Junction Quotes

We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.

People have often accused me of inconsistency but i feel that i have always, at any given junction, done the same thing. Exactly what i pleased.

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

This is how....life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.

The first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station.

You know," Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, "I've heard the saying 'That sucks' for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.

Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?" Oh GOD. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to THEM and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, "Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo," than, "Super, thanks.

The 114 Chakras are not just the junction points but the divine hidden dimensions of higher consciousness. Body and mind are just the manifestation of those energy centers.

The meek shall inherit the earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.

Let's get really fucked up and full of sentimental despair and then finally decide life, despite every heartbreak and anguished cry, is worth each pulse and breath.

The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turn-off, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate.

Loneliness is here. It molds our souls, but also our bodies. Right inferior temporal gyri, posterior cingulates, temporoparietal junctions, retrosplenial cortices, dorsal raphe. Lonely people’s brains are shaped differently. And I just want mine to . . . not be. I want a healthy, plump, symmetrical cerebrum. I want it to work diligently, impeccably, like the extraordinary machine it’s supposed to be. I want it to do as it’s told.

The path to the three-way junction is one I’d take ten times over, no matter where it leads because loving Arianna Johnson is worth the risk. Being loved by her is priceless. The time was worth the torment.

We believe and we hold our beliefs to be true and sacred until the day we discover that we were duped. The end of belief is a challenging moment. You feel lonely, unconnected, with nothing to hang on. Your life becomes empty and aimless. You curse the day doubt entered your mind but you cannot undo the damage. You need to find a new direction for your life, something new to hang your hope on to continue living. And most of the time that thing is you. At that junction in life you will need to believe in you to continue living.

I will Basquiat the canvas of your body like a Broadway Junction wall…and Gordon Parks you for those dark midnights when your scent fades.

I have a natural tendency to go away when told to do so. Do you really want me to?

The truth exists at the junction between good and bad.

It's quite commonplace for a young man to fall in love and equally commonplace for him to be rejected, but come what may, I'll always be fond of you.

I can’t stop and all I have is a word addiction. Conjunction-Junction really fucked me up as a kid. This is all childhood trauma that’s manifesting itself in word needles and I can’t find enough good veins.

Why are the ones who are too good to be true always being true to someone else?

The door to the primary power junction was reinforced. A red border was painted around the frame, with warnings in half a dozen languages that all meant Please be careful. There’s a lot of things in here that we’ll have to fix after they finish killing you.

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance. People with good judgment weigh the assurance of a comfortable living represented by the mariners’ certificates that declare them masters of all ships, whether steam or sail, and masters of all oceans and all navigable rivers, and do not forsake such work in order to learn English and write books signed Joseph Conrad. People who have had hard lives but somehow found themselves fetched up in executive positions with prosperous West Coast oil firms do not drink and wench themselves out of such comfy billets in order in their middle age to write books as Raymond Chandler; that would be poor judgment. No one on the payroll of a New York newspaper would get drunk and chuck it all to become a free-lance writer, so there was no John O’Hara. When you have at last progressed to the junction that enforces the decision of whether to proceed further, by sending your stuff out, and refusing to remain a wistful urchin too afraid to beg, and you have sent the stuff, it is time to pause and rejoice.

Golf sits in that beautiful junction between perfection and frustration.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT! Due to the cumulative effect of collective sharing and loving intentionality, the Shame Train has derailed at the junction of Self-Belief and Divine Uniqueness. The engine couldn’t run on self-hatred any longer. All formerly shamed passengers please disembark the train. You are free. A new train—fueled by healthy self-regard and sacred purpose—will be along momentarily to pick you up. No tickets required on this self-love train—just a growing faith in your sacred magnificence. All aboard!

He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled into it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station

You're just going to stand there?" I asked. Uriel folded his arms and tapped his chin with one fingertip. "Mmmm. It does seem that perhaps she deserves some form of aid. Perhaps if I'd had the presence of mind to see to it that some sort of agent had been sent to balance the scales, to giver her that one tiny bit of encouragement, that one flicker of inspiration that turned the tide..." He shook his head sadly. "Things might be different now." And, as if on cue, Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer, limped out of the lower hallway and into the electrical-junction room, with Sir Stuart's shade at his right hand. Mort took a look around, his dark eyes intent, and then his gaze locked onto Molly. "Hey," he croaked. "You. Arrogant bitch ghost.

I really didn’t mean to hurt him. But we’re all means to an end. And he was no exception.

The mind is the shadow of the light it seeks.

You spend so much time hating the fact that April behaves more like a mother than a sister, but you're the one who's holding onto the apron strings every time she tries to cut them.

You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about a gun fight in an Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter could—" "Oh, well," said I, "that's different. Arizona is a long way from New York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair of chaparreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn't be noticed until the usual error-sharp from around McAdams Junction isolates the erratum and writes in to the papers about it." (from "The Plutonian Fire")

first heard the song “Tuxedo Junction” in 1941. I was an MP in Colorado, pulling guard duty at Lowry Field for the Army Air Corps. Most people think it was Glenn Miller who first made that song famous, but it was a black bandleader named Erskine Hawkins.

Human beings are not made to take shortcuts,... You're to live your life, moment by moment. Your life isn't here to entertain you - it's to be lived.

Keeping one's guests supplied with liquor is the first law of hospitality.

Don’t let anyone tell you what you cannot do, Edward, not even your inner voice. "World's End", From Red Junction Book

She then threw herself into her work for the City of Grand Junction in the northwest corner of Colorado, burying herself in

[M]an is not an island, he is more like a spaghetti junction.

Wherever did they find you?" "At the junction of hard luck and bad times," I answer. It's something that my momma says.

junction at the top of the stairs. She gave a curious glance down General Tilney’s corridor, but she

Maybe he was what Lucian would have turned out to be if the old sheriff hadn't have lived in such interesting times. A couple of years in a Japanese prison camp might be just what Turk needed. But I didn't have a bridge over the river Kwai for him to build so we had to settle for Powder Junction.

Common right is nought but the protection of all radiating over the right of each. This protection of all is termed Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these aggregated sovereignties is called Society. This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence comes what is called the social tie.

You have stood at this junction before You will stand at this junction again And if you pause you can ask yourself Which way to turn You can turn away from your own sadness And run the race named revenge You will run that tired track again and again Or you can admit your own pain And walk the path that ends In this direction lies freedom, my friend I can show you where hope and wholeness make their homes But you can’t push past your anguish on your way there To find the path to peace You will have to meet your pain And speak its name

We thought Bugles and a Tiger and its sequel, The Road Past Mandalay, plus Bhowani Junction, which was made into a movie starring Ava Gardner as a half-caste (or Chi Chi) East Indian and Stewart Granger playing an Indian Army

It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.

Life is a long road with lots of junctions and every time you chose to go one way, you may just have easily have gone the other. We don't make choices so much as choices are made like a new fashion we slip into without realising.

Bob,” I said, louder. “Are you saying it… it ate my magic?” Bob got a defensive look on his face. “Not all of it. I woke you up as quick as I could. Harry, don’t worry about it, you’ll heal. Sure, you might be down for a couple of months. Or, um, years. Well, decades, possibly, but that’s only a very outside chance—” I cut him off with a slash of my hand. “He ate part of my power,” I said. “Does that mean that the Nightmare is stronger?” “Well, naturally, Harry. You are what you eat.” “Dammit,” I snarled, pressing one hand against my forehead. “Okay, okay. We’ve really got to find this thing now.” I started pacing back and forth. “If it’s using my power, it makes me responsible for what it does with it.” Bob scoffed. “Harry, that’s irrational.” I shot him a look. “That doesn’t make it any less true,” I snapped. “Okay,” Bob said, meekly. “We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.

Allahabad, that is, the City of God, one of the most venerated in India, being built at the junction of the two sacred rivers, Ganges and Jumna, the waters of which attract pilgrims from every part of the peninsula. The Ganges, according to the legends of the Ramayana, rises in heaven, whence, owing to Brahma's agency, it descends to the earth.

Certainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.

I don't know a fucking thing. That must mean I'm finally sane and that's an excellent place to start going crazy again.

The main skill is to keep from getting lost. Since the roads are used only by local people who know them by sight nobody complains if the junctions aren’t posted. And often they aren’t. When they are it’s usually a small sign hiding unobtrusively in the weeds and that’s all. County-road-sign makers seldom tell you twice. If you miss that sign in the weeds that’s your problem, not theirs. Moreover, you discover that the highway maps are often inaccurate about county roads. And from time to time you find your “county road” takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer’s backyard. So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn’t show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to “get somewhere” it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.

Time is such a crazy thing, a junction of every second turning into minutes then hours, and finally into a lifetime. More precious than gold, money, or talent. In the end, it all comes down to how long we still have left to live. And it’s never enough. 

Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: 'I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.' From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

Air and earth form an anthill traversed, level upon level, by roads live with traffic. Air trains, ground trains, underground trains, people mailed through tubes special-delivery, and chains of cars race along horizontally, while express elevators pump masses of people vertically from one traffic level to another; at the junctions, people leap from one vehicle to the next, instantly sucked in and snatched away by the rhythm of it, which makes a syncope, a pause, a little gap of twenty seconds during which a word might be hastily exchanged with someone else. Questions and answers synchronize like meshing gears; everyone has only certain fixed tasks.

He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

If my years have taught me anything, it's this: there are many roads to God and all men and women have a right to choose their own. And yet...there are those who want to set a tollbooth at every junction, demanding that you pay and pay and pay, that you walk only on the road they have walked, the only one they say is open.

listen to your heart for guidance and be guided by its message of comfort or discomfort. Your heart is the junction point between your mind and your body. If the choice feels comfortable in your body, move into it with confidence. If the choice feels uncomfortable, pause and see the consequences of your action with your inner vision. Honoring the guidance that is provided by your body’s intelligence will help you make the most evolutionary choices for yourself and those in your life.

This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.

You have got a sharp tongue, haven't you honey? You'll have to watch it or you'll go to a lonely spinster's grave.

There are more good women in the world than there are men worthy of them!

Let's get really fucked up and full of sentimental despair and then finally decide life, despite every heartbreak and anguished cry, is worth each pulse and breath

most reviews are written by morons about morons. sensibility is at a premium in american culture these days.

Jesus was “the meeting place of eternity and time, the blending of deity and humanity, the junction of heaven and earth.” His

And as they turned onto the M40 motorway at Junction 9, near Bicester, not one of them even noticed the oversized helicopter that had suddenly appeared in the sky about a mile behind, like some strange, primeval monster. They didn’t see how almost at once, it began to swoop down towards them, trailing something that looked, at least from a distance, like a huge claw…

The scale of the laying of mines in Italy and in North Africa cannot be imagined. At the Kismaayo-Afmadu road junction, 260 mines were found. There were 300 at the Omo River Bridge area. On June 30, 1941, South African sappers laid 2,700 Mark 11 mines in Mersa Matruh in one day. Four months later the British cleared Mersa Matruh of 7,806 mines and placed them elsewhere.

People who work in slaughterhouses know that there is a spot on an animal’s forehead to be found by drawing an imaginary line from the right ear to the left eye and another from the left ear to the right eye. They aim the killing blow an inch or two above the junction of this X. My uncle taught me that. He didn’t work in a slaughterhouse, though. He just knew how to kill things.

He reached the foot of the embankment, and waved with one arm, shouting at the few cars moving along the westbound carriageway. None of the drivers could see him, let alone hear his dry-throated croak, and Maitland stopped, conserving his strength. lie tried to climb the embankment, but within a few steps collapsed in a heap on the muddy slope. Deliberately, he turned his back to the motorway and for the first time began to inspect the island. 'Maitland, poor man, you're marooned here like Crusoe - If you don't look out you'll be beached here for ever...' He had spoken no more than the truth. This patch of abandoned ground left over at the junction of three motorway routes was literally a deserted island. Angry with himself, Maitland lifted the crutch to strike this meaningless soil.

Remember, your wishes are on the ways God created. If you miss the way, you are automatically missing that great treasure! Be on the way of the Lord and your wishes will meet you at a chosen junction!

There was a time when wen we did not form all our words as we do now, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word "&" was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it. Humanity learned to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails. What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us, but to one place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”? An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs’ width from where we began. & tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it’s going, as we all must do.

It only remained," he said, "that the noble Chiefs assembled, laying aside every lesser consideration, should unite, heart and hand, in the common cause; send the fiery cross through their clans, in order to collect their utmost force, and form their junction with such celerity as to leave the enemy no time, either for preparation, or recovery from the panic which would spread at the first sound of their pibroch.

Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride--the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes--from two-fifty to four-fifteen--and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa.

The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or ‘de-minded’.

Early youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting before a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.

One cold night in December 1941 I won a dance contest jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction” at the Denver Dance Hall. The next thing I knew I was on a troop train at four in the morning heading for the West Coast to defend California. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I just turned twenty-one and I was 6′2″. Four years later when the war ended I got my discharge one day before I turned twenty-five; I was 6′ 4″. I had grown two inches.

Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the junction between those who think and those who suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving stones, nor of timbers, nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows. Here misery encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with you and you will be born again with me. From the heavy embrace of all desolations springs faith. Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and immortality will mingle and make up our death. Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn.

I read somewhere that we never completely forget a thing, that there are the imprints of everything we’ve ever seen or done, all of these tiny details at the bottoms of our minds, like pebbles and weeds that never surface from a river bottom.

Paul Chehade is dedicated to serves the unfortunate, regardless of a person's religion, race, ethnicity, or gender, as a demonstration of God's unconditional love for all people, helping communities worldwide. Ethical junction making choices easy.

I do not remember if it was the smell of the land, of the haystacks outside the barn, or the warm breath that the horse exhaled on my t-shirt, but there was one moment when I finally felt at home. It happened at Louise’s farm, called Infinity Farms, an isolated place a few miles south of Stoneville. A miniscule dot on the map of Oklahoma’s desolate land. "Oklahoma", from Red Juntion Book

The Marquis stepped between Richard and Door. 'You can't go back to your old home or your old job or your old life,' he said to Richard almost gently. 'None of those things exist. Up there, you don't exist.' They had reached a junction: a place where three tunnels came together. Door and Hunter set off along one of them, the one that no water was coming down, and they did not look back. The Marquis lingered. 'You'll just have to make the best of it down here,' he said to Richard, 'in the sewers and the magic and the dark.

We believe and we hold our beliefs to be true and sacred until the day we discover that we were duped. The end of belief is a challenging moment. You feel lonely, unconnected, with nothing to hang on. Your life becomes empty and aimless. You curse the day doubt entered your mind but you cannot undo the damage. You need to find a new direction for your life, something new to hang your hope on to continue living. And most of the time that thing is you. At that junction in life you will need to believe in yourself to continue living.

I couldn't motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn't remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon's shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back - a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.

And so Emma Morley walked home in the evening light, trailing her disappointment behind her. The day was cooling off now, and she shivered as she felt something in the air, an unexpected shudder of anxiety that ran the length of her spine, and was so intense as to make her stop walking for a moment. Fear of the future, she thought. She found herself at the imposing junction of George Street and Hanover Street as all around her people hurried home from work or out to meet friends or lovers, all with a sense of purpose and direction. And here she was, twenty-two and clueless and sloping back to a dingy flat, defeated once again. ‘What are you doing to do with your life?’ In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever, teachers. her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer. The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her. How would she ever fill them all? She began walking again, south towards The Mound. ‘Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and be courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at…something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.

Some of the city legislators, whose concern for appropriate names and the maintenance of the city's landmarks was the principal part of their political life, saw to it that "Doctor Street" was never used in any official capacity. And since they knew that only Southside residents kept it up, they had notices posted in the stores, barbershops, and restaurants in that part of the city saying that the avenue running northerly and southerly from Shore Road fronting the lake to the junction of routes 6 and 2 leading to Pennsylvania, and also running parallel to and between Rutherford Avenue and Broadway, had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street. It was a genuinely clarifying public notice because it gave Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please the city legislators as well. They called it Not Doctor Street, and were inclined to call the charity hospital at its northern end No Mercy Hospital since it was 1931, on the day following Mr. Smith's leap from its cupola, before the first colored expectant mother was allowed to give birth inside its wards and not on its steps.

As I walk behind her down the halls, it happens. I shrink inch by inch until I am no longer an adult, but a baby toddling along in a comically oversized business suit. I have been pretending to be a grown-up this whole time. My briefcase is full of milk: I have been found out. 'This, then, is home. What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place? Is it the intersection of rigidity and comfort--a junction of familiartiy that you curl into? Is it a feeling? I don't know, but I'm being hugged hard against it, and I can't tell when I'll be let go.

Mechanical stress on the bone produced a piezoelectric signal from the collagen. The signal was biphasic, switching polarity with each stress-and-release. The signal was rectified by the PN junction between apatite and collagen. This coherent signal did more than merely indicate that stress had occurred. Its strength told the cells how strong the stress was,and its polarity told them what direction it came from. Osteogenic cells where the potential was negative would be stimulated to grow more bone, while those in the positive area would close up shop and dismantle their matrix. If growth and resorption were considered as two aspects of one process, the electrical signal acted as an analog code to transfer information about stress to the cells and trigger the appropriate response.Now we knew how stress was converted into an electrical signal. We had discovered a transducer, a device that converts other forces into electricity or vice versa.

It's a child's world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I roamed when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ant's nest. The newt pond. The oak covered in marble galls. The birches by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I'd run to check the place where once I'd caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since.

Listen, does your boy know how to work? Try to teach him to work, to sacrifice, to fight. He better learn now, because he’s going to have to do it some day. Lloyd Hale was a sophomore on that first team we took to Junction, and he asked me one time what I meant by “fight.” Well, I don’t mean fistfight, like we used to do back in Arkansas, I told him. I mean, some morning when you’ve been out of school twenty years and you wake up and your house has burned down and your mother is in the hospital and the kids are all sick and you’re overdrawn at the bank and your wife has run off with the drummer, what are you going to do? Throw in?

The Middle Ages in Europe are traditionally seen as the time of Crusades, chivalry and the growing power of the papacy, but all this was little more than a sideshow to the titanic struggles taking place further east. The tribal system had led the Mongols to the brink of global domination, having conquered almost the whole continent of Asia. Europe and North Africa yawned open; it was striking then that the Mongol leadership focused not on the former but on the latter. Put simply, Europe was not the best prize on offer. All that stood in the way of Mongol control of the Nile, of Egypt’s rich agricultural output and its crucial position as a junction on the trade routes in all directions was an army commanded by men who were drawn from the very same steppes: this was not just a struggle for supremacy, it was the triumph of a political, cultural and social system. The battle for the medieval world was being fought between nomads from Central and eastern Asia.

3.    Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; [Perhaps the word “balk” falls short of expressing the full force of the Chinese word, which implies not an attitude of defense, whereby one might be content to foil the enemy’s stratagems one after another, but an active policy of counter-attack. Ho Shih puts this very clearly in his note: “When the enemy has made a plan of attack against us, we must anticipate him by delivering our own attack first.”] the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; [Isolating him from his allies. We must not forget that Sun Tzu, in speaking of hostilities, always has in mind the numerous states or principalities into which the China of his day was split up.] the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; [When he is already at full strength.] and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities. 4.    The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided.

order a prawn curry,

But sometimes there’s the family you’re born into, and then there’s the family you feel most at home with.

The world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power. The earth has lived through several evolutionary stages - but following always natural laws. It is presently experiencing a new one, which follows constructive, conscious, and no less elemental laws. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat.

Katie shrugged. “I took a detour.” “Damn it, Katie. You need to be more careful. You’re pregnant, remember?” “Just a second ago you were talking about jamming a spyglass up my hoo-ha. Now you’re going to act protective?

So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to 'get somewhere' it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.

I wanted someone to hold me close so I slide across and snuggled in tight and said, 'Hold me.' He did, and it was tender and truly sweet, but without a trace of that wild carnal edge you would have to cross if you want to get so close together you can't tell each other apart. I pushed it. I said, 'I want to get closer. I want you to love who I am.' Love doesn't do much for the powers of explanation, but since Love has never asked for one itself, that seems fair enough.

But revenue from slave labor was only part of the profitability of slavery. Selling slaves was part of the commerce at every little Southern junction. Most farmers who had slaves bought or sold them at one time or another. “In slavery, niggers and mules was white folk’s living,” recalled an unnamed formerly enslaved woman in Tennessee, who said that her former master “would sell his own children by slave women just like he would any others. Just since he was making money…. My mother sold for $1,000.

Sitting in the shadows next to the Volvo was Mr. FBI’s pickup. Inside of the cab, his lit cigarette burned red then faded to a pale orange. She paused next to his open window, slipping on the jean jacket she’d borrowed from Claire. Old Hank Williams Sr.’s singing Your Cheatin’ Heart came from his speakers.

The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?” Diomedes said, “Aren’t men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intellectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant.” Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how often it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking patience, he said: “Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works. Take me, for example. Look around: I employed partials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it’s the same with me and the Sophotechs. “Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, an hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more valuable—exploring the depth of abstract mathematics, or inventing a new scientific miracle, anything at all (provided that it will earn more in that second than I earn in an hour)—then the competition is not making me redundant. The Sophotech still needs me and receives the benefit of my labor. Since I am going to get the benefit of every new invention and new miracle put out on the market, I want to free up as many of those seconds of Sophotech time as my humble labor can do. “And I get the lion’s share of the benefit from the swap. I only save him a second of time; he creates wonder upon wonder for me. No matter what my fear of or distaste for Sophotechs, the forces in the marketplace, our need for each other, draw us together. “So you see why I say that not a thing the Silent One said about Sophotechs made sense. I do not understand how they could have afforded to hate each other. Machines don’t make us redundant; they increase our efficiency in every way. And the bids of workers eager to compete for Sophotech time creates a market for merely human work, which it would not be efficient for Sophotechs to underbid.

When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and—possibly—the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires. We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)

One of Sherrington's greatest pupils, Sir John Eccles, held similar views. Eccles won a Nobel Prize for his seminal contributions to our understanding of how nerve cells communicate across synapses, or nerve junctions. In his later years, he worked toward a deeper understanding of the mechanisms mediating the interaction of mind and brain-including the elusive notion of free will. Standard neurobiology tells us that tiny vesicles in the nerve endings contain chemicals called neurotransmitters; in response to an electrical impulse, some of the vesicles release their contents, which cross the synapse and transmit the impulse to the adjoining neuron. In 1986 Eccles proposed that the probability of neurotransmitter release depended on quantum mechanical processes, which can be influenced by the intervention of the mind. This, Eccles said, provided a basis for the action of a free will.

—and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu." "Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of—" "No, no, no!" Her voice was as high as a harpy's. "Don't go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?" She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. "Madame, I'm not positive I follow." "Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?" "I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in—" "Oh, come off it!" Madame Kagle shrilled. "People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can't begin to foresee or understand?" "What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?" "The pain." She glared. "The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we're afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying—the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unless we experience it." She slurped champagne in the silence. She eyed him defiantly. "Well, Father? What have you got to say?" Discreetly Father Bleu coughed into his closed fist. "Theologically, Madame, I find the attempt to separate the mystical act of dying into neat little compartments rather a matter of hairsplitting. And furthermore—" "If that's how you feel," she interrupted, "you're just not thinking it out." "My good woman!" said Father Bleu gently. "Pay attention to me!" Madame Wanda Kagle glared furiously. "I say you pay attention! Because you have never stopped to think about it, have you? If death resembles going to sleep, why, that's an idea your mind can get hold of, isn't it? You may be afraid of it, yes. Afraid of the end of everything. But at least you can get hold of some notion of something of what it's like. Sleep. But can you get hold of anything of what it must feel like to experience the most agonizing of deaths? Your head popping open like that bootboy's tonight, say? A thousand worms of pain inside every part of you for a second long as eternity? Can you grasp that? No, you can't, Father Bleu. And that's what death is at it's worst—the unknown, the possibly harrowing pain ahead." She clamped her lips together smugly. She held out her champagne glass for a refill. A woman in furs clapped a hand over her fashionably green lips and rushed from the group. Though puzzled, Joy was still all eyes and ears. "Even your blessed St. Paul bears me out, Father." The priest glanced up, startled. "What?" "The first letter to the Corinthians, if I remember. The grave has a victory, all right. But it's death that has the sting." In the pause the furnace door behind her eyes opened wide, and hell shone out. "I know what I'm talking about, Father. I've been there." Slowly she closed her fingers, crushing the champagne glass in her hand. Weeping, blood drooling from her palm down her frail veined arms, she had to be carried out. The party broke up at once.

Bell resisted selling Texas Instruments a license. “This business is not for you,” the firm was told. “We don’t think you can do it.”38 In the spring of 1952, Haggerty was finally able to convince Bell Labs to let Texas Instruments buy a license to manufacture transistors. He also hired away Gordon Teal, a chemical researcher who worked on one of Bell Labs’ long corridors near the semiconductor team. Teal was an expert at manipulating germanium, but by the time he joined Texas Instruments he had shifted his interest to silicon, a more plentiful element that could perform better at high temperatures. By May 1954 he was able to fabricate a silicon transistor that used the n-p-n junction architecture developed by Shockley. Speaking at a conference that month, near the end of reading a thirty-one-page paper that almost put listeners to sleep, Teal shocked the audience by declaring, “Contrary to what my colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors, I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket.” He proceeded to dunk a germanium transistor connected to a record player into a beaker of hot oil, causing it to die, and then did the same with one of his silicon transistors, during which Artie Shaw’s “Summit Ridge Drive” continued to blare undiminished. “Before the session ended,” Teal later said, “the astounded audience was scrambling for copies of the talk, which we just happened to bring along.”39 Innovation happens in stages. In the case of the transistor, first there was the invention, led by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal. Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step in the innovation process.