. I want to say to you, about myself, that I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism, and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully has it tormented me (and torments me even now)—this longing for faith, which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it. And yet God gives me sometimes moments of perfect peace; in such moments I love and believe that I am loved;

Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved ---- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both. This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics. Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before. Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have seen before. There is one simplication at least. Electrons behave in this respect in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way…. The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it. There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

waiting for the other shoe to drop. Did you know it originated in cities like Chicago and New York?” “No. I did not” He tilted his head, his mouth hooking upward to one side as though he were trying not to laugh. “Tell me about it.”He was teasing me again. “Well, it did. So…”He lifted his eyebrows, “That’s all? You’re not going to tell me the specific origin of the idiom waiting for the other shoe to drop’?”I shook my head, “I don’t know it.”He mimicked me and shook his head in response, “You’re lying. You do know.”“Nope. I don’t.”“This is just like the mammals.” He sighed and placed his phone on the table. Before he took a bite from his sandwich he said, “You’re stingy with information.”My frowned deepened, “No, I’m not-”His words were somewhat garbled as he spoke between chewing, “You’re an information tease.”“What?!”“Or maybe you don’t really know the origin and you’re just making things up to impress me-” he took another bite. “I am not! It originates from the late industrial revolution, in the late 19th and early 20th century.Apartments were all built with the same floor plan, in similar design so one tenant’s bedroom was under another’s. Therefore it was normal to hear an upstairs neighbor removing his or her shoes and hearing one shoe hit the floor, then the other, when they undressed at night.”“I wonder what else they heard.” His gaze held mine, seemed to burn with a new intensity.“I suppose anything that was loud enough.

The sexual eagle exults he will gild the earth once more his descending wing his ascending wing sways imperceptibly the sleeves of the peppermint and all the water's adorable undress Days are counted so clearly that the mirror has yielded to a froth of fronds of the sky i see but one star now around us there is only the milk describing its dizzy ellipsis from which sometimes soft intuition with pupils of eyed agate rises to poke its umbrella tip in the mud of the electric light then great reaches cast anchor stretch out in the depths of my closed eyes icebergs radiating the customs of all the worlds yet to come bron from a fragment of you fragment unkown and iced on the wing your existence the giant bouquet escaping fr4om my arms is badly tied it didgs out walls unrolls the stairs of houses loses its leaves in the show windows of the street to gether the news i am always leaving to gather the news the newspaper is glass today and if letters no longer arrive it's that the train has been consumed the great incision of the emerald which gaave birth to the foliage is scarred for always the sawdust of blinding snow and the quarries of flesh are sounding along on the first shelf reversed on this shelf i take the impression of death and life to the liquid air

There’s more than one way to sneak into a place, you know,’ Otto said, pulling his Blackbox out of his pocket and passing it to Laura. Laura glanced at the display, her eyes widening in shock. ‘That’s impossible,’ she whispered, not taking her eyes off the screen. ‘Apparently not,’ Otto said with a sly grin. ‘Want a copy?’ ‘That would be cheating,’ Laura replied, handing the Blackbox back to Otto. ‘Of course I want a copy.’ ‘A copy of what?’ Shelby said impatiently, trying and failing to grab the PDA from Otto. ‘Next week’s exam,’ Otto said quietly. ‘But I’m sure you’ll just be able to sneak in and steal one, what with you being so stealthy . . .’ Shelby looked half annoyed and half impressed. ‘How much?’ she said with a smile. ‘Well, there are a couple of things in the Science and Technology centre that I might like to borrow for a while,’ Otto replied. ‘I am surrounded by people of low moral character,’ Wing sighed.

So . . . ,” she says, following him to the chalkboard. “You got a Visiting. An actual Visiting—Natasha Grimm-Pitch was here.” Baz glances back over his shoulder. “You sound impressed, Bunce.” “I am,” Penelope says. “Your mother was a hero. She developed a spell for gnomeatic fever. And she was the youngest headmaster in Watford history.” Baz is looking at Penny like they’ve never met. “And,” Penny goes on, “she defended your father in three duels before he accepted her proposal.” “That sounds barbaric,” I say. “It was traditional,” Baz says. “It was brilliant,” Penny says. “I’ve read the minutes.” “Where?” Baz asks her. “We have them in our library at home,” she says. “My dad loves marriage rites. Any sort of family magic, actually. He and my mother are bound together in five dimensions.” “That’s lovely,” Baz says, and I’m terrified because I think he means it. “I’m going to make time stop when I propose to Micah,” she says. “The little American? With the thick glasses?” “Not so little anymore.” “Interesting.” Baz rubs his chin. “My mother hung the moon.” “She was a legend,” Penelope beams. “I thought your parents hated the Pitches,” I say. They both look at me like I’ve just stuck my hand in the soup bowl. “That’s politics,” Penelope says. “We’re talking about magic.” “Obviously,” I say. “What was I thinking.” “Obviously,” Baz says. “You weren’t.” “What’s happening right now?” I say. “What are we even doing?” Penelope folds her arms and squints at the chalkboard. “We,” she declares, “are finding out who killed Natasha Grimm-Pitch.” “The legend,” Baz says. Penelope gives him a soft look, the kind she usually saves for me. “So she can rest in peace.

Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution.Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time” — his voice rose — “there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation ‘seraphically free From taint of personality,’ which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.

You were supposed to be on that elevator with him," Tristan said from behind us. "If you don't make it to the car before he does, believe me, he will drop the both of you on the spot" Atticus and I glanced at each for a second, before I took off my heels and bolted towards the stairs. "Are you insane? There are at least 60 flights of stairs!" Atticus yelled after me, but I ignored him, running as quickly as I could. AsI reached the 49th level, Ipushed open the door and dashed towards the elevator, pressing the botton over and over again, as if my life depended on it. "Ma'am?" a security guard asked, coming towards me. Fortunately, the doors opened, and sure enough there was Levi reading his paper. "I work for him!" I shouted, pointing to Levi, as I jumped inside. He looked up at me, confused as I entered gasping. "I would have been more impressed if you ran down all of the stairs," he said, no longer interested in me. As I stood there trying to catch my breath, he continued reading. "Fuck you" "Excuse me?" he turned back to look at me, his eyes narrowing. "Achoo," I sneezed. "Excuse me," I lied and he knew it, but I put my heels back on anyway. "Where's Atticus?" he asked as the doors opened. "I don't know maybe he just isn't hungry for-" I stopped, seeing Atticus already standing at the car door. Levi looked back to me. "He wins.

You’re not gonna believe what just happened to me,” Jase says the minute I flip my cell open, taking advantage of break at the B&T. I turn away from the picture window just in case Mr. Lennox, disregarding the break sign, will come dashing out to slap me with my first-ever demerit. “Try me.” His voice lowers. “You know how I put that lock on the door of my room? Well, Dad noticed it. Apparently. So today, I’m stocking the lawn section and he comes up and asks why it’s there.” “Uh-oh.” I catch the attention of a kid sneaking into the hot tub (there’s a strict no-one-under-sixteen policy) and shake my head sternly. He slinks away. Must be my impressive uniform. “So I say I need privacy sometimes and sometimes you and I are hanging out and we don’t want to be interrupted ten million times.” “Good answer.” “Right. I think this is going to be the end of it. But then he tells me he needs me in the back room to have a ‘talk.’” “Uh-oh again.” Jase starts to laugh. “I follow him back and he sits me down and asks if I’m being responsible. Um. With you.” Moving back into the shade of the bushes, I turn even further away from the possible gaze of Mr. Lennox. “Oh God.” “I say yeah, we’ve got it handled, it’s fine. But, seriously? I can’t believe he’s asking me this. I mean, Samantha. Jesus. My parents? Hard not to know the facts of life and all in this house. So I tell him that we’re moving slowly and—” “You told him that?” God, Jase! How am I ever going to look Mr. Garret in the eye again? Help. “He’s my dad, Samantha. Yeah. Not that I didn’t want to exit the conversation right away, but still . . .” “So what happened then?” “Well, I reminded him they’d covered that really thoroughly in school, not to mention at home, and we weren’t irresponsible people.” I close my eyes, trying to imagine having this conversation with my mother. Inconceivable. No pun intended. “So then . . . he goes on about”—Jase’s voice drops even lower—“um . . . being considerate and um . . . mutual pleasure.” “Oh my god! I would’ve died. What did you say?” I ask, wanting to know even while I’m completely distracted by the thought. Mutual pleasure, huh? What do I know about giving that? What if Shoplifting Lindy had tricks up her sleeve I know nothing about? It’s not like I can ask Mom. “State senator suffers heart attack during conversation with daughter.” “I said ‘Yes sir’ a lot. And he went on and on and on and all I could think was that any minute Tim was gonna come in and hear my dad saying things like, ‘Your mom and I find that . . . blah blah blah.’” I can’t stop laughing. “He didn’t. He did not mention your mother.” “I know!” Jase is laughing too. “I mean . . . you know how close I am to my parents, but . . . Jesus.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. — Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

Of course, we cannot deny the fact that many people live for a long time even though they idealize the parents who were once cruel to them. But we do not know how they contrived to come to terms with their own un-truth. Most of them passed it on unconsciously to the next generation. What we do know is that, at some point, the writers we have been discussing began to suspect their own truth. But isolated in a society that will always take the part of the parents, they were unable to find the courage to abandon their denial. Just how strong this social pressure can be is something that each and every one of us can experience for ourselves. Adults realizing that they were cruelly treated by their mothers in childhood and talking openly and frankly about that fact will invariably get the same response, from therapists as much as anyone else: “Yes, but she had a difficult time of it, and she did a lot for you. You shouldn’t condemn her; you shouldn’t see things in black and white and take a one-sided view of things. There’s no such thing as ideal parents, etc.” The impression we get is that the people who talk in this way are, in fact, defending their own mothers, though the person they are speaking to is not attacking them. This social pressure is much stronger than we tend to realize. So I hope very much that my discussion of these writers will not be understood as a criticism of their lack of courage. It is meant rather as a sympathetic portrayal of the tragedy of people unable in their isolation to admit their own personal truth, although they sensed it deep down in their own selves. I am writing this book in the hope of being able to reduce that isolation. In therapy, it is by no means unusual to encounter the loneliness of the small child that the adult once was. After all, therapy itself is usually conducted in a way that is also dictated by the Fourth Commandment.

Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.” — Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)

Abundance of the Heart. He describes an experience with nature and his father. An environment of trust can have to do with a special experience, a place, another person, or people. My first real discovery of nature in life came one morning in April 1916. My father put me on the back of his bike, where I had a little seat, and said, "Off we go." And then he turned in the wrong direction for I thought he was taking me down to Quakers' meeting--it was a Sunday. "No," he said, "we are going somewhere else today." And we rode for about eight miles, and we stopped at a wood. . . . We went into the wood; and there, suddenly, was a great pool of bluebells stretching for perhaps a hundred yards in the shade of the oak trees. And I could scarcely breathe because the impression was so great. The experience then was just the bluebells and the scent; now, when I recall it, it is also the love of my father who chose to do that that morning--to give me that experience. I am sure he had been there the day before, found it, and thought, "I'll take my son there." As we rode there and as we rode back, we heard the distant thud of the guns at the Battle of the Somme, where thousands were dying every day. That overwhelming experience of a natural phenomenon, a demonstration of beneficent creation, and at the same time hearing those guns on the Somme--that experience has remained with me almost more clearly than anything else in my life. [The Abundance of the Heart (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986), p. 88]

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have, I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Where is it, Rudolf?” she whispers, pressing herself against me. “Tell me where it is! Has a piece of me been left behind everywhere? In all the mirrors I have looked into? I have seen lots of them, countless ones! Am I scattered everywhere in them? Has each of them taken some part of me? A thin impression, a thin slice of me? Have I been shaved down by mirrors like a piece of wood by a carpenter’s plane? What is still left of me?” I take her by the shoulders. “All of you is still here,” I say. “On-the contrary, mirrors add something. They make it visible and give it to you—a bit of space, a lighted bit of our-self.” “Myself?” She continues to cling to my hand. “But suppose it is not that way? Suppose myself is buried all over in thousands and thousands of mirrors? How can I get it back? Oh, I can never get it back! It is lost! Lost! It has been rubbed away like a statue that no longer has a face. Where is my face? Where is my first face? The one before all the mirrors? The one before they began to steal me!” “No one has stolen you,” I say in desperation. “Mirrors don’t steal. They only reflect.

I trust you will not be as scared by this word as you were Thursday [Du Bois was referring to the audience’s reaction to a speech by Dr. Broadus Mitchell of Johns Hopkins University]. I am not discussing a coming revolution, I am trying to impress the fact upon you that you are already in the midst of a revolution; you are already in the midst of war; that there has been no war of modern times that has taken so great a sacrifice of human life and human spirit as the extraordinary period through which we are passing today. Some people envisage revolution chiefly as a matter of blood and guns and the more visible methods of force. But that, after all, is merely the temporary and outward manifestation. Real revolution is within. That comes before or after the explosion—is a matter of long suffering and deprivation, the death of courage and the bitter triumph of despair. This is the inevitable prelude to decisive and enormous change, and that is the thing that is on us now. We are not called upon then to discuss whether we want revolution or not. We have got it. Our problem is how we are coming out of it. 67

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

And so this end in confusion, where when things stop I never get to know it, and this moving is the space, is that what is yet to be, which is for others to see filled wherever it may finally be in the frame when the last pieces are fitted and the others stop, and there will be the stopped pattern, the final array, but not even that, because that final finitude will itself be a bit of scrolling, a percent clump of tiles, which will generally stay together but move about within another whole and be mingled, with in endless ways of other people's memories, so that I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all of the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else's frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their downtime, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren, I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world because they were made from this world, even though the fleeting tenants of those bits of colored glass have vacated them before they have had even the remotest understanding of what it is to inhabit them, and if they -- if we are fortunate (yes, I am lucky, lucky), and if we are fortunate, have fleeting instants when we are satisfied that the mystery is ours to ponder, if never to solve, or even just rife personal mysteries, never mind those outside-- are there even mysteries outside? a puzzle itself -- but anyway, personal mysteries, like where is my father, why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simple even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this.

I smiled as our hands pressed against one another in midair, as though we were pretending to touch through invisible glass. We managed a long stare before Jack finally blushed, retracting his hands. “How old are you, Jack Patrick?” “I turned fourteen this summer,” he said. I gave an impressed nod, indicating this was no small accomplishment. “Well you’re certainly old enough to know what you like.” Principal Deegan’s first-day speech came back to mind; I had to bite my lip not to jokingly add in, Am I right? “Here, let me give you some examples. Do you like it when girls wear lipstick?” He blushed and nodded. “Yeah.” His voice had an embarrassed tone, like he’d just made a vile confession. “Good—do you like lighter lipstick? Darker lipstick? Red?” I wanted to grab his hand again. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to slide my fingers beneath the desk and touch the bare skin of his leg. “Um,” he said. His hand began to scratch at his scalp. “Wait,” I said. “I have an idea.” I walked up to my desk and grabbed my purse and a box of Kleenex. “So what I’m wearing now is called fuchsia. Kind of a bright pink.” I sat and wiped it off, then took the fuchsia tube of lipstick out of my purse along with two others. “Okay, ready?” He nodded with sudden animation—we were about to play a game.

It was getting late, but sleep was the furthest thing from my racing mind. Apparently that was not the case for Mr. Sugar Buns. He lay back, closed his eyes, and threw an arm over his forehead, his favorite sleeping position. I could hardly have that. So, I crawled on top of him and started chest compressions. It seemed like the right thing to do. "What are you doing?" he asked without removing his arm. "Giving you CPR." I pressed into his chest, trying not to lose count. Wearing a red-and-black football jersey and boxers that read, DRIVERS WANTED. SEE INSIDE FOR DETAILS, I'd straddled him and now worked furiously to save his life, my focus like that of a seasoned trauma nurse. Or a seasoned pot roast. It was hard to say. "I'm not sure I'm in the market," he said, his voice smooth and filled with a humor I found appalling. He clearly didn't appreciate my dedication. "Damn it, man! I'm trying to save your life! Don't interrupt." A sensuous grin slid across his face. He tucked his arms behind his head while I worked. I finished my count, leaned down, put my lips on his, and blew. He laughed softly, the sound rumbling from his chest, deep and sexy, as he took my breath into his lungs. That part down, I went back to counting chest compressions. "Don't you die on me!" And praying. After another round, he asked, "Am I going to make it?" "It's touch-and-go. I'm going to have to bring out the defibrillator." "We have a defibrillator?" he asked, quirking a brow, clearly impressed. I reached for my phone. "I have an app. Hold on." As I punched buttons, I realized a major flaw in my plan. I needed a second phone. I could hardly shock him with only one paddle. I reached over and grabbed his phone as well. Started punching buttons. Rolled my eyes. "You don't have the app," I said from between clenched teeth. "I had no idea smartphones were so versatile." "I'll just have to download it. It'll just take a sec." "Do I have that long?" Humor sparkled in his eyes as he waited for me to find the app. I'd forgotten the name of it, so I had to go back to my phone, then back to his, then do a search, then download, then install it, all while my patient lay dying. Did no one understand that seconds counted? "Got it!" I said at last. I pressed one phone to his chest and one to the side of his rib cage like they did in the movies, and yelled, "Clear!" Granted, I didn't get off him or anything as the electrical charge riddled his body, slammed his heart into action, and probably scorched his skin. Or that was my hope, anyway. He handled it well. One corner of his mouth twitched, but that was about it. He was such a trouper. After two more jolts of electricity--it had to be done--I leaned forward and pressed my fingertips to his throat. "Well?" he asked after a tense moment. I released a ragged sigh of relief,and my shoulders fell forward in exhaustion. "You're going to be okay, Mr. Farrow." Without warning, my patient pulled me into his arms and rolled me over, pinning me to the bed with his considerable weight and burying his face in my hair. It was a miracle!

Book, when I close you life itself opens. I hear broken screams in the harbor. The copper slugs cross the sandy areas, descending to Tocopilla. It is night. Between the islands our ocean palpitates with fish. It touches the feet, the thighs, the chalky ribs of my homeland. Night touches the shoreline and rises while singing at daybreak like a guitar awakening. I feel the irresistible force of the ocean's call. I am called by the wind, and called by Rodriguez, José Antonio, I received a telegram from the "Mina" worker's union and the one I love (I won't tell you her name) waits for me in Bucalemu. Book, you haven't been able to enwrap me, you haven't covered me with typography, with celestial impressions, you haven't been able to trap my eyes between covers, I leave you so I can populate groves with the hoarse family of my song, to work burning metals or to eat grilled meat at the fireside in the mountains. I love books that are explorers, books with forest and snow, depth and sky, but I despise the book of spiders that employs thought to weave its venomous wires to trap the young and unsuspecting fly. Book, free me. I don't want to be entombed like a volume, I don't come from a tome, my poems don't eat poems, they devour passionate events, they're nurtured by the open air and fed by the earth and by men. Book, let me wander the road with dust in my low shoes and without mythology: go back to the library while I go into the streets. I've learned to take life from life, to love after a single kiss, and I didn't teach anything to anyone except what I myself lived, what I shared with other men, what I fought along with them: what I expressed from all of us in my song.

Why then I do but dream on sovereignty, Like one that stands upon a promontory And spies a far-off shore where he would tread, Wishing his foot were equal with his eye, And chides the sea that sunders him from thence, Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way: So do I wish the crown, being so far off, And so I chide the means that keeps me from it, And so, I say, I'll cut the causes off, Flattering me with impossibilities, My eye's too quick, my hear o'erweens too much, Unless my hand and strength could equal them. Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard; What other pleasure can the world afford? I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap, And deck my body in gay ornaments, And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks. O miserable thought! and more unlikely Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns! Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb; And for I should not deal in her soft laws, She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe, To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub, To make an envious mountain on my back, Where sits deformity to mock my body; To shape my legs of an unequal size, To disproportion me in every part, Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp That carries no impression like the dam. And am I then a man to be belov'd? O monstrous fault, to harbor such a thought! Then since this earth affords no joy to me But to command, to check, to o'erbear such As are of better person than myself, I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown, And whiles I live, t' account this world but hell, Until my misshap'd trunk that bears this head Be round impaled with a glorious crown. And yet I know not how to get the crown, For many lives stand between me and home; And I - like one lost in a thorny wood, That rents the thorns, and is rent with the thorns, Seeking a way, and straying from the way, Not knowing how to find the open air, But toiling desperately to find it out - Torment myself to catch the English crown; And from that torment I will free myself, Or hew my way out with a bloody axe. Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile, And cry "Content" to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions. I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall, I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk, I'll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slily than Ulysses could, And like a Simon, take another Troy. I can add colors to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murtherous Machevil to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.

She heard him close the door. “I was going to impress you with my romantic eloquence, of course. I’d thought to wax philosophical about the beauty of your brow.” Lucy blinked. “My brow?” “Mmm. Have I told you that your brow intimidates me?” She felt his warmth at her back as he moved behind her, but he didn’t touch her. “It’s so smooth and white and broad, and ends with your straight, knowing eyebrows, like a statue of Athena pronouncing judgment. If the warrior goddess had a brow like yours, it is no wonder the ancients worshiped and feared her.” “Blather,” she murmured. “Blather, indeed. Blather is all I am, after all.” She frowned and turned to contradict him, but he moved with her so that she couldn’t quite catch sight of his face. “I am the duke of nonsense,” he whispered in her ear. “The king of farce, the emperor of emptiness.” Did he really see himself so? “But—” “Blathering is what I do best,” he said, still unseen. “I’d like to blather about your golden eyes and ruby lips.” “Simon—” “The perfect curve of your cheek,” he murmured close. She gasped as his breath stirred the hair at her neck. He was distracting her with lovemaking. And it was working. “What a lot of talk.” “I do talk too much. It’s a weakness you’ll have to bear in your husband.” His voice was next to her ear. “But I’d have to spend quite a bit of time outlining the shape of your mouth, its softness and the warmth within. -Simon to Lucy on their wedding night.

We can get some relatively clear thought in science. But even there it is not entirely clear because scientists are worried about their prestige and status, and so on. Sometimes they won't consider ideas that don't go along with their theories or with their prejudices. Nevertheless, science is aimed at seeing the fact, whether the scientist likes what he sees or not—looking at theories objectively, calmly, and without bias. To some extent, relatively coherent thought has been achieved better in science than in some other areas of life. Some results flowed out of science and technology which are quite impressive—a great power was released. But now we discover that whenever the time comes to use science we just forget the scientific method. We just say that the use of what scientists have discovered will be determined by the needs of our country, or by my need to make money, or by my need to defeat that religion or merely by my need to show what a great powerful person I am. So we see that relatively unpolluted thought has been used to develop certain things, and then we always trust to the most polluted thought to decide what to do with them. That's part of the incoherence

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants—they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone… ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I'll call Mr. 'Miller,' a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller's great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out [...]. Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swag-bellied cops lying about themselves and the political succession changed as much by bullets as by ballots.

Trace started to wave toward Matt, still with Priss wrapped around him, and she blurted, “I love you, Trace.” That effectively drew him to a halt. His hands contracted on her backside. “What?” “I love you.” Then she pointed at Chris, and to where Matt had disappeared. “They told me to fess up, so I am, and if you reject me, I swear I’ll drown them both.” Very slowly, Trace’s expression changed from the heat of anger to a different type of heat. “Say it again.” “Why?” She frowned at him with challenge. “Why don’t you say something first?” “All right.” Sliding his hands up her back, over her shoulders, and into her wet hair, he kissed her. “You make me nuts, Priscilla.” He turned his head and kissed her again, a little longer this time. “You make me hot as hell, too.” “I love you,” Priss reminded him, hoping it might prompt him to a more telling declaration. His next kiss lasted long enough to take the chill off the lake, and Priss got so wrapped up in the taste of him that she almost forgot what she wanted to hear. Chris didn’t. From the dock, he said, “If you’re going to keep her waiting like this, someone needs to finish putting sunscreen on her.” Trace moved fast, grabbing for Chris’s ankle, but Chris jumped back out of reach. Priss, feeling very affected by that kiss, nuzzled Trace’s neck and stroked his shoulders. He smelled delicious, felt even better. “Stop being a voyeur, Chris, and go away.” Having joined Chris on the dock, Matt asked, “Does that mean I can stay?” Trace lurched forward again, and Matt jumped back so quick he fell on his butt. “I’m going. I’m going!” To bring Trace’s attention back to her, Priss bit him. Not a hard bite, but she felt the impression of her sharp teeth on that sensitive spot where his neck met his shoulder. Trace shuddered. “I love you, too.” She licked the bite mark. “I’m so glad.

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous. ... Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone. Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope. This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

Asia is rising against me. I haven't got a chinaman's chance. I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources cousist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & V anzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don't really want to go to war. America it's them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I'd better get right down to the job. It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Don’t you remember how I was always all over you, wanting cuddles and hugs and your hands on me? I loved being close to you, loved your scent, even when you came from the gym and claimed that you smelled gross. I loved being your babe, your love, and your sweetheart. I “always loved touching you,” Harry said softly, licking his lips. He moved his hands from Adam’s shoulders and slipped them under Adam’s unbuttoned shirt. “Even when I was incapable of feeling arousal, I was still attracted to you so badly I felt the attraction even despite the bond, but I couldn’t quite understand what I felt until the bond broke completely.” Harry looked Adam in the eye, his face open and earnest. “I was ridiculously smitten with you. You were my sun and my moon and my stars. I wanted to make you happy. I “wanted to impress you. I wanted you to smile at me and call me love. I wanted you to say I was special to you, your only babe. I fell in love with you long before I was even capable of feeling lust.” Harry took Adam’s hand and brought it to his lips. “I love you,” he murmured. “I always have. The fact that I need you physically doesn’t negate the fact that I love you so very much. Because I do.” He nuzzled into Adam’s hand like a kitten. “I love you. I love you more than you can imagine. I don’t care what people back home will think of me because of our relationship. I want to be yours. I am yours. Your Harry.

He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into the low places. Like that—and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, “Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this hand has.” And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went. I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able even to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive—old, old—when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.

The Future is an illusion because, at the most fundamental level, Choice is an illusion. I am a believer in the theory, popular among physicists, that every time there is a Choice, the universe splits: both choices come to pass, but in now-separate universes. And so on, and on, with every choice of every particle, every atom, every molecule, every cell, every being, coming into being. In this universe of universes, everything happens, and every combination of things happens. Our universe is a mote of dust in an ever-growing dust-storm of possibilities, but each mote of dust in that storm is generating its own dust-storm of possibilities every instant, the motes of which in turn... But you get the general impression. Indeed to think of ourselves as single selves, and our universe as a single universe, is to be blinded, by the limitations of our senses and our consciousness, to the infinite-faceted truth: that we are infinite in a universe of universes that are each infinitely infinite..." "An intriguingly intricate view of the world," I said (...) Pat Sheeran nodded. "And it is astonishing how little practical difference it makes," he said. "All my other lives are as inaccessible to me as if they did not exist at all. No doubt in other universes I am a beggar, a revolutionary thinker, an academic, an accountant; a drinker, a thinker, a writer of books; I lose a freckle, gain a mole, shade off into men nothing like me at all; I have sons, fire guns, live forever, die too young. Whenever any particle in this universe changes state, I am split and travel in both directions, multiplied. But here I am, suffering the illusion of unity in this endlessly bifurcating moment. Yet sometimes, I wave my arms for the joy of creating a spray of universes." I said startled at the implications, “Though it may make no practical difference, the implications are nonetheless startling." "Indeed," said Pat Sheeran. "I had immediately to file all the fiction on my shelves under Non-Fiction. For it is an unavoidable corollary of this theory, that Fiction is impossible. For all novels are true histories of worlds as real as ours, but which we cannot see. All stories are possible, all histories have happened. I, billion-bodied, live a trillion lives every quantum instant. Those trillion lives branch out, a quintillion times a second, as every particle in every atom in each mote of dust on land, in sea, and sky, and space, and star, flickering in and out of being in the void, hesitates and decides its next stage. All tragedies, all triumphs, are mine, are yours." "It is a curious and difficult thing, to think that all is possible. No, probable. No, certain," I said, attempting to grasp the largeness of the thought."That nothing is improbable." "It is a comforting thought, some nights, to this version of me, now," said Pat Sheeran, and we roared on.

I believe that I have not been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply. In doing so, however, I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself just as deeply. I say this not as an excuse or a means of self-justification but because it is true. If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that, I would really go to pieces. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. I don't know for a fact that you are really like that, but sometimes you give me that impression. I often envy that in you, which may be why I led you around in circles so much. This may be an over-analytical way of looking at things. Don't you agree? The therapy they perform here is certainly not over-analytical, but when you are under treatment for several months the way I am here, like it or not, you become more or less analytical. "This was caused by that, and that means this, because of which such-and-such." Like that. I can't tell whether this kind of analysis is trying to simplify the world or complicate it. In any case, I myself feel that I am far closer to recovery than I once was, and people here tell me this is true. This is the first time in a long while I have been able to sit down and calmly write a letter. The one I wrote you in July was something I had to squeeze out of me (though, to tell the truth, I don't remember what I wrote - was it terrible?), but this time I am very calm. How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvellous. Of course, once I do put them to words, I find I can only express a fraction of what I want to say, but that's all right. I'm happy just to be able to feel I want to write to someone. And so I am writing to you.

Asking a writer why they like to write {in the theoretical sense of the question} is like asking a person why they breathe. For me, writing is a natural reflex to the beauty, the events, and the people I see around me. As Anais Nin put it, "We write to taste life twice." I live and then I write. The one transfers to the other, for me, in a gentle, necessary way. As prosaic as it sounds, I believe I process by writing. Part of the way I deal with stressful situations, catty people, or great joy or great trials in my own life is by conjuring it onto paper in some way; a journal entry, a blog post, my writing notebook, or my latest story. While I am a fair conversationalist, my real forte is expressing myself in words on paper. If I leave it all chasing round my head like rabbits in a warren, I'm apt to become a bug-bear to live with and my family would not thank me. Some people need counselors. Some people need long, drawn-out phone-calls with a trusted friend. Some people need to go out for a run. I need to get away to a quiet, lonesome corner--preferably on the front steps at gloaming with the North Star trembling against the darkening blue. I need to set my pen fiercely against the page {for at such moments I must be writing--not typing.} and I need to convert the stress or excitement or happiness into something to be shared with another person. The beauty of the relationship between reading and writing is its give-and-take dynamic. For years I gathered and read every book in the near vicinity and absorbed tale upon tale, story upon story, adventures and sagas and dramas and classics. I fed my fancy, my tastes, and my ideas upon good books and thus those aspects of myself grew up to be none too shabby. When I began to employ my fancy, tastes, and ideas in writing my own books, the dawning of a strange and wonderful idea tinged the horizon of thought with blush-rose colors: If I persisted and worked hard and poured myself into the craft, I could create one of those books. One of the heart-books that foster a love of reading and even writing in another person somewhere. I could have a hand in forming another person's mind. A great responsibility and a great privilege that, and one I would love to be a party to. Books can change a person. I am a firm believer in that. I cannot tell you how many sentiments or noble ideas or parts of my own personality are woven from threads of things I've read over the years. I hoard quotations and shadows of quotations and general impressions of books like a tzar of Russia hoards his icy treasures. They make up a large part of who I am. I think it's worth saying again: books can change a person. For better or for worse. As a writer it's my two-edged gift to be able to slay or heal where I will. It's my responsibility to wield that weapon aright and do only good with my words. Or only purposeful cutting. I am not set against the surgeon's method of butchery--the nicking of a person's spirit, the rubbing in of a salty, stinging salve, and the ultimate healing-over of that wound that makes for a healthier person in the end. It's the bitter herbs that heal the best, so now and again you might be called upon to write something with more cayenne than honey about it. But the end must be good. We cannot let the Light fade from our words.

How nice that our former stable boy has begotten a namesake from my elder daughter,” the countess remarked acidly. “This will be the first of many brats, I am sure. Regrettably there is still no heir to the earldom…which is your responsibility, I believe. Come to me with news of your impending marriage to a bride of good blood, Westcliff, and I will evince some satisfaction. Until then, I see little reason for congratulations.” Though he displayed no emotion at his mother’s hard-hearted response to the news of Aline’s child, not to mention her infuriating preoccupation with the begetting of an heir, Marcus was hard-pressed to hold back a savage reply. In the midst of his darkening mood, he became aware of Lillian’s intent gaze. Lillian stared at him astutely, a peculiar smile touching her lips. Marcus arched one brow and asked sardonically, “Does something amuse you, Miss Bowman?” “Yes,” she murmured. “I was just thinking that it’s a wonder you haven’t rushed out to marry the first peasant girl you could find.” “Impertinent twit!” the countess exclaimed. Marcus grinned at the girl’s insolence, while the tightness in his chest eased. “Do you think I should?” he asked soberly, as if the question was worth considering. “Oh yes,” Lillian assured him with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. “The Marsdens could use some new blood. In my opinion, the family is in grave danger of becoming overbred.” “Overbred?” Marcus repeated, wanting nothing more than to pounce on her and carry her off somewhere. “What has given you that impression, Miss Bowman?” “Oh, I don’t know…” she said idly. “Perhaps the earth-shattering importance you attach to whether one should use a fork or spoon to eat one’s pudding.” “Good manners are not the sole province of the aristocracy, Miss Bowman.” Even to himself, Marcus sounded a bit pompous. “In my opinion, my lord, an excessive preoccupation with manners and rituals is a strong indication that someone has too much time on his hands.” Marcus smiled at her impertinence. “Subversive, yet sensible,” he mused. “I’m not certain I disagree.” “Do not encourage her effrontery, Westcliff,” the countess warned. “Very well—I shall leave you to your Sisyphean task.” “What does that mean?” he heard Daisy ask. Lillian replied while her smiling gaze remained locked with Marcus’s. “It seems you avoided one too many Greek mythology lessons, dear. Sisyphus was a soul in Hades who was damned to perform an eternal task…rolling a huge boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again just before he reached the top.” “Then if the countess is Sisyphus,” Daisy concluded, “I suppose we’re…” “The boulder,” Lady Westcliff said succinctly, causing both girls to laugh. “Do continue with our instruction, my lady,” Lillian said, giving her full attention to the elderly woman as Marcus bowed and left the room. “We’ll try not to flatten you on the way down.