Italic Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Italic. Here they are! All 100 of them:

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
Henry James
They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch, #2))
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it
Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo)
Rilla was fond of italics, as most girls of fifteen are.
L.M. Montgomery (Rilla of Ingleside (Anne of Green Gables, #8))
This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.
Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)
You can't have many exclamation points left,' thought Anne, 'but no doubt the supply of italics is inexhaustible.
L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Windy Poplars (Anne of Green Gables, #4))
He also seemed to speak predominantly in italics.
Gail Carriger (The Parasol Protectorate Boxed Set: Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, Heartless and Timeless)
Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can't help but consider irony.
Ann Beattie (Walks With Men)
He wielded verbal italics as if they were capable of actual bodily harm.
Gail Carriger (Prudence (The Custard Protocol, #1))
How about we walk back? Through the cemetery?' One thing my mom had taught me is that it's difficult to refuse requests made in italics.
The Harvard Lampoon (Nightlight: A Parody)
I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this: The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before. Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?
Jesse Andrews (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl)
And this is it. This is the life we get here on earth. We get to give away what we receive. We get to believe in each other. We get to forgive and be forgiven. We get to love imperfectly. And we never know what effect it will have for years to come. And all of  it…all of  it is completely worth it.
Nadia Bolz-Weber (Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People)
I’m sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a family that could invent italics.
Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)
The world is full of stories, and no matter how much time we spend in it—alive or dead—there’s never time to learn them all. They just go by so quickly.
Seanan McGuire (Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day)
He struggles to make sense of it--all this love, so bent out of shape, refracted, like light through the lens.
M.L. Stedman (The Light Between Oceans)
When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?
Neil Gaiman
"What?" The italics just flew out past the alcohol's guard.
Edgar Cantero (Meddling Kids)
Dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory.
Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)
Oh, good,” he muttered. “We’re going to discuss it now.” “No discussion,” she said. Her mind was quite clear now, as though a fire had blazed through it, burning away all confusion. “It’s perfectly simple. No One Must Ever Know.” He came up onto one elbow and looked at her. “Do you know,” he said, “I can hear those five words in italics. Capitalized.
Loretta Chase (Scandal Wears Satin (The Dressmakers, #2))
Fate's book, but my italics.
Don Paterson
We never see any boats. But you man the light anyway--just in case. And WE got to see it--all these years. The great light. The beautiful sweeping beam! We were here to see it, and that was enough....Weed your mind. And man the great light. Even when no one is looking.
Matthew Quick (Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock)
I adore italics, don't you?
Ronald Firbank
You might say she feels in italics and thinks in capital letters!
Katharine Weber (The Little Women)
Everyone is so desensitised that the potency of artfully deployed italics has long been lost. It was good enough for H. P. Lovecraft, but apparently it isn’t good enough for the modern world, filled as it is with obtuse bastards.
Jonathan L. Howard (The Fear Institute (Johannes Cabal, #3))
Oh, sure," Gansey said, still cold and annoyed. "God forbid young men display their principles with futile but public protests when they could be skipping school and judging other students from the backseat of a motor vehicle." "Principles? Henry Cheng's principles are all about getting larger font in the school newsletter," Ronan said. He did a vaguely offensive version of Henry's voice: "Serif? Sans serif? More bold, less italics.
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone! To be remiss is to be positively out in the country! What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable! I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me. I missed them all, through deliberate negligence, Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come. I’m free, and against organized, clothed society. I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination. It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time, Deliberately at the same time... No matter, I’ll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics. This spectator aspect of life is so amusing! I can’t even light the next cigarette... If it’s an action, It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life.
Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems)
There's an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.
Glen Duncan (I, Lucifer)
Dating, after all, only ends one way: poorly. If you think about it...all romantic relationships end in either (1) breakup, (2) divorce, or (3) death.
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
…никогда и ничего не просите! Никогда и ничего, и в особенности у тех, кто сильнее вас. Сами предложат и сами всё дадут!
Mikhail Bulgakov (Mikhail Bulgakov's Master & Margarita Or the Devil Comes to Moscow)
And, my darlingest of puggles, she is yours to command.” Rue was moved to italics by the gesture. “Mine?
Gail Carriger (Prudence (The Custard Protocol, #1))
You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it--all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
We must at regular and appropriate intervals speak and reassure others of our love and the long time it takes to prove it by our actions. Real love does take time. The Great Shepherd had the same thoughts in mind when he taught, ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’ (John 14:15; italics added) and ‘If ye love me feed my sheep’ (John 21:16; italics added). Love demands action if it is to be continuing.
Marvin J. Ashton
Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.
J.D. Salinger
I doubt I was much of a storyteller, but I would have put that smile in my book. On page 104, right next to the image of the Ward. I would have written it on my heart. I would have proofread it a thousand times under a thousand moons until a thousand tears thoroughly rationalized what it meant to me. Each time for when I’d met the darkness, and then succumbed. The smile read “you can’t break me’”—bold and in italics.
Nadège Richards (Asylum 54.0)
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we care about profit and growth. And just as much we also care about things like the health of the earth, Whole Foods plant based or I-Tal living, vegan or vegetarian living, holistic education, spirituality, human rights, money equity, social cohesion, liberty, family, human health and more. To us, Investing is more than profit.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Mental illness didn’t really change people. It just made them more of who they were going to be anyway. Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics.
Heather Sellers (You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness)
Plato also wrote—and I lettered this in firm italic letters and posted it on my dorm-room door—All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.
Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art)
Just so you know, I realize that what happened is not in any way okay, but I think we're going to have to pretend like it is. Because it wasn't okay and never will be. We will power through it; I will continue to power through it-all the stagnant, soul-crushing grief-but it will never be okay that my mom is not here.
Julie Buxbaum (Tell Me Three Things)
She thought to herself how amazing it was that she was here, walking at dusk with an old pirate-her (italics), May! If only Somber Kitty could have seen her. Maybe he would see her, soon. The thought lifted her spirits.
Jodi Lynn Anderson (May Bird and the Ever After (May Bird, #1))
I shot all the bad, but damn it all, I shot all the good as well. That's something you never quite come back from. That's something that's a fresh pain every day.
Tiffany McDaniel (The Summer that Melted Everything)
But if today's low-income countries are to move from poverty to an incipient affluence... then none of those factors could make a difference without the rising consumption of fuels and electricity: a decoupling of economic growth and energy consumption during early stages of modern economic development would defy the laws of thermodynamics." (p. 350, italics added)
Vaclav Smil (Energy and Civilization: A History)
humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness” and that “nonhuman animals, including all birds and mammals, and many other creatures, including octopuses [italics added], also possess these neurological substrates.
Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness)
I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.
Allen Ginsberg
Clicking on "send" has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals ("I AM joking!") to compensate. That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne. You will know all about emoticons. Emoticons are the proper name for smileys. And a smiley is, famously, this: :—) Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader's attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind. Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What's this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a pair of eyes. What's this curvy thing for? It's a mouth, look! Hey, I think we're on to something. :—( Now it's sad! ;—) It looks like it's winking! :—r It looks like it's sticking its tongue out! The permutations may be endless: :~/ mixed up! <:—) dunce! :—[ pouting! :—O surprise! Well, that's enough. I've just spotted a third reason to loathe emoticons, which is that when they pass from fashion (and I do hope they already have), future generations will associate punctuation marks with an outmoded and rather primitive graphic pastime and despise them all the more. "Why do they still have all these keys with things like dots and spots and eyes and mouths and things?" they will grumble. "Nobody does smileys any more.
Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)
They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator's prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard's own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen.
John Updike
The silence inside the library, the big chairs, and long tables, and the fact that the library was always there and didn’t seem to have a mortgage on it, or any sort of insecurity about it—all of that made me love it.
Langston Hughes (The Big Sea (American Century Series))
When we were sprung fro the hos[ital, we waited at the elevator with two other couples, who seemed as dazed and clueless as we were. We were all being set free to care for the tiny creatures and just figure this out on our own. Looking at our faces, I wondered how the human race continues to survive.
Rachel Dratch (Girl Walks into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle)
When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself . . . you shall no more be able to [reach] him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interest. [Italics added]
Donald T. Phillips (Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times)
Without the right to defend yourself--and the right to possesss the means to do it--all other supposed rights are so much hot air.
James Carlos Blake
„Защо не наминеш? Вчера у дома се беше събрал половината град.“ — А той ми отговаря: „Аз живея в другата половина!
Mikhail Bulgakov
Кирпич ни с того ни с сего никому и никогда на голову не свалится.
Mikhail Bulgakov (Mikhail Bulgakov's Master & Margarita Or the Devil Comes to Moscow)
А я действительно похож на галлюцинацию. Обратите внимание на мой профиль в лунном свете... Хорошо, хорошо, готов молчать. Я буду молчаливой галлюцинацией.
Mikhail Bulgakov (Mikhail Bulgakov's Master & Margarita Or the Devil Comes to Moscow)
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms...(italics in original).
Richard P. Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol 1)
Italics are like a rash -- you never know whether to ignore them entirely or whether the more you attention you give the more they spread.
Zanesh Catkin
He looks at me just long enough for me to think, in desperate italics: Fuck.
Alix E. Harrow (Starling House)
Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). .... When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.
Zadie Smith (Feel Free: Essays)
There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won't allow any deviation from that rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don't do it, they screamed, while that's exactly what they did. My mother's cunt was all bent out of shape to prove it...All those Puritan preachers were vindictive, vengeful men spouting hateful thoughts and threats, and it's disheartening that they're still taught in the schools with reverence. They were shits. And they spouted shit. And a goodly portion of the world is still spouting shit.
Larry Kramer (The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart)
So what if sometimes Sam was an emotional exhibitionist, going up and down all the time? She could be a storm. But she could be a soft candle lighting up a dark room. So what if she made me a little crazy? All of it—​all her emotional stuff, her ever-changing moods and tones of voice—​it made her seem so incredibly alive.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz (The Inexplicable Logic of My Life)
When everything was burning up right in front of you, you could imagine parts of yourself burning along with it-all your disappointments, all the things you'd done that you wish you hadn't, even all the bad memories.
Tommy Wallach (We All Looked Up)
I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
When a male-based culture is re-formed into a male-and-female-based culture, it presents a truer picture of the character of God, who created all people as his image bearers. When the voices of women become customary, common, expected, and accepted, the church becomes more inviting, more inclusive, more empathetic, more compassionate, safer, and more secure—for everyone. We pray for that day. [1] Luke 4:18-19, NRSV, italics added. [
Scot McKnight (A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing)
That day was an education for me. I'll never forget it. Standing in teh doorway, watching the reaction of the men and women gathered there, I witnessed the poewrful effect of unwavering, uncomplaining, uncompromising leadership. It changed me. It was one of those moments when you say to yourself, [in italics] That's what I want to be when I grow up. and you know you've grown up a little already, simply because you recognize it. Norman called Ducky-Bob's party supply and ordered chairs while I wheeled the second bed out to the hallway. Mommy, Margaret Valentine, and I rushed around, getting everything we needed to cater the cramped but memorable even, and on Tuesday morning, about three dozen top members of the Chili's team jammed into Norman's room at Presbyterian Hospital. Norman didn't what his people to see him lying down, so I'd helped him get into a jogging suit and robe, and propped him up on one of those rolling carts they use to distribute meals. He was in unthinkable pain, but he spoke to them from his heart about how much he appreciated them, how committed he was to the success of the organization, and how far they could all go together.
Nancy G. Brinker (Promise Me: How a Sister's Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer)
Writing about the futility of trying to force a wolf into a vehicle, Martino describes the final stage of the conflict. The italics are hers: "But if I continue, perhaps muttering 'Get up you lazy old dusty thing,' The wolf grabs my arm in his teeth, snarling, as if to say, Look, move me where I don't want to go, and we're going to have problems. Your problems will be bigger than mine. He then looks at me with a frank arresting stare, the strength of the mountain rumbling in his eyes.
Teresa Tsimmu Martino
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
Christopher Hitchens (For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports)
immediately commenced copying them, and in a short time was able to make the four letters named. After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, "I don't believe you. Let me see you try it." I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way. During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write. I then commenced and continued copying the Italics in Webster's Spelling Book, until I could make them all without looking on the book.
Frederick Douglass (Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass: By Frederick Douglass & Illustrated)
People were wired to hell. He wanted to growl like a rabid mastiff when he heard someone say, "The body is a machine." What asshole thought of that? Screwed up and angry and wanting love, fucking desperate to get it and not knowing how to get it, and willing to do anything just to get a taste of it. Or worse, striking out because you couldn't get it-all that love you wanted. The body was not a machine. Machines and computers, he could deal with. There was always a solution for the problem. What was the solution for him?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz (In Perfect Light)
The July 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention—brought about by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, among others—issued a “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” that sanctified a movement’s creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” The italics are mine; the vision the suffragists’. Susan B. Anthony, an essential figure, echoed the point down the years: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union,” she said in 1873 after she illegally cast a ballot for U. S. Grant for president. “And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the dream, a question which is in itself double-sided. There is, firstly, the psychical significance of the dream, its position with regard to the psychical processes, as to a possible biological function; secondly, has the dream a meaning—can sense be made of each single dream as of other mental syntheses?
Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)
She closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick. Olivia had experienced strangulation before. Having to look directly into the face of the person who was killing you made the experience beyond awful. But there were worse things than that. Staring into the void of unresolved memory, living an eternal mystery, waking up night after night seeing the face of someone you desperately wanted to save but having not the slightest clue how to do it—all that was worse. If going through with this experience gave her the answers she needed, if it gave her peace, it would be well worth one-hundred-and-thirty seconds of fear and pain.
Leslie Parrish (Cold Touch (Extrasensory Agents, #2))
All of it—all of it for him. For Rowan, who had known exactly what sword he was picking up that day in the mountain cave, who had thrown it to her across the ice as a future bargaining chip—the only protection he could offer her against Maeve, if she was smart enough to figure it out. She had only realized what he’d done—that he’d known all along—when she’d mentioned the ring to him weeks ago and he’d told her he hoped she found some use for it. He didn’t yet understand that she had no interest in bargaining for power or safety or alliance. So Celaena said, “I’ll make a trade with you, though.” Maeve’s brows narrowed. Celaena jerked her chin. “Your beloved’s ring—for Rowan’s freedom from his blood oath.” Rowan stiffened. His friends whipped their heads to her. “A blood oath is eternal,” Maeve said tightly. Celaena didn’t think his friends were breathing. “I don’t care. Free him.” Celaena held out the ring again. “Your choice. Free him, or I melt this right here.
Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
I know that of all the great shifts that have occurred in America--the freedom of slaves, the rights of women, the equality of gays and lesbians--none has happened easily, and certainly none has happened instantly and without serious attacks and backlash. But the reason we have these things is because the fair-minded people who came before us would not give up. In my life, I have seen elections stolen--either outright or through the electoral college. I have seen wars fought because there was no other way to get peace. I have seen the rich get richer and I have seen the poor get poorer. I have seen facts get harder and harder to hide--and easier and easier to manipulate. I have been angry and I have been frustrated and I have been ecstatic and I have been proven right and wrong and back again. I have given up on some things, but I have refused to give up on most things. And I can honestly say that all of it--all of it--seems to have led me to where we are, here and now.
David Levithan (Wide Awake)
This first period includes the Rise of Venice, her noblest achievements, and the circumstances which determined her cha* Hist- def Rep. Ital., vol. i. ch. v. f Appendix 3.: "Serra r Del t "Ha Maputo trove mo do Che non uni, non pooch, non molt i, ma molt i bubonic, pooch migliori, e insiememente, ultimo solo."— Ah, well done, Venice! Wisdom
John Ruskin (The Stones of Venice)
I'd said it before and meant it.Alive or undead,the love of my life was a bad ass.
Richelle Mead
And now, it—all of it—is too much. Too hot. Too bright to hear. Too loud to see. And with no way to turn it down, there is no sleep, nothing to stop the onslaught.
Juliann Garey (Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See)
Your grandparents are English?" "Grandfather is,but Grandmere is French. And my other grandparents are American,of course." "Wow.You really are a mutt." St. Clair smiles. "I'm told I take after my English grandfather the most, but it's only because of the accent." "I don't know.I think of you as more English than anything else.And you don't just sound like it,you look like it,too." "I do?" He surprised. I smile. "Yeah,it's that...pasty complexion. I mean it in the best possible way," I add,at his alarmed expression. "Honestly." "Huh." St. Clair looks at me sideways. "Anyway.Last summer I couldn't bear to face my father, so it was the first time I spent the whole holiday with me mum." "And how was it? I bet the girls don't tease you about your accent anymore." He laughs. "No,they don't.But I can't help my height.I'll always be short." "And I'll always be a freak,just like my dad. Everyone tells me I take after him.He's sort of...neat,like me." He seems genuinely surprised. "What's wrong with being neat? I wish I were more organized.And,Anna,I've never met your father,but I guarantee you that you're nothing like him." "How would you know?" "Well,for one thing,he looks like a Ken doll.And you're beautiful." I trip and fall down on the sidewalk. "Are you all right?" His eyes fill with worry. I look away as he takes my hand and helps me up. "I'm fine.Fine!" I say, brushing the grit from my palms. Oh my God, I AM a freak. "You've seen the way men look at you,right?" he continues. "If they're looking, it's because I keep making a fool of myself." I hold up my scraped hands. "That guy over there is checking you out right now." "Wha-?" I turn to find a young man with long dark hair staring. "Why is he looking at me?" "I expect he likes what he sees." I flush,and he keeps talking. "In Paris, it's common to acknowledge someone attractive.The French don't avert their gaze like other cultures do. Haven't you noticed?" St. Clair thinks I'm attractive. He called me beautiful. "Um,no," I say. "I hadn't noticed." "Well.Open your eyes." But I stare at the bare tree branches, at the children with balloons, at the Japanese tour group. Anywhere but at him. We've stopped in front of Notre-Dame again.I point at the familiar star and clear my throat. "Wanna make another wish?" "You go first." He's watching me, puzzled, like he's trying to figure something out. He bites his thumbnail. This time I can't help it.All day long, I've thought about it.Him.Our secret. I wish St. Clair would spend the night again.
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescant spirit of the man!
Robert D. Richardson Jr. (William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism)
There is a wonderful metaphor of the unconscious in Peter Gay’s excellent biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 128: “Rather, the unconscious proper resembles a maximum-security prison holding anti-social inmates languishing for years or recently arrived, inmates harshly treated and heavily guarded, but barely kept under control and forever attempting to escape” (italics added).
John E. Sarno (Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection)
But this story ends when you open the door. It doesn’t matter if you managed to guess which room is mine, which door I closed behind me. You put your hand on the door handle, you knock, it’s all over. End of story. By choosing one, you chose the other, too. Do you understand why? Those two consequences are joined at the hip, they’re Siamese twins. Even if you picked the door with the lady behind it—all questions answered, all explanations given, your life solved for you—it’s still true that you gave the tiger permission to jump. You gave your assent to catastrophe, you invited tragedy and horror to walk right in. You got lucky, that’s all. Mallon
Peter Straub (A Dark Matter)
Listen: Haunted: “Often visited by ghosts or spirits.” Funk and Wagnalls. Haunting: “Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget.” Ditto Funk and Friend. To haunt: “To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost.” But—and listen!—“A place often visited: resort, den, hangout…” Italics are of course mine. And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and it’s the one that really scares me: “A feeding place for animals.
Stephen King (It)
You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it—all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
It’s easy to forget that life is supposed to be hard. God wired the world this way. Even Jesus said in John 16:33, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble [italics mine].” Life is meant to be difficult. For some, it is downright crushing and they’ve convinced themselves that unhappiness is here to stay. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Perhaps the answer is not to get rid of unhappiness but to find a new definition for it.
Joni Eareckson Tada (A Thankful Heart in a World of Hurt)
The more dutifully scholars acknowledge that the concept of race belongs in the same category as geocentrism or witchcraft, the more blithely they invoke it as though it were both a coherent analytical category and a valid empirical datum. In place of Jefferson’s moment of impassioned truth-telling, his successors fall back on italics or quotation marks, typographical abbreviations for the trite formula, ‘race is a social construction.’ The formula is meant to spare those who invoke race in historical explanation the raised eyebrows that would greet someone who, studying a crop failure, proposed witchcraft as an independent variable. But identifying race as a social construction does nothing to solidify the intellectual ground on which it totters. The London Underground and the United States of America are social constructions; so are the evil eye and the calling of spirits from the vasty deep; and so are murder and genocide. All derive from the thoughts, plans, and actions of human beings living in human societies. Scholars who intone ‘social construction’ as a spell for the purification of race do not make clear—perhaps because they do not themselves realize—that race and racism belong to different families of social construction, and that neither belongs to the same family as the United States of America or the London Underground. Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity.
Barbara J. Fields (Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life)
Then there occurred to me the 'glucklichste Gedanke meines Lebens,' the happiest thought of my life, in the following form. The gravitational field has only a relative existence in a way similar to the electric field generated by magnetoelectric induction. Because for an observer falling freely from the roof of a house there exists-at least in his immediate surroundings-no gravitational field [his italics]. Indeed, if the observer drops some bodies then these remain relative to him in a state of rest or of uniform motion, independent of their particular chemical or physical nature (in this consideration the air resistance is, of course, ignored). The observer therefore has the right to interpret his state as 'at rest.' Because of this idea, the uncommonly peculiar experimental law that in the gravitational field all bodies fall with the same acceleration attained at once a deep physical meaning. Namely, if there were to exist just one single object that falls in the gravitational field in a way different from all others, then with its help the observer could realize that he is ina gravitational field and is falling in it. If such an object does not exist, however-as experience has shown with great accuracy-then the observer lacks any objective means of perceiving himself as falling in a gravitational field. Rather he has the right to consider his state as one of rest and his environment as field-free relative to gravitation. The experimentally known matter independence of the acceleration of fall is therefore a powerful argument for the fact that the relativity postulate has to be extended to coordinate systems which, relative to each other, are in non-uniform motion.
Albert Einstein
Had she been able to listen to her body, the true Virginia would certainly have spoken up. In order to do so, however, she needed someone to say to her: “Open your eyes! They didn’t protect you when you were in danger of losing your health and your mind, and now they refuse to see what has been done to you. How can you love them so much after all that?” No one offered that kind of support. Nor can anyone stand up to that kind of abuse alone, not even Virginia Woolf. Malcolm Ingram, the noted lecturer in psychological medicine, believed that Woolf’s “mental illness” had nothing to do with her childhood experiences, and her illness was genetically inherited from her family. Here is his opinion as quoted on the Virginia Woolf Web site: As a child she was sexually abused, but the extent and duration is difficult to establish. At worst she may have been sexually harassed and abused from the age of twelve to twenty-one by her [half-]brother George Duckworth, [fourteen] years her senior, and sexually exploited as early as six by her other [half-] brother… It is unlikely that the sexual abuse and her manic-depressive illness are related. However tempting it may be to relate the two, it must be more likely that, whatever her upbringing, her family history and genetic makeup were the determining factors in her mood swings rather than her unhappy childhood [italics added]. More relevant in her childhood experience is the long history of bereavements that punctuated her adolescence and precipitated her first depressions.3 Ingram’s text goes against my own interpretation and ignores a large volume of literature that deals with trauma and the effects of childhood abuse. Here we see how people minimize the importance of information that might cause pain or discomfort—such as childhood abuse—and blame psychiatric disorders on family history instead. Woolf must have felt keen frustration when seemingly intelligent and well-educated people attributed her condition to her mental history, denying the effects of significant childhood experiences. In the eyes of many she remained a woman possessed by “madness.” Nevertheless, the key to her condition lay tantalizingly close to the surface, so easily attainable, and yet neglected. I think that Woolf’s suicide could have been prevented if she had had an enlightened witness with whom she could have shared her feelings about the horrors inflicted on her at such an early age. But there was no one to turn to, and she considered Freud to be the expert on psychic disorders. Here she made a tragic mistake. His writings cast her into a state of severe uncertainty, and she preferred to despair of her own self rather than doubt the great father figure Sigmund Freud, who represented, as did her family, the system of values upheld by society, especially at the time.   UNFORTUNATELY,
Alice Miller (The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting)
Left the poem at the typists and sent off the two others: looking in a copy of the English Review for its address, I was disgusted by the poetry in it—all in the worst modern tradition—and half thought of not sending mine. But I decided I need not be nice, as I shall almost certainly be rejected anyway.
C.S. Lewis (All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927)
the perversity is not lost on me that the most oft-cited, well-respected, best-selling books about the caretaking of babies—Winnicott, Spock, Sears, Weissbluth— have been and are mostly still by men. On the front cover of The Baby Book—arguably one of the more progressive contemporary options (albeit oppressively heteronormative)—the byline reads “by William Sears (MD) and Martha Sears (RN).” This seems promising(ish), but nurse/wife/mother Martha’s voice appears only in anecdotes, italics, and sidebars, never as conarrator. Was she too busy taking care of their eight children to join in the first-person?
Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts)
Jung suggests taking a bad mood, and focusing on it, making it as conscious as possible. This crystallizes it into a symbol, fantasy image, or some other representation, achieving an “enrichment and clarification of the affect [emotion].”25 The unconscious seeks consciousness and Jung discovered that “as soon as the image was there, the unrest or sense of oppression vanished.” “The whole energy of these emotions,” Jung says, “was transformed into interest in and curiosity about the image [my italics].”26 With no exaggeration, focusing on his dark moods and transforming them into inner images saved Jung from madness.
Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
В первые годы, когда я еще их не знала, они бывали во французских литературных кругах, встречались с людьми своего поколения (сходившего во Франции на нет), с Ренье, с Бурже, с Франсом. — Потом мы им всем надоели, — говорил Дмитрий Сергеевич, — и они нас перестали приглашать. — Потому что ты так бестактно ругал большевиков, — говорила она своим капризным скрипучим голосом, — а им всегда так хотелось их любить. — Да, я лез к ним со своими жалобами и пхохочествами (он картавил), а им хотелось совсем другого: они находили, что русская революция ужасно интересный опыт, в экзотической стране, и их не касается. И что, как сказал Ллойд Джордж, торговать можно и с каннибалами.
Нина Берберова (Italics are Mine)
CORE MEDITATION: Breathing This classic meditation can deepen concentration by teaching us to focus on the “in breath” and the “out breath.” Sit comfortably on a cushion or chair and keep your back upright, without straining or overarching. If you can’t sit, then lie on your back on a yoga mat or folded blanket with your arms at your sides. Just be at ease and close your eyes, or gaze gently a few feet in front of you and aim for a state of alert relaxation. Take three or four deep breaths, feeling the air as it enters your nostrils, fills your chest and abdomen, and flows out again. Then let your breathing settle into a natural rhythm, and just feel the breath as it happens, without trying to change it or improve it—all you have to do is feel it. Notice where you sense your breath most intensely. Perhaps it’s at the nostrils, or at the chest or abdomen. Then rest your attention as lightly as a butterfly rests on a flower—only on that area—and become aware of the sensations there. For example, if you’re focusing on the breath at the nostrils, you may experience tingling, vibration, or pulsing, or you may observe that the breath is cooler when it comes in and warmer when it goes out. If you’re focusing on the breath at the abdomen, you may feel movement, pressure, stretching, or release. You don’t need to name these feelings—simply let your attention rest on them, one breath at a time. (Notice how often the word rest comes up in this instruction. This is a very restful practice). You don’t need to make the inhalation deeper or longer or different from the way it is. Just be aware of it, one breath at a time. Whenever you notice your attention has wandered and your mind has jumped to the past or the future, to judgment or speculation, don’t worry about it. Seeing your attention has wandered is the signal to gently let go of whatever has distracted you and return your attention to the feeling of the breath. If you have to let go over and over again, that’s fine—being able to more gracefully start over when we’ve become distracted or disconnected is one of the biggest benefits of meditation practice.
Sharon Salzberg (Real Happiness at Work: Meditations for Accomplishment, Achievement, and Peace)
One often hears that today’s cultural war is fought between traditionalists who believe in a firm set of values and postmodern relativists who consider ethical rules, sexual identities, and so on as a result of contingent power games. But is this really the case? The ultimate postmodernists today are conservatives themselves. Once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it—all such returns today are a postmodern fake. Does Trump enact traditional values? No, his conservativism is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. Playing with “traditional values,” mixing references to tradition with open obscenities, Trump is the ultimate postmodern president, while Sanders is an old-fashioned moralist.
Slavoj Žižek (Heaven in Disorder)
Ambition is a constipated expression of a human longing. Whereever you are you want to be something more, depending on what you are exposed to . If you know money you are thinking more money, knowledge more knowledge , love more love etc. The moment you acheived it, you just want more and more of it.All you are looking for is a limitless expansion. As long as your ambition is physical in nature (from your senses) which essentially has a defined boundary. Through physical nature if you are trying to satisfy your urge for boundlesness, you will exhaust somewhere. To acheive this you need alternative means , which today is the most corrupted word called "Spirituality" . Sprituality is not a religion or looking up or down, it means a dimension you want to touch beyond your physical nature.
Sadhguru (Ambition to Vision)
The CRT is really hard. But here’s the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise people’s scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder. The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That’s pretty good, though it is well short of the 2.18 that MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read—a 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font—so that it looked like this: 1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The average score this time around? 2.45. Suddenly, the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.
Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants)
hold of people’s minds and actually control them. View a corporate stronghold like the giant squid that attacked Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, waiting for people to swim near so it could wrap its tentacles about them. Whenever people begin to think in certain ways, principalities can maneuver appropriate corporate strongholds into position to clamp about them and actually rob them of the freedom to think. While individual strongholds serve as lodgings for local ruling demons, corporate strongholds offer a home to what Paul referred to: Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:11–12, italics mine Corporate strongholds are wielded by principalities, rulers, demonic archangels that use them to imprison the minds and control the thoughts of entire peoples—nations, cities, denominations, local churches, political parties, even philanthropic groups. If you have ever asked, “How could principalities become world rulers of this present darkness?” the foremost answer lies here—by means of corporate strongholds. The function of a corporate stronghold is to imprison the minds of a people or group, to take away their freedom to think anything— including cold, hard facts and logic—contrary to the mindset of the stronghold. It hypnotizes whomever its spell overshadows, so that they cannot see portions of the Word of God (or even secular truths) that might set them free from its delusive grip. But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 2 Corinthians 3:14–16, italics mine That veil, to me, is a corporate stronghold of
John Loren Sandford (Deliverance and Inner Healing)
On the face of it, society has little use for depressive realism or indeed for any significant negativity, and certainly spurns any Zerzanian agenda. DR’s evangelism of bleakness is not wanted here. However, a large literature exists arguing for the benefits of learning from negativity and failure (e.g. Ormerod, 2005; Feltham, 2012). Much of this is disingenuous platitude and management hype, but some of it concentrates on the importance of failure in specific, critical circumstances. Insurance professionals must calculate risk, and accident investigators have to learn from black boxes the causes of airplane crashes. In more philosophical terms, Scruton (2010) draws on Schopenhauer’s concept of ‘unscrupulous optimism’ to identify its various fallacies. He argues that we should ‘look with irony and detachment on our actual condition’ (p. 232, italics added), instead of succumbing to the lure of Leftist ‘junk thought.’ Everyone claims to learn something from negatives and DR ‘prophets’ are those most likely to speak the unpopular negatives.
Colin Feltham (Depressive Realism: Interdisciplinary perspectives (Explorations in Mental Health))
What though some suffer and die, what though they lay down their lives for the testimony of Jesus and the hope of eternal life--so be it--all these things have prevailed from Adam's day to ours. They are all part of the eternal plan; and those who give their "all" in the gospel cause shall receive the Lord's "all" in the mansions which are prepared. . . . We have yet to gain that full knowledge and understanding of the doctrines of salvation and the mysteries of the kingdom that were possessed by many of the ancient Saints. O that we knew what Enoch and his people knew! Or that we had the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon, as did certain of the Jaredites and Nephites! How can we ever gain these added truths until we believe in full what the Lord has already given us in the Book of Mormon, in the Doctrine and Covenants, and in the inspired changes made by Joseph Smith in the Bible? Will the Lord give us the full and revealed account of the creation as long as we believe in the theories of evolution? Will he give us more guidance in governmental affairs as long as we choose socialistic ways which lead to the overthrow of freedom? We have yet to attain that degree of obedience and personal righteousness which will give us faith like the ancients: faith to multiply miracles, move mountains, and put at defiance the armies of nations; faith to quench the violence of fire, divide seas and stop the mouths of lions; faith to break every band and to stand in the presence of God. Faith comes in degrees. Until we gain faith to heal the sick, how can we ever expect to move mountains and divide seas? We have yet to receive such an outpouring of the Spirit of the Lord in our lives that we shall all see eye to eye in all things, that every man will esteem his brother as himself, that there will be no poor among us, and that all men seeing our good works will be led to glorify our Father who is in heaven. Until we live the law of tithing how can we expect to live the law of consecration? As long as we disagree as to the simple and easy doctrines of salvation, how can we ever have unity on the complex and endless truths yet to be revealed? We have yet to perfect our souls, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel, and to walk in the light as God is in the light, so that if this were a day of translation we would be prepared to join Enoch and his city in heavenly realms. How many among us are now prepared to entertain angels, to see the face of the Lord, to go where God and Christ are and be like them? . . . Our time, talents, and wealth must be made available for the building up of his kingdom. Should we be called upon to sacrifice all things, even our lives, it would be of slight moment when weighed against the eternal riches reserved for those who are true and faithful in all things. [Ensign, Apr. 1980, 25]
Bruce R. McConkie
Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.'s" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. (They were aware, more generally, of the usefulness of tiny type in enhancing the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship: typographical density forces you to crouch like Robert Hooke or Henry Gray over the busyness and intricacy of recorded truth.) They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not, and whether they would read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d'oeuvre. The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries; the rectus externus and internus grow dazed waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school: the footnote functions as a switch, offering the model-railroader's satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted "1" and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels. Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, "essay-like" footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going?
Nicholson Baker (The Mezzanine)
This—this is going to sound really weird, but …” I swallowed, getting my nerve up. I mean, I thought he was in love with me, but was he? I sucked in a sharp breath and gathered my courage. Be brave. “I—I have a mountain to climb in life, and I want you next to me. I want you to walk up it with me—behind me to give me a push or next to me when I need to hold your hand. And when there’s a jungle there, I want you to fight with me. We’ll have machetes, and it will be tough some days when I try to figure out who I am and what I need, but with you next to me, it’ll be okay. I want you to carry me when I’m tired, and I’ll carry you when you’re tired. I want you to rub my fingers when I’ve worked a hard day making pretty things, and I’ll rub your muscles when they get hurt. I want to be the blanket that covers you when you are cold. Or vice versa. I want all of it—all the blood, sweat, and tears—no matter what dream you decide to follow. I’m here. Forever. I love you.
Ilsa Madden-Mills (Dirty English (English, #1))
to look at Louisa, stroked her cheek, and was rewarded by a dazzling smile. She had been surprised by how light-skinned the child was. Her features were much more like Eva’s than Bill’s. A small turned-up nose, big hazel eyes, and long dark eyelashes. Her golden-brown hair protruded from under the deep peak of her bonnet in a cascade of ringlets. “Do you think she’d come to me?” Cathy asked. “You can try.” Eva handed her over. “She’s got so heavy, she’s making my arms ache!” She gave a nervous laugh as she took the parcel from Cathy and peered at the postmark. “What’s that, Mam?” David craned his neck and gave a short rasping cough. “Is it sweets?” “No, my love.” Eva and Cathy exchanged glances. “It’s just something Auntie Cathy’s brought from the old house. Are you going to show Mikey your flags?” The boy dug eagerly in his pocket, and before long he and Michael were walking ahead, deep in conversation about the paper flags Eva had bought for them to decorate sand castles. Louisa didn’t cry when Eva handed her over. She seemed fascinated by Cathy’s hair, and as they walked along, Cathy amused her by singing “Old MacDonald.” The beach was only a short walk from the station, and it wasn’t long before the boys were filling their buckets with sand. “I hardly dare open it,” Eva said, fingering the string on the parcel. “I know. I was desperate to open it myself.” Cathy looked at her. “I hope you haven’t built up your hopes, too much, Eva. I’m so worried it might be . . . you know.” Eva nodded quickly. “I thought of that too.” She untied the string, her fingers trembling. The paper fell away to reveal a box with the words “Benson’s Baby Wear” written across it in gold italic script. Eva lifted the lid. Inside was an exquisite pink lace dress with matching bootees and a hat. The label said, “Age 2–3 Years.” Beneath it was a handwritten note:   Dear Eva, This is a little something for our baby girl from her daddy. I don’t know the exact date of her birthday, but I wanted you to know that I haven’t forgotten. I hope things are going well for you and your husband. Please thank him from me for what he’s doing for our daughter: he’s a fine man and I don’t blame you for wanting to start over with him. I’m back in the army now, traveling around. I’m due to be posted overseas soon, but I don’t know where yet. I’ll write and let you know when I get my new address. It would be terrific if I could have a photograph of her in this little dress, if your husband doesn’t mind. Best wishes to you all, Bill   For several seconds they sat staring at the piece of paper. When Eva spoke, her voice was tight with emotion. “Cathy, he thinks I chose to stay with Eddie!” Cathy nodded, her mind reeling. “Eddie showed me the letter he sent. Bill wouldn’t have known you were in Wales, would he? He would have assumed you and Eddie had already been reunited—that he’d written with your consent on behalf of you both.” She was afraid to look at Eva. “What are you going to do?” Eva’s face had gone very pale. “I don’t know.” She glanced at David, who was jabbing a Welsh flag into a sand castle. “He said he was going to be posted overseas. Suppose they send him to Britain?” Cathy bit her lip. “It could be anywhere, couldn’t it? It could be the other side of the world.” She could see what was going through Eva’s mind. “You think if he came here, you and he could be together without . . .” Her eyes went to the boys. Eva gave a quick, almost imperceptible nod, as if she was afraid someone might see her. “What about Eddie?” “I don’t know!” The tone of her voice made David look up. She put on a smile, which disappeared the
Lindsay Ashford (The Color of Secrets)
In my own mind I find that I can also classify highways advantageously as dominating, equal, or dominated. A dominating highway is one from which, as you drive along it, you are more conscious of the highway than of the country through which you are passing. Six-lane highways, and four-lane highways, particularly in flat country, give this impression. You see the highway itself, the traffic upon it, and the life that has grown up along it and is dependent upon it—all the world of service-stations and garages and restaurants and motor-courts. To many people, of whom I am one, parkways produce the same effect. Although esthetically beautiful, the artificial landscape on both sides of the parkway becomes part of the road itself, and is divorced from the countryside and from reality. The parkway by-passes towns, and therefore the motorist has no sense of actuality. A parkway is excellent at providing unimpeded transportation, and for allowing the city-dweller his escape, but when you drive along the parkway, you are not seeing the real United States of America. The dominated highway, on the contrary, is one which seems to be oppressed and to lose its own identity because of the surroundings through which it is passing. Highways are dominated when they pass along city streets. There is too much close by on either hand. There is too much local traffic that has not the slightest concern with the farther reaches of the highway. On the other hand, highways may be dominated when they are comparatively small roads passing through high mountains or vast plains. Again the highway becomes insignificant, and one's interest is pulled outward, away from it. In between, lies the equal highway, that one which seems to be an intimate and integral part of the countryside through which it is passing. On such a road there is a division of interest between one's focus upon the highway and its margin and upon the country back from the highway. . . .
George R. Stewart (U.S. 40: Cross Section of The United States of America)