Length And Breadth Of Life Quotes

I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!

I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know..." I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.

I will not play it safe! I want to experience the length, depth, and breadth of life. I'm not just here for the victories... I'm here for the scars.

Don’t try to fit me in a box… My life is not one dimensional. I’m the summer breeze and the hurricane… I’m the serene lake and the raging ocean… I’m the gentle poet and the rough warrior… I can build and I can destroy... I can romance and I can ravage... I can be wise and I can be silly... I can and WILL be everything that the length, depth, and breadth of life will allow... KNOW THIS! Your labels don’t limit me… they limit your experience of me. Don’t confuse the two.

I’m also now immune to politicians who say, “I’ve traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know…” I’ve traveled more than any of them, and I don’t know.

I will not live a stagnant life. I will explore the length, depth, and breadth of what this beautiful life offers. Wins and losses, love and heartbreak, laughter and tears... I’m not just here for the victories; I’m here for the scars. I refuse to experience anything less.

Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby. He’s met people over the course of his life who he truly believes existed as the ancient shamans did, with one foot in each world: this one and the one beyond. When you meet these people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go.

So life is a rectangle then. The length is the years we live and the breadth is the love we get from the people that matter in our lives.

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements, and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world," - all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.

The essence of Christianity is centered upon the Lord Jesus Christ. The sum and substance of being a Christian is trusting Christ with the entirety of one’s being. The height of the Christian life is adoring Christ, the depth of it loving Him, the breadth of it obeying Him, and the length of it following Him. Everything in the Christian life revolves around Jesus Christ. Simply put, Christianity is Christ.

Light up the radiant flame of conscience, goodwill and compassion in your heart, and go over the length and breadth of your society in the pursuit of shedding light over the whole world. And in time, you’ll become a glorious sun that will shine over the entire human population.

For every time Lola was happy, she would be happy. Every time Lola was unhappy, she would be unhappy. Her life was doubled, instantly, and she felt the new length of it, the breadth of it, like opening a door one day and discovering her kitchen had turned into the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

Love, that is first and last of all things made, The light that has the living world for shade, The spirit that for temporal veil has on The souls of all men woven in unison, One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought And lights of sunny and starry deed and thought, And alway through new act and passion new Shines the divine same body and beauty through, The body spiritual of fire and light That is to worldly noon as noon to night; Love, that is flesh upon the spirit of man And spirit within the flesh whence breath began; Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime; Love, that is blood within the veins of time; That wrought the whole world without stroke of hand, Shaping the breadth of sea, the length of land, And with the pulse and motion of his breath Through the great heart of the earth strikes life and death, The sweet twain chords that make the sweet tune live Through day and night of things alternative, Through silence and through sound of stress and strife, And ebb and flow of dying death and life: Love, that sounds loud or light in all men's ears, Whence all men's eyes take fire from sparks of tears, That binds on all men's feet or chains or wings; Love that is root and fruit of terrene things; Love, that the whole world's waters shall not drown, The whole world's fiery forces not burn down; Love, that what time his own hands guard his head The whole world's wrath and strength shall not strike dead; Love, that if once his own hands make his grave The whole world's pity and sorrow shall not save; Love, that for very life shall not be sold, Nor bought nor bound with iron nor with gold; So strong that heaven, could love bid heaven farewell, Would turn to fruitless and unflowering hell; So sweet that hell, to hell could love be given, Would turn to splendid and sonorous heaven; Love that is fire within thee and light above, And lives by grace of nothing but of love; Through many and lovely thoughts and much desire Led these twain to the life of tears and fire; Through many and lovely days and much delight Led these twain to the lifeless life of night.

Sounds cheesy, but I love that each day gives us the opportunity to experience and affect the length, depth, and breadth of life. It took me a long time and a lot of heartache to realize that no matter what our history, we have the opportunity to be better, to act better, and to live better... to whatever capacity that may mean. I love that.

Meditation Take the world, but give me Jesus, Sweetest comfort of my soul; With my Savior watching o’er me, I can sing though billows roll. Take the world, but give me Jesus, Let me view his constant smile; Then throughout my pilgrim journey Light will cheer me all the while. Take the world, but give me Jesus, All its joys are but a name; But his love abideth ever, Through eternal years the same. Take the world, but give me Jesus. In his cross my trust shall be, Till, with clearer, brighter vision, Face to face my Lord I see. Refrain Oh, the height and depth of mercy! Oh, the length and breadth of love! Oh, the fullness of redemption, Pledge of endless life above! “TAKE THE WORLD, BUT GIVE ME JESUS,” FANNY CROSBY (1879)

Those whom [the Lord] teaches, are always increasing in knowledge, both of themselves and of him. The heart is deep, and, like Ezekiel's vision, presents so many chambers of imagery, one within another, that it requires time to get a considerable acquaintance with it, and we shall never know it thoroughly. It is now more than twenty-eight years since the Lord began to open mine to my own view; and from that time to this, almost every day has discovered to me something which until then was unobserved; and the farther I go, the more I seem convinced that I have entered but a little way. A person who travels in some parts of Derbyshire may easily be satisfied that the country is cavernous; but how large, how deep, how numerous the caverns may be, which are hidden from us by the surface of the ground, and what is contained in them—are questions which our most discerning inquirers cannot fully answer… And if our own hearts are beyond our comprehension, how much more incomprehensible is the heart of Jesus! If sin abounds in us—grace and love superabound in him! His ways and thoughts are higher than ours, as the heavens are higher than the earth; his love has a height, and depth, and length, and breadth, which passes all knowledge! The riches of his grace are unsearchable riches! Eph. 3:8, Eph. 3:18, Eph. 3:19. All that we have received or can receive from him, or know of him in this life, compared with what he is in himself, or what he has for us—is but as the drop of a bucket—compared with the ocean; or a single ray of light—compared with the sun. The waters of the sanctuary flow to us at first almost ankle deep—so graciously does the Lord condescend to our weakness; but they rise as we advance, and constrain us to cry out, with the Apostle, O the depth! We find before us, as Dr. Watts beautifully expresses it, A sea of love and grace unknown, Without a bottom or a shore!

From my college courses and my reading I knew the various names that came at the end of a line of questions or were placed as periods to bafflement: the First Cause, the First Mover, the Life Force, the Universal Mind, the First Principle, the Unmoved Mover, even Providence. I too had used those names in arguing with others, and with myself, trying to explain the world to myself. And now I saw that those names explained nothing. They were of no more use than Evolution or Natural Selection or Nature or The Big Bang of these later days. All such names do is catch us within the length and breadth of our own thoughts and our own bewilderment. Though I knew the temptation of simple reason, to know nothing that can't be proved, still I supposed that those were not the right names. I imagined that the right name might be Father, and I imagined all that that name would imply: the love, the compassion, the taking offense, the disappointment, the anger, the bearing of wounds, the weeping of tears, the forgiveness, the suffering unto death. If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down into the world? Could I not see how it might, because it could know its creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death? Yes. I could imagine a Father who is yet like a mother hen spreading her wings before the storm or in the dusk before the dark night for the little ones of Port William to come in under, some of whom do, and some do not. I could imagine Port William riding its humble wave through time under the sky, its little flames of wakefulness lighting and going out, its lives passing through birth, pleasure, sufferning, and death. I could imagine God looking down upon it, its lives living by His spirit, breathing by His breath, knowing by His light, but each life living also (inescapably) by its own will--His own body given to be broken.

Love yourself, if that means rational, healthy, and moral self-interest. You are commanded to do that. That is the length of life. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. You are commanded to do that. That is the breadth of life. But never forget that there is a first and even greater commandment, "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind." This is the height of life. And when you do this you live the complete life.

Father Kolvenbach recounted the story of an abbot in the Middle Ages who would speak to his monks every day “on finding God, on searching for God, on encountering God.” One day a monk asked the abbot if he ever encountered God. Had he ever had a vision or seen God face-to-face? After a long silence the abbot answered frankly: no, he hadn’t. But, said the abbot, there wasn’t anything surprising in this because even to Moses in the Book of Exodus (33:19–20) God said, “You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” God says that Moses will see his back as he passed by him. “Thus,” Father Kolvenbach wrote, “looking back over the length and breadth of his life the abbot could see for himself the passage of God.

What is a human life after all? Whether it endures for a brief spell or longer - even if it could last a thousand years; take it as a breath of air merging into eternity. From the beginning, life bears death's signature; they are brothers in the secret play of their eyes. For how long then do you want to deceive yourself? For how long will you refuse to see yourself as you are and as you will be? Each grain of sand takes its own length and breadth as the measure of the world; yet, beside a mountain range it is as nothing. You yourself are the grain of sand; you are your own prisoner. Break your cage, break free from yourself, free from humanity; learn that what you thought was real is not so in reality. Follow Nizami: burn your own treasure, like a candle - then the world, your sovereign, will become your slave.

I didn’t say it out loud because I knew he’d mock me—but I was thinking of writing my memoirs, too. The life of Vercingetorix the Red: soldier, and gladiator, and general who had traveled the length and breadth of the Empire, served three emperors, loved one empress and fathered another. Hadrian would preserve my son in his memoirs, god and beloved—but what of the others who had crossed Hadrian’s path and mine over the course of our long and complicated lives? What about Titus, friend and future Caesar? Young Marcus, Imperial heir and future son-in-law? And all those women, the women in blue: sinuous lapis-eyed Sabina, bitter-edged Mirah in her blue scarf, merry sapphire-decked Faustina, and fleet-footed Annia running in a bloodstained blue tunic to save the Empire? If Hadrian will not tell their story, I suppose it will be up to me.

Perhaps the heritability of IQ implies something entirely different, something that once and for all proves that Galton’s attempt to discriminate between nature and nurture is misconceived. Consider this apparently fatuous fact. People with high IQ s, on average, have more symmetrical ears than people with low IQ s. Their whole bodies seem to be more symmetrical: foot breadth, ankle breadth, finger length, wrist breadth and elbow breadth each correlates with IQ. In the early 1990s there was revived an old interest in bodily symmetry, because of what it can reveal about the body’s development during early life. Some asymmetries in the body are consistent: the heart is on the left side of the chest, for example, in most people. But other, smaller asymmetries can go randomly in either direction. In some people the left ear is larger than the right; in others, vice versa. The magnitude of this so-called fluctuating asymmetry is a sensitive measure of how much stress the body was under when developing, stress from infections, toxins or poor nutrition. The fact that people with high IQs have more symmetrical bodies suggests that they were subject to fewer developmental stresses in the womb or in childhood. Or rather, that they were more resistant to such stresses. And the resistance may well be heritable. So the heritability of IQ might not be caused by direct ‘genes for intelligence’ at all, but by indirect genes for resistance to toxins or infections – genes in other words that work by interacting with the environment. You inherit not your IQ but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances. How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture? It is frankly impossible.

Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when his faith seems about to yield, is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it, no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and tortured, as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded by fire, it declares for God. The sacrifice ascends in the cry, My God. The cry comes not out of happiness, out of peace, out of hope. Not even out of suffering comes that cry. It was a cry in desolation, but it came out of Faith. It is the last voice of Truth, speaking when it can but cry. The divine horror of that moment is unfathomable by human soul. It was blackness of darkness. And yet he would believe. Yet he would hold fast. God was his God yet. My God— and in the cry came forth the Victory, and all was over soon. Of the peace that followed that cry, the peace of a perfect soul, large as the universe, pure as light, ardent as life, victorious for God and his brethren, he himself alone can ever know the breadth and length, and depth and height.

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height and depth of his character. Perhaps we only need to know how his shores trend, and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth to him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. Also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is a harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially landlocked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of waters…It becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh.

The street sprinkler went past and, as its rasping rotary broom spread water over the tarmac, half the pavement looked as if it had been painted with a dark stain. A big yellow dog had mounted a tiny white bitch who stood quite still. In the fashion of colonials the old gentleman wore a light jacket, almost white, and a straw hat. Everything held its position in space as if prepared for an apotheosis. In the sky the towers of Notre-Dame gathered about themselves a nimbus of heat, and the sparrows – minor actors almost invisible from the street – made themselves at home high up among the gargoyles. A string of barges drawn by a tug with a white and red pennant had crossed the breadth of Paris and the tug lowered its funnel, either in salute or to pass under the Pont Saint-Louis. Sunlight poured down rich and luxuriant, fluid and gilded as oil, picking out highlights on the Seine, on the pavement dampened by the sprinkler, on a dormer window, and on a tile roof on the Île Saint-Louis. A mute, overbrimming life flowed from each inanimate thing, shadows were violet as in impressionist canvases, taxis redder on the white bridge, buses greener. A faint breeze set the leaves of a chestnut tree trembling, and all down the length of the quai there rose a palpitation which drew voluptuously nearer and nearer to become a refreshing breath fluttering the engravings pinned to the booksellers’ stalls. People had come from far away, from the four corners of the earth, to live that one moment. Sightseeing cars were lined up on the parvis of Notre-Dame, and an agitated little man was talking through a megaphone. Nearer to the old gentleman, to the bookseller dressed in black, an American student contemplated the universe through the view-finder of his Leica. Paris was immense and calm, almost silent, with her sheaves of light, her expanses of shadow in just the right places, her sounds which penetrated the silence at just the right moment. The old gentleman with the light-coloured jacket had opened a portfolio filled with coloured prints and, the better to look at them, propped up the portfolio on the stone parapet. The American student wore a red checked shirt and was coatless. The bookseller on her folding chair moved her lips without looking at her customer, to whom she was speaking in a tireless stream. That was all doubtless part of the symphony. She was knitting. Red wool slipped through her fingers. The white bitch’s spine sagged beneath the weight of the big male, whose tongue was hanging out. And then when everything was in its place, when the perfection of that particular morning reached an almost frightening point, the old gentleman died without saying a word, without a cry, without a contortion while he was looking at his coloured prints, listening to the voice of the bookseller as it ran on and on, to the cheeping of the sparrows, the occasional horns of taxis. He must have died standing up, one elbow on the stone ledge, a total lack of astonishment in his blue eyes. He swayed and fell to the pavement, dragging along with him the portfolio with all its prints scattered about him. The male dog wasn’t at all frightened, never stopped. The woman let her ball of wool fall from her lap and stood up suddenly, crying out: ‘Monsieur Bouvet!

Noah and the Flood 9These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. 10And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 11Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. 13And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, [3] for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth. 14Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. [4] Make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. 15This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark 300 cubits, [5] its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits. 16Make a roof [6] for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above, and set the door of the ark in its side. Make it with lower, second, and third decks. 17For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die. 18But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. 19And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. 20Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground, according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive. 21Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up. It shall serve as food for you and for them.” 22Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.

he moved beyond the stately confines of the Rashtrapati Bhawan and travelled the length and breadth of the country, meeting students, politicians, teachers, bureaucrats, professionals from all fields, talking to them, answering their queries patiently and filling every gathering with inspiration and pride. He talked of his humble beginnings, of working with the best minds of the country in his years at ISRO and DRDO, and laid out specific programmes to bring about prosperity and connectivity to every corner of the country.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of an Irishman in love. The inspiration that might fail him almost every other time in his life suddenly comes to the fore when he finds himself in noble pursuit of the girl who has captured his heart. Rosie Hughes might have a slightly different recollection of events, but suffice to say that I, Patrick O’Reilly, surprised even myself with the lengths and breadths of my endeavours.

The heart continues increasing in weight, and also in length, breadth and thickness, up to an advanced period of life: this increase is more marked in men than in women. Henry Gray FRS Gray’s Anatomy

A willing soul will keenly go the length, breadth and depth to fulfill the dream.

Tombstones and legacies are for the dead. I will live for now… Impact the world for now… Change lives for now… Laugh for now… Love for now… I will experience the length, depth, and breadth of life for now… Later will come soon enough and I will be so tired that I shall welcome the rest it offers…. But for now, ONWARD!

Take it to the Streets     “Pray continually”(1 Thessalonians 5:17).     I’ve enjoyed walking since my youth and continue to enjoy it today as my number one cardiovascular activity. I find walking to be the most flexible and relaxing exercise. No special equipment or skills are needed – just a good pair of shoes and sensible clothing. It can be done anywhere and anytime with a friend or by myself.   There can also be both spiritual and physical benefits by combining prayer with walking. What walking accomplishes in building a strong body, prayer achieves in building spiritual strength. Your body requires exercise and food, and it needs these things regularly. Once a week won’t suffice. Your spiritual needs are similar to your physical needs, and so praying once a week is as effective as eating once a week. The Bible tells us to pray continually in order to have a healthy, growing spiritual life.   Prayer walking is just what it sounds like — simply walking and talking to God. Prayer walking can take a range of approaches from friends or family praying as they walk around schools, neighbourhoods, work places, and churches, to structured prayer campaigns for particular streets and homes. I once participated in a prayer walk in Ottawa where, as a group, we marched to Parliament Hill and prayed for our governments, provinces, and country.   In the Bible, there are many references to walking while thinking and meditating on the things of God. Genesis 13:17 says, “Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.” The prophet Micah declared, “All the nations may walk in the name of their gods, we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.” (Micah 4:5) And in Joshua 14:9 it says, “So on that day Moses swore to me, ‘The land on which your feet have walked will be your inheritance and that of your children forever, because you have

God says that Moses will see his back as he passed by him. “Thus,” Father Kolvenbach wrote, “looking back over the length and breadth of his life the abbot could see for himself the passage of God.” The examen helps you see God in retrospect.

I will not play it safe! I want to experience the length, depth, and breadth of life. I'm not just here for the victories... I'm here for the scars.

It will sound to be perhaps funny. But of, its the fact.. On 19th January 2015 I suddenly had fallen sick. My nearest and dearest person, our beloved family physician had expired on 18th January, 2015 at 6P.M. Every length and breadth of nostalgic thoughts fogged to my mind. I was becoming too restless.No particular medicine, as such acted upon me.My mother's words were in despair..I heard her to say on me, "What should I do with her now?" On other doctor's prescription, medicines were been continuing but my weakness was all along on my way, severely... 20th January, 7P.M.-On one side my mother's inspiration that I have to be awaken, I need to be shaken up myself again and, on the other hand my own teachings to my students when they repel my words "Life and Death together is temporary. When there is Birth, prepare for Death: When there is Hope, prepare for Despair : When there is Happiness, prepare for Sadness: Laugh and Be Merry..:""Life is not a stagnant water,A man is mortal:" And today is 21st January, Feeling much better ..I am, now again to continue with my work-my Life..

Life should not be lived in length; its breadth is insightful and not tenable in undepuracy. It will not be furious, but it will flip in curiosity and bravery hypotheses for peculiarities in mellow praxis. Open-heartedly, it will express the entity of your unpretentiousness, reality, and precision sustainability again and again; this will only be a fragment of a different and eccentric life.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father . . . that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. —EPHESIANS 3:14, 16–19

Early in his career, Martin Luther King Jr. preached about the need to have three dimensions in our life: length, breadth, and height. Length is about our connection to ourselves. Breadth is about our connection to our community. And height is about our connection to the transcendent. If these three dimensions are out of whack, King said, we will be, too.

Early in his career, Martin Luther King Jr. preached about the need to have three dimensions in our life: length, breadth, and height. Length is about our connection to ourselves. Breadth is about our connection to our community. And height is about our connection to the transcendent. If these three dimensions are out of whack, King said, we will be, too. This advice tracks the three fears of commitment—and the three gifts on the other side of them. When you defeat the fear of regret and find a vocation—a purpose—you find a connection to yourself. When you defeat the fear of association and find solidarity—when you make friends—you find a connection to a greater community. And when you defeat the fear of missing out—through the joy of depth—you find a connection to the transcendent.

The painfully prolonged polite greetings finally over, she stealthily drifted over to the table of goodies. She was just a finger’s length away from a chocolate-glazed precious with her name written all over it when a firm hand clamped down on her elbow. Her empty stomach sank to the bottom of her sensible shoes, and she stared up at her boss with what she knew was the most effectively pathetic hangdog expression in her arsenal. But he was having none of it; his jaw was clenched so tightly she was amazed his teeth didn’t crack. She gave one final forlorn look at the doughnuts before he led her to the long conference table in the center of the room. “Try to pay attention,” he muttered in her ear as he planted her into a seat that, cruelly, faced the delicious spread just a table’s breadth away from her. What followed was the longest, most boring and torturous three hours of Cleo’s life. The meeting was conducted entirely in Japanese, which Cleo didn’t speak but Dante most certainly did, and quite fluently too from what she could tell. She didn’t know why she was there. He had a Dictaphone recording the meeting, so even if she’d been able to understand what was going on, she wouldn’t have had to take notes anyway. All she could do was stare at the doughnuts and other delicious goodies in front of her and imagine how they tasted. At one point a fly landed on her doughnut. It took everything she had not to jump up with a primal scream and chase it away. Instead, she watched in revulsion as it crawled over every inch of her beautiful doughnut. She nearly sobbed in disappointment, gave up on the chocolate one, and shifted her attention to a gorgeous éclair on a different platter. But when that bastard fly, which she had now named Damaso Jr., landed on her éclair as well, she slumped back in her chair and stared glumly down at the blank notebook in front of her.

I took in the open barrenness of the landscape and wondered what compelled people, any kind of people, to settle in a place where the prominent colors were brown, gray, and white; where the growing season was barely one quarter of the year; and the length and breadth of the land was dwarfed by the immensity of the sky. The eternally optimistic, that's who, because only people with a totally optimistic worldview would look at this seemingly dead countryside and figure that it would be a great place to build a life, start a family, and/or create a civilization. Then again, maybe they were seduced by the seemingly constant sunlight. This day may have been overcast, but that was an anomaly. For the most part, sunshine was the norm, even during those bitterly cold days when the light lasted less than the average workday and the cold could kill you if you weren't prepared. But maybe they knew that; maybe they understood that even in the dead of winter there would be light, yes, diffused to a constant orange glow because of the sharp angle of the sun, but light nevertheless. And that was enough to stay.

The biggest difference between the Psalms and much of our modern music today is not (as many think) the length of songs, or the lack of repetition, or of the lesser use of the "I" pronoun - it is the breadth and depth of the character of God and how we as His creation humbly find our place within that.

Here is the way I was in those days. My life just filled out into all the freedom it was allowed, like water seeking its level. My private life—my secret life, I might as well say, though really I had no secrets worth keeping—achieved length and breadth and height. After the first year, I asked for and was given a small single room, and in that way got shed of my roommate. I now had money that I had earned myself; I now had a few possessions that I had bought with my own money. These few things that were mine I cherished with a steady small exultation that was also mine. At night, shut in my little room with all my worldly possessions, I felt like a worm in an apple.

There was a feeling about this hard to uncover, for he was not a self-analyzing man, never one to dig deeply into the source of his emotions. Facing this range, its good thick layer of fertility and its length and breadth, he came as close to it as he ever would come. It was a strength in his chest and in his muscles. The amber color of the short, nutritious suncured grass, sweeping on like a tawny and thick-napped carpet, had a meaning; the round green spots here and there in that tawniness, indicating water, had a meaning. The sunshine pouring down upon it and the shadows creased into occasional ridges, the wild, sweet smell of the land, the stillness, the free sweep, the quick wheel of cowbirds in the foreground and the faint blot of faraway cattle—all this had meaning. Beneath this grass was a generous, fecund earth. A man had to translate this richness into terms of cattle. But it wasn’t only cattle. Behind the cattle lay something else. Maybe a sense of personal growth, of pride, of something fought for and won, of large-handedness. It stiffened a man’s backbone and made him look at the world differently than other men looked at it. In his world certain things stood out; weather and water and grass and cattle; and himself against all the odds the range put against a lone man. He had his thoughts. They carried him at once into the past and presently he sent his glance all across the flats to the Lost Hills where, ten years before, he had started his married life with Lila. He remembered that one year vividly, as he remembered everything vividly that had to do with her; and he said to himself, “She should have lived to see this. Maybe it might have made a difference to her.” He slanted across the valley and rode up the narrow length of his older range, reaching home-quarters in the middle of the afternoon. As soon as he left the saddle old Mose gave him the latest news: Hack Breathitt had been pulled into a fight at War Pass, killing Liard Connor. Now Hack was hiding in the hills with Sheriff Nickum on his trail. Somebody had said, Mose added, that Herendeen had sent out a party under McGeen also to hunt Breathitt. Of that, Mose qualified, he wasn’t sure, but it sounded in the nature of the Three Pines beast. “I’m going to town,” decided Morgan at once, “and ought to be back around eight.” Old Mose said: “The way things are now, I wouldn’t skylark on the trail after dark. I’ve lived through a

We are repelled by the Teutons, because their thoughts will not minister to our private needs; but this instinctive recoil at the same time explains a furtive attraction which was not exhausted by the romantic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concentration of the Teutons exposes a narrowness of another kind in ourselves; every time we are confronted with a people of another type, a stone in the foundation of our complacency is loosened. We are surprised by an uneasy feeling that our civilization does not exhaust the possibilities of life; we are led to suspect that our problems derive their poignancy from the fact that, at times, we mistake our own reasonings about reality for reality itself. We become dimly aware that the world stretches beyond our horizon, and as this apprehension takes shape, there grows upon us a suspicion that some of the problems which baffle us are problems of our own contrivance; our questionings often lead us into barren fastnesses instead of releasing us into the length and breadth of eternity, and the reason may be that we are trying to make a whole of fragments and not, as we thought, attempting to grasp what is a living whole in itself. And at last, when we learn to gaze at the world from a new point of view, revealing prospects which have been concealed from our eyes, we may perhaps find that Hellas also contains more things, riches as well as mysteries than are dreamt of in our philosophy; after all, we have perhaps been no less romantic in our understanding of Greece than in our misunderstanding of the Teutons and other primitive peoples.

Glossary Agni: God of fire Agnipariksha: A trial by fire Angaharas: Movement of limbs or steps in a dance Ankush: Hook-shaped prods used to control elephants Annapurna: The Hindu Goddess of food, nourishment and plenty; also believed to be a form of Goddess Parvati Anshan: Hunger. It also denotes voluntary fasting. In this book, Anshan is the capital of the kingdom of Elam Apsara: Celestial maidens from the court of the Lord of the Heavens – Indra; akin to Zeus/Jupiter Arya: Sir Ashwamedh yagna: Literally, the Horse sacrifice. In ancient times, an ambitious ruler, who wished to expand his territories and display his military prowess, would release a sacrificial horse to roam freely through the length and breadth of any kingdom in India. If any king stopped/captured the horse, the ruler’s army would declare war against the challenger, defeat the king and annexe that territory. If an opposing king did not stop the horse, the kingdom would become a vassal of the former Asura: Demon Ayuralay: Hospital Ayurvedic: Derived from Ayurved, an ancient Indian form of medicine Ayushman bhav: May you have a long life Baba: Father Bhang: Traditional intoxicant in India; milk mixed with marijuana Bhiksha: Alms or donations Bhojan graham: Dining room Brahmacharya: The vow of celibacy Brahmastra: Literally, the weapon of Brahma; spoken of in ancient Hindu scriptures. Many experts claim that the description of a Brahmastra and its effects are eerily similar to that of a nuclear weapon. I have assumed this to be true in the context of my book Branga: The ancient name for modern West Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh. Term coined from the conjoint of the two rivers of this land: Brahmaputra and Ganga Brangaridai: Literally, the heart of Branga. The capital of the kingdom of Branga Chandravanshi: Descendants of the moon Chaturanga: Ancient Indian game that evolved into the modern game of chess Chillum: Clay pipe, usually used to smoke marijuana Choti: Braid Construction of Devagiri royal court platform: The description in the book of the court platform is a possible explanation for the mysterious multiple-column buildings made of baked brick discovered at Indus Valley sites, usually next to the public baths, which many historians suppose could have been granaries Dada: Elder brother