Jael Quotes

Jael returned the lazy smile. "You're not my type." "Well, you're not anybody's type," said Hazael. "No, wait. I take it back. My sword says she'd like to know you better.

In my life I've had good days and bad days. Miserable days. Painful days. And no matter how bad the bad ones get, there's a mercy in them. Every single one of them ends.

It was no dream. The Ben-Elim, he gave me a choice. Go forward or go back. I wanted to cross over, to be with my kin, my friends. To find peace.´ ´Why did you come back, then?´Fidele asked him. ´Three reasons. Three people. Jael. Lykos. You.´He paused and looked up into her eyes. ´Two for vengeance. One for love.´ She stared at him a long, timeless moment, then she leaned forwards and kissed him. Page 273 (Fidele and Maquin)

There is no god, you fools. There are only monsters, and I am the worst of them.

Hazael rose from his knees. It had to take extraordinary effort, yet somehow he managed a version of his lazy smile when he said, "You know, I've always wanted to be a bath attendant. You should take me instead. I'm nicer than my sister." Jael returned the lazy smile. "You're not my type." "Well, you're not anybody's type," said Hazael. "No, wait. I take it back. My sword says she'd like to know you better." "I'm afraid I must deny her the pleasure. I've been kissed by swords before, you see." "I may have noticed.

There is no normal. There's only what's right for you and being honest.

Jael" It still gives her a strange shiver when he says her name. Like she can almost get a sense of the person he believes she's capable of becoming. A person who deserves an exotic name spoken with reverence. But now he looks a little sad. "If all you ever do is try to avoid pain, you'll never create something truly worthwhile.

I tell myself I’m fine on my own, but am I? No friends to fall back on, no relationships, no support. Left to my own devices, I have no devices.

If you don’t know how to deal with emotion, other people’s feelings can hit you like a drug.

I want them to bite into a cookie, and think of me, and smile. Food is love. Food has a power. I knew it in my mind, but now I know it in my heart.

Hope is a waking dream," Jael quoted softly. "And it's the last thing to go. It torments you like a bird killing itself slowly against the glass.

What are you waiting for?" he screamed, launching himself at Liraz. With a neat step and parry she sent him face-first into the ground, and with one well-placed kick turned him over, gasping, onto his back. "Kill me!" he coughed out, lying there. "I know you want to!" But she just shook her head and smiled, and Jael wanted to howl, because her smile had...plans in it, and in those plans, he saw, there would be no easy death.

I preferred to think of myself as a cat. If I think of my behavior as cat behavior instead of people behavior, it pretty much always makes sense.

I just feel like we understood each other." "Oh," says Rob, and nods kind of stiffly. "Wait," says Jael. "Are you, like, jealous of a telepathic ram?

Contact. When someone touches me wrong it isn’t a feeling. It isn’t hate or fear or pain. It is just blackness and a chant in me: get/out/get/out/get/out.

there is something intriguing about knowing how things are going to turn out, but being constantly surprised about how they'll get there.

My most insightful comments have been forgotten while letting a whining dog out the door.

You can quote me, but I'll tell everyone that you're lying.

Seventh bearer of the cursed name Akiva.” Here he paused, speculative. “No Misbegotten ever bore that name to manhood before you. Did you know that? Old Byon the steward, he gave it out of spite. Wanted your mother to beg him not to. Any other woman in the harem would have, but not Festival. ‘Scribble whatever you like on your list, old man,’ she told him. ‘My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.’

Everybody struggles with this stuff, you know. With social discomfort and grief and fitting in. People with syndromes, people with disorders, people with diagnoses, and without. People who would be classified as neurotypical. Idiots and geniuses, maids and doctors. Nobody's got it all figured out.

It takes a particular kind of strength to exist in a world where you are not wanted that doesn't feel like strength at all.

I want them to bite into a cookie, and think of me, and smile. Food is love. Food has a power.

We all have our own patterns, I guess ... And whether we like it or not, they persist.

Panic, panic, can't panic. Think of food. Think of sugar. I am a sugar cube in cold water. I won't dissolve. Precise edges. Made up of tiny, regular, secure parts. If the water were hotter I would worry, but it's cold. I stay together. Precise. Clean. Surrounded, but whole.

The story goes like this," he said. "We were having dinner together, you and I. As we do from time to time. It was grimgrouse. Over-spiced. You killed the cook for that. Temper." He added, as an instructive side, "You know, in a story, it's the details like that that make it seem real. Anyway, you for a bone stuck in your mustache. Did I mention you has a mustache?

The big man glanced at the princess in chains for permission, hefting his axe suggestively. Jael expected her to nod and give him the go-ahead to serve as her executioner. Instead, she put out a hand and took the weapon from him. Her green eyes were like chips of jade in her pale, bloody countenance. This was the face of the Dread Queen. "Kneel," she commanded, and the command had an inexorable weight. Not only did Priest drop to his knees, so did the other men in the vicinity; two belonged to Silence. The Speaker frowned at this. In a single swing, she took her enemy's head. The crowd roared. And Jael fell a little in love.

Three nails driven into the head commemorated as many crises in Maggie’s nine years of earthly struggle; that luxury of vengeance having been suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in the old Bible.

Are you sure you're okay?" she asks. "Should I call 911 or something?" "I'm totally fine," says Rob. "It's going to take a little while to recover, I think. It was like ... an orgasm... times a hundred." He sighs again, and continues to lie on the table. "Really?" says Jael. "Like a ..." she isn't sure how she feels about that at all.

Food has power. Nonna knew that. Ma did too. I know it now. And though it can't save me, it might help me, in some way. All I have besides food is grief.

I find the title How to Be Good. Curious, I open it up. I'm disappointed to find it's fiction.

I think of a person I haven't seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street. I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story that I have spent the morning writing about. A car passes me on the road, and its license plate consists of my wife's and my initials side by side. When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh. One wonders why. I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that's going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: "You've turned up in the right place at the right time. You're doing fine. Don't ever think that you've been forgotten.

The afflicted pray for healing--just as hungry people pray for bread, but when has God ever sent bread? In my recollection of the scriptures, God has always sent a woman. A woman like Eve and the unnamed woman that preceded her. A woman like Moses's mother, Jochebed, and the woman who raised him to be a king, Bithia. A woman like Deborah and her skull-piercing homegirl, Jael. Maybe some manna, but when has God ever sent bread?

This is home, it's the only place I want to be, but at the same time everything familiar feels strange. It's the same as it ever was except without the people who most belong here.

But I can't force everything into the arrangement I'd like. I can't use denial to make everything simple.

Heartbreak is stupid and impossible. Hearts don't break. Hearts squeeze, they wrench, they ache, they shrivel. Hearts pull apart in wet chunks like canned tomatoes.

Innocence isn't a set of house keys. You don't just up and lose it one day. It's a process.

This is the way I’ve always been. I think of the answer long after the person asking the question has lost interest and walked away.

All I have besides food is grief.

He knew that Jael's pack would be chosen for the queen's mission because of him.

In every drop of water, gust of air, speck of earth, and crackle of lightning, she hears the same thing: This world is alive. And it loves her. A little while later, the storm notices that Jael has fallen asleep. The rain tapers off. The clouds sneak away like they're trying not to wake her. The wind caresses her cheek one last time, then disperses in all directions. It carries with it the memory of this funny girl with the sad green eyes. And it carries with it a little bit of hope that things might change. That the world might become what it was supposed to be.

SONG OF ONE OF THE GIRLS Here in my heart I am Helen; I’m Aspasia and Hero, at least. I’m Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Staël; I’m Salomé, moon of the East. Here in my soul I am Sappho; Lady Hamilton am I, as well. In me Récamier vies with Kitty O’Shea, With Dido, and Eve, and poor Nell. I’m of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.

A girl learns who she is from the woman she sees loving her," Ida says. "She learns what's good and what's lovely about herself, and the further apart she is from that woman, and the more different they are, the harder it is for her to know what to love about herself. Especially when everything around her tells her she's not right.

Oh my God, I can totally see it," says Britt. She scrunches her face into a frown and glares at herself in the mirror. "Jael ... ," she says, in a pretty good imitation of Jael's father's flat, gruff voice. "Jael, money is tight. Do you really need these things?" "No, you're right, Dad," says Jael in a chipper, squeaky voice. "It's actually really convenient that I can store all my pens and pencils in my hair. In fact, you know what? I'll just grow my hair a little longer so you don't even have to get me folders this year!

Fortuity itself, as the deadly game unfolded move by move, appeared to conform to a pattern of hard luck; so much so, indeed, that in time men would say of Lee, as Jael had said of Sisera after she drove the tent peg into his temple, that the stars in their courses had fought against him.

Her hand is close to my arm. My options are limited. I can't run away. I can't handle this. I lose myself in food. The rich, wet texture of melting chocolate. The way good aged goat cheese coats your tongue. The silky feel of pasta dough when it's been pressed and rested just enough. How the scent of onions changes, over an hour, from raw to mellow, sharp to sweet, and all that even without tasting. The simplest magic: how heat transforms.

When I drew pictures of Mother and me, I used Peach for her and Chestnut for myself. "Why is your skin named after something soft and sweet and mine is something hard and bitter?" "Because you are so much tougher," she said. I thought that was a very good answer. And maybe it's true. But I am forced to be tough.

I believe in you,’ he said. ‘So turn off all the voices in your head. Shut them all out. Don’t listen to any of them. Put one foot in front of the other. That’s it. Leave everything else alone.’ Jael frowned. ‘You can’t look back. What has happened is done. What is coming will come. And you’ll have all of us, right there beside you. All

Es casi imposible describirlo, y no tiene nada que ver con el aburrimiento.

I let myself relax into the pattern of the recipe.

She's not quite making sense, but no one does all the time.

My world had turned upside down again and again, which should mean it's right side up now, but it isn't. Everything's different, everything's the same.

I'm all I can be, a women a poetess. Soy todo lo que puedo ser, soy poeta, soy mujer.

i love sofia and lorena <3 <3 <3 love themm <3 ;) :*

Once I wrote a love story, then I decided not to fall in love again.

Las personas que le tienen pavor a la muerte son las más valientes a la hora de morir. -Principio Liberable

Not all choices are right and not all choices can make us happy.

You can learn from the Internet but you can't be sure what you're learning is true. Same as life. Be careful.

Before he got out of the house, which he did after a most affectionate farewell, Johnny felt himself compelled to promise that he would come to Miss Demolines again as soon as he got back to town; and as the door was closed behind him by the boy in buttons, he made up his mind that he certainly would call as soon as he returned to London. “It’s as good as a play,” he said to himself. Not that he cared in the least for Miss Demolines, or that he would take any steps with the intention of preventing the painting of the picture. Miss Demolines had some battle to fight, and he would leave her to fight it with her own weapons. If his friend chose to paint a picture of Jael, and take Miss Van Siever as a model, it was no business of his. Nevertheless he would certainly go and see Miss Demolines again, because, as he said, she was as good as a play.

His voice is muddy, that's what it is. Dark and brown and muddy. A note to it like coffee left too long on the burner. And unsweetened, bitter chocolate. But there's dirt in it too, deep, dark dirt, like the garden in October.

you think heaven is a real place? She said, Of course it is. Then I said, I think heaven is a lie. And she sat up in the bed and said, God is going to strike you down for talking like that, Jael! I just laughed and told her God is just a white man stupid niggas made up, like Santa Claus. Well, she didn’t like that one bit. She folded her arms across her chest and said, Well if there ain’t no God, then answer me this. Where do people go when they . . .

I'm terrified of Elena's ghost, but at the same time, I feel strongly that it's the right thing to do. I can help, and I said I would, so I will. Besides, love is a powerful force. More powerful than reason. Even if that love, as strong as it is, isn't yours.

They say you learn by doing, but you don't have to. If you learn only from your own experience, you're limited. By reading the Internet you can find out more. What grows in what season. The best way to strip an artichoke. What type of onions work best in French onion soup. Endless detail on any topic. You can learn from people who are experimenting with Swiss buttercream, or perfecting their gluten-free pumpernickel crackers, or taste-testing everything from caviar to frozen pizza to ginger ale. All of their failures keep you from having to fail in the same way.

One of my professors in college used to say As the wise man said, Do or do not, there is no try, but the advice columns generally say the opposite. If someone promises to try, and you're happy with that, don't push. It can backfire. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble asking for too much.

I need the comfort. I look for a food memory to calm me and I settle on ceviche. A tart bite, a clean, fresh wave of flavor. Think of the process. Raw fish is translucent, but when you dip the lime juice onto it, it becomes something else. Cubes of white-fleshed fish begin to flake. Shrimp turn pink. Texture becomes color. Visible streaks, almost stripes, show the grain.

Ma kept the alcohol for company in the dining room china cabinet. All the sweet after-dinner liqueurs nestle there together. But there is one bottle she never knew about right here in the kitchen. I reach deep into the cabinets and remove Dad's hidden bottle of Lagavulin. I set a tumbler on the counter and pour him two fingers of scotch. 'This is a tumbler, watch it tumble,' he said. The golden brown liquid, more gold than brown, somewhere between weak tea and apple juice. I stare at it. Nothing. Out loud I say, "This is a tumbler, watch it tumble," an incantation or a toast or both, and drink it down. It's like drinking a handful of matches. It burns and then smokes. I fight back a cough. There's a note of something deep and earthy, like beets or truffles, which then vanishes, leaving only a palate seared clean.

While I'm waiting, I reach into the cupboard for dried pineapple. I added them to the grocery order because I find them reassuring, but they have to be the right kind. Ma started buying the fancy natural low-sulfur version from Trader Joe's in the past few years. Those are fibrous and taste good for you. These are the ones from my childhood, which just taste good. They are as yellow as lemons, crusted all around with sugar. The inside is as thick and wet as a gumdrop.

I've made countless variations on this recipe. Chai-infused shortbread diamonds. Rosewater shortbread squares. Cocoa shortbread sandwiches spliced with Nutella. But tonight, in honor of Grandma Damson, I make hers, from memory. In a sense, I fail. No ghosts materialize in the kitchen, not Grandma Damson, not Nonna, not anyone. But out of the mess I make a dozen ideal shortbread wedges, perfect in shape, size and flavor. Warm and delicate. With a glass of cold milk, they are delicious. When shortbread melts on your tongue, you feel the roundness of the butter and the kiss of the sugar and then they vanish. Then you eat another, to feel it again, to get at that moment of vanishing. I eat myself sick on them.

Strong, good smells clash with each other, garlic against cinnamon, savory against sweet. Two dressings, Ma's traditional corn bread version as well as the stuffing she made last year for a change of pace, a buttery version with cherries and sausage and hazelnuts. The herb-brined turkey, probably larger than we need, and a challenge to manhandle into and out of the refrigerator. A deep dish of creamy, smooth mashed potatoes, riced and dried to make them thirsty, then plumped back up with warmed cream and butter. For dessert, a mocha cake I came up with one day. In the batter is barely sweetened chocolate and dark, strong coffee. The layers are sealed together with more chocolate, warmed up with a hint of ancho powder.

This chipped quite a bit off the euphoria I was feeling. I had been relying on the story I had prepared to put me over with a bang, carrying me safely through the first awkward moments when the fellow you've called on without an invitation is staring at you as if wondering to what he owes the honour of this visit, and now it would have to remain untold. It was one I had heard from Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright at the Drones and it was essentially a conte whose spiritual home was the smoking-room of a London club or the men's wash-room on an American train – in short, one by no means adapted to the ears of the gentle sex; especially a member of that sex who probably ran the local Watch Committee. It was, consequently, a somewhat damped Bertram Wooster whom the maid ushered into the drawing-room, and my pep was in no way augmented by the first sight I had of mine hostess. Mrs McCorkadale was what I would call a grim woman. Not so grim as my Aunt Agatha, perhaps, for that could hardly be expected, but certainly well up in the class of Jael the wife of Heber and the Madame Whoever-it– was who used to sit and knit at the foot of the guillotine during the French Revolution. She had a beaky nose, tight thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo. Seeing her steadily and seeing her whole, as the expression is, one marvelled at the intrepidity of Mr McCorkadale in marrying her – a man obviously whom nothing could daunt.

Obama’s narrative culminates in his month-long journey to Africa, where he talks to various relatives about who his dad really was, and then weeps at the man’s grave. It’s powerful stuff. But at first glance it’s a little hard for the reader to understand Obama’s depth of allegiance. His dad was, after all, a complete jerk. He married Kezia in Kenya and had two children with her. Before the second child was born, he abandoned his family to come to America. There he met Obama’s mother Ann, got her pregnant, and then married her, but without telling her he was already married. When Obama was two, his father abandoned him and his mother to go to Harvard; there he moved in with a teacher, Ruth Nidesand. Eventually he took Nidesand back to Africa, married her, and had two children with her. But he also rejoined his African wife, Kezia, and had two more children with her. Later in life he took up with still another woman, Jael Otieno, and impregnated her. The two of them planned to get married after the child was born, but the marriage never took place. By the time he was done, Barack Sr. managed a grand total of three wives, one wife-to-be, and eight children. He was a terrible husband and a worse father; he neglected virtually all his offspring, and one of his sons has accused him of domestic violence. In the words of Mark Ndesandjo, who is the son of Obama Sr. and Nidesand, “I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds and screams, and my father’s voice and my mother shouting. I remember one night when she ran out into the street and she didn’t know where to go.”11

We have so little in common, but we were both avid readers growing up. I read almost nonstop when I was little, and it saved me in school. I hated classes, hated teachers. They always wanted me to do things I didn't want to do. But because I was a reader, they knew I wasn't stupid, just different. They cut me slack. It got me through. Reading couldn't help me make friends, though. I never got the hang of it. I would talk to kids, and over the years a handful of them even seemed to like me enough to ask to come over, but after that first visit to the house they never lasted. Ma told me what I did wrong but I could never manage to do it right. 'Act interested in what they say,' she said, but they never said anything interesting. 'Don't talk too much,' she said, but it never seemed like too much to me. So it wasn't like people threw tomatoes at me, or dipped my pigtails in inkwells, or stood up to move their desks away from mine, but I never really managed to make friends that I could keep. And I got used to it. I got used to a lot of things. Writing extra papers to make up for falling short in class participation. Volunteering to do the planning and the typing up whenever we had group work assigned, because I knew I could never really work right with a group. And the coping always worked. Up until three years into college, where despite Ma's repeated demands to try harder, I stalled. Every semester since, I was always still trying to finish that last Oral Communications class, which I had repeatedly failed. This semester I only made it six weeks in before it became obvious I wouldn't pass. I think we'd both finally given up.

When Jael questioned her about what the whales said, Eroica usually replied, "They love me. They love the sea. They love each other. They love God." Always love was their message, and Jael knew her daughter was telling the truth as she heard it. Love was the truth, whether it came from a whale, a human, or God in heaven.

A la larga te das cuenta de que los amigos no existen y cuando pase no querrás verte rodeado de gente. -Enfriamiento Masivo

Una persona tiene todo que hacer en la vida, donde sea que esté. -Enfriamiento masivo

¿Y que si en vez de fingir demencia he estado fingiendo estar cuerda? -Enfriamiento masivo

So then,’ said Jael, ‘you’re establishing a plutocracy. You’re making us a land of traders and merchant princes. Then what of the future?’ Mallow lifted his gloomy face, and exclaimed fiercely, ‘What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems, as I have solved the one of today.

sector weren’t knocked over with compressed-air pistols. Jael, they’re getting ships from the Empire itself. Don’t open your mouth like a fool. I said the Empire! It’s still there, you know. It may be gone here in the Periphery but in the Galactic centre it’s still very much alive. And one false move means that it, itself, may be on our neck. That’s why I must be mayor and high priest. I’m the only man who knows how to fight the crisis.

I was so excited by that, thinking it was a sign that this child would be blessed. That she would be different. I didn’t stop to read the story of Jael in the Bible, not till much later. Maybe if I had read it, I mighta chose a different name. But probably not. What I look like going against six generations of tradition? We never talked about the stories behind the names. The name picked was the name given.

As I read verse twenty-one, I stopped. Jael, a woman who had been minding her own business, had come across an enemy of God, and she’d killed him. My heart felt as if it would grow wings and burst from my chest.

¡Pobre! Piensa que corriendo puede alejarse de la realidad. -Enfriamiento masivo

A la larga te das cuenta de que los amigos no existen y cuando pase no querrás verte rodeado de gente.

Una persona tiene todo que hacer en la vida, donde sea que esté.

¿Y que si en vez de fingir demencia he estado fingiendo estar cuerda?

¡Pobre! Piensa que corriendo puede alejarse de la realidad.

Las personas que le tienen pavor a la muerte son las más valientes a la hora de morir.

I'm completely out of control, and I can hear the beginnings of the chant, get/out/, but now that I'm not being touched maybe I can master it and I shut the world out: separating an orange into skinless sections. Peel it, but not with your fingers. Level off the top and bottom. Set it on the board. Remove the peel in strips with a paring knife, pushing down from the top to bottom with slow, curved strokes. Nick off all the white parts. Cup the cool, wet skinless fruit in your hand. Take care. Don't rush. Press the blade into the flesh of the orange, sink it down, a segment at a time, along the left side of the skin and then the right. Left and right. Left and right. As close as you can to the membrane. Press to the center with your knife, level and easy. If you cut right, the segment will fall out onto the board, triangular, gleaming. Left and right. Left and right. If you rush you'll cut yourself. Take care with it. Cut right along the seam, right where the sweet fruit meets the tough membrane. Let and right. Left and right. As close as you can.

I love it," I say. "So I learned it." It's an explanation that leaves a lot out. But I learned a long time ago that people don't really want explanations.

As strange as my life gets, it's just my life. I'm still in it. Whatever happens, I'm going to have to find a way to get by.

It preoccupies me until it's time to leave. It seems such the right expression of grief. I am sad, so in whatever small way I can, I will tear myself apart. They've taken what's on the inside and made it visible. If I thought it wouldn't be inappropriate I'd do it myself.

It's a French technique. Soups get screened, and sauces. Forced through a tamis or a chinois. Everything that comes out is smooth and all the rough parts get left behind, thrown away. I don't want to be screened.

Difficult, but not impossible. I am not impossible.

Alone doesn't just mean without people. It can mean without anything else. And maybe, even without putting a word on me, she's found a way to take away things I thought were mine. If this is the start I have no way to know when it will stop.

He has a key and could come back in, but I doubt he will. He doesn't want to be here any more than I want him here. We've failed. I've failed. I made a promise that I couldn't, didn't, keep.

The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren't they? The dead don't betray or harm. They've already done all they can do. I can't figure out what people mean or who they are or whether they can be trusted, so, forget them. Don't even try anymore. For now at least, forget the living.

I don't have to move into Amanda's house to be present in her family. Even though I'm not there physically all the time, I want them to have something that says, 'I'm out here. I'm okay. I love you.' I want them to bite into a cookie, and think of me, and smile. Food is love. Food has a power. I knew it in my mind, but now I know it in my heart.

I need something to calm me. Something sweet and rich and decadent. Not chocolate, not pie. There it is. Tres leches cake. A white cake waiting in a white porcelain baking dish. Cream pouring down, not a drizzle, but a thick, steady, heavy stream. Soaking into the dry sponge of the cake. Being drunk up hungrily. Seeming to disappear, but changing everything. Texture. Taste. The cake can't stay the way it is. Without all three milks it's too dry. It has to change.

Gert has a voice like the poppy seed filling of hamantaschen, inky and sweet, but it's her Cuban pastries I really remember. Even now, remembering, the taste of her coconut turnovers fills my mouth. Creamy, papery white filling. Rich yellow pastry falling apart in flakes.

hero-worship of one parent over another is normal but can still be destructive

I walk out into the hall and remember when Ma chose the paint. Mountain Sage out here, Irish Oatmeal in their bedroom, the master bathroom in Ice Blue Gloss. She gave me the samples from the paint store and I cut them out in little identical squares, playing the game of remembering which was which, knowing every color by its name. The carpets on the second floor are soft under my bare feet. The next room down is Amanda's, a pale buttery yellow called Chardonnay on the walls, boxes of shoes still under the bed.

Think of other foods, other meals. The most complicated menu planning I can think of, my truly desperate resort. The imaginary dinner party I've always wanted to throw, the seven-course "Continental Cuisine" menu, with a dish for each continent. One, the amuse-bouche, ceviche of scallops and shrimp, with the leche de tigre served alongside in a tall shot glass, to wake the appetite. Two, a Moroccan soup, lentils, rich with cardamom and cumin and pepper. Three, the fish course, miso-glazed cod. Four, a white, barely lemon-tinted sorbet, representing Antarctica, because who cooks penguin? Five, Australian lamb, from Paula Wolfert's seven-hour-lamb recipe, so tender it melts in the mouth like butter instead of meat. Six, a small triangle of classically American apple pie, the crust enriched with white cheddar from Vermont. Seven, three European cheeses: tangy Manchego with membrillo, creamy asked Morbier with red pepper honey, sweet Gorgonzola Dolce on-

Amanda is wrong. I do have an instinct about people, and it tells me David is just fine. I wonder if he doesn't cook because his wife did all the cooking until she died. I wonder what she was like. Like Ma, maybe, capable and in charge, always repeating rules and being protective. I felt smothered sometimes but I know Ma always tried to do what was right for me. One of her unsuccessful lessons in how to make and keep friends was 'Be a little mysterious.' Of course I could never find the right level of mystery. If I asserted myself, she said, 'Don't be too insistent,' and if I hung back too much, it was 'Don't be such a little wallflower.' I preferred to think of myself as a cat. If I think of my behavior as cat behavior instead of people behavior, it pretty much always makes sense. Maybe that's part of why I love Midnight. Maybe she reminds me of me.

HEARTBREAK IS STUPID and impossible. Hearts don’t break. Hearts squeeze, they wrench, they ache, they shrivel. Hearts pull apart in wet chunks like canned tomatoes. I

Maybe I would get along with everyone if I only saw them for three hours once a week. My mother, my sister, they were always around too much. There were too many opportunities for me to screw things up. Dad I saw less, and he liked me more. There could be a connection.

I will take a new approach to death, because what is important about death is not the dead. It’s the living. Those of us left behind.

I decide if I can't do anything right, I might as well not do anything I don't want to do.

I can't force everything into the arrangement I'd like. I can't use denial to make everything simple.

Jael feared it was true, that she was shallow, dissolute. Trendy.

That’s why I must be mayor and high priest. I’m the only man who knows how to fight the crisis.” Jael swallowed dryly. “How? What are you going to do?” “Nothing.” Jael smiled uncertainly. “Really! All of that!” But Mallow’s answer was incisive. “When I’m boss of this Foundation, I’m going to do nothing. One hundred percent of nothing, and that is the secret of this crisis.

Geçmişinden bir ses kulaklarına çalındı. "Sen ona ait değilsin." Annesinin sesiydi. Gür, melodik ve aksanlı. "Bana da değilsin. Sen kendine aitsin." Hiç ağlamamıştı. Festival. Onu tutmaya, muhafızlara karşı koymaya çalışmamıştı. Ona veda bile edememişti. Vedalar kaderin akışını değiştirir, demişti Jael.

What if greatness only happens when we're together, when we don't let them pull us apart?

Start where you are. Begin. Commence. Get going. Crank up. Initiate. Mobilize. Start where you are.” “Never be intimidated by external indicators. The mortgage rate’s too high. Weather too hot. Your body too sick. You think you’re too young, too old, too black, too white. Some of us are so discouraged by where [we] want to be. It appears so distant and so far away and so unlikely. The dreams seem so expansive and the horizons seem so far. It feels like you won’t ever get it done.” “But Jael told me to tell you start where you are.”6 “You’ve gotten stuck in your reality at the expense of your possibility.” “Subversive shifts begin with one small beginning.” “Don’t stay hamstrung by your yesterdays, harnessed and muzzled by who hurt you, who failed you and who dropped you and who quit on you and who cheated on you and who left you.” “Bust the move and start where you are.

My first Bible was one of those Precious Moments volumes that boasted blond, doe-eyed David on the cover, two baby lambs resting in his arms, and a sparrow perched on his staff, the shepherd boy blissfully unaware that in a few short years he'd be delivering 200 Philistine foreskins to his father-in-law as a bride price. Inside were all my favorite biblical heroes and heroines depicted as children. (Well, almost all of them. The artists failed to include Jael, whose precious moment involved assassinating a general by driving a tent peg through his skull.)

Most blessed of women be Jael, Wife of Heber the Kenite, Most blessed of women in tents. 25 He asked for water, she offered milk; In a princely bowl she brought him curds. 26 Her [left] hand reached for the tent pin, Her right for the workmen’s hammer. She struck Sisera, crushed his head, Smashed and pierced his temple. 27 At her feet he sank, lay outstretched, At her feet he sank, lay still; Where he sank, there he lay—destroyed.

Jael said grimly, "You're overconfident, Mallow. You're ignoring the possibility of a popular rebellion." Mallow looked up, grim in his turn, "Once and for all, Jael, there is no possibility of a popular rebellion." I'm sure of the Seldon crisis and the historical validity of their solutions, externally and internally. There are some things I didn't tell Suit right now. He tried to control the Foundation itself by religious forces as he controlled the outer worlds, and he failed, which is the surest sign that in the Seldon scheme, religion is played out. "Economic control worked differently. And to paraphrase that famous Salvor Hardin quotation of yours, it's a poor nuclear blaster that won't point both ways. If Korell prospered with our trade, so did we. If Korellian factories fail without our trade; and if the prosperity of the outer worlds vanishes with commercial isolation; so will our factories fail and our prosperity vanish. "And there isn't a factory, not a trading center. not a shipping line that isn't under my control; that I couldn't squeeze to nothing if Sutt attempts revolutionary propaganda. Where his propaganda succeeds, or even looks as though it might succeed, I will make certain that prosperity dies. Where it fails, prosperity will continue, because my factories will remain fully staffed. "So by the same reasoning which makes me sure that the Korellians will revolt in favor of prosperity, I am sure we will not revolt against it. The game will be played out to its end." "So then," said Jael, "you're establishing a plutocracy. You're making us a land of traders and merchant princes. Then what of the future?" Mallow lifted his gloomy face, and exclaimed fiercely, "What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems, as I have solved the one of today.

Grief was like the sun, Jael realised. You could never escape it. It kept rising, no matter how many times you thought it had gone away.

Received this very flattering review of my new book The Blind Will See from Jules on Amazon.au: Jules 5.0 out of 5 stars Another brilliant book from this fabulous Author! Reviewed in Australia on 10 July 2020 Verified Purchase I loved I am Jael and now she has written another masterpiece. Ms Kendig has taken on Wickham and changed his destiny with this book. ODC found their love earlier on than the original P&P but that allows for other characters to be given a chance to shine. Well done and all I can say is please write faster!

Luck just has bumps and curves.

Joy starts right here, in your own heart.

That's the slow death you don't see coming. The hardest one to fight. The one that comes for your mind.

I don't know if I have happiness, but I found purpose. I suppose. That's what drive me. Perhaps you can find that too. If you ask me, purpose is far more useful than happiness. Happiness is like sugar, sweet but quick to go. But purpose is really something babygirl, purpose gets you through whatever comes.

Struggle makes you stronger.

It's fine to be alone. It's fine to be different. It's fine to show emotions. It's fine to cry. Because it's fine.

I once knew a young journalist from Tacoma, Washington,” Jael continued, “who was crushed when the novel he’d spent the last two years writing was rejected by every publisher he submitted it to. He wanted to give up, but then I told him of another author I knew who considered quitting writing—this one was a woman–due to suffering endless rejections as no one wanted to read her rabbit-in-a-waist-jacket story. At my suggestion, she decided to take matters into her own hands and self-publish her books. She became a household name and created what became the National Trust in the United Kingdom. “Hearing that, the America writer persisted, and his book became one of greatest science fiction novels of all time. I have signed first editions of all his books at home. I tell you that story to say this: you’re a better writer than either of them, my friend. Better by many orders of magnitude. Persevere, Sergeant. Persevere. You owe it to yourself, to your friends, your family, and finally, to prosperity. Because what are stories but anthropology of the soul?