Mention Story Quotes

Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

He desperately tried to think of a story to explain his involvement in her sudden appearance, without mentioning the book of magic in his possession.  

I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-- despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have 'that thing' even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination-- the complete and merciless devaluation of self." - pg 20-21

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot talk, so I listen very well. I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. It's like being a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met at a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor's yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story, you, hearing the words "soccer" and "neighbor" in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pele, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn't he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that, no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Tres Coracoes with Pele, and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit - that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor's dog - would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pele. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.

I found it interesting when, after the program, both Mrs. Rath and Mrs. Walker mentioned how nice it was to see Ira attending school and community events again.

Like This If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say, Like this. When someone mentions the gracefulness of the nightsky, climb up on the roof and dance and say, Like this. If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is, or what "God’s fragrance" means, lean your head toward him or her. Keep your face there close. Like this. When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon, slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe. Like this. If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead, don’t try to explain the miracle. Kiss me on the lips. Like this. Like this. When someone asks what it means to "die for love," point here. If someone asks how tall I am, frown and measure with your fingers the space between the creases on your forehead. This tall. The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns. When someone doesn’t believe that, walk back into my house. Like this. When lovers moan, they’re telling our story. Like this. I am a sky where spirits live. Stare into this deepening blue, while the breeze says a secret. Like this. When someone asks what there is to do, light the candle in his hand. Like this. How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob? Huuuuu. How did Jacob’s sight return? Huuuu. A little wind cleans the eyes. Like this. When Shams comes back from Tabriz, he’ll put just his head around the edge of the door to surprise us Like this.

He snorted. “He thinks killing a day-old hydra has made him a hero.” None of the songs had ever mentioned the Vandalus Hydra being one day old: it diminished the story more than a little.

A lot of the stories were highly suspicious, in her opinion. There was the one that ended when the two good children pushed the wicked witch into her own oven...Stories like this stopped people thinking properly, she was sure. She'd read that one and thought, Excuse me? No one has an oven big enough to get a whole person in, and what made the children think they could just walk around eating people's houses in any case? And why does some boy too stupid to know a cow is worth a lot more than five beans have the right to murder a giant and steal all his gold? Not to mention commit an act of ecological vandalism? And some girl who can't tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family.

Doesn’t it bother you? That your husbands have become such a headline story, so often mentioned, that they have nearly eclipsed your work and yourself? That all anyone talks about when they talk about you are the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo?” And her answer was quintessential Evelyn. “No,” she told me. “Because they are just husbands. I am Evelyn Hugo. And anyway, I think once people know the truth, they will be much more interested in my wife.

Truth is stranger than fiction," as the old saying goes. When I watch a documentary, I can't help crying and then I think to myself, "Fiction can't compete with this." But when I mentioned this to a veteran manga artist friend of mine he said that "fiction brings salvation to characters in stories that would otherwise have no salvation at all." His words strengthened the conviction of my manga spirit.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.

Simon?” “Yeah?” “Can you tell me a story?” He blinked. “What kind of story?” “Something where the good guys win and the bad guys lose. A nd stay dead.” “So, like a fairy tale?” he said. He racked his brain. He knew only the Disney versions of fairy tales, and the first knew only the Disney versions of fairy tales, and the first image that came to mind was A riel in her seashell bra. He’d had a crush on her when he was eight. Not that this seemed like the time to mention it. “No.” The word was an exhaled breath. “We study fairy tales in school. A lot of that magic is real—but, anyway. No, I want something I haven’t heard yet.” “Okay. I’ve got a good one.” Simon stroked Isabelle’s hair, feeling her lashes flutter against his neck as she closed her eyes. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems.

My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.

Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

She's got a certain feisty charm for a racist. Not to mention all those great dead-animal stories.

I think what hurts the most is that I just really want to belong. I want to stand inside the circle of other people and be noticed for the right things, but it seems like the wrong things are always bigger. And all the advie I've ever read --smile more, be yourself, dream big, stay positive--seems to have some darker side that's never mentioned.

Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore—despite...

Okay. how about that time when you smoked all that weed that you thought was laced with something? You fell into the tub, but you refused to get out because you were convinced that the back of your head was going to fall off? "That third story happened to a guy named Jace in my dorm. Me and Sam and another guy in our hall took turns reading "Paradise Lost" through the locked door. I think it made him more paranoid, though." "That's not true," he says. "Well, he *seemed* more paranoid to me," I say. "And he still gets a little weired out when any one mentions angels.

I don't remember Sherlock Holmes ever mentioning what you are supposed to do when you've eliminated everything improbable, and nothing is left.

My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

Okay, I should probably mention right here that Brandon used the real word, but this is my story, so I'm cleaning it up a little.

I should prefer that you do not mention my name at all in connection with this case, as I choose to be only associated with those crimes which present some difficulty in their solution.

When you tell the children tales of the Baba Yaga on a cold winter’s night, you might remember to mention that whether or not the witch is wicked often depends on who is telling the story.

There’s this thing love stories always forget to mention. That love isn’t a constant thing. Sometimes it changes, other times it fades completely. Sometimes you have to fall in love twice to truly understand it.

I mention her name and the old pain returns. Forget her, you say? How can you forget a living human being?

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn’t mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into. They’re who we are, even if so much of it is a performance. This

Originally, he'd wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem, And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction - the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, to, about the "war on drugs." And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they'd think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

A hero is also someone who, in their day to day interactions with the world, despite all the pain, uncertainty and doubt that can plague us, is resiliently and unashamedly themselves. If you can wake up every day and be emotionally open and honest regardless of what you get back from the world then you can be the hero of your own story. Each and every person who can say that despite life’s various buffetings that they are proud to be the person they are is a hero. Now I do have to mention the real heroes of The Trevor Project, the men and women volunteers, all of whom stand up day after day answering the calls of desperate teens whose circumstances have pushed them to the edge of the abyss. To take that call, and say yes, I will be the one who saves this life takes such courage and compassion. Hemingway’s definition of ‘grace under pressure’ seems fitting as the job they do is every bit as important, and every bit as delicate as a soldier defusing a bomb.

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy? Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question. O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre. P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre. O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction. P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that. (Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

The boy in the tree sobs uncontrollably when I tell him about the Hermit and my mother, yet his eyes light up each time I mention Hannah. And every single time he asks, “Taylor, what about the Brigadier who came searching for you that day? Whatever became of him?” I try to explain that the Brigadier is of no importance to my story, but he always shakes his head as if he knows better.

The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.

Here's what all the stories forget to mention; life goes on around the cursed.

I’ll finish your fairy tale. You forgot to mention the snake. In the story the apple poisons the snake, and Eve packs her books and moves out of paradise. The End.

Do you ever feel lost?” The question hangs between us, intimate, awkward only on my end. He doesn’t scoff as Tactus and Fitchner would, or scratch his balls like Sevro, or chuckle like Cassius might have, or purr as Victra would. I’m not sure what Mustang might have done. But Roque, despite his Color and all the things that make him different, slowly slides a marker into the book and sets it on the nightstand beside the four-poster, taking his time and allowing an answer to evolve between us. Movements thoughtful and organic, like Dancer’s were before he died. There’s a stillness in him, vast and majestic, the same stillness I remember in my father. “Quinn once told me a story.” He waits for me to moan a grievance at the mention of a story, and when I don’t, his tone sinks into deeper gravity. “Once, in the days of Old Earth, there were two pigeons who were greatly in love. In those days, they raised such animals to carry messages across great distances. These two were born in the same cage, raised by the same man, and sold on the same day to different men on the eve of a great war. “The pigeons suffered apart from each other, each incomplete without their lover. Far and wide their masters took them, and the pigeons feared they would never again find each other, for they began to see how vast the world was, and how terrible the things in it. For months and months, they carried messages for their masters, flying over battle lines, through the air over men who killed one another for land. When the war ended, the pigeons were set free by their masters. But neither knew where to go, neither knew what to do, so each flew home. And there they found each other again, as they were always destined to return home and find, instead of the past, their future.

I realized I had become wild and undomesticated, living a gypsy life—coming and going from Bernie’s. But even the thought about settling down in a cozy home with a dog and a cat, not to mention a person, would cause me to panic, pick up and run away. It’s not that I would want to leave. I would have to. The very idea of being settled, I found unsettling. I believed I didn’t deserve these things. I felt secure and comfortable getting what I needed on the fly—no commitments.

Some people at the party, she adds, are freaks, then mentions a drug I've never heard of, and tells me a story that involves ski masks, zombies, a van, chains, a secret community, and asks me about a Hispanic girl who disappeared in some desert.

If you are told that someone is talking badly of you, don’t defend yourself against the story but reply: “Obviously he didn’t know my other faults, or he would have mentioned them as well.

The director mentions the whispers about Clifton's sexual orientation, a supposed gig on a porn site years ago, a rumor about a very famous actor and a tryst in Santa Barbara and Clifton's denial in a Rolling Stone cover story about the very famous actor's new movie which Clifton had a small part in: 'We're so into girls it's ridiculous.

A man, a life - it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.

You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her or even asked where she was buried. Tia was a virgin. She was beautiful. She was poor. And she was a girl. It was her duty to sacrifice her life for his.

Love is a strange concept. That the very sight of someone, the very mention of their name, can cause an intense chemical reaction inside you is crazy.

I should mention, by the way, that LVR stands for Luminal Velocity Regulator. I suppose it could also stand for Large Venezeulan Rats, but in this case it does not.

The story goes like this," he said. "We were having dinner together, you and I. As we do from time to time. It was grimgrouse. Over-spiced. You killed the cook for that. Temper." He added, as an instructive side, "You know, in a story, it's the details like that that make it seem real. Anyway, you for a bone stuck in your mustache. Did I mention you has a mustache?

Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected—not to mention true—that I can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative’ nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work.

Another sign of suicide attempt which is mentioned in the leaflet is being silent. You stop talking about your problems, showing emotions or reacting to anything, you enter a hopeless path, with no return. I realised that whenever I screamed or complained, I wanted help but when I stopped acting out, my mind was already made up.

As I’ve mentioned, I am an only child. This makes me a member of the worldwide super-smart-afraid-of-conflict narcissist club. And let me emphasize: afraid of conflict. Since I had no siblings to routinely challenge/hit me and equally no interest in playing sports, I had grown up without any experience in conflict. I therefore had no reason to imagine that confrontation of any kind, ranging from fighting to kissing, was not probably fatal.

Every love story,every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing. Blackmail, kidnapping, then, are among the extreme violations of the deal. Anyway, I seem to be about to have Jim's child; at least, I think I will, and the thing is I haven't mentioned it to Jim.

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.

You could have mentioned that this kid never sleeps,” Tim calls from the living room. We go in to find him slumped in the easy chair next to the pulled-out sofa bed. Andy’s sprawled out on the bed, long tan legs in a V, George gathered in her arms. Duff, still in his clothes, lies across the bottom, Harry curled in a ball on the pillow under Andy’s outstretched leg. Safety, as much as could be found, must have lain in numbers.Patsy’s fingering Tim’s nose and pulling on his bottom lip, her eyes wide-blue open. “Sorry, man,” Jase says. “She’s usually good to go at bedtime.” “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to this kid? That is one fucked-up story. How is that a book for babies?” Jase laughs. “I thought it was about babysitting.” “Hell no, it’s addiction. That friggin’ mouse is never satisfied. You give him one thing, he wants something else, and then he asks for more and on and on and on. Fucked up. Patsy liked it, though. Fifty thousand times.” Tim yawns, and Patsy snuggles more comfortably onto his chest, grabbing a handful of shirt. “So what’s doin’?” We tell him what we know—nothing—then put the baby in her crib. She glowers, angry and bewildered for a moment, then grabs her five pacifiers, closes her eyes with a look of fierce concentration, and falls very deeply asleep.

I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality ... How many forgotten heroes sleep in history's great cemetery?

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith--still the religion's focal personage-- married at least thirty-three women and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story ... Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.'' —Sherlock Holmes on John Watson's "pamphlet", "A Study in Scarlet".

Self-compassion is an easy list to write, and a hard list to live. For me, it’s all about sleep, healthy food, exercise, and connection. It’s what I mentioned in the concussion story—the best predictor of living into my values is being in physical, spiritual, and emotional shape.

Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.

First and foremost, girls are survivors. We are trained to expect the world to be toxic to us and make the best of a bad situation by developing the skills to survive it. No one ever says the skills won’t be toxic. No one ever mentions how we are cruel sometimes and we don’t choose it.

Falling in love: how does it work? Over the years we gather the odd clue, but nothing adds up. We’d like to think we have a picture of our future partner projected in our mind, all their qualities recorded as if on film, and we just search the planet for that person until we find them, sitting in Casablanca waiting to be recognised. But in reality our love lives are blown around by career and coincidence, not to mention lack of nerve on given occasions, and we never have respectable reasons for anything until we have to make them up afterwards for the benefit of our curious friends.

Don't mention your move before you make a move.

God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new. New doesn't always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don't actually deserve it. New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to not mention when I'm right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn't live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming- never even hoped for- but ends up being what we needed all along.

unlike, say, the sun, or the rainbow, or earthquakes, the fascinating world of the very small never came to the notice of primitive peoples. if you think about this for a minute, it's not really surprising.. they had no way of even knowing it was there, and so of course they didn't invent any myths to explain it. it wasn't until the microscope was invented in the sixteenth century that people discovered that ponds and lakes, soil and dust, even our body, teem with tiny living creatures, too small to see, yet too complicated and, in their own way, beautiful, or perhaps frightening, depending on how you think about them. the whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye - and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all knowing god, mentions them at all. in fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. they don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or nuclear fusion, or electricity, or anaesthetics. in fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive people who first started telling them. if these 'holly books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things?

If all, or almost all, the plays that are popular now, imaginative works as well as historical ones, are known to be nonsense and without rhyme or reason, and despite this the mob hears them with pleasure and thinks of them and approves of them as good, when they are very far from being so, and the authors who compose them and the actors who perform them say they must be like this because that is just how the mob wants them, and no other way; the plays that have a design and follow the story as art demands appeal to a handful of discerning persons who understand them, while everyone else is incapable of comprehending their artistry; and since, as far as the authors and actors are concerned, it is better to earn a living with the crowd than a reputation with the elite, this is what would happen to my book after I had singed my eyebrows trying to keep the precepts I have mentioned and had become the tailor who wasn't paid.

Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began to affect the netting under which the three children lay. It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries. The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brother had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but in a very low tone, and with bated breath:-- "Sir?" "Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes. "What is that?" "It's the rats," replied Gavroche. And he laid his head down on the mat again. The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves in throngs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap. Still the little one could not sleep. "Sir?" he began again. "Hey?" said Gavroche. "What are rats?" "They are mice." This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he lifted up his voice once more. "Sir?" "Hey?" said Gavroche again. "Why don't you have a cat?" "I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate her." This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little fellow began to tremble again. The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:-- "Monsieur?" "Hey?" "Who was it that was eaten?" "The cat." "And who ate the cat?" "The rats." "The mice?" "Yes, the rats." The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate cats, pursued:-- "Sir, would those mice eat us?" "Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche. The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:-- "Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catch hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!

While I was explaining to my own doctor that I was planning to undertake some serious exercise, I happened to mention that I thought I had lost quite a bit of weight since my last physical. “You didn’t lose it,” he said. “It just slipped around to your rear where you can’t see it.

Recently, Stacey Milbern brought up the concept of “crip doulas”—other disabled people who help bring you into disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before. The more seasoned disabled person who comes and sits with your new crip self and lets you know the hacks you might need, holds space for your feelings, and shares the community’s stories. She mentioned that it’s telling that there’s not even a word for this in mainstream English. We wondered together: How would it change people’s experiences of disability and their fear of becoming disabled if this were a word, and a way of being? What if this was a rite of passage, a form of emotional labor folks knew of—this space of helping people transition? I have done this with hundreds of people. What if this is something we could all do for each other? How would our movements change? Our lives? Our beliefs about what we can do?

Quinn once told me a story.” He waits for me to moan a grievance at the mention of a story, and when I don’t, his tone sinks into deeper gravity. “Once, in the days of Old Earth, there were two pigeons who were greatly in love. In those days, they raised such animals to carry messages across great distances. These two were born in the same cage, raised by the same man, and sold on the same day to different men on the eve of a great war. “The pigeons suffered apart from each other, each incomplete without their lover. Far and wide their masters took them, and the pigeons feared they would never again find each other, for they began to see how vast the world was, and how terrible the things in it. For months and months, they carried messages for their masters, flying over battle lines, through the air over men who killed one another for land. When the war ended, the pigeons were set free by their masters. But neither knew where to go, neither knew what to do, so each flew home. And there they found each other again, as they were always destined to return home and find, instead of the past, their future.” He folds his hands gently, a teacher arriving at his point. “So do I feel lost? Always. When Lea died at the Institute …” His lips slip gently downward. “… I was in a dark woods, blind and lost as Dante before Virgil. But Quinn helped me. Her voice calling me out of misery. She became my home. As she puts it, ‘Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.’ ” He grasps the top of my hand. “Find your home, Darrow. It may not be in the past. But find it, and you’ll never be lost again.

The story ran that Sunday. Because I had not been able to interview him, he didn’t get a mention. It would have amounted to a nice bit of publicity for him, but the other interviews made it unnecessary in the end. I sent him a clip of the piece along with the business card that he had asked for. To this day, I won’t step inside that retailer. I will not mention the name, not because of censorship or a desire to protect any company’s reputation, but because of our cultural tendency to believe that if we just identify the presumed-to-be-rare offending outlier, we will have rooted out the problem. The problem could have happened anyplace, because the problem is, in fact, at the root.

And Mother, I love her dearly, but she flies into a panic whenever I mention women’s rights. As she sees it, it will be so much more difficult to marry me off if I am not only of a weak constitution but of a progressive mind as well.

Why hadn’t they ever mentioned the place happiness had within righteousness, or how the taking up of the cross would be a practice of obtaining delight? Delight in all that God is? Even their Savior had this kind of joy in mind as He endured His cross. So why hadn’t they set their focus on the same? In their defense, they were not to blame for my unbelief. I just wonder if they would’ve told me about the beauty of God just as much, if not more, than they told me about the horridness of hell, if I would’ve burned my idols at a faster pace.

Can what's buried beneath the ground on Oak Island possibly be worth what the search for it has already cost? Six lives, scores of personal fortunes, piles of wrecked equipment, and tens of thousands of man-hours have been spent so far, and that's not to mention the blown minds and broken spirits that lie in the wake of what is at once the world's most famous and frustrating treasure hunt.

A lot of the stories were highly suspicious, in her opinion. There was the one that ended when the two good children pushed the wicked witch into her own oven. Tiffany had worried about that after all that trouble with Mrs. Snapperly. Stories like this stopped people thinking properly, she was sure. She’d read that one and thought, Excuse me? No one has an oven big enough to get a whole person in, and what made the children think they could just walk around eating people’s houses in any case? And why does some boy too stupid to know a cow is worth a lot more than five beans have the right to murder a giant and steal all his gold? Not to mention commit an act of ecological vandalism? And some girl who can’t tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family. The stories weren’t real.

In an effort to gain “converts,” Christians often refrain from telling the full story. We want people to follow, so like cheap salesmen, we share the benefits without explaining the cost. We tell them about Jesus’ promises of life and forgiveness, but we don’t mention His calls for repentance and obedience. We avoid His promise that we will experience persecution. When we do this, we cheapen the gospel.

If I had your life story, it would be the first thing I mentioned to anyone. ‘Hullo, I’m Chase Reynaud. I learned to toddle aboard a merchant ship, and the Seven Seas rocked my cradle. And have I mentioned that no tropical sunset could compare with your beauty?’ The women would fall into bed with me.” “Don’t they fall into bed with you anyway?” “That’s true. But they might do so a half minute faster. Over months and years, those half minutes add up. So let’s hear the rest of the tale.

If you were going to give a gold medal tot he least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn't give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway. Carmelita Spats was rude, she was violent, and she was filthy, and it is really a shame that I must describe her to you, because there are enough ghastly and distressing things in this story without even mentioning such an unpleasant person.

When the bald associate had mentioned a sleeping beauty, he was referring to a fairy tale that you have probably heard one thousand times. Like all fairy tales, the story of Sleeping Beauty begins with 'Once upon a time,' and continues with a foolish young princess who makes a witch very angry, and then takes a nap until her boyfriend wakes her up with a kiss and insists on getting married, at which point the story ends with the phrase 'happily ever after.' The story is usually illustrated with fancy drawings of the napping princess, who always looks very glamorous and elegant, with her hair neatly combed and a long silk gown keeping her comfortable as she snores away for years and years.

I'm not convinced that it's worth it. How many Cambodians ever asked for a $2 billion election? Nighty percent of them are rice farmers. I lived with them, watched them die at the hospital, and never was the word "election" mentioned. That money would repair hundreds of roads and bridges and pay for tons of seed and fertilizer. And clear a lot of landmines.

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind returned away from what Joshie was saying and I pondered my father's humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshipping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

NINA Your life is beautiful. TRIGORIN I see nothing especially lovely about it. [He looks at his watch] Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry. [He laughs] You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. [After a few moments' thought] Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth--I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!

Love is overrated, not to mention fickle. It comes and goes. You can’t build a foundation on it. Mutual interests and alliance are a different story.

Mr. Satterthwaite’s conversation was apt to be unduly burdened by mentions of his titled acquaintances.

He mentioned that he didn't like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn't quite true. "I don't like people who like Jack Kerouac," he clarified.

Swaminathan had never thought that this story contained a moral. But now he felt that it must have one since the question paper mentioned it.

I’m very insecure, actually, but I have found that if you roll up screaming like a madwoman, hair on fire, guns blazing, no one is going to mention the zit on your forehead.” Which

I said, “Doesn’t it bother you? That your husbands have become such a headline story, so often mentioned, that they have nearly eclipsed your work and yourself? That all anyone talks about when they talk about you are the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo?” And her answer was quintessential Evelyn. “No,” she told me. “Because they are just husbands. I am Evelyn Hugo. And anyway, I think once people know the truth, they will be much more interested in my wife.

So when we say that Christians work from a gospel worldview, it does not mean that they are constantly speaking about Christian teaching in their work. Some people think of the gospel as something we are principally to “look at” in our work. This would mean that Christian musicians should play Christian music, Christian writers should write stories about conversion, and Christian businessmen and -women should work for companies that make Christian-themed products and services for Christian customers. Yes, some Christians in those fields would sometimes do well to do those things, but it is a mistake to think that the Christian worldview is operating only when we are doing such overtly Christian activities. Instead, think of the gospel as a set of glasses through which you “look” at everything else in the world. Christian artists, when they do this faithfully, will not be completely beholden either to profit or to naked self-expression; and they will tell the widest variety of stories. Christians in business will see profit as only one of several bottom lines; and they will work passionately for any kind of enterprise that serves the common good. The Christian writer can constantly be showing the destructiveness of making something besides God into the central thing, even without mentioning God directly.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)

When Joseph leaves home on this simple fact-finding mission, he leaves for the last time. Joseph will never return to live in the land until his bones are brought back after the Exodus (Ex. 13:19). In fact, it is this aspect of Joseph’s story that warranted mention in the “Faith Hall of Fame” (Heb. 11:22). This is not a feel-good story wherein the hero returns victorious. This is a tale of redemption in which Joseph pays an unthinkable price for a purpose much greater than he.

Given the intervention of the gods and other magical and supernatural happenings, I have—as mentioned in the Introduction that you so wisely skipped—thought it best to tell the story of the war and its aftermath without attempting to dot every sequential iota or cross every chronological tau.

During my travels in India I met a man at an ashram who was about 45-50. A little older than everyone else. He tells me a story. He had retired and he was traveling on a motorcycle with his wife on the back. While stopped at a red light, a truck ran into them from behind and killed his wife. He was badly injured and almost died. He went into a coma and it was unclear if he’d ever walk again. When he finally came out of it and found out what had happened, he naturally was devastated and heartbroken. Not to mention physically broken. He knew that his road ahead of rehabilitation, both physically and psychologically, was going to be hard. While he had given up, he had one friend who was a yoga teacher who said, “We're going to get you started on the path to recovery.” So, she kept going over to his place, and through yoga, helped him be able to walk again. After he could walk and move around again, he decided to head to India and explore some yoga ashrams. While he was there he started to learn about meditation and Hinduism and Buddhism. He told me that he never would have thought he’d ever go down this path. He would have probably laughed at anyone who goes to India to find themselves. I asked, “Did you get what you were hoping for?” He said, "Even though I lost my wife, it turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me because it put me on this path.

As with Jakobson, I queried Poston as to the source of Manson's philosophy. Scientology, the Bible, and the Beatles. These three were the only ones he knew. A peculiar triumvirate. Yet by now I was beginning to suspect the existence of at least a fourth influence. The old magazines I'd found at Barker, Gregg's mention that Charlie claimed to have read Nietzsche and that he believed in a master race, pus the emergence of a startling number of disturbing parallels between Manson and the leader of the Third Reich, led me to ask Poston: "Did Manson ever say anything about Hitler?" Poston's reply was short and incredibly chilling. A. "He said that Hitler was a tuned-in guy who had leveled the karma of the Jews.

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn’t mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves.

When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that's what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No idea that hearing them talk about AIDS, like that was the important part of the story--more important than who Finn was, or how much I loved him, or how much he was still breaking my heart every single hour of every single day--made me want to scream.

Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of a snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah'd and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love- don't let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of lovem it's awful, we're stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama- lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow- the secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under fall leaves.

There’s a bit in “Echoes” we call “the wind section” where it all falls apart, and then comes back in,’ explains Guy Pratt. ‘Some of the younger players, mentioning no names, couldn’t get their heads around it not being a set number of bars. It was like, “You have to feel it and know instinctively when to come back in.” David’s great line about that was, “The trouble with modern musicians is that they don’t know how to disintegrate.

If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.

I should mention here that librarians tell me never to tell this story, and especially never to paint myself as a feral child who was raised in libraries by patient librarians; the tell me they are worried that people will misinterpret my story and use it as an excuse to use their libraries as free day care for their children.

The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disemboweled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you’re in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs’ contempt for other people’s bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above-mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a series of promotions, had become a kind of chickenshit god, an abominably exigent little sun.

Soon he essentially stopped talking. "I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode," he mentioned. Eventually, he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised," he wrote, "by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable." Later he added, "I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. It's like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor's yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story , you, upon hearing the words 'soccer' and 'neighbor' in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pele, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn't he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Tres Coracoes with Pele and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say, not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit - that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor's dog - would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pele. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.

More prized by his parents than good grades, Chris mentioned, was “Yankee ingenuity”—putting your smarts to work. “It’s better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent,” he said, repeating a family maxim.

We publicized it. We capitalized on it. We exploited it for ratings or whatever, for stories, with our memes and GIFs and tweeting and all that. We jump on the train. We show their pictures on live TV. We make clever hashtags. We find ways to, like, absolve ourselves from responsibility or say we’ve helped out with a retweet or something. We’ve helped because we’ve mentioned an injustice in passing to our neighbor and we both got to shake our heads.

The Blissworm inched up a tree, hung upside down from a branch, and blew Charlotte a kiss good-bye, and then its soft body slowly hardened into a cocoon—which was very surprising, since Conner had never mentioned anything about it having a metamorphosis. The space worm even placed a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the corner of its chrysalis. Although

There are certain bits of stories that, because of their nature, are rather dull. This is because very little happens in them. And for some reason, they also always happen to take place over a rather tediously long period of time. So, yes, I could tell you of the five-hour trek Timothy and Alex took to reach the hidden bay. I could tell you that when they reached the fort, the view was rather impressive. I could also mention that Timothy lost his footing at one point as they made their way through the thick forest on the other side and, had Alex not grabbed the back of his jacket, his tale would have ended there rather abruptly. But honestly... Let's just get to the pirate stuff already.

Why have I never heard anything about all this—and not just from you? Sophie never said a word. Hell, I didn’t even know that people escaped over the mountains or that there was a concentration camp just for women who resisted the Nazis.” “Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over. Your sister was as desperate to forget it as I was. Maybe that was another mistake I made—letting her forget. Maybe we should have talked about it.

My mother used to tell me, every time we were watching Cinderella, that Cinderella had the best attitude and that I should strive to be just like her. Later when I grew up, I resented my mother for teaching me that way, as I saw it as the reason why I often felt preyed on by people who were much more like the ugly stepsisters. But now, all of a sudden, I’ve realized that what my mom meant was that no matter how ugly people can be to you, no matter how rough they treat you, no matter how much their actions tempt you to become your worst— you should overcome them by never letting them steal your gentleness. People only win when they are able to take away your gentleness, your sweetness. But if you remember that you’re a princess, and they’re just not, at the end of the day you win! Still, my mom should have pointed me in the direction of Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Cinderella is fine, but had she taught me that Belle was the best way to be, I would have probably never grown to resent that. Belle always retained her gentleness but she could still beat up a pack of wolves at the same time and that’s the kind of princess I wanted to be like! Not to mention she loved books!

I notice that a man seldom mentions what he had supposed to be his most idiosyncratic sensations without receiving from at least one (often more) of those present the reply, “What! Have you felt that too? I always thought I was the only one.” The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography, still less “Confessions” like those of St. Augustine or Rousseau. This means in practice that it gets less like a general autobiography as it goes on.

I Have been asked to tell you about the back of the north wind. An old Greek writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place. I am going to tell you how it fared with a boy who went there.

Yes, it's Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine in the words that I've uttered, in which there's often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of hermore, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less. Not to mention what she never said but let me guess, what I didn't know and read later in her notebooks. Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.

My father exerted an emotional monopoly. His happiness tolerated no dissent. When he was in a good mood, everyone was supposed to be delighted to hear his long stories, laugh at his jokes and cheerfully partake in whatever project he had in mind—calamitous home renovations, around-the-clock printing jobs, excursions to the Bronx in search of an Italian butcher someone had mentioned. But whenever he was low or had been wronged, he made everyone pay for it. I have yet to see a face as determined as his was in anger. It was, sadly, a determination that was fixed only on itself—determined to be determined. Once he got into that state, I think he viewed any kind of compromise as self-betrayal, as if his whole being could be eroded and wiped away by the admission of a fault. I lived with my father for over twenty years, and we stayed close after I moved out. Not once, in all those decades, did he apologize to me for anything.

Jesus' favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in church, and only a couple mention the name God. As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren't about God, so there was nothing in them threatening their own sovereignty. They relaxed their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts. An abyss opened up at their very feet. He was talking about God; they had been invaded!

seemed so epic. But I mentioned the challenges to Adrian’s mother and she gave me some good advice. She said I shouldn’t try to write a book, I should just sit down at my laptop and tell the story, one sentence at a time, using the same language I’d use to tell a friend over coffee. She said it was okay not to sound like J. K. Rowling. It was fine if I sounded like Mallory Quinn from Philadelphia.

I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

Following Someone is always falling in love with you: men and women, infants and children, octogenarians and adolescents. A tenant of heaven-haven on the pearly doorstep hopes you will wave your hand in passing. Where you stood just now a white bird has flown into a ponderosa pine and a black bee hovers in a bush of yellow flowers. People would like to discuss you, but hold back. Mystery is a fragile substance, too easy to tear. Several persons, however, have noticed that you are followed not by the usual shadow but by a shaft of sunlight. Even on a day of fog or light rain. Even after sunset. When you are not present, you still walk quietly through our minds, and we tell ourselves little stories or small poems about you, like this one. When a bird sings, we listen carefully hoping your name will be mentioned.

the media, at least in the U.S., tends to focus on pain pill use, abuse, and addiction by people who do not have chronic pain. Even if these stories offhandedly mention that these pills are used to treat pain in people whose physical pain does not go away, however, the stories of those who use pain medicine responsibly -- or, worse, accused of drug-seeking behavior because they need certain types of pills for chronic pain -- are usually overshadowed by the “How can we prevent pain pill addiction?” concern, instead of asking, “How can we treat chronic pain more effectively?

Betsy Trotwood don’t look a likely subject for the tender passion, but the time was, Trot, when she believed in that man most entirely. When she loved him, Trot, right well. When there was no proof of attachment and affection that she would not have given him. He was a fine-looking man when I married him”, said my aunt, with an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone. “I was a fool; and I am so far an incurable fool on that subject, that, for the sake of what I once believed him to be, I wouldn’t have even this shadow of my idle fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman was. There, my dear. Now, you know the beginning, middle, and end, and all about it. We won’t mention the subject to one another any more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpy story, and we’ll keep it to ourselves, Trot!

I would agree that encyclopedia’s could teach me facts, but only a great story could transport me into the mind of another person. These stories taught me about empathy, about good and evil, about love and sorrow. My tastes covered many different genres, but the books I loved most proposed the idea that ordinary people (not to mention hobbits) are born with the capability to do extraordinary, even heroic things. The realization came as a sort of code to all the lessons my parents had taught me about looking beyond wealth and appearances, and appreciating the worth of everyone I met. It’s a lesson that sticks with me to this day. No real leader can see the people around them as static creatures. If you cannot see the potential I the people around you, it’s impossible to rouse them to great things. That may be one of the reasons why, even now, I always make time for a novel or two every month, amongst the mountains of serious works and briefing notes. Facts may fuel a leader’s intellect. But literature fuels the soul.

In the Scriptures and the stories, in the stained-glass windows of the cathedral or the paintings that hung from its stone walls, the angels always looked like Leah: golden-haired and blue-eyed, dressed in fine silks and satins, with full cheeks and skin as pale as river pearls. As for the girls like Immanuelle—the ones from the Outskirts, with dark skin and raven-black curls, cheekbones as keen as cut stone—well, the Scriptures never mentioned them at all. There were no statues or paintings rendered in their likeness, no poems or stories penned in their honor. They went unmentioned, unseen.

To sum up, when writing in the first person, it helps to keep these things in mind:    • Every word the narrator says must in some way reflect his point of view.    • The narrator never mentions anything that doesn’t affect him in some way.    • The narrator draws a conclusion about everything he mentions.    • The narrator is never neutral; he always has an agenda.    • The narrator can never tell us what anyone else is thinking or feeling. Conveying

In England on a hot day, women are happy to walk around with their bra straps showing. In Paris, they don't shave their armpits. And you just can't mention Germany and style in the same book, let alone the same sentence. It's the same story in America too, where the Farrah Fawcett haido of 1975 still reigns supreme. In Italy, even the policemenists look like they've just come off a catwalk. One I found, standing on a rostrum in the middle of a Roman square, was immaculate, as was his routine. Each wave of the hand, each toot of the whistle and each twist of the body was Pans People perfect. Never mind that the traffic was completely ignoring him, he looked good, and that's what mattered. Looking good in Italy is even more important than looking where you're going.

There is a story, for instance, that has very much the ring of truth about it. It goes like this: One of the older officials, a good and peaceful man, was dealing with a difficult matter for the court which had become very confused, especially thanks to the contributions from the lawyers. He had been studying it for a day and a night without a break — as these officials are indeed hard working, no-one works as hard as they do. When it was nearly morning, and he had been working for twenty-four hours with probably very little result, he went to the front entrance, waited there in ambush, and every time a lawyer tried to enter the building he would throw him down the steps. The lawyers gathered together down in front of the steps and discussed with each other what they should do; on the one hand they had actually no right to be allowed into the building so that there was hardly anything that they could legally do to the official and, as I've already mentioned, they would have to be careful not to set all the officials against them. On the other hand, any day not spent in court is a day lost for them and it was a matter of some importance to force their way inside. In the end, they agreed that they would try to tire the old man out. One lawyer after another was sent out to run up the steps and let himself be thrown down again, offering what resistance he could as long as it was passive resistance, and his colleagues would catch him at the bottom of the steps. That went on for about an hour until the old gentleman, who was already exhausted from working all night, was very tired and went back to his office.

Brewing is mentioned rarely in accounts of the Industrial Revolution. Temperance pressures meant it was impolitic for brewers to boast of their achievements and innovations, and few accurate records exist of exactly how it performed in the 19th Century compared to those glamorous, sexy industries like coal mining and steel making.

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance and, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that you have finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem. Or you can declare at the very start that it is impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your own back so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels. I have also been told that it makes a good impression, an impression of modesty so to speak, if you begin by saying that a novel can't have a hero anymore because there are no more individualists, because individuality is a thing of the past, because man- each men and all men together- is alone in his loneliness and no one is entitled to individual loneliness, and all men lumped together make up a "lonely mass" without names and without heroes. (...) I shall begin far away from me, for no one ought to tell the story of his life who hasn't the patience to say a word or two at least half of his grandparents before plunging into his own existence. And so to you personally, dear reader, who are no doubt leading a muddled life outside this institution, to you my friends and weekly visitors, I introduce Oskar's maternal grandmother

As a new mom, your life changes overnight. Your priorities change, you forget to brush your teeth, you aren’t sure how you’re ever going to balance all your new responsibilities, and it’s overwhelming. Not to mention that your body that used to be almost purely recreational has become much like a dairy cow but not as delicate and petite.

Dr. Bar David?” A young man with black eyes and curly hair came toward him. Carrying a digital recorder. He looked familiar. “Richard Falco, North Richardson High. I took algebra and Calc I from you.” “Oh, yes, of course. Good to see you.” “I’m now reporting for Anchor Media. Just started a couple of months ago.” David started walking away. “Good for you. What a good course of action.” “Listen, I need to get a couple of quotes anyway. I wonder if—Oh, wait! I’m so sorry. You were at the North Richardson school shooting, five years ago.” David nodded. And began to panic. “That’s why you’re here, right?” the stupid student asked. “Protesting gun laws?” “I really need to be going, now. Good luck with your interviews.” Hyperventilating. Richard grabbed David’s shoulder. “But Dr. Bar David. Your story, tragic as it is, ends up being the reason for this whole public gun melting, right? A few words from you about—” David lost it. “Listen! My whole life changed that day. When that meshugener killed my entire family, my wife and my son, in an instant! With a gun he purchased the week before!” David grabbed the kid’s throat. “I do not want to talk about it. Don’t mention me in your article. I will sue you! Leave me alone.” Richard swallowed and nodded, fast. “Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry—” David started shouting, “The bullets! The bullets! The bullets!” His head pounded. His ears roared.

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true.

Conflicting stories continue to circulate concerning the death of the President. A second White House announcement has now called attention to the President's schedule for the day, pointing out that no mention is made there of dying. Also released was the President's schedule for tomorrow, wherein there also appears to be no plan on the part of the President or his advisers for him to die. "I think it would be best," said the White House Bilge Secretary, "in the light of these schcedules, to wait for a statement, one way or another, from the President himself.

Also the spectacle and the awareness of her own body. Daily and, so to speak, ceremoniously soiled with saliva and sperm, she felt herself literally to be the respository of impurity, the sink mentioned in the Scriptures. And yet those parts of her body most constantly offended, having become less sensitive, at the same time seemed to her to have become more beautiful and, as it were, ennobled: her mouth closed upon anonymous members, the tips of her breasts constantly fondled by hands, and between her quartered thighs the twin, contiguous paths wantonly ploughed.

The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts—although they seldom mentioned this to anyone—and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio. Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio—or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them—and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever.

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim 'worked' well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York. Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: 'It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.' Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy.

Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape—-the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know. 2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. 3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. 4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. 5. No Chinaman must figure in the story. 6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. 7. The detective himself must not commit the crime. 8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover. 9. The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader. 10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

The story of the angel announcing what the church calls the immaculate conception, is not so much as mentioned in the books ascribed to Mark, and John; and is differently related in Matthew and Luke. The former says the angel, appeared to Joseph; the latter says, it was to Mary; but either Joseph or Mary was the worst evidence that could have been thought of; for it was others that should have testified for them, and not they for themselves. Were any girl that is now with child to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed? Certainly she would not. Why then are we to believe the same thing of another girl whom we never saw, told by nobody knows who, nor when, nor where? How strange and inconsistent is it, that the same circumstance that would weaken the belief even of a probable story, should be given as a motive for believing this one, that has upon the face of it every token of absolute impossibility and imposture.

Years earlier, while briefing Colin Powell on the missions we conducted in Colombia, I mentioned to him that we were successful because we were nimble. We didn’t ask anyone to approve our concepts; we moved first, and figured things out as we went along. Listening intently to the story, he smiled and reflected to me that good leaders don’t wait for official blessings to try things out. They use common sense to guide them because they understand a simple fact of life in most organizations: if you ask enough people for permission, you’ll inevitably find someone who believes that they should tell you no.

Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live; his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began. In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years. I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional.

Fromm-Reichmann described loneliness as “one of the least satisfactorily conceptualized psychological phenomena, not even mentioned in most psychiatric textbooks”—a state in which the “fact that there were people in one’s past life is more or less forgotten, and the possibility that there may be interpersonal relationships in one’s future life is out of the realm of expectation.” Loneliness was such a deep threat, she wrote, that psychiatrists avoided talking about it, because they feared they’d be contaminated by it, too. The experience was nearly impossible to communicate; it was a kind of “naked existence.

I am not a religious soul, but I must say it does seem a little uncanny that on that morning of all mornings I should have looked over the bridge at such a propitious moment. I mentioned the story at lunch to one of the members of the cathedral, and he nodded sagely and pointed a finger heavenward, as if to say, ‘It was God, of course.’ I nodded and didn’t say anything, but thought: ‘Then why did He push him in?’ Beyond

But look for a moment at the spread of Christianity from the other side and what emerges is a far less easy picture. It is neither triumphant, nor joyful. It is a story of forced conversion and government persecution. It is a story in which great works of art are destroyed, buildings are defaced and liberties are removed. It is a story in which those who refused to convert were outlawed and, as the persecution deepened, were hounded and even executed by zealous authorities. The brief and sporadic Roman persecutions of Christians would pale in comparison to what the Christians inflicted on others—not to mention on their own heretics. If this seems implausible, then consider one simple fact. In the world today, there are over two billion Christians. There is not one single, true “pagan.” Roman persecutions left a Christianity vigorous enough not only to survive but to thrive and to take control of an empire. By contrast, by the time the Christian persecutions had finally finished, an entire religious system had been all but wiped from the face of the earth.

The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.

Show me the telegrams they sent you, one every day for six days while they were walking six hundred miles on their pigeon toes." .. 1. Feet are as good as wings if you have to. Chickamauga. ... 3. In the night sleeping you forget whether you have wings or feet or neither. Chattahoochee. ... 6. Pity me. Far is far. Near is near. and there is no place like home when the yellow roses climb up the ladders and sing in the early summer. Pity me. Wednesday Evening In The Twilight And The Gloaming. .. Well, Wednesday Evening was the only one I noticed making any mention of the yellow roses in her telegram," Hatrack the Horse explained. Then the old man and the girl sat on the cracker box saying nothing, only listening to the yellow roses all on fire with early summer climbing up th ecrooked ladders, up and down and crossways, some of them leaning out and curving and nearly falling.

Answer Professor Mandell’s letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily “Stop that!” Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides.

Last fall, I was sitting at the kitchen table of two friends who have been together since 1972. They tell me a story about how they got together. She couldn't decide between two suitors, so she left New York City to spend the summer in an ashram. (Did I mention was 1972?) One of the suitors sent her postcards while she was gone, the famous postcards that came inside the sleeve of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. Needless to say, he was the suitor that won her hand. They tell me this story, laughing and interrupting each other, as their teenage daughter walks through the kitchen on her way out to a Halloween party. I've heard of these postcards - over the years, I've heard plenty of record-collector guys boast that they own the original vinyl Exile on Main Street with the original postcards, intact and pristine in the virgin sleeve. I've never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watch these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they've shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

There is certainly something to ponder over in this man's state. Several points seem to make what the American interviewer calls "a story," if one could only get them in proper order. Here they are: Will not mention "drinking." Fears the thought of being burdened with the "soul" of anything. Has no dread of wanting "life" in the future. Despises the meaner forms of life altogether, though he dreads being haunted by their souls. Logically all these things point one way! He has assurance of some kind that he will acquire some higher life. He dreads the consequence, the burden of a soul. Then it is a human life he looks to! And the assurance…? Merciful God! The Count has been to him, and there is some new scheme of terror afoot!

To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work The Destruction of the European Jews I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.

In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, 'One of those things,' impelling me to remark to my cousin, 'Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn't time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel that he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it's being written.

I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they’ve had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one family member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be - and not only you, but virtually the entire family - if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past - I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I used it as an example because it’s the one that most appeals to their imaginations - and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes are also put on the list of innocent victims. That their names are also chiselled into the war memorials.

Yes, Phebe was herself now, and it showed in the change that came over her at the first note of music. No longer shy and silent, no longer the image of a handsome girl, but a blooming woman, alive and full of the eloquence her art gave her, as she laid her hands softly together, fixed her eye on the light, and just poured out her song as simply and joyfully as the lark does soaring toward the sun. "My faith, Alec! that's the sort of voice that wins a man's heart out of his breast!" exclaimed Uncle Mac, wiping his eyes after one of the plaintive ballads that never grow old. "So it would!" answered Dr. Alec, delightedly. "So it has," added Archie to himself; and he was right: for just at that moment he fell in love with Phebe. He actually did, and could fix the time almost to a second: for at a quarter past nine, he thought merely thought her a very charming young person; at twenty minutes past, he considered her the loveliest woman he ever beheld; at five and twenty minutes past, she was an angel singing his soul away; and at half after nine he was a lost man, floating over a delicious sea to that temporary heaven on earth where lovers usually land after the first rapturous plunge. If anyone had mentioned this astonishing fact, nobody would have believed it; nevertheless, it was quite true: and sober, business-like Archie suddenly discovered a fund of romance at the bottom of his hitherto well-conducted heart that amazed him. He was not quite clear what had happened to him at first, and sat about in a dazed sort of way; seeing, hearing, knowing nothing but Phebe: while the unconscious idol found something wanting in the cordial praise so modestly received, because Mr. Archie never said a word.

So these Kings and Queens entered the thicket, and before they had gone a score of paces, they all remembered that the thing they had seen was called a lamppost, and before they had gone twenty more, they noticed that they were making their way not through branches but through coats. And next moment they all came tumbling out of a wardrobe door into the empty room, and they were no longer Kings and Queens in their hunting array but just Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy in their old clothes. It was the same day and the same hour of the day on which they had all gone into the wardrobe to hide. Mrs. Macready and the visitors were still talking I the passage; but luckily they never came into the empty room and so the children weren’t caught. And that would have been the very end of the story if it hadn’t been that they felt they really must explain to the Professor why four of the coats out of his wardrobe were missing. And the Professor, who was a very remarkable man, didn’t tell them not to be silly or not to tell lies, but believed the whole story. “No,” he said, “I don’t think it will be any good trying to go back through the wardrobe door to get the coats. You won’t get into Narnia again by that route. Nor would the coats be much use by now if you did! Eh? What’s that? Yes, of course you’ll get back to Narnia again someday. Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it. And don’t talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find that they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves. What’s that? How will you know? Oh, you’ll know all right. Odd things they say--even their looks--will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?” And that is the very end of the adventures of the wardrobe. But if the Professor was right, it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.

I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find his path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea the story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair - a long, sad affair - one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it. Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do? In the end I thought Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work. We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and st back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

As I mentioned briefly on the phone, the best thing about the Air Chrysalis is that it's not an imitation of anyone. It has absolutely none of the usual new writer's sense of 'I want to be another so-and-so'. the syle, for sure, is rough,and the writing is clumsy. She even gets the title wrong: she's confusing 'chrysalis' and 'cocoon'. You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in. the overall plots is a fantasy, but the descriptive details is incredibly real.The balance between the two is excellent. I don't know if words like 'originality' or Inevitability' fit here, and I suppose I might agree if someone insisted it's not at that level, but finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression- it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing.

You said earlier today that you wanted to talk about something,” Halt said. Crowley nodded, gathering his thoughts before he began. “We seem to share a lot of the same skills,” he said. “And the same weapons. I noticed you carry a saxe knife and a throwing knife like mine. I wondered where you came by them.” Crowley, of course, carried his two knives in the distinctive Ranger-issue double scabbard. Halt’s were in separate scabbards, placed close together on the left side of his belt. He glanced at them now, where the belt was draped over a rock beside the campfire. “My mentor gave them to me,” he said. “He was a Ranger, like you.” Crowley sat up at that piece of information. “A Ranger?” he said. “In Hibernia? What was his name?” “He called himself Pritchard. He was an amazing man.” “He was indeed,” Crowley affirmed, and now it was Halt’s turn to look surprised. “You knew him?” Crowley nodded eagerly. “I was his apprentice for five years. He taught me everything I know. How did you come to meet him?” “He turned up at Du . . . Droghela, some three years ago. He took me under his wing and taught me silent movement, knife work, tracking and the rest. I could already shoot, but he tightened up my technique quite a bit.” Crowley noticed the hesitation and correction when Halt mentioned the name of the place where he’d met Pritchard. But he let it pass. “Yes. He was very big on technique.” “And practice,” Halt agreed. Crowley smiled at the memory of his old teacher. “He had a saying. An ordinary archer practices until he gets it right. A Ranger—” “Practices until he never gets it wrong.” Halt

The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe (Beowulf) The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area - the monster Grendel - and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it. It starts with a mention of 'olden days', looking back, as many stories do, to an indefinite past ('once upon a time'), in which fact blends with fiction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture - as is the theme of transience and mortality. ................ Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance. Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, and of the need to resolve and bring to fruition a proper human order, against the enemy - whatever it be - here symbolised by a monster and a dragon, among literature's earliest 'outsiders'. ....... Beowulf has always attracted readers, and perhaps never more than in the 1990s when at least two major poets, the Scot Edwin Morgan and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, retranslated it into modern English. Heaney's version became a worldwide bestseller, and won many awards, taking one of the earliest texts of English literature to a vast new audience.

The story of Herod destroying all the children under two years old, belongs altogether to the book of Matthew; not one of the rest mentions anything about it. Had such a circumstance been true, the universality of it must have made it known to all the writers, and the thing would have been too striking to have been omitted by any. This writer tells us, that Jesus escaped this slaughter because Joseph and Mary were warned by an angel to flee with him unto Egypt; but he forgot to make any provision for John, who was then under two years of age. John, however, who stayed behind, fared as well as Jesus, who fled; and, therefore, the story circumstantially belies itself.

I wonder why he hastened to tell us that George Hearne was buried in the churchyard, and then added that naturally he was!' 'It's the natural place to be buried in,' said I. 'Quite. That's just why it was hardly worth mentioning.' I felt then, just momentarily, just vaguely, as if my mind was regarding stray pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. The fancied ringing of the telephone bell last night was one of them, this burial of George Hearne in the churchyard was another, and, even more inexplicably, the ladder I had seen under the trees was a third. Consciously I made nothing whatever out of them, and did not feel the least inclination to devote any ingenuity to so fortuitous a collection of pieces. Why shouldn't I add, for that matter, our morning's bathe, or the gorse on the hillside? But I had the sensation that, though my conscious brain was presently occupied with piquet, and was rapidly growing sleepy with the day of sun and sea, some sort of mole inside it was digging passages and connecting corridors below the soil. ("Expiation")

The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence of supernatural stories in these parts, was doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region ; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at Yan Tassel's, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major Andre was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also of the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the stories, however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the headless horseman, who had been heard several times of late, patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the churchyard.

Inside the room there sat a rocker, which she sat on, and which had rocked her while she sipped the beer, because in spite of herself she had become so giddy to have so quickly relieved her heart that she allowed herself to lean backwards while in the rocker, which had made it possible for the rocker to rock her, although it was not her intention to be so rocked. Also there stood an ironing board with a still hot iron on it that was burning a yellow shift, and there was, among several items that were not as noticeable to the woman, and yet were noticeable enough to at least bear mention, a fake man. "I hope you don't mind me asking," said the woman who lived in the room, but then while in her chair she nodded off.

One of the distinctions that religious scholars make about various religions is the monotheistic and polytheistic world views. It seems to me that if one were to describe to a Hindu the myriad of divine beings in Christianity (and by relationship Judaism and Islam), such as angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, putti, Satan and his crew, Mother Mary, Jesus the son of God – who threw out demons; not to mention the saints and martyrs, who can be contacted and prayed to as divine guides, etc., I dare say this Hindu would consider the Christians polytheistic like himself. If we then include holy relics, the cunning snake and the talking fiery bush, then we are moving towards animism. Monotheism in this light is actually referring to One ruling (and jealous) god over many lesser “gods,” deities, angels and souls, which is describing a polytheistic hierarchy and not monotheism. My conclusion: there is no monotheism. It may be heretical to say, but perhaps the Western religions have more in common with Hinduism and with the Roman or Scandinavian pantheons than they care to admit.

Paul, all I know is that this is the third time we've talked tonight, you're saying 'fuck' to me, I'm a guy, and your penis has been mentioned numerous times. Jesus, you're acting like you're some teenager. Work through this shit with a shrink, man. I don't care if you're gay.' Here again, I achieved silence. But not for long. The breathing became heavy and then, 'What the fuck kind of game are you playing?' 'It's no game, man. You want to close a sale? I want to see your penis. It's a fair exchange if you ask me.' He hung up again, and I reached for my perfectly spicy, scratch-your-throat-like-a-cat-claw-hot Blenheim ginger ale and took a long swallow. This particular credit card company has not called me again. And, to my delight, AT&T never called me again after I asked one of their friendly Southern females if by any chance she happened to be a male-to-female transsexual, and if so, what vaginal depth her surgeon had managed to attain for her. 'Four inches is pretty common,' I told her. 'But if you dilate religiously, you can probably achieve five.' I even got the phrase 'self-lubricating' out before she hung up on me.

Tell me the story," said Fenchurch firmly. "You arrived at the station." "I was about twenty minutes early. I'd got the time of the train wrong." "Get on with it." Fenchurch laughed. "So I bought a newspaper, to do the crossword, and went to the buffet to get a cup of coffee." "You do the crossword?" "Yes." "Which one?" "The Guardian usually." "I think it tries to be too cute. I prefer The Times. Did you solve it?" "What?" "The crossword in the Guardian." "I haven't had a chance to look at it yet," said Arthur, "I'm still trying to buy the coffee." "All right then. Buy the coffee." "I'm buying it. I am also," said Arthur, "buying some biscuits." "What sort?" "Rich Tea." "Good Choice." "I like them. Laden with all these new possessions, I go and sit at a table. And don't ask me what the table was like because this was some time ago and I can't remember. It was probably round." "All right." "So let me give you the layout. Me sitting at the table. On my left, the newspaper. On my right, the cup of coffee. In the middle of the table, the packet of biscuits." "I see it perfectly." "What you don't see," said Arthur, "because I haven't mentioned him yet, is the guy sitting at the table already. He is sitting there opposite me." "What's he look like?" "Perfectly ordinary. Briefcase. Business suit. He didn't look," said Arthur, "as if he was about to do anything weird." "Ah. I know the type. What did he do?" "He did this. He leaned across the table, picked up the packet of biscuits, tore it open, took one out, and..." "What?" "Ate it." "What?" "He ate it." Fenchurch looked at him in astonishment. "What on earth did you do?" "Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do. I was compelled," said Arthur, "to ignore it." "What? Why?" "Well, it's not the sort of thing you're trained for is it? I searched my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience or even primal instincts to tell me how to react to someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits." "Well, you could..." Fenchurch thought about it. "I must say I'm not sure what I would have done either. So what happened?" "I stared furiously at the crossword," said Arthur. "Couldn't do a single clue, took a sip of coffee, it was too hot to drink, so there was nothing for it. I braced myself. I took a biscuit, trying very hard not to notice," he added, "that the packet was already mysteriously open..." "But you're fighting back, taking a tough line." "After my fashion, yes. I ate a biscuit. I ate it very deliberately and visibly, so that he would have no doubt as to what it was I was doing. When I eat a biscuit," Arthur said, "it stays eaten." "So what did he do?" "Took another one. Honestly," insisted Arthur, "this is exactly what happened. He took another biscuit, he ate it. Clear as daylight. Certain as we are sitting on the ground." Fenchurch stirred uncomfortably. "And the problem was," said Arthur, "that having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject a second time around. What do you say? "Excuse me...I couldn't help noticing, er..." Doesn't work. No, I ignored it with, if anything, even more vigor than previously." "My man..." "Stared at the crossword, again, still couldn't budge a bit of it, so showing some of the spirit that Henry V did on St. Crispin's Day..." "What?" "I went into the breach again. I took," said Arthur, "another biscuit. And for an instant our eyes met." "Like this?" "Yes, well, no, not quite like that. But they met. Just for an instant. And we both looked away. But I am here to tell you," said Arthur, "that there was a little electricity in the air. There was a little tension building up over the table. At about this time." "I can imagine.

It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.

The Atonist nobility knew it was impossible to organize and control a worldwide empire from Britain. The British Isles were geographically too far West for effective management. In order to be closer to the “markets,” the Atonist corporate executives coveted Rome. Additionally, by way of their armed Templar branch and incessant murderous “Crusades,” they succeeded making inroads further east. Their double-headed eagle of control reigned over Eastern and Western hemispheres. The seats of Druidic learning once existed in the majority of lands, and so the Atonist or Christian system spread out in similar fashion. Its agents were sent from Britain and Rome to many a region and for many a dark purpose. To this very day, the nobility of Europe and the east are controlled from London and Rome. Nothing has changed when it comes to the dominion of Aton. As Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe have proven, the Culdean monks, of whom we write, had been hired for generations as tutors to elite families throughout Europe. In their book The Knights Templar Revealed, the authors highlight the role played by Culdean adepts tutoring the super-wealthy and influential Catholic dynasties of Burgundy, Champagne and Lorraine, France. Research into the Templars and their affiliated “Salt Line” dynasties reveals that the seven great Crusades were not instigated and participated in for the reasons mentioned in most official history books. As we show here, the Templars were the military wing of British and European Atonists. It was their job to conquer lands, slaughter rivals and rebuild the so-called “Temple of Solomon” or, more correctly, Akhenaton’s New World Order. After its creation, the story of Jesus was transplanted from Britain, where it was invented, to Galilee and Judea. This was done so Christianity would not appear to be conspicuously Druidic in complexion. To conceive Christianity in Britain was one thing; to birth it there was another. The Atonists knew their warped religion was based on ancient Amenism and Druidism. They knew their Jesus, Iesus or Yeshua, was based on Druidic Iesa or Iusa, and that a good many educated people throughout the world knew it also. Their difficulty concerned how to come up with a believable king of light sufficiently appealing to the world’s many pagan nations. Their employees, such as St. Paul (Josephus Piso), were allowed to plunder the archive of the pagans. They were instructed to draw from the canon of stellar gnosis and ancient solar theologies of Egypt, Chaldea and Ireland. The archetypal elements would, like ingredients, simply be tossed about and rearranged and, most importantly, the territory of the new godman would be resituated to suit the meta plan.

George Muller, that remarkable man of such simple yet strong faith in God, a man of prayer and Bible reading, founder and promoter of the noted orphanage in England, which cared for hundreds of orphan children, conducted the institution solely by faith and prayer. He never asked a man for anything, but simply trusted in the Providence of God, and it is a notorious fact that never did the inmates of the home lack any good thing. From his paper he always excluded money matters, and financial difficulties found no place in it. Nor would he mention the sums which had been given him, nor the names of those who made contributions. He never spoke of his wants to others nor asked a donation. The story of his life and the history of this orphanage read like a chapter from the Scriptures. The secret of his success was found in this simple statement made by him: “I went to my God and prayed diligently, and received what I needed.” That was the simple course which he pursued. There was nothing he insisted on with greater earnestness than that, be the expenses what they might be, let them increase ever so suddenly, he must not beg for anything. There was nothing in which he took more delight and showed more earnestness in telling than that he had prayed for every want which ever came to him in his great work. His was a work of continuous and most importunate praying, and he always confidently claimed that God had guided him throughout it all. A stronger proof of a divine providence, and of the power of simple faith and of answered prayer, cannot be found in Church history or religious biography.

The Brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is, like Il Conde, associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second Officer. Captain Blake was, of all my commanders, the one I remember with the greatest affection. I have sketched in his personality, without however mentioning his name, in the first paper of The Mirror of the Sea. In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence of the brute was a fact.

He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. In Alphonso's Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes 'with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs.' There was a gem in the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and 'by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe' the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep and slain. According to the great alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. The bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the aspirates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire.

I have to tell you, Major, if we don't get these bombs and stop this Jap fleet, they're gonna come in here and bomb the hell out of this place and maybe recapture it. Then their planes will be dropping these bombs on you. I've gotta have these bombs, sir, or we'll have a disaster on our hands.' Lupo asked who the major's superior was. The Army officer mentioned a colonel who stationed out toward the front. 'He's out fighting a war, and I'm not going to bother him." 'Well," Lupo said, "that's just too bad." The pilot pulled out his service revolver and pointed it at the major. Then Lupo handed the pistol to his radioman, Earl Gifford, instructing the flabbergasted aircrewman to hold the Army officer at bay. Lupo climbed into the cockpit of his plane and hailed the Fanshaw Bay on the radio. His fellow pilots from VC-68 and other Taffy 3 squadrons were already inbound

Certainly I understand Czech. I've meant to ask you several times why you don't ever write to me in Czech. I'm not suggesting that you don't master German. Most of the time you master it surprisingly well and if once in a while you don't, it bows before you of its own accord, and this is particularly pleasing, for this is something a German doesn't dare to expect from his language, he doesn't dare to write so personally. But I wanted to read you in Czech because it is part of you, because only there is the whole Milena (the translation confirms it), whereas here is just the one from Vienna or the one preparing herself for Vienna. So Czech, please. And send the feuilletons you mention, too. Let them be shabby, you have also read your way through the shabbiness of my story, how far I don't know. Perhaps I can do this, too; but if I can't, then I'll remain stuck in the very best of prejudices.

Our most heated argument concerned the preponderance of women in my epic and Athene’s ubiquity, and the precedence given to famous women when Odysseus meets the ghosts of the departed. I had mentioned only Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene, Jocasta, Chloris, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene and, naturally, Eriphyle, and let Odysseus describe them to Alcinous. “My dear Princess,” said Phemius, “if you really think that you can pass off this poem as the work of a man, you deceive yourself. A man would give pride of place to the ghosts of Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Odysseus’s old comrades, and other more ancient heroes such as Minos, Orion, Tityus, Salmoneus, Tantalus, Sisyphus and Hercules; and mention their wives and mothers incidentally, if at all; and make at least one god help Odysseus at some stage or other.” I admitted the force of his argument, which explains why, now, Odysseus first meets a comrade who has fallen off a roof at Circe’s house—I call him Elpenor—and cracks a mild joke about Elpenor’s having come more quickly to the Grove of Persephone by land than he by sea. I also allow Alcinous to ask after Agamemnon, Achilles and the rest, and Odysseus to satisfy his curiosity. For Phemius’s sake I have even let Hermes supply the moly in passages adapted from my uncle Mentor’s story of Ulysses. In my original version I had given all the credit to Athene.

You have told yourself that you have found your knight in shining armor, my brother Rick. Isn't that the truth? You met him and he fit the bill, so you have told yourself a wonderful story and, stubborn brat that you are, you have been clinging to it ever since. After all, what could be more appropriate than for Francesca Cahill, reformer extraordinaire, to fall in love with my reform-minded Republican brother? But wait! Being as this is a love story, there has to be an unhappy middle and the perfect hero isn't quite so perfect after all. For he is married. Oh, wait! It isn't that bad, after all, for as it turns out he is a man of virtue, and he really loves you, while he despises his wife! And did I forget to mention that she is vile and evil? So the story can limp along, and true love might survive after all! Does this sound at all familiar, Francesca?" "I almost hate you," she whispered. And she felt a tear sliding down her cheek.

And I read something else," Jacob goes on. "There was this discussion of the story of Cain and Abel, from the Bible. After Cain kills his brother, God says, 'The bloods of your brother call out to me.' Not blood. Bloods. Weird, right? So the Talmud tries to explain it." "I can explain it," says William. "The scribe was drunk." "William!" cries Jeanne. "The Bible is written by God!" "And copied by scribes," the big boy replies. "Who get drunk. A lot. Trust me." Jacob is laughing. "The rabbis have a different explanation. The Talmud says it's 'bloods' because Cain didn't only spill Abel's blood. He spilled the blood of Abel and all the descendants he never had." "Huh!" "And then it says something like, 'Whoever destroys a single life destroys the whole world. And whoever saves a single life saves the whole world." There are sheep in the meadow beside the road. Gwenforte walks up to the low stone wall, and one sheep--a ram--doesn't run away. They sniff each other's noses. Her white fur beside the ram's wool--two textures, two colors, both called white in our inadequate language. Jeanne is thinking about something. At last, she shares it. "William, you said that it takes a lifetime to make a book." "That's right." "One book? A whole lifetime?" William nods. "A scribe might copy out a single book for years. An illuminator would then take it and work on it for longer still. Not to mention the tanner who made the parchment, and the bookbinder who stitched the book together, and the librarian who worked to get the book for the library and keep it safe from mold and thieves and clumsy monks with ink pots and dirty hands. And some books have authors, too, like Saint Augustine or Rabbi Yehuda. When you think about it, each book is a lot of lives. Dozens and dozens of them." Dozens and dozens of lives," Jeanne says. "And each life a whole world." "We saved five books," says Jacob. "How many worlds is that?" William smiles. "I don't know. A lot. A whole lot.

HOW TO DRIVE A WRITER CRAZY “1. When he starts to outline a story, immediately give him several stories just like it to read and tell him three other plots. This makes his own story and his feeling for it vanish in a cloud of disrelated facts. "2. When he outlines a character, read excerpts from stories about such characters, saying that this will clarify the writer's ideas. As this causes him to lose touch with the identity he felt in his character by robbing him of individuality, he is certain to back away from ever touching such a character. "3. Whenever the writer proposes a story, always mention that his rate, being higher than other rates of writers in the book, puts up a bar to his stories. "4. When a rumor has stated that a writer is a fast producer, invariably confront him with the fact with great disapproval, as it is, of course, unnatural for one human being to think faster than another. "5. Always correlate production and rate, saying that it is necessary for the writer to do better stories than the average for him to get any consideration whatever. "6. It is a good thing to mention any error in a story bought, especially when that error is to be editorially corrected, as this makes the writer feel that he is being criticized behind his back and he wonders just how many other things are wrong. "7. Never fail to warn a writer not to be mechanical, as this automatically suggests to him that his stories are mechanical and, as he considers this a crime, wonders how much of his technique shows through and instantly goes to much trouble to bury mechanics very deep—which will result in laying the mechanics bare to the eye. "8. Never fail to mention and then discuss budget problems with a writer, as he is very interested. "9. By showing his vast knowledge of a field, an editor can almost always frighten a writer into mental paralysis, especially on subjects where nothing is known anyway. "10. Always tell a writer plot tricks, as they are not his business.

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.

As a fantasist, I well understand the power of escapism, particularly as relates to romance. But when so many stories aimed at the same audience all trumpet the same message – And Lo! There shall be Two Hot Boys, one of them your Heart’s Intended, the other a vain Pretender who is also hot and with whom you shall have guilty makeouts before settling down with your One True Love – I am inclined to stop viewing the situation as benign and start wondering why, for instance, the heroines in these stories are only ever given a powerful, magical destiny of great importance to the entire world so long as fulfilling it requires male protection, guidance and companionship, and which comes to an end just as soon as they settle their inevitable differences with said swain and start kissing. I mean to invoke is something of the danger of mob rule, only applied to narrative and culture. Viz: that the comparative harmlessness of individuals does not prevent them from causing harm en masse. Take any one story with the structure mentioned above, and by itself, there’s no problem. But past a certain point, the numbers begin to tell – and that poses a tricky question. In the case of actual mobs, you’ll frequently find a ringleader, or at least a core set of agitators: belligerent louts who stir up feeling well beyond their ability to contain it. In the case of novels, however, things aren’t so clear cut. Authors tell the stories they want to tell, and even if a number of them choose to write a certain kind of narrative either in isolation or inspired by their fellows, holding any one of them accountable for the total outcome would be like trying to blame an avalanche on a single snowflake. Certainly, we may point at those with the greatest (arguable) influence or expostulate about creative domino effects, but as with the drop that breaks the levee, it is impossible to try and isolate the point at which a cluster of stories became a culture of stories – or, for that matter, to hold one particular narrative accountable for the whole.

The eccentric passion of Shankly was underlined for me by my England team-mate Roger Hunt's version of the classic tale of the Liverpool manager's pre-game talk before playing Manchester United. The story has probably been told a thousand times in and out of football, and each time you hear it there are different details, but when Roger told it the occasion was still fresh in his mind and I've always believed it to be the definitive account. It was later on the same day, as Roger and I travelled together to report for England duty, after we had played our bruising match at Anfield. Ian St John had scored the winner, then squared up to Denis Law, with Nobby finally sealing the mood of the afternoon by giving the Kop the 'V' sign. After settling down in our railway carriage, Roger said, 'You may have lost today, but you would have been pleased with yourself before the game. Shanks mentioned you in the team talk. When he says anything positive about the opposition, normally he never singles out players.' According to Roger, Shankly burst into the dressing room in his usual aggressive style and said, 'We're playing Manchester United this afternoon, and really it's an insult that we have to let them on to our field because we are superior to them in every department, but they are in the league so I suppose we have to play them. In goal Dunne is hopeless- he never knows where he is going. At right back Brennan is a straw- any wind will blow him over. Foulkes the centre half kicks the ball anywhere. On the left Tony Dunne is fast but he only has one foot. Crerand couldn't beat a tortoise. It's true David Herd has got a fantastic shot, but if Ronnie Yeats can point him in the right direction he's likely to score for us. So there you are, Manchester United, useless...' Apparently it was at this point the Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan, who was never known to whisper a single word on such occasions, asked, 'What about Best, Law and Charlton, boss?' Shankly paused, narrowed his eyes, and said, 'What are you saying to me, Callaghan? I hope you're not saying we cannot play three men.

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.' He mentions Seneca, Antonius Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their names posterity would add his own.

But I learned at my expense that Father believed there was another animal even more dangerous than us, and one that was extremely common, too, found on every continent, in every habitat: the redoubtable species Animalus anthropomorphicus, the animal as seen through human eyes. We've all met one, perhaps even owned one. It is an animal that is "cute", "friendly", "loving", "devoted", "merry", "understanding". These animals lie in ambush in every toy store and children's zoo. Countless stories are told of them. They are the pendants of those "vicious", "bloodthirsty", "depraved" animals that inflame the ire of the maniacs I have just mentioned, who vent their spite on them with walking sticks and umbrellas. In both cases we look at an animal and see a mirror. The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists. I learned the lesson that an animal is an animal, essentially and practically removed from us, twice: once with Father and once with Richard Parker. Martel, Yann. Life of Pi (p. 39). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it— he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth. I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream- familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust.

So, once more, the question is: Does the Bible forbid homosexual behavior? Well, I’ve already said that it does. The Bible is so realistic! You might not expect it to mention a topic like homosexual behavior, but in fact there are six places in the Bible—three in the Old Testament and three in the New Testament—where this issue is directly addressed—not to mention all the passages dealing with marriage and sexuality which have implications for this issue. In all six of these passages homosexual acts are unequivocally condemned. In Leviticus 18.22 it says that it is an abomination for a man to lie with another man as with a woman. In Lev. 20.13 the death penalty is prescribed in Israel for such an act, along with adultery, incest, and bestiality. Now sometimes homosexual advocates make light of these prohibitions by comparing them to prohibitions in the Old Testament against having contact with unclean animals like pigs. Just as Christians today don’t obey all of the Old Testament ceremonial laws, so, they say, we don’t have to obey the prohibitions of homosexual actions. But the problem with this argument is that the New Testament reaffirms the validity of the Old Testament prohibitions of homosexual behavior, as we’ll see below. This shows they were not just part of the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, which were done away with, but were part of God’s everlasting moral law. Homosexual behavior is in God’s sight a serious sin. The third place where homosexual acts are mentioned in the Old Testament is the horrifying story in Genesis 19 of the attempted gang rape of Lot’s visitors by the men of Sodom, from which our word sodomy derives. God destroyed the city of Sodom because of their wickedness. Now if this weren’t enough, the New Testament also forbids homosexual behavior.

O Tell Me The Truth About Love - Poem by WH Auden Some say love's a little boy, And some say it's a bird, Some say it makes the world go round, Some say that's absurd, And when I asked the man next door, Who looked as if he knew, His wife got very cross indeed, And said it wouldn't do. Does it look like a pair of pyjamas, Or the ham in a temperance hotel? Does its odour remind one of llamas, Or has it a comforting smell? Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is, Or soft as eiderdown fluff? Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges? O tell me the truth about love. Our history books refer to it In cryptic little notes, It's quite a common topic on The Transatlantic boats; I've found the subject mentioned in Accounts of suicides, And even seen it scribbled on The backs of railway guides. Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian, Or boom like a military band? Could one give a first-rate imitation On a saw or a Steinway Grand? Is its singing at parties a riot? Does it only like Classical stuff? Will it stop when one wants to be quiet? O tell me the truth about love. I looked inside the summer-house; It wasn't even there; I tried the Thames at Maidenhead, And Brighton's bracing air. I don't know what the blackbird sang, Or what the tulip said; But it wasn't in the chicken-run, Or underneath the bed. Can it pull extraordinary faces? Is it usually sick on a swing? Does it spend all its time at the races, or fiddling with pieces of string? Has it views of its own about money? Does it think Patriotism enough? Are its stories vulgar but funny? O tell me the truth about love. When it comes, will it come without warning Just as I'm picking my nose? Will it knock on my door in the morning, Or tread in the bus on my toes? Will it come like a change in the weather? Will its greeting be courteous or rough? Will it alter my life altogether? O tell me the truth about love.

These stories are real, the dreams are real, yet the dilemmas each person faces are founded on the presences that haunt from their past. We see again the twin mechanisms present in all relationships: projection and transference. Each of them, meeting any stranger, reflexively scans the data of history for clues, expectations, possibilities. This scanning mechanism is instantaneous, mostly unconscious, and then the lens of history slips over one's eyes. This refractive lens alters the reality of the other and brings to consciousness a necessarily distorted picture. Attached to that particular lens is a particular history, the dynamics, the script, the outcomes of which are part of the transferred package. Freud once humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that those parents also import their own relational complexes from their parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate relationships not be congested arenas? As shopworn as the idea seems, we cannot overemphasize the importance of primal imagoes playing a domineering role in our relational patterns. They may be unconscious, which grants them inordinate power, or we may flee them, but they are always present. Thus, for example, wherever the parent is stuck—such as Damon's mother who only equates sexuality with the perverse and the unappealing, and his father who stands de-potentiated and co-opted—so the child will feel similarly constrained or spend his or her life trying to break away (“anything but that”) and still be defined by someone else's journey. How could Damon not feel depressed, then, at his own stuckness, and how could he not approach intimacy with such debilitating ambivalence?

I started by collecting copies of all the novels and short stories featuring him and piled them up beside my bed. I wanted to get to the very heart of what Dame Agatha thought of him and what he was really like, and to do that, I had to read every word his creator had ever written about him. I didn’t want my Poirot to be a caricature, something made up in a film or television studio, I wanted him to be real, as real as he was in the books, as real as I could possibly make him. The first thing I realised was that I was a slightly too young to play him. He was a retired police detective in his sixties when he first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, while I was in my early forties. Not only that, he was also described as a good deal fatter than I was. There was going to have to be some considerable padding, not to mention very careful make-up and costume, if I was going to convince the world that I was the great Hercule Poirot. Even more important, the more I read about him, the more convinced I became that he was a character that demanded to be taken seriously. He wasn’t a silly little man with a funny accent, any more than Sherlock Holmes was just a morphine addict with a taste for playing the violin. There was a depth and quality to the Poirot that Dame Agatha had created – and that was what I desperately wanted to bring to the screen.

Gen 22:11–16a The story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac is traced to E. It refers to the deity as Elohim in vv. 1,3,8, and 9. But, just as Abraham’s hand is raised with the knife to sacrifice Isaac, the text says that the angel of Yahweh stops him (v. 11). The verses in which Isaac is spared refer to the deity as Yahweh (vv. 11–14). These verses are followed by a report that the angel speaks a second time and says, “… because you did not withhold your son from me….” Thus the four verses which report that Isaac was not sacrificed involve both a contradiction and a change of the name of the deity. As extraordinary as it may seem, it has been suggested that in the original version of this story Isaac was actually sacrificed, and that the intervening four verses were added subsequently, when the notion of human sacrifice was rejected (perhaps by the person who combined J and E). Of course, the words “you did not withhold your son” might mean only that Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son. But still it must be noted that the text concludes (v. 19), “And Abraham returned to his servants.” Isaac is not mentioned. Moreover, Isaac never again appears as a character in E. Interestingly, a later midrashic tradition developed this notion, that Isaac actually had been sacrificed. This tradition is discussed in S. Spiegel’s The Last Trial (New York: Schocken, 1969; Hebrew edition 1950).

Miss Kay There are only a few things in life that make me really, really angry. One of them is when people struggle in their marriages and refuse to fight for them, but I have already mentioned that. Another thing that infuriates me--and embarrasses me so much for the people who do it--is when women nearly fall all over my sons flirting with them. They try some of the most disgraceful things to catch Willie’s, Jase’s, or Jep’s attention. Some of the behavior I have seen toward my sons--and even toward Phil and Si--is just shameful! I don’t understand how people can let themselves act that way, and as a woman, I really am humiliated when other women do such things. I realize all the boys are good-looking, and I know what great men they are, but they’re taken. A lot of people don’t respect the vows and commitments of marriage anymore and simply do not have any self-respect. They do not seem to have any reservation at all about flirting with men they know to be married. When people don’t honor the fact that each of my sons already has the woman he has chosen, I want to say, “Come on! These boys are happily married men. Go find your own duck hunter!” This kind of thing did not happen before we went on television, and I hate to see it happening now. As much as I enjoy interacting with our fans and hearing stories about the positive impact Duck Dynasty has had on so many people, I will never be okay with women chasing after my sons.

From an interview with Susie Bright: SB: You were recently reviewed by the New York Times. How do you think the mainstream media regards sex museums, schools and cultural centers these days? What's their spin versus your own observations? [Note: Here's the article Susie mentions: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/nat... ] CQ: Lots of people have seen the little NY Times article, which was about an event we did, the Belle Bizarre Bazaar -- a holiday shopping fair where most of the vendors were sex workers selling sexy stuff. Proceeds went to our Exotic Dancers' Education Project, providing dancers with skills that will help them maximize their potential and choices. This event got into the Times despite the worries of its author, a journalist who'd been posted over by her editor. She thought the Times was way too conservative for the likes of us, which may be true, except they now have so many column inches to fill with distracting stuff that isn't about Judith Miller! The one thing the Times article does not do is present the spectrum of the Center for Sex & Culture's work, especially the academic and serious side of what we do. This, I think, points to the real answer to your question: mainstream media culture remains quite nervous and touchy about sex-related issues, especially those that take sex really seriously. A frivolous take (or a good, juicy, shocking angle) on a sex story works for the mainstream press: a sex-positive and serious take, not so much. When the San Francisco Chronicle did its article about us a year ago, the writer focused just on our porn collection. Now, we very much value that, but we also collect academic journals and sex education materials, and not a word about those! I think this is one really essential linchpin of sex-negative or erotophobic culture, that sex is only allowed to be either light or heavy, and when it's heavy, it's about really heavy issues like abuse. Recently I gave some quotes about something-or-other for a Cosmo story and the editors didn't want to use the term "sexologist" to describe me, saying that it wasn't a real word! You know, stuff like that from the Times would not be all that surprising, but Cosmo is now policing the language? Please!

Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.

Because both Birkenau and Auschwitz are infamous names and a blot on the history of mankind it is necessary to explain how they differed. The railroad separated one from the other. When the selectors told off the deportees on the station platform “Right!” or “Left!” they were sending them to either Birkenau or Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a slave camp. Hard as life was at Auschwitz it was better than Birkenau. For the latter was definitely an extermination camp, and as such was never mentioned in the reports. It was part of the colossal guilt of the German rulers and was rarely referred to, nor was its existence ever admitted until the troops of the liberating Allies exposed the secret to the world. At Auschwitz many war factories were in operation, such as the D.A.W. (Deutsches-Aufrustungswerk), Siemens, and Krupp. All were devoted to the production of armaments. The prisoners detailed to work there were highly privileged compared to those who were not given such employment. But even those who did not work productively were more fortunate than the prisoners in Birkenau. The latter were merely awaiting their turn to be gassed and cremated. The unpleasant job of handling the soon-to-be corpses, and later the ashes, were relegated to groups called “kommandos.” The sole task of the Birkenau personnel was to camouflage the real reason for the camp: extermination. When the internees in Auschwitz, or in other camps in the area, were no longer judged useful they were dispatched to Birkenau to die in the ovens. It was as simple and cold-blooded as that.

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

Mandana Misra was a great scholar and authority on the Vedas and Mimasa. He led a householder’s life (grihastha), with his scholar-philosopher wife, Ubhaya Bharati, in the town of Mahishi, in what is present-day northern Bihar. Husband and wife would have great debates on the veracity of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and other philosophical works. Scholars from all over Bharatavarsha came to debate and understand the Shastras with them. It is said that even the parrots in Mandana’s home debated the divinity, or its lack, in the Vedas and Upanishads. Mandana was a staunch believer in rituals. One day, while he was performing Pitru Karma (rituals for deceased ancestors), Adi Shankaracharya arrived at his home and demanded a debate on Advaita. Mandana was angry at the rude intrusion and asked the Acharya whether he was not aware, as a Brahmin, that it was inauspicious to come to another Brahmin’s home uninvited when Pitru Karma was being done? In reply, Adi Shankara asked Mandana whether he was sure of the value of such rituals. This enraged Mandana and the other Brahmins present. Thus began one of the most celebrated debates in Hindu thought. It raged for weeks between the two great scholars. As the only other person of equal intellect to Shankara and Mandana was Mandana’s wife, Ubhaya Bharati, she was appointed the adjudicator. Among other things, Shankara convinced Mandana that the rituals for the dead had little value to the dead. Mandana became Adi Shankara’s disciple (and later the first Shankaracharya of the Sringeri Math in Karnataka). When the priest related this story to me, I was shocked. He was not giving me the answer I had expected. Annoyed, I asked him what he meant by the story if Adi Shankara himself said such rituals were of no use to the dead. The priest replied, “Son, the story has not ended.” And he continued... A few years later, Adi Shankara was compiling the rituals for the dead, to standardize them for people across Bharatavarsha. Mandana, upset with his Guru’s action, asked Adi Shankara why he was involved with such a useless thing. After all, the Guru had convinced him of the uselessness of such rituals (Lord Krishna also mentions the inferiority of Vedic sacrifice to other paths, in the Gita. Pitru karma has no vedic base either). Why then was the Jagad Guru taking such a retrograde step? Adi Shankaracharya smiled at his disciple and answered, “The rituals are not for the dead but for the loved ones left behind.

Come on, Bob, kill it!” “I’m trying, Tom. It won’t stop moving.” I looked at Wolf and whispered, “What do you think they are trying to kill?” Wolf shrugged. “Let’s go check it out.” We snuck forward until we could get a visual on what was happening. We saw that there were two large slimes and one baby slime. Judging by the way the large slimes were protecting the baby, I assumed it was their child rather than a random baby slime. The two players were slashing at the large slimes who were trying to defend themselves but failing. Eventually the players chopped the two large slimes into medium slimes, then into small slimes until they had finally killed all the pieces. That left the baby slime all alone. Bob and Tom looked at each other. “I think we should kill it,” said Tom. “Otherwise, it’s going to grow into an adult slime and try to get its revenge on us.” Where have I heard this story before? Bob laughed. “Slimes are stupid. It won’t be able to get revenge because it will be dead.” The players began to move forward to the baby slime. And that’s when something snapped in me. I was reminded of the night my parents sacrificed their lives for me. I couldn’t let this baby slime be killed. I jumped up and rushed to the players. Wolf shout-whispered, “No! Don’t do it!” I didn’t care. I ran up to the two players and without giving them a chance to surrender, mercilessly assassinated them. The baby slime looked at me with fear in its eyes and backed away, fearful that I would kill it too. But I didn’t. I put my sword back into my inventory and reached down and gently picked up the slime. “Can you talk?” I asked. The slime made cooing and booping noises, but apparently was too young to be able to speak yet. “I wish I could talk to you, Child. I would tell you that everything is going to be alright. I’ll be your new guardian.” Wolf arrived by my side a moment later. “It’s not part of the Way to kill players unless the killing falls under a specific rule or arises from self-defense.” I shot a look at Wolf. “I was defending the life of another. Is that not the same as self-defense?” “I guess, but it’s … hurrr … it’s a slime.” “Are you saying a slime has less right to be alive than us?” “I’m not saying that, but now that you mention it….” “Shut up. I’m taking charge of this child.” Wolf shook his head. “You realize that according to the Way, if you take the life of an orphan into your hands you have to protect it and see that it makes it to adulthood, just as I have with you.

If mind belongs to humans alone, then stones, trees, and streams become mere objects of human tinkering. We can plunder the earth's resources with impunity, treating creeks and mountaintops in Kentucky or rivers in India or forests in northwest America as if they existed only for economic development. Systems of land and river become inert chunks of lifeless mud or mechanical runs of H2O rather than the living, breathing bodies upon which we and all other creatures depend for our very lives. Not to mention what 'nature as machine' has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being. When we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well as the delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation -- a lonely spot indeed. Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts become the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams -- if we attend to them at all -- are but the cast-offs of yesterday's overactive brain. Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exingencies of mud or leaf, shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not, like rocks, made of soil. And then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own view of reality has sunk us into an unbearable solipsism, an agony of separateness -- from loved ones, from other creatures, from rich but unruly emotions, in short, from our ability to connect, through senses and feeling and imagination, with the world that is our home.

In one of our early conversations, Bob said to me, "I like Einstein as a character, because everybody knows who he is." In a sense, we didn't need to tell an Einstein story because everybody who eventually saw our Einstein brought their own story with them. In the four months that we toured Einstein in Europe we had many occasions to meet with our audiences, and people occasionally would ask us what it "meant." But far more often people told us what it meant to them, sometimes even giving us plot elucidation and complete scenario. The point about Einstein was clearly not what it "meant" but that it was meaningful as generally experienced by the people who saw it. From the viewpoint of the creators, of course, that is exactly the way it was constructed to work. Though we made no attempt at all to tell a story, we did use dramaturgical devices to create a clearly paced overall dramatic shape. For instance, a "finale" is a dramaturgical device; an "epilogue" is another. Using contrasting sections, like a slow trial scene followed by a fast dance scene, is a dramaturgical device, and we used such devices freely. I am sure that the absence of direct connotative "meaning" made it all the easier for the spectator to personalize the experience by supplying his own special "meaning" out of his own experience, while the work itself remained resolutely abstract. As to the use of three visual schemes, or images, Bob often mentioned that he envisioned them in three distinct ways: (1) a landscape seen at a distance (the Field/Spaceship scenes); (2) still lifes seen at a middle distance (the Trial scenes); and (3) portraits seen as in a closeup (the Knee Plays). As these three perspectives rotated through the four acts of the work, they created the sequence of images in an ordered scale. Furthermore, the recurrence of the images implied a kind of quasi-development. For example, the sequence of Train scenes from the Act I, scene 1 Train, to the "night train" of Act II and finally the building which resembled in perspective the departing night train, presented that sequence of images in a reductive order (each one became less "train-like") and at the same time more focused and energized. The same process applies to the sequence of Trial scenes (ending with a bar of light representing the bed) as well as the Field/Spaceship, with the final scene in the interior of the spaceship serving as a kind of apocalyptic grand finale of the whole work. Each time an image reappeared, it was altered to become more abstract and, oddly enough, more powerful. The way these three sequences were intercut with each other, as well as with the portrait-scale Knee Plays, served to heighten the dramatic effect.

A month passed, and it was time again for Marcus to return to his research. He had been avoiding it because it wasn’t going well. Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and ‘work-shy’ women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease.  Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered.  The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help ‘asocial’ survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as ‘fighters’ against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.  As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went. For many decades, Holocaust researchers also considered the asocials’ stories irrelevant; they barely rate mention in camp histories. Finding survivors amongst this group was doubly hard because they formed no associations, nor veterans’ groups. Today, door-knocking down the Düsseldorf Bahndamm, one of the few pre-war red-light districts not destroyed, brings only angry shouts of ‘Get off my patch'.

I was soon discharged from the rehab center and sent back to the SAS. But the doctor’s professional opinion was that I shouldn’t military parachute again. It was too risky. One dodgy landing, at night, in full kit, and my patched-up spine could crumple. He didn’t even mention the long route marches carrying huge weights on our backs. Every SF soldier knows that a weak back is not a good opener for life in an SAS squadron. It is also a cliché just how many SAS soldiers’ backs and knees are plated and pinned together, after years of marches and jumps. Deep down I knew the odds weren’t looking great for me in the squadron, and that was a very hard pill to swallow. But it was a decision that, sooner or later, I would have to face up to. The doctors could give me their strong recommendations, but ultimately I had to make the call. A familiar story. Life is all about our decisions. And big decisions can often be hard to make. So I thought I would buy myself some time before I made it. In the meantime, at the squadron, I took on the role of teaching survival to other units. I also helped the intelligence guys while my old team were out on the ground training. But it was agony for me. Not physically, but mentally: watching the guys go out, fired up, tight, together, doing the job and getting back excited and exhausted. That was what I should have been doing. I hated sitting in an ops room making tea for intelligence officers. I tried to embrace it, but deep down I knew this was not what I had signed up for. I had spent an amazing few years with the SAS, I had trained with the best, and been trained by the best, but if I couldn’t do the job fully, I didn’t want to do it at all. The regiment is like that. To keep its edge, it has to keep focused on where it is strongest. Unable to parachute and carry the huge weights for long distances, I was dead weight. That hurt. That is not how I had vowed to live my life, after my accident. I had vowed to be bold and follow my dreams, wherever that road should lead. So I went to see the colonel of the regiment and told him my decision. He understood, and true to his word, he assured me that the SAS family would always be there when I needed it. My squadron gave me a great piss-up, and a little bronze statue of service. (It sits on my mantelpiece, and my boys play soldiers with it nowadays.) And I packed my kit and left 21 SAS forever. I fully admit to getting very drunk that night.

It was a wise policy in that false prophet, Alexander, who though now forgotten, was once so famous, to lay the first scene of his impostures in Paphlagonia, where, as Lucian tells us, the people were extremely ignorant and stupid, and ready to swallow even the grossest delusion. People at a distance, who are weak enough to think the matter at all worth enquiry, have no opportunity of receiving better information. The stories come magnified to them by a hundred circumstances. Fools are industrious in propagating the imposture; while the wise and learned are contented, in general, to deride its absurdity, without informing themselves of the particular facts, by which it may be distinctly refuted. And thus the impostor above mentioned was enabled to proceed, from his ignorant Paphlagonians, to the enlisting of votaries, even among the Grecian philosophers, and men of the most eminent rank and distinction in Rome; nay, could engage the attention of that sage emperor Marcus Aurelius; so far as to make him trust the success of a military expedition to his delusive prophecies. 23 The advantages are so great, of starting an imposture among an ignorant people, that, even though the delusion should be too gross to impose on the generality of them (which, though seldom, is sometimes the case) it has a much better chance for succeeding in remote countries, than if the first scene had been laid in a city renowned for arts and knowledge. The most ignorant and barbarous of these barbarians carry the report abroad. None of their countrymen have a large correspondence, or sufficient credit and authority to contradict and beat down the delusion. Men’s inclination to the marvellous has full opportunity to display itself. And thus a story, which is universally exploded in the place where it was first started, shall pass for certain at a thousand miles distance. But had Alexander fixed his residence at Athens, the philosophers of that renowned mart of learning had immediately spread, throughout the whole Roman empire, their sense of the matter; which, being supported by so great authority, and displayed by all the force of reason and eloquence, had entirely opened the eyes of mankind. It is true; Lucian, passing by chance through Paphlagonia, had an opportunity of performing this good office. But, though much to be wished, it does not always happen, that every Alexander meets with a Lucian, ready to expose and detect his impostures.

That’s your ghoul, isn’t it?” asked Harry, who had never actually met the creature that sometimes disrupted the nightly silence. “Yeah, it is,” said Ron, climbing the ladder. “Come and have a look at him.” Harry followed Ron up the few short steps into the tiny attic space. His head and shoulders were in the room before he caught sight of the creature curled up a few feet from him, fast asleep in the gloom with its large mouth wide open. “But it . . . it looks . . . do ghouls normally wear pajamas?” “No,” said Ron. “Nor have they usually got red hair or that number of pustules.” Harry contemplated the thing, slightly revolted. It was human in shape and size, and was wearing what, now that Harry’s eyes became used to the darkness, was clearly an old pair of Ron’s pajamas. He was also sure that ghouls were generally rather slimy and bald, rather than distinctly hairy and covered in angry purple blisters. “He’s me, see?” said Ron. “No,” said Harry. “I don’t.” “I’ll explain it back in my room, the smell’s getting to me,” said Ron. They climbed back down the ladder, which Ron returned to the ceiling, and rejoined Hermione, who was still sorting books. “Once we’ve left, the ghoul’s going to come and live down here in my room,” said Ron. “I think he’s really looking forward to it—well, it’s hard to tell, because all he can do is moan and drool—but he nods a lot when you mention it. Anyway, he’s going to be me with spattergroit. Good, eh?” Harry merely looked his confusion. “It is!” said Ron, clearly frustrated that Harry had not grasped the brilliance of the plan. “Look, when we three don’t turn up at Hogwarts again, everyone’s going to think Hermione and I must be with you, right? Which means the Death Eaters will go straight for our families to see if they’ve got information on where you are.” “But hopefully it’ll look like I’ve gone away with Mum and Dad; a lot of Muggle-borns are talking about going into hiding at the moment,” said Hermione. “We can’t hide my whole family, it’ll look too fishy and they can’t all leave their jobs,” said Ron. “So we’re going to put out the story that I’m seriously ill with spattergroit, which is why I can’t go back to school. If anyone comes calling to investigate, Mum or Dad can show them the ghoul in my bed, covered in pustules. Spattergroit’s really contagious, so they’re not going to want to go near him. It won’t matter that he can’t say anything, either, because apparently you can’t once the fungus has spread to your uvula.

There are many things that men and women ought to think about, and must think about, in private, that they would not for a moment discuss in public. There are books on the proper conduct of women in certain most sacred relations of life, relations of life which are as holy as any, and which can be entered into in the presence of a holy God with no question of His approval, but which do not permit of public mention. . . . That the Bible is a pure book is evidenced by the fact that it is not a favourite book in dens of infamy. But on the other hand, books that try to make out that the Bible is an obscene book, and that endeavour to keep people from reading it, are favourite books in dens of infamy. The unclean classes, both men and women, were devoted admirers of the most brilliant man this country ever produced who attacked what he called the "obscenity of the Bible." These unclean classes do not frequent Bible classes. They do frequent infidel lectures. These infidel objectors to the book as an "obscene book" constantly betray their insincerity and hypocrisy. Colonel Ingersoll . . . objected to the Bible for telling these vile deeds "without a touch of humour." In other words, he did not object to telling stories of vice, if only a joke was made of the sin. Thank God, that is exactly what the Bible does not do--make a joke of sin. It makes sin hideous, so men who are obscene in their own hearts object to the Bible as being an obscene book. . . . To sum up, there are in the Bible descriptions of sins that cannot wisely be read in every public assembly, but these descriptions of sin are morally most wholesome in the places where God, the Author of the Book, manifestly intends them to be read. The child who is brought up to read the Bible as a whole, from Genesis to Revelation, will come to know in the very best way possible what a child ought to know very early in life if he is to be safeguarded against the perils that surround our modern life on every hand. A child who is brought up upon a constant, thorough, continuous reading of the whole Bible is more likely than any other child to be free from the vices that are undermining the mental, moral, and physical strength of our boys and girls, and young men and young women. But the child who is brought up on infidel literature and conversation is the easiest prey there is for the seducer and procuress. The next easiest is the one who, through neglect of the Bible, is left in ignorance of the awful pitfalls of life.

The studio was immense and gloomy, the sole light within it proceeding from a stove, around which the three were seated. Although they were bold, and of the age when men are most jovial, the conversation had taken, in spite of their efforts to the contrary, a reflection from the dull weather without, and their jokes and frivolity were soon exhausted. In addition to the light which issued from the crannies in the stove, there was another emitted from a bowl of spirits, which was ceaselessly stirred by one of the young men, as he poured from an antique silver ladle some of the flaming spirit into the quaint old glasses from which the students drank. The blue flame of the spirit lighted up in a wild and fantastic manner the surrounding objects in the room, so that the heads of old prophets, of satyrs, or Madonnas, clothed in the same ghastly hue, seemed to move and to dance along the walls like a fantastic procession of the dead; and the vast room, which in the day time sparkled with the creations of genius, seemed now, in its alternate darkness and sulphuric light, to be peopled with its dreams. Each time also that the silver spoon agitated the liquid, strange shadows traced themselves along the walls, hideous and of fantastic form. Unearthly tints spread also upon the hangings of the studio, from the old bearded prophet of Michael Angelo to those eccentric caricatures which the artist had scrawled upon his walls, and which resembled an army of demons that one sees in a dream, or such as Goya has painted; whilst the lull and rise of the tempest without but added to the fantastic and nervous feeling which pervaded those within. Besides this, to add to the terror which was creeping over the three occupants of the room, each time that they looked at each other they appeared with faces of a blue tone, with eyes fixed and glittering like live embers, and with pale lips and sunken cheeks; but the most fearful object of all was that of a plaster mask taken from the face of an intimate friend but lately dead, which, hanging near the window, let the light from the spirit fall upon its face, turned three parts towards them, which gave it a strange, vivid, and mocking expression. All people have felt the influence of large and dark rooms, such as Hoffmann has portrayed and Rembrandt has painted; and all the world has experienced those wild and unaccountable terrors - panics without a cause - which seize on one like a spontaneous fever, at the sight of objects to which a stray glimpse of the moon or a feeble ray from a lamp gives a mysterious form; nay, all, we should imagine, have at some period of their lives found themselves by the side of a friend, in a dark and dismal chamber, listening to some wild story, which so enchains them, that although the mere lighting of a candle could put an end to their terror, they would not do so; so much need has the human heart of emotions, whether they be true or false. So it was upon the evening mentioned. The conversation of the three companions never took a direct line, but followed all the phases of their thoughts; sometimes it was light as the smoke which curled from their cigars, then for a moment fantastic as the flame of the burning spirit, and then again dark, lurid, and sombre as the smile which lit up the mask from their dead friend's face. At last the conversation ceased altogether, and the respiration of the smokers was the only sound heard; and their cigars glowed in the dark, like Will-of-the-wisps brooding o'er a stagnant pool. It was evident to them all, that the first who should break the silence, even if he spoke in jest, would cause in the hearts of the others a start and tremor, for each felt that he had almost unwittingly plunged into a ghastly reverie. ("The Dead Man's Story")

What did you say to them?” “Told them I was Stan Shunpike. First person I could think of.” “And they believed that?” “They weren’t the brightest. One of them was definitely part troll, the smell off him…” Ron glanced at Hermione, clearly hopeful she might soften at this small instance of humor, but her expression remained stony above her tightly knotted limbs. “Anyway, they had a row about whether I was Stan or not. It was a bit pathetic to be honest, but there were still five of them and only one of me and they’d taken my wand. Then two of them got into a fight and while the others were distracted I managed to hit the one holding me in the stomach, grabbed his wand, Disarmed the bloke holding mine, and Disapparated. I didn’t do it so well, Splinched myself again”--Ron held up his right hand to show two missing fingernails; Hermione raised her eyebrows coldly--“and I came out miles from where you were. By the time I got back to that bit of riverbank where we’d been…you’d gone.” “Gosh, what a gripping story,” Hermione said in the lofty voice she adopted when wishing to wound. “You must have been simply terrified. Meanwhile we went to Godric’s Hollow and, let’s think, what happened there, Harry? Oh yes, You-Know-Who’s snake turned up, it nearly killed both of us, and then You-Know-Who himself arrived and missed us by about a second.” “What?” Ron said, gaping from her to Harry, but Hermione ignored him. “Imagine losing fingernails, Harry! That really puts our sufferings into perspective, doesn’t it?” “Hermione,” said Harry quietly, “Ron just saved my life.” She appeared not to have heard him. “One thing I would like to know, though,” she said, fixing her eyes on a spot a foot over Ron’s head. “How exactly did you find us tonight? That’s important. Once we know, we’ll be able to make sure we’re not visited by anyone else we don’t want to see.” Ron glared at her, then pulled a small silver object from his jeans pocket. “This.” She had to look at Ron to see what he was showing them. “The Deluminator?” she asked, so surprised she forgot to look cold and fierce. “It doesn’t just turn the lights on and off,” said Ron. “I don’t know how it works or why it happened then and not any other time, because I’ve been wanting to come back ever since I left. But I was listening to the radio really early on Christmas morning and I heard…I heard you.” He was looking at Hermione. “You heard me on the radio?” she asked incredulously. “No, I heard you coming out of my pocket. Your voice,” he held up the Deluminator again, “came out of this.” “And what exactly did I say?” asked Hermione, her tone somewhere between skepticism and curiosity. “My name. ‘Ron.’ And you said…something about a wand…” Hermione turned a fiery shade of scarlet. Harry remembered: It had been the first time Ron’s name had been said aloud by either of them since the day he had left; Hermione had mentioned it when talking about repairing Harry’s wand.

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: I see what you're saying but people in psychology don't have a uniform agreement on this issue of the depth of -- I guess the term that was used at the conference was -- "robust repression." TAT: Well, Pamela, there's a whole lot of evidence that people dissociate traumatic things. What's interesting to me is how the concept of "dissociation" is side-stepped in favor of "repression." I don't think it's as much about repression as it is about traumatic amnesia and dissociation. That has been documented in a variety of trauma survivors. Army psychiatrists in the Second World War, for instance, documented that following battles, many soldiers had amnesia for the battles. Often, the memories wouldn't break through until much later when they were in psychotherapy. Freyd: But I think I mentioned Dr. Loren Pankratz. He is a psychologist who was studying veterans for post-traumatic stress in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland. They found some people who were admitted to Veteran's hospitals for postrraumatic stress in Vietnam who didn't serve in Vietnam. They found at least one patient who was being treated who wasn't even a veteran. Without external validation, we just can't know -- TAT: -- Well, we have external validation in some of our cases. Freyd: In this field you're going to find people who have all levels of belief, understanding, experience with the area of repression. As I said before it's not an area in which there's any kind of uniform agreement in the field. The full notion of repression has a meaning within a psychoanalytic framework and it's got a meaning to people in everyday use and everyday language. What there is evidence for is that any kind of memory is reconstructed and reinterpreted. It has not been shown to be anything else. Memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted from fragments. Some memories are true and some memories are confabulated and some are downright false. TAT: It is certainly possible for in offender to dissociate a memory. It's possible that some of the people who call you could have done or witnessed some of the things they've been accused of -- maybe in an alcoholic black-out or in a dissociative state -- and truly not remember. I think that's very possible. Freyd: I would say that virtually anything is possible. But when the stories include murdering babies and breeding babies and some of the rather bizarre things that come up, it's mighty puzzling. TAT: I've treated adults with dissociative disorders who were both victimized and victimizers. I've seen previously repressed memories of my clients' earlier sexual offenses coming back to them in therapy. You guys seem to be saying, be skeptical if the person claims to have forgotten previously, especially if it is about something horrible. Should we be equally skeptical if someone says "I'm remembering that I perpetrated and I didn't remember before. It's been repressed for years and now it's surfacing because of therapy." I ask you, should we have the same degree of skepticism for this type of delayed-memory that you have for the other kind? Freyd: Does that happen? TAT: Oh, yes. A lot.