Legacy Short Quotes

I don’t know; I still like the name Six. Maren Elizabeth was when I was a different person, and right now Six just feels right. It can be short for something if someone asks.” Sam looks over. “For what? Sixty?

I keep my back turned while he maneuvers his shorts into place. “Are you decent?” I call after a few seconds. No matter how many times I tell him I can’t see into the water yet, he insists I’m just trying to look at his “eel.” For crying out loud.

Chuck skipped through the rest of the preamble to the actual examples Spaceguard had chronicled: “On March 23rd, 1989, an asteroid designated Asteroid 1989FC missed hitting the Earth by six hours. This little jewel packed the energy of roughly a thousand of the most powerful nuclear bombs, and the human race became aware of it shortly after its closest approach. Had this celestial baseball been only six hours later most of the population of the Earth would have been eliminated with zero warning.” “In October of 1990, an asteroid that would have been considered very small, struck the Pacific Ocean. This little fellow only packed the energy of a small atomic bomb, about the same as the one that flattened Hiroshima, and if it had arrived a few hours later or earlier it could have easily struck a city rather than making a relatively harmless splash into the center of the ocean. Remember, relatively here, is just a comparative term.”   

He was strength and safety; fire and desire; comfort and happiness. In short, he was the man I loved.

He hung up and glanced at me. "I'm sorry, I have to take care of business. It can't wait, but I'll keep it short." "Not a problem. I'll busy myself with being seen and tossing my hair. Would you like me to twirl it on my finger while biting my lip?" "Could you?" "No, sorry." I grinned at him

I have no idea where to take a girl on a date.” Sandor cuts short a laugh. We sit in silence, both of us pondering.

THE QUR’AN BEGINS WITH A MYSTERY. AFTER A SHORT SEVEN-VERSE preface, the Qur’an’s grand opening chapter launches not with a word, but with . . . three enigmatic Arabic letters: Alif Lam Mim

I[John/Four] scratched Bernie Kosar's head. I don't think I could get used to calling him Hadley, but maybe I could get used to calling Six Maren Elizabeth. "I think you should take on a human name," I say. "If not Maren Elizabeth, then something else. I mean, at least for when we're in front of strangers." Everyone grows silent, and I reach behind me into the Chest for the velvet bag holding the Lorien's solar system. I set the six planets and the sun in my palm and watch them hover and glow to life. As the planets begin to orbit their sun, I find that I am able to dim their brightness with my mind. I intentionally lose myself in them, successfully forgetting just for a few moments that I might ba seeing Sarah soon. Six turns to look at the faint solar system that floats in front of my chest, and then she finally says. "I don't know; I still like the name Six. Maren Elizabeth was when I was a different person, and right now Six just feels right. It can be short for something if Someone asks." Sam looks over. "For what? Sixty?

I want to own every part of you,” he continued, his breath hot against my skin. “I want to throw you face-first across this counter, rip off those shorts, and fuck you hard and fast until my goddamned cock stops hurting and my balls don’t feel like they’re gonna explode. Because they’ve felt that way for a helluva long time, Soph, and I’m startin’ to think it’s not gonna go away unless I do something about it.

Remember, life is too short to be spent dancing with idiots.

My heart beats with you, Love runs red throughout my veins, Making me alive SA Node - Haiku

Poppy took my hand and held it to her cheek. “I really believe that tales of loss don’t always have to be sad or sorrowful. I want mine to be remembered as a great adventure that I tried to live as best as I possibly could. Because how dare we waste a single breath? How dare we waste something so precious? Instead, we should strive for all those precious breaths to be taken in as many precious moments as we can squeeze into this short time on Earth. That’s the message I want to leave behind. And what a beautiful legacy to leave for those I love.

Men's lives are short . The hard man and his cruelties will be Cursed behind his back and mocked in death. But one whose heart and ways are kind - of him strangers will bear report to the whole wide world, and distant men will praise him. - Penelope in Robert Fitzgerald trans. THE ODYSSEY (364)

Where'd you get that lighter?" she demanded. "Frida," Dan said, closing it. "She left it behind. Remember how she was always talking about outdoorsy stuff? She said she kept a water-resistant lighter on her at all times, in case she needed emergency fire." There was a short beat of silence in the dumpster. "Huh," said Dan. "Except probably now.

It's nothing short of astonishing that a religious tradition with this relentless emphasis on salvation and one so hyperattuned to personal sin can simultaneously maintain such blindness to social sins swirling about it, such as slavery and race-based segregation and bigotry.

Paintings of Jesus with long hair and a full beard and of first-century Jews in Persian turbans and Bedouin robes are fantasies of later artists. The Hellenistic world created by Alexander the Great was remarkably homogenous in style. From Britain to North Africa, from Spain to India, people affected Greek manners. The earliest paintings of Jesus depict him as the Good Shepherd with short hair, no beard, and wearing a knee-length tunic. This is probably far more what Jesus looked like than the paintings we know and love. The apostle Paul admonished men not to let their hair grow long (1 Cor 11:14), which he would hardly have done if the other apostles or the Sanhedrin had worn their hair long; he certainly would not have written that if Jesus had worn his hair long.

We met our love in the February air And the lives we had before, They began to tear

What kind of legacy will you leave behind? What will your children and your children's children say about you? How will you be remembered? Will your life and decisions have inspired others to do better? Life is too short to postpone it - choose to be positive today.

How about I duct-tape his ass cheeks together? Short-sheet his bed? Ex-Lax his chocolate pudding…? I have other ideas, you know…

Anyway, that's the past, and what matters is the future. That's how life works, because it's short and precious and kind of doubtful.

I end where you begin And begin where you end; You are my Earth’s horizon And the axis on which it spins

God’s shit,” says Aleena. “That’s your idea of a fucking short cut? Let’s save time by getting sodomised by magic worms?

In short, the Negroes’ problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.

Release my horse!" I ordered, infuriated with him and wary of both the large, energetic beast and its rider. "No," Steldor snapped. "You're coming back with me." Gripping my reins, he permitted his stallion to move forward in the direction of the city, my mount obediently following. Unwilling to give in to him, I slid from my horse's back. "I don't think I will return just yet, Your Majesty." With an exasperated sigh, he dismounted and strode toward me.As he did, he took in my preposterous appearance. "What are you doing?" he demanded, stopping in his tracks. "You're out in the middle of nowhere, by yourself, dressed like a man and riding your father's horse! Have you gone mad, woman?" He continued to scrutinize me, and his incredulity transformed itself into a frown. "And just where did you get the belt and breeches?" As realizatin struck, he sarcastically added, "Just my luck that you would decide to get into my trousers when I wasn't there yo enjoy it." My cheeks burned at his crude comment, and had I been a little closer, I would likely have dealt him a second slap. At the same time, I knew his assessment was accurate. "I was just going for a ride.I have the right to some fresh air," I asserted, hands upon my hips. Steldor gave a short, scathing laugh. "Not like this you don't.Now get on your horse.

She’d already memorized the short Psalm and was hungry for more. Indeed, each word seemed woven into her soul the way the weaver wove his wares, taking the barest threads of her faith and making something beautiful and enduring as fine cloth deep inside her.

She had mailed them a few days before she died, wishing everyone a great future. It was a powerful lesson in creating a legacy by choosing your words with intention. We are on this earth such a short time, cruelly short in Sarah’s case. What message did I want to leave behind?

Olujime was a pit fighter, an accountant, a magical warrior, and an ostrich whisperer. Somehow I was not surprised. “Is he going with you?” I asked. Thalia laughed. “No. Just helping us get ready. Seems like a good guy, but I don’t think he’s Hunter material. He’s not even, uh…a Greek-Roman type, is he? I mean, he’s not a legacy of you guys, the Olympians.” “No,” I agreed. “He is from a different tradition and parentage entirely.” Thalia’s short spiky hair rippled in the wind, as if reacting to her uneasiness. “You mean from other gods.” “Of course. He mentioned the Yoruba, though I admit I know very little about their ways.” “How is that possible? Other pantheons of gods, side by side?” I shrugged. I was often surprised by mortals’ limited imaginations, as if the world was an either/or proposition. Sometimes humans seemed as stuck in their thinking as they were in their meat-sack bodies. Not, mind you, that gods were much better. “How could it not be possible?” I countered. “In ancient times, this was common sense. Each country, sometimes each city, had its own pantheon of gods. We Olympians have always been used to living in close proximity to, ah…the competition.” “So you’re the sun god,” Thalia said. “But some other deity from some other culture is also the sun god?” “Exactly. Different manifestations of the same truth.” “I don’t get it.” I spread my hands. “Honestly, Thalia Grace, I don’t know how to explain it any better. But surely you’ve been a demigod long enough to

Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.

Latin America possesses some Western traits, this cannot be denied. The Spanish legacy, Christianity, and a high number of original writers (e.g. Jorge Luis Borges, known for his invention of the philosophical short story, Rubén Darío and the modernismo poetic movement, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Julio Cortázar, to name but a few).

They asked a bunch of ninety-five-year-olds, I don’t know where they found them all, Florida I guess, but anyway they asked them if they could do it all over again and live their life again what would they do differently. The three things that almost all of them said were: (1) They would reflect more. Enjoy more moments. More sunrises and sunsets. More moments of joy. (2) They would take more risks and chances. Life is too short not to go for it. (3) They would have left a legacy. Something that would live on after they die.

When you teach, you don’t always get a short term reward, but you do leave a legacy. You have a choice about what that legacy will be.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

Toraf nods in all seriousness. “Humans eat sand. That’s why they spend so much time on land”.

I always thinks that a garden is the best sort of legacy a person can leave. [Caroline, 'Skelmerton']

Over time, the system will get better as long as people aren’t introducing duplication behind your back. If they are, you can take steps with them short of physical violence, but that is another issue.

In short, our emotions don’t always lead us astray; sometimes, on the contrary, when we listen to them, they can save us. This can work not only when people are trying to make us live on the edge of radioactive landfill sites, but also in situations of harassment and abuse, like those outlined above. By giving some credit to their feelings—whether disgust, anger, rejection or resistance—by listening to the alarms going off in their bodies and minds, victims may find the strength to defend themselves, especially when the voice of reason is just a front for the debilitating, intimidating voice of authority.

Bet you’re wet like a dirty little slut.” He effortlessly pushes down my shorts so they pool around my ankles and slips a ruthless hand inside my underwear, cupping me. “I knew you’d be soaking for me, baby. You like being manhandled till you can’t breathe. You like how I confiscate your will. It turns you the fuck on, doesn’t it? Admit it, you don’t like my nice side. You’re a fucking whore for my devil side.

You become a man when you marry not just for love but to be a partner with your wife. To be the best man you can be with her, and when you fall short, to admit your shortcomings and to constantly strive to be a great man to your wife.

What's Toraf's favorite color?" She shrugs. "Whatever I tell him it is." I raise a brow at her. "Don't know, huh?" She crosses her arms. "Who cares anyway? We're not painting his toenails." "I think what's she's trying to say, honey bunches, is that maybe you should paint your nails his favorite color, to show him you're thinking about him," Rachel says, seasoning her words with tact. Rayna sets her chin. "Emma doesn't paint her nails Galen's favorite color." Startled that Galen has a favorite color and I don't know it, I say, "Uh, well, he doesn't like nail polish." That is to say, he's never mentioned it before. When a brilliant smile lights up her whole face, I know I've been busted. "You don't know his favorite color!" she says, actually pointing at me. "Yes, I do," I say, searching Rachel's face for the answer. She shrugs. Rayna's smirk is the epitome of I know something you don't know. Smacking it off her face is my first reflex, but I hold back, as I always do, because of the kiss I shared with Toraf and the way it hurt her. Sometimes I catch her looking at me with that same expression she had on the beach, and I feel like fungus, even though she deserved it at the time. Refusing to fold, I eye the buffet of nail polish scattered before me. Letting my fingers roam over the bottles, I shop the paints, hoping one of them stands out to me. To save my life, I can't think of any one color he wears more often. He doesn't have a favorite sport, so team colors are a no-go. Rachel picked his cars for him, so that's no help either. Biting my lip, I decide on an ocean blue. "Emma! Now I'm just ashamed of myself," he says from the doorway. "How could you not know my favorite color?" Startled, I drop the bottle back on the table. Since he's back so soon, I have to assume he didn't find what or who he wanted-and that he didn't hunt them for very long. Toraf materializes behind him, but Galen's shoulders are too broad to allow them both to stand in the doorway. Clearing my throat, I say, "I was just moving that bottle to get to the color I wanted." Rayna is all but doing a victory dance with her eyes. "Which is?" she asks, full of vicious glee. Toraf pushes past Galen and plops down next to his tiny mate. She leans into him, eager for his kiss. "I missed you," she whispers. "Not as much as I missed you," he tells her. Galen and I exchange eye rolls as he walks around to prop himself on the table beside me, his wet shorts making a butt-shaped puddle on the expensive wood. "Go ahead, angelfish," he says, nodding toward the pile of polish. If he's trying to give me a clue, he sucks at it. "Go" could mean green, I guess. "Ahead" could mean...I have no idea what that could mean. And angelfish come in all sorts of colors. Deciding he didn't encode any messages for me, I sigh and push away from the table to stand. "I don't know. We've never talked about it before." Rayna slaps her knee in triumph. "Ha!" Before I can pass by him, Galen grabs my wrist and pulls me to him, corralling me between his legs. Crushing his mouth to mine, he moves his hand to the small of my back and presses me into him. Since he's still shirtless and I'm in my bikini, there's a lot of bare flesh touching, which is a little more intimate than I'm used to with an audience. Still, the fire sears through me, scorching a path to the furthest, deepest parts of me. It takes every bit of grit I have not to wrap my arms around his neck. Gently, I push my hands against his chest to end the kiss, which is something I never thought I'd do. Giving him a look that I hope conveys "inappropriate," I step back. I've spent enough time in their company to know without looking that Rayna's eyes are bugging out of their sockets and Toraf is grinning like a nutcracker doll. With any luck, Rachel didn't even see the kiss. Stealing a peek at her, she meets my gaze with openmouthed shock. Okay, it looked as bad as I thought it did.

I really believe that tales of loss don’t always have to be sad or sorrowful. I want mine to be remembered as a great adventure that I tried to live as best as I possibly could. Because how dare we waste a single breath? How dare we waste something so precious? Instead, we should strive for all those precious breaths to be taken in as many precious moments as we can squeeze into this short time on Earth. That’s the message I want to leave behind. And what a beautiful legacy to leave for those I love.

to “fundamentally transform” a uniquely great and Christian nation like America into just one more pitiful, secular, redistributionist welfare state presided over by an all-powerful nanny government, the American people must be seduced into becoming less Christian and less moral than they once were, less rugged and resilient, less rational and competent, less principled and courageous – in short, they must become lesser people than they once were. This, alas, is the true legacy of the Obama presidency: the degradation and demoralization of America.

The easiest way to live a short unimportant life is to consume the world around you rather than contribute to it. Meanwhile, the people who keep on contributing tend to be the ones who keep on living. The message was clear. People who contribute to their community live longer.

She bit the inside of her cheek. “You wouldn’t keep secrets from me, would you? I mean we’ve been friends how long?” "We have been friends, thirteen years, eight months, two weeks, four days,” The wheelchair stopped and Ari watched the long shadow look at his watch. “Sixteen hours, four minutes and forty seven seconds and counting I’d say; give or take thirty minutes. Or if you want the short version: five thousand and four days plus or minus a few hours." She put her hands to her face and laughed to keep from crying. “Please tell me you made half of that up. Who actually keeps track of time like that?

This first generation of corporate barons left a lasting, if dubious, legacy: they made America more hierarchical, with new divisions between management and labor, between a professional class and everyday workers. They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism.

How dare we waste a single breath? How dare we waste something so precious?...We should strive for all those precious breaths to be taken in as many precious moments as we can squeeze into this short time on Earth. That's not the message I want to leave behind. And what a beautiful legacy to leave for those I love.

There's something to be said about practice-even if I'm not actually practicing anything. Just hanging out in the water, holding my breath, withering my skin to grandma-like wrinkles. I pull off the flippers Toraf brought me and chuck them onto shore. I keep my back turned while he maneuvers his shorts into place. "Are you decent?" I call after a few seconds. No matter how many times I tell him I can't see into the water yet, he insists I'm just trying to look at his "eel." For crying out loud. "Oh, I'm more than decent. I'm actually quite a catch." I couldn't agree more. Toraf is good-looking, funny, and considerate-which makes me question Rayna's attitude.

Then Toraf opens the passenger side door…Wait. That’s not Toraf. I’ve never seen this man before, yet he’s eerily familiar. His silhouette sitting next to Galen was definitely classic Syrena male, but the glare from the sun had hidden his face. I’d naturally just assumed that where there’s a Galen, there’s a Toraf. Now that his face is in full view though, I see that this man looks like a slightly older version of Galen. Slightly older as in slightly more jaded. Other than that, he could be his twin brother. It may be because he’s wearing some of Galen’s clothes, a wrinkled brown polo shirt and plaid shorts. But he shares other things, too, besides clothes. He’s handsome like Galen, with the same strong jaw and the same eyebrow shape and the way he’s wearing the same expression on his face that Galen is-that he’s found what he’s been looking for. Only, the stranger’s expression clearly divulges that he’s been looking for a lot longer than Galen has-and this man is not looking at me. And that’s when I know just exactly who he is. That’s when I believe the look in Galen’s eyes. That he didn’t lie to me, that he loves me. Because this man has to be Grom. Mom confirms it with a half cry, half growl. “No. No. It can’t be.” Even if she weren’t handcuffed to Rachel right now, I’m not sure she’d actually be able to move. Disbelief has a special way of paralyzing you. With every step the man takes toward Rachel’s car, he shakes his head more vigorously. It’s like he’s deliberately taking his time, drinking in the moment, or maybe he just can’t believe this moment is actually happening. Yep, disbelief is a cruel hag.

A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value.

When my feet touch bottom, Galen releases me. I tiptoe toward shore, jumping with the waves like a toddler. Reaching the beach, I deposit myself in the sand just far enough in for the tide to tickle my feet. "Aren't you coming in?" I call to him. "I need you to throw me my shorts," he says, pointing behind me. "Oh. Oh. You're naked?" I squeak, bordering on dolphin pitch. Of course, I should have realized that fins don't come with a cubby for carry-on luggage, and most Syrena wouldn't have a need to stash something like swimming shorts. It doesn't matter much when he's in fish form, but seeing Galen-no, thinking about Galen-naked in human form would be detrimental to my plan to use him. Could be my undoing. "Guess that means you can't see into the water yet," he says. When I shake my head, he says, "I took them off before you came out this morning. I'd prefer not to ruin them if I don't have to." Clearing my throat, I hoist myself up and trudge through the sand, finding them a few feet away. I toss them to him and take my seat again, in case my vision suddenly gives me an unhealthy view of the briny deep. Thankfully, he keeps everything submerged as he makes his way to the floating trunks and pulls them on. Tying them as he walks ashore, he kicks water on me before sitting beside me.

Harrison Salisbury When Amor Towles was ten years old, he threw a bottle containing a short note he had written into the Atlantic Ocean. A few weeks later he received a letter from the man who found it: Harrison Salisbury, the managing editor of The New York Times. From this childhood incident, a correspondence developed between Salisbury and Towles and they eventually met. In his earlier career, Harrison Salisbury was the real-life chief correspondent for The New York Times in Moscow. The author of an important history of the Russian Revolution, Black Nights, White Snow, his memoirs were the source of some of the detail Towles uses in A Gentleman in Moscow. Salisbury’s cameo appearance in the novel, along with the mention of his fedora and trench coat (stolen by the Count as a disguise) pay tribute to Salisbury’s literary legacy on early twentieth century Russia as well as the author’s serendipitous connection with him.

Here is an entry from June 12, 1989, three and a half years after my father’s death: I feel so helpless sometimes. I know that my destiny is in my own hands, but to what extent? There is so much to think about—family, friends, career, LIFE! Will my grandchildren read this, years from now, and see it as the only thing to remember me by? No legacy? We’re here for such a short time. But what exactly are my ambitions? I thought ambition was viewed as bad, as wrong. It turns out it’s the key to everything. Where will I be in ten years? I want to be successful. What do I believe in—really believe in? Hell, Megyn, what do you even know about the world? I want to know what my teachers know. Where is it all? In books? I know where it is—it’s in years and years of research and experiences. That’s not something I can just have. I have to get it all for myself. I’m just sitting here wondering who I really am inside and—who am I to become?

Short of dragging her to the water kicking and screaming-and destroying Emma’s trust in him-Galen made the snap decision to leave them both in Rayna’s care. And the word “care” can be very subjective where his sister is concerned. But they couldn’t waste any more time; with Yudor’s head start on them, a search party might have already been dispatched, and if not, then Galen knew it was coming. And he couldn’t-wouldn’t-risk them finding Emma. Beautiful, stubborn Half-Breed Emma. And he’s a little perturbed that Nalia would. The three of them plod holes in the sand reaching up to Emma’s back porch, alongside a recent trail of someone else’s-probably Emma’s-footsteps leading from the beach. Galen knows this moment will always be burned into his memory. The moment when his brother, the Triton king, put on human clothes and walked up to a house built by humans, squinting in the broad daylight with eyes unaccustomed to the sun. What will he say to Nalia? What will he do?

How can this woman have spent half her life in Nostraza and turn out like that? It should have broken her. It should have left her as a shell. But somehow, she survived both that and Atlas’s Trials and came out on the other end in a blazing ball of confident fire that threatens to burn me up every time she walks into the room. It’s as though her spirit has always understood her legacy and her purpose. She behaves exactly like a queen. A slightly wild one with a short fuse, but a queen nonetheless.

Galen slides into his desk, unsettled by the way the sturdy blond boy talking to Emma casually rests his arm on the back of her seat. "Good morning," Galen says, leaning over to wrap his arms around her, nearly pulling her from the chair. He even rests his cheek against hers for good measure. "Good morning...er, Mark, isn't it?" he says, careful to keep his voice pleasant. Still, he glances meaningfully at the masculine arm still lining the back of Emma's seat, almost touching her. To his credit-and safety-Mark eases the offending limb back to his own desk, offering Emma a lazy smile full of strikingly white teeth. "You and Forza, huh? Did you clear that with his groupies?" She laughs and gently pries Galen's arms off her. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the eruption of pink spreading like spilled paint over her face. She's not used to dating him yet. Until about ten minutes ago, he wasn't used to it either. Now though, with the way Mark eyes her like a tasty shellfish, playing the role of Emma's boyfriend feels all too natural. The bell rings, saving Emma from a reply and saving Mark thousands of dollars in hospital bills. Emma shoots Galen a withering look, which he deflects with that he hopes is an enchanting grin. He measures his success by the way her blush deepens but stops short when he notices the dark circles under her eyes. She didn't sleep last night. Not that he thought she would. She'd been quiet on the flight home from Destin two nights ago. He didn't pressure her to talk about it with him, mostly because he didn't know what to say once the conversation got started. So many times, he's started to assure her that he doesn't see her as an abomination, but it seems wrong to say it out loud. Like he's willfully disagreeing with the law. But how could those delicious-looking lips and those huge violet eyes be considered an abomination? What's even crazier is that not only does he not consider her an abomination, the fact that she could be a Half-Breed ignited a hope in him he's got no right to feel: Grom would never mate with a half human. At least, Galen doesn't think he would. He glances at Emma, whose silky eyelids don't even flutter in her state of light sleep. When he clears his throat, she startles. "Thank you," she mouths to him as she picks her pencil back up, using the eraser to trace the lines in her textbook as she reads. He acknowledges with a nod. He doesn't want to leave her like this, anxious and tense and out of place in her own beautiful skin.

Life is filled with challenges and interruptions. We live in a world that is full of excuses and personal responsibility is in short supply. The projector has for a while now replaced the tried and true mirror for being true to ourselves as we serve the business community. Refuse to let your limits from others be your legacy for yourself. Do not let others dictate how much you are going to make or how successful you are becoming. They don’t own you nor have they made the commitment to provide for you.

Footsteps from the stairwell startle him out of the past. He turns around as Emma's mother takes the last step into the dining area, Emma right behind her. Mrs. McIntosh glides over and puts her arm around him. The smile on her face is genuine, but Emma's smile is more like a straight line. And she's blushing. "Galen, it's very nice to meet you," she says, ushering him into the kitchen. "Emma tells me you're taking her to the beach behind your house today. To swim?" "Yes, ma'am." Her transformation makes him wary. She smiles. "Well, good luck with getting her in the water. Since I'm a little pressed for time, I can't follow you over there, so I just need to see your driver's license while Emma runs outside to get your plate number." Emma rolls her eyes as she shuffles through a drawer and pulls out a pen and paper. She slams the door behind her when she leaves, which shakes the dishes on the wall. Galen nods, pulls out his wallet, and hands over the fake license. Mrs. McIntosh studies it and rummages through her purse until she produces a pen-which she uses to write on her hand. “Just need your license number in case we ever have any problems. But we’re not going to have any problems, are we, Galen? Because you’ll always have my daughter-my only daughter-home on time, isn’t that right?” He nods, then swallows. She holds out his license. When he accepts it, she grabs his wrist, pulling him close. She glances at the garage door and back to him. “Tell me right now, Galen Forza. Are you or are you not dating my daughter?” Great. She still doesn’t believe Emma. If she won’t believe them anyway, why keep trying to convince her? If she thinks they’re dating, the time he intends to spend with Emma will seem normal. But if they spend time together and tell her they’re not dating, she’ll be nothing but suspicious. Possibly even spy on them-which is less than ideal. So, dating Emma is the only way to make sure she mates with Grom. Things just get better and better. “Yes,” he says. “We’re definitely dating.” She narrows her eyes. “Why would she tell me you’re not?” He shrugs. “Maybe she’s ashamed of me.” To his surprise, she chuckles. “I seriously doubt that, Galen Forza.” Her humor is short lived. She grabs a fistful of his T-shirt. “Are you sleeping with her?” Sleeping…Didn’t Rachel say sleeping and mating are the same thing? Dating and mating are similar. But sleeping and mating are the same exact same. He shakes his head. “No, ma’am.” She raises a no-nonsense brow. “Why not? What’s wrong with my daughter?” That is unexpected. He suspects this woman can sense a lie like Toraf can track Rayna. All she’s looking for is honesty, but the real truth would just get him arrested. I’m crazy about your daughter-I’m just saving her for my brother. So he seasons his answer with the frankness she seems to crave. “There’s nothing wrong with your daughter, Mrs. McIntosh. I said we’re not sleeping together. I didn’t say I didn’t want to.” She inhales sharply and releases him. Clearing her throat, she smoothes out his wrinkled shirt with her hand, then pats his chest. “Good answer, Galen. Good answer.” Emma flings open the garage door and stops short. “Mom, what are you doing?” Mrs. McIntosh steps away and stalks to the counter. “Galen and I were just chitchatting. What took you so long?” Galen guesses her ability to sense a lie probably has something to do with her ability to tell one. Emma shoots him a quizzical look, but he returns a casual shrug. Her mother grabs a set of keys from a hook by the refrigerator and nudges her daughter out of the way, but not before snatching the paper out of her hand.

Shortly after this date, on April 17, Mrs. Browning’s father died. In the course of the previous summer an attempt made by a relative to bring about a reconciliation between him and his daughters was met with the answer that they had ‘disgraced his family;’ and, although he professed to have ‘forgiven’ them, he refused all intercourse, removed his family out of town when the Brownings came thither, and declined to give his daughter Henrietta’s address to Mr. Kenyon’s executor, who was instructed to pay her a small legacy.

In a less race-conscious world, black fiddlers and white blues singers might have been regarded as forming a single southern continuum, and such collaborations might have been the norm rather than being hailed as genre-crossing anomalies. Indeed, it is arguably due to the legacy of segregation that blues has presented the most common interracial meeting ground, since, given a level playing field, many of the African American southerners we think of as blues artists might have made their mark performing hillbilly or country and western material.

Old man,” she said. “Don’t you want to prepare or something?” “Prepare what?” “Yourself. For death.” Siri laughed. “Well, Bpoo. Let’s see. If the Buddhists are right, I’m just on my way to the next incarnation. Unless there’s a manual for how to behave correctly as a gnat I’m not sure how I’d prepare for that. If the Catholics are right, nothing short of an asbestos suit and a glass of iced water will help where I’m going. And if the communists are right, you do your best and when you’re gone they put up a statue in your honor and the locals dry their laundry on it. So, if I’m going, you’re the heir to today’s legacy.

Why do these people crave fame? Why do any of us? Well, I’d argue it’s not about money. If it were our tabloids would be devoted to the lives and times of bankers. I think we all want to leave a legacy. We want to be remembered. We want to be Great.... In short, Alexander [the Great] was Great because others decided he was Great, because they chose to admire and emulate him. ... We made Alexander Great, just as today we make people great when we admire them and try to emulate them. History has traditionally been in the business of finding and celebrating great men, and only occasionally great women, but this obsession with Greatness is troubling to me. It wrongly implies, first, history is made primarily by men and secondly, that history is made primarily by celebrated people, which of course makes us all want to be celebrities. Thankfully we’ve left behind the idea that the best way to become an icon is to butcher people and conquer a lot of land, but the ideals that we’ve embraced instead aren’t necessarily worth celebrating either. All of which is to say we decide what to worship and what to care about and what to pay attention to. We decide whether to care about [so-called ‘celebrities’]. Alexander couldn’t make history in a vacuum, and neither can anyone else.

I remember on one of my many visits with Thomas A. Edison, I brought up the question of Ingersoll. I asked this great genius what he thought of him, and he replied, 'He was grand.' I told Mr. Edison that I had been invited to deliver a radio address on Ingersoll, and would he be kind enough to write me a short appreciation of him. This he did, and a photostat of that letter is now a part of this house. In it you will read what Mr. Edison wrote. He said: 'I think that Ingersoll had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed....' I mention this as an indication of the tremendous influence Ingersoll had upon the intellectual life of his time. To what extent did Ingersoll influence Edison? It was Thomas A. Edison's freedom from the narrow boundaries of theological dogma, and his thorough emancipation from the degrading and stultifying creed of Christianity, that made it possible for him to wrest from nature her most cherished secrets, and bequeath to the human race the richest of legacies. Mr. Edison told me that when Ingersoll visited his laboratories, he made a record of his voice, but stated that the reproductive devices of that time were not as good as those later developed, and, therefore, his magnificent voice was lost to posterity.

the treaties, the agreements between these intruders and the people, all of which would be broken, and the land that would be taken—and taken again. There was the Treaty of Savannah in 1733. The Treaty of Coweta in 1739. The Treaty of Augusta in 1763. Ten years later, a second treaty in that same place. The Treaty of New York in 1790, and the realization that our land would be fertile for short-staple cotton, and after this, there came an invention by a man named Eli Whitney. Think of him, a man stewing in the juice of mediocrity, the blankness of his legacy breathing down his neck, tinkering with his rude invention. Or did a slave invent the gin, as some have said?

In short, Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a stable, albeit repressive country that had been an ally in the fight against terrorism and turned it into a breeding ground for the most radical of jihadis in a feeble attempt at nation-building. The Obama/Clinton misadventure was everything many disliked about the war in Iraq only much, much worse. Unlike Iraq, Obama committed U.S. forces for the intervention in Libya without a congressional declaration of war, violating the War Powers Act of 1973.117 Libya, like Iraq, suffered greatly at the hands of Obama’s foreign policy decisions, turning the once stable and prosperous country into a terrorist haven.118

Of the two, Cope’s scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakingly industrious career, he wrote some 1,400 learned papers and described almost 1,300 new species of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs)—more than double Marsh’s output in both cases. Cope might have done even more, but unfortunately he went into a rather precipitate descent in his later years. Having inherited a fortune in 1875, he invested unwisely in silver and lost everything. He ended up living in a single room in a Philadelphia boarding house, surrounded by books, papers, and bones. Marsh by contrast finished his days in a splendid mansion in New Haven. Cope died in 1897, Marsh two years later.

The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.

We're all so happy you're feeling better, Miss McIntosh. Looks like you still have a good bump on your noggin, though," she says in her childlike voice. Since there is no bump on my noggin, I take a little offense but decide to drop it. "Thanks, Mrs. Poindexter. It looks worse than it feels. Just a little tender." "Yeah, I'd say the door got the worst of it," he says beside me. Galen signs himself in on the unexcused tardy sheet below my name. When his arm brushes against mine, it feels like my blood's turned into boiling water. I turn to face him. My dreams really do not do him justice. Long black lashes, flawless olive skin, cut jaw like an Italian model, lips like-for the love of God, have some dignity, nitwit. He just made fun of you. I cross my arms and lift my chin. "You would know," I say. He grins, yanks my backpack from me, and walks out. Trying to ignore the waft of his scent as the door shuts, I look to Mrs. Poindexter, who giggles, shrugs, and pretends to sort some papers. The message is clear: He's your problem, but what a great problem to have. Has he charmed he sense out of the staff here, too? If he started stealing kids' lunch money, would they also giggle at that? I growl through clenched teeth and stomp out of the office. Galen is waiting for me right outside the door, and I almost barrel into him. He chuckles and catches my arm. "This is becoming a habit for you, I think." After I'm steady-after Galen steadies me, that is-I poke my finger into his chest and back him against the wall, which only makes him grin wider. "You...are...irritating...me," I tell him. "I noticed. I'll work on it." "You can start by giving me my backpack." "Nope." "Nope?" "Right-nope. I'm carrying it for you. It's the least I can do." "Well, can't argue with that, can I?" I reach around for it, but he moves to block me. "Galen, I don't want you to carry it. Now knock it off. I'm late for class." "I'm late for it too, remember?" Oh, that's right. I've let him distract me from my agenda. "Actually, I need to go back to the office." "No problem. I'll wait for you here, then I'll walk you to class." I pinch the bridge of my nose. "That's the thing. I'm changing my schedule. I won't be in your class anymore, so you really should just go. You're seriously violating Rule Numero Uno." He crosses his arms. "Why are you changing your schedule? Is it because of me?" "No." "Liar." "Sort of." "Emma-" "Look, I don't want you to take this personally. It's just that...well, something bad happens every time I'm around you." He raises a brow. "Are you sure it's me? I mean, from where I stood, it looked like your flip-flops-" "What were we arguing about anyway? We were arguing, right?" "You...you don't remember?" I shake my head. "Dr. Morton said I might have some short-term memory loss. I do remember being mad at you, though." He looks at me like I'm a criminal. "You're saying you don't remember anything I said. Anything you said." The way I cross my arms reminds me of my mother. "That's what I'm saying, yes." "You swear?" "If you're not going to tell me, then give me my backpack. I have a concussion, not broken arms. I'm not helpless." His smile could land him a cover shoot for any magazine in the country. "We were arguing about which beach you wanted me to take you to. We were going swimming after school." "Liar." With a capital L. Swimming-drowning-falls on my to-do list somewhere below giving birth to porcupines. "Oh, wait. You're right. We were arguing about when the Titanic actually sank. We had already agreed to go to my house to swim.

We are not doing it for Jagen. We are doing it for our kind.” “We?” Rayna snaps. “What Gift do you have, Grom? Oh, that’s right. You and Nalia get to stay safely behind while me and Galen and Emma drown an entire island.” Oh, heck no. “Um, I’m not killing anyone,” I say, raising my hand. “Not humans, not Syrena.” “It’s a good thing your Gift isn’t deadly then, isn’t it?” Rayna sneers. “I have an idea. You can give the humans their last meal. That would be special, wouldn’t it?” “How would you like to go without eating for a while?” I shoot back. I could use my Gift to send the fish away from her, or I could just bust all her teeth out. Maturity seems to be evaporating into the air. I wonder if her Gift includes pushing all my buttons in rapid-point-five seconds. But then, I know her animosity is really toward Grom, not me. All I’m doing is feeding her anxiety. Galen tucks a tendril of my hair behind my ear. It’s enough to distract me and he knows it. I give him a sour look for interfering, but he grins. “You don’t have to kill anyone, angelfish. In fact, we need your help to save them.” He seems to be telling me something with his eyes, but I’m not picking up on it. I’d love to blame it on the pain meds. “Doesn’t that kind of miss the point?” Rayna says. “Of course not,” Galen says. “Our objective is to rescue our kind, not kill the humans. We can do that without destroying them.” Everyone is all ears, but Galen is not ready to divulge his plan just yet. He stands. “Highness, tell the Archives we will meet with them to discuss our terms.” “Terms?” Grom says. “This isn’t negotiable, Galen. They need us. It’s our duty as Royals.” Galen shrugs. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s entirely negotiable. And we’re not Royals anymore, not until I hear it from their lips.” He turns to Antonis. “And tell them that in view of recent events, the council must come here, on land. There is no reason for us to doubt that this is a trap to recapture us.” Antonis chuckles. I get the feeling that this is all an amusing game to him. But then, old people have earned the right to be amused by everything. And I’m pretty sure he’s the oldest person I know. “Young Prince Galen, I am at your service.” With that, my grandfather leaves. I turn away as he begins to finagle the shorts from his skinny waist on his way down the beach.

It isn't easy to become a fossil. The fate of nearly all living organisms- over 99.9 percent of them- is to compost down to nothingness. When your spark is gone, every molecule you own will be nibbled off you or sluiced away to be put to use in some other system. That's just the way it is. Even if you make it into the small pool of organisms, the less than 0.1 percent, that don't get devoured, the chances of being fossilized are very small... Only one born in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today- that's 270 million people with 206 bones each- will only be about fifty bones, one quarter of a complete skeleton. That's not to say of course that any of these bones will actually be found. p322

Even if these two didn't share the same short dark hair, the same violet eyes, and the same flawless olive skin, I'd know they were related because of their most dominant feature-their habit of staring. "I'm Chloe. This is my friend Emma, who apparently just head-butted your boyfriend Galen. We were in the middle of apologizing." I pinch the bridge of my nose and count to ten-Mississippi, but fifty-Mississippi seems more appropriate. Fifty allows more time to fantasize about ripping one of Chloe's new waves out. "Emma, what's wrong? Your nose isn't bleeding, is it?" She chirps, enjoying herself. Tingles gather at my chin as Galen lifts it with the crook of his finger. "Is your nose bleeding? Let me see," he says. He tilts my head side to side, leans closer to get a good look. And I meet my threshold for embarrassment. Tripping is bad enough. Tripping into someone is much worse. But if that someone has a body that could make sculpted statues jealous-and thinks you've broken your nose on one of his pecs-well, that's when tripping runs a distant second to humane euthanasia. He is clearly surprised when I swat his hand and step away. His girlfriend/relative seems taken aback that I mimic his stance-crossed arms and deep frown. I doubt she has ever met her threshold for embarrassment. "I said I was fine. No blood, no foul." "This is my sister Rayna," he says, as if the conversation steered naturally in that direction. She smiles at me as if forced at knifepoint, the kind of smile that comes purely from manners, like the smile you give your grandmother when she gives you the rotten-cabbage-colored sweater she's been knitting. I think of that sweater now as I return her smile.

Anyone who’s ever been in a leadership role quickly learns that you’re squeezed between others’ lofty expectations and your own personal limitations. You realize that while others want you to be of impeccable character, you’re not always without fault. You learn that you can’t see around every corner, and even if you know your way forward everyone may not end up at the same destination, let alone be on time. You discover that despite your best efforts to introduce brilliant innovations, most of them don’t succeed. You find that you sometimes get angry and short, and that you don’t always listen carefully to what others have to say. You’re reminded that you don’t always treat everyone with dignity and respect. You recognize that others deserve more credit than they get, and that you’ve failed to say thank you. You know that sometimes you get, and accept, more credit than you deserve. In other words, you realize that you’re human.

Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today—that’s 270 million people with 206 bones each—will only be about fifty bones, one quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say of course that any of these bones will actually be found. Bearing in mind that they can be buried anywhere within an area of slightly over 3.6 million square miles, little of which will ever be turned over, much less examined, it would be something of a miracle if they were. Fossils are in every sense vanishingly rare. Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all. It has been estimated that less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record. That in itself is a stunningly infinitesimal proportion. However, if you accept the common estimate that the Earth has produced 30 billion species of creature in its time and Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s statement (in The Sixth Extinction) that there are 250,000 species of creature in the fossil record, that reduces the proportion to just one in 120,000. Either way, what we possess is the merest sampling of all the life that Earth has spawned. Moreover, the record

Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,

The depressed person shared that she could remember, all too clearly, how at her third boarding school, she had once watched her roommate talk to some boy on their room's telephone as she (i.e., the roommate) made faces and gestures of entrapped repulsion and boredom with the call, this popular, attractive, and self-assured roommate finally directing at the depressed person an exaggerated pantomime of someone knocking on a door until the depressed person understood that she was to open their room's door and step outside and knock loudly on it so as to give the roommate an excuse to end the call. The depressed person had shared this traumatic memory with members of her Support System and had tried to articulate how bottomlessly horrible she had felt it would have been to have been that nameless pathetic boy on the phone and how now, as a legacy of that experience, she dreaded, more than almost anything, the thought of ever being someone you had to appeal silently to someone nearby to help you contrive an excuse to get off the phone with. The depressed person would implore each supportive friend to tell her the very moment she (i.e., the friend) was getting bored or frustrated or repelled or felt she (i.e., the friend) had other more urgent or interesting things to attend to, to please for God's sake be utterly candid and frank and not spend one moment longer on the phone than she was absolutely glad to spend. The depressed person knew perfectly well, of course, she assured the therapist;' how such a request could all too possibly be heard not as an invitation to get off the telephone at will but actually as a needy, manipulative plea not to get off-never to get off-the telephone.

Muhammad’s violent end years and final violent words were quickly followed by those who succeeded him in power, after his death in 632 AD.          “Within thirty years after Muhammad’s death Islam achieved the most spectacular expansion in its history. During the caliphate of Muhammad’s immediate successors from 632 to 661, Islam conquered the whole Arabian peninsula and invaded territories which had been in Greco-Roman hands since the reign of Alexander the Great….Damascus fell in 635. Jerusalem was captured in 638. In the same year Antioch fell, and the other great Hellenistic capital, Alexandria, became a permanent Arab possession in 646. Coastal cities in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as well as the island of Cyprus were successively occupied by Arabs in a short period of time…The rapid advance of Islam spread panic and consternation among the Christians in the Greek Near East…The Arabic wars against the Greeks were not only political and economic wars, but holy wars of Islam against Christianity.” (“Greek Christian and Other Accounts of the Muslim Conquests of the Near East,” Demetrios Constantelos, article in The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books, 2005, Edited by Andrew Bostom, MD).

For hundreds of years, parental rights were considered inviolate—in the name of discipline, parents could do just about anything to their children, short of killing them.

Control Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates). Embrace the inspectors. Competence Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods. Clarity Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.

MINISTER: Ulick Gamp TERM OF OFFICE: 1707 – 1718 Previously head of the Wizengamot, Gamp had the onerous job of policing a fractious and frightened community adjusting to the imposition of the International Statute of Secrecy. His greatest legacy was to found the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

Being a borderland meant two things. First, Ukrainians inherited a legacy of violence. ‘Rebellion; Civil War; Pogroms; Famine; Purges; Holocaust’ a friend remarked, flipping through the box of file-cards I assembled while researching this book. ‘Where’s the section on Peace and Prosperity?’ Second, they were left with a tenuous, equivocal sense of national identity. Though they rebelled at every opportunity, the few occasions on which they did achieve a measure of self-rule – during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, the Civil War of 1918–20, and towards the end of Nazi occupation – were nasty, brutish, and above all short.

I immediately packed up Bindi and went to catch the next plane home. The family was in free fall. Steve was in shock, and Bob was even worse off. Lyn had always acted as the matriarch, the one who kept everything together. She was such a strong figure, a leader. Her death didn’t seem real. I sat on that plane and looked down at Bindi. Life is changed forever now, I thought. As we arrived home, I didn’t know what to expect. I had never dealt with grief like this before. Lyn was only in her fifties, and it seemed cruel to have her life cut short, as she was on the brink of a dream she had held in her heart forever. These were going to be her golden years. She and Bob could embark on the life they had worked so hard to achieve. They would be together, near their family, where they could take care of the land and enjoy the wildlife they loved. I couldn’t imagine what Steve, his dad, and his sisters were going through. My heart was broken. Bindi’s gran was gone just when they had most looked forward to spending time together. The aftermath of Lyn’s death was every bit as awful as I could have imagined. Steve was absolutely inconsolable, and Bob was very obviously unable to cope. Joy and Mandy were trying to keep things together, but they were distraught and heartbroken. Everyone at the zoo was somber. I felt I needed to do something, yet I felt helpless, sad, and lost. Steve’s younger sister Mandy performed the mournful task of sifting through the smashed items from the truck. One of the objects Lyn had packed was Bob’s teapot. There was nothing Bob enjoyed more than a cup of tea. As Mandy went to wash out the teapot, she noticed movement. Inside was Sharon, the bird-eating spider, the sole survivor of the accident. Although her tank had been smashed to bits, she had managed to crawl into the teapot to hide. After the funeral, time appeared to slow down and then stop entirely. Steve talked about moving out to Ironback Station. He couldn’t seem to order his thoughts. He no longer saw a reason for going on with all the projects on which we had worked so hard. Bindi was upset but didn’t have the understanding to know why. She was too young to get her head around what had happened. She simply cried when she saw her daddy crying. It would be a long time before life returned to anything like normalcy. Lyn’s death was something that Steve would never truly overcome. His connection with his mum, like that of so many mothers and sons, was unusually close. Lyn Irwin was a pioneer in wildlife rehabilitation work. She had given her son a great legacy, and eventually that gift would win out over death. But in the wake of her accident, all we could see was loss. Steve headed out into the bush alone, with just Sui and his swag. He reverted to his youth, to his solitary formative years. But grief trailed him. My heart broke for my husband. I was not sure he would ever find his way back.

A weak competitor may resort to dropping prices because it is the only available action for increasing its volume in the short term to stave off disaster. By the late 1970s, Tesco had been suffering because of their legacy of small, town-centre sites but succeeded in taking the industry by storm with their ‘check-out’ campaign. The whole UK retail market became price-driven for several years, before it swung once again towards a market orientation with the battle being fought on location, format and service.

YA DA DO (Lovie Austin) Every evenin’ ’bout half past four Sweet piano playin’ near my door And turn to raggin’, you never heard such blues before There’s a pretty little thing they play It’s very short, but folks all say “Oh, it’s a-pickin’,” when they start to want to cry for more I don’t know the name, but it’s a pretty little thing, goes Ya da da do, ya da da do Fill you with harmonizing, minor refrain It’s a no-name blues, but’ll take away your pains Ya da da do, ya da da do Everybody loves it, ya da do do do Ya da da do, ya da da do Fill you with harmonizing, minor refrain It’s a no-name blues, but’ll take away your pains Ya da da do, ya da da do Everybody loves it, ya da do do do. YONDER

In 1376, Pope Gregory responded to the betrayal with a bull of excommunication, singling out the “otto dei preti,” or “8 priests,” as well as the “otto della guerra.” When Bernabo received his, he was said to have flown into such a rage that he temporarily held the 2 papal officials who bore the bad news hostage. Only upon consuming the papers they had attempted to serve him, down to their seals and the silk cords that bound them, would they be released. He was later deposed and imprisoned by his nephew several years later for unrelated matters, his captivity cut short by a lethal dose of poison injected into his drink. Apart

Invest your evaporating life and reap greatness. Invest your evaporating time and leave a legacy behind for future generations. Take this short time that you have on earth and convert it into greatness.

When you receive what you begged for, it only lasts for a short time. But what you build day after day will stay on for posterity to meet. Be a world changer and work out your dreams.

There are three locations in the vicinity of Bethlehem that have been claimed to be the location where these events took place. The old town of Beit Sahour, located a short distance east of Bethlehem, is said to be the location where an angel announced to the shepherds that Jesus had been born.

They weren't all like this but Mr. Jenkins was a few bones short of a graveyard and his instability as a human had followed him into Lycanthropy, creating exciting and lethal new problems.

Martin Luther King’s legacy, as its keepers know, is profoundly at odds with the historic American order, and that is why they can have no rest until the symbols of that order are pulled up root and branch. To say that Dr. King are the cause he really represented are now part of the official American creed, indeed the defining and dominant symbol of that creed – which is what both houses of the United States Congress said in 1983 and what President Ronald Reagan signed into law shortly afterward – is the inauguration of a new order and the things they symbolized can retain neither meaning nor respect, in which they are as mute and dark as the gods of Babylon and Tyre and from whose cold ashes will rise a new god, leveling their rough places, straightening their crookedness, and exalting every valley until the whole earth is flattened beneath his feet and perceives the glory of the new lord.

That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human-being - that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen - seems little short of miraculous.

We can now see how the expansion of blockspace is on track to give us a cryptographically verifiable macrohistory, or cryptohistory for short. This is the log of everything that billions of people choose to make public: every decentralized tweet, every public donation, every birth and death certificate, every marriage and citizenship record, every crypto domain registration, every merger and acquisition of an on-chain entity, every financial statement, every public record — all digitally signed, timestamped, and hashed in freely available public ledgers.26 The thing is, essentially all of human behavior has a digital component now. Every purchase and communication, every ride in an Uber, every swipe of a keycard, and every step with a Fitbit — all of that produces digital artifacts. So, in theory you could eventually download the public blockchain of a network state to replay the entire cryptographically verified history of a community.25 That’s the future of public records, a concept that is to the paper-based system of the legacy state what paper records were to oral records.

Throughout the over 200 years of the field of biogeography, its researchers have discovered some strikingly general patterns in biological diversity, and have advanced an equally intriguing set of explanations for the forces driving those patterns. Despite the many levels, qualitative features, and potential quantitative means of measuring biological diversity, the overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on just one or two relatively simple, but intuitively valuable measures—species richness and endemicity. Species richness is a simple count of the number of species in a particular area of interest (e.g. the number of fish in a pond, lake, or ocean basin). It is a direct, albeit simplistic expression of our innate value for the more complex. But our instinctive valuation of diversity is a bit more ecologically sophisticated than this, as it is also influenced by our apparently innate attraction to the rarest, most precious “gems” of the natural world. A simple thought experiment should bear this out: given two assemblages with the same species richness—one comprising species common to most other ecosystems, and the other solely comprising endemics (so rare that they occur nowhere else), nearly all of us would be drawn to the latter assemblage because it has high endemicity. Beyond this instinctive attraction to the most rare, there clearly is a more pragmatic reason for valuing endemic species over the more broadly distributed (cosmopolitan) ones. If an endemic is lost from its assemblage, it disappears globally and the legacy of many thousands of generations of natural selection are irrevocably lost as well.

Isaac Asimov’s ability to take the Big Ideas so crucial to the sense of wonder in science fiction and embody them in compellingly human stories and settings—particularly in his robot stories, Foundation works, and other speculative fiction both long and short—raised the bar high for all of us who have followed him in the tradition of idea-driven science fiction. Asimov was a law unto himself, yet he gave his fellow writers laws—of robotics, and psychohistory—that have shaped all of us who have tried to write of machine intelligence or of human civilizations vast in time and space. That is his great and vital legacy.” —Howard V. Hendrix

She might be on some mission to play with fire and stick it to her father, but it’s her own rebellion against the hand she herself was personally dealt that fuels her. In that, we’re alike. In that, she’s like us. Ensnared by her in that short time, realization struck—Cecelia Horner is filled to the fucking brim with untapped potential. There’s a sort of power brewing within her that not even she is aware of. That’s what I saw, felt, and rang through me with absolute certainty. Not her age, beauty, or our undeniable chemistry, or even the danger she presents to us. The realization was so visceral that it had the hairs on my neck rising. Now that I’ve seen it, it can’t be denied.

He’s lean, but well-fucking-built. A smooth plane of chest muscles and protruding abs that end in a delicious V-line that’s unfortunately half hidden by the shorts.

My wife had been murdered by a criminal. The remainder of my life—short, I hoped—was to be spent in seeking that criminal. But the trap that I set to catch him would probably catch other criminals first; and since the available method of identification could not be applied to newly-acquired specimens while in the living state, it followed that each would have to be reduced to the condition in which identification would be possible. And if, on inspection, the specimen acquired proved to be not the one sought, I should have to add it to the collection and rebait the trap. That was evidently the only possible plan. "But before embarking on it I had to consider its ethical bearings. Of the legal position there was no question. It was quite illegal. But that signified nothing. There are recent human skeletons in the Natural History Museum; every art school in the country has one and so have many board schools. What is the legal position of the owners of those human remains? It will not bear investigation. As to the Hunterian Museum, it is a mere resurrectionist's legacy. That the skeleton of O'Brian was obtained by flagrant body-snatching is a well-known historical fact, but one at which the law, very properly, winks. Obviously the legal position was not worth considering. "But the ethical position? To me it looked quite satisfactory, though clearly at variance with accepted standards. For the attitude of society towards the criminal appears to be that of a community of stark lunatics. In effect, society addresses the professional criminal somewhat thus: "'You wish to practice crime as a profession, to gain a livelihood by appropriating—by violence or otherwise—the earnings of honest and industrious men. Very well, you may do so on certain conditions. If you are skilful and cautious you will not be molested. You may occasion danger, annoyance and great loss to honest men with very little danger to yourself unless you are clumsy and incautious; in which case you may be captured. If you are, we shall take possession of your person and detain you for so many months or years. During that time you will inhabit quarters better than you are accustomed to; your sleeping-room will be kept comfortably warm in all weathers; you will

I slowed my steps as I started up the path toward the front entrance, feeling like I was about to walk on smoldering embers. Had the fire burned down enough that it couldn’t harm me? Or would I be scorched? Reaching the front door, I took a deep breath, aware of the importance of what I was about to do and fearful that I would not succeed. Then I rapped firmly upon the dark wood. This was not the time to practice timidity. Grayden opened the door himself and our eyes met. For a moment, neither of us moved, equally flustered--he was stunned to find me on his stoop, while I had expected a servant to answer my knock. “May I come in, my lord?” I inquired, sounding more nervous than I would have liked. “As you wish.” He leaned back against the door frame and gestured for me to enter, his manner not entirely hospitable. I stepped inside and glanced around the spacious foyer, then cleared my throat, ready to begin a short, but well-rehearsed, statement of contrition. “I owe you an apology, Lord Grayden. I’m sorry for failing to attend the dinner to which you were invited at my family’s home. While I do not deserve your kind regard, I hope you will be gracious enough to forgive me.” “That depends on what you were doing instead.” “Excuse me?” I squeaked, for this was an unexpected reaction. My mind spun, trying to decide what to do. Did I need to apologize better? Or should I just leave? He laughed, and I felt even more flustered. “Your mother and sisters kept changing their stories. Makes me think they didn’t know what you were doing. I’d like the mystery solved.” Taken aback, I surveyed him, noting his dark brown hair that made his skin appear all the more fair, his perfectly proportioned nose, his gorgeous green eyes and his inviting smile. He wanted me to be honest. I decided to risk it, for nothing worse could come of his knowing the truth. “I forgot you were coming.” He straightened and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “At least I know you’re not a liar.” “Not usually,” I blurted, and he laughed once more. “Well then, I accept your apology.” “That’s very considerate of you.” I hesitated then gave him another curtsey. “Good day to you, my lord.” His eyebrows rose in surprise. “You’re leaving so soon?” “Yes,” I replied, a grin playing at the corners of my mouth. “You see, I haven’t been invited to stay.” Before he could respond, I slipped past him and out the door, pleased at his befuddled expression. All in all, things had gone well--I had accomplished my appointed task; at the same time, I was certain I could cross another suitor off the list. After all, even the best impressions Lord Grayden had of me left much to be desired. But I didn’t feel as happy about that outcome as I had expected. Strangely, the young man held more appeal for me now than he had before. I sighed, for my nature did indeed appear to be a fickle one.

All went smoothly for the first fifteen minutes--my mother was, after all, very adept at making people comfortable. She chatted, though not excessively, primarily with me. As I had predicted, Narian was silent and observant, letting me carry the conversation while he tried to get a feel for the woman across from us, not quite trusting that she was on our side. He was never rude, and never short with her; he simply hid himself behind good etiquette. During a natural pause in conversation, my mother perused Narian and me, and her mood became contemplative. “When was it that you fell in love?” she asked. “Was it right under our noses?” “More or less,” I said with a laugh, glancing at Narian. “We became friends when he first came to Hytanica. All those trips Miranna and I made to Baron Koranis’s estate were really so I could see him.” Mother smiled and Narian glanced at me as if this were news to him. Then she picked up the thread of the conversation. “I remember falling in love,” she mused, and I wondered how far she would venture into her story, knowing it was not a wholly happy one. “I was fifteen, going through the very difficult experience of losing my family in a fire. I was brought to live in the palace, for I’d been betrothed for years to Andrius, Alera’s uncle, who later died in the war before we could be married.” I realized she was not talking to me, and that, though he was still aloof, she had captured Narian’s interest, for his deep blue eyes were resting attentively upon her. “At the time, I was so lost and alone and frightened. And then Andrius and I grew close. With him, my life made sense again. I had something to hold on to, something to steady me. What was the worst time of my life became the best.” There was a pause, and she innocently met Narian’s gaze. But her story was not innocent at all. If I could recognize the parallel she was drawing to his life in the aftermath of learning of his Hytanican heritage, then he surely could, as well. He didn’t say a word, however, and she dropped the veiled attempt to connect with him before it became awkward, turning to me instead. “I’ve told you before, Alera--Andrius lives on in you. I see him in you every day.” I smiled, tipping my head in acceptance of the compliment. “And in you--” she said, once more turning to Narian, tapping a finger against her lips in thought “--I see Cannan.” She was lightly cajoling him, exactly as a parent would do. I couldn’t imagine what was going on in his mind, but he was no longer eager to leave, his eyes never once flicking toward me or the door.

Narian and I left the parlor shortly thereafter in high spirits. The former Queen had been very accepting of him, and he had been remarkably forthcoming with her. Somehow, through common experience and maternal instinct, she had reached out to forge a connection with her future son-in-law. We went to my quarters and Narian stayed in the parlor while I changed for dinner, although he would not accompany me to the meal--we may have had luck with my mother, but my father would not be so receptive to the news of our betrothal. When I reemerged in simpler garb, he was in an armchair, contemplatively rubbing his once-broken wrist, his face growing progressively more trouble. I glanced around the room, wondering what could possibly have happened to change his temperament in the short time we had been apart. “Narian? What is it?” He shook his head, then ran a hand through his thick blond hair. “Your mother would make an excellent interrogator.” I couldn’t help it--I laughed, harder than I had in a long time. “I hardly think she’s the type!” “Find it as funny as you like,” he said with a smile. “But I don’t know what I was telling her!” “Well, do you regret it?” I asked, and he flashed through a myriad of emotions: confusion, deliberation, discomfort at having been so open with her, then, at last, acceptance. “No,” he said, with a touch of wonder. “I…I understand it now, I suppose--why you talk to her. Why you trust her. I wanted to trust her.” I walked over to him and sat in his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but it’s time I did. I’m in love with you, Narian.” “I love you, too,” he said, the corners of his mouth flicking upward. The words weren’t so difficult, after all.

system will get better as long as people aren’t introducing duplication behind your back. If they are, you can take steps with them short of physical violence,

If you are working on a short story for a small online press, don't try to write a serious, world-changing, add-this-to-the-literary-canon masterpiece. Do your best work, but keep it all in perspective. Save the stress for when it is really called for, like facing a two-week deadline to rewrite a novel for a major house.

A little girl, perhaps five years of age and bursting with enthusiasm, broke away from her mother and ran toward me, stopping a couple of feet short, suddenly aware that she was in the midst of strangers. She was holding a purple flower, her dark hair held back by a woven headband, her large blue eyes round with alarm. “It’s all right,” I said to her, believing she intended to give the flower to me. “Don’t be afraid.” She looked at me curiously, then took a tentative step--not toward me, but toward Narian. He watched her draw closer, his expression uncertain, as though he were trying to determine the girl’s motivations. When she stood before him, he knelt down to accept the flower, while the crowd held its collective breath, and I wondered if they thought he would harm her. “You’re brave like my papa,” she said, and the people chuckled. The girl blushed, not used to such attention. A smile flicked across Narian’s face. “And you’re beautiful like the woman I love.” He touched her cheek, and the girl giggled, then ran back to her mother. A sprinkling of applause broke out, which Narian acknowledged with a nod. When I caught his eye, I beamed at him, suddenly envisioning our future. He would be the father of my children someday, and a wonderful father he would be.