Master Splinter Quotes

The early women rise before I do. Their lamps splinter the gloom of the kitchens. They chatter in whispers as they brew tea for the cooks. Windows are open to counter the heat of the ovens. Outside, the sky is as black as my soul.

The master of word manipulation strikes again.

Leadership is not about being appreciated; it is about responsibility. It does not matter that the burden is heavy; it matters that you carry it.

You’ve always brought out the softer side in my master. But he hasn’t changed. He’s as changeless as he is ageless. He’ll always be selfish, manipulative, untamable. He knows no other way to be, for he is all things Wonderland.

I warn you, Captain, God crafted these creatures for three things only. Passing wind from the rear end, passing wind from the front end, and spitting. They spit stomach acid so tell your men, and don't let anyone venture into the hold with a naked flame or you may find yourself the master of a marvelous collection of floating splinters. Also, we'll all drown.

“You laid it on a little thick out there.” Morpheus clucks his tongue. “I performed masterfully,” he answers, at last managing to claim his hat from Chessie. “Right,” Jeb scoffs. “Pretty sure my mistreatment wouldn’t have sent you into hysterics, drama queen.” Morpheus smirks. “Fair enough. On the other hand, your portrayal of a brainless wind-up numbskull was spot on.” Jeb’s lips quiver, as if he’s fighting a smile himself. “You know, I still have enough paint to make that flyswatter.” “Tut. No need for violence.” Morpheus taps the dust from his hat and places it on his head. “I’m simply giving credit where it’s due.”

“I promised him something,” I answer softly. I don’t want to admit what he already knows. That there’s more going on between me and Morpheus than I ever let on. “A promise, huh? How romantic.” His words slash like knives. He’s become a master at wielding more than a brush since he’s been here. “So that’s why you’ve crashed our little paradise. To keep your promise to Morpheus.” I wince. “No. I came to rescue you both. You have every right not to believe me . . . to be mad at me. I know this has been hell. This place . . . it’s broken you.” “I was broken before that.” His tortured expression delivers the allegation— thanks to you and bug-rot —better than his voice ever could.

In the bows of the Desaix there was a sudden movement, a response to an order. Jack stepped to the wheel, taking the spokes from the quartermaster’s hands and looking back over his left shoulder. He felt the life of the sloop under his fingers: and he saw the Desaix begin to yaw. She answered her helm as quickly as a cutter, and in three heartbeats there were her thirty-seven guns coming round to bear. Jack heaved strongly at the wheel. The broadside’s roar and the fall of the Sophie’s maintopgallantmast and foretopsail yard came almost together – in the thunder a hail of blocks, odd lengths of rope, splinters, the tremendous clang of a grape-shot striking the Sophie’s bell; and then a silence. The greater part of the seventy-four’s roundshot had passed a few yards ahead of her stem: the scattering grape-shot had utterly wrecked her sails and rigging – had cut them to pieces. The next broadside must destroy her entirely. ‘Clew up,’ called Jack, continuing the turn that brought the Sophie into the wind. ‘Bonden, strike the colours.

See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It

This happened after Romero accidentally locked himself in his office. Hearing the pleas, Carmack gave the knob a twist, paused, then deduced the most obvious and immediate solution. “You know,” he said, “I do have a battle-ax in my office.” Carmack had recently paid five thousand dollars for the custom-made weapon—a razor-edged hatchet like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. As the other guys gathered around chanting, “Battle-ax! Battle-ax! Battle-ax!” Carmack chopped Romero free. The splintered door remained in the hall for months.

In fact, looking at the data for the blackbody radiation (passive heat emissions) of many experiments, it cannot be assured that they aren't already naturally splintered across timelines, because they already agree with Mynt's formula better than Planck's law. The means that the sun not only holds us in orbit, it connects us in time.

Politics views the globe exactly as it did in the preceding centuries (but now translunar space is included)—as a chessboard for contests. But all along, that board has been surreptitiously changing; it is no more a stationary ground, a foundation, but a raft, afloat and splintering under the blows of unseen currents that are carrying it in a direction in which no one has been looking.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy borrows heavily from Stoic principles and the splintering methods of psychological healing that stem from CBT, all owe something to the original teachings of Ancient Greece.

It is a well-established fact that language is not only our servant, when we wish to express—or even to conceal—our thoughts, but that it may also be our master, overpowering us by means of the notions attached to the current words. This fact is the reason why it is desirable to create a new terminology in all cases where new or revised conceptions are being developed. Old terms are mostly compromised by their application in antiquated or erroneous theories and systems, from which they carry splinters of inadequate ideas, not always harmless to the developing insight.

You've always brought out the softer side in my master. But he hasn't changed. He's as changeless as he is ageless. He'll always be selfish, manipulative, untamable. He knows no other way to be, for he is all things Wonderland.

When you’re six, seven, or eight years old, you know what feels right and what feels way the fuck off. And when you are born into a cyclone of terror and pain, you know it doesn’t have to be that way, and that truth nags at you like a splinter in your jacked up mind. You can choose to ignore it, but the dull throbbing is always there as the days and nights bleed together into one blurred memory.

He held out his hand as if to receive something, and the Turanian cried out sharply like a man in mortal agony. He reeled drunkenly, and then, with a splintering of bones, a rending of flesh and muscle and a snapping of mail-links, his breast burst outward with a shower of blood, and through the ghastly aperture something red and dripping shot through the air into the Master's outstretched hand, as a bit of steel leaps to the magnet.