Legendary Man Quotes

Aja gave Loor an up and down once-over. She then said, "Is Loor a man's name or a woman's name?" Ouch. Loor answered, "It is the name of a legendary hero on Zadaa. A woman." Really?" Aja said. "What did she do that was so heroic?" She killed her enemies and ate them.

You know the old saying: 'one riot, one Ranger.'" The saying stemmed from a legendary event in the past. A minor fief had risen up against their cruel and avaricious lord, with hundreds of people surrounding his mano house, threatening to burn it to the ground. The panicked nobleman's message for help was answered by the arrival of a single Ranger. Aghast, the nobleman confronted the solitary figure. They sent one Ranger?" he said incredulously. "One man?" How many riots do you have?" the Ranger replied. On this occasion, however, Duncan was not inclined to be swayed by a legend. "I have a new saying," he replied. "One daughter, two Rangers." Two and a half," Will corrected him. The King couldn't help smiling at the eager young face before him. Don't sell yourself short," he said. "Two and three-quarters.

History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.

The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

They have seen Death and ultimate defeat, and yet they would not in despair retreat, but oft to victory have tuned the lyre and kindled hearts with legendary fire, illuminating Now and dark Hath-been with light of suns as yet by no man seen.

I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor,... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel pround of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.

At last, Sturmhond straightened the lapels of his teal frock coat and said, “Well, Brekker, it’s obvious you only deal in half-truths and outright lies, so you’re clearly the man for the job.” “There’s just one thing,” said Kaz, studying the privateer’s broken nose and ruddy hair. “Before we join hands and jump off a cliff together, I want to know exactly who I’m running with.” Sturmhond lifted a brow. “We haven’t been on a road trip or exchanged clothes, but I think our introductions were civilized enough.” “Who are you really, privateer?” “Is this an existential question?” “No proper thief talks the way you do.” “How narrow-minded of you.” “I know the look of a rich man’s son, and I don’t believe a king would send an ordinary privateer to handle business this sensitive.” “Ordinary,” scoffed Sturmhond. “Are you so schooled in politics?” “I know my way around a deal. Who are you? We get the truth or my crew walks.” “Are you so sure that would be possible, Brekker? I know your plans now. I’m accompanied by two of the world’s most legendary Grisha, and I’m not too bad in a fight either.” “And I’m the canal rat who brought Kuwei Yul-Bo out of the Ice Court alive. Let me know how you like your chances.” His crew didn’t have clothes or titles to rival the Ravkans, but Kaz knew where he’d put his money if he had any left. Sturmhond clasped his hands behind his back, and Kaz saw the barest shift in his demeanor. His eyes lost their bemused gleam and took on a surprising weight. No ordinary privateer at all. “Let us say,” said Sturmhond, gaze trained on the Ketterdam street below, “hypothetically, of course, that the Ravkan king has intelligence networks that reach deep within Kerch, Fjerda, and the Shu Han, and that he knows exactly how important Kuwei Yul-Bo could be to the future of his country. Let us say that king would trust no one to negotiate such matters but himself, but that he also knows just how dangerous it is to travel under his own name when his country is in turmoil, when he has no heir and the Lantsov succession is in no way secured.” “So hypothetically,” Kaz said, “you might be addressed as Your Highness.

Even if we are right and the other person is definitely wrong, we only destroy ego by causing someone to lose face. The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

Just thinking. Man, Sophie, it's only your first day and you've already befriended the school outcast, pissed off the most popular girls at Hecate, and developed a full-blown thing for the hottest guy. If you can manage to get detention tomorrow, you'll be like, legendary.

I do not have to be only one thing, Anna thought. I can choose what suits me when it suits me. The trousers and jacket do not make me a man, and the necklace does not make me a woman. They are only what makes me feel beautiful and powerful in this moment. I am exactly as I choose to be. I am a Shadowhunter who wears gorgeous suits and a legendary pendant.

As the just, legendary Arabic King Omar put it, “I would rather release a criminal than imprison an innocent man.

The man was a legendary scoundrel. An expert ruiner of young ladies. And he’d never once been punished for it. Perhaps because he was so very good at it. It seemed a shame to punish someone for what was clearly a remarkable skill.

I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy, that He meant to provide him with what he needed to maintain life in order to be happy, and that we did not need to have quite so much destruction and misery as I saw all around and read of in the daily press.

Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this spring-tide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.

Your mind is not your friend, Mike. I hope you know that. You have to fight with your mind, control it, put it in its place. You have to control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is ninety percent psychological. It’s just the excuse of a man who wants to quit.

On the TV screen right now, it's 1975, and Jimmy Page is playing like a man who answers to nobody. A man existing in that seductive state of extended adolescence that rock legends bask in, a man connected to something in the universe larger than even the sum total of the legendary Led Zeppelin, playing guitar because that is so clearly what he was put here to do. And it's wrong to expect that kind of divine moment to last forever, and to expect an artist to stay in 1975. Fact is, ten minutes ago I saw the guy onscreen right downstairs, coming off the trading floor of the stock exchange with a banker carrying his guitar cases for him. I sit cross-legged on the floor on a workday staring into my cereal bowl, thinking about how we all change. We all grow up. We all move on, one way or another, whether we want to or not.

For to Ade,...the holy man was the whole mad, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was.

A man must believe in himself and his judgment if he expects to make a living at this game.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

The name of Robert G. Ingersoll is in the pantheon of the world. More than any other man who ever lived he destroyed religious superstition. He was the Shakespeare of oratory -- the greatest that the world has ever known. Ingersoll lived and died far in advance of his time. He wrought nobly for the transformation of this world into a habitable globe; and long after the last echo of destruction has been silenced, his name will be loved and honored, and his fame will shine resplendent, for his immortality is fixed and glorious. {Debbs had this much respect for Ingersoll, despite their radically different political views. This statement was made at Ingersoll's funeral}

What are the tales?" Adrienne asked wryly. "His exploits are legendary!" "His conquests are legion. 'Tis rumored he's traveled the world accompanied by only the most beautiful lasses." "'Tis said there isna a comely lass in all of Scotia he hasna tumbled" "in England, too!" "and he canna recall any of their names." "He is said to have godlike beauty, and a practiced hand in the fine art of seduction." "He is fabulously wealthy and rumors say his castle is luxurious beyond compare." Adrienne blinked. "Wonderful. A materialistic, unfaithfill, beautiful playboy of a self-indulged, inconsiderate man with a bad memory. And he's all mine. Dear sweet God, what have I done to deserve this?" she wondered aloud. Twice, she brooded privately.

If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. – If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. – Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. – Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives

Give a man a noble cause and he would fight to the death for what he believed in,but get the woman he loves to leave him and his once honourable principles would cease to be quite so important.

Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies. But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces. But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, 'Yeah. Sure. They couldn’t possibly have made this an escalator.

Royce eyed Hadrian with a skeptical expression. “He’ll never manage the climb.” “Climb?” Hadrian asked. “The treasure room is at the top of the Crown Tower,” Arcadius explained. Even Hadrian had heard of that. Even farmers in Hintindar knew of the Crown Tower. Supposedly it was the leftover corner of some ancient but legendary castle. “I’m in good shape. A few stairs aren’t going to kill me.” “The tower is heavily guarded in every way, except against a person climbing up the outside,” Royce replied, his eyes fixed on the long fang he continued to twirl. “Isn’t that because … well, I’ve heard it’s sort of tall.” “The tallest surviving structure built by man,” Arcadius said. “Should I bring a lunch?” “Considering we’ll begin after dusk and climb all night, I’d suggest a late dinner,” Royce replied. “I was joking.” “I wasn’t. But I only ask one thing.” “What’s that?” “When you fall to your death, do so quietly.

He penned a letter to the Company in London, a letter whose unfailing spirit would become legendary among the sailors of the East India Company. 'I cannot tell where you should looke for me.' he wrote, 'because I live at the devotion of the winds and seas.' (Written by/about Captain James Lancaster, on the ship Red Dragon, during a terrible storm, 1603)

One of the diversions will be rock musician Rick Wakeman, soaring down from the roof on a flying saucer and dressed like the legendary Mekon, SF’s most endearing little green man.

Why are some of us, he wondered, unable to love success or power or great beauty? Because we feel unworthy of them, because we feel more at home with failure? He didn't believe that was the reason. Perhaps one wanted the right balance, just as Christ had, the legendary figure whom he would have liked to believe in. 'Come unto me all ye that travail are and heavy laden.' Young as the girl was at that August picnic she was heavily laden with her timidity and shame. Perhaps he had merely wanted her to feel that she was loved by someone and so he began to love her himself. It wasn't pity, any more than it had been pity when he fell in love with Sarah pregnant by another man. He was there to right the balance. That was all.

Who has vocation hears the voice of the inner man; he is called. And so it is the legendary belief that he possesses a private demon who counsels him and whose mandates he must execute.

In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock….His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.” “I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth…his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.” Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character. “Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together. “We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.

Because...” he used to cradle his daughter in his arms every morning and often they would exchange soft nuances “...if you can dream it, if you can see it in your visions at night, if you can feel it in your soul, it’s yours! And it never really belonged to anyone else, in the first place! It was always yours!” Viera returned her scroll to the drawer and closed it, she kissed the compass around her neck and climbed into her bed under the warm quilts, the candle flame crackled and the memories of her father’s arms around her embraced her there in bed and his deep, hoarse voice resounded in her ears; “... and if you chance upon a treasure that is yours and it happens to be in the possession of someone else, it’s not very wrong to take what is yours, to take what you dreamed, what you saw in your visions at night, what you felt visit you in your spirit! Sure, it’s not lawful, but aye aye my little one, listen to me when I tell you that the best things in life are not under the laws of any sort! For which law created love? Which law created courage? The best things, the real things, are the things that are not measured by any man’s laws! Fear is the only thing that any law has ever created! And what kind of pirates would we all be if we were afraid of any of our fears, even a little!

He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and moving on. It had taken the form, at various times, of a bitter comedy, a stoical Hemingwayesque tragedy, a hard-nosed lesson in social anatomy like something by John O’Hara, a bare-knuckles urban Huckleberry Finn. It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal

The flat was large and airy, sparsely furnished with sleek, modern pieces; no walls separated living spaces, except the bedroom. Vintage posters advertising the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Grand Prix de Monaco decorated the walls. There was a picture of Steve McQueen, leaning against his famous Ford Mustang, and another of Carroll Shelby, the legendary American automaker going face-to-face with Enzo Ferrari, his even more legendary Italian counterpart.

If there was indeed a recording of the conversation that followed, it did not exist for long. Carter would never speak of it, except to say that it was among the most difficult of his long career. The only other witness was Ed Fielding. The security man could not hear Carter's words, but he could see the terrible toll they were taking. He saw a hand gripping the telephone with such force that the knuckles were white. And he saw the eyes. The unusually bright green eyes now burning with a terrifying rage. As Fielding slipped quietly from the room, he realized he had never seen such rage before. He did not know what his friend Adrian Carter was saying to the legendary Israeli assassin. But he was certain of one thing. Blood was going to flow. And men were going to die.

November 2, 1984 was an especially tragic day in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/AIDS epidemic. That was the day Anthony Fauci became the Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (NIAID). (Good Intentions p.128) It was the day a thin-skinned, physically ultra-diminutive man with a legendary Napoleonic attitude was positioned by destiny to become the de facto AIDS Czar. In the fog of culpability that constitutes what could be called "Holocaust II" one thing is clear: the buck, on its way to the very top of the government, at least pauses at the megalomaniac desk of Anthony Fauci.

That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time; but to-day history and daylight have arrived. That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader. Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Caesar, Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form.

They’re in the presence of the beast now, an enormous incisor sunk into the horizon.

Big Rab has worked in Barlinnie’s Wendy House for over seven and a half years. The average time a screw works in the seg blocks is two years, this man has seen it and done it all. Most prisoners will agree, he isn’t a dog either but can be when he wants. He has had legendary roll abouts with some of Scotland’s hardest criminals but at the end of it he doesn’t hold any grudges.

privilege is founded on duty, and if the horse carries the man, the animal is fed before the rider himself doth eat. Thus in certain respects the first comes last, and the greatest king is the loneliest.

Stevenson’s most famous novel was first published in 1886 and concerns the unfortunate Dr. Jekyll (pronounced ‘Jeekill’), whose attempts to understand the ‘thorough and primitive duality of man’ lead him to ingest a potion that splits him into two people. To the novel’s original readers, this summary would constitute a fatal spoiler – but so legendary has the novel become that there can be few modern readers unaware of its central twist.

Shurq Elalle's fate had taken a turn for the worse. Nothing to do with her profession, for her skills in the art of thievery were legendary among the lawless class. An argument with her landlord, sadly escalating to attempted murder on his part, to which she of course - in all legality - responded by flinging him out the window. The hopeless man's fall had, unfortunately, been broken by a waddling merchant on the street below. The landlord's neck broke. So did the merchant's.

You've got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all. They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority. That's exactly what has happened here.

There’s no respect for older people at all today, and that’s saddening. Look at the way crime against older people has risen! You know, there’s no calling people ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ now, they just call you, and it’s all ‘fuck off’ and the likes of.

His face ends up on a 1992 cover of the local alt weekly Westword, which contains profiles of him and a few other Denver storm geeks. “Some call it a hobby, some call it an addiction,” Tim tells the reporter. “I think it’s more of an obsession with me.

I therefore hold the legendary Jesus in no way responsible for the trouble: it began with Luther, perhaps, and went on with Wesley; but no matter! — what I am trying to get at is the religion which makes England to-day a hell for any man who cares at all for freedom. That religion they call Christianity; the devil they honour they call God. I accept these definitions, as a poet must do, if he is to be at all intelligible to his age, and it is their God and their religion that I hate and will destroy.

Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.

used to watch these comic book characters on TV, the X-Men and one of my favorites, Apocalypse. Apocalypse would say, “I’m not malevolent, I just am.” Cayton and Jacobs wanted me to be friendly with everybody, sociable, but I knew a man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.

Tyson came in with a lot of excess baggage. The press has vilified him. Not a day goes by that the press doesn’t bring up his faults. This is not the Tyson I know. The Tyson I know is a sensitive, thoughtful, caring man. He may be terrifying in the ring, but that ends when he leaves the ring.

Jess Pepper's review of the Avalon Strings: 'In a land so very civilized and modern as ours, it is unpopular to suggest that the mystical isle of Avalon ever truly existed. But I believe I have found proof of it right here in Manhattan. To understand my reasoning, you must recall first that enchanting tale of a mist-enshrouded isle where medieval women--descended from the gods--spawned heroic men. Most notable among these was the young King Arthur. In their most secret confessions, these mystic heroes acknowledged Avalon, and particularly the music of its maidens, as the source of their power. Many a school boy has wept reading of Young King Arthur standing silent on the shore as the magical isle disappears from view, shrouded in mist. The boy longs as Arthur did to leap the bank and pilot his canoe to the distant, singing atoll. To rejoin nymphs who guard in the depths of their water caves the meaning of life. To feel again the power that burns within. But knowledge fades and memory dims, and schoolboys grow up. As the legend goes, the way became unknown to mortal man. Only woman could navigate the treacherous blanket of white that dipped and swirled at the surface of the water. And with its fading went also the music of the fabled isle. Harps and strings that heralded the dawn and incited robed maidens to dance evaporated into the mists of time, and silence ruled. But I tell you, Kind Reader, that the music of Avalon lives. The spirit that enchanted knights in chain mail long eons ago is reborn in our fair city, in our own small band of fair maids who tap that legendary spirit to make music as the Avalon Strings. Theirs is no common gift. Theirs is no ordinary sound. It is driven by a fire from within, borne on fingers bloodied by repetition. Minds tormented by a thirst for perfection. And most startling of all is the voice that rises above, the stunning virtuoso whose example leads her small company to higher planes. Could any other collection of musicians achieve the heights of this illustrious few? I think not. I believe, Friends of the City, that when we witnes their performance, as we may almost nightly at the Warwick Hotel, we witness history's gift to this moment in time. And for a few brief moments in the presence of these maids, we witness the fiery spirit that endured and escaped the obliterating mists of Avalon.

Because it wasn’t enough to be accompanied by the beast who scared the crap out of every god in Heaven, Xuanzang was assigned a few more traveling companions. The gluttonous pig-man Zhu Baijie. Sha Wujing, the repentant sand demon. And the Dragon Prince of the West Sea, who took the form of a horse for Xuanzang to ride. The five adventurers, thusly gathered, set off on their— “Holy ballsacks!” I yelped. I dropped the book like I’d been bitten. “How far did you get?” Quentin said. He was leaning against the end of the nearest shelf, as casually as if he’d been there the whole time, waiting for this moment. I ignored that he’d snuck up on me again, just this once. There was a bigger issue at play. In the book was an illustration of the group done up in bold lines and bright colors. There was Sun Wukong at the front, dressed in a beggar’s cassock, holding his Ruyi Jingu Bang in one hand and the reins of the Dragon Horse in the other. A scary-looking pig-faced man and a wide-eyed demon monk followed, carrying the luggage. And perched on top of the horse was . . . me. The artist had tried to give Xuanzang delicate, beatific features and ended up with a rather girly face. By whatever coincidence, the drawing of Sun Wukong’s old master could have been a rough caricature of sixteen-year-old Eugenia Lo from Santa Firenza, California. “That’s who you think I am?” I said to Quentin. “That’s who I know you are,” he answered. “My dearest friend. My boon companion. You’ve reincarnated into such a different form, but I’d recognize you anywhere. Your spiritual energies are unmistakable.” “Are you sure? If you’re from a long time ago, maybe your memory’s a little fuzzy.” “The realms beyond Earth exist on a different time scale,” Quentin said. “Only one day among the gods passes for every human year. To me, you haven’t been gone long. Months, not centuries.” “This is just . . . I don’t know.” I took a moment to assemble my words. “You can’t walk up to me and expect me to believe right away that I’m the reincarnation of some legendary monk from a folk tale.” “Wait, what?” Quentin squinted at me in confusion. “I said you can’t expect me to go, ‘okay, I’m Xuanzang,’ just because you tell me so.” Quentin’s mouth opened slowly like the dawning of the sun. His face went from confusion to understanding to horror and then finally to laughter. “mmmmphhhhghAHAHAHAHA!” he roared. He nearly toppled over, trying to hold his sides in. “HAHAHAHA!” “What the hell is so funny?” “You,” Quentin said through his giggles. “You’re not Xuanzang. Xuanzang was meek and mild. A friend to all living things. You think that sounds like you?” It did not. But then again I wasn’t the one trying to make a case here. “Xuanzang was delicate like a chrysanthemum.” Quentin was getting a kick out of this. “You are so tough you snapped the battleaxe of the Mighty Miracle God like a twig. Xuanzang cried over squashing a mosquito. You, on the other hand, have killed more demons than the Catholic Church.” I was starting to get annoyed. “Okay, then who the hell am I supposed to be?” If he thought I was the pig, then this whole deal was off. “You’re my weapon,” he said. “You’re the Ruyi Jingu Bang.” I punched Quentin as hard as I could in the face.

This was why love was so dangerous. Love turned the world into a garden, so beguiling it was easy to forget that rose petals sails appeared charmed. They blazed red in the day and silver at night, like a magician’s cloak, hinting at mysteries concealed beneath, which Tella planned to uncover that night. Drunken laughter floated above her as Tella delved deeper into the ship’s underbelly in search of Nigel the Fortune-teller. Her first evening on the vessel she’d made the mistake of sleeping, not realizing until the following day that Legend’s performers had switched their waking hours to prepare for the next Caraval. They slumbered in the day and woke after sunset. All Tella had learned her first day aboard La Esmeralda was that Nigel was on the ship, but she had yet to actually see him. The creaking halls beneath decks were like the bridges of Caraval, leading different places at different hours and making it difficult to know who stayed in which room. Tella wondered if Legend had designed it that way, or if it was just the unpredictable nature of magic. She imagined Legend in his top hat, laughing at the question and at the idea that magic had more control than he did. For many, Legend was the definition of magic. When she had first arrived on Isla de los Sueños, Tella suspected everyone could be Legend. Julian had so many secrets that she’d questioned if Legend’s identity was one of them, up until he’d briefly died. Caspar, with his sparkling eyes and rich laugh, had played the role of Legend in the last game, and at times he’d been so convincing Tella wondered if he was actually acting. At first sight, Dante, who was almost too beautiful to be real, looked like the Legend she’d always imagined. Tella could picture Dante’s wide shoulders filling out a black tailcoat while a velvet top hat shadowed his head. But the more Tella thought about Legend, the more she wondered if he even ever wore a top hat. If maybe the symbol was another thing to throw people off. Perhaps Legend was more magic than man and Tella had never met him in the flesh at all. The boat rocked and an actual laugh pierced the quiet. Tella froze. The laughter ceased but the air in the thin corridor shifted. What had smelled of salt and wood and damp turned thick and velvet-sweet. The scent of roses. Tella’s skin prickled; gooseflesh rose on her bare arms. At her feet a puddle of petals formed a seductive trail of red. Tella might not have known Legend’s true name, but she knew he favored red and roses and games. Was this his way of toying with her? Did he know what she was up to? The bumps on her arms crawled up to her neck and into her scalp as her newest pair of slippers crushed the tender petals. If Legend knew what she was after, Tella couldn’t imagine he would guide her in the correct direction, and yet the trail of petals was too tempting to avoid. They led to a door that glowed copper around the edges. She turned the knob. And her world transformed into a garden, a paradise made of blossoming flowers and bewitching romance. The walls were formed of moonlight. The ceiling was made of roses that dripped down toward the table in the center of the room, covered with plates of cakes and candlelight and sparkling honey wine. But none of it was for Tella. It was all for Scarlett. Tella had stumbled into her sister’s love story and it was so romantic it was painful to watch. Scarlett stood across the chamber. Her full ruby gown bloomed brighter than any flowers, and her glowing skin rivaled the moon as she gazed up at Julian. They touched nothing except each other. While Scarlett pressed her lips to Julian’s, his arms wrapped around her as if he’d found the one thing he never wanted to let go of. This was why love was so dangerous. Love turned the world into a garden, so beguiling it was easy to forget that rose petals were as ephemeral as feelings, eventually they would wilt and die, leaving nothing but the thorns.

Considered in the abstract the boxing ring is an altar of sorts, one of those legendary spaces where the laws of a nation are suspended: inside the ropes, during an officially regulated three-minute round, a man may be killed at his opponents hands but he cannot be legally murdered. Boxing inhabits a sacred space predating civilization; or, to use D.H. Lawrence's phrase, before God was love. If it suggests a savage ceremony or a rite of atonement it also suggests the futility of such gestures. For what possible atonement is the fight waged if it must shortly be waged again... and again? The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind's collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness.

A little drop of Native American blood was exciting and unique. But a full-blooded Native American…she was horrified.” Cecily’s opinion of the legendary Maureen dropped eighty points. She ground her teeth together. She couldn’t imagine anyone being ashamed of such a proud heritage. He looked down at her and laughed despite himself. “I can hear you boiling over. No, you wouldn’t be ashamed of me. But you’re unique. You help, however you can. You see the poverty around you, and you don’t stick your nose up at it. You roll up your sleeves and do what you can to help alleviate it. You’ve made me ashamed, Cecily.” “Ashamed? But, why?” “Because you see beauty and hope where I see hopelessness.” He rubbed his artificial arm, as if it hurt him. “I’ve got about half as much as Tate has in foreign banks. I’m going to start using some of it for something besides exotic liquor. One person can make a difference. I didn’t know that, until you came along.” She smiled and touched his arm gently. “I’m glad.” “You could marry me,” he ventured, looking down at her with a smile. “I’m no bargain, but I’d be good to you. I’d never even drink a beer again.” “You need someone to love you, Colby. I can’t.” He grimaced. “I could say the same thing to you. But I could love you, I think, given time.” “You’d never be Tate.” He drew in a long breath. “Life is never simple. It’s like a puzzle. Just when we think we’ve got it solved, pieces of it fly in all directions.” “When you get philosophical, it’s time to go in. Tomorrow, we have to talk about what’s going on around here. There’s something very shady. Leta and I need you to help us find out what it is.” “What are friends for?” he asked affectionately. “I’ll do the same for you one day.” He didn’t answer her. Cecily had no idea at all how strongly her pert remark about being intimate with Colby had affected Tate. The black-eyed, almost homicidal man who’d come to his door last night had hardly been recognizable as his friend and colleague of many years. Tate had barely been coherent, and both men were exhausted and bloody by the time the fight ended in a draw. Maybe Tate didn’t want to marry Cecily, but Colby knew stark jealousy when he saw it. That hadn’t been any outdated attempt to avenge Cecily’s chastity. It had been revenge, because he thought Colby had slept with her and he wanted to make him pay. It had been jealousy, not protectiveness, the jealousy of a man who was passionately in love; and didn’t even know it.

P. 51, l. 915. The speech of the Muse seems like the writing of a poet who is, for the moment, tired of mere drama, and wishes to get back into his own element. Such passages are characteristic of Euripides.—The death of Rhesus seems to the Muse like an act of vengeance from the dead Thamyris, the Thracian bard who had blasphemed the Muses and challenged them to a contest of song. They conquered him and left him blind, but still a poet. The story in Homer is more terrible, though more civilised: "They in wrath made him a maimed man, they took away his heavenly song and made him forget his harping." Thamyris, the bard who defied Heaven; Orpheus, the bard, saint, lover, whose severed head still cried for his lost Eurydice; Musaeus, the bard of mystic wisdom and initiations—are the three great legendary figures of this Northern mountain minstrelsy.

Legendary explanations of history always served as belated corrections of facts and real events, which were needed precisely because history itself would hold man responsible for deeds he had not done and for consequences he had never foreseen. The truth of the ancient legends—what gives them their fascinating actuality many centuries after the cities and empires and peoples they served have crumbled to dust—was nothing but the form in which past events were made to fit the human condition in general and political aspirations in particular. Only in the frankly invented tale about events did man consent to assume his responsibility for them, and to consider past events his past. Legends made him master of what he had not done, and capable of dealing with what he could not undo. In this sense, legends are not only among the first memories of mankind, but actually the true beginning of human history.

Much has been written about the character of Louis IX—all of it good. Even his staunchest enemies agreed that Louis was a man of integrity whose moral character was unassailable and whose devotion to justice was legendary. Like all men of his class, Louis was raised in a culture of chivalry that celebrated the crusade as the greatest use of Christian arms. It is no exaggeration to say that the liberation of Jerusalem was the single most cherished goal in his life.

And if I was seen as temperamentally cool and collected, measured in how I used my words, Joe was all warmth, a man without inhibitions, happy to share whatever popped into his head. It was an endearing trait, for he genuinely enjoyed people. You could see it as he worked a room, his handsome face always cast in a dazzling smile (and just inches from whomever he was talking to), asking a person where they were from, telling them a story about how much he loved their hometown (“Best calzone I ever tasted”) or how they must know so-and-so (“An absolutely great guy, salt of the earth”), flattering their children (“Anyone ever tell you you’re gorgeous?”) or their mother (“You can’t be a day over forty!”), and then on to the next person, and the next, until he’d touched every soul in the room with a flurry of handshakes, hugs, kisses, backslaps, compliments, and one-liners. Joe’s enthusiasm had its downside. In a town filled with people who liked to hear themselves talk, he had no peer. If a speech was scheduled for fifteen minutes, Joe went for at least a half hour. If it was scheduled for a half hour, there was no telling how long he might talk. His soliloquies during committee hearings were legendary. His lack of a filter periodically got him in trouble, as when during the primaries, he had pronounced me “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” a phrase surely meant as a compliment, but interpreted by some as suggesting that such characteristics in a Black man were noteworthy. As I came to know Joe, though, I found his occasional gaffes to be trivial compared to his strengths. On domestic issues, he was smart, practical, and did his homework. His experience in foreign policy was broad and deep. During his relatively short-lived run in the primaries, he had impressed me with his skill and discipline as a debater and his comfort on a national stage. Most of all, Joe had heart. He’d overcome a bad stutter as a child (which probably explained his vigorous attachment to words) and two brain aneurysms in middle age.

To outside observers, Göring seemed to have a limited grip on sanity, but an American interrogator, General Carl Spaatz, would later write that Göring, “despite rumors to the contrary, is far from mentally deranged. In fact he must be considered a very ‘shrewd customer,’ a great actor and professional liar.” The public loved him, forgiving his legendary excesses and coarse personality. The American correspondent William Shirer, in his diary, sought to explain this seeming paradox: “Where Hitler is distant, legendary, nebulous, an enigma as a human being, Göring is a salty, earthy, lusty man of flesh and blood. The Germans like him because they understand him. He has the faults and virtues of the average man, and the people admire him for both. He has a child’s love for uniforms and medals. So have they.” Shirer detected no resentment among the public directed toward the “fantastic, medieval—and very expensive—personal life he leads. It is the sort of life they would lead themselves, perhaps, if they had the chance.” Göring

Where Hitler is distant, legendary, nebulous, an enigma as a human being, Göring is a salty, earthy, lusty man of flesh and blood. The Germans like him because they understand him. He has the faults and virtues of the average man, and the people admire him for both. He has a child’s love for uniforms and medals. So have they.” Shirer detected no resentment among the public directed toward the “fantastic, medieval—and very expensive—personal life he leads. It is the sort of life they would lead themselves, perhaps, if they had the chance.

By the 1920’s, the wolves had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness. One species almost completely whipped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough, but as Barry Lopez asked in “Of Wolves and Men”, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue, even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to rout out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained? There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too. Something more akin to envy. Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration within its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like, the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.

One man who did not understand was the New Zealanders’ legendary commander, Lieutenant General Bernard C. Freyberg. English-born but raised in New Zealand, Freyberg had been a dentist before finding his true calling as warrior of Homeric strength and courage. Known as Tiny to his troops, he had a skull the size of a medicine ball, with a pushbroom mustache and legs that extended like sycamore trunks from his khaki shorts. In the Great War, he had won the Victoria Cross on the Somme, served as a pallbearer for his great friend Rupert Brooke, and emerged so seamed by shrapnel that when Churchill once persuaded him to display his wounds the count reached twenty-seven. More were to come. Oarsman, boxer, swimmer of the English Channel, he had been medically retired for “aortic incompetence” in the 1930s before being summoned back to uniform. No greater heart beat in British battle dress. Churchill a month earlier had proclaimed Freyberg “the salamander of the British empire,” an accolade that raised Kiwi hackles—“Wha’ in ’ell’s a ‘sallymander’?”—until the happy news spread that the creature mythically could pass through fire unharmed.

Social life was similarly affected by the teachings of the Koran. At a time when in Christian Europe an epidemic was regarded as a scourge of God to which man had but to submit meekly - at that time, and long before it, the Muslims followed the injunction of their Prophet which directed them to combat epidemics by segregating the infected towns and areas. And at a time when even the kings and nobles of Christendom regarding bathing as an almost indecent luxury, even the poorest of Muslim houses had at least one bathroom, while elaborate public baths were common in every Muslim city (in the ninth century, for instance, Córdoba had three hundred of them): and all this in response to the Prophet’s teaching that ‘Cleanliness is part of faith’. A Muslim did not come into conflict with the claims of spiritual life if he took pleasure in the beautiful things of material life, for, according to the Prophet, ‘God loves to see on His servants an evidence of His bounty’. In short, Islam gave a tremendous incentive to cultural achievements which constitute one of the proudest pages in the history of mankind; and it gave this incentive by saying Yes to the intellect and No to obscurantism, Yes to action and no to quietism, Yes to life and No to ascetism. Little wonder, then, that as soon as it emerged beyond the confines of Arabia, Islam won new adherents by leaps and bounds. Born and nurtured in the world-contempt of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity, the populations of Syria and North Africa, and a little layer of Visigothic Spain, saw themselves suddenly confronted with a teaching which denied the dogma of Original Sin and stressed the inborn dignity of earthly life: and so they rallied in ever-increasing numbers to the new creed that gave them to understand that man was God’s vicar on earth. This, and not a legendary ‘conversion at the point of the sword’, was the explanation of Islam’s amazing triumph in the glorious morning of its history. It was not the Muslims that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great. But as soon as their faith became habit and ceased to be a programme of life, to be consciously pursued, the creative impulse that underlay their civilisation waned and gradually gave way to indolence, sterility and cultural decay.

During her lifetime, people across the globe furiously debated whether [Blavatsky] was a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three. Born in Russia in 1831, Blavatsky was short and fat with bulging eyes and folds of skin falling from her multiple chins. Her face was so broad that some people suspected she was a man. She professed to be a virgin; in fact, she had two husbands and an illegitimate son, and an apostle of asceticism. She smoked up to 200 cigarettes a day and swore like a solider.

You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does. “Your mind is not your friend, Mike. I hope you know that. You have to fight with your mind, control it, put it in its place. You have to control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is ninety percent psychological. It’s just the excuse of a man who wants to quit.

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

1. Linus Malthus "Winning is just the snow that came down yesterday"   Founder of total football. Tactical revolutionary who created the foundation of modern football  저희는 7가지 철칙을 바탕으로 거래를 합니다. 고객들과 지키지못할약속은 하지않습니다 1.정품보장 2.총알배송 3.투명한 가격 4.편한 상담 5.끝내주는 서비스 6.고객님 정보 보호 7.깔끔한 거래 [경영항목] 엑스터시,신의눈물,lsd,아이스,캔디,대마초,떨,마리화나,프로포폴,에토미데이트,해피벌륜등많은제품판매하고있습니다 믿고 주문해주세요~저희는 제품판매를 고객님들과 신용과신뢰의 거래로 하고있습니다. 제품효과 못보실 그럴일은 없지만 만의하나 효과못보시면 저희가 1차재발송과 2차 환불까지 약속합니다 텔레【KC98K】카톡【ACD5】라인【SPR331】 The only winner in the international major tournament, Holland, the best soccer line of football 2. Sir Alex Ferguson Mr.Man Utd   The Red Boss The best director in soccer history (most of the past soccer coach rankings are the top picks) It is the most obvious that shows how important the director is in football.   Manchester United's 27-year-old championship, the spiritual stake of all United players and fans, Manchester United itself 3. Theme Mourinho "I do not pretend to be arrogant, because I'm all true, I am a European champion, I am not one of the cunning bosses around, I think I am Special One." The Special One The cost of counterattack after a player Charming world with charisma and poetry The director who has the most violent career of soccer directors 4. Pep Guardiola A man who achieved the world's first and only six treasures beyond treble. Make a team with a page of football history 5. Ottmar Hitzfeld Borussia Dortmund and Bayern are the best directors in Munich history. Legendary former football manager of Germany Sir Alex Ferguson's rival

Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing and explaining with an enthusiasm that was uniquely his own. Douglas’s ability to miss deadlines became legendary. (“I love deadlines,” he said once. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”) He died in May 2001—too young. His death surprised us all, and left a huge, Douglas Adams–sized hole in the world. We had lost both the man (tall, affable, smiling gently at a world that baffled and delighted him) and the mind.

If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. – If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. – Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. – Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. – Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. – It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong. – The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world. – The worst possible decision is to give up.

If I were sure I had talent. . . . But I have never—never written anything of that sort. Historical articles, yes—lots of them. A book. A novel. And there would be people who would read this book and say: "Antoine Roquentin wrote it, a red-headed man who hung around cafes," and they would think about my life as I think about the Negress's: as something precious and almost legendary. A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a troublesome, tiring work, it wouldn't stop me from existing or feeling that I exist. But a time would come when the book would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think that a litt'e of its clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance. Perhaps one day, thinking precisely of this hour, of this gloomy hour in which I wait, stooping, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: "That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started." And I might succeed —in the past, nothing but the past—in accepting myself.

Clad in red velvet it came, the very covering my old Master had so loved, the dream king, Marius. It came swaggering and camping through the lighted streets of Paris as though God had made it. But it was a vampire child, the same as I, son of the seventeen hundreds, as they reckoned the time to be then, a blazing, brash, bumbling, laughing and teasing blood drinker in the guise of a young man, come to stomp out whatever sacred fire yet burnt in the cleft scar tissue of my soul and scatter the ashes. It was The Vampire Lestat. It wasn't his fault. Had one of us been able to strike him down one night, break him apart with his own fancy sword and set him ablaze, we might have had a few more decades of our wretched delusions. But nobody could. He was too damned strong for us. Created by a powerful and ancient renegade, a legendary vampire by the name of Magnus, this Lestat, aged twenty in mortal years, an errant and penniless country aristocrat from the wild lands of Auvergne, who had thrown over custom and respectability and any hope of court ambitions, of which he had none anyway since he couldn't even read or write, and was too insulting to wait on any King or Queen, who became a wild blond-haired celebrity of the boulevard gutter theatricals, a lover of men and women, a laughing happy-go-lucky blindly ambitious self-loving genius of sorts, this Lestat, this blue-eyed and infinitely confident Lestat, was orphaned on the very night of his creation by the ancient monster who made him, bequeathed to him a fortune in a secret room in a crumbling medieval tower, and then went into the eternal comfort of the ever devouring flames. This Lestat, knowing nothing of Old Covens and Old Ways, of soot covered gangsters who thrived under cemeteries and believed they had a right to brand him a heretic, a maverick and a bastard of the Dark Blood, went strutting about fashionable Paris, isolated and tormented by his supernatural endowments yet glorying in his new powers, dancing at the Tuileries with the most magnificently clad women, reveling in the joys of the ballet and the high court theater and roaming not only in the Places of Light, as we called them, but meandering mournfully in Notre Dame de Paris itself, right before the High Altar, without the lightning of God striking him where he stood. Armand’s description of Lestat from The Vampire Armand

Listen,” I said. “There was once this legendary French acrobat named Charles Blondin, okay? He was famous in the nineteenth century for doing these impossible daredevil tightrope-walking stunts. He strung a rope across Niagara Falls, a thousand feet long. And this crowd gathered and he walked on the tightrope over the falls, hundreds of feet above the gorge, and the crowd went crazy when he got to the other side, clapping and cheering.” Gabe gave me a skeptical glance. “Yeah?” “And then he said to the crowd, ‘Do you believe I can do it again?’ and the crowd cheered, ‘Yes!’ And he did it. And the crowd cheered even louder, and he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it wearing a blindfold?’ And some people in the crowd got scared and shouted, ‘No, don’t do it,’ and others said, ‘Yes! You can do it!’” “And he fell,” Gabe said. I shook my head. “He did it, and the crowd cheered even louder, and he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it on stilts this time?’ And the crowd shouted out, “Yes! You can do it!’ And he did it, and the crowd roared and got even wilder. So then he said, ‘Do you believe I can do it pushing a wheelbarrow along the rope?’ And the crowd roared and cheered and said, ‘Yes!’ And Blondin said, ‘You really think I can? You believe it?’ And they shouted, ‘Yes! Yes, you can!’ ” Despite himself, despite his teenage cynicism, he was actually listening. For a moment he almost seemed to be a child again, listening to a bedtime story. “Is this true?” “Yes.” “He actually did it?” “Yep. He did it. He walked across the tightrope hundreds of feet above the gorge pushing a wheelbarrow, and when he made it to the other side the audience had grown huge and frenzied and totally worked up and they cheered. Really went crazy. So Blondin said, ‘Do you believe I can do it again but this time pushing a man in this wheelbarrow?’ And the crowd roared and said, ‘Yes!’ He said, ‘You really believe I can do it?’ And they all went, ‘Yes, definitely! You can do it! We believe in you! Yes! Absolutely!’ By that time the crowd was completely behind him. They thought he could do anything. So Blondin said, ‘Then who will volunteer to sit in the wheelbarrow?’ And the crowd suddenly went quiet. Totally silent. And he said, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t believe in me anymore?’ And they were silent for a long time before someone from the crowd finally said, ‘Yes, we believe in you. But not that much.’ ” “Huh. Did anyone ever volunteer to get in the wheelbarrow?” I shrugged. “How’d the guy die?” “In bed. Forty years later. From diabetes.

Just as legendary rivers were used to represent the flow of life, so Mount Athos is a handy image to show human vulnerability. Its minerals themselves reminding us that ours is a planet constituted around Nature’s awesome violence! Struggling to survive then, is integral to our existence. Literature on these issues, transforming rock and boulder into a subjective mountain, where fleshly mountaineers set forth, in the blinding brilliance of an alpine dawn, to ascend their own transgressions, remains telling. Breathing in, when nearing the top, to smell the pure air of spiritual comprehension: of heady intrinsic freedom, only to descend, once more, into the obscure and the pedestrian; albeit existentially transformed! In this way, indeed, Mount Athos transfigures many a man.

widening. “Don’t you dare draw their fire.”  Lynn.   Jonathan committed the name to memory. The outsiders didn’t seem to notice the man’s slip. They kept their weapons trained on the girl. She glared at them as if daring them to kill her. “Go ahead! Shoot! I’m sick of being hunted by you! Kill me and claim the fame. Do it!”  Parker dodged forward, rushing past any and all that stood between him and the woman named Lynn. He shoved his body in front of hers in a protective manner and glared at the men. “You’ll not harm her. She’s under my protection now.”  Eli let out a low whistle. “Never did I see that coming. Saw-bones is a born skirt-chaser. Think he might have The Fever or something? He’s always doctorin’ folks with weird ailments.”  Well, if The Fever included an uncontrollable urge to protect a woman, then his brother most certainly had caught it. He could only hope Parker’s case was curable. Jonathan knew his own case wasn’t. Molly had infected him long ago and he knew he’d never get her out of his veins. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried. His exploits of the female persuasion were legendary—so was the fact he refused to commit. “Are you stupid?” Lynn asked, giving Parker a good shove. At five-eight, she was tall by female standards but short compared the MacSweeny boys. Still, she managed to get Parker to budge ever so slightly, shocking Jonathan. “Move! They’ll gun you down to get to me.”  “Then so be it.”  Jonathan shook his head. Parker was bound to get himself killed without some serious intervention. “Parker, get her and your ass out of there. We’ll take care of our guests. We’ll even be sweet enough to give ‘em that welcome speech you had worked out.”  “Parker?” the girl asked. She glanced at Jonathan and Eli and her eyes widened. “That means one of you is Jonathan.” The feel of a cold, hard barrel pressed against the back of Jonathan’s head. Cursing himself for letting his guard down, he put his hands up as his attacker shoved harder with the gun.  “Lookie, boys, we got us a sheriff. He’s got to bring a good amount of coinage, don’t ya think?”  There was a flash of black. A blur. Several shots. Screams. Jonathan caught movement out of the corner of his eye and realized someone had shot the man who had him at gunpoint. Chapter Four Molly

I can choose what suits me when it suits me. The trousers and jacket do not make me a man, and the necklace does not make me a woman. They are only what makes me feel beautiful and powerful in this moment. I am exactly as I choose to be. I am a Shadowhunter who wears gorgeous suits and a legendary pendant.

He could have broken the man's neck with little difficulty, and it had taken a portion of his legendary self-control to keep from giving in to the impulse. Particularly when the cold, killing rage that had sustained him for ten long years had suddenly burned white-hot at the sight of his enemy mauling Emma. Perhaps that was what was troubling him. He'd ruthlessly stripped himself of all weakness, all emotion, anticipating little from this life except a passably entertaining evening and the bloody death of Jasper Darnley. And yet, suddenly, desires were churning inside him, stronger than he'd felt in years. He didn't like it. Emma didn't like it either, he thought absently. He had felt her animosity, hot, intense, almost sexual, radiating out at him during the ride home. It had been very... arousing. That, and the memory of her face at the opera, eyes shining with delight. He'd wanted to reach for her, put his hands on her, and pull her against him, to touch her and wipe out the touch of Darnley's fat-fingered hands. She'd have fought him, of course, and he had yet to find the struggles of an unwilling woman to be the slightest bit entertaining. But the interest lay in how long it would take him to make her cease struggling. What kind of sounds would she make when he pulled the black silk down to her waist and freed her breasts from the soft chemise he'd bought her? What kind of sounds would she make when he pushed her down on the bed upstairs and drove into her? Would she be easy to pleasure? Or would she be shy, wary, making him seduce her oh, so carefully?

friends easily and apparently kept them for years; it seems that virtually everyone he ever encountered liked him, unlikely as this seems. A skeptic might suspect that some of those friends were drawn to him by his generosity, which was legendary; he spread money around lavishly wherever he went. Many

Be an example to your men in your duty and in private life. Never spare yourself, and let the troops see that you don't in your endurance of fatigue and privation. Always be tactful and well-mannered, and teach your subordinates to be the same. Avoid excessive sharpness or harshness of voice, which usually indicates the man who has shortcomings of his own to hide.” – Erwin Rommel

But the fact was Millat didn’t need to go back home: he stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willesden. In his mind he was as much there as he was here. He did not require a passport to live in two places at once, he needed no visa to live his brother’s life and his own (he was a twin, after all). Alsana was the first to spot it. She confided to Clara: By God, they’re tied together like a cat’s cradle, connected like a see-saw, push one end, other goes up, whatever Millat sees, Magid saw and vice versa! And Alsana only knew the incidentals: similar illnesses, simultaneous accidents, pets dying continents apart. She did not know that while Magid watched the 1985 cyclone shake things from high places, Millat was pushing his luck along the towering wall of the cemetery in Fortune Green; that on February 10, 1988, as Magid worked his way through the violent crowds of Dhaka, ducking the random blows of those busy settling an election with knives and fists, Millat held his own against three sotted, furious, quick-footed Irishmen outside Biddy Mulligan’s notorious Kilburn public house. Ah, but you are not convinced by coincidence? You want fact fact fact? You want brushes with the Big Man with black hood and scythe? OK: on April 28, 1989, a tornado whisked the Chittagong kitchen up into the sky, taking everything with it except Magid, left miraculously curled up in a ball on the floor. Now, segue to Millat, five thousand miles away, lowering himself down upon legendary sixth-former Natalia Cavendish (whose body is keeping a dark secret from her); the condoms are unopened in a box in his back pocket; but somehow he will not catch it; even though he is moving rhythmically now, up and in, deeper and sideways, dancing with death

THE FINE LINE BETWEEN FEAR AND COURAGE “I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.” —CUS D’AMATO, LEGENDARY BOXING TRAINER

I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.” —CUS D’AMATO, LEGENDARY BOXING TRAINER When

Something deep within Loretta knotted, twisted. She hugged her middle and tried desperately not to think, to deny the reality she could not accept, that Hunter, the legendary killer, was a man who thought, and felt, and loved--just like any other. He even mourned a dead wife. He was also a man true to his word. He had promised to defend her, and he had.

I was determined to teach him (Jeremy) a safe route if nothing else, and not to repeat his legendary North Pole experience. A former sergeant from the SBS gave Jeremy a lesson on dispatching polar bears with a shotgun. He's kicked doen more doors with that weapon than Jezza had eaten hot breakfasts. But that didn't stop Jeremy telling the sergeant he was wrong, and taking over the lesson. They pushed Jeremy into a frozen lake later that week, but I'm sure there was no connection.

Mea, go. Until your loyalty to me is greater than your hatred.” “I have stepped between you and enemy rifles!” “And now you make war on my woman. Do not test me again, cousin.” The muscles across Red Buffalo’s back knotted and twitched. He stood there a moment, quivering with rage, then spun and spat in Loretta’s direction, his black eyes livid with hatred. “Your woman,” he sneered. “She sickens my gut. You forget your wife who died for a yellow-hair?” With that, he stormed out. A brittle silence settled over the lodge. A tremor shook Loretta as the aftershock set in. The snake had been planted? She stared at Hunter; he stared at the doorway. When at last he looked at her, his eyes churned darkly with emotion. He returned to his pallet and sat down, legs crossed at the ankles in front of him. With a sigh, he reclaimed his flint and bone punch, bending over the flat rock he used as a base for his work. “You will sleep. I will watch.” The stony mask of anger that hooded his face did a poor job of concealing his pain. He loved his cousin, yet he had defended her against him. Loretta lay down, but sleep was beyond her. Seconds dragged by, mounting into minutes, and still the silence rang out, broken only by the report of bone against flint. Loretta swallowed. “Hunter?” His indigo gaze met hers. “Thank you. For--defending me.” Almost imperfectibly, he inclined his head. “Sleep, Blue Eyes. It is well.” “I--I’m sorry for causing a rift--a big fight--between you. I truly am sorry.” Afraid he might not understand, she placed a hand on her chest. “My heart is on the ground.” His mouth thinned, and he glanced outside. “Let your heart be glad again. The hatred came upon him long ago.” Something deep within Loretta knotted, twisted. She hugged her middle and tried desperately not to think, to deny the reality she could not accept, that Hunter, the legendary killer, was a man who thought, and felt, and loved--just like any other. He even mourned a dead wife. He was also a man true to his word. He had promised to defend her, and he had.

Staring down at Hunter, she noticed things about him that she hadn’t before. Or perhaps it was that she now saw him in a new light. The broad span of his shoulders, knotted with muscle, hunched protectively around Amy, no longer seemed threatening. His large hands, capable of brutal strength, touched Amy with incredible gentleness. Even his voice seemed altered, low and silken, his whispers transcending the language barrier, a blend of English and Comanche that seemed to soothe Amy, tranquilize her, while Loretta could not. Man and child, strength and fragility, dark skin and fair. Loretta couldn’t feel the ground under her feet. A warmth spread through her chest. She tried to remember, a little guiltily, how it had felt when Hunter’s hand rested on her back like that, on her hair. This was no time for such thoughts. Only Amy should matter right now, but Loretta couldn’t help herself. Hunter. Her hated captor had become her hero, and the backwash of her own emotions swamped her. Hunter, the legendary killer. Where had he gone? Had he ever existed?

Technically, Sheena predates even Superman, having first appeared in the primordial dawn of comic books in 1937. But her true origins are older than that. Sheena is often described as the female version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 creation, Tarzan. The majority of Burroughs’ popular works revolves around a tension between the savage and the civilized, also seen in Sheena’s adventures. Burroughs’ work, like that of fellow adventure writer H. Rider Haggard, came out of the colonial era, and was written for men and boys who yearned for an escape from stifling modern life, through tales of dangerous worlds and exotic women. The common theme of these stories is that a man from the civilized world finds his way to a fantastic, often barbaric, world of adventure, where he falls in love with an intoxicating savage princess. While most of Burroughs’ heroines, like Dejah Thoris or Dian the Beautiful, were in need of rescuing, Haggard’s 1886 novel She introduced a stronger heroine. The novel’s English protagonist encounters the beautiful queen Ayesha, the ruler of a lost city in Africa. Ayesha is referred to as “she who must be obeyed,” and is a creature that provokes both fear and lust. Ayesha was the ultimate fantasy of civilized man: the beautiful, savage white queen, ruling a kingdom unhindered by the laws of modern morality. This brand of men’s fiction produced the swirling foam of exotic and erotic fantasy from which rose the jungle Venus known as Sheena. (...) Now that we have some historical context on these female monarchs, let’s talk about their specific origins. In the 1930s, there were several studios that produced art and stories for the various publishers who were getting into the new field of comic books. One of the most successful and prolific was the Universal Phoenix Studio, operated by two young artists named Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. In 1937, they created a female Tarzan-type character named Sheena for the British tabloid Wags. The strip was credited to the pseudonym W. Morgan Thomas, and the heroine’s name was meant to remind readers of H. Rider Haggard’s She. Demand for new comic book material was growing in the United States, and American pulp magazine publisher Fiction House was looking for material for a new comic book. Sheena made her American debut in 1938’s Jumbo Comics #1, just three months after Superman’s now legendary first appearance. She was the first female adventure character in comic books. This would be just one of her claims to fame.

If you go anywhere near that filthy old man,” Inge said fiercely, “I’ll have you thrown into the king’s dungeons!” She spoiled her threat the next moment by asking, “Does the king even have dungeons, Colonel Raske?” "He does, but stocks are a more common punishment for insubordinate soldiers.” “But I can still order him to the dungeons, can’t I?” “Yes, Your Highness.

So, it took the openly gay guy to bring down the legendary ladies’ man? That’s kind of funny.

The breeder had pressured the new owners into showing the promising young puppy. After McDuff’s first blue ribbon in Puppy Class, they were hooked but for the wrong reasons. Most people are involved in with dogs because they had that one special dog in their past. That special dog had been a friend, a confidant and fellow warrior against life’s travails. They now searched for that special dog once again but the search was for a memory which, like dreams, is vapor and shadow. Alice and Arnold needed the status of owning an American Kennel Club Champion. The man, more than the woman, had no particular love for the breed or dogs in general. McDuff had, in fact been a big disappointment because of the legendary Airedale WILL. The Airedale WILL compares to the proverbial immovable object meeting the irresistible force.

Even Dick Bacon, the legendary Milwaukee man who sat on the beach in a reflective tinfoil contraption to tan himself all year long, was still there in his Speedo, catching rays in the cold.

And Launcelot and Guinevere were the most notable pair of adulterers ever to be, for their joining was not in ignorance of the consequences nor as a result of a magical potion, but they came together from Envy and Vanity and the offspring of these: the hunger for mastery by man over woman and vice versa.

Never be too sure you've seen the worst the storm can deliver. The sky can always show you something you haven't seen yet.

Croatia, with hundreds of thousands of Serbs within its boundaries, was not ready to accept such an outcome. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had long dreamed of establishing Croatia as an independent country. But the boundaries of his “country,” drawn originally by Tito to define the republic within Yugoslavia, would contain areas in which Serbs had lived for centuries. In the brief war in Slovenia the Yugoslav Army seemed to be defending the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia; when that same army went to war only a few weeks later against Croatia, it had become a Serb army fighting for the Serbs inside Croatia. The Croatian-Serbian war began with irregulars and local incidents, and escalated rapidly to full-scale fighting. In August 1991, an obscure Yugoslav Army lieutenant colonel named Ratko Mladic joined his regular forces with the local irregulars—groups of young racists and thugs who enjoyed beating up Croats—and launched an attack on Kijevo, an isolated Croat village in the Serb-controlled Krajina. There had been fighting prior to Kijevo, but this action, backed fully by Belgrade, “set the pattern for the rest of the war in Croatia: JNA [Yugoslav] artillery supporting an infantry that was part conscript and part locally-recruited Serb volunteers.”12 Within weeks, fighting had broken out across much of Croatia. The JNA began a vicious artillery assault on Vukovar, an important Croat mining town on the Serbian border. Vukovar and the region around it, known as eastern Slavonia, fell to the Serbs in mid-November, and Zagreb was threatened, sending Croatia into panic. (The peaceful return of eastern Slavonia to Croatia would become one of the central issues in our negotiations in 1995.) After exhausting other options, the European Community asked the former British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington to take on the task of bringing peace to Yugoslavia. Carrington, an urbane man of legendary integrity, told me later that he had never met such terrible liars in his life as the peoples of the Balkans. As the war in Croatia escalated and Vukovar crumbled under Serb shells, Carrington put forward a compromise plan

Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela. Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance. 'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well. The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov. "One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.

Ilich's academic syllabus motivated him much less than far-left politics, as he readily recognised: 'I acquired a personal culture by travelling in Russia and other countries. I learned to use Marx's dialectic method. It's an experience which is useful to all revolutionaries'. Fellow students describe him as passionate about Marxism, but as a romantic rather than an ideologue. An envoy of the Venezuelan Communist Party came to the conclusion that this young man had potential. But the offer of a post as its representative in Bucharest which Dr Eduardo Gallegos Mancera, a member of the party's politburo, made to llich when they met in Moscow did not tempt him. As his father had done, Ilich decided to keep the party at arm's length and turned Mancera down. His snubbing of the appointment did not endear him to the Venezuelan Communist Party, and he further blackened his name by supporting a rebel faction. Since 1964 a storm had been brewing back home following the refusal of the young Commander Douglas Bravo, in charge of the party's military affairs and loyal to Che Guevara's doctrine, to toe the official line. Party policy dictated that armed struggle as a means to revolution should be abandoned in favour of a 'broad popular movement for progressive democratic change'. The storm broke in the late 1960s when Bravo left the party. Ilich, still at Lumumba University, wholeheartedly supported him as a true revolutionary, and this led to his expulsion in the early summer of 1969 from the Venezuelan Communist Youth, the first political movement he had joined. Robbed of the backing of a Soviet-endorsed party, Ilich was an easy target for the university authorities, whom he had again angered earlier in 1969 when he joined a demonstration by Arab students. Moscow had no time for Bravo's followers: one Pravda editorial condemned Cuban-backed revolutionary movements in Latin America like Bravo's as 'anti-Marxist' and declared that only orthodox parties held the key to the future.

The process of working out the specifics of Operation Husky had turned into a dogfight, with intense disagreements among commanders, and rising tensions between the British and American allies. Patton found Montgomery ‘wonderfully conceited’ and noted that Alexander, the commander of Allied ground forces had ‘an exceptionally small head’. This from a man whose big-headedness was legendary.

figures out how to successfully navigate the legendary maze of crushing rocks known as the Symplegades, yoke fire-breathing, bronze-hoofed

figures out how to successfully navigate the legendary maze of crushing rocks known as the Symplegades, yoke fire-breathing, bronze-hoofed oxen, trick

Most of the pubs had barred Des, but he came in to the Tiger bar and he points to me and says, ‘And you, out! I want you by the back of the car park.’ So I obliged him and proceeded to kick the poor cunt all around the car park, he ended up in hospital for a week! Eventually, when he came out of hospital he said that I was the best thing that had happened to him, I’d cured him!

Obviously it’s hard for anyone to imagine, but these dance halls were powder kegs just waiting to erupt. Names were made and reputations were enhanced or blown in a flash!

These near death escapades didn’t put me off working in violent situations. If trouble happened then I couldn’t stop to think of what might happen. There were some good people about and my job was to protect them from trouble, I couldn’t let past experiences put me off.