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The wind seems to be blowing through the gaps in the conversation like the rushing of empty space.
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Michael Cisco
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Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again.
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Michael Cisco (The Traitor)
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Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast to a genre of commodity or a section in a bookstore, by breaking it. Michael Moorcock revived fantasy by prying it loose from morality; writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Stepan Chapman, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud are doing the same by prying fantasy away from pedestrian writing, with more vibrant and daring styles, more reflective thinking, and a more widely broadcast spectrum of themes.
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Michael Cisco
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There is no perfection but in chance
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Michael Cisco
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What it must feel like to lie back with cut wrists in a warm bath, a voluptuous dwindling feeling.
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Michael Cisco
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Although unavailable for analysis the moment it happens, being struck a violent blow on the head is a very interesting experience.
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Michael Cisco (Animal Money)
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Sometimes I lie awake and hear noises in the house, and despite myself I’m frightened. Then I hear some familiar sound—a clock strikes, or a train whistles somewhere—and my fear abates. But why should those sounds comfort me, and others frighten me? Why couldn’t a ghost make the sound of a train?
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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I learned always to avoid glorious campaigns—everyone is more likely to die in glorious campaigns.
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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The global economy is destroying the world; steal it all and then charge your victims for the service, abandon humanity and save the financial institutions.
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Michael Cisco (Animal Money)
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The sky all at once is overhead dim and grey, puzzle of blocks sprawl, their own horizon; the city looks like a cemetery full of weak daylight, cool and a little wrong, making Ella feel a little put upon, like leap-year day—nothing in itself, but a nudge jostling every other day.
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Michael Cisco (The Tyrant)
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Anyone could say that a miracle is something impossible, but they say it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, because most people have such weak imaginations they couldn’t possibly understand what they’re saying when they say that a miracle is something impossible. Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it’s something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.
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Michael Cisco (The Traitor)
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Echoing streets melt into dark autumn rooms—melt to black plastic bags inflated by the wind and spinning on playground blacktop like free-floating punctuation...the horizon is just a line and past it there's only black dark...that rolls toward her as she walks in its direction...smooth-worn wooden chairs at the bakery where ella sits tea on the table in front of her, it's getting dark but the girl behind the counter hasn't turned on a single light yet...Ella animal staring into the street: “Did I ever touch him?
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Michael Cisco (The Tyrant)
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eyes, black and glistening like deep wells, narrow to two happy crescents
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Michael Cisco (The Divinity Student)
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Why is the station so far out of the city limits anyway? Most likely a collusion between the builders of stations and the builders of long roads.
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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With great profundity I note the pleasure one gets or takes in pushing wheeled objects, as opposed to the depression involved in pulling them.
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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I could say she looks like da Vinci’s “Lady with Ermine” if there had ever been such a thing.
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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But above all there is speech, incessant speaking, where the inflated edges of the tube are stretched and contracted, knotted and unknotted, ripped open or pressed shut, flued and drummed, hammered and gnawed. Licked.
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it's something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.
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Michael Cisco (The Traitor)
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She starkly sees her inanimate future blocked out before her right through to her own end—without him...
...and worst of all, she knows she will be asked about him and be called upon to talk about him and tell the story again and again...her jaws will work without end with all that talking her jaws will chew up the ravel of all her remaining life, telling the same story until it becomes bare and alien and something blunt to her; more the belonging of other people, and no longer hers.
Now she has to live ordinarily...she's going to have to numb herself if she's going to go on—no going on from this point without getting numb.
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Michael Cisco (The Tyrant)
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My exuberance breaks things, breaks me. It marches me up to people and elicits from me declarations of love, if only to give me the satisfaction of disappointment, to know that I am in love. I am forever building up this edifice of love and happiness, which would get to be as big as the world, or bigger, if it weren't for the storms, eruptions, convulsions, that tear it all down again. When any of it comes down, it all comes down. Although these catastrophic failures deeply wound me, still I am grateful for the opportunity to rebuild, and to renew my trust with the world. I do everything on the scale of the world, as the only thing commensurate to my happiness.
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Michael Cisco
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I was told, or read, that everyone visits Veciofeni’s cave sooner or later. He stood in there and wept himself to death, evidently, and this manner of dying, so gently incremental, brought about the perfect preservation of his body as a consequence of his mummy-like dehydration and the saturation of his person with his own lachrymal salt.
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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I think of beauty as something that dies; either it's destroyed by time or stupidity or I have only a moment to experience it, and then only memory after that; even if i can return and look again, I can't quite manage to get back the moment. So, to me, the beauty of the trees is like the beauty of death, as if death will mean wondering forever in the dim of those trees, the landscape funerealizes in its lushest profusion of green.
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Michael Cisco
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So much strain and muscular labor involved in absorbing food. I’m exhausted just watching it. But above all there is speech, incessant speaking, where the inflated edges of the tube are stretched and contracted, knotted and unknotted, ripped open or pressed shut, flued and drummed, hammered and gnawed. Licked. That tube has two ends. To the far end goes all ignominy, and to the fore end all the glory, hymns of praise. Her lips were lovely. The swollen ring at one end of the tube, fastened to rings and riggings of muscle. All these sounds. It’s exhausting. I notice the upper jaw doesn’t move at all, only the lower. You see the skull so clearly I wonder people don’t think of death whenever they witness speech, or speak themselves, feeling that hinge flap up and down, and even back and forth a bit—how can it go back and forth? Is the socket that loose, or is it something else, like a leather hinge, like a book binding?
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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John Chambers, the legendary CEO (now Executive Chairman) of Cisco, successfully led the company through what he refers to as “five or six” transformational changes in networking technology that helped him create the vision and culture that would drive Cisco from $ 70 million in revenue when he took the CEO role to today’s nearly $ 50 billion. His strategy: Identify the transitions in technology early and then lean into the change with all you’ve got.
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Michael Gale (The Digital Helix: Transforming Your Organization's DNA to Thrive in the Digital Age)
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From peak to trough (June 1998 through March 2000), Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway fell 51% in value! During this time, I estimated that Buffett's net worth fell by more than $10 billion. How much Berkshire did Buffett sell? How much Cisco did he buy? Zero point zero. Not tempted by tech stocks, Buffett remained committed to value investing, and it paid off.1 One of the keys to successfully managing your money is to accept, like Buffett did, that there will be times when your style is out of favor or when your portfolio hits a rough patch. It's when you start to reach for opportunities that you can do serious damage to your financial well‐being.
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
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a select group of high-performing companies have managed to close the strategy-to-performance gap through better planning and execution. These companies—Barclays, Cisco Systems, Dow Chemical, 3M, and Roche, to name a few—develop realistic plans that are solidly grounded in the underlying economics of their markets and then use the plans to drive execution.
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Michael C. Mankins (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy)
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How a switch made by Cisco compared to a switch made by Juniper.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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The trembling stars shout down to me, and the life that is in me shouts back. That I know I’m living goes up levels in me like surf rising against the tide marks.
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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There’s still a problem here: we need to know that the device itself hasn’t been compromised at some point, that the machine’s own “identity,” going back to its origins as a pile of unassembled parts in the factory, can be trusted. It’s a hard nut to crack. Device manufacturers use the phrase “trusted computing” to describe their efforts to resolve it. It’s a concept that chipmakers AMD and Intel Corp. have worked on in concert with IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and others within a consortium known as the Trusted Computing Group. As it is currently designed, trusted computing is intended to confirm that a computer will act as intended—for example, that it will communicate the very string of text that the user types in, and nothing else, when certain keystrokes are hit—that is, that it has not been compromised by malicious code.
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Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
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series Weekend Warriors (2003) (Amazon) Payback (2004) (Amazon) Vendetta (2005) (Amazon) The Jury (2005) (Amazon) Sweet Revenge (2006) (Amazon) Lethal Justice (2006) (Amazon) Free Fall (2007) (Amazon) Hide and Seek (2007) (Amazon) Hokus Pokus (2007) (Amazon) Fast Track (2008) (Amazon) Collateral Damage (2008) (Amazon) Final Justice (2008) (Amazon) Under the Radar (2009) (Amazon) Razor Sharp (2009) (Amazon) Vanishing Act (2009) (Amazon) Deadly Deals (2009) (Amazon) Game Over (2010) (Amazon) Cross Roads (2010) (Amazon) Deja Vu (2010) (Amazon) Home Free (2011) (Amazon) Gotcha! (2013) (
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Listastik (Fern Michaels Series Reading Order: Series List - In Order: Sisterhood series, Godmother series, Men of the Sisterhood series, Texas series, Cisco series, ... (Listastik Series Reading Order Book 26))
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call down to the desk to ask about the room?” “No phone,” Cisco said. “Just watch.” Once back on the ground floor, Gloria stepped out of the elevator and went to a house phone that was on a table against the wall. She made a call and soon was speaking to someone. “This is her asking to be connected to the room,” Cisco said. “She is told by the operator that there is no Daniel Price registered in the hotel and no one in eight thirty-seven.” Gloria hung up the phone, and I could tell by her body language that she was annoyed, frustrated. Her trip had been wasted. She headed back through the lobby, moving at a faster clip than when she had arrived. “Now watch this,” Cisco said. Gloria was halfway across the lobby when a man entered the screen thirty feet behind her. He was wearing a fedora and had his
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Michael Connelly (The Gods of Guilt--Free Preview: The First 8 Chapters (A Lincoln Lawyer Novel))
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Xerox had the Alto; IBM launched the Personal Computer. Xerox had the graphical user interface with mouse, icons, and overlapping windows; Apple and Microsoft launched the Macintosh and Windows. Xerox invented What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processing; Microsoft brazenly turned it into Microsoft Word and conquered the office market. Xerox invented the Ethernet; today the battle for market share in the networking hardware industry is between Cisco Systems and 3Com. Even the laser printer is a tainted triumph. Thanks to the five years Xerox dithered in bringing it to market, IBM got there first, introducing its own model in 1975.
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Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age)
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I shake with seizure hysterics panic, I'm moving on all my limbs through bullets dying blood and pain they don't stop they run in among each other killing firing their rifles not a foot away from each other shooting as they are shot all eyes white, white, white.
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Michael Cisco (The Narrator)
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But if IOTA lost the confidence of some of the most respected cryptographers in the blockchain community, it continued to generate enthusiasm among a variety of big-name enterprises. That’s perhaps because, quite apart from how badly or otherwise it developed and managed its cryptography, the IOTA team’s economic model is enticing. If its cryptographic flaws can be fixed, the tangle idea could in theory be far less taxing and expensive in terms of computing power than Bitcoin and Ethereum’s methods, which require every computer in their massive networks of validators to process and confirm the entire list of new transactions in each new block. German engineering and electronics giant Bosch has been running a range of experiments with IOTA, including one involving payments between self-driving trucks arranged in an energy-saving linear “platoon.” The idea is that the trucks at the back that are enjoying the benefits of the slipstream would pay IOTA tokens to those at the front to compensate them for bearing the bulk of energy costs in creating that slipstream. Meanwhile, IOTA and Bosch are both part of a consortium called the Trusted IoT Alliance that’s committed to building and securing a blockchain infrastructure for the industry. Other members include Foxconn, Cisco, BNY Mellon, and a slew of blockchain-based startups, such as supply-chain provider Skuchain and Ethereum research lab ConsenSys.
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Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
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Cisco pointed south in the
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Michael Connelly (The Brass Verdict (The Lincoln Lawyer, #2; Harry Bosch Universe, #19))
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There are problems we solve and problems we live with, and when we see people who have learned to live with terrible problems, the ordinary way they have about them makes it easy for us to forget, or never to notice, the merciless persistence of the problem, the way its agony has made itself into the root and stone of an ordinary life. We want to think that adaptation is a cure, when in reality it isn’t even a palliative; it’s usually nothing more or less than the difference between death and being able to live in pain.
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Michael Cisco