“
And I should mention the light
which falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches...
”
”
Billy Collins (Ballistics)
“
Do me a favor, doc?"
"Anything, Captain."
"Stop italicizing the word 'Captain' when you say it."
"Go easy on the fourth wall there, sir."
-Captain Andreyasn & Doctor Bunnigus
”
”
Howard Tayler (Resident Mad Scientist (Schlock Mercenary, #6))
“
It was a noteworthy lesson, even for someone who'd been fed a daily diet of italicized lessons: that people in high places, luminaries with advanced degrees in Classics and in possession of excellent manners, can disappoint you as profoundly as anyone else.
”
”
Elinor Lipman (My Latest Grievance)
“
Miracles do not happen:"—'t is plain sense, If you italicize the present tense; But in those days, as rare old Chaucer tells, All Britain was fulfilled of miracles. So, as I said, the great doors opened wide. In rushed a blast of winter from outside, And with it, galloping on the empty air, A great green giant on a great green mare
”
”
Thomas Malory (King Arthur Collection (Including Le Morte d'Arthur, Idylls of the King, King Arthur and His Knights, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court))
“
Alex:
OK, that sounds like a challenge! Well firstly, I would have brought you to a hotel along the coast so that your suite would have the best sea view in the hotel. You could fall asleep listening to the waves crashing against the rocks, I would sprinkle the bed with red rose petals and have candles lit all around the room, I would have your favorite CD playing quietly in the background.
But I wouldn’t propose to you there. I would bring you to where there was a huge crowd of people so they could all gasp when I got down on one knee and proposed. Or something like that. Note I have italicized all important buzz words.
Rosie:
Oh.
Alex:
Oh? That’s all you can say? One word for the most important night of our lives?
”
”
Cecelia Ahern (Love, Rosie)
“
And now suddenly there was this intensity to everything we did and everything we said. Like my life had been italicized.
”
”
Cora Carmack (Losing It (Losing It, #1))
“
His “devoted” is italicized by sarcasm, underlined by hurt.
”
”
David Levithan (Every Day (Every Day, #1))
“
Its Seventh Commandment, italicized by the authors, stated: “Battles are beyond everything else struggles of morale. Defeat is inevitable as soon as the hope of conquering ceases to exist. Success comes not to him who has suffered the least but to him whose will is firmest and morale strongest.
”
”
Barbara W. Tuchman (The Guns of August)
“
He could see why his mum chose (italicized) friends, instead of just putting up with anyone she happened to bump into, or sticking with people who supported the same football team, or wore the same clothes, which was pretty much happened at school; his must have conversations like this with Suzie, conversations that moved, conversations where each thing the other person said seemed to lead you on somewhere.
”
”
Nick Hornby (About a Boy)
“
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
“
JESUS’S PATH WAS exactly that, a radically unmanageable simplicity—nothing held back, nothing held onto. It was almost too much for his followers to bear. Even within the gospels themselves, we see a tendency to rope him back in again, to turn his teachings into a manageable complexity. Take his radically simple saying: “Those who would lose their life will find it; and those who would keep it will lose it.” Very quickly the gospels add a caveat: “Those who would lose their life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will find it.” That may be the way you’ve always heard this teaching, even though most biblical scholars agree that the italicized words are a later addition. But you can see what this little addition has done: it has shifted the ballpark away from the transformation of consciousness (Jesus’s original intention) and into martyrdom, a set of sacrificial actions you can perform with your egoic operating system still intact. Right from
”
”
Cynthia Bourgeault (The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind)
“
The chords of the heart need to be touched to be played,” I recited again, trying to figure out what it meant.
Then it hit me. [Italicized] No one is immune to emotion when those chords are pulled.
”
”
Penelope Douglas (Fire Night (Devil's Night, #4.5))
“
McKusick's belief in this paradigm-the focus on disability rather than abnormalcy-was actualized in the treatment of patients in his clinic. Patients with dwarfism, for instance, were treated by an interdisciplinary team of genetic counselors, neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, nurses, and psychiatrists trained to focus on specific disabilities of persons with short stature. Surgical interventions were reserved to correct specific deformities as they arose. The goal was not to restore "normalcy"-but vitality, joy, and function.
McKusic had rediscovered the founding principles of modern genetics in the realm of human pathology. In humans as in wild flies, genetic variations abounded. Here too genetic variants, environments, and gene-environment interactions ultimately collaborated to cause phenotypes-except in this case, the "phenotype" in question was disease. Here too some genes had partial penetrance and widely variable expressivity. One gene could cause many diseases, and one disease could be caused by many genes. And here too "fitness" could not be judged in absolutes. Rather the lack of fitness-illness [italicized, sic] in colloquial terms- was defined by the relative mismatch between an organism and environment.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his friend would say to him. Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicize his misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the stomach has to be consulted.
”
”
Victor Hugo (The Man Who Laughs)
“
When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart.
But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code" - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. by 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather "ridiculously simple." Species were specious. "Being natural" was often "just a pose.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you—every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.
”
”
Mark Twain (How to Tell a Story and Other Essays)
“
Did life's penurious length
Italicize its sweetness,
The men that daily live
Would stand so deep in joy
That it would clog the cogs
Of that revolving reason
Whose esoteric belt
Protects our sanity.
”
”
Emily Dickinson
“
If I had nothing to say to Henry right off it was because following Lippman’s seminar, language didn’t really seem my domain any longer. I wasn’t exactly a stranger to disputation, but never in my life had I felt so enclosed by a world so contentious, where the argument is enormous and constant and everything turns out to be pro or con, positions taken, positions argued, and everything italicized by indignation and rage.
”
”
Philip Roth (The Counterlife)
“
At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.'
In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
The only reason anyone is "moderate" in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two thousand years of human thought (democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc.). The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside (italicized). The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there is evidence for it.... Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions are in principle open to new learning: it is just that the utility of ignoring (or "reinterpreting") certain articles of faith is now overwhelming.
”
”
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
“
On the Right, the extremists are white ethno-nationalist majoritarians; on the Left, they are identitarians who see progress as a process of bringing one marginalized group after another in from the cold. Spokespeople for each marginalized group are regarded as 'owning' its policies, meaning transactivists get to promote gender self-identification without hard questions about how it impacts on everyone else. And as the Left has adopted their creed, it hs descended to depths of science-denialism formerly associated with climate-change and evolution deniers on the Right. Indeed, denying the materiality and immutability of human sex is not merely akin to denying evolution - it is [italicized] denying evolution, since the two sexes are evolved categories, and immutable in all mammals.
”
”
Helen Joyce (Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality)
“
. . . that the State is, or ought to be, founded on contract." This would be true if the words which I have italicized should be omitted. It was the insertion of these words that furnished the writer a basis for his otherwise groundless analogy between the Anarchists and the followers of Rousseau. The latter hold that the State originated in a contract, and that the people of to-day, though they did not make it, are bound by it. The Anarchists, on the contrary, deny that any such contract was ever made; declare that, had one ever been made, it could not impose a shadow of obligation on those who had no hand in making it; and claim the right to contract for themselves as they please. The position that a man may make his own contracts, far from being analogous to that which makes him subject to contracts made by others, is its direct antithesis.
”
”
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (Selected essays and writings on Individualist anarchism & Liberty: (plus selected letters))
“
I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.
”
”
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics)
“
*To illustrate, humans are in the domain eucarya, in the kingdom animalia, in the phylum chordata, in the subphylum vertebrata, in the class mammalia, in the order primates, in the family hominidae, in the genus homo, in the species sapiens. (The convention, I’m informed, is to italicize genus and species names, but not those of higher divisions.) Some taxonomists employ further subdivisions: tribe, suborder, infraorder, parvorder, and more. †The formal word for a zoological category, such as phylum or genus. The plural is taxa. ‡We are actually getting worse at some matters of hygiene. Dr. Maunder believes that the move toward low-temperature washing machine detergents has encouraged bugs to proliferate. As he puts it: “If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious (italicized) terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance (italicized)—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God's law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
”
”
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
“
In 2006, researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler created fake newspaper articles about polarizing political issues. The articles were written in a way that would confirm a widespread misconception about certain ideas in American politics. As soon as a person read a fake article, experimenters then handed over a true article that corrected the first. For instance, one article suggested that the United States had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The next article corrected the first and said that the United States had never found them, which was the truth. Those opposed to the war or who had strong liberal leanings tended to disagree with the original article and accept the second. Those who supported the war and leaned more toward the conservative camp tended to agree with the first article and strongly disagree with the second. These reactions shouldn’t surprise you. What should give you pause, though, is how conservatives felt about the correction. After reading that there were no WMDs, they reported being even more certain than before that there actually were WMDs and that their original beliefs were correct.
The researchers repeated the experiment with other wedge issues, such as stem cell research and tax reform, and once again they found that corrections tended to increase the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if those corrections contradicted their ideologies. People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired.
Researchers Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks expanded on this work in 2013. In their study, people already suspicious of electronic health records read factually incorrect articles about such technologies that supported those subjects’ beliefs. In those articles, the scientists had already identified any misinformation and placed it within brackets, highlighted it in red, and italicized the text. After they finished reading the articles, people who said beforehand that they opposed electronic health records reported no change in their opinions and felt even more strongly about the issue than before. The corrections had strengthened their biases instead of weakening them.
Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.
”
”
David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
“
Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant I am glad I resisted the temptation, if it was a temptation when I was young, to write a poem about an old man eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant. I would have gotten it all wrong thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world and with only a book for a companion. He’ll probably pay the bill out of a change purse. So glad I waited all these decades to record how hot and sour the hot and sour soup is here at Chang’s this afternoon and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass. And my book—José Saramago’s Blindness as it turns out—is so absorbing that I look up from its escalating horrors only when I am stunned by one of its arresting sentences. And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches—the plates and tea pots, the immaculate tablecloths, as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress in the white blouse and short black skirt, the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.
”
”
Billy Collins (Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems)
“
On the night of November 24, 1956, the Granma slipped her moorings with Castro’s guerrillas aboard, known as “los expedicionarios del yate Granma,” and left from Tuxpan, Veracruz, setting a course across the Yucatán Channel for southeastern Cuba. The 1,200-mile distance between Mexico and their landing point in southeastern Cuba was difficult and included 135 miles of open water and cross currents between Cape Catoche in Mexico and Cape San Antonio in Cuba. They had to stay far enough off the southern coast of Cuba to remain undetected. The overcrowded small vessel leaked, forcing everyone to take turns bailing water out of her, and at one point they lost a man overboard, which further delayed them. In all, the entire five-day trip ultimately lasted seven days. Their destination was a playa, beach, near Niquero in the Oriente Province, close to where José Martí landed 61 years prior, during the War of Independence. However, on December 2, 1956, when the Granma finally arrived at its destination, it smashed into a mangrove swamp crawling with fiddler crabs, near Los Colorados beach. They were well south of where they were supposed to meet up with 50 supporters. Having lost their element of surprise, they were left exposed and vulnerable.
After the revolution the Granma was moved to Havana and is now on display in a protected glass enclosure at the Granma Memorial, near the Museum of the Revolution. The official newspaper in Cuba is also called the Granma.
Note: Ships and boats as well as newspapers and other publications are italicized whereas memorials are not!
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Miracles do not happen:"—'t is plain sense,
If you italicize the present tense;
But in those days, as rare old Chaucer tells,
All Britain was fulfilled of miracles.
”
”
Charlton Miner Lewis (Gawayne and the Green knight;)
“
1978, Hawaiian has had official standing as a state language. So in this edition of Shoal of Time, published in 2015, Hawaiian words are not italicized.
”
”
Gavan Daws (Shoal Of Time: A History Of The Hawaiian Islands (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition))
“
Every clue was italicized with a burst of surging trumpets, and under questioning, the suspects snapped like toothpicks, buckling in less time than it took to soft-boil an egg.
”
”
David Sedaris (Naked)
“
Noi suntem ]n fond ge\i, =i ge\ii reprezint[ unul din cele mai vechi popoare autohtone ale Europei, contemporane cu grecii, cu cel\ii, cu grupurile italice anterioare imperiului roman.
”
”
Anonymous
“
When I was a kid I thought that the biggest moments in life would be trumpeted and highlighted and italicized somehow, that you would know when they were coming and could get your feet set to brace for them, and you would know they were upon you, and make a satisfactory effort to memorialize and celebrate them, but it turns out that’s not at all how it works, and the biggest moments of your life just amble up behind you and suddenly are just there without fanfare. You fall into and out of love without much drama, you stammer like an idiot as you propose to your girlfriend, your brother just stops breathing quietly without any notice that death has come, your daughter just slides out of your wife suddenly like an otter emerging from a burrow. It turns out that the biggest moments are a lot like the smallest moments, just trundling and shuffling along one after another, each one utterly normal and absolutely the most amazing moment ever.
”
”
Brian Doyle
“
Chapter Seven The Franciscan Genius: The Integration of the Negative You can show your love to others by not wishing that they should be better Christians.88 —Francis of Assisi We must bear patiently not being good…and not being thought good.89 —Francis of Assisi Yes, you read the quotes above correctly. The first quote was considered so untrue, so impossible that Francis would write such a thing, that for centuries we deleted the “not” in the text! In the second quote, the point seems to have largely been ignored or denied until the very same thing was taught by a later female doctor of the Church, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, in the nineteenth century. Maybe you would have automatically deleted the “nots” yourself, as I would have, which is why I italicized them.
”
”
Richard Rohr (Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi)
“
the smallest integer whose English-language descriptions always use at least thirty syllables. But wait a moment! How many syllables does my italicized phrase contain? Count them — 24. We somehow described b in fewer syllables than its definition allows. In fact, the italicized phrase does not merely describe b “somehow”; it is b’s very definition! So the concept of b is nastily self-undermining. Something very strange is going on.
”
”
Douglas R. Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop)
“
I want to create amazing things and learn from other smart people. That is the culture fit you should be looking for,” Kaya wrote (italics mine). The statement I’ve italicized is probably the best distillation I’ve ever read of what young developers are looking for in an employer. Those two factors—create amazing things and learn from other smart people
”
”
Jeff Lawson (Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century)
“
The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general “law of environmental limitation of culture.” And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: “The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies
”
”
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
“
Tucker sank back and whispered i Kane's ear. "WAWPOINT, COVER, QUIET CLOSE, TAKE ALPHA."
He repeated the complex chain of commands.
While Kane's vocabulary was impressive, he also had an amazing ability to string together actions. In this case, Kane would need to cross the road, find cover, close the distance between himself and their target - then attack.
"Got it buddy? Tucker asked.
Kane bumped his nose against Tucker's. His dark eyes twinkled with his answer: (italicized) Of course I do, you stupid ass.
"Off you go then.
”
”
James Rollins (The Kill Switch (Tucker Wayne, #1))
“
Throughout Indian history, the thoughts of Muslim women have been ignored, overlooked, regarded with a sense of being ahead of this time, or out of place. This is the conundrum of being invisible, and very much seen. I italicize non-English words because they look more beautiful that way. Since we can’t honor the beauty of their own script and still be legible to most readers of English, I want to give the words their own space. Some think of italics as othering, but I am Other when I speak my mother language. Words in Bangla or Arabic or Urdu have their own weight separate from English. America took my first language, mother language, gave me my life language. I don’t recall the feeling of my first language fading as I learned the language I write, love, and fight in best.
”
”
Tanaïs (In Sensorium: Notes for My People)
“
1. Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,” he said in the italicized initial headline in his first shareholder letter in 1997. “We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.” Focusing on the long term allows the interests of your customers, who want better and faster services cheaper, and the interests of your shareholders, who want a return on investment, to come into alignment. That’s not always true in the short term.
”
”
Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
“
In his study of the Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon, Hebrew scholar David Wright concluded that the Book of Mormon’s use of “Isaiah derives directly from the KJV text with some secondary modifications by Smith and that it does not derive from an ancient text through translation.”3 He also noted that the variant readings “can be explained as modifications of the KJV text, especially where there are italics,” and that Smith’s alterations of these italicized words often produced “incomplete and conceptually difficult or impossible readings” that were “incompatible with the Hebrew text” of Isaiah.4 New Testament scholar Stan Larson, in his study of the Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi 12–14, similarly concluded that the Book of Mormon’s text “originated in the nineteenth century, derived from unacknowledged plagiarism of the KJV,” which “Smith copied [from] the KJV blindly, not showing awareness of translation problems and errors in the KJV.”5 Larson also noted that some alterations were made to italicized words, but that “the Book of Mormon fails to revise places where the KJV text ought to have been printed in italics but is not.”6 Wright observed that the character of the alterations Smith made in his Bible revision are the same as what has been found in the Book of Mormon and that Smith’s 1829 efforts could be considered a “training ground” for his subsequent work on the Bible.7
”
”
Dan Vogel (Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839)
“
On the day she got her first piece of junk mail, she told him, “Guess what? I got a letter today.” That credit card preapproval, with her name correctly spelled and elegantly italicized, had roused her spirits, made her a little less invisible, a little more present. Somebody knew her.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
In evangelizing the worlds of culture, as in evangelizing the worlds of political and economic life, the Church’s method must be that of freedom. “The Church proposes; she imposes nothing,” John Paul wrote with characteristically italicized emphasis. “She respects individuals and cultures, and she honors the sanctuary of conscience.” At the same time, the Church evangelizes in the conviction that it has been given the truth about humanity and its destiny in Jesus Christ and is solemnly obliged to propose that truth to everyone.
”
”
George Weigel (The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform)
“
I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.
”
”
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
“
We armed ourselves with pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles.
We knew that the government had us impossibly outgunned but nevertheless felt obliged to not only prepare ourselves for the upcoming collapse of society as we had known it, but also to do whatever it took to speed the day when that collapse occurred.
The government was illegitimate; a puppet regime manipulated by a shadowy and sinister force that was hellbent on our destruction. The supposed democracy that seated traitorous politicians had been tainted by mass media that poisoned the minds and souls of our people to not only blind them against what was happening, but also to con them into complicity in their own downfall.
Our guns served many purposes. In addition to the simple purpose they were designed for-to kill people-our firearms endowed with us a sense of destiny befitting an epic struggle against fearsome odds.
The deadly seriousness of the situation was underlined, italicized, and emboldened by the smell of gun oil and the clack of magazines sliding into position as we recruited new soldiers into our movement. According to the founding Fathers, it was not only our right, but our duty to bear arms against the tyrants who had usurped our beloved nation.
I spent 7 years immersed in that world. A reality where I was constantly looking over my shoulder to reveal the handiwork of the enemy. Every aspect of our culture faced a relentless assault. Everything that was good about America-Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit of Happiness-had been denigrated and disparaged by those that sought to impose Marxist equality. I hated them for that. I hated them with the passion of a patriot. That hate was fueled by what I truly believed was a love for my race.
Oops! Did I say "race?" I meant a love for my country, Or was it a love of Christ? Or Allah? It could have been any of a number of allegiances-any number of ways to identify myself-that I built walls around and bristled at those outside, and it was all in the name of love.
Roads to a lot of really bad places are paved with that kind of bizarro love. A vampiric, soul-depleting love-substitute that beckons to those who never know the real thing.
I was very lucky to realize the true love of a little girl-my daughter-otherwise I'd likely be dead or in prison like so many of my former comrades. Simply by playing with other children, she taught me that the walls and guns and hate that had seemed to give me purpose were in fact unnecessary constructs that threatened to separate us. The children she shared toys, laughs, and smiles with also shared the same need for love and compassion that we all do-regardless of the color of our skin, our family's choice of spirituality, or the part of the world we come from.
I made a decision to cast aside the fear that masqueraded as love, and to live my life in wonderful affection for diversity instead of scorn for it.
”
”
Arno Michaelis (My Life After Hate)
“
BUNAHAN
When the last speaker of Boro
falls silent,
who will notice
the first-grown feather
of a bird’s wing? (gansuthi)
or feel how far pretending
to love (onsay) is
from loving
for the last time (onsra)?
Quiet and uneasy, in an
unfamiliar place (asusu)
no one sees her, or listens;
there is less of her
than there was.
The last speaker feels
Boro’s world fall apart,
knowledge unravels:
healing plants go
unseen; the bodies of animals
are unreadable.
With a last thought, onguboy
(to love it all, from the heart),
she leaves fragments
of the world she held in place.
We touch their husks,
about to speak and
about not to speak
(bunhan, bunahan);
awash in loss,
incomplete.
Note:
The italicized words are from Boro, an endangered language still spoken in parts of northern India. For more on this story, see Mark Abley’s Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages.
”
”
Laurelyn Whitt
“
Now we confront the melancholy spectacle of this pioneer breed being swamped and submerged by an overwhelming tide of latecomers from the old-world hive,” the sociologist E. A. Ross wrote in 1914. He then italicized his alarm: “Certainly never since the colonial era have the foreign-born and their children formed so large a proportion of the American people as at the present moment.” From observation in New York’s Union Square, Ross reported that he’d “scanned 368 persons as they passed me…at a time when the garment-workers of the Fifth Avenue lofts were returning to their homes. Only thirty-eight of these passers-by had the type of face one would find at a county fair in the West or the South.
”
”
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
“
The statement that the essence of the human being consists in being-inthe-world likewise contains no decision aboutwhether the human being in a
theologico-metaphysical sense is merely a this-worldly or an other-worldly
Creature.
115th the existential determination of the essence of the human being,
therefore, nothing is decided about the "existence of God" or his "nonbeing," no more than about the possibility or impossibility of gods. Thus
it is not only rash hut also an error in procedure to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of the human being from the relation of his
essence to the mth of being is atheism. And what is more, this arbitrary
classification betrays a lack of careful reading. No one bothers to notice
that in my essay "On the Essence of Ground" (1929) the following appears
(,,, 2~, note I): "Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as beingin-the-world no decision, whether positive or neptive, is made concerning
a possible being toward God. It is, however, the case that through an illumi-
.,tion of transcendence we first achieve nn adeqrcnte concept of Dnsein, with
respect to which it can now he asked how the relationship of Dasein to God
is ontologically ordered." If we think about this remark too quickly, as is
usually the case, we will declare that such a philosophy does not decide either for or against the existence of God. It remains stalled in indifference.
~hus it is unconcerned with the religious question. Such indifferentism
falls prey to nihilism.
Rut does the foregoing observation teach indifferentism? Why then
are particular words in the note italicized - and not just random ones? For
no other reason than to indicate that the thinking that thinks from the
question concerning the uuth of being questions more primordially than
metaphysics can. Only from the truthofbeing can the essence of the holy he
thought. [I~z] Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity
to he thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought
or said what the word "God" is to signify. Or should we not first be able
to hear and understand all these words carefully if we are to be permirted
as human beings, that is, as eksistent creatures, to experience a relation of
God to human beings? How can the human being at the present stage of
world history ask at all seriously and rigorously whether the god nears or
withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into the dimension
in which alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of
the holy, which indeed remains closed as a dimension if the open region of
being is not cleared and in its clearing is near to humans. Perhaps what is
distinctive about this world-epoch consists in the closure of the dimension
of the hale [des Heilen]. Perhaps that is the sole malignancy [Unheil].
But with this reference the thinking that points toward the truth of
I)eing as what is to be thought has in no way decided in favor of theism. It
can he theistic as little as atheistic. Not, however, because of an indifferent
attitude, hutoutofrespect forthe boundaries that have heen set forthinking
as such, indeed set by what gives itself to thinking as what is to be thought,
1)). the truth of being. Insofar as thinking limits itself to its task it tlirects
the human being at the present moment of the world's destiny into the
primordial dimension of his historical abode.
”
”
Martin Heidegger
“
My shirt said, I like cooking my family and pets. Use commas. Don’t be a psycho. The sweatshirt was black with white lettering. The last line was italicized and the psycho was done in blood-red creepy-looking lettering.
“Of course.” I knew perfectly well what it said. When I put the sweatshirt on earlier, Marshell burst out laughing.
“How did I miss this sick sense of humor you have?”
“Who has a sick sense of humor?” Heller came up behind Lawson and rested his chin on Lawson’s shoulder, looking at my shirt. “Good one, Remi.”
“Can we please discuss Remi’s sick sense of humor and his style choices inside? In case nobody noticed, it’s snowing. I hate the snow,
”
”
M.A. Church (It Takes Two to Tango (Fur, Fangs, and Felines #3))
“
in fact, vast passages from the King James Version of The Bible had been copied virtually verbatim and spread throughout, comprising almost one eighteenth of The Book of Mormon. Koplanski then went on to further question the veracity of Smith’s claim that The Book of Mormon had been originally written in the 1st Century. He did this by pointing out that the near identical King James Version passages included within The Book of Mormon also contained the same italicized words that the KJV translators had inserted into the King James Version when it was completed in 1611, some 200 years before Smith discovered and translated the Gold Plates.
”
”
Jack L. Brody (The Moroni Deception)