“
Holy [Insert your choice of a swear word here]," said Fang stunned.
”
”
James Patterson (The Angel Experiment (Maximum Ride, #1))
“
The key to a successful relationship isn’t just in the words, it’s in the choice of punctuation. When you’re in love with someone, a well-placed question mark can be the difference between bliss and disaster, and a deeply respected period or a cleverly inserted ellipsis can prevent all kinds of exclamations.
”
”
David Levithan (The Lover's Dictionary)
“
I wonder at my incapacity for easy banter, smooth conversation, empty words to fill awkward moments. I don't have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don't know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I'm a noun through and through.
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2))
“
Madame Bellwings, Memoir Elf Coordinator, was not at all pleased with this request, because elves who write the memoirs of teenage girls have the habit of returning to the magical realm with atrocious grammar. They can't seem to shake the phrases "watever" and "no way," and they insert the word like into so many sentences that the other elves start slapping them...and for no apparent reason occasionally call out the name Edward Cullen.
”
”
Janette Rallison
“
Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert words like “anger,” “ambition,” “loudness,” “stubbornness,” “coldness,” “ruthlessness.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
“
There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You'll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there's a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There'll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose."
Where?"
In the 'word-memory' section," he said, epexegetically.
”
”
Roald Dahl (The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl)
“
literally: This word should be deleted. All too often, actions described as “literally” did not happen at all. As in, “He literally jumped out of his skin.” No, he did not. Though if he literally had, I’d suggest raising the element and proposing the piece for page one. Inserting “literally” willy-nilly reinforces the notion that breathless nitwits lurk within this newsroom. Eliminate on sight—the usage, not the nitwits. The nitwits are to be captured
”
”
Tom Rachman (The Imperfectionists)
“
Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do."
The sign read:
"Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion."
"It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.
”
”
Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4))
“
What is magic?
Then there is the witches' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on the age of the witch. Older witches hardly put words to it at all, but may suspect in their hearts that the universe really doesn't know what the hell is going on and consists of a zillion trillion billion possibilities, and could become any one of them if a trained mind rigid with quantum certainty was inserted into the crack and twisted; that, if you really had to make someone's hat explode, all you needed to do was twist into that universe where a large number of hat molecules all decide at the same time to bounce off in different directions.
Younger witches, on the other hand, talk about it all the time and believe it involves crystals, mystic forces, and dancing about without yer drawers on.
Everyone may be right, all at the same time. That's the thing about quantum.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies (Discworld, #14; Witches, #4))
“
Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it's protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.
”
”
Thomas Jefferson (Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson)
“
Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called “radical” or “progressive” people don’t hear enough “buzz” words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings).
”
”
Krysta Williams (Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism)
“
The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other's blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. They can even be said to define it.
”
”
Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life)
“
You were trying to insult him by calling him Blue?” Thor narrowed his eyes. “I can think of several things more insulting, right off the top of my head.” “She told him it would be the color of his balls if he kept trying to boff her,” Ull’s voice inserted helpfully. “You what?” I didn’t know if Thor was going to laugh or choke. “Well not in those precise words,” I mumbled.
”
”
Amy Sumida (Godhunter (The Godhunter, #1))
“
Dauntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room. Jeanine stands a few steps away. The scratches on her face show through hastily applied makeup. She doesn’t look at me.
Four cameras dangle from the ceiling, one at each corner of the table. I sit down first, wipe my hands off on my pants, and then lie down.
The table is cold. Frigid, seeping into my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, because that is what will happen to my body when all the life leaves it; it will become cold and heavy, heavier than I have ever been. As for the rest of me, I am not sure. Some people believe that I will go nowhere, and maybe they’re right, but maybe they’re not. Such speculations are no longer useful to me anyway.
Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switches on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing.
And then rising from within me is a single thought:
I don’t want to die.
All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all of this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. But no. No, no.
Burning and boiling inside me is the desire to live.
I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to!
Jeanine steps forward with a syringe full of purple serum. Her glasses reflect the fluorescent light above us, so I can barely see her eyes.
Every part of my body chants it in unison. Live, live, live. I thought that in order to give my life in exchange for Will’s, in exchange for my parents’, that I needed to die, but I was wrong; I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.
Jeanine holds my head steady with one hand and inserts the needle into my neck with the other.
I’m not done! I shout in my head, and not at Jeanine. I am not done here!
She presses the plunger down. Peter leans forward and looks into my eyes.
“The serum will go into effect in one minute,” he says. “Be brave, Tris.”
The words startle me, because that is exactly what Tobias said when he put me under my first simulation.
My heart begins to race.
Why would Peter tell me to be brave? Why would he offer any kind words at all?
All the muscles in my body relax at once. A heavy, liquid feeling fills my limbs. If this is death, it isn’t so bad. My eyes stay open, but my head drops to the side. I try to close my eyes, but I can’t—I can’t move.
Then the heart monitor stops beeping.
”
”
Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
“
Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights ..." thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we've just kept the old ones, but with the word "not" inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn't really have them in the first place.
”
”
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
“
While you are at zero and feeling completely at peace and serene, gently state the following intention by speaking these words silently to yourself: “I now release / drop / let go of (insert issue / block here) for an infinite number of times until zero. I release this ____ infinitely, for as many times as necessary, until I remain at zero.
”
”
Richard Dotts (Infinite Manifestations: The Power of Stopping at Nothing (Light Touch Manifestations Book 2))
“
if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert words like anger, ambition, loudness, stubbornness, coldness, ruthlessness.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions: The Inspiring Guide to Raising a Feminist from global bestselling author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
“
Wow,” Ryan said, taking the excedo in from his bare feet to his worn jeans and wrinkled T-shirt. “Protesting showers?”
“Bite me.” Trance stood aside and let Ryan inside, despite his growled words.
Ryan strode to the living room, went straight to Trance's DVD player, and inserted one of his sex discs.
Trance stood in the entrance to the living room, arms crossed, leaning against the wall as if it were the only thing holding him up. “I don't remember making a movie date with you.”
“Keep your dick in your pants, Romeo.” Ryan pushed Play and stood back. “What do you know about that?”
Trance's eyes shot wide, and he yanked himself off the wall. “I know you need an ass-kicking if you came to watch porn with me—oh, fuck me, that's you. Turn it off! I don't need to see that.”
Ryan hit the Pause button. “Well?”
“Well, what?” Trance shuddered. “Christ. I'm going to have to gouge out my eyes now.
”
”
Sydney Croft (Taming the Fire (ACRO, #4))
“
In the LGBT community, the opposite of pride is self- hatred. But in the Bible, the opposite of pride is faith. Was pride keeping me from faith, or was pride keeping me from self-hatred? That was when the question inserted itself like a foot in the door: Did pride distort self-esteem the way lust distorts love? This was the first of my many betrayals against the LGBT community: whose dictionary did I trust? The one used by the community that I helped create or the one that reflected the God who created me? As soon as the question formed itself into words, I felt convicted of the sin of pride. Pride was my downfall. I asked God for the mercy to repent of my pride at its root.
”
”
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ)
“
Salome interrupts. We're not members! she repeats. We are the women of Molotschna. The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy (translator's note: Salome didn't use the word "patriarchy" - I inserted it in the place of Salome's curse, of mysterious origin, loosely translated as "talking through the flowers"), where the women live our their days as mute, submissive, and obedient servants. Animals. Fourteen-year-old boys are expected to give us orders, to determine our fates, to vote on our excommunications, to speak at the burials of our own babies while we remain silent, to interpret the Bible for us, to lead us in worship, to punish us! We are not members, Mariche. We are commodities.
”
”
Miriam Toews (Women Talking)
“
All over America, infuriating white people would address black men with the words “Hey, boy.” And it grated. It really grated. That’s why, in the 1940s, black Americans started taking the fight the other way and greeting each other with the words “Hey, man.” The vocative was not inserted for the purposes of sexual identification; it was a reaction against all those years of being called boy. It worked. White people were so confused by “Hey, man” that the sixties happened and everybody, of whatever race, started calling each other man, until the original significance was lost. This is an example of Progress. Now,
”
”
Mark Forsyth (The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language)
“
I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.
”
”
Edwidge Danticat (The Farming of Bones)
“
...my beloved Eudosia [a member of Buckley's household staff], who is Cuban, very large, quite old, and altogether superstitious, and speaks only a word or two of English (even though she has been with us for 19 years), is quite certain that the gentleman who raped the 16-year-old girl in New Caanan three years ago and escaped has successfully eluded the police only because of his resourceful determination to ravage Eudosia before he dies. Accordingly she demanded, and I gave her, a shotgun, into which I have inserted two empty shells. Still, Eudosia with blank cartridges is more formidable than Eugene McCarthy with The Bomb.
”
”
William F. Buckley Jr. (Cruising Speed: A Documentary)
“
• Click "Insert" at the top of the screen in Word • Click "Page Break" o Example: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
”
”
Kindle Direct Publishing (Building Your Book for Kindle)
“
Toni Morrison read The New York Times every day with pen in hand, making corrections she felt necessary, deleting words or inserting them as she went along.
”
”
Amitava Kumar (A Time Outside This Time: A novel)
“
Why the red letters? Because they are spirit, and they are life - that's why. The entrance of these Words of Christ not only brings knowledge and understanding to the mind but light to the soul. These words bring to us the heart of Christ and His teachings, and they insert into us His opinion, attitude, and Spirit. The absence of these red letters eliminates all the above.
”
”
Mark T. Barclay (The Missing Red Letters)
“
I feel myself begin to blush and I wonder at my inability to be so free with words and feelings. I wonder at my incapacity for easy banter, smooth conversation, empty words to fill awkward moments. I don’t have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don’t know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I’m a noun through and through.
Stuffed so full of people places things and ideas that I don’t know how to break out of my own brain. How to start a conversation. I want to trust but it scares the skin off my bones.
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2))
“
Years ago in 1959 when Dellinger was already an editor on Liberation (then an anarchist-pacifist magazine, of worthy but not very readable articles in more or less vegetarian prose) Mailer had submitted a piece, after some solicitation, on the contrast between real obscenity in advertising, and alleged obscenity in four-letter words. The piece was no irreplaceable work of prose, and in fact was eventually inserted quietly into his book, Advertisements for Myself, but it created difficulty for the editorial board at Liberation, since there was a four-letter word he had used to make his point, the palpable four-letter word which signifies a woman’s most definitive organ: these editorial anarchists were decorous; they were ready to overthrow society and replace it with a communion of pacifistic men free of all laws, but they were not ready to print cunt.
”
”
Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History)
“
Your wife,” said Arthur, looking around, “mentioned some toothpicks.” He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried that she might suddenly leap out from behind a door and mention them again.
Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy laugh, and sounded like one he had used a lot before and was happy with.
“Ah yes,” he said, “that’s to do with the day I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better.”
This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again.
“Here,” said Wonko the Sane, “we are outside the Asylum.” He pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing, and the gutters. “Go through that door” — he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered — “and you go into the Asylum. I’ve tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there’s very little one can do. I never go in there myself. If I ever am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and I shy away.”
“That one?” said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it.
“Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do.”
The sign read:
“Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.”
“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”
He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.
“And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how it possibly might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point. Wonko is what my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked things over, and sane is what I am, and how,” he added, with one of his smiles that made you feel, Oh. Well that’s all right then. “I intend to remain.
”
”
Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4))
“
Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I’m able to say.
”
”
Elena Ferrante (The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels, #4))
“
A survivor from one party composed what he described as a “faithful narrative,” insisting, “I have been scrupulously careful not to insert one word of untruth: for falsities of any kind would be highly absurd in a work designed to rescue the author’s character.
”
”
David Grann (The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder)
“
Fawcett also shared with me a passion for words and we would trawl the dictionary together and simply howl and wriggle with delight at the existence of such splendours as ‘strobile’ and ‘magniloquent’, daring and double-daring each other to use them to masters in lessons without giggling. ‘Strobile’ was a tricky one to insert naturally into conversation, since it means a kind of fir-cone, but magniloquent I did manage.
I, being I, went always that little bit too far of course. There was one master who had berated me in a lesson for some tautology or other. He, as what human being wouldn’t when confronted with a lippy verbal show-off like me, delighted in seizing on opportunities to put me down. He was not, however, an English teacher, nor was he necessarily the brightest man in the world.
‘So, Fry. “A lemon yellow colour” is precipitated in your test tube is it? I think you will find, Fry, that we all know that lemons are yellow and that yellow is a colour. Try not to use thee words where one will do. Hm?’
I smarted under this, but got my revenge a week or so later.
‘Well, Fry? It’s a simple enough question. What is titration?’
‘Well, sir…, it’s a process whereby…’
‘Come on, come on. Either you know or you don’t.’
‘Sorry sir, I am anxious to avoid pleonasm, but I think…’
‘Anxious to avoid what?’
‘Pleonasm, sir.’
‘And what do you mean by that?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I meant that I had no wish to be sesquipedalian.’
‘What?’
‘Sesquipedalian, sir.’
‘What are you talking about?’
I allowed a note of confusion and bewilderment to enter my voice. ‘I didn’t want to be sesquipedalian, sir! You know, pleonastic.’
‘Look, if you’ve got something to say to me, say it. What is this pleonastic nonsense?’
‘It means sir, using more words in a sentence than are necessary. I was anxious to avoid being tautologous, repetitive or superfluous.’
‘Well why on earth didn’t you say so?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll remember in future, sir.’ I stood up and turned round to face the whole form, my hand on my heart. ‘I solemnly promise in future to help sir out by using seven words where one will do. I solemnly promise to be as pleonastic, prolix and sesquipedalian as he could possibly wish.’
It is a mark of the man’s fundamental good nature that he didn’t whip out a knife there and then, slit my throat from ear to ear and trample on my body in hobnailed boots. The look he gave me showed that he came damned close to considering the idea.
”
”
Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1))
“
very should be made to pay its way in sentences. Too often it is used where it adds nothing to sense (‘It was a very tragic death’), or is inserted in a futile effort to prop up a weak word that would be better replaced by something with more punch (‘The play was very good’).
”
”
Bill Bryson (Troublesome Words)
“
The problem is that only thirty to forty per cent of all words can be read directly from the lips. To understand the rest you have to study the face and body language, and use your linguistic instincts and logic to insert the missing words. Thinking is as important as seeing.
”
”
Jo Nesbø (Nemesis (Harry Hole, #4))
“
The American middle-class is being squeezed to death by a vise. (See Chart 9) In the streets we have avowed revolutionary groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (which was started by the League for Industrial Democracy, a group with strong C.F.R. ties), the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the Young Socialist Alliance. These groups chant that if we don't "change" America, we will lose it. "Change" is a word we hear over and over. By "change" these groups mean Socialism. Virtually all members of these groups sincerely believe that they are fighting the Establishment. In reality they are an indispensible ally of the Establishment in fastening Socialism on all of us. The naive radicals think that under Socialism the "people" will run everything. Actually, it will be a clique of Insiders in total control, consolidating and controlling all wealth. That is why these schoolboy Lenins and teenage Trotskys are allowed to roam free and are practically never arrested or prosecuted. They are protected. If the Establishment wanted the revolutionaries stopped, how long do you think they would be tolerated? ---- Chart 9 [Insert pic p125]
”
”
Gary Allen (None Dare Call It Conspiracy)
“
So far as I personally am concerned I had better state that I feel as little entitled to assert as to deny the existence of what others call God, for I must admit that I just do not know what this word is supposed to mean. I certainly reject every anthropomorphic, personal or animistic interpretation of the term, interpretations through which many people succeed in giving it a meaning. The conception of a man-like or mind-like acting being appears to me rather the product of an arrogant overestimation of the capacities of a man-like mind. [...]
I long hesitated whether to insert this personal note here, but ultimately decided to do so because support by a professed agnostic may help religious people more unhesitatingly to pursue that conclusions that we do share. Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive.
”
”
Friedrich A. Hayek (The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism)
“
E L James, Party Games
you’re looking kind of smug
inserting that god damn anal plug
giving me your kinky love
after writing Fifty Shades
you’re acting like some kind of renegade
giving me your kinky love
sit me on a dildo and spin me right around
chain me up and hang me upside down
giving me your kinky love
god damn you E L James
making me into some kind of party game
giving me your kinky love
put me in a dream
and wheel in the Fucking Machine
god damn you E L James
spank a hand on my bum
see how much I can cum
god damn you E L James
stand me up and sit me down
lay me out and roll me about
god damn you E L James
BDSM
electro impulses up my brainstem
god damn you E L James
cast me in a submissive role-play
with my genitals on display
god damn you E L James
suspend me high in the air
slap me around like I don’t care
god damn you E L James
take that whip off the shelf
make me forget myself
god damn you E L James
Why are you wearing oven mittens?
branding iron your name written
inner goddess don’t keep in hidden
god damn you E L James
holy crap
my mind has snapped
to forget one thing that I have heard
I’m never going to use the safe-word
god damn you E L James
By R.M.Romarney
”
”
R.M. Romarney
“
Can you sharpen this for me, please?”
Logan leaned across the table and took the pencil from him. “You want me to play with your pencil, Tate?”
“Hilarious. The sharpener is right by you. You just have to pick it up and slide it in.”
As soon as the words left his mouth and Logan’s quirked into an arrogant line, Tate bit his tongue.
“Really? Did you really just say that to me?”
Feeling more comfortable than ever with Logan and this group, Tate shrugged and nodded. Time to give it to Logan as good as he gives.
“Yeah. Is there a problem? You just line it up...and slide it in.”
“You know, Tate—”
“Don't do it.” Tate cut him off as he moved his foot, the one he’d had sitting between Logan’s feet all night, so his shin bumped Logan’s calf.
“Do what?”
“Say something dirty. I know you're dying to, but just sharpen the pencil.”
Logan picked up the sharpener and made a big show of inserting the tip in the hole.
“Jesus,” Shelly muttered from beside Logan. “I thought Rachel and Cole were bad.
”
”
Ella Frank (Take (Temptation, #2))
“
patriarchy’s dominance depends on the complicity and compliance of women and on the way we enforce these rules with each other, training our children to be obedient to this system as well. As they point out, children come to insert the word don’t before critical words: For boys, it becomes I don’t care; for girls, it is I don’t know.
”
”
Elise Loehnen (On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good)
“
This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It’s the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn’t what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.
”
”
Margaret Atwood
“
The deletion of an apostrophe and a single letter turned “Jane’s” into “Jane,” and the words “and her” were inserted immediately thereafter. Now the crown was to pass not to the male heirs of Jane Grey but to “the Lady Jane and her heirs masles.” (Edward was of course highly literate, but spelling was a kind of free-form creative art in the sixteenth century
”
”
G.J. Meyer (The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty)
“
Gifford took her damp hand and pushed a ring onto her finger. "I give myself to you."
"I receive you." It sounded more like a croak. "And I, Jane Grey, hereby declare my devotion to you. I swear to love you, parley with you, be faithful to you, and make you the happiest man in the world."
The original version of the vow her mother had suggested had said "obey you" but that simply would not do. It was enough that Jane had agreed to keep the word love where she had tried to insert the phrase "feel some sort of emotion", but with obey she could not bend. She would consult him regarding decisions. She didn't have to listen to him after that. And she would be faithful. She might try to make him happy, unless he insisted on being unreasonable.
”
”
Cynthia Hand (My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies, #1))
“
So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves.
”
”
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
“
In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being.
During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle - the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective model.
”
”
Frantz Fanon
“
Now Brutus had deliberately assumed a mask to hide his true character. When he learned of the murder by Tarquin of the Roman aristocrats, one of the victims being his own brother, he had come to the conclusion that the only way of saving himself was to appear in the king's eyes as a person of no account. If there were nothing in his character for Tarquin to fear, and nothing in his fortune to covet, then the sheer contempt in which he was held would be a better protection than his own rights could ever be. Accordingly he pretended to be a half-wit and made no protest at the seizure by Tarquin of everything he possessed. He even submitted to being known publicly as the 'Dullard' (which is what his name signifies), that under cover of that opprobrious title the great spirit which gave Rome her freedom might be able to bide its time. On this occasion he was taken by Arruns and Titus to Delphi less as a companion than as a butt for their amusement; and he is said to have carried with him, as his gift to Apollo, a rod of gold inserted into a hollow stick of cornel-wood - symbolic, it may be, of his own character.
The three young men reached Delphi, and carried out the king's instructions. That done, Titus and Arruns found themselves unable to resist putting a further question to the oracle. Which of them, they asked, would be the next king of Rome? From the depths of the cavern came the mysterious answer: 'He who shall be the first to kiss his mother shall hold in Rome supreme authority.' Titus and Arruns were determined to keep the prophecy absolutely secret, to prevent their other brother, Tarquin, who had been left in Rome, from knowing anything about it. Thus he, at any rate, would be out of the running. For themselves, they drew lots to determine which of them, on their return, should kiss his mother first.
Brutus, however, interpreted the words of Apollo's priestess in a different way. Pretending to trip, he fell flat on his face, and his lips touched the Earth - the mother of all living things.
”
”
Livy (The History of Rome, Books 1-5: The Early History of Rome)
“
If Christianity is true, this changes EVERYTHING. Christ's very last words to us in scripture were: "Behold, I make all things new." (Rev. 21:5) I hope you remember that most moving line in the most moving movie ever made, The Passion Of The Christ, when Christ turns to His mother on the way to Calvary, explaining the need for the Cross and the blood and the agony: "See, Mother, I make all things new." I hope you remember that line with your tear ducts, which connect to the heart, as well as with your ears, which connect to the brain. Christ changed every human being he ever met. In fact, He changed history, splitting it open like a coconut and inserting eternity into the split between B.C. and A.D. If anyone claims to have met Him without being changed, he has not met Him at all. When you touch Him, you touch lightning.
”
”
Peter Kreeft (Jesus-Shock)
“
The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it's protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it's protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.
”
”
Thomas Jefferson (Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson (Optimized for Kindle))
“
The dark leaden mask hides the devil with a soul of deceit, with his warm syrupy vacuous words coercing, enticing and grasping with exposed sharpened claws, scratching slow at his prey's surface with bullet pointed precision, inserting the slow hot mercurial poison of falsification of love straight into the flowing veins of the succumbing vulnerable heart. The prey’s wanton escape futile, isolated & drawn into the hot fiery abyss.
”
”
Alison Blackmore
“
SEALs are warriors in every sense of the word: men who actually go into combat on missions that bring them eye to eye with their enemy, up close and personal. Even their methods of insertion are extremely dangerous; parachute jumps, submarine launches, and ocean swims in treacherous seas are very serious business. I guess that's why I find it hard to accept how our society tosses around the word "warrior" when describing an athlete, businessman, or even a politician. To me the term "warrior" is a sacred one characterizing a lifestyle of personal sacrifice. A warrior's training is continuous in order to maintain a constant state of readiness, often taking him away from the ones he loves and those he's sworn to protect. A warrior does this not for reward but for a chance to join his brothers on a high-risk mission. It doesn't sound like any civilian occupation I know of.
”
”
Mark L. Donald (Battle Ready: Memoir of a SEAL Warrior Medic)
“
TAKE THE ROOM-TEMPERATURE op-ed article that you have read lately, or may be reading now, or will scan in the future. Cast your eye down as far as the sentence that tells you there will be no terminus to Muslim discontent until there has been a solution to the problem of Palestine. Take any writing implement that comes to hand, strike out the word “Palestine,” and insert “Kashmir.” Then spend as much time as you can afford in elucidating the subject. And then . .
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (And Yet ...: Essays)
“
Has someone made you feel shame for taking selfies? For daring to believe so much in your beauty, in your style, in your badassery, in your joy, in your body, in your sensuality, in your humanity that you'd be so audacious, so bold, so (insert judgmental word of choice here) to want to witness and be witnessed for who and what you are. ⠀
⠀
Has someone out there sold you their own truth that this is conceited or narcissistic or superficial? How dare you think so much of yourself that you stop to take a photo?⠀
⠀
Forget. those. people. ⠀
⠀
Seriously. You are worthy of capture. Of celebration. Of admiration. You are worthy of being seen and witnessed. Of being looked at with awe and with joy. Just as you are, right now. All made up and wearing the outfit that makes you feel like you can take on the world or just waking up in bed, bare skin and messy hair and eyes hazy with dreams. ⠀
⠀
Here's the thing. Self-portraiture in art is as old as time. We are fascinated with the visible proof of our own existence, our own reality, and for damn good reason. We are infinite and complex and ever changing. We are majestic and mundane. Self-portraits, regardless of the medium, offer us a way to capture ourselves at a specific moment in time. ⠀
⠀
For me, this is an act of self-love. Of self-honoring. Of owning myself as beautiful and sovereign. It is the way I learned to look at myself without needing to look away. It is how I learned to trace the lines of my own being with the sort of admiration I used to reserve for others, for those I loved or for rarified celebrities I never thought I could live up to. ⠀
⠀
When I stop to take a photo of myself, it is a way to say that I am here. I have something to say that can't be spoken in words. It might be deep and poetic, or maybe I just damn well love my outfit and think you should see it. And that yes, it is a way to say I want to be seen and I no longer hold shame in that wanting.
”
”
Jeanette LeBlanc
“
We live in the world, Jacob thought. That thought always seemed to insert itself, usually in opposition to the word ideally. Ideally, we would make sandwiches at homeless shelters every weekend, and learn instruments late in life, and stop thinking about the middle of life as late in life, and use some mental resource other than Google, and some physical resource other than Amazon, and permanently retire mac and cheese, and give at least a quarter of the time and attention to aging relatives that they deserve, and never put a child in front of a screen. But we live in the world, and in the world there’s soccer practice, and speech therapy, and grocery shopping, and homework, and keeping the house respectably clean, and money, and moods, and fatigue, and also we’re only human, and humans not only need but deserve things like time with a coffee and the paper, and seeing friends, and taking breathers, so as nice as that idea is, there’s just no way we can make it happen. Ought to, but can’t.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (Here I Am)
“
What separates me most deeply from the metaphysicians is: I don’t concede that the ’I’ is what thinks. Instead, I take the ’I’ itself to be a construction of thinking, of the same rank as ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individual’, ‘purpose’, ‘number’; in other words to be only a regulative fiction with the help of which a kind of constancy and thus ‘knowability’ is inserted into, invented into, a world of becoming. Up to now belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs has subjugated the metaphysicians: I teach the renunciation of this belief. It is only thinking that posits the ’I’: but up to now philosophers have believed, like the ‘common people’, that in ‘I think’ there lay something or other of unmediated certainty and that this ‘I’ was the given cause of thinking, in analogy with which we ‘understood’ all other causal relations. However habituated and indispensable this fiction may now be, that in no way disproves its having been invented: something can be a condition of life and nevertheless be false.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“
People with high IQs, the most intelligent folks of the bunch, are more likely than anyone else to curse… swears are the only types of English words that you can use as an infix. An infix is a grammatical unit of meaning that you insert into the middle of a word, similar to a prefix, which comes at the beginning, or a suffix, which comes at the end. Contrary to what teachers and parents might proselytize, I am willing to bet that English speakers who can curse fluently have a more creative grasp of the language as a whole.
”
”
Amanda Montell (Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language)
“
And he was right. Because Carlos De Vil’s brain, by way of comparison, was almost as big as Cruella De Vil’s fur-coat closet. That’s what Carlos tried to tell himself, anyway, especially when people were making him run the tombs. His first class today was Weird Science, one he always looked forward to. It was where he’d originally gotten the idea to put his machine together, from the lesson on radio waves. Carlos was not the only top student in the class—he was tied, in fact, with the closest thing he had to a rival in the whole school: the scrawny, bespectacled Reza. Reza was the son of the former Royal Astronomer of Agrabah, who had consulted with Jafar to make sure the stars aligned on more than one nefarious occasion, which was how his family had found their way to the Isle of the Lost with everyone else. Weird Science was the class where Carlos always worked the hardest. The presence of Reza, who was every bit as competitive in science lab as he was, only made Carlos work that much harder. And as annoying as everyone found Reza to be—he always had to use the very biggest words for everything, whether they were used correctly and whether he was inserting a few extra syllables where they might or might not belong—he was still smart. Very smart. Which meant Carlos enjoyed besting him. Just the other week they had been working on a special elixir, and Reza had been annoyed that Carlos had figured out the secret ingredient first. Yeah, Reza was almost as smart as he was irritating. Even now he was raising his hand, waving it wildly back and forth. Their professor, the powerful sorcerer Yen Sid,
”
”
Melissa de la Cruz (The Isle of the Lost (Descendants #1))
“
As you are all aware, in the course of life we experience many kinds of pain. Pains of the body and pains of the heart. I know i have experienced pain in many different forms, and I'm sure you have too. In most cases, though, im sure you've found it very difficult to convey the truth of that pain to another person: to explain it in words. People say that only they themselves can understand the pain they are feeling. But is it true? I for one do not believe that it is. If, before our eyes, we see someone who is truly suffering , we do sometimes feel his suffering and pain as our own. This is the power of empathy. Am I making myself clear?''
He broke off and looked around the room once again.
''The reason that people sing songs for other people is because they want to have the power to arouse empathy, to break free of the narrow shell of the self and share their pain and joy with others. This is not an easy thing to do, of course. And so tonight, as kind of experiment, I want you to experience a simpler, more physical kind of empathy. Lights please.''
Everyone in the place was hushed now, all eyes fixed on stage. Amid the silence, the man stared off into space, as if to insert a pause or to reach a state of mental concentration. Then, without a word, he held his hand over the lighted candle. Little by little, he brought the palm closer and closer to the flame. Someone in the audience made a sound like a sigh or a moan. You could see the tip of the flame burning the man's palm. You could almost hear the sizzle of the flesh. A woman let out a hard little scream. Everyone else just watched in frozen horror. The man endured the pain, his face distorted in agony. What the hell was this? Why did he have to do such a stupid, senseless thing? I felt my mouth going dry. After five or six seconds of this, he slowly removed his hand from the flame and set the dish with the candle in it on the floor. Then he clasped his hands together, the right and left palms pressed against each other.
''As you have seen tonight, ladies and gentleman, pain can actually burn a person's flesh,'' said the man. His voice sounded exactly as it had earlier: quiet, steady, cool. No trace of suffering remained on his face. Indeed, it had been replaced by a faint smile. ''And the pain that must have been there, you have been able to feel as if it were your own. That is the power of empathy.
”
”
Haruki Murakami
“
when John Lloyd was putting together the Not 1982 calendar, and was stuck for things to put on the bottoms of the pages (and also the tops and quite a few middles). He turned out the drawer, chose a dozen or so of the best new words, and inserted them in the book under the name Oxtail English Dictionary. This quickly turned out to be one of the most popular bits of Not 1982, and the success of the idea in this small scale suggested the possibility of a book devoted to it—and here it is: The Meaning of Liff, the product of a hard lifetime’s work studying and chronicling the behaviour of man. From
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt (Dirk Gently, #3))
“
The Reverse Motte & Bailey Trojan Horse strategy involves three elements. First, unlike the Motte & Bailey, a motte (uncontroversial) position is proposed by one or multiple Woke participants. Second, the motte position is usually inserted through the use of a Woke crossover word. Third, once the Woke crossover word has been accepted and integrated into the situation (this can take a long time), it is then maintained by the Woke participant(s) that the correct interpretation of the crossover word is the extreme Critical Social Justice meaning. As such, the Trojan horse is the Woke crossover word, which goes unnoticed until the overt advance is made.
”
”
Charles Pincourt (Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond)
“
At nights, he craved that list, sometimes more than he craved her; he could picture it in his mind, the funny up-and-down capitalizations she inserted into a single word, the mechanical pencil she always used, the yellow legal pads, left over from her years as a lawyer, on which she made her notes. Sometimes the letters solidified into words, and in the dream life he'd feel triumphant; ah, he'd think, of course! Of course that's what I need! Of course Ana would know! But in the mornings, he could never remember what those things were. In those moments he wished, perversely, that he had never met her, that it was surely worse to have had her for so brief a period than to never have had her at all.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
Salome interrupts. We’re not members ! she repeats. We are the women of Molotschna. The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy (translator’s note: Salome didn’t use the word “patriarchy”—I inserted it in the place of Salome’s curse, of mysterious origin, loosely translated as “talking through the flowers”), where the women live out their days as mute, submissive and obedient servants. Animals. Fourteen-year-old boys are expected to give us orders, to determine our fates, to vote on our excommunications, to speak at the burials of our own babies while we remain silent, to interpret the Bible for us, to lead us in worship, to punish us! We are not members, Mariche, we are commodities.
”
”
Miriam Toews (Women Talking)
“
What happens when those of us living at the pace of fashion try to insert an awareness of these much larger cycles into our everyday activity?
In other words, what's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year impact of tossing that plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. Unless we're living in utter harmony with nature, thinking in ten-thousand-year spans is an invitation to a nightmarish obsession. It's a potentially burdensome, even paralyzing, state of mind. Each present action becomes a black hole of possibilities and unintended consequences. We must walk through life as if we had traveled in to the past, aware that any change we make—even moving an ashtray two inches to the left—could ripple through time and alter the course of history. It's less of a Long Now than a Short Forever.
This weight on every action—this highly leveraged sense of the moment—hints at another form of present shock that is operating in more ways and places than we may suspect. We'll call this temporal compression overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It's the effort to make the "now" responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.
”
”
Douglas Rushkoff (Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)
“
. . . that the State is, or ought to be, founded on contract." This would be true if the words which I have italicized should be omitted. It was the insertion of these words that furnished the writer a basis for his otherwise groundless analogy between the Anarchists and the followers of Rousseau. The latter hold that the State originated in a contract, and that the people of to-day, though they did not make it, are bound by it. The Anarchists, on the contrary, deny that any such contract was ever made; declare that, had one ever been made, it could not impose a shadow of obligation on those who had no hand in making it; and claim the right to contract for themselves as they please. The position that a man may make his own contracts, far from being analogous to that which makes him subject to contracts made by others, is its direct antithesis.
”
”
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (Selected essays and writings on Individualist anarchism & Liberty: (plus selected letters))
“
Sir, —
Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask [for a definitive acknowledgement that at least they are animals?… Many hon. members may object to the proposed Bill enacting that, in statutes respecting the suffrage, 'wherever words occur which import the masculine gender they shall be held to include women;' but could any object to the insertion of a clause in another Act that 'whenever the word "animal" occur it shall be held to include women?' Suffer me, thorough your columns, to appeal to our 650 [parliamentary] representatives, and ask — Is there not one among you then who will introduce such a motion? There would then be at least an equal interdict on wanton barbarity to cat, dog, or woman…
Yours respectfully,
AN EARNEST ENGLISHWOMAN
”
”
Joanna Bourke (What It Means to Be Human)
“
What is magic? Then there is the witches’ explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on the age of the witch. Older witches hardly put words to it at all, but may suspect in their hearts that the universe really doesn’t know what the hell is going on and consists of a zillion trillion billion possibilities, and could become any one of them if a trained mind rigid with quantum certainty was inserted in the crack and twisted; that, if you really had to make someone’s hat explode, all you needed to do was twist into that universe where a large number of hat molecules all decide at the same time to bounce off in different directions. Younger witches, on the other hand, talk about it all the time and believe it involves crystals, mystic forces, and dancing about without yer drawers on. Everyone may be right, all at the same time. That’s the thing about quantum.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies (Discworld, #14))
“
Yet once we are done nodding earnestly at Whitehead and Latour, what do we do? We return to our libraries and our word processors. We refine our diction and insert more endnotes. We apply "rigor," the scholarly version of Tinker Bell's fairy dust, in adequate quantities to stave off interest while cheating death. For too long, being "radical" in philosophy has meant writing and talking incessantly, theorizing ideas so big that they can never be concretized but only marked with threatening definite articles ("the political," "the other," "the neighbor," "the animal"). For too long, philosophers have spun waste like a goldfish's sphincter, rather than spinning yarn like a charka. Whether or not the real radical philosophers march or protest or run for office in addition to writing inscrutable tomes - this is a question we can, perhaps, leave aside. Real radicals, we might conclude, make things.
”
”
Ian Bogost (Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Posthumanities))
“
To be sure, in the case of such long episodes as the one we are considering, a purely syntactical connection with the principal theme would hardly have been possible; but a connection with it through perspective would have been all the easier had the content been arranged with that end in view; if, that is, the entire story of the scar had been presented as a recollection which awakens in Odysseus’ mind at this particular moment. It would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, where the motifs “Odysseus” and “recollection” were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.
”
”
Erich Auerbach (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature)
“
What separates me most deeply from the metaphysicians is: I don’t concede that the’I’ is what thinks. Instead, I take the I itself to be a construction of thinking, of the same rank as ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individual’, ‘purpose’, ‘number’; in other words to be only a regulative fiction with the help of which a kind of constancy and thus ‘knowability’ is inserted into, invented into, a world of becoming. Up to now belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs has subjugated the metaphysicians: I teach the renunciation of this belief. It is only thinking that posits the I: but up to now philosophers have believed, like the ‘common people’, that in ‘I think’ there lay something or other of unmediated certainty and that this ‘I’ was the given cause of thinking, in analogy with which we ‘understood’ all other causal relations. However habituated and indispensable this fiction may now be, that in no way disproves its having been invented: something can be a condition of life and nevertheless be false.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebook 35, May – July 1885 paragraph 35
“
After he returned from Paris, he had a dream in which he was running across a cracked reddish plain of earth. Behind him was a dark cloud, and although he was fast, the cloud was faster. As it drew closer he heard a buzzing, and realized it was a swarm of insects, terrible and oily and noisy, with pincerlike protuberances jutting out from beneath their eyes. He knew that if he stopped, he would die, and yet even in the dream he knew he couldn’t go on much longer; at some point he had stopped being able to run and had started hobbling instead, reality inserting itself even in his dreams. And then he heard a voice, one unfamiliar but calm and authoritative, speak to him. Stop, it said. You can end this. You don’t have to do this. It was such a relief to hear those words, and he stopped, abruptly, and faced the cloud, which was seconds, feet away from him, exhausted and waiting for it to be over.
He woke, frightened, because he knew what the words meant, and they both terrified and comforted him. Now, as he moved through his days, he heard that voice in his head, and was reminded that he could, in fact, stop. He didn’t, in fact, have to keep going.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
Verse 71. To feed Jacob his people. (This is a curious specimen of medieval spiritualising, and is here inserted as such. It is amusing to note that a Tractarian expositor quotes the passage with evidently intense admiration. C. H. S.) Observe, a good shepherd must be humble and faithful, he ought to have bread in a wallet, a dog by a string, a staff with a rod, and a tuneful horn. The bread is the word of God, the wallet is the memory of the word; the dog is zeal, wherewith the shepherd glows for the house of God, casts out the wolves with pious barking, following preaching and unwearied prayer: the string by which the dog is held is the moderation of zeal, and discretion, whereby the zeal of the shepherd is tempered by the spirit of piety and knowledge. The staff is the consolation of pious exhortation by which the too timid are sustained and refreshed, lest they fail in the time of tribulation; but the rod is the authority and power by which the turbulent are restrained. The tuneful horn, which sounds so sweetly, signifies the sweetness of eternal blessedness, which the faithful shepherd gently and often instils into the ears of his flock. Johannes Paulus Palanterius. 1600.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (The Treasury of David, Complete)
“
As you are all aware, in the course of life we experience many kinds of pain. Pains of the body and pains of the heart. I know I have experienced pain in many different forms, and I'm sure you have too. In most cases, though, I'm sure you've found it very difficult to convey the truth of that pain to another person: to explain it in words. People say that only they themselves can understand the pain they are feeling. But is it true? I for one do not believe that it is. If, before our eyes, we see someone who is truly suffering, we do sometimes feel his suffering and pain as our own. This is the power of empathy. Am I making myself clear?''
He broke off and looked around the room once again.
''The reason that people sing songs for other people is because they want to have the power to arouse empathy, to break free of the narrow shell of the self and share their pain and joy with others. This is not an easy thing to do, of course. And so tonight, as kind of experiment, I want you to experience a simpler, more physical kind of empathy. Lights please.''
Everyone in the place was hushed now, all eyes fixed on stage. Amid the silence, the man stared off into space, as if to insert a pause or to reach a state of mental concentration. Then, without a word, he held his hand over the lighted candle. Little by little, he brought the palm closer and closer to the flame. Someone in the audience made a sound like a sigh or a moan. You could see the tip of the flame burning the man's palm. You could almost hear the sizzle of the flesh. A woman let out a hard little scream. Everyone else just watched in frozen horror. The man endured the pain, his face distorted in agony. What the hell was this? Why did he have to do such a stupid, senseless thing? I felt my mouth going dry. After five or six seconds of this, he slowly removed his hand from the flame and set the dish with the candle in it on the floor. Then he clasped his hands together, the right and left palms pressed against each other.
''As you have seen tonight, ladies and gentleman, pain can actually burn a person's flesh,'' said the man. His voice sounded exactly as it had earlier: quiet, steady, cool. No trace of suffering remained on his face. Indeed, it had been replaced by a faint smile. ''And the pain that must have been there, you have been able to feel as if it were your own. That is the power of empathy.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
“
In ninety seconds they were naked and he was nibbling at her ear while his hand rubbed her pubic mat; but a saboteur was at work at his brain. 'I love you,' he thought, and it was not untrue because he loved all women now, knowing partially what sex was really all about, but he couldn't bring himself to say it because it was not totally true, either, since he loved Mavis more, much more. 'I'm awfully fond of you,' he almost said, but the absurdity of it stopped him. Her hand cupped his cock and found it limp; her eyes opened and looked into his enquiringly. He kissed her lips quickly and moved his hand lower, inserting a ringer until he found the clitoris. But even when her breathing got deeper, he did not respond as usual, and her hand began massaging his cock more desperately. He slid down, kissing nipples and bellybutton on the way, and began licking her clitoris. As soon as she came, he cupped her buttocks, lifted her pelvis, got his tongue into her vagina and forced another quick orgasm, immediately lowering her slightly again and beginning a very gentle and slow return in spiral fashion back to the clitoris. But still he was flaccid.
'Stop,' Stella breathed. 'Let me do you, baby.'
George moved upward on the bed and hugged her. 'I love you,' he said, and suddenly it did not sound like a lie.
Stella giggled and kissed his mouth briefly. 'It takes a lot to get those words out of you, doesn't it?' she said bemusedly.
'Honesty is the worst policy,' George said grimly. 'I was a child prodigy, you know? A freak. It was rugged. I had to have some defense, and somehow I picked honesty. I was always with older boys so I never won a fight. The only way I could feel superior, or escape total inferiority, was to be the most honest bastard on the planet earth.'
'So you can't say 'I love you' unless you mean it?' Stella laughed. 'You're probably the only man in America with that problem. If you could only be a woman for a while, baby! You can't imagine what liars most men are.'
'Oh, I've said it at times. When it was at least half true. But it always sounded like play-acting to me, and I felt it sounded that way to the woman, too. This time it just came out, perfectly natural, no effort.'
'That is something,' Stella grinned. 'And I can't let it go unrewarded.' Her black body slid downward and he enjoyed the esthetic effect as his eyes followed her— black on white, like the yinyang or the Sacred Chao—what was the psychoses of the white race that made this beauty seem ugly to most of them? Then her lips closed over his penis and he found that the words had loosened the knot: he was erect in a second. He closed his eyes to savor the sensation, then opened them to look down at her Afro hairdo, her serious dark face, his cock slipping back and forth between her lips. 'I love you,' he repeated, with even more conviction. 'Oh, Christ, Oh, Eris, oh baby baby, I love you!' He closed his eyes again, and let the Robot move his pelvis in response to her. 'Oh, stop,' he said, 'stop,' drawing her upward and turning her over, 'together,' he said, mounting her, 'together,' as her eyes closed when he entered her and then opened again for a moment meeting his in total tenderness, 'I love you, Stella, I love,' and he knew it was so far along that the weight wouldn't bother her, collapsing, using his arms to hug her, not supporting himself, belly to belly and breast to breast, her arms hugging him also and her voice saying, 'I love you, too, oh, I love you,' and moving with it, saying 'angel' and 'darling' and then saying nothing, the explosion and the light again permeating his whole body not just the penis, a passing through the mandala to the other side and a long sleep.
”
”
Robert Anton Wilson (The Illuminatus! Trilogy)
“
By giving full expression to the contradiction between civil society and the state, the French Revolution radically transformed both its terms. To put it differently: dualism was not abolished but, rather, displaced within the space delimited by the two poles of the contradiction. This created a new split between 'man', a member of civil society, and the 'citizen', a member of the state. It is only by 'abstracting' from his condition as man and his insertion into the organization of civil society that the political subject can become a citizen and make his entry into the political community: it is only as a 'sheer, blank individual' who accepts the fact that the political is divorced from the social that he can take part in the life of the state, which is based on the freedom and equality of its citizens.
(...)
The political state is 'abstract' in the sense suggested by the etymology of the word; it appears as the residue or the 'precipitate' of the constitutive movement by means of which civil society transcends its own limits to attain political existence, while leaving its internal differences intact, or, rather, transforming them into mere 'differences of social life' 'without significance in political life'.
The state is incapable of substantially affecting the contents of civil society, for it is, precisely, a product of civil society's abstraction from itself.
”
”
Stathis Kouvelakis (Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx)
“
Could it be that we lose some of the visual functions that we inherited from our evolution as we learn to read? Or, at the very least, are these functions massively reorganized? This counterintuitive prediction is precisely what my colleagues and I tested in a series of experiments. To draw a complete map of the brain regions that are changed by literacy, we scanned illiterate adults in Portugal and Brazil, and we compared them to people from the same villages who had had the good fortune of learning to read in school, either as children or adults.41 Unsurprisingly perhaps, the results revealed that, with reading acquisition, an extensive map of areas had become responsive to written words (see figure 14 in the color insert). Flash a sentence, word by word, to an illiterate individual, and you will find that their brain does not respond much: activity spreads to early visual areas, but it stops there, because the letters cannot be recognized. Present the same sequence of written words to an adult who has learned to read, and a much more extended cortical circuit now lights up, in direct proportion to the person’s reading score. The areas activated include the letter box area, in the left occipitotemporal cortex, as well as all the classical language regions associated with language comprehension. Even the earliest visual areas increase their response: with reading acquisition, they seem to become attuned to the recognition of small print.42 The more fluent a person is, the more these regions are activated by written words, and the more they strengthen their links: as reading becomes increasingly automatic, the translation of letters into sounds speeds up.
”
”
Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
“
Jews, notably, were defined as a ‘people’, while others, not even identified, were referred to only as ‘communities’. It was an extraordinary phrase that echoes down the decades and explains why Balfour is remembered a century later by Arabs as the architect of perfidy and disaster.16 Zionists, for opposite reasons, revere his memory; Balfour Street in Jerusalem is still the site of the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. The reservation had been inserted in the text to meet the strong objections raised by Lord Curzon, the former British viceroy of India and, as lord president of the council, an influential member of the war cabinet. Curzon – reflecting contemporary perceptions about the map and identity of the region – had referred to the ‘Syrian Arabs’ who had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’, and asked what would become of them. ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’, he predicted with the help of another then familiar biblical reference.17 The declaration’s second reservation – about the rights of Jews in other countries – was a response to the opposition of Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, even though he was not in the war cabinet. Montagu was a Jewish grandee who feared that an official expression of sympathy for Zionism in fact masked anti-Semitic prejudice and would undermine the hard-won position of British Jews and their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. However, it did not weaken his vehement opposition, any more than the words about ‘non-Jewish communities’ assuaged Arab fears. Over time, Jewish attitudes to Zionism would change significantly; Arab attitudes, by and large, did not.
”
”
Ian Black (Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017)
“
Since I did Selection all those years ago, not much has really changed.
The MOD (Ministry of Defence) website still states that 21 SAS soldiers need the following character traits: “Physically and mentally robust. Self-confident. Self-disciplined. Able to work alone. Able to assimilate information and new skills.”
It makes me smile now to read those words. As Selection had progressed, those traits had been stamped into my being, and then during the three years I served with my squadron they became molded into my psyche.
They are the same qualities I still value today.
The details of the jobs I did once I passed Selection aren’t for sharing publicly, but they included some of the most extraordinary training that any man can be lucky enough to receive.
I went on to be trained in demolitions, air and maritime insertions, foreign weapons, jungle survival, trauma medicine, Arabic, signals, high-speed and evasive driving, winter warfare, as well as “escape and evasion” survival for behind enemy lines.
I went through an even more in-depth capture initiation program as part of becoming a combat-survival instructor, which was much longer and more intense than the hell we endured on Selection.
We became proficient in covert night parachuting and unarmed combat, among many other skills--and along the way we had a whole host of misadventures.
But what do I remember and value most?
For me, it is the camaraderie, and the friendships--and of course Trucker, who is still one of my best friends on the planet.
Some bonds are unbreakable.
I will never forget the long yomps, the specialist training, and of course a particular mountain in the Brecon Beacons.
But above all, I feel a quiet pride that for the rest of my days I can look myself in the mirror and know that once upon a time I was good enough.
Good enough to call myself a member of the SAS.
Some things don’t have a price tag.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
Hey cupcake!” he says, like he just had a great idea. “I’m so glad you’re here.” “Me too,” I say. “I thought you were ready to kick me to the curb.” I was. But when I found out he was hurt, it nearly gutted me. “Would if I could,” I say. “Do you think you could fall in love with me, cupcake?” he blurts out. I’m startled. I know he’s medicated, so I shouldn’t put any stock into his words, but I can’t help it. “You should get some rest,” I say. Tap. Tap. “So, that would be a no.” He whistles. Then he scrunches up his face when it makes his head hurt. “I’m in trouble,” he whispers quietly. “What?” He squeezes my hand. “I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you, cupcake,” he says. “I just wish you could love me back.” “You’ve had a lot of pain meds,” I say. Suddenly, he grabs the neck of my shirt and jerks me so that I fall over his chest. His lips are right next to mine. “Listen to me,” he says. “Okay,” I whisper. “I don’t have much going for me, but I know what love feels like.” “How?” “It just is, cupcake. You don’t get to pick who you fall in love with. And God knows, if my head could pick, it wouldn’t be you.” I push back to get off his chest, because I’m offended. But he holds me tight. “You’re not easy to love, because you can’t love me back. But you might one day. I’ll wait. But you got to start taking my calls.” He cups the back of my head and brings my face toward his. A cough from the doorway startles us apart. I stand up and pull my shirt down where he rucked it up. “Visiting hours are over,” a nurse says. “She’s not a visitor,” he says. She comes and inserts a needle into his IV, and his eyes close. He doesn’t open them when he says, “She’s going to marry me one day. She just doesn’t know it yet.” His head falls to the side and he starts to softly snore. His hand goes slack around mine. I pull back, my heart skipping like mad. “They say some of the most ridiculous things when they’re medicated.” The nurse shakes her head. “He probably won’t remember any of this tomorrow.” Pete
”
”
Tammy Falkner (Zip, Zero, Zilch (The Reed Brothers, #6))
“
If one could prove from established and reliable histories that the events in Judith really happened, it would be a noble and fine book, and should properly be in the Bible. Yet it hardly squares with the historical accounts of the Holy Scriptures, especially Jeremiah and Ezra. For these show how Jerusalem and the whole country were destroyed, and were thereafter laboriously rebuilt during the time of the monarchy of the Persians who occupied the land. Against this the first chapter of Judith claims that King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was the first one to set about conquering this territory; it creates the impression that these events
took place before the captivity of the Jews, and before the rise of the Persian monarchy. Philo, on the contrary, says that they happened after the release and return of the Jews from Babylon under King Ahasuerus, at which time the Jews had rebuilt neither the temple nor Jerusalem, and had no government. Thus as to both time and name, error and doubt are still present, so that I cannot reconcile [the accounts] at all. Such an interpretation strikes my fancy, and I think that the poet deliberately and painstakingly inserted the errors of time and name in order to remind the reader that the book should be taken and understood as that kind of a sacred, religious, composition. It may even be that in those days they dramatized literature like this, Just as among us the Passion and other sacred stories are performed. In a common presentation or play they conceivably wanted to teach their people and youth to trust God, to be righteous, and to hope in God for all help and comfort, in every need, against all enemies, etc. Therefore this is a fine, good, holy, useful book, well worth reading by us Christians. For the words spoken by the persons in it should be understood as though they were uttered in the Holy Spirit by a spiritual, holy poet or prophet who, in presenting such persons in his play, preaches to us through them. Next after Judith, therefore, like a song following a play, belongs the Wisdom of Philo, a work which denounces tyrants and praises the help which God bestows on his people. The song [that follows] may well be called an illustration of this book [of Judith].
”
”
Martin Luther (Luther's Works, Volume 35: Word and Sacrament I)
“
If one could prove from established and reliable histories that the events in Judith really happened, it would be a noble and fine book, and should properly be in the Bible. Yet it hardly squares with the historical accounts of the Holy Scriptures, especially Jeremiah and Ezra. For these show how Jerusalem and the whole country were destroyed, and were thereafter laboriously rebuilt during the time of the monarchy of the Persians who occupied the land. Against this the first chapter of Judith claims that King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was the first one to set about conquering this territory; it creates the impression that these events
took place before the captivity of the Jews, and before the rise of the Persian monarchy. Philo, on the contrary, says that they happened after the release and return of the Jews from Babylon under King Ahasuerus, at which time the Jews had rebuilt neither the temple nor Jerusalem, and had no government. Thus as to both
time and name, error and doubt are still present, so that I cannot reconcile [the accounts] at all. Such an interpretation strikes my fancy, and I think that the poet deliberately and painstakingly inserted the errors of time and name in order to remind the reader that the book should be taken and understood as that kind of a sacred, religious, composition.
It may even be that in those days they dramatized literature like this, Just as among us the Passion and other sacred stories are performed. In a common presentation or play they conceivably wanted to teach their people and youth to trust God, to be righteous, and to hope in God for all help and comfort, in every need, against all enemies, etc. Therefore this is a fine, good, holy, useful book, well worth reading by us Christians. For the words spoken by the persons in it should be understood as though they were uttered in the Holy Spirit by a spiritual, holy poet or prophet who, in presenting such persons in his play, preaches to us through them. Next after Judith, therefore, like a song following a play, belongs the Wisdom of Philo, a work which denounces tyrants and praises the help which God bestows on his people. The song [that follows] may well be called an illustration of this book [of Judith].
”
”
Martin Luther (Luther's Works, Volume 35: Word and Sacrament I)
“
The front door swung open and a gust of wind rushed inside. Boots scuffled along the floor, and Camille turned to see what pig had shown up at Daphne’s so early in the day. Her heart thumped as the door slammed. Stuart McGreenery tucked his arched captain’s hat under his arm and pulled off his white gloves.
“A charming establishment,” he said. He turned up his nose, and sniffed the air.
“Is that desperation I smell?”
Oscar threw his fork and knife on the table and kicked back his chair. “Did you decide to join us for breakfast?”
McGreenery lunged forward and Oscar rose to his feet.
“I came to see what you know about the hole in the hull of my ship, you insolent whelp,” McGreenery said.
Oscar’s cheek twitched with pleasure. “Why not just have me escorted down to it with a knife in my back?”
Camille stood and inserted herself between the two men. Daphne sat in the corner of the parlor rolling cigars, her wide eyes darting from McGreenery to Oscar.
“We heard the explosion,” Camille said. “What makes you think we had anything to do with it?”
McGreenery retreated one small step and stared down the slope of his nose at her. This time he kept his icy stare level with her eyes. “Because it was not an accident. The explosion was set in a deliberate attempt to keep me from departing for Port Adelaide.”
Camille tried to subdue the shake of her knees. “We certainly didn’t see it. Oscar and I were in our room.”
McGreenery cocked his head.
“I heard you were sharing a room.” He glanced at Oscar. “I doubt William would be fond of that.”
“You don’t have the right to even speak his name,” Oscar said, strangling each word.
McGreenery gracefully removed the hat out from under his arm and slipped it back on. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing will stop me from reaching the stone, least of all a little girl and her trained monkey.”
Camille rushed forward, ready to smack McGreenery across the cheek. Oscar grabbed her around the waist and held her back. McGreenery bowed slightly, grinning with pleasure, and then whisked out the front door.
She shrugged out form Oscar’s grasp and watched through the windows as McGreenery sauntered down the street toward the Stealth, where she could hear the echo of repairs already under way.
“One day that prick is going to get what he deserves,” Oscar muttered. “I just hope I’m the one who gets to give it to him.
”
”
Angie Frazier (Everlasting (Everlasting, #1))
“
As you are all aware, in the course of life we experience many kinds of pain. Pains of the body and pains of the heart. I know I have experienced pain in many different forms, and I'm sure you have too. In most cases, though, I'm sure you've found it very difficult to convey the truth of that pain to another person: to explain it in words. People say that only they themselves can understand the pain they are feeling. But is it true? I for one do not believe that it is. If, before our eyes, we see someone who is truly suffering, we do sometimes feel his suffering and pain as our own. This is the power of empathy. Am I making myself clear?''
He broke off and looked around the room once again.
''The reason that people sing songs for other people is because they want to have the power to arouse empathy, to break free of the narrow shell of the self and share their pain and joy with others. This is not an easy thing to do, of course. And so tonight, as a kind of experiment, I want you to experience a simpler, more physical kind of empathy. Lights please.''
Everyone in the place was hushed now, all eyes fixed on stage. Amid the silence, the man stared off into space, as if to insert a pause or to reach a state of mental concentration. Then, without a word, he held his hand over the lighted candle. Little by little, he brought the palm closer and closer to the flame. Someone in the audience made a sound like a sigh or a moan. You could see the tip of the flame burning the man's palm. You could almost hear the sizzle of the flesh. A woman let out a hard little scream. Everyone else just watched in frozen horror. The man endured the pain, his face distorted in agony. What the hell was this? Why did he have to do such a stupid, senseless thing? I felt my mouth going dry. After five or six seconds of this, he slowly removed his hand from the flame and set the dish with the candle in it on the floor. Then he clasped his hands together, the right and left palms pressed against each other.
''As you have seen tonight, ladies and gentleman, pain can actually burn a person's flesh,'' said the man. His voice sounded exactly as it had earlier: quiet, steady, cool. No trace of suffering remained on his face. Indeed, it had been replaced by a faint smile. ''And the pain that must have been there, you have been able to feel as if it were your own. That is the power of empathy.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
“
Drive to the expired home, take a photo. Have a unique letter saved in your computer that you can print out that morning. This letter will have the home owner’s name at the top of the page with the words “Your listing expired at midnight last night.” Include a copy of the expired MLS sheet. Hi-lite the date it expired. In your letter state they’ll be receiving a box from you in the mail in a few days. Insert this letter into a unique mailing envelope. I use white bubble wrap envelopes (9x12) and brown craft envelopes (9x12). Write the owner’s name on the front of the envelope and directly below that write “Confidential”. That’s all. Don’t write their address on the card. Then, back at the office or your home, enter the owner and address in the SOC contact manager. Upload photo of home to the SOC system. Send a custom greeting card with box of cookies or brownies. Follow up 3-5 days after you’ve sent the package with either a phone call, knock at the door or another drop off letter. They will remember you because they just received a custom card with brownies or cookies. It turns a cold call into a warm call every time. It works!
”
”
Jim McCord (A Revolution in Real Estate Sales: How to Sell Real Estate)
“
Further, a solution to the Kashmir problem must take into account the interests of India, Pakistan and above all the Kashmiri people (the words ‘above all’ were inserted at the instance of Atal).
”
”
Kingshuk Nag (Atal Bihari Vajpayee: A Man for All Seasons)
“
4 Insertion between words and concepts: Différance is neither a word (in French) nor a concept (a signified). It doesn’t exist; it’s not a present-being, a “thing” with essence and existence. It refuses the question, “What is différance?”. Better to write: différance Derrida crosses out the verb of being, putting it under erasure (“sous rature”: borrowed from Heidegger). Both there and not there, cancelled but not ejected, present and absent.
”
”
Jeff Collins (Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides Book 0))
“
Iterability has many implications. CITATION is always possible. We can always lift out a sequence of words from a written tract. We can make an extract, and it can still function meaningfully. GRAFTING is equally possible. We can insert the stolen sequence (whose property was it?) into other chains of writing. As Derrida writes: “No context can enclose it.” Hence writing is writing always with stolen words. Not to mention all of its quotations, plagiarisms, imitations, pastiches, etc.
”
”
Jeff Collins (Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides Book 0))
“
(insert your own bad word here)
”
”
Lee M. Winter (What Reggie Did on the Weekend 2: Unfair! (The Reggie Books))
“
There used to be a time when neighbors took care of one another, he remembered. [Put “he remembered”first to establish reflective tone.] It no longer seemed to happen that way, however. [The contrast supplied by “however”must come first. Start with “But.”Also establish America locale.] He wondered if it was because everyone in the modern world was so busy. [All these sentences are the same length and have the same soporific rhythm; turn this one into a question?] It occurred to him that people today have so many things to do that they don’t have time for old-fashioned friendship. [Sentence essentially repeats previous sentence; kill it or warm it up with specific detail.] Things didn’t work that way in America in previous eras. [Reader is still in the present; reverse the sentence to tell him he’s now in the past. “America”no longer needed if inserted earlier.] And he knew that the situation was very different in other countries, as he recalled from the years when he lived in villages in Spain and Italy. [Reader is still in America. Use a negative transition word to get him to Europe. Sentence is also too flabby. Break it into two sentences?] It almost seemed to him that as people got richer and built their houses farther apart they isolated themselves from the essentials of life. [Irony deferred too long. Plant irony early. Sharpen the paradox about richness.] And there was another thought that troubled him. [This is the real point of the paragraph; signal the reader that it’s important. Avoid weak “there was”construction.] His friends had deserted him when he needed them most during his recent illness. [Reshape to end with “most”; the last word is the one that stays in the reader’s ear and gives the sentence its punch. Hold sickness for next sentence; it’s a separate thought.] It was almost as if they found him guilty of doing something shameful. [Introduce sickness here as the reason for the shame. Omit “guilty”; it’s implicit.] He recalled reading somewhere about societies in primitive parts of the world in which sick people were shunned, though he had never heard of any such ritual in America. [Sentence starts slowly and stays sluggish and dull. Break it into shorter units. Snap off the ironic point.]
”
”
William Zinsser (On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction)
“
How spontaneously does a baby insert his thumb into his mouth and fill that blank space.
The emptiness of the heavens can be filled in by assigning God residence.
The emptiness of space can be filled with a satellite.
The empty womb with seed.
The empty tomb with a corpse.
The empty pyramid with a coffin.
The empty desert with pyramids.
The game of planting words on the blank pages of a newspaper can be played on and on, for ever.
The game of filling in the blank spaces on the hit-list of a terrorist group.
The game of filling an empty gun with bullets.
The game of razing a city to the ground with a bulldozer.
”
”
Manoj Kumar Panda (One Thousand Days in a Refrigerator)
“
Don Fabrizio remembered a conversation with Father Pirrone some months before in the sunlit observatory. What the Jesuit had predicted had come to pass. But wasn’t it perhaps good tactics to insert himself into the new movement, make at least part use of it for a few members of his own class? The worry of his imminent interview with Don Calogero lessened. “But the rest of his family, Don Ciccio, what are they really like?” “Excellency, no one has laid eyes on Don Calogero’s wife for years, except me. She only leaves the house to go to early Mass, the five o’clock one, when it’s empty. There’s no organ-playing at that hour; but once I got up early just to see her. Donna Bastiana came in with her maid, and as I was hiding behind a confessional I could not see very much; but at the end of Mass the heat was too great for the poor woman and she took off her black veil. Word of honour, Excellency, she was lovely as the sun, one can’t blame Don Calogero, who’s a beetle of a man, for wanting to keep her away from others. But even in the best kept houses secrets come out; servants talk; and it seems Donna Bastiana is a kind of animal: she can’t read or write or tell the time by a clock, can scarcely talk; just a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth; she’s incapable even of affection for her own daughter! Good for bed and that’s all.” Don Ciccio, who, as protégé of queens and follower of princes, considered his own simple manners to be perfect, smiled with pleasure. He had found a way of getting some of his own back on the suppressor of his personality. “Anyway,” he went on, “one couldn’t expect much else. You know whose daughter Donna Bastiana is, Excellency?” He turned, rose on tiptoe, pointed to a distant group of huts which looked as if they were slithering off the edge of the hill, nailed there just by a wretched-looking bell-tower: a crucified hamlet. “She’s the daughter of one of your peasants from Runci, Peppe Giunta he was called, so filthy and so crude that everyone called him Peppe “Mmerda” . . . excuse the word, Excellency.” Satisfied, he twisted one of Teresina’s ears round a finger. “Two years after Don Calogero had eloped with Bastiana they found him dead on the path to Rampinzeri, with twelve bullets in his back. Always lucky, is Don Calogero, for the old man was getting above himself and demanding, they say.” Much of this was known to Don Fabrizio and had already been balanced up in his mind; but the nickname of Angelica’s grandfather was new to him; it opened a profound historical perspective, and made him glimpse other abysses compared to which Don Calogero himself seemed a garden flowerbed. The Prince began to feel the ground giving way under his feet; how ever could Tancredi swallow this? And what about himself? He found himself trying to work out the relationship between the Prince of Salina, uncle of the bridegroom, and the grandfather of the bride; he found none, there wasn’t any. Angelica was just Angelica, a flower of a girl, a rose merely fertilised by her grandfather’s nickname. Non olet, he repeated, non olet; in fact optime foeminam ac contuberninum olet.
”
”
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (The Leopard)
“
You are angry?”
Her reply was frigid silence.
“Blue Eyes, what wrong words have I said?”
“What have you said?”
Hunter frowned. “It would not please you to marry with me? Better a wife than a slave, yes?”
“I will never play second fiddle, never!”
Hunter studied her, trying to figure out why she had switched the topic of conversation from marriage to making music.
“How dare you!” she cried. “Of all the-- You arrogant, simple-- Oh, never mind! Just you understand this! Amongst my people, a man has one wife, only one, and he looks at no other, thinks of no other, touches no other, until death do they part. I wouldn’t marry you if you got on your knees and begged me!”
Hunter sat up slowly, feeling a little dazed by her fury and wondering what had sparked it. Would he never understand her?
She leaned toward him, her blue eyes flashing. “Even if I would marry you, an announcement by a central fire would not constitute a marriage in my books.” She thumped her chest. “I must make my vows before a priest! And furthermore, when I take a husband, he won’t be a Comanche. You couldn’t be chief husband, second husband, any husband, to me. You’re a barbarian who treats women like chattel!”
Very calmly Hunter inserted, “You are my woman. You will sure enough marry no other.”
“Well, if you think I’m going to marry you, you have another think coming! Never, do you hear me?”
With that, she wrapped her arms around herself and glared at him. Hunter sighed and flopped onto his back, staring upward sightlessly. Minutes passed. When at last he felt her curl up at the foot of the bed, as far away from him as possible, a knowing smile touched his lips. No woman could possibly get that angry over another woman unless she was jealous. And a woman didn’t get jealous unless she was in love. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one with another think coming.
”
”
Catherine Anderson (Comanche Moon (Comanche, #1))
“
What do you know about the benefits of (insert product sector)?
”
”
Phil M. Jones (Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact)
“
Loh-rhett-ah, you will be silent and let him say the God words.”
“He can say the God words until snowballs melt in--” She broke off and blushed. “I’m the one who has to say the words, Hunter, and I won’t. Do you understand?”
“My dear child,” the priest inserted, “it’s not often one of these”--he threw a meaningful glance at Hunter--“gentlemen offers to make an honorable woman of a captive. Wouldn’t it be wise to accept?”
“I’m in no need of matrimony, Father. I still have my honor.”
Hunter jerked her to his side and, in an ominously even voice, said, “Your honor will soon go the way of the wind, Blue Eyes. You made a God promise. You are my woman! Now I say you will be my wife!”
Loretta wet her lips, trying to meet his gaze without wavering.
“I brought you a Black Robe, yes? So this will be a marriage in your heart. If you do not say your God words to make it so, I will sure enough marry you my way.” He swept his hand in a wide arc. “Your honor will fly away on the wind. Suvate, it is finished. You choose.”
Her voice hoarse with frustration, Loretta cried, “But I don’t want to marry you. If I do, it’s for forever! Don’t you understand?”
“For forever is very much good.”
“No, it’s very much bad. I’ll never be able to leave you!”
Hunter threw up his hands. “No Black Robe, no marriage for your God. I am sure enough happy with a marriage my way.” With a determined glint in his eyes, he turned toward the crowd, raising his arms, and shouted something. Then he shrugged. “There. Suvate, it is finished. I have said my words. We are married.” Seizing her by the arm, he growled, “Keemah, come, wife.
”
”
Catherine Anderson (Comanche Moon (Comanche, #1))
“
Pray your words, old man.”
The priest licked his lips and glanced fearfully at the crowd of savages around them. Perhaps it was the stark contrast of black robes against pallid flesh, but Loretta thought he was losing color at an alarming rate. Indeed, he looked as if he might faint.
“Say the God words, old man!” Hunter snarled again.
“Don’t you dare bully him,” Loretta hissed. “He’s a man of God, Hunter! You don’t roar at a man of God.”
“It’s qu-quite all right, child, quite all right.” The priest, his face dripping sweat, made haste to open his Bible. “Merciful Father,” he muttered, clearly praying for deliverance. With a strangled cough, he began leafing through pages, turning slightly so the light from the fire was thrown across the small print. “I beg your forgiveness. I don’t usually need to use the book--” He coughed again and waved away smoke. “For some reason, the words have fled my mind. Ah, yes, here we are.”
Infuriated, Loretta jerked her arm from Hunter’s grasp. “Father, there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of, I assure you.”
Hunter reclaimed her arm in a biting grip that made her swing around to face him. Bending his head, he whispered, “Blue Eyes, you test my temper. I will blow hard at you like the wind.”
“Blow, then!” She tried to twist her arm free. “You’re hurting me.”
“I will beat you. Then you will know a hurt. Now be silent!”
Loretta’s eyes flared to a fiery blue. “I’m not going to marry you. Beat me senseless! Go ahead.”
Hunter sent her a look that would have scared her to death a month ago. “Loh-rhett-ah, you will be silent and let him say the God words.”
“He can say the God words until snowballs melt in--” She broke off and blushed. “I’m the one who has to say the words, Hunter, and I won’t. Do you understand?”
“My dear child,” the priest inserted, “it’s not often one of these”--he threw a meaningful glance at Hunter--“gentlemen offers to make an honorable woman of a captive. Wouldn’t it be wise to accept?”
“I’m in no need of matrimony, Father. I still have my honor.
”
”
Catherine Anderson (Comanche Moon (Comanche, #1))
“
I have never really understood our gene-father's obsession with martial glory. It always seemed to me more efficient to simply eradicate our foes from orbit. Pound the earth flat and build over the ashes.
And if they dig in?
There are ways. Saboteurs, chemical weapons - there are hundreds of ways of dismantling a world and its population that do not involve orbital insertions and glorious advances into the teeth of enemy fire. Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of our species. Perhaps we are little more than psychopathic apes, driven to fashion clubs and smash out the brains of our closest neighbours.
And here I thought you were the clever one. I figured that out the day of my culling, when my family forced my cousins and me to fight for the honour of joining the Third. War as you describe it would be little more than pest control. What is there for the gods to feed on? Where is the desire for victory, the savagery, the hope and despair? Where is the entertainment?
I believe you have made my point for me.
No, you are not listening. On my pilgrimage, I learned much. Win or lose, the gods feast on our deeds. A man pets a stray, and his small pleasure in the kindness of the act feeds Slaanesh. A woman strikes her crying child, and that awful moment of elation she feels feeds Khorne. A Munitorum drone considers suicide. Nurgle grows fat on his despair. A merciful strategist devises a plan for bloodless victory, and Tzeentch is content. The Word Bearers believe the gods crave worship. But the gods care for nothing save filling their bellies with our sorrows. Intentionally or not, we are all meat for the beast. Even you, Fabius.
”
”
Josh Reynolds (Fabius Bile: The Omnibus (Fabius Bile: Warhammer 40,000))
“
God had spoken a promise to Joseph as a young boy, that he would someday be a ruler and his family would bow to him. Joseph did not have a lot of wisdom at this young age, and because of this, he revealed dreams and promises that were given to him by God that were not meant to be shared. Right here I would like to insert: when God speaks a promise into our lives, gives us a Word regarding a situation, or prompts us to claim a promise, we don’t need to announce it to others or post it for the world of social media to see. Some things are to be kept inside our spirit and are to be shared between us and God alone. When this breach takes place and spiritual things are not protected, something is lost because it wasn’t guarded.
”
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Kim Haney (God Has a Waiting Room: It's how we respond during the wait)
“
contained a suture kit, more water purification tablets, Russian aspirin, blood-clotting gauze, an Israeli-style wrap bandage, tweezers, six Russian-style Band-Aids of varying sizes, two antibacterial wipes, a small tube of antiseptic ointment, and an electrolyte drink mix. The fourth and final pouch in the ditch kit was emblazoned with words Harvath didn’t know. Opening it up, he looked inside. As soon as he saw the signal mirror, he knew exactly what this bag was—a SERE kit. In addition to the mirror, there was a compass, a whistle, more stormproof matches, more water purification tablets, a small notebook and pen, a silk scarf printed with panels containing survival instructions, more hextabs, a flint and striker, a packet of sunscreen, and some mosquito wipes. Opening the flare gun case, he examined its contents. In keeping with similar setups from the Soviet days, the kit included the pistol itself and four flares, beneath which was a conversion tube. When inserted into the barrel, it allowed for firing of .45 or .410 ammunition. Two cardboard boxes with five rounds of each
”
”
Brad Thor (Backlash (Scot Harvath, #18))
“
No constitution arises from deliberation. The rights of the people are never written, except as simple restatements of previous, unwritten rights. … Although written laws are merely the declarations of pre-existing laws, it is far from true that all these laws can be written. … The more of it one puts into writing, the weaker the institution becomes. … No nation can give itself liberty if it is not already free, for human influence extends only as far as existing rights have developed. … There never existed a free nation which did not have seeds of liberty as old as itself in its natural constitution. … Nor has any nation ever successfully attempted to develop, by its fundamental written laws, rights other than those which existed in its natural constitution. … One of the greatest errors of a century which professed them all was to believe that a political constitution could be created and written a priori, whereas reason and experience unite in proving that a constitution is a divine work and that precisely the most fundamental and essentially constitutional of a nation’s laws could not possibly be written. … Promises, contracts, and oaths are mere words. It is as easy to break this trifling bond as to make it. Without the doctrine of a Divine Legislator, all moral obligation becomes illusory. Power on one side, weakness on the other: this constitutes all the bonds of human societies. The codifiers of Roman law unpretentiously inserted a remarkable fragment of Greek jurisprudence in the first chapter of their collection. Among the laws which govern us, it says, some are written and others are not. Nothing could be more simple and yet more profound. …428
”
”
Kerry R. Bolton (The Perversion of Normality: From the Marquis de Sade to Cyborgs)
“
We know that Dickens got paid by the word (writers still do), a fact that is often used to explain his prodigious output, but I think he might have collected a bonus for punctuation. Dickens was especially fond of inserting a comma between the subject and the predicate, one of the few things that the two modern schools of punctuation agree is a mistake.
”
”
Mary Norris (Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen)
“
Many people, including many Christians, live out their lives under a weight of unforgivenness, blaming themselves for things that have gone wrong in their lives, blaming other people, particularly parents, children and spouses, for things that have gone wrong, feeling the weight of everyone else doing the same thing to them. Many people live with a sense of great obligation: obligation to God, to be impossibly perfect; obligation to other people, to be everything they need all the time; obligation to themselves, to achieve the highest results and position they possibly can. And since these obligations are usually impossible to attain, we live out our lives under a burden of guilt. Often people whom others regard as happy and sunny, outgoing and successful, are crippled inside with a sense of failure and inadequacy. And then there are, of course, the real sins, the real shortcomings: the violent temper, the sexual wrongdoings, the subtle cheating and lying and financial trickery to which most are tempted and many are prone. And over all this sorry mess, guilt both real and imaginary, is written the words, ‘It is finished.’ Jesus has dealt with it. The only reason for hanging on to that guilt and sense of failure is if you want to stop being one of Jesus’ friends. If you are a friend, you are a forgiven friend. Calvary achieved it. When you are invited to walk the way of the cross you are invited to do so as a forgiven friend. You’ve got nothing to prove any more. The only person worth trying to please loves you already so much that he died for you. If you are one of Jesus’ friends, every breath you take you should breathe in that sense of relief, of letting the past go, of forgiveness. That is the birthright of all who travel the way of the cross. This is the reality to be inserted into the tissue of the rest of our life.
”
”
N.T. Wright (The Way of the Lord: Christian Pilgrimage Today)
“
After you clean your subconscious, you can insert new beliefs into your mind otherwise your old beliefs can sabotage the new ones.
”
”
Stephen Richards (NAPS: Discover The Power Of Night Audio Programs)
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In a truly dreadful moment of lexical perversion, the US military’s deployment of troops on the island of Grenada in October 1983 was presented as a ‘pre-dawn vertical insertion’.
”
”
Henry Hitchings (The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English)