Incendiary Quotes

Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.

An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo!

They regarded each other. Adam fair and cautious, Ronan dark and incendiary. This was Ronan at his most truthful.

Often, though, the passivity of the woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever.

When we come to face the entangled vagaries on the chessboard of our life, let us not shrink from using the queen’s gambit to disentwine predictable hassles or diffuse incendiary plots if we want to take control of our being and make our dreams come true, transparent, and straightforward. (”Life with a sea view”)

I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades.

Fear is a communicable disease; it comes out in the sweat and passes from host to host. Fear is an incendiary agent; it combusts with stupidity.

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

How ex are we talking?" "The kind where you have to take everything that he ever gave you and bury it in the backyard so there will be nothing to remind you of how much you loved him.

Just when you think that maybe Brennus is running' out of crazy, he shows up with a brand new can of it... economy size.

Her heart begins to sing to me, the Siren's song that's calling me to shipwreck. I go to it willingly. When her lips meet mine, I know I'm lost, I'm found - I'm home.

If they took you from me, it would be like they concealed my heart from me.

There is nothing remotely ordinary about you, accept it. I'll show you what you are." "And what am I?" "Mine. I will tear open the sky to make you see it.

You're art that cannot be concealed... danger that cannot be tamed... love that cannot be measured... a new law that denies a probable outcome.

As our bodies mesh as one, I know that this is the heaven I want to fight for: the one in my arms.

How do y'all say, 'hoorah' in Angel? Rude Car.

Evie's head is pressed tightly to my chest; I would pull her inside of me and have my heart beat for us both if I could.

He must know that we have more game than Mattel.

But there was a cost. Being near Ethan was just... incendiary. Part animosity, part ridiculous chemistry, neither conducive to a peaceful home environment. And this was only my first night under his thumb. Not a good sign of things to come.

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milošević and Karadžić were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina.

Ronan’s expression was still incendiary. His code of honor left no room for infidelity, for casual relationships. It wasn’t that he didn’t condone them; he couldn’t understand

You were afraid of me? Don't you meet with the Fallen in Sheol?" "Yes, but none of them had ever stolen my heart nor left me without words to ponder its loss.

What the hell do you call that?" I asked him quietly. "Firefog?" "We could," he responded. "Kilvin would probably call it an atmospherically enhanced incendiary action.

You know how it is, boss; you’re out on the town with a few friends, drinking it up; you’re young, you've got incendiaries... shit happens.

When a soul arrives in Paradise after a lifetime on earth, it will sometimes pine for the soul mate that was left behind." "He has that look?" "No... he has the other look." "The other look?" "The look of that soul when it reunites with its soul mate.

...we're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works-- groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless-- have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

Ye're na meant for a tepid existence, so maybe 'tis time ta leave da sandbox. Brennus

Sometimes it's better to drop the anchor when you can't steer.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

He can still taste you on his lips, smell your scent in his memory, remember when you smiled just for him, and the thought of never having that again is...harrowing. So, he's willing to hurt you because he's focusing on the pain to try to kill everything that you were to him... so that he can survive it.

Do I pray for her life or mine? They're one in the same...Be this soul in Thine hands...I stop, unable to pray for her ascension. I cannot let her go, I think in agony. I try again, May this soul in Thine hands be with me...always.

Sometimes I wonder if a person can have so much regret they'll drown in it.

Xavier...he is afraid of losing you-He is also insane for you. Insane for you without the soul to join yours or the deep attraction to awaken you...but with the devotion to endure this Godless place for you.

There is so much wrong in the world." she says. "Sometimes, I feel the only thing I can give is a bit of kindness, even when I can't give hope.

Breakable. No matter who we are we are breakable.

To ache from the knowledge that I may never hold you again - to count the moments, like grains of sand, while we were parted only to escape the sky and find that you still only know me as a boy from school...

The smell of old books and dust wafts from the opening, more powerful than any memory.

People were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unaccountable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that has always been the image of a lunatic.

Crooked smiles for crooked hearts.

You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there?

I’m not forgiveness and redemption. I’m violent retaliation and vengeance.

Fear is a communicable disease; it comes out in the sweat and passes from host to host. Fear is an incendiary agent; it combusts with stupidity.

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.

Russell?” “Yeah! You got my back now?” Russell asks in a sour tone, looking over the railing from the tower above. “’Cuz one of them freaky demon things almost ate me after y’all left!” “A Riser nearly ate you?” Reed asks with humor in his tone “Yeah, whatever—it’s not funny!” he calls down, sounding irritated. “Next time, I want Zee for my wingman.” “That is because I am the ultimate assassin,” Zephyr replies from behind Reed.

Did she go postal?” Russell grins at him, “You know, for pullin’ her portal on the island and sendin’ her to your safe house before the fight?” “Define postal?” Zephyr counters, his brows pulling together further. “Insanely angry,” Russell says. “Yes,” Zephyr nods his head adamantly, pointing at him. “She has not called me ‘sweetie’ since.” “Oooo,” Russell says, ducking his head and wrinkling his nose. “Doghouse.

Intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like drowned statues.

Zee replies grimly, 'I understand that problem...Buns is a force of nature.' 'She is,' I say with a reluctant smile, 'you're kind of screwed, dude. She's definitely got her own ideas.' Zee grins too. 'Do not laugh too hard, playa, yours is a Throne..karma...' he says, noddin' his head before grimacin' and addin', 'ouch'. My smile broadens involuntarily. 'Zee, when did you become funny?' I ask. 'It is difficult to be funny in Human,' he says, before lookin' at his watch and than graspin' the cover of the portal computer. 'Learn my language and you will think I am hysterical.

People consume each other when they're afraid, don't they?

I hope this letter reaches you (Osama) anyway. I hope it finds you before the Americans do otherwise I'm going to wish I hadn't bothered aren't I?

Thomas scowled. “An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo.

For if thought that exceeds what has yet been thought were not possible, the infinite would not be possible, and self/ itself or subjectivity its intermediary transcendence/ incendiary.

I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges.

Malick to Jacin: "There is no trade anymore, you're not nothing, you didn't kill Caidi, you're going to be the most beautiful-dangerous Incendiary the gods have ever seen, and I fucking love you. Deal with it.

I thought it would fix everything, but it just made everything worse. Lies do. Remember when I told you white lies were like ball bearings in the machinery of society? Wrong. Lies are like incendiary bombs, burning and melting and mangling everything- trust, hopes, everyone you love.

Nothing is more incendiary to an ill-advised, unanticipated tryst than to be enclosed in a darkened, plush-upholstered, moving chamber. Privacy, Intimacy, Darkness, Transience: the Four Whorsemen of the Apocalypse.

But everything about me has always been loud, the sound of my heart, the weight in my tread, even the cry I always seem to be holding back.

I believe that we, in the attempt to live, invented Him. But if I could, I'd ask Him to give you everything.

We are medians because we will never have enough," Callum said hoarsely. "We aren't normal; we are gods born with pain built in. We are incendiary beings and we are flawed, except the weaknesses we pretend to have are not our true weaknesses at all. We are not soft, we do not suffer impairment or frailty—we imitate it. We tell ourselves we have it. But our only real weakness is that we know we are bigger, stronger, as close to omnipotence as we can be, and we are hungry, we are aching for it. Other people can see their limits, Tristan, but we have none. We want to find our impossible edges, to close our fingers around constraints that don't exist, and that," Callum exhaled. "That is what will drive us to madness.

You have the right to not have to constantly manage how you look for other people’s sake. You aren’t here to decorate the world for other people. You’re here to live in it for yourself, no matter what that looks like.

I have to kiss her again; I start with her lips. When I taste her on my tongue, I want more. I need more. Tugging on her bottom lip with mine elicits a soft groan of pleasure from her. I live in the sound of it. When our bodies fit together, like pieces falling into place, I’m nearly undone by it and by her eyes. They narrow and her forehead leans forward to rest against mine. Through her eyes, I can almost see inside her soul. That’s where I long to be: centered near her soul, wedged between it and her heart. ~ Reed's POV

I know, 0 Caesar, that thou art awaiting my arrival with impatience, that thy true heart of a friend is yearning day and night for me. I know that thou art ready to cover me with gifts, make me prefect of the pretorian guards, and command Tigellinus to be that which the gods made him, a mule-driver in those lands which thou didst inherit after poisoning Domitius. Pardon me, however, for I swear to thee by Hades, and by the shades of thy mother, thy wife, thy brother, and Seneca, that I cannot go to thee. Life is a great treasure. I have taken the most precious jewels from that treasure, but in life there are many things which I cannot endure any longer. Do not suppose, I pray, that I am offended because thou didst kill thy mother, thy wife, and thy brother; that thou didst burn Eome and send to Erebus all the honest men in thy dominions. No, grandson of Chronos. Death is the inheritance of man; from thee other deeds could not have been expected. But to destroy one's ear for whole years with thy poetry, to see thy belly of a Domitius on slim legs whirled about in a Pyrrhic dance; to hear thy music, thy declamation, thy doggerel verses, wretched poet of the suburbs, — is a thing surpassing my power, and it has roused in me the wish to die. Eome stuffs its ears when it hears thee; the world reviles thee. I can blush for thee no longer, and I have no wish to do so. The howls of Cerberus, though resembling thy music, will be less offensive to me, for I have never been the friend of Cerberus, and I need not be ashamed of his howling. Farewell, but make no music; commit murder, but write no verses; poison people, but dance not; be an incendiary, but play not on a cithara. This is the wish and the last friendly counsel sent thee by the — Arbiter Elegantiae.

Reece…Reed…isn’t that a silly coincidence?” he asks, his mouth twisting in a grim smile that neither reaches his blue eye nor his green one.

I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it.

Not only a fanatic and an incendiary (two of the insults that dogged Defoe most closely in his lifetime), the author of Robinson Crusoe was also an egregious spiv, and a slave to bling.

Language, George Orwell reminds us, is always political. It can be used to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” The euphemism, he wrote, is the weapon of choice: "Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.

I think I finally understand the saying like a moth to a flame. I’m the moth. My heart flutters like the paper thin wings. And he is the flame, incendiary, scorching my soul. He inhales so heavily, like he’s been holding his breath under water. He presses his lips against mine and tugs at my hair gently. My head falls back and my mouth falls open. His tongue, slick as silver, dances with mine. I’m wrong. I’m not a moth. I’m Icarus and I’ve flown too close to the sun.

Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.

This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.

They're afraid. Fear makes people do things they normally wouldn't. Like share a drink with someone they despise.

Phoebe, you’re a capable girl, but I’m afraid being alone isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.

I ate pain. I swilled tears. If I could take enough in, I'd have no space left to fit my own.

and like in a movie I appear in front of the D'Agostino's, sale's clerks beckoning for me to enter, and I'm using an expired coupon for a box of oat-bran cereal and the girl at the checkout counter--black, dumb,slow-- doesn't get it, doesn't notice the expiration date has passed even though it's the only thing I buy, and I get a small but incendiary thrill when I walk out of the store, opening the box, stuffing handfuls of the cereal into my mouth, trying to whistle "Hips to Be Square".

What am I?” I ask. “Unforgettable,” Reed replies. “You’re art that cannot be concealed… danger that cannot be tamed…love that cannot be measured… a new law that denies a probable outcome.

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.

I want to get one thing straight right from the start: I am not a natural-born jock. I am about as intrinsically athletic as an oyster, with the innate grace and sporty prowess of a brick—a very cute oyster and a very intelligent brick, if I do say so myself, but oysterly and bricklike nevertheless.

We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings---" And pumpkin-colored scarves, Polly thought. "---and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances" - here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs - "and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a solider, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith. "But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, thought hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do 'our bit'. For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long.

I could just as easily have taken the train.” He shut his eyes, just long enough for a movie of a Tess-induced train riot to screen on the backs of his eyelids. Fists flying, teeth broken, friendships destroyed as men vied to get closer to her lush body barely covered in that incendiary French maid outfit. And now he was turning hard again.

And Mr Verloc, temparamentally identical with his associates, drew fine distinctions in his mind on the strenght of insignificant differences. He drew them with a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid for the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures, too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by, vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.

According to Keltar legend, each Druid born into the clan was destined for a soul mate, a perfect match in heart and mind, as well as body, coming together with an explosive, incendiary passion that could not be denied. If the Keltar male exchanged the sacred Druid binding vows with his true love, and his mate willingly returned them, they could bind their souls together for all eternity, in this life and forever beyond. The vows linked them inextricably. ’Twas said if a Keltar gave the vows and they were not returned, he would be forever incomplete, missing a part of his heart, aching for the love of a woman he could never have, eternally bound to her, through this life and all his future existence, whether in the cycle of rebirth, heaven, hell, or even an eternal Unseelie prison. If aught must be lost . . . the legendary vows began, ’twill be my life for yours. . . .

Tain Shir walks the deck of RNS Sulane between the bombs and incendiaries and steel-tipped barbs. A weapon among weapons but she alone is free. The tragedy of the knife is the hilt. The tragedy of the crossbow is the trigger. Shir has neither. She cannot be gripped nor fired. She is unmastered. The sailors are rude with her. So be it. Etiquitte is the domain of those whose power is conditional upon the respect of others, and Shir is unconditional. If she drifted alone in the void beyond the moon or if she walked among the monarchs of the ancient Cheetah Palaces she would not be altered in her capabilities or her intentions, for not one truth of her resides within a relationship to any other thing.

There was probably something very wrong with the fact that an exchange of death threats made Malick all warm and fuzzy, but there it was.

Yeah, you're fucked up, baby." He smiled a little and kissed Fen again. "'S part of what I love about you.

Heeeeeere kitty-kitty, stupid fucking kitty.

I was hoping my life might make more sense from a great height.

I do what I always do when the day has shown me its worst: I make do.

It was not warm and not cold. There was no wind and the sky was very low and grey but it wasn't raining. It was like they'd completely run out of weather.

Flames as large as houses don't crackle - they roar.

I should have told him sooner that I needed something inside me to break so thoroughly I could never be put back together.

Personally, I have learned to welcome the sensation of boredom when I’m working out because boredom can actually provide opportunities that are relaxing and, dare I say it, even useful.

You ever wonder why an East Eng girl like me hasn't got much in the way of family? Well here's the reasons Petra. World War 1. World War 2. Falklands War. Gulf War 1. Gulf War 2 and the War on Drugs. You can take your pick because I've lost whole bloody chunks of my family in all of them.

Opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got one. Most people are quite fond of their own, especially in private. Yet they’re not really something that should be waved around too much in public. When they are, it’s okay to ignore them, because showing them off, unsolicited, is actually kind of rude.

The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly.  There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable.  Those are the fanatics.  The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries

Qualitative and quantitative research with adults and children reporting ritual abuse has found that it occurs alongside other forms of organised abuse, particularly the manufacture of child abuse images (Scott 2001, Snow and Sorenson 1990, Waterman et al. 1993), and hence subsuming such non-ritualistic experiences under the moniker ‘ritual abuse’ is misleading at best and incendiary at worst. Moreover, it is unclear why an abusive group that invokes a religious or metaphysical mandate to abuse children should be considered as largely distinct from an abusive group that invokes a non-religious rationale to do so. The presumption evident amongst some authors writing on ritual abuse that a professed spiritual motivation for abusing children necessarily reflects the offenders actual motivation seems naïve at best, and at worst it risks colluding with the ways in which abusive groups obfuscate responsibility for their actions.

The Strategic Bombing Survey estimates that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man.” The fire storm at Dresden may have killed more people but not in so short a space of time. More than 100,000 men, women and children died in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945; a million were injured, at least 41,000 seriously; a million in all lost their homes. Two thousand tons of incendiaries delivered that punishment—in the modern notation, two kilotons. But the wind, not the weight of bombs alone, created the conflagration, and therefore the efficiency of the slaughter was in some sense still in part an act of God.

The more you behave like you have the right to exist in the world without interference, the less others will question it. The power of a fait accompli is astonishing. The more people see fat bodies moving and being physical and doing whatever makes them happy in the world, without apology and without shame, the more they get used to seeing that and thinking of it as normal.

How’s the coffee?” “She hasn’t had any yet,” Cletus answered for me, then added, “but she wants you to ask her on a date tonight, no place public. Somewhere private, for discussing things.” Jethro’s eyes widened, and he glared at his brother’s reflection in the rearview mirror, snapping, “Cletus.” “Don’t clutch your pearls at me, big brother. Look at her, for hootenanny’s sake. She’s got the hots for your ugly face, Lord help her. And I know you’ve been thinking about her, judging by how long you took in the bathroom this morning.” I clamped a hand over my mouth just as shocked laughter burst from my lips. “Dammit, Cletus,” Jethro growled, turning the ignition and shooting his brother an incendiary look. “You are the worst. Just, don’t speak. Ever. Don’t speak ever again.” Jethro’s gaze darted to me then away as he sighed, looking remorseful. “I’m so sorry.” I placed my hand on Jethro’s thigh—FYI he had a really nice thigh—to ease his mind and because I wanted to touch him. “No, no. Please don’t apologize. He’s right and he’s wrong. I do have the hots for your face, but it isn’t at all ugly.” At this Cletus snorted and grumbled, “Well, it ain’t pretty.” Jethro pressed his lips together and I could see the hint of a smile there amidst his frustration. “Glad you have the hots for my face.” “Just ask her out already,” Cletus demanded. “She ain’t doing anything tonight. You two will go out tonight.

Paine knew that class tensions existed. He understood that revolutions stirred up resentments. In Common Sense, he adopted an ominous tone at a key point in his argument, warning readers that the time was ripe to declare independence and form a stable government. Or else. In the current state of things, “the mind of the multitude is left at random,” he wrote, and “the property of no man is secure.” Therefore, if the leadership class did not seize hold of the narrative, the broad appeal to political independence would be supplanted by an incendiary call for social leveling.

When Paris, a Trojan prince, stole the beautiful Helen from her husband, the King of Sparta, that,’ he pointed to the Marathonisi, ‘is where the runaways first dropped anchor. They left the caique and spent the first night together on the island. Homer wrote about it. It used to be called Kranae.’ We were dumbfounded. Kranae! I had always wondered where it was. The whole of Gytheion was suddenly transformed. Everything seemed to vanish except the dark silhouette of the island where thousands of years ago that momentous and incendiary honeymoon began among the whispering fennel.

Illumination Always there is something more to know what lingers at the edge of thought awaiting illumination as in this second-hand book full of annotations daring the margins in pencil a light stroke as if the writer of these small replies meant not to leave them forever meant to erase evidence of this private interaction Here a passage underlined there a single star on the page as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy where only the brightest appears a tiny spark I follow its coded message try to read in it the direction of the solitary mind that thought to pencil in a jagged arrow It is a bolt of lightning where it strikes I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns Beyond the exclamation point its thin agreement angle of surprise there are questions the word why So much is left untold Between the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl between what is said and not white space framing the story the way the past unwritten eludes us So much is implication the afterimage of measured syntax always there ghosting the margins that words their black-lined authority do not cross Even as they rise up to meet us the white page hovers beneath silent incendiary waiting

The attack was designed as a show of overwhelming strength for which the audience was not the already conquered people of Bukhara, but the still distant army and people of Samarkand, the next city on his march. The Mongol invaders rolled up their newly constructed siege engines—catapults, trebuchets, and mangonels that hurled not only stones and fire, as besieging armies had done for centuries, but also pots of burning liquids, exploding devices, and incendiary materials. They maneuvered immense crossbows mounted on wheels, and great teams of men pushed in portable towers with retractable ladders from which they could shoot down at the defenders of the walls. At the same time that they attacked through the air, miners went to work digging into the earth to undermine the walls by sapping. During this awesome display of technological prowess in the air, on the land, and beneath the earth, Genghis Khan heightened the psychological tension by forcing prisoners, in some cases the captured comrades of the men still in the citadel, to rush forward until their bodies filled the moat and made live ramparts over which other prisoners pushed the engines of war.