L Single Quotes

You’re such an ass. Has…anyone ever told you that?” He flashed a genuinely amused smile. “Oh, Kitten, every single day of my blessed life.

Each night I lie and dream about the one Who kissed me and awakened my desire I spent a single hour with him alone And since that hour, my days are layed with fire.

Yeah, tell me I’m a bottle of single malt scotch, she thought. That’s the way to my heart.

I Ignore the unwelcome stab of disappointment. Why do I want to spend every single minute with this controlling sex god? Oh yes, I've fallen in love with him, and he can fly.

I nodded, wondering how one person could single-handedly ruin everything within a minute. It was a talent.

Hell, I’d keep her in Bubble Wrap if it weren’t so damn creepy and also inconvenient, considering I had a terrible habit of obsessively popping the damn things until not a single bubble was left.

Fuck, Avery. You think I don't want you? There's not a single part of you that I don't want, you understand? I want to be on you and inside of you. I want you against the wall, on the couch, in your bed, in my bed, and every fucking place I can possibly think of, and trust me, I have a vast imagination when it comes to these kinds of things. Don't ever doubt that I want you. That is not what this is about.

It is better to stay single and wait for the one that makes sense then to marry someone that makes absolutely no sense. The moment you settle is when the one person that makes all the sense in the world shows up and Satan sits back and enjoys your spiritual meltdown.

Love...who needed love? As long as she had her books and her friends and an occasional hookup, she was perfectly content.

Make sure to tell our baby that his father loves him every day of his life, just like I will always love you every single day.

I stared at him in disbelief and sputtered, "You can't - Get off!" One single brown arched up. "I can't get off? Oh, I most definitely can get of.

There is no side of you that is not as beautiful as the other half. Not a single inch isn’t stunning.” His lashes lifted, and the intensity in his stare held me captive. “That was true the first time I said it to you, and it is still the truth today and tomorrow.

Never let your fear of the unknown and things being too difficult make your choices for you in life. One of the saddest lessons in life is finding out that your fear made the situation worse than what it was and a braver person stole the dream you gave up on.

The people that truly love us in life don't fight for us to remain a doormat for others.

You don't walk away to prove your worth. You walk away because you allowed someone else to dictate your value and you found yourself believing it.

I wanted Kat out. Every cell of my being demanded that I protect her, even though I knew she was hella capable of doing so herself, but I wanted her far away from here. Hell, I'd keep her in Bubble Wrap if it weren't so damn creepy and also inconvenient, considering I had a terrible habit of obsessively popping the damn things until not a single bubble was left.

Never allow yourself to become a choice in any relationship. The moment you do is when you have reduced your loved one's affections to a daily biological question: Should I take a dump here or wait till I get home?

As much as I get sick of eating Mexican food every single day of my life, if heaven existed, I know it would smell like fried tortillas.

Don’t,” Ash cut me off as he spun around. “Not a single word.” I scrambled to my feet. “Excuse me?” “In case you have trouble counting, that is two words.

They had been a couple for so long that everyone thought of them as Tom-and-Jenny, a single unit.

Here am I, sweating my brains out to introduce a really sensational incident into your dull and disreputable little police investigation, and you refuse to show a single spark of enthusiasm.

When you least expect it is when the person you always dreamt of will finally show up.

The only man meant to be in your life is a man that knows your worth.

A single tiny light creates a space where darkness cannot exist. The light vanquishes the darkness. Try as it might, the darkness cannot conquer the light.

I don't say Valancy deliberately murdered these lovers as she outgrew them. One simply faded away as another came. Things are very convenient in this respect in Blue Castles.

Read the Bible, my friends, as if you were seeking for something of value. It is a good deal better to take a single chapter, and spend a month on it, than to read the Bible at random for a month.

You’re beautiful, Trin. You have this thing. It’s this spark from within. A light. There isn’t a single person out here that can’t see that.

All my days were written in Your book and planned before a single one of them began. Psalm 139:16

She used to leave chewed pencils on her desk every single day in calculus class. I may have picked them up. I may have saved them. They may still be in a drawer somewhere in my old room.

The century's greatest detective, advertised as solving every case imaginable. How great his burden must be, how much pain must he go through every single moment: past, present, and future... A burden so great it would leave you hunched over. A bitter taste in your mouth that would leave you longing for sweets. -M

Was the headmaster serious about challenging people to single combat? You guys really still do that?” “How else would we settle our differences?” “I don’t know. Talking?

Time is a funny thing, it can give and it can take away; and a single moment in time can truly change one’s life forever! The best kind of love is unexpected, unexplainable, undeniable, and unimaginable. Your sweet scent will forever be with me, reminding me of the love we once shared. I will breathe in the memories until we meet again. Before you act on what you have been told, consider your source. It may simply be assumption on their part, and that can be far from fact. Why stand back and wait for someone to fail when you can stand up and offer your support? Love is when the sound of your partner’s snoring lulls you to sleep, and it acts as a reminder that they are there by your side. Building a wall around your heart is a voluntary imprisonment to which only you have the key. Open your heart to life’s possibilities!

I'm mad at you - at myself. I'm so angry, I can taste it. I want to find Blake and rearrange parts of his body. But do you know what I thought about all day yesterday? All night? The one single thing I couldn't escape, no matter how pissed off I am at you? " "No," I whispered. "That I'm lucky, because the person I can't get out of my head, the person who means more to me than I can stand, is still alive. She's still here. And that's you.

I have a lot of questions,” I announced the moment Casteel ushered me back into our room, and King Valyn left. “Not a single person in the entirety of either kingdom would be surprised by that,” Kieran stated as he closed the veranda doors behind him. “Not even remotely.

I'm shocked by anyone who doesn't consider Los Angeles to be anything less than a bozo-saturated hellhole. It is pretty much without question the worst city in America. The reason "Walking in L.A." by Missing Persons was the most accidentally prescient single of 1982 was because of its unfathomable (but wholly accurate) specificity: Los Angeles is the only city in the world where the process of walking on the sidewalk could somehow be a) political and b) humiliating. It is the only community I've ever visited where absolutely everything cliche proved to be completely accurate. I don't care if 85% of Los Angeles is stupid. I can deal with stupid. My problem is that every stupid person in Los Angeles is also a) unyieldingly narcissistic and b) unyieldingly nice. They have somehow managed to combine raging megalomania with genuine friendliness.

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.

Some of us find our way with a single light to guide us; others lose themselves even when the star field is as sharp as a neon ceiling. Ethics may not be situational, but feelings are. We learn to adjust, and, over time, the stars we use to guide ourselves come to reside within rather than without.

Look at him!” One of the girls beside me breathes enthusiastically to her friend. “He’s hot.” I stiffen. I’m sure they’re not talking about Professor Collins. “Must be Christian Grey.” “Is he single?” I bristle. “I don’t think so,” I murmur. “Oh.” Both girls look at me in surprise. “I think he’s gay,” I mutter. “What a shame,” one of the girls groans.

If you want to be free to serve Jesus, there’s no question—stay single. Marriage takes a lot of time. But if you want to become more like Jesus, I can’t imagine any better thing to do than to get married. Being married forces you to face some character issues you’d never have to face otherwise.

life is a collection of similarities rather than identities; no single observation is a perfect example of generality.

Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn't.' He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together., their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds. And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other. That was surely the purest kind of thing. Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.

You may be a badass Trojan, but I’m yours. You’re mine. That means when you go toe to toe with anyone or anything, you go to battle with me beside you, and if I go down fighting to back you up, there won’t be a single part of me that regrets that.

Don't be fretting...about me marrying. Marrying's a trouble and not marrying's a trouble and I sticks to the trouble I knows.

Lesa’s eyes flicked up behind me and widened. “Wow. Now that’s even more unexpected.” Something smelled sweet and familiar. Confused, I twisted around. A single rose in full bloom, a vibrant red, brushed against the tip of my nose. Tan fingers held the green stem. My eyes lifted. Daemon stood there, his eyes glittering like green tinsel. He patted me on the nose with the rose again. “Good morning.” Dumbfounded, I stared at him. “This is for you,” he added when I didn’t say anything.

Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands.

She was so damn beautiful, so kind and sweet. She made him so damn happy. He couldn’t imagine going a single day without seeing her, holding her, kissing her or showing her just how much he loved her. Every day he did everything in his power to show her how much he loved her, but he’d foolishly never told her how he felt, because he was terrified that she wouldn’t feel the same way.

Singular Touch. With that singular touch of his precious warm hand, His finger slowly skimmed her porcelain cheek. As her eyes fell upon his delicate soul, It was then he knew, He had captured every single ounce of her being.

Next time you make a joke about someone else fucking you, just remember I own every single hole in your body, including the one I’ll leave in your heart when I’m done.

We do food every single day! Conscious Eating is a big step toward Conscious Living. Quality and Quantity of Food is directly related to our Health and state of mind. We can use food to help us recover from Stress and Disease. Not taking food seriously will eventually lead to Stress or/and Disease.

A fine layer of ash had blown into the carport, showing a single set of cat prints going from the side of the house to the cat hatch built into my door. People in Minnesota see things like this with snow.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies... Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

Some may think that little creature is useless," Eliam said. "But even the very smallest of all creations is essential to our existence. Every single one adds to the whole.

One good action does not make a man good. Nor does a single wrong action make a good man evil.

Simply stated, there is not a single verse anywhere in the Bible that pronounces us already forgiven for our future sins (meaning, sins we have not yet committed). Not one verse. Nowhere. Not even a hint of such a concept.

No, I took you out on a date because I want to fuck your brains out, among other things, and I know that the feeling is mutual. Unlike your buddy Shane, I don’t sugarcoat my intentions. I don’t want to be your friend. I have no interest in hanging out with you at the mall or choosing outfits with you or crap like that. I crave you. I want all of you, every single inch of you. And call it an only-child syndrome, but I. DO. NOT. FUCKING. SHARE.

I hate to go mincing through life, afraid to take a single long step for fear somebody is watching. I want to "wave my wild tail and walk by my wild lone." There wasn't a bit of real harm in my opening that window and talking to Perry. There wasn't even any harm in his trying to kiss me. He just did it to tease me. Oh, I hate conventions. As you say, hang consequences.' 'But we can't hang 'em, Pussy - that's just the trouble. They're more likely to hang us.

The French fairy tale writers were so popular and prolific that when their stories were eventually collected in the 18th century, they filled forty–one volumes of a massive publication called the Cabinet des Fées. Charles Perrault is the French fairy tale writer whom history has singled out for attention, but the majority of tales in the Cabinet des Fées were penned by women writers who ran and attended the leading salons: Marie–Catherine d’Aulnoy, Henriette Julie de Murat, Marie–Jeanne L'Héritier, and numerous others. These were educated women with an unusual degree of social and artistic independence, and within their use of the fairy tale form one can find distinctly subversive, even feminist subtext.

It is far better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

A story is about a single moment in a character's life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same.

An eternally changing world offers no future for which you must aim. With no future to aspire to, you are free to live fully in the here and now.

Because I just fell in love. I’m talking love at first sight. Your pussy is just so darn pretty, I wanna marry it. Can I marry your pussy? The rest of your body can stay single, I swear.

I learned at a very early age it's the reaction to the word, that gives it it's power. The positive and negative affect on a single person is the driving force that created my love of writing.

Oh man, Alex. That's sad. Seriously, mate, go get yourself laid." "What?" He gave Baldrick a quick kiss on his little head--he didn't care how stupid he looked, he loved his ugly cat--and put him down on his kitty bed in the corner. "Isn't that what single sad people do--get cats when they've given up on human companionship?

I love you in the light and in the dark. I love you like a whisper and like a shout. I love your good days and your bad days, and I love you. All of you. Every single piece … And every single scar.

Horst, I am not as single-minded—’ ‘Bloody-minded…’ ‘—as I was. On occasion I have been known to not do something despite it being logical, or done something despite it being somewhat irrational.’ ‘That is the most grudging description of a conscience I have ever heard.

All men are liars, inconstant, hollow, talkative, hypocrites, proud and cowards, contemptible and sensual; all woman are perfidious, artificial, vain, curious and depraved; the world is nothing but a bottomless sewer where the most shapeless seals crawl and wriggle on mountains of muck; but there one single thing in this world, saint and sublime, it’s the union of these two beings so imperfect and dreadful. We are often deceived in love, often wounded and often miserable; but we love, and when we are on of the verge of the grave, we look back, and we say: I often suffered, I erred sometimes: but I loved. It is me who lived and not a factitious being created by my pride and my boredom.

His gaze, lowered toward the ground, slowly, leisurely drifts up, until it slams into mine with the heavy force of steel against steel. The green is back, emerald flames dancing behind clouds of black and grey. And with just that single look, his head slightly dipped, I know . . . Here, right now, I’m the one with all the power.

If I thought there was even a single shred of a chance you’d still be alive, then I would have destroyed the entire world to find you. You’re my brother. I love you. Please understand that none of what happened was within either of our power to change.

Fine!” I threw my hands up in the air. “Yes, you mean something to me. What you did for me on Thanksgiving—that made me…” My voice cracked. “That made me happy. You made me happy. And I still care about you. Okay? You mean something to me—something I can’t really even put into words because everything seems too lame in comparison. I’ve always wanted you, even when I hated you. I want you even though you drive me freaking insane. And I know I screwed everything up. Not just for you and me, but for Dee.” My breath caught on a sob. The words rushed from me, one after another. “And I never felt this way with anyone else. Like I’m falling every time I’m around you, like I can’t catch my breath, and I feel alive —not just standing around and letting my life walk past me. There’s been nothing like that with anyone else.” Tears pricked my eyes as I stepped back. My chest was swelling so fast it hurt. “But none of this matters, because I know you really hate me now . I understand that. I just wish I could go back and change everything! I—” Daemon was suddenly in front of me, clasping my cheeks in his warm hands. “I never hated you.” I blinked back the wetness gathering in my eyes. “But—” “I don’t hate you now , Kat.” He stared intently into my eyes. “I’m mad at you—at myself. I’m so angry, I can taste it. I want to find Blake and rearrange parts of his body. But do you know w hat I thought about all day yesterday? All night? The one single thought I couldn’t escape, no matter how pissed off I am at you?” “No,” I whispered. “That I’m lucky, because the person I can’t get out of my head, the person who means more to me than I can stand, is still alive. She’s still there. And that’s you.

Isabel was squeezing the girl to her, sobbing at the touch of her, the legs fitting snugly around her waist and the head slotting automatically into the space beneath her chin, like the final piece of a jigsaw. She was oblivious to anything and anyone else.... The woman and child were knitted together like a single being, in a world no one could enter.

Rome, on the other hand, lost—suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history.

She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose. “I want nothing from life except you,” he wrote. “I want to be with you forever, to work and write for you, to live wherever you want to live, to love nothing, nobody but you, to love you with the passion of earth but also with the above earthly elements of more eternal, spiritual love.…” He did not, however, get his wish.

Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape—it wasn’t. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

None of them, not even what he suspected should have been little boys, were small. He’d always thought that the James boys were freakishly large, but the men that were beating the shit out of each other over food had been much, much bigger. Most every single one of them had been shirtless and all had been buff, making him feel scrawny and making him wonder if Rory thought he was scrawny.

mad maddie: I GOT ACCEPTED TO SANTA CRUZ!!!! SnowAngel: omg!!! zoegirl: maddie!!!! yay!!!!! mad maddie: i know! it's incredible! SnowAngel: *squeals and hugs sweet maddie* SnowAngel: tell us every single detail!!! mad maddie: well, i got home from school and saw this big thick envelope on the kitchen counter, with "Santa Cruz Admissions Office" as the return address. i got really fidgety and just started screaming, right there in the house. no one was there but me, so i could be as loud as i wanted. zoegirl: omg!!! mad maddie: i took a deep breath and tried to calm down, but my hands were shaking. i opened the envelope and pulled out a folder that said, "Welcome to Santa Cruz!" inside was a letter that said, "Dear Madigan. You're in!" mad maddie: isn't that cool? i LOVE that, that instead of being all prissy and formal, they're like, "you're in! yahootie!" SnowAngel: oh maddie, i am sooooo happy for u! mad maddie: i ran out to my car all jumping and hopping around and drove to ian's, cuz i knew neither of u would be home yet. i showed him my letter and he hugged me really hard and lifted me into the air. it was AWESOME. zoegirl: i'm so proud of u, maddie! SnowAngel: me 2!

A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech—the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife's fiber-optic network.

Wars are waged by people who were parented by someone. Crimes are committed by people who were parented by someone. Brutality is inflicted by people who were parented by someone. Nations are led by people who were parented by someone. Hope, help, and healing are all shared by people who were parented by someone. We, the parents of today, are that someone for our children, and our children will one day be that someone for their children. We may not be able to eliminate all war, end all crime, or stop all brutality, but sowing peace, kindness, compassion, and empathy into our children is the single most powerful way we can each be someone who changes the world for the better.

He nodded, picking my hand up in his, bringing it to his mouth. His eyes locked on mine in the dark, and he put his lips to the back of my hand. He kissed the spot just behind my knuckles. He smoothed his thumb over the spot. He singled out a finger and pulled it in his mouth again and chewed. The rattling of my spine, shaking of my fingers and crazy spinning of my heart returned. Nathan kissed my hand. That meant something. Tingling radiated the area he kissed. A surge of worry swept over me as I realized I may have made a terrible mistake. Victor might be okay with us sleeping in the same bed, but what would he think if Nathan started kissing me? And why did I have the crazy urge to let him if he tried?

Leader of a backward and ignorant mass, he was yet in the forefront of the great historical movement of his time. The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution, and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman. That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton. And in one respect he excelled them all. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class complications of their society, too often had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify. Toussaint could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time. The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood that elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth.

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilárd, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. ... This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port altogether with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

In a moment of crisis we don't act out of reasoned judgment but on our conditioned reflexes. We may be able to send men to the moon, but we'd better remember we're still closely related to Pavlov's dog. Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver's body works kinesthetically . . .A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought. I'm convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we've made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors, as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation.

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me—I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had “borrowed” from her class at school. And then there was L.A.—all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different.

I reject animal welfare reform and single-issue campaigns because they are not only inconsistent with the claims of justice that we should be making if we really believe that animal exploitation is wrong, but because these approaches cannot work as a practical matter. Animals are property and it costs money to protect their interests; therefore, the level of protection accorded to animal interests will always be low and animals will, under the best of circumstances, still be treated in ways that would constitute torture if applied to humans. By endorsing welfare reforms that supposedly make exploitation more “compassionate” or single-issue campaigns that falsely suggest that there is a coherent moral distinction between meat and dairy or between fur and wool or between steak and foie gras, we betray the principle of justice that says that all sentient beings are equal for purposes of not being used exclusively as human resources. And, on a practical level, we do nothing more than make people feel better about animal exploitation.

You miss her, don’t you?” Luc laughed, but it was without humor. “With every single breath I take.” “Did you love her, Luc?” His eyes closed, and that beautiful face was stricken. Utterly broken wide open as he reopened his eyes and said, “With every breath I take.” “The knot in my throat expanded, and I suddenly wanted to cry. He said take and not took. Even though she was gone, he was still in love with her. That was beautiful in the way only heartbreak could be.

Take a bar of metal and put a single notch in it. The two lengths thus defined have a relationship that can be expressed as the ratio between them. In theory, therefore, any rational number can be expressed with a single mark on a bar of metal. Using a simple alphabetic code, a mark that calculated to a ratio of .1215225 could be read as 12-15-22-5, or “l-o-v-e.” The complete plays of Shakespeare could be written in a single mark, if it were possible to measure accurately enough.

In the days following the Zimmerman verdict, Bill O’Reilly used his Fox News program to call attention to “the disintegration of the African America family,” which he identified as the ultimate source of “so much violence and chaos” in black communities. So long as 73 percent of black children are born to single mothers, said O’Reilly, blacks will find themselves overrepresented among delinquents.

Awakening as a moment of now Awakening as an experience Awakening as a moment that is the same - today, yesterday or tomorrow Awakening of a Hinduist, of a Buddhist, of a Christian of a believer or a nonbeliever Awakening that lives within every single cell Awakening within no qualities as emptiness of Consciousness as direct contact with love and light and life experienced with every breath Awakening as resting within true nature as acting from the true nature as Remembering Awakening as opening to the possibility of Now

This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career. It is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe.

Words evolve, perhaps more rapidly and tellingly than do their users, and the change in meanings reflects a society often more accurately than do the works of many historians. In he years preceding the first collapse of NorAm, the change in the meaning of one word predicted the failure of that society more immediately and accurately than did all the analysts, social scientists, and historians. That critical word? 'Discrimination.' We know it now as a term meaning 'unfounded bias against a person, group, or culture on the basis of racial, gender, or ethnic background.' Prejudice, if you will. The previous meaning of this word was: 'to draw a clear distinction between good and evil, to differentiate, to recognize as different.' Moreover, the connotations once associated with discrimination were favorable. A person of discrimination was one of taste and good judgment. With the change of the meaning into a negative term of bias, the English language was left without a single-word term for the act of choosing between alternatives wisely, and more importantly, left with a subterranean negative connotation for those who attempted to make such choices. In hindsight, the change in meaning clearly reflected and foreshadowed the disaster to come. Individuals and institutions abhorred making real choices. At one point more than three-quarters of the youthful population entered institutions of higher learning. Credentials, often paper ones, replaced meaning judgment and choices... Popularity replaced excellence... The number of disastrous cultural and political decisions foreshadowed by the change in meaning of one word is truly endless...

Still, I knew rehab was important. So I listened. I went to every class. I held hands with strangers. With suburban mummies who’d gotten addicted to prescription pills, and a preacher’s son who’d fallen into the arms of heroin, and a Russian oligarch’s daughter who, like me, had snorted pounds and pounds of cocaine to numb the feeling that the world was closing in on you from all angles. I wrote letters to my family and friends. Angry letters. Apologetic letters. Funny letters. Then I burned them all. I couldn’t write Stardust shite, though. Everything I had to say to her—every single groveling word—had to be said in person.

In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years—who sought to use science to justify their unbelief—never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation. That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H. L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).

Spleen Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux, Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes, S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes. Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon, Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau, Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau, Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilette Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette. Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais pu De son être extirper l'élément corrompu, Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent, II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé // I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch, one who escapes his tutor's monologues, and kills the day in boredom with his dogs; nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry, his people dying by the balcony; the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite no longer gets him through a single night; his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb; even the ladies of the court, for whom all kings are beautiful, cannot put on shameful enough dresses for this skeleton; the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent washes to cleanse the poisoned element; even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy, our tyrants' solace in senility, he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood. — Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)

I used to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting, for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play: a profession or calling being, according to that concept—one that seemed, at least on the surface, unequivocally assumed by persons so dissimilar from one another as Widmerpool and Archie Gilbert, something entirely different from “spare time.” That illusion, as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear—was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways: unthinkable, as formerly appeared, any single consummation of cause and effect. In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.

There are three ways you can live life—three again—remember that the great writers almost always do things in threes. You can live life as though it’s all a cosmic accident; we’re nothing but an irritating skin disease on the face of the earth. Maybe you can live your life as though everything’s a bad joke. I can’t.” They couldn’t, either, though for some of the kids who sat around the table that day not much had happened to make them think that life is anything else. “Or you can go out at night and look at the stars and think, yes, they were created by a prime mover, and so were you, but he’s aloof perfection, impassible, indifferent to his creation. He doesn’t care, or, if he cares, he only cares about the ultimate end of his creation, and so what happens to any part of it on the way is really a matter of indifference. You don’t matter to him, I don’t matter to him, except possibly as a means to an end. I can’t live that way, either.” Again there was general agreement. “Then there’s a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That’s the only way I can live.

La Mort des Amants Nous aurons des lits pleins d'odeurs légères, Des divans profonds comme des tombeaux, Et d'étranges fleurs sur des étagères, Ecloses pour nous sous des cieux plus beaux. Usant à l'envi leurs chaleurs dernières, Nos deux coeurs seront deux vastes flambeaux, Qui réfléchiront leurs doubles lumières Dans nos deux esprits, ces miroirs jumeaux. Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique, Nous échangerons un éclair unique, Comme un long sanglot, tout chargé d'adieux; Et plus tard un Ange, entr'ouvrant les portes, Viendra ranimer, fidèle et joyeux, Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes. We will have beds which exhale odours soft, We will have divans profound as the tomb, And delicate plants on the ledges aloft, Which under the bluest of skies for us bloom. Exhausting our hearts to their last desires, They both shall be like unto two glowing coals, Reflecting the twofold light of their fires Across the twin mirrors of our two souls. One evening of mystical azure skies, We'll exchange but one single lightning flash, Just like a long sob — replete with good byes. And later an angel shall joyously pass Through the half-open doors, to replenish and wash The torches expired, and the tarnished glass.

Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher. Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why. As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.” The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento. . .blah, blah, blah.” The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment. Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’” “It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

In one sense the cause of suicide is simple: overwhelming pain. This overwhelming pain, however, is the aggregate of thousands of pains. Any hurt that we have ever suffered, if it remains consciously or unconsciously lodged within us, can contribute to suicide. This may range from being an incest victim 50 years ago, to losing a job 10 years ago, to having a car battery stolen yesterday. The pains come from everywhere: ill-health, family, peers, school, work, community, caregivers. For each suicide there was a finite point at which this aggregate became too much. Although "The straw that broke the back," is frequently an accurate metaphor, no one pain is ever the cause of suicide. Suicidal pain is decomposable into thousands of pains, and nearly all of these pains are decomposable into painful constituents. Sexual abuse, job loss, and personal theft each have numerous painful constituents. The search for the single cause is a fundamentally wrongheaded approach to the understanding and prevention of suicide. It is inaccurate to say simply that pain causes suicide, since a level of pain that is lethal for one person may not be lethal for someone with greater resources. Similarly, deficiency in resources cannot be regarded as the cause of suicide, since two people may have equal resources and unequal pain. Our resources may also come from everywhere; even such trivial distractions as going to a movie can contribute to coping with suicidal pain.

3. Alone The long march up the fulvous ridgebacks to The marches, the frontiers of difference -- Where flesh marches with bone, day marches with His wife the night, and country marches with Another country -- is accomplished best, By paradox, alone. A world of twos, Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, of Sound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayed By sole infiltrators who have cast off Their ties to living moorings, and stand out Into the roads of noon approaching night Casting a single shadow, earnest of Their honorable intention to lay down Their lives for their old country, humankind, In the same selfish spirit that inspired Their lifelong journey, largely and at last Alone, across the passes that divide A life from every other, the sheer crags Of overweening will, the deepening scarps Like brain fissures that cunningly cut off Each outcrop from the main and make it one While its luck lasts, while its bravura holds Against all odds, until the final climb Across the mountains to the farther shore Of sundown on the watersheds, where self, Propelled by its last rays, sways in the sway Of the last grasses and falls headlong in The darkness of the dust it is part of Upon the passes where we are no more: Where the recirculating shaft goes home Into the breast that armed it for the air, And, as we must expect, the art that there Turned our lone hand into imperial Rome Reverts to earth and its inveterate love For the inanimate and its return. FINIS -- from 'Tras Os Montes

Julius explained that the palace rooms where they stood were called Wunderkammers, or wonder rooms. Souvenirs of nature, of travels across continents and seas; jewels and skulls. A show of wealth, intellect, power. The first room had rose-colored glass walls, with rubies and garnets and bloodred drapes of damask. Bowls of blush quartz; semiprecious stone roses running the spectrum of red down to pink, a hard, glittering garden. The vaulted ceiling, a feature of all the ten rooms Julius and Cymbeline visited, was a trompe l'oeil of a rosy sky at down, golden light edging the morning clouds. The next room was of sapphire and sea and sky; lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold and silver. A silver mermaid lounged on the edge of a lapis lazuli bowl fashioned in the shape of an ocean. Venus stood aloft on the waves draped in pearls. There were gold fish and diamond fish and faceted sterling silver starfish. Silvered mirrors edged in silvered mirror. There were opals and aquamarines and tanzanite and amethyst. Seaweed bloomed in shades of blue-green marble. The ceiling was a dome of endless, pale blue. A jungle room of mica and marble followed, with its rain forest of cats made from tiger's-eye, yellow topaz birds, tortoiseshell giraffes with stubby horns of spun gold. Carved clouds of smoky quartz hovered over a herd of obsidian and ivory zebras. Javelinas of spotted pony hide charged tiny, life-sized dik-diks with velvet hides, and dazzling diamond antlers mingled with miniature stuffed sable minks. Agate columns painted a medley of dark greens were strung with faceted ropes of green gold. A room of ivory: bone, teeth, skulls, and velvet. A room crowded with columns all sheathed in mirrors, reflecting world maps and globes and atlases inlaid with silver, platinum, and white gold; the rubies and diamonds that were sometimes set to mark the location of a city or a town of conquest resembled blood and tears. A room dominated by a fireplace large enough to hold several people, upholstered in velvets and silks the colors of flame. Snakes of gold with orange sapphire and yellow topaz eyes coiled around the room's columns. Statues of smiling black men in turbans offering trays of every gem imaginable-emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz, diamond-stood at the entrance to a room upholstered in pistachio velvet, accented with malachite, called the Green Vault. Peridot wood nymphs attended to a Diana carved from a single pure crystal of quartz studded with tiny tourmalines. Jade tables, and jade lanterns. The royal jewels, blinding in their sparkling excess: crowns, tiaras, coronets, diadems, heavy ceremonial necklaces, rings, and bracelets that could span a forearm, surrounding the world's largest and most perfect green diamond. Above it all was a night sky of painted stars, with inlaid cut crystal set in a serious of constellations.

The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ... Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short. Everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception. In the short short the writer gets no second chance. Either he strikes through at once or he's lost. And because it depends so heavily on this one sweeping blow, the short short often approaches the condition of a fable. When you read the two pieces by Tolstoy in this book, or I.L. Peretz's 'If Not Higher,' or Franz Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus,' you feel these writers are intent upon 'making a point' - but obliquely, not through mere statement. What they project is not the sort of impression of life we expect in most fiction, but something else: an impression of an idea of life. Or: a flicker in darkness, a slight cut of being. The shorter the piece of writing, the more abstract it may seem to us. In reading Paz's brilliant short short we feel we have brushed dangerously against the sheer arbitrariness of existence; in reading Peretz's, that we have been brought up against a moral reflection on the nature of goodness, though a reflection hard merely to state. Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ... Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness. Sometimes they have to be prepared to speak out directly, not so much in order to state a theme as to provide a jarring or complicating commentary. The voice of the writer brushes, so to say, against his flash of invention. And then, almost before it begins, the fiction is brought to a stark conclusion - abrupt, bleeding, exhausting. This conclusion need not complete the action; it has only to break it off decisively. Here are a few examples of the writer speaking out directly. Paz: 'The universe is a vast system of signs.' Kafka in 'First Sorrow': The trapeze artist's 'social life was somewhat limited.' Paula Fox: 'We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.' Babel's cossack cries out, 'You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.' Such sentences serve as devices of economy, oblique cues. Cryptic and enigmatic, they sometimes replace action, dialogue and commentary, for none of which, as it happens, the short short has much room. There's often a brilliant overfocussing. ("Introduction")