Iris Chang Quotes

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.

When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.

Suicide isn't really about death, though. It's about change. Release.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

I am not the heroine of this story. And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dysfunctional and that's the way I like it, so don't expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.

The Rape of Nanking did not penetrate the world consciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima because the victims themselves had remained silent.

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.

Apparently some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided only that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.

Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

I feel I'm at the end of something — everything is going to be different — and terrible." "That doesn't sound like you, you ride every wave." "There is one that will drown me.

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

on the famous Lord Acton line: “Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.

The heroic efforts of the Americans and Europeans during this period are so numerous (their diaries run for thousands of pages) that it is impossible to narrate all of their deeds here.

In Japan censorship is practiced not only by the government when it tampers with textbooks but by the media, which police themselves.

The Knowing Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise- comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other. I do not know what he sees, but I see eyes of surpassing tenderness and calm, a calm like the dignity of matter. I love the open ocean blue-grey-green of his iris, I love the curve of it against the white, that curve the sight of what has caused me to come, when he’s quite still, deep inside me. I have never seen a curve like that, except the earth from outer space. I don’t know where he got his kindness without self-regard, almost without self, and yet he chose one woman, instead of the others. By knowing him, I get to know the purity of the animal which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing, his entire face lit. I love to see it change if I cry–there is no worry, no pity, no graver radiance. If we are on our backs, side by side, with our faces turned fully to face each other, I can hear a tear from my lower eye hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth, and then the upper eye’s tears braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow like the invention of farmimg, irrigation, a non-nomadic people. I am so lucky that I can know him. This is the only way to know him. I am the only one who knows him. When I wake again, he is still looking at me, as if he is eternal. For an hour we wake and doze, and slowly I know that though we are sated, though we are hardly touching, this is the coming the other coming brought us to the edge of–we are entering, deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze, this place beyond the other places, beyond the body itself, we are making love.

Racial and ethnic tensions simmer just below the surface in virtually all multiethnic societies, but it usually takes an economic crisis to blow off the lid of civility and allow deep-seated hatred to degenerate into violence.

In 1996 I began an investigation into the life of John Rabe and eventually unearthed thousands of pages of diaries that he and other Nazis kept during the Rape. These diaries led me to conclude that John Rabe was “the Oskar Schindler of China.

Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.

Perhaps the most fascinating character to emerge from the history of the Rape of Nanking is the German businessman John Rabe. To most of the Chinese in the city, he was a hero, “the living Buddha of Nanking,” the legendary head of the International Safety Zone who saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives.

How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain.

So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of “bestial machinery.

Kate wondered for a moment how it was that eyes conveyed such an immense amount of information about their owners. They were, after all, merely spheres of white gristle. They hardly changed as they got older, apart from getting a bit redder and a bit runnier. The iris opened and closed a bit, but that was all. Where did this flood of information come from?

Matins You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I'm looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?

There are several important lessons to be learned from Nanking, and one is that civilization itself is tissue-thin.

And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking; Dachau. —WILLIAM C. KIRBY, Professor of Modern Chinese History and Chairman of the Department of History,

The suicide risk for mental health patients goes up during changes in medication.

history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal—that only a sense of absolute unchecked power can make atrocities like the Rape of Nanking possible.

recent response to the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda: while thousands have died almost unbelievably cruel deaths, the entire world has watched CNN and wrung its hands.

The peach gown she'd chosen was the color of the sunrise, the rippling watered silk seeming to subtly change from rose to pink to nearly orange in different lights. She'd fallen in love with it at once.

You are a nymph, Iris. You can read the tides; you can change currents. But this current, this swift course, cannot be changed. Well I know metal, Princess. And I know that any steel that does not bend is fated to break.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has a monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin—one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran.

Some even tried to use opium to commit suicide, swallowing large doses as poison. Others turned to crime to support their addiction, causing a wave of banditry to sweep through Nanking. After making conditions ripe for banditry in Nanking, the Japanese used the epidemic of crimes to justify their occupation, preaching the need for imperial law and order.

A lot had changed, and yet nothing had really changed at all.

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

I was a diva for thinking that my life would dramatically change when I came out of the gigantic closet-o-porn.

It was funny yet pitiable when I imagined how they gathered whatever white cloth they could find, attached it to a dead twig, and marched forward just to surrender,

It's terrible that one doesn't love people forever.

I can't tell you—oh I can't tell you—how awful—how sort of unlivable—everything is now—like a great black wall in front of me—Something's got to smash.

Youth is a marvelous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity, when, as in her own case, one ceases to be une jeune fille un peu folle, and becomes merely a woman, worst of all, a wife. The very young have their troubles, but they have at least a part to play, the part of being very young.

But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.

He was not the only one; a total of seven Japanese class A war criminals, including Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki, were judged guilty by the IMTFE and later hanged at the Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.

In a sixty-page report released in June 1938, Smythe concluded that the 120 air raids that Nanking experienced and the four-day siege of the city did only 1 percent of the damage inflicted by the Japanese army after it entered Nanking.

To a man who came from a military culture in which pilots were given swords instead of parachutes, and in which suicide was infinitely preferable to capture, it was incomprehensible that the Chinese would not fight an enemy to the death.

Because they saw themselves as intellectuals rather than refugees, they were concerned less about preserving their Chinese heritage than with casting their lot with modern America, and eventual American citizenship. It is in connection with these immigrants, not surprisingly, that the term “model minority” first appeared. The term refers to an image of the Chinese as working hard, asking for little, and never complaining. It is a term that many Chinese now have mixed feelings about.

Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.” The less restraint on power within a government, Rummel found, the more likely that government will act on the whims or psychologically generated darker impulses of its leaders to wage war on foreign governments.

I have always attributed a great importance to eyes. How mysteriously expressive those damp orbs can be; the eyeball does not change and yet it is the window of the soul. And colour in eyes is, in its nature and inherence, quite unlike colour in any other substance. Mr Osmand had grey eyes, but his eyes were hard and speckled like Aberdeen granite, while Tommy’s were clear and empty like light smoke.

This pervasive sense of danger has discouraged many serious scholars from visiting Japanese archives to conduct their research on the subject; indeed, I was told in Nanking that the People’s Republic of China rarely permits its scholars to journey to Japan for fear of jeopardizing their physical safety.

So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of “bestial machinery.” Yet the Rape of Nanking remains an obscure incident. Unlike the atomic explosions in Japan or the Jewish holocaust in Europe, the horrors of the massacre at Nanking remain virtually unknown to people outside Asia. The massacre remains neglected in most of the historical literature published in the United States.

As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, middleman minorities typically arrive in their host countries with education, skills, or a set of propitious attitudes about work, such as business frugality and the willingness to take risks. Some slave away in lowly menial jobs to raise capital, then swiftly become merchants, retailers, labor contractors, and money-lenders. Their descendants usually thrive in the professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, or finance.

I lead a worthless life, he thought, I live in unreality and untruth. If only there could be total change, regeneration, escape. If only I could run and run and get back to the people, back to where real wholesome, ordinary life is being lived. I have given myself a mean role and cannot now stop enacting it. Oh if only I could get out! But even as he thought these familiar thoughts he knew: unreality is my reality, untruth is my truth, I am too old now and I have no other way.

If you are struck by a bus, someone may steal your purse or wallet while you lie injured, but many more will come to your aid, trying to save your precious life. One person will call 911, and another will race down the street to alert a police officer on his or her beat. Someone else will take off his coat, fold it, and place it under your head, so that if these are indeed your last moments of life you will die in the small but real comfort of knowing that someone cared about you.

All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable.

Unable to hold the line and under pressure, Tang complied. It was a decision that resulted in one of the worst disasters of Chinese military history.

The mysterious awful changes which alter the human face from youth to age may gently dally and delay, then act decisively all at once.

What was to change many lives happened, and happened very fast in the next moments.

Do you think she'll change?" "Hope nothing." "Is there a cure?" "Only art. Or more love." "I should die of more love.

She did not want to be as before. She wanted great changes in her life.

They haven't been standing still in the past.

I must have been changing though, and becoming, though I didn't know it, what I am now. I can't have become all this, and there's really a lot of it, in a few days, can I?

(In 1990 a gunman shot Motoshima Hitoshi, mayor of Nagasaki, in the chest for saying that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for World War II.)

There is a deep foundation of my being which knows not of time and change and is still and ever with Hartley, in that good place where we once were.

Happiness is a soap bubble that changes color as the iris and that breaks when touched.

Indeed, this is the very promise of behavioral design; it can change behavior by changing environments rather than mindsets.

the shadow side of human nature. There are several important lessons to be learned from Nanking, and one is that civilization itself is tissue-thin.

Azrael raised his finger to a face that filled the sky, lit by the faint glow of dying galaxies. There are a billion Deaths, but they are all aspects of the one Death: Azrael, the Great Attractor, the Death of Universes, the beginning and end of time. Most of the universe is made up of dark matter, and only Azrael knows who it is. Eyes so big that a supernova would be a mere suggestion of a gleam on the iris turned slowly and focused on the tiny figure on the immense whorled plains of his fingertips. Beside Azrael the big Clock hung in the center of the entire web of the dimensions, and ticked onward. Stars glittered in Azrael's eyes. The Death of the Discworld stood up. LORD I ASK FOR - Three of the servants of oblivion slid into existence alongside him. One said, Do not listen. He stands accused of meddling. One said, And morticide. One said, And pride. And living with intent to survive. One said, And siding with chaos against good order. Azrael raised an eyebrow. The servants drifted away from Death, expectantly. LORD, WE KNOW THERE IS NO GOOD ORDER EXCEPT THAT WHICH WE CREATE.... Azrael's expression did not change. THERE IS NO HOPE BUT US. THERE IS NO MERCY BUT US. THERE IS NO JUSTICE. THERE IS JUST US. The dark, sad face filled the sky. ALL THINGS THAT ARE ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS. Death took a step backwards. It was impossible to read expression in Azrael's features. Death glanced sideways at the servants. LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN? He waited. LORD? said Death. In the time it took to answer, several galaxies unfolded, whirled around Azrael like paper streamers, impacted, then were gone. Then Azrael said: Yes.

Weary of fire, weary of bombardment, and weary of siege, scattered groups of Chinese actually rushed out to welcome the Japanese invaders as they thundered into the city with their tanks, artillery, and trucks. Some people hung Japanese flags from their windows while others even cheered the Japanese columns as they marched through the south and west gates of the city.

The Ministry interfered with Ienaga’s attempts to document the Nanking massacre for schoolchildren. For example, in his textbook manuscript Ienaga wrote: “Immediately after the occupation of Nanking, the Japanese Army killed numerous Chinese soldiers and citizens. This incident came to be known as the Nanking Massacre.” The examiner commented: “Readers might interpret this description as meaning that the Japanese Army unilaterally massacred Chinese immediately after the occupation. This passage should be revised so that it is not interpreted in such a way.

How fearful that dark shadow is when we catch sight of it in the life of another. No wonder those at whom that black arrow is aimed so often turn and flee. How unendurable it can be, the love another bears us. I would never persecute my darling with that dread knowledge. From now onward until the world ended everything must remain, although utterly changed, exactly as it was before.

I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided--'visions' is too serious a word--our looks, two looks: art 'copying from life' and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail --the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

His sudden decision not to see her any more was utterly incomprehensible to the girl, it was a death sentence from a hidden authority for an unknown crime. Nothing had changed, and then there was suddenly this.

Iris said they come from a long line of voodoo high priestesses. I see it in Lotus. A regalness—a mystery and an aura, like she knows your thoughts before you think them and is fully capable of changing your mind.

Field Flowers What are you saying? That you want eternal life? Are your thoughts really as compelling as all that? Certainly you don’t look at us, don’t listen to us, on your skin stain of sun, dust of yellow buttercups: I’m talking to you, you staring through bars of high grass shaking your little rattle – O the soul! The soul! Is it enough only to look inward? Contempt for humanity is one thing, but why disdain the expansive field, your gaze rising over the clear heads of the wild buttercups into what? Your poor idea of heaven: absence of change. Better than earth? How would you know, who are neither here nor there, standing in our midst? Louise Glück

The Rape of Nanking should be perceived as a cautionary tale—an illustration of how easily human beings can be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures.

television in virtually every living room. Apparently some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided only that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.

The rain landed on my skin with a barely audible patter and changed the tempo of its repetitive dance, letting the wind change its course and angle. The cold soon seeped through my dress and into my bones. An iris from my garland fell in my lap.

There are violent things in my heart. Perhaps they have been festering there ever since that change. And now I have run in here to find some different pain, some mystery of myself to keep secret, something which, for this short time, is absolutely not Jack.

Louise was a jewel locked away; and after the first 'if only' period had passed and Clement had got used to 'Mrs Anderson', he felt that his love for her had not faded, but had suffered a sea change into something special and unique, causing a special and unique and much valued, pain.

Another lesson to be gleaned from Nanking is the role of power in genocide. Those who have studied the patterns of large-scale killings throughout history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal—that only a sense of absolute unchecked power can make atrocities like the Rape of Nanking possible.

Memories are curious things. We mistake them for perfect copies of life; experiences etched in crystal and tucked away for later. But they change on us when we least expect it. A detail is forgotten and a new reality scabs over the hole. History is scarred, the story reimagined. And the strange thing is we don’t even realize it’s happening. It just does.

But every answer suggests a new question, and I now wondered why the victims of this crime had not screamed out for justice. Or if they had indeed cried out, why had their anguish not been recognized? It soon became clear to me that the custodian of the curtain of silence was politics. The People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China, and even the United States had all contributed to the historical neglect of this event for reasons deeply rooted in the cold war. After the 1949 Communist revolution in China, neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Republic of China demanded wartime reparations from Japan (as Israel had from Germany) because the two governments were competing for Japanese trade and political recognition.

We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged . . . Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.)

But all this, all this shift and change, thought Bellamy, is part of the vast lie which surrounds me and wherein I move from one fantasy to another. I wanted to escape to solitude and darkness in a holy place, but the dark is just the old dark of meaninglessness and falsehood, which separates me from my friends and from the real world where people love and help each other.

Back in 1943, Prince Mikasa Takahito, the youngest brother of Emperor Hirohito, spent a year as a staff officer at the Nanking headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army’s expeditionary force in China, where he heard a young officer speak of using Chinese prisoners for live bayonet practice in order to train new recruits. “It helps them acquire guts,” the officer told the prince.

Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow.

One historian has estimated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would stretch from Nanking to the city of Hangchow, spanning a distance of some two hundred miles. Their blood would weigh twelve hundred tons, and their bodies would fill twenty-five hundred railroad cars. Stacked on top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a seventy-four-story building.

Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm to no one. I cannot think of any tiny good things to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow.

I rather liked him.I asked him to come and see us.' ‘Oh Christ !’ ‘But, Bradley, you mustn’t reject people,you musn't just write them of. You must be curious about them. Curiosity is kind of charity.’ ‘I don’t think curiosity is a kind of charity. I think it’s a kind of malice.’ ‘That’s what makes a writer, knowing the details.’ ‘It may make your kind of writer. It doesn’t make mine.’ ‘Here we go again,’ said Arnold. ‘Why pile up a jumble of “details”? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn’t the reproduction of oddments out of life.’ ‘I never said it was!’ said Arnold. ‘I don’t draw direct from life.’ ‘Your wife thinks you do.’ ‘Oh that. Oh God.’ ‘Inquisitive chatter and cataloguing of things one’s spotted isn’t art. ‘ ‘Of course it isn’t -‘ ‘Vague romantic myth isn’t art either. Art is imagination. Imagination changes, fuses. Without imagination you have stupid details on one side and empty dreams on the othet.’ ‘Bradley, I know you -‘ ‘Art isn’t chat plus fantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silnce.’ ‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art! It’s people without creative gifts who say that more mean worse!’ ‘One should only complete something when one feels one’s bloody privileged to have it all. Those who only do what’s easy will never be rewarded by -‘ ‘Nonsense. I write whether I feel like it or not. I complete things whether I think they’re perfect or not. Anything else is hypocrisy. I have no muse. That’s what being a professional writer is.’ ‘Then thank God I’m not one.’…

Then I put the hot barrel beneath my chin. “No.” Zoeller lurched toward me, eyes wide. “No, Laney.” I curled my finger around the trigger and he froze. I could see his white sclera. I’d never seen him frightened. I was only half-serious but his fear made it feel suddenly real. “Don’t,” he said. “This is all I want. It’s all I can think about.” “It’s defeat. You’re too strong for this.” “No I’m not.” I laughed, the muzzle digging into the soft meat beneath my jaw. “I’m weak, like you said.” “You’re better than me. I’m broken, Laney. I’m a sociopath.” “If you’re a sociopath, you can’t feel compassion. You don’t care whether I live or die.” “I do. I need you. I’ve never met anyone like you.” I rolled my eyes. “Spare me the suicide hotline bullshit. I’ve heard it all before. You know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, I’m sick of this. Things are going to change.” “Don’t leave me,” he said. The parallel of my words to Dad startled me. That gleam in his eyes wasn’t madness. It was tears. Was this really happening? Look at every terrible thing he’s done to me. Look at every good thing he didn’t have to do, but did.

Ronald Takaki, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California at Berkeley, once called the Chinese and other Asian Americans “strangers from a different shore.” I propose to take this a step further. At various times in history, the Chinese Americans have been treated like strangers on both shores—a people regarded by two nations as too Chinese to be American, and too American to be Chinese.

I always thought I would have to change myself wholly to be accepted. But then you came along, and you made me realize that I don’t have to change or be perfect to be loved. I just have to want to be better. So, Orion, see me as I am now, and tell me. Can you love me truly? Can you love me even when I’m cruel and wicked and violent? Can you love me even when I’m small and fearful and tender? Can you love me when I hate myself? Can you?

in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?

No honey, he is not gay. And, no, there's nothing wrong with him.” Kristen shrugged. “I suppose… You can call me old fashioned, but the fact that you just want to have sex with him because he looks good and you might think one night with him might move your earth, doesn’t seem to be right. Why don’t you change your bucket list to something along the line get to know Harrison? I've known him for all my life, and he's the most gorgeous man I've known—

I’m trying. God knows. I’m trying. But I’m only halfway there. Don’t trust me too far.” His voice suddenly grew harsh. “I like your friends, Sara, but I hated seeing them with you. I didn’t want you to smile at them. I don’t want you to smile at anyone but me. It rubs me raw to see you—” He stopped and drew a ragged breath. “But you’re a woman people will always want to smile at and touch and—” He broke off again. “So I’d better get used to it, hadn’t I

The pictures up on that wall in Cupertino illustrated that not just one person but hundreds of thousands could have their lives extinguished, die at the whim of others, and the next day their deaths would be meaningless. But even more telling was that those who had brought about these deaths (the most terror-filled, even if inevitable, tragedy of the human experience) could also degrade the victims and force them to expire in maximum pain and humiliation.

Our mandala is indeed an 'eye,' the structure of which symbolizes the centre of order in the unconscious. The eye is a hollow sphere, black inside, and filled with a semi-liquid substance, the vitreous humour. Looking at it from outside, one sees a round, coloured surface, the iris, with a dark centre, from which a golden light shines. Bohme calls it a 'fiery eye,' in accordance with the old idea that seeing emanates from the eye. The eye may well stand for consciousness (which is in fact an organ of perception), looking into its own background. It sees its own light there, and when this is clear and pure the whole body is filled with light. Under certain conditions consciousness has a purifying effect. This is probably what is meant by Matthew 6 : 22ff., an idea expressed even more clearly in Luke 11 : 33. The eye is also a well-known symbol for God. Hence Bohme calls his 'Philosophique Globe' the 'Eye of Eternity,' the 'Essence of all Essences,' the 'Eye of God.' By accepting the darkness, the patient has not, to be sure, changed it into light, but she has kindled a light that illuminates the darkness within. By day no light is needed, and if you don't know it is night you won't light one, nor will any light be lit for you unless you have suffered the horror of darkness. This is not an edifying text but a mere statement of the psychological facts.

Just as Rolland and I know that together with our team, God has given us the nation of Mozambique, our dear friends Brian and Pamela Jourden know that the Lord has a great revival to birth in Zimbabwe and across Africa. Many prophetic words have been released over their lives, and financial miracles grow their ministry. When they started Generation Won/Iris Zimbabwe in 2008, Zimbabwe had gone from being one of the most prosperous nations in Africa, called the “breadbasket of Africa,” to being the poorest nation in the world. God spoke to them that Zimbabwe, which means house of stones, was like the stone the builders rejected, Jesus, but it would become a cornerstone nation, just as Jesus is the chief cornerstone, and a house of prayer for all nations. They have over twenty churches among three tribes, and they have seen HIV/AIDS and cancer miraculously healed as they preach the gospel. God is also opening doors with national leaders.

And all this time I was keeping my eyes open, or trying to, only they kept closing, because I wanted to go on watching the stars, where the most extraordinary things were happening. A bright satellite, a man-made star, very slowly and somehow carefully crossed the sky in a great arc, from one side to the other, a close arc, one knew it was not far away, a friendly satellite slowly going about its business round and round the globe. And then, much much farther away, stars were quietly shooting and tumbling and disappearing, silently falling and being extinguished, lost utterly silent falling stars, falling from nowhere to nowhere into an unimaginable extinction. How many of them there were, as if the heavens were crumbling at last and being dismantled. And I wanted to show all these things to my father. Later I knew that I had been asleep and I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars. The moon was gone. The water lapped higher, nearer, touching the rock so lightly it was audible only as a kind of vibration. The sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars. And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable. And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold. Later still I awoke and it had all gone; and for a few moments I thought that I had seen all those stars only in a dream. There was a weird shocking sudden quiet, as at the cessation of a great symphony or of some immense prolonged indescribable din. Had the stars then been audible as well as visible and had I indeed heard the music of the spheres? The early dawn light hung over the rocks and over the sea, with an awful intent gripping silence, as if it had seized these faintly visible shapes and were very slowly drawing tgem out of a darkness in which they wanted to remain. Even the water was now totally silent, not a tap, not a vibration. The sky was a faintly lucid grey and the sea was a lightless grey, and the rocks were a dark fuzzy greyish brown. The sense of loneliness was far more intense than it had been under the stars. Then I had felt no fear. Now I felt fear. I discovered that I was feeling very stiff and rather cold. The rock beneath me was very hard and I felt bruised and aching. I was surprised to find my rugs and cushions were wet with dew. I got up stiffly and shook them. I looked around me. Mountainous piled-up rocks hid the house. And I saw myself as a dark figure in the midst of this empty awfully silent dawn, where light was scarcely yet light, and I was afraid of myself and quickly lay down again and settled my rug and closed my eyes, lying there stiffly and not imagining that I would sleep again.

There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it. But for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt by blinking and moving quickly on. I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already 'done' them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. Projects would change in a second from hazy uncommitted dreams into unsalvageable ancient history. Whole novels existed only in their titles.

You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I'm looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems, Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest, Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out, The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!

She gave me her limp hand. It felt damp and unresponsive and small and I could not continue the gesture into an embrace. She withdrew her hand and began to fiddle in her handbag. She brought out a fragment of the mirror which had been broken by Rosina’s kick, then a small white handkerchief. As soon as she had the handkerchief in her hand she began very quietly to cry. I felt so touched and sad, and yet so oddly proudly detached and somehow sentimental, as I seemed to see in a second, all rolled up into a ball and all vanishing, some life that I might have had with Lizzie, my Cherubino, my Ariel, my Puck, my son: some life we might have had together if I had been different, and she had been different. Now it was gone, whatever happened next, and the world was changed.

And all that time, Franca contained in her breast a storm of anguish and violence so terrible that she had at times, when she was alone and longing to 'break down', to clutch her breast with a fierce answering force to keep the black horror from spurting forth. Her face was calm and benign, always in company, and usually alone too, for she was aware that to play such a part properly allowed of no rest periods, no weak moments of unmasking. She must continue, in her deceit, whole, like the spy who, in order to go on, has to become what he seems. She was, daily, amazed at herself, at her self-control; and at the terrible demons which fed upon her, and in doing so, she realised, fed her. She had begun to need her rage and her hate, even of late her fierce cruel fantasies. She could not, and did not try to, riddle out, rationally order, explain, least of all banish, these horrible consolations, As it seemed, if she were not to die of her love she had to poison it; and even, over its death agonies, to exult. As the days went by, Franca cherished and nourished and developed her suffering, unable to envisage any change or any plan — any machine into which so much relentless force might be fed. Indeed she was afraid to plan or picture a different future of any kind. So long as she stayed silent she had a secret weapon. If she spoke, if once there were the least word, the least crack or fissure, upon which tears and screams could follow, she would have lost her one advantage, her source of ordinary viable life, and would be utterly undone and destroyed.

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay.

There are no miracles, no redemptions, no moments of healing, no transfiguring changes in one's relation to the past. There is nothing but accepting the beastliness and defending oneself. When I was a little child I believed that Christ died for my sins. That was magic all right. He suffered and then somehow everything was made well. And nothing can be more consoling than that, to think that suffering can blot out sin, can really erase it completely, and that there is no death at the end of it all. Not only that, but there is no damage done on the way either, since every little thing can be changed and washed, everything can be saved, everything, what a marvellous myth, and they teach it to little defenceless children, and what a bloody awful lie, this denial of causation and death, this changing of death into a fairytale of constructive suffering! Who minds suffering if there's no death and the past can be altered? One might even want to suffer if it could automatically wipe out one's crimes. Whoopee. Only it ain't so.

For all his formidable self-confidence, he harboured doubts about the person he was at heart, and sometimes questioned whether he had a heart at all. Iris Caldwell, his girlfriend from Liverpool, recalled that her mother had accused him of being emotionally cold. It ate at him: years later, just before the release of 'Yesterday', Paul called Iris and said her mother should listen to Yesterday to see if it changed her mind. In an interview in the 1980s, he brought up the moment when he heard about his mother's death (‘What are we going to do for money?’), and said, ‘I’ve never forgiven myself for that. Really, deep down, I never have quite forgiven myself for that.’ As he danced through a Beatle life in which every door seemed to open the moment he touched it, he retained, in his mind, the baleful image of himself he drew as a teenager: a face that scowled rather than smiled. He once described his public self as 'pleasantly insincere’. He was drawn to those who saw through his masks and loved him nonetheless. Being accepted by John confirmed to him that he was special. Being loved by Linda, and by Heather, convinced him he was good.

Clement was a long time dying. They had the headlines set up in type for weeks. I lay on the bed beside her and stroked her face, which had become, just very lately, so much more wrinkled with pain and fear. My fingers can still remember those soft wrinkles and the tears that quietly filled them. She said she wanted to die in a storm of noise and for days we had the hi-fi turned up playing Wagner and we drank whisky and together we waited. It was the strangest waiting I ever remember for it was and it was not waiting. There was a sort of intense timelessness in the way in which we kept each other company. Our fear divided us, her fear, my fear, of the event: two different sharp fears which we had to overcome by a constant force of mutual attention, laying our hands upon each other’s hearts. We became tired and we turned off the noise and we wept and still we waited. My God, Clement’s tears, how much I had seen of them before and how much they had sickened me. Now I felt they would make a saint of me, and perhaps for a month they almost did. In the end she died when I was asleep. Every morning I had thought I might find her dead, but had then seen her breathing, the little rhythmic rising and falling of the bedclothes that covered her body which had become so shrunken and small. Then one day there was no movement and I saw her eyes open and her face changed.

Did Mama leave you all alone in here?" I picked her up out of bed and rubbed her back for a minute while she hiccuped. "Daddy's here," I murmured against her bald head, rocking her from side to side. "Let's get that wet diaper off you." I laid her on the bed and grabbed a diaper from the top of Kate's dresser, talking the whole time. "I don't know what your mommy was thinking, leaving my princess in here all alone," I crooned, my voice somehow keeping Iris calm. "She's outside with your brothers and sister and Daddy's friend Miles. He's a jackass. You stay away from him, okay?" I smiled as Iris froze, like she was listening intently. "Daddy was not very nice," I said, pulling her little pants down her legs and unbuttoning her onesie. "I wasn't even there when you were born, and I'm really sorry about that. But your mama came home with me anyway, so that means there's a chance, right? As long as Miles keeps his you-know-what in this pants." Iris lifted her hand to her face and tried really hard to get it to her mouth, her eyes unfocused as I babbled. "You're doing so good, princess. Look at you, not even crying while I change you. Such a big girl." I finished re-dressing her and pulled her to my chest. "You think your mama could love me again?" I asked, kissing her little cheek. "Probably not, huh? We'll just have to keep working at it so you can live with Daddy forever.

Hawa! It’s my family!” Camellia’s smile was brighter than a star as she waved at them. “Kirikiri, Iris, Lilian, Kevin-kyun! Hullo!” “Um, hello, Camellia,” Kevin muttered, warily eying the soldiers, who were looking at them stupidly. “My Lady, are… are you well? You’re not hurt, are you?” Kirihime asked, her fingers twitching, clearly longing to reach for the daggers under her dress. “Um!” Camellia nodded joyfully. “These nice people kept me company.” The “nice people” that Camellia mentioned snapped out of their fugue. They looked from the group of kitsune to Camellia, then back to the kitsune. Camellia again. Then the kitsune one more time. For good measure. “So, wait, these are the people you’re looking for?” one of the soldiers asked. “Yes!” Camellia’s sunny smile hadn’t changed in the slightest. She was completely unaware of the heavy tension pervading the atmosphere. “Those two are my daughters, and that’s Kevin-kyun, and that one is Kirikiri.” “Daughters,” one of the men muttered, eyes straying to the tails writhing behind the backs of the three kitsune. “Your daughters are kitsune.” “Of course,” Camellia said as if the answer should have been obvious. “I’m a kitsune, too.” As she spoke, five tails emerged from underneath her magical girl skirt, and her ears sprouted fur and became long and pointed. The group of spandex-clad men eyed each other. Anxiety was written all over their faces. They looked at Camellia’s still smiling face, then at the other four people. Kirihime had now taken out her knives, Lilian had several orbs of light orbiting her, and Iris had summoned some void fire, which hovered over her tails. Kevin didn’t have a weapon, or superpowers, but that didn’t stop him from preparing for combat. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?” asked one of the men. Everyone sans Camellia nodded. “Thought so.” ***

to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

no race or culture has a monopoly on wartime cruelty.

The Satyr's Heart" Now I rest my head on the satyr's carved chest, The hollow where the heart would have been, if sandstone Had a heart, if a headless goat man could have a heart. His neck rises to a dull point, points upward To something long gone, elusive, and at his feet The small flowers swarm, earnest and sweet, a clamor Of white, a clamor of blue, and black the sweating soil They breed in...If I sit without moving, how quickly Things change, birds turning tricks in the trees, Colorless birds and those with color, the wind fingering The twigs, and the furred creatures doing whatever Furred creatures do. So, and so. There is the smell of fruit And the smell of wet coins. There is the sound of a bird Crying, and the sound of water that does not move... If I pick the dead iris? If I wave it above me Like a flag, a blazoned flag? My fanfare? Little fare with which I buy my way, making things brave? The way Now I bend over and with my foot turn up a stone, And there they are: the armies of pale creatures who Without cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth. Brigit Pegeen Kelly, O Blessed Dark (BOA Editions, Ltd. 2004)

It was reputed that more than one teacher who accidentally stumbled over the words committed suicide to atone for the insult to the sacred document.

I, Mary Iris Malone, smile at the bright new moon. Wiping away my tears, I wonder if things are finally changing.

What a nothing you were, to be changed so quickly into an image, an odor— you are everywhere, source of wisdom and anguish.

I can't change the past. I can only learn from it.

teachers but every Japanese citizen. The Rescript was the civilian equivalent of Japanese military codes, which valued above all obedience to authority and unconditional loyalty to the emperor. In every Japanese school a copy of the Rescript was enshrined with a portrait of the emperor and taken out each morning to be read.

She unwinds her scarf, taking so long about it that I wonder if she expects me to respond. “You were following the rules,” I offer after a minute. It makes her words no more pleasant. Resentment. Was that how she’d looked at me? Then how am I supposed to trust how she looks at me now? My words elicit a thankful smile. “Mostly, though, I knew you could do the job. Did you ever know other autistic people?” I shake my head. I’d heard rumors about one teacher, but never asked him. Mom had encouraged me to find a local support group, but I’d never seen the appeal—or the need. It wouldn’t change anything. I had friends, anyway. Peopleonline, my fellow volunteers at the Way Station. I even got along with Iris’s friends. “Well, I did, and I feel like a fool for never recognizing your autism. I had autistic colleagues at the university. They were accommodated, and they thrived. One researcher came in earlier than everyone else and would stay the longest. I saw the same strengths in you once I knew to look for them. You’re punctual, you’re precise, you’re trustworthy. When you don’t know something, you either figure it out or you ask, and either way, you get it right. I wanted to give you the same chance my colleagues had, and that other Nassau passengers got. One of the doctors is autistic—did you know?” Els silences an incoming call. “Does that answer your question?

Şimdi dikenler, şurada, ayağımın dibinde, iri şimşirler gibi güzel, etli, usareyle dolu fakat hareketsizdiler. Yerlerinden kımıldamıyorlardı, çünkü henüz ağustos başlarındaydık. Bir aya kadar onlarla birlikte koşacak mıydık? Nereye götürdüklerini, nereye gittiklerini öğrenecek miydim? Çoğunun bir sobada çatırtılarla yanıp kül olduğunu biliyordum. Ama ya ötekiler? Ya o 'macera yaratanlar?' Onlar bir çocuğun gözlerine hangi memleketleri gösterirlerdi; bazılarının talihlerini değiştirmeyi nasıl başarırlardı? Bana çılgınlıklar anlatacak, yalan söylese de zararı yok, bir parça hayal kurmama, cesaret göstermeme olanak verecek biriyle konuşmayı ne kadar istiyordum! Dikenlerse hayal ve cesaretten, insanı sahip olduğu şeyleri, olabileceği şeylere fedaya çağıran bir davetten ibarettir: Bu şeyler elde bulunanlardan daha beter olsalar da ne çıkar? Bütün yeryüzünü sevenler için, olduğu yerde çürümekten daha kötü ne vardır?

Have you no sense?" he snarled. "I tell you that you are 'in danger' and to stay inside the abbey, and that causes you to go tripping about the countryside?" She tried to step back. "I merely-" "No." He yanked her into his chest, his face within inches of hers, his breath hot on her lips. "No explanations, no excuses. I've had enough of your carelessness, madam." Her eyes widened and for a second she was almost afraid. Something in Raphael's face twisted and changed. "What you do to me-" He slammed his mouth onto hers, forcing her lips apart and thrusting in his tongue. She mewled helplessly as he bent her back over his arm. Her senses were filled with the taste of coffee and the scent of cloves and she couldn't think. He lifted his mouth from hers so abruptly she could only stare up at him, dazed. Then she heard the sounds of wheels on gravel. A carriage jolted down the drive at a fast clip and halted in front of the house. Raphael swung her to the side and partially behind him, his grip on her arm still firm.

In classical art this 'aura' surrounding motherhood depicts repose. The dominant culture projects pregnancy as a time of quiet waiting. We refer to the woman as 'expecting,' as though this new life were flying in from another planet and she sat in her rocking chair by the window, occasionally moving the curtain aside to see whether the ship is coming. The image of uneventful waiting associated with pregnancy reveals clearly how much the discourse of pregnancy leaves out the subjectivity of the woman. From the point of view of others pregnancy is primarily a time of waiting and watching, when nothing happens. For the pregnant subject, on the other hand, pregnancy has a temporality of movement, growth, and change. The pregnant subject is not simply a splitting which the two halves lie open and still, but a dialectic. The pregnant woman experiences herself as a source and participant in a creative process. Though she does not plan and direct it, neither does it merely wash over; rather, she is this process, this change. Time stretches out, moments and days take on a depth because she experiences more changes in herself, her body. Each day, each week, she looks at herself for signs of transformation... For others the birth of an infant may only be a beginning, but for the birthing woman it is a conclusion as well. It signals the close of a process she has been undergoing for nine months, the leaving of this unique body she has moved through, always surprising her a bit in its boundary changes and inner kicks. Especially if this is her first child she experiences the birth as a transition to a new self that she may both desire and fear. She fears a loss of identity, as though on the other side of the birth she herself became a transformed person, such that she would 'never be the same again.

find Nardik, and we’ll find Hu Chang.” “It will be okay, Catherine,” he said quietly. “I know you’re

The subtlety of your visual attention. You could alert me or change the subject with a contraction of your iris.

I changed my mind Iris, run!” I didn’t have to tell Iris twice. She was already sprinting down the path. Why she wasn’t on the track team, I didn’t know. She was lightning fast! I didn’t care if I looked like a coward. Being ripped to shreds wasn’t on my self-preservation list.

hollow laugh. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got nothing but regrets. Doesn’t just about everyone?” “I expect so. You think I don’t wish I hadn’t worked that second shift? But it was overtime and we always had more month left at the end of the paycheck. I’d done it a hundred times. I never really thought about what it could cost. How about you?” He sighed. “Well, of course I regret speeding, even though I’ve made peace with the changes it brought my life. But it kills me to think I lost Iris before I ever knew how much

change in his iris but she never really

She edged toward the bathroom but she didn’t go in yet. Indeed, she couldn’t go in—she was too transfixed by the sight of Sylvan, who seemed to be changing before her eyes. She shivered when she looked at his face. His fangs were out again, deadly and sharp and the pupils of his eyes had grown until the iris was only a thin blue ring around a well of black. But not just black, she saw—his pupils were red. Blood red. And the look on his face was one of pure menace. Completely inhuman. But then he’s not human, she reminded herself. He’s a warrior from another galaxy. But even telling herself that didn’t help—he still looked chillingly animalistic in his anger.

YOU COULD LIVE ONE day in your life over again and change the outcome of something that happened that day, what day would it be? This is a question many people have difficulty answering. Not Iris Winters. She knows the day, and she knows exactly how she’d change what happened.

The eye allows us to see and interpret the shapes, colors, and dimensions of objects by processing light. Light enters the eye first through the clear cornea and then through the circular opening in the iris called the pupil. Next the light is converged by the crystalline lens. The light progresses through the gelatinous vitreous humor to a clear focus on the retina, the central area of which is the macula. In the retina, light impulses are changed into electrical signals and sent along the optic nerve to the occipital (posterior) lobe of the brain, which interprets these electrical signals as visual images.

Nngg…” A groan made him and Iris look at the other bed and its occupant. The inu stirred, eyes fluttering open. He looked around the room before noticing Kevin. “You…” “I’m surprised you’re already up,” Kevin said. “Anyone else would have gone into shock after losing an arm. You inu really are a hardy species.” “But they’re not as hard as you, Stud,” Iris quipped. Kevin rolled his eyes. “Why didn’t you kill me?” asked Cien. “Because I don’t believe in killing if I don’t have to.” “I should have died.” “That’s your foolish pride talking. Only a fool asks for death after his enemy spares him.” Cien scoffed. “Che. I don’t expect a human like you to understand. To a warrior like myself, our pride means everything. We inu are a proud race. For us to be defeated in single combat, and by a human no less, is nothing short of disgraceful.” “A human like me, huh?” Kevin murmured, turning his back on Cien. “You can think that way if you want. I certainly won’t try to force your perceptions of me to change. I don’t really care enough to try. Anyway, I suggest you get some rest. You haven’t been out for that long, and you no longer have a right arm. Even an inu can’t shrug that off like it’s nothing.” Kevin wandered to the hut’s entrance and looked out. No one else was around. The hut that Orin was letting them stay in was further removed from everyone else, over on the outskirts of New Genbu. Kevin didn’t mind, especially since no one in the village liked him. “That was a stupid thing to say,” Iris started, “even for a dog.” “What was that?!” Cien growled. “I dare you to get up and say that to my face you—owch!” He yelped when something smacked him in the face. Looking down at the object as it fell to the ground and landed by his head, he frowned. “Is that… a shoe?” “Don’t fight with my mate’s sister,” Kevin said, grabbing his discarded sneaker and putting it back on. “She started it,” Cien mumbled as Iris snickered behind her hand. “What was that?!” “Nothing,” he said, his body jolting as if he’d touched a live wire. That tone of voice… it had sounded almost feral! Like it belonged to some kind of animal instead of a human! “I’m glad to hear that. Now, then, do as I said and get some sleep. I’m going to be interrogating you tomorrow, and I want you to be perfectly capable of answering every question I have.” Kevin smiled. “I am the victor, after all, and this is my request.” “R-right.” Cien felt his forehead break out in a cold sweat. Who knew humans could be so frightening?

I think I have said enough of these horrible cases. There are hundreds of thousands of them, being so many of them finally makes the mind dulled, so that you almost cease to be shocked anymore. I did not imagine that such cruel people existed in the modern world. It would seem that only a rare, insane person like Jack the Ripper would act so.

He has this blissful sense of the way patterns repeat themselves throughout the universe at different scales. A forest on every mossy tree. A supernova in the iris of an eye. To the gods, we’re tiny dust mites on a blue marble in space. To the infinitesimal ecosystems we can barely see, we’re bumbling giants. We’re the gods, and we haven’t yet learned to control our destructive powers.

I change Viola Constantinople’s cloak for the sake of having something to do. “We broke up.” The truth, again, unbidden: “He broke up. With me.” “What?” Gideon says. “Why?” On-screen, Trippola Lightyear begins arming a flaming arrow. “What are you doing?” I say. “I’m gonna shoot him,” Iris replies simply. “Iris! You can’t just shoot players indiscriminately!” “He dumped you; he deserves to die.” “That’s—” “In the context of the game,” she amends. “His stupid character deserves death in the game.

While you wandered the meadows of sleep, my seminocturnal flower, your private secretary has been taking your calls.” Eddi coughed, and he ignored her. “Carla will be here in a quarter of an hour to discuss a gig—quaint, that; it used to mean a small carriage—for the band.” “We don’t even have a name yet, and already she found us a job?” “You’ll have to ask her.” He looked at the ceiling, as if reading it off. “And Willy Silver telephoned.” Perhaps Eddi only imagined the pause after that, the fragment of silence as loud as a voice. She was certain it wasn’t as long as it seemed to be. “What’d he say?” She asked. “He wanted to know, since there’s no rehearsal this evening, if you would like to go dancing.” And, of course, she would like to. The phouka was still staring at the ceiling, his expression perfectly neutral. “Would it be dangerous?” Eddi asked him. She wasn’t sure why she did; surely the wisest course was to treat the news casually and change the subject. He gave her a long, sardonic look. “Dangerous to what?” “Me.” “Oh, I know that, my sweet, but dangerous to what portion of you? Your physical self? Your sanity? Your immortal soul? Or, perhaps, your heart?” Eddi couldn’t help but flinch a little at that. “Don’t be annoying. You know what I mean.” “Yes,” he sighed. “I do. But are you certain you don’t want the answers to the others as well?” “No. Not from you, anyway.” “I didn’t really think you would. No, my iris, you may go dancing fearlessly and with the utmost lightness of foot. You will be as safe as if you were at home with me.” “How safe is that?” Eddi asked. The phouka’s gaze was measuring. “My, you’re full of many-faceted questions this morning.” Something in his expression made Eddi look away.

Iris had made up her mind; there was no changing it, and she was too tired to argue with him.

Years later experts at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE) estimated that more than 260,000 noncombatants died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking in late 1937 and early 1938, though some experts have placed the figure at well over 350,000.

When we learn to look to the outside for self-value, self-worth and self-love, it’s a losing game. That’s because it’s impossible to manage outside forces very well. We simply cannot manage or control others’ opinions of us and this unending need for acknowledgement – impossible to truly fulfill – often leads to frustration and burnout. The goal was clear – to transform Iris’ need for external affirmation to a reliance on self-love and self-acknowledgement. But how to change years of conditioning? Because

Every woman goes through changes in their midlife. Just not… these changes.

Apparently some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakableacts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided onlythat they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.

I was out every day, and often all night, sleeping but little, studying the so-called wonders and common things ever on show, wading, climbing, sauntering among the blessed storms and calms, rejoicing in almost everything alike that I could see or hear: the glorious brightness of frosty mornings; the sunbeams pouring over the white domes and crags into the groves end waterfalls, kindling marvelous iris fires in the hoarfrost and spray; the great forests and mountains in their deep noon sleep; the good-night alpenglow; the stars; the solemn gazing moon, drawing the huge domes and headlands one by one glowing white out of the shadows hushed and breathless like an audience in awful enthusiasm, while the meadows at their feet sparkle with frost-stars like the sky; the sublime darkness of storm-nights, when all the lights are out; the clouds in whose depths the frail snow-flowers grow; the behavior and many voices of the different kinds of storms, trees, birds, waterfalls, and snow-avalanches in the ever-changing weather.

The greatest disservice you can do to yourself is to let evil actions change who you are." — Hank, Iris

The greatest disservice you can do to yourself is to let evil actions change who you are.” — Hank

The greatest disservice you can do to yourself is to let evil actions change who you are.

Life throws all kinds of obstacles at us but never let them change who you are. Never deny the world the person you are today.

One Buddhist nun and a little girl avoided rape and murder because they lay still in a ditch filled with bodies and feigned death for five days.

Living alone is not so easy sometimes, coming home to a room where nothing has changed and everything belongs to you. Sometimes I hide things then put them out of my mind. When I find the stapler behind the couch a month from now, I'll be surprised and feel less lonely.

fears that the FBI, whose computer technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could not guarantee the data's security. “If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can't just get a new eyeball,” Saffo said.

Tragedy! You finally make it to camp alive – only to discover that you forgot your toothbrush! You could Iris-message your mortal parent for a new one. But do you really want to walk around with drakon breath until it arrives? Instead, hit the camp store! While you’re there, be sure to check out the latest line of wind chimes – available in Celestial bronze, silver and seashell – perfect for interpreting the voices of prophecy-spouting trees! If hanging bling in branches isn’t your thing, how about the new Mythomagic expansion pack, Dual Deity Duel? The cards feature holographic images that change the gods’ aspects from Greek to Roman and back. He’s Ares! No, he’s Mars! No, he’s Ares again! Hours of dizzying head-to-head play! From tees to totes, whatever your needs, the camp store is your perfect one-stop shop.

The Satyr's Heart" Now I rest my head on the satyr's carved chest, The hollow where the heart would have been, if sandstone Had a heart, if a headless goat man could have a heart. His neck rises to a dull point, points upward To something long gone, elusive, and at his feet The small flowers swarm, earnest and sweet, a clamor Of white, a clamor of blue, and black the sweating soil They breed in...If I sit without moving, how quickly Things change, birds turning tricks in the trees, Colorless birds and those with color, the wind fingering The twigs, and the furred creatures doing whatever Furred creatures do. So, and so. There is the smell of fruit And the smell of wet coins. There is the sound of a bird Crying, and the sound of water that does not move... If I pick the dead iris? If I wave it above me Like a flag, a blazoned flag? My fanfare? Little fare with which I buy my way, making things brave? The way Now I bend over and with my foot turn up a stone, And there they are: the armies of pale creatures who Without cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth.

While Iris mercilessly teased Christine until the poor girl looked ready to start flinging icicles, Alex and Andrew continued their merciless assault on Kevin. “You put the ‘k’ in otaku.” “When people look up otaku in the dictionary, they see your face.” “You’ve even got an otaku meme on Twitter.” “Shut up! I am not an otaku!” Kevin stood up and slammed his hands on the stone table. He glared at his friends. “I’m not! Just because I like anime that doesn’t mean I’m an otaku. And you two have no right to say anything!” He pointed an accusing finger at Alex and Andrew. “You watch and read just as much anime and manga as I do!” “You make a good point,” Alex admitted. “It doesn’t change the fact that you are, indeed, an otaku.” Andrew nodded at his brother’s words. “Only a true otaku would deny being otaku.” “No, they wouldn’t! Otaku are people who proudly proclaim their status even though they know others will look down on them for it. That’s half the reason they get such a bad rep in Japan, and even then, Japanese society has begun to accept otaku culture more readily in the last few years. I once read an article on Rocket News 24 that some people are beginning to think that being otaku isn’t something to be ashamed of.” “And how could you possibly know that unless you were an otaku?” Iris teased. Kevin grabbed his hair and threw his head back. “Arggghhh!” “Poor Kevin.” Lilian giggled. “Getting ganged up on by everyone.” “Ha…” Kevin sat down and pouted at his mate. “You’re not really helping me out, you know. You should be backing me up.” “I can only back you up when something isn’t true.” “Now you’re just being mean.” “I’m sorry,” Lilian said in mock contrite, her eyes glittering with mirth. “Would a hug make it better?” Kevin sniffled. “Maybe.” Lilian spread her arms wide. “Okay. Come here, Kevin.” “Lilian.” “Kevin!” “Lilian!” “Would you two knock it off already!” Christine snapped out of her state of perpetual humiliation long enough to shout at the hugging couple.

Even Japanese historians pronounced the Rabe finding important. Kasahara Tokushi, a professor of modern Chinese history at Utsunomiya University, testified to the Asahi Shimbun: “What makes this report significant is the fact that, not only was it compiled by a German, an ally of Japan, Rabe submitted the report to Hitler to make him aware of the atrocities occurring in Nanking. The fact that Rabe, who was a vice-president of the Nazi Party, entreated Hitler, the top leader of a Japanese ally, to intervene testifies to the tremendous scale of the massacre.

Once in the United States, Vautrin entered a psychiatric hospital in Iowa, where she endured electroshock treatment.

First, the irony of a kind-hearted Nazi working with American missionaries to save Chinese refugees from Japanese soldiers was too intriguing for me to ignore. And second, I was convinced that something terrible must have happened to Rabe after he returned to Germany.

The less restraint on power within a government, Rummel found, the more likely that government will act on the whims or psychologically generated darker impulses of its leaders to wage war on foreign governments.

To encourage addiction and further enslave the people, the Japanese routinely used narcotics as payment for labor and prostitution in Nanking. Heroin cigarettes were offered to children as young as ten. Based on his research, the University of Nanking history professor Miner Searle Bates concluded that some fifty thousand people in the Nanking area were using heroin—one-eighth of the population at the time. Many of the downtrodden citizens of Nanking fell prey to drugs because it gave them the means to escape, if only temporarily, from the misery of their lives. Some even tried to use opium to commit suicide, swallowing large doses as poison. Others turned to crime to support their addiction, causing a wave of banditry to sweep through Nanking. After making conditions ripe for banditry in Nanking, the Japanese used the epidemic of crimes to justify their occupation, preaching the need for imperial law and order.

The most famous story involves Li Xouying, a woman who not only suffered thirty-seven bayonet wounds during her struggle against the Japanese but survived and remained robust enough to narrate and play-act the story almost sixty years later.

When the article “The Sack of Nanking” appeared in Reader’s Digest, one subscriber wrote: “It is unbelievable that credence could be given a thing which is so obviously rank propaganda and so reminiscent of the stuff fed the public during the late war.

It was later determined that Japanese treatment of their POWs surpassed in brutality even that of the Nazis. Only one in twenty-five American POWs died under Nazi captivity, in contrast to one in three under the Japanese.

The Japanese soldier was not simply hardened for battle in China; he was hardened for the task of murdering Chinese combatants and noncombatants alike. Indeed, various games and exercises were set up by the Japanese military to numb its men to the human instinct against killing people who are not attacking.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Taking a deep breath, I steady myself. "I'm still learning about the dark history of my heritage. I don't agree with what my kind did in the past, but I don't have the power to undo it. All I can do is try to make up for it." "I can't change history, but I can change the future. I can be different—better than my ancestors.

You have a choice, Genevieve. Do nothing, or do something. Either way, the world will change around you.

It was immediately obvious that he lived alone. The house had a sense of emptiness. It felt stuck in time, as if nothing had changed, but it was immediately obvious what was missing. There were photographs on every surface, mounted in a variety of frames, but all of them showing the same subject: a beautiful woman, always smiling, her face filled with life. Iris Pennington at work, Iris on the beach, Iris and Andrew arm in arm on a swing chair, Iris and Andrew dancing, Iris making a heart sign with both hands, Iris in bed, ill and wasted but still smiling for the camera. Well House spoke equally of her death and her surviving husband’s life.

Another time, when she saw a boy wearing an armband with the Japanese symbol of the “Rising Sun” to ensure his safety, Vaultrin scolded him and said: "You do not need to wear this Rising Sun emblem. You are Chinese, and your country has not perished. You should remember the day you wore this thing, and you should never forget.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

You get to choose who you want to be every single day." she said. "You're allowed to change, if you want.