“
Never forget," a Stranger said to me once in the lobby of the Midland Hotel in Manchester, "that only dead fish swim with the stream.
”
”
Malcolm Muggeridge (The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge)
“
Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
We don't want to lose you Lord Rahl. We don't want to go back to way things were." She sounded on the verge of tears. "We like being able to do simple things, like make a joke, and laugh. We could never do such things before. We always lived in fear that if we said the wrong thing we would be beaten, or worse. Now that we have seen another way, we don't want to go back to that. If you throw your life away for the Midlands, then we will.- Cara
”
”
Terry Goodkind (Blood of the Fold (Sword of Truth, #3))
“
He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. He [C.S. Lewis] says elsewhere that that's the very definition of humility. Humility does not mean to have a low view of your self. It means to have no view of yourself. Having a low view of yourself is miserable--psychologists know that. And that's also the solution to the problem of introspection. If I ask myself, how am I doing, I come out with one of three answers: well, terribly, or so-so.
If I say I'm doing well, I'm a proud, self-righteous, arrogant, self-satisfied, priggish Pharisee; if I say I'm doing lousy, I'm a miserable worm with a guilt complex and I need some psychiatry; and if i say I'm sort of fair to midland then I'm dull, wishy-washy, Charlie Brown. So what's the solution? Don't look at yourself. Take your temperature when you're sick, otherwise look at other people and God. They're much more interesting. The first step is to try to forget about yourself altogether. Your real self, your new self, will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come only when you're looking for Him.
”
”
Peter Kreeft
“
I guess that isn't the right word," she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
Richard thought a moment. "I don't know, but we have to get across the pass. We're too tired to have to spend tonight fighting shadows again. We must get to the Midlands before dark. And this time, I promise I won't let go of your hand."
Kahlan smiled and squeezed his hand.
I won't let go of yours either.
”
”
Terry Goodkind (Wizard's First Rule (Sword of Truth, #1))
“
The Midland Midwest would develop as a center of moderation and tolerance, where people of many faiths and ethnicities lived side by side, largely minding their own business.
”
”
Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
“
In the modern food landscape, the Krafts, Monsantos, and Archer Daniels Midlands are standing in the way of food democracy.
”
”
Brian Halweil (Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket (The Worldwatch Environmental Alert Series))
“
The agony of man is always longer than the fleeting moments of bliss. The trick is to reverse those two.
”
”
Ben Midland
“
Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Deadeye Dick)
“
Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands ... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon.... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes.
”
”
D.H. Lawrence (Mr Noon)
“
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
The Midlanders—a great many of them German speaking—carried their pluralistic culture into the Heartland, a place long since identified with neighborliness, family-centered progress, practical politics, and a distrust of big government.
”
”
Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
“
Showing your compassion to another human takes less energy than hating him.
”
”
Ben Midland
“
It didn't matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn't mattered much for years. It didn't matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery - or other measurable thins. Every person had a clearly defined part to play - as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.
That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imaginations insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of awful truth.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
But rituals turn us all into fucking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don't remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women - and that's fucking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland.
”
”
Josh Bazell (Beat the Reaper (Peter Brown, #1))
“
Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds.
”
”
Frederick Weisel (Teller)
“
her. “He assassinated his whole family—” “Almost certainly,” Suukmel purred as he stalked away, “but unproven.” “—and then lied about it! As though anyone would believe that vaporous nonsense about a merchant—a midlands peddler!—bringing down the whole of a lineage like the Kitheri. And now he dares to ask for my daughter!” Face twisted with disgust, Ma turned to his wife. “Suukmel, he buggers animals—and sings about it!
”
”
Mary Doria Russell (Children of God (The Sparrow, #2))
“
By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So the essential continuity of England was assured. Hampshire is older than France. Other shires, like those in the midlands, were constructed later; but they are still very ancient.
”
”
Peter Ackroyd (Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors (History of England #1))
“
Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
The Vindili, to whom belong the Burgundiones, Varini, Carini, and Guttones; the Ingaevones, including the Cimbri, Teutoni, and Chauci; the Istaevones, near the Rhine, part of whom are the midland Cimbri; the Hermiones, containing the Suevi, Hermunduri, Catti, and Cherusci; and the Peucini and Bastarnae, bordering upon the Dacians.
”
”
Publius Cornelius Tacitus (The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus)
“
Religion is like wax. How anyone deals with it is decisive for how it will look like.
”
”
Ben Midland
“
Fighters generally came from working-class backgrounds, and the Midlands contributed a number to their ranks.
”
”
Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper)
“
Captain Midlands: "I met the real you once."
John (Lennon) the Skrull: "You're meeting the real me now."
Captain Midlands: "I told him to get his bleedin' hair cut.
”
”
Paul Cornell (X-Men: Wisdom - Rudiments of Wisdom (MAX Comics))
“
To be honest, it felt so distant from us, we din't give it much thought. Our world was made up of our immediate neighbours and foreign meant the people of the midlands or fenlands.
”
”
Bernardine Evaristo (Blonde Roots)
“
That is why, for instance, horses in New England (as in East Anglia) neigh, while those in the middle states of America (and the Midlands of England) whinny.
”
”
Bill Bryson (Made in America)
“
Most white people in Midland City were insecure
when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words
simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum.
Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their
ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to
speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they
were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if
they couldn’t love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems
and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.
The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking
English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn’t
understand—on the grounds they couldn’t understand them. They
would ask such impudent questions as, “Whuffo I want to read no Tale
of Two Cities? Whuffo?
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
I know you and I know the way you feel, but you have to listen to me. The time has not yet come. It may never come. You may think I’m wrong in this, but if you close your eyes to the reality of what is, in favor of what you would wish just because you’re the Mother Confessor and feel responsible for the people of the Midlands, then there is no reason for us to bother hoping we’ll be together again because we won’t. We will be dead, and the cause of freedom will be dead.
”
”
Terry Goodkind (Faith Of The Fallen (Sword of Truth Book 6))
“
I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
Now don't jerk me around. This is the Midlands. There are no vampires here, and dressing up like one doesn't make it so. You can't even tell me how he's got no marks on his neck!"
"Oh yes I can. It's the twenty-first century. These days we tend to clean up after ourselves.
”
”
John Hennessy (Murderous Little Darlings (A Tale of Vampires))
“
Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get.
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
Those were comfortable, carefree years. The word I’d use now is idyllic. On Friday nights, we cheered on the Bulldogs of Midland High. On Sunday mornings, we went to church. Nobody locked their doors. Years later, when I would speak about the American Dream, it was Midland I had in mind.
”
”
George W. Bush (Decision Points)
“
Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from
under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to
make holes in human beings. It looked like this:
In Dwayne's part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his
local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people
caught in between.
Criminals would point guns at people and say, "Give me all your money," and the
people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, "Stop"
or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they
wouldn't. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole
in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put
a hole in her. And so on.
In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy
put holes in his mother and father because he didn't want to show them the bad report
card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity,
which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the
difference between right and wrong.
· Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly
famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to
someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew
the airplane to someplace else.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
Essex raised its ugly head. When i was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house. I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes - a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker - varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it alone the Say. Sticklebacks in jars,. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get?
”
”
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
“
The blind cannot see, but nothing escapes him. The others can see but them eludes the things the blind can see.
”
”
Ben Midland
“
Words and laws in this world made place for signs and symbols.
”
”
Ben Midland
“
To close a fellow human being in your heart compels more respect than attending 1000 Christmas Masses.
”
”
Ben Midland
“
(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
The story of loss and regaining of identity is the framework, I think, of all literature
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
Le directeur m'a demandé si j'avais compris pourquoi je m'étais mis à boire. J'en ai entendu qui prétendaient avoir bu pour attendre. Moi, je crois que je buvais d'avoir trop attendu
”
”
Arnaud Cathrine (La Route de Midland)
“
Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: "What's blocking the traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“
A black intern at the County Hospital now watched Mary Young die of pneumonia.
The intern did not know her. He had been in Midland City for only a week. He wasn't even a fellow-American, although he had taken his medical degree at Harvard. He was an Indaro. He was a Nigerian. His name was Cyprian Ukwende. He felt no kinship with Mary or with any American blacks. He felt kinship only with Indaros.
As she died, Mary was as alone on the planet as were Dwayne Hoover or Kilgore Trout. She had never reproduced. There were no friends or relatives to watch her die. So she spoke her very last words on the planet to Cyprian Ukwende. She did not have enough breath left to make her vocal chords buzz. She could only move her lips noiselessly.
Here is all she had to say about death: "Oh my, oh my.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
A Marxist historian would say that industries grew up and remained in an area because there was a plentiful supply of a certain necessary item. The existence of coal and steel in the Midlands led to the engineering industry being based there, a humid climate meant cotton was woven in Lancashire, and finance was located in the City of London because of a plentiful supply of hard-hearted and cruel individuals.
”
”
Alexei Sayle (Stalin Ate My Homework)
“
The range and variety of Chaucer's English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of London which Chaucer himself spoke. Indeed, by the end of the fourteenth century the educated language of London, bolstered by the economic power of London itself, was beginning to become the standard form of written language throughout the country, although the process was not to be completed for several centuries. The cultural, commercial, administrative and intellectual importance of the East Midlands (one of the two main universities, Cambridge, was also in this region), the agricultural richness of the region and the presence of major cities, Norwich and London, contributed much to the increasing standardisation of the dialect.
”
”
Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
“
Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
People don’t get into planes because they want to fly, they get into planes because they want to get somewhere else faster. What’s produced the aeroplane is not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against the tyranny of time and space.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
I thought it very likely I might have this sort of untestable power myself. It was kind of logical--no good at sport, alrightish at my studies, there must have been some field in which I excelled. Magic had to be it.
It's difficult for adults to picture just what a grip these fantasies can take on a child. There's occasionally a reminder as a kid throws himself off a roof pretending to be Batman, but mostly the interior life of children goes unnoticed.
When I say I thought I could be a wizard, that's exactly true. I really did believe I had latent magical powers, and, with enough concentration and fiddling my fingers into strange patterns, I might suddenly find how to unlock the magic inside me.
I wouldn't call this a delusion, more a very strong suspicion. I'd weighed all the evidence, and that was the likely conclusion--so much so that I had to stop myself trying to turn Matt Bradon into a fly when he was jumping up and down on the desk in French saying, "Miss, what are mammary glands?" to the big-breasted Miss Mundsley. I feared that, if I succeeded, I might not be able to turn him back. It was important, I knew, to use my powers wisely.
There's nothing that you'd have to call a psychoanalyst in for here. At the bottom line my growing interest in fantasy was just an expression of a very common feeling--"there's got to be something better than this," an easy one to have in the drab Midlands of the 1970s. I couldn't see it, though. My world was very small, and I couldn't imagine making things better incrementally, only a total escape.
”
”
Mark Barrowcliffe (The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons And Growing Up Strange)
“
If we lose this war, we lose more than our lives, we lose more than the future for our people. We will lose our connection to all that is good". Magda lifted her head, showing them the ring with the Grace on it. "We will lose our connection to the very nature of Creation, life, and our souls. To win, we must have the truth," Magda said. "Today, the true war for our survival begins. I intend to help see to it that this war, that our people not only survive, but thrive. The Midlands is my home. I promise you all that I will not abandon you, our cause, the Midlands, or the truth.
”
”
Terry Goodkind (The First Confessor (The Legend of Magda Searus, #1))
“
The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves. In Shakespeare we can still have heroes who can see ghosts and talk in magnificent poetry, but by the time we get to Beckett's Waiting for Godot they're speaking prose and have turned into ghosts themselves.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
With effort, he concentrated on an editorial. It told of widespread industrial unrest in the Midlands and asserted that it was imperative to pay a fair wage for a fair day’s work. Another article lamented that the huge industrial machine of England was operating at only half capacity and cried that greater new markets must be found for the productive wealth it could spew forth; more production meant cheaper goods, increased employment, higher wages. There were news articles that told of tension and war clouds over France and Spain because of the succession to the Spanish throne; Prussia was spreading its tentacles into all the German states to dominate them and a Franco-Prussian confrontation was imminent; there were war clouds over Russia and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire; war clouds over the Italian States that wished to throw out the upstart French King of Naples and join together or not to join together, and the Pope, French-supported, was involved in the political arena; there were war clouds over South Africa because the Boers – who had over the last four years trekked out of the Cape Colony to established the Transvaal and the Orange Free State – were now threatening the English colony of Natal and war was expected by the next mail; there were anti-Semitic riots and pogroms throughout Europe; Catholic were fighting against Protestants, Mohammedans against Hindus, against Catholics, against Protestants, and they fighting among themselves; there were Red Indian wars in America, animosity between the Northern and Southern states, animosity between America and Britain over Canada, trouble in Ireland, Sweden, Finland, India, Egypt, the Balkans . . . ‘Does na matter what you read!’ Struan exploded to no one in particular. ‘The whole world’s mad, by God!
”
”
James Clavell (Tai-Pan (Asian Saga, #2))
“
China's food comes from abroad: from South America, the United States and Australia. This means prosperity for agricultural traders and processors, like Archer Daniels Midland, which is making its way into China in every way imaginable, into a $ 100 billion domestic processed food market that is growing more than 10 percent annually. This translates into a windfall for farmers in the Midwest, who are now enjoying a two-thirds rise in the price of soybeans compared to a year ago. It also means a better diet for the Chinese, who have increased their caloric intake by a third over the past 25 years.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
“
The Abominable Snowman has arrived,” he said to Milo. “If I’m not as clean as most abominable snowmen are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child from the slopes of Mount Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello in Rio de Janeiro, where I have been cleaning the unspeakably filthy toilets for the past fifty years. A visitor to our whipping room there screamed in a transport of agony and ecstasy that there was to be an arts festival in Midland City. I escaped down a rope of sheets taken from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland City to have myself acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I believe myself to be.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the languages of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
“
Adolf Hitler a ajuns cancelar al Germaniei in 1933, pe cand eu aveam de-abia un an. tata, care nu-l mai vazuse din 1914, i-a transmis cele mai calde felicitari si un cadou, pictura lui Hitler in acuarela, Biserica minorita din Viena.
Hitler a fost incantat. avea amintiri placute despre tata, din cate spunea, si l-a invitat in Germania, ca oaspete personal, sa ia seama la noua ordine sociala pe care o construia, sperand ca aceasta va dura vreo mie de ani, daca nu mai mult.
mama, tata si Felix, care avea noua ani pe-atunci, au plecat din Ohio in Germania, pentru 6 luni, in 1934. [..] si imediat ce s-au intors acasa, tata s-a apucat sa-si arboreze cadoul favorit de la Hitler, pe bratul orzontal al morii de vant. era un steag nazist, mare cat un cearceaf. era un lucru misterios, exuberant, si, din cate zicea mama, comunitatea era mandra si in acelasi timp invidioasa pe tata, pe ea si pe Felix. nimeni in Midland City nu intretinuse vreodata relatii de prietenie cu un sef de stat.
pana si eu apar intr-o poza din ziar. una cu toata familia noasta, in strada, in fata atelierului, privind in sus catre steagul nazist. sunt in brate la Mary Hoobler, bucatareasa noastra, care, incetul cu incetul, m-a invatat tot ce stia ea despre mancaruri si prajituri.
pe cand pozam toti in strada pt fotografia din ziar, tata avea 42 de ani. dupa cum spunea mama, in Germania trecuse printr-o profunda transfigurare spirituala. isi redefinise scopurile in viata. nu-i mai era de ajuns sa fie artist. avea de gand sa se faca profesor si activist politic. sa fie purtatorul de cuvant in America al noii ordini ce abia se nastea in Germania, dar care, cu timpul, urma sa devina salvarea lumii.
asta a fost, evident, o greseala.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Deadeye Dick)
“
When she was safely in America, Sarah Liu and two other refugees from the South China Church all resettled in Midland. The Midland community helped provide support for their living expenses under ChinaAid. We invited them over to our home during the Christmas season. We watched as Sarah walked ever so slowly up to our Christmas tree and stared at the lights twinkling on and off, absolutely mesmerized. “Those are just decorations,” I explained. “They’re on a string.” I pulled out a package and handed them to her, so she could see what they looked like before being draped over the tree. She took the string of lights out of the package faster than I could blink, her hands untangling them like she was knitting a blanket. Within seconds, she had completely unwrapped and disassembled the lights. Then she looked up at me with the various parts in her hands. “I assembled these in my labor camp for sixteen hours a day,” she explained. “We made Christmas lights and put them in packages that look just like this one.” She then reassembled them just as quickly. The whole process took only seconds.
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Bob Fu (God's Double Agent: The True Story of a Chinese Christian's Fight for Freedom)
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Nimalo se, kažem, ne može nauditi velikoj knjizi ako se ponese u zahod. Samo beznačajne knjige trpe zbog toga. Samo beznačajne knjige služe brisanju guzice. Takva je knjiga Mali Cezar koja je sad prevedena na francuski i koja je izišla u biblioteci Passions. Dok okrećem stranice te knjige, čini mi se da sam opet kod kuće i da čitam naslove u novinama, da slušam one proklete radio aparate, da se vozim u starim krntijama, da pijem jeftini džin, da guram kukuruzni klip u dupe prostitutkama djevicama, da vješam Crnce i žive ih spaljujem. Da čovjek dobije sraćku. A to isto vrijedi za Atlantic M o n t h 1 y ili za bilo koji drugi mjesečnik, za Aldousa Huxleyja, Gertrudu Stein, Sinclaria Lewisa, Hemingwaya, Dos Passosa, Dreisera itd, itd... Ne čujem nikakvo zvono da zvoni u meni kad donesem te ptičice u WC. Povučem lančić i odoše u kanal. Niz Seinu pa u Atlantski ocean. Možda će za godinu dana opet izroniti — na obalama Coney Islan-da ili Midland Beacha ili Miamija, s mrtvim meduzama, puževima, račićima, rabljenim prezervativima, ružičastim toaletnim papirom, jučerašnjim novostima, sutrašnjim samoubojstvima ...
str. 58-59
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Henry Miller (Black Spring)
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There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good.
In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic.
Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world.
George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.
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Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
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of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. On being compelled by force of arms to give up their slave workforce, Deep Southerners developed caste and sharecropper systems to meet their labor needs, as well as a system of poll taxes and literacy tests to keep former slaves and white rabble out of the political process. When these systems were challenged by African Americans and the federal government, they rallied poor whites in their nation, in Tidewater, and in Appalachia to their cause through fearmongering: The races would mix. Daughters would be defiled. Yankees would take away their guns and Bibles and convert their children to secular humanism, environmentalism, communism, and homosexuality. Their political hirelings discussed criminalizing abortion, protecting the flag from flag burners, stopping illegal immigration, and scaling back government spending when on the campaign trail; once in office, they focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy, funneling massive subsidies to the oligarchs’ agribusinesses and oil companies, eliminating labor and environmental regulations, creating “guest worker” programs to secure cheap farm labor from the developing world, and poaching manufacturing jobs from higher-wage unionized industries in Yankeedom, New Netherland, or the Midlands. It’s a strategy financial analyst Stephen Cummings has likened to “a high-technology version of the plantation economy of the Old South,” with the working and middle classes playing the role of sharecroppers.[1] For the oligarchs the greatest challenge has been getting Greater Appalachia into their coalition and keeping it there. Appalachia has relatively few African
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Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
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I don’t like to think too much about you, in my head, that only makes a mess of us both. But of course what I live for now is for you and me to live together. I’m frightened, really...I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. So they won’t be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me. We’ll be together next year. And though I’m frightened, I believe in your being with me. A man has to fend and fettle for the best, and then trust in something beyond himself. You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it’s the only thing in the world. I’ve got no friends, not inward friends. Only you. And now the little flame is all I care about in my life.. It’s my Pentecost, the forked flame between me and you... Me and God is a bit uppish, somehow. But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That’s what I abide by, and will abide by...
“That’s why I don’t like to start thinking about you actually. It only tortures me, and does you no good. I don’t want you to be away from me. But if I start fretting it wastes something. Patience, always patience. This is my fortieth winter. And I can’t help all the winters that have been. But this winter I’ll stick to my little pentecost flame, and have some peace. And I won’t let the breath of people blow it out. I believe in a higher mystery, that doesn’t let even the crocus be blown out. And if you’re in Scotland and I’m in the Midlands, and I can’t put my arms round you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I’ve got something of you. My soul softly flaps in the little pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it’s a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause.
“So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause of peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander! What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace, and the little flame alight, impotent and unable to be chaste in the cool between-whiles, as by a river.
“Well, so many words, because I can’t touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure.
“Never mind, never mind, we won’t get worked up. We really trust in the little flame, in the unnamed god that shields it from being blown out. There’s so much of you here with me, really, that it’s a pity you aren’t all here.
“Never mind about Sir Clifford. If you don’t hear anything from him, never mind. He can’t really do anything to you. Wait, he will want to get rid of you at last, to cast you out. And if he doesn’t, we’ll manage to keep clear of him. But he will. In the end he will want to spew you out as the abominable thing.
“Now I can’t even leave off writing to you.
“But a great deal of us is together, and we can but abide by it, and steer our courses to meet soon. John Thomas says good night to lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.
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D.H. Lawrence
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Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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Meyrick Builders and Roofers
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countries. The United States has a notoriously high infant mortality rate for a rich country—6.1 deaths per thousand live births in 2010. In Finland, by comparison, it is just 2.3. But it turns out that physicians in America, like those in the UK’s Midlands, seem to be far more likely to record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, than as a late miscarriage.
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Tim Harford (The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics)
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Crestacre Chiropractic Clinic. Chiropractor Aldridge, Walsall, Birmingham & West Midlands treating acute and chronic back pain, neck pain, hip pain, headaches & sporting injuries. Our patients travel from Sutton Coldfield, Lichfield, Cannock and surrounding areas providing professional holistic Chiropractor care that can include: Plantar fasciitis treatment, shockwave therapy, Rotator cuff injury treatment, heel spurs treatment, shin splints treatment, ultrasound imaging, tendonitis treatment, trapped nerve treatment, slipped disc treatment, carpal tunnel treatment, gait scanning for lower back pain treatment, ganglion cyst treatment and much more. Open late with appointments to meet your needs.
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Crestacre Chiropractic Clinic
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It was all wrong that this girl should be sitting in this train among these dull, drab-looking people—all wrong that she should be going into the dreary midlands of England… She should be somewhere splendid, not squeezed into the corner of a third-class carriage.
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Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot's Christmas (Hercule Poirot, #20))
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The Prayer-wallah came from one of the Midland towns, but had been working in Lancashire when he enlisted. He was the only real pal I had in India, and there is nothing that we would not have done for each other, but the strange thing is that I have never heard a word from him or about him from that day to this.
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Frank Richards (Old-Soldier Sahib)
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We went to look at Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament which we recognised from the H.P. Sauce bottle. I wondered what brown sauce had in common with the Houses of Parliament. Apparently the recipe was devised in 1895 by a Nottingham grocer called Frederick Garton. He adopted the name H.P. for his sauce when he found out that it was being served in the Houses of Parliament. In 1905 Garton sold his recipe to the Midland Vinegar Company who marketed it widely. Although the company which owns the brand has changed several times and it is now manufactured in the Netherlands, H.P. Sauce remains the most popular British brown sauce to this day.
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Cathy Murray (Cabbage and Semolina: Memories of a 1950s Childhood)
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People from eastern England tended to settle in New England, people from southern England went to Virginia, people from the English Midlands went to Pennsylvania, and people from northern England went to Appalachia. This was all roughly 350 years ago.
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David Brooks (How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen)
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Grace enquires in a whisper who the girl is, and where I met her and adds that Bill is an extremely eligible young man. His father has a big place in the Midlands and a flat in London and his mother is one of the Winkles of Wersh. Grace is a born matchmaker and is never happy unless she is pairing people off, but I am not so reckless; I explain—also in a whisper—that Pinkie is a mere babe and that I am responsible for her, and add that I do not want any complications to arise while she is in my charge.
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D.E. Stevenson (Mrs. Tim Carries On (Mrs. Tim #3))
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Impossible to have any respect when your perspective on the bright and shiny West Midlands Police Service is the small minority of bad apples.
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Rachel McLean (Deadly Reprisal (Detective Zoe Finch #5))
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Sprayworks UK
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Remember too that to me the word myth, like the words fable and fiction, is a technical term in criticism, and the popular sense in which it means something untrue I regard as a debasing of language.
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Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
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R and G Satellite Services
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There’s something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we’re either fighting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we’re taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization.
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Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
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The origin of this most poisonous misunderstanding was in my account in Chapel of riding around with Grandfather in his car one Sunday morning in Midland City, Ohio, when I was a little boy. He, not I, was mocking all organized religions. When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, “You think your dad’s a good chemist? They’re turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?” When we passed a Pentecostal church, he said, “The mental giants in there believe that every word is true in a book put together by a bunch of preachers 300 years after the birth of Christ. I hope you won’t be that dumb about words set in type when you grow up.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Hocus Pocus)
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...most of the parade's attendees clung to a notion of what their town was, what values it embodied, what hopes it carved out, though by 2007 its once-largest employers, a steel tube plant and two plate glass manufacturers, were over twenty years gone and most of the county's small farms had been gobbled up by Smithfield, Syngenta, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many of those residents who had not been born in this country but who'd made their way from Kuala Lumpur or Jordan or Delhi or Honduras waved those flags the hardest when the casket went by.
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Stephen Markley (Ohio)
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Piling Contractor Leicestershire
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earwaxspecialist
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The Halifax-Bank of Scotland merger brought to an end the greatest wave of consolidation in British banking history, wholly reshaping the industry in just a few years. It had begun with NatWest bidding for Legal & General; that caused the Bank of Scotland to make a surprise hostile bid for NatWest which it lost to Royal Bank of Scotland. In the meantime Lloyds bid for Abbey National which then approached Bank of Scotland – which merged with Halifax. It seemed like a great game of musical chairs, with Lloyds, which had earlier lost Midland to HSBC, the one left out.
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Ivan Fallon (Black Horse Ride: The Inside Story of Lloyds and the Banking Crisis)
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Why should I write to the newspapers instead of to the machines themselves, why not summon a monster meeting of machines, place the steam engine in the chair, and hold a council of war?” asked the anonymous “mad correspondent.” “I answer, the time is not yet ripe for this. . . . Our plan is to turn man’s besotted enthusiasm to our own advantage, to make him develop us to the utmost, and find himself enslaved unawares. “My object is to do my humble share towards pointing out what is the ultimatum, the ne plus ultra of perfection in mechanized development,” the writer continued, “even though that end be so far off that only a Darwinian posterity can arrive at it. I therefore venture to suggest that we declare machinery and the general development of the human race to be well and effectually completed when—when—when—Like the woman in white, I had almost committed myself of my secret. Nay, this is telling too much. I must content myself with disclosing something less than the whole. I will give a great step, but not the last. We will say then that a considerable advance has been made in mechanical development, when all men, in all places, without any loss of time, are cognizant through their senses, of all that they desire to be cognizant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge, so that the back country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself—may sit in his own chair in a back country hut and hear the performance of Israel in Ægypt at Exeter Hall—may taste an ice on the Rakaia, which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house Covent garden. Multiply instance ad libitum—this is the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for, and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised.”67 This letter, bearing the stamp of Samuel Butler in style if not in name, was signed “Lunaticus.” One hundred years after Erasmus Darwin gathered his circle of Lunaticks in the English Midlands, a strand of telegraph wire was uncoiled at the antipodes of the earth. Sparked by the transit of a few pulses of electromagnetic code over this embryonic fragment of a net, Samuel Butler foresaw the evolution, perhaps not so far off as he imagined, of that phenomenon, somewhere between mechanism and organism, now manifested as the World Wide Web.
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George Dyson (Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books))
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Wrist Envy Limited
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Park Garage Auto Sales Ltd
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The unknown is just as unknown as the ability to discover the known inside it.
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Ben Midland
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That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imagination insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.
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Anonymous
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Algiz Technology
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The Bosworth Company has been providing midland tx with quality air conditioning, heating, air quality, plumbing and electrical services since 1949.
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Contact Name: Frank Peterson
Address: 2205 W Industrial Ave, Midland, TX, 79701
Phone: (432) 570-5233
Email: sdbbosworthco@gmail.com
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Frank Peterson
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It didn’t matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn’t mattered much for years. It didn’t matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery—or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play—as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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This is how it goes in life: sometimes you’re born with a cleft palette or rickets, like my bow-legged Granddaddy, or a touch short on brains, like my Great Aunt Cal who everyone called ‘Stool.’ Me? I’m a double hitter. In addition to being what folks call “large boned,” I came into this world with homosexual tendencies—though back then I thought of it only as my strange, strong affections for some female friends, having no such notion of “homosexual tendencies” as a thing, at least not in Midland, Texas.
Notions of this nature found footing in me eight months before I ran away to work in the kitchen at Sugarland Prison, when I got a job at the egg store. The egg store was all wood. Wood floors, wood ceiling beams, wood shelves—that rugged, knotty, reddish wood. The simple kind of wood they used to bury folks in before the floods, when rotting coffins popped from the ground like splinters and dead bodies dropped out in maggoty heaps.
The egg store smelled like wood, too, which I liked. That and just the tiniest hint of smoke from Bibby’s metal pork smoker two streets over. I swear he ran that thing day and night, crazy redneck. And that’s where I fell in love for the first time, there in the egg store that smelled like wood and smoked pig fat.
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Tammy Lynne Stoner (Sugar Land)
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He preferred his own judgments and, if the truth were told, his own company, too. That was how he had always been, even as a boy, always by himself, stravaging the fields or the back streets of the Midlands town where he was born, looking for something and never knowing what, hoping to chance on something, anything at all, that would interest or amuse him.
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Benjamin Black (The Silver Swan (Quirke, #2))
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We drove out of London, heading north through the East Midlands and across Yorkshire to Lancashire. I sat in the back with Monro wedged under my seat and slept on and off as a dozen counties went by. Every so often I woke up with the feeling that I was repeating parts of the journey. But then England is much the same all over, I suppose.
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Andrew Michael Hurley (The Loney)
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John Clason
“
Influenciar la bota Adrian C. North, David J. Hargreaves y Jennifer McKendrick, de la Universidad de Leicester, diseñaron un estudio para investigar el poder de «influir en la elección de una bota de vino». En el estudio, llevado a cabo en un mercado de los East Midlands del Reino Unido, se exponía vino francés y vino alemán mientras sonaba música francesa o alemana cerca del expositor.[16] Mientras sonaba música francesa se vendieron cuarenta botellas de vino francés y ocho de vino alemán. En cambio, cuando sonaba música alemana, se vendieron veintidós botellas de vino alemán y doce de francés. Luego, en un cuestionario se preguntaba a los compradores si habían sido conscientes de alguna influencia externa mientras compraban. Cuando se los interrogó con una pregunta abierta, sólo uno mencionó la música como influencia. Cuando se preguntaba concretamente si la música los había influenciado, sólo seis de los 44 compradores reconocieron que sí. Los investigadores interpretaron estos resultados como que la música puede «condicionar conocimientos relacionados y la selección de ciertas causas si coinciden con este conocimiento». De modo que ¡tal vez la música adecuada (u otros factores ambientales) pueda ayudarte a cautivar a la gente! Y si eres propietario de una tienda, es probable que quieras evitar que suenen Shop Around («Compra por ahí») y Walk On By («Pasa de largo») donde los clientes puedan oírlas.
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Guy Kawasaki (El arte de cautivar: Cómo se cambian los corazones, las mentes y las acciones)
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This had once been the northwest of England, the Welsh border, the start of the Midlands—all now drowned in saltwater.
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Adrian J. Walker (The End of the World Running Club: A Dystopian Survival Thriller About Endurance and Redemption)
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She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when the spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as 'Ivanhoe.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
It didn't matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn't mattered much for years. It didn't matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery - or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play - as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.
That was the main reason the people in MIdland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imaginations insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
En cierta ocasión, paseaba con el Abuelo en su coche, un
domingo por la mañana, en Midland City, Ohio. Yo era un niño. El, y no yo, se burlaba de todas las religiones organizadas.
Recuerdo que cuando pasamos frente a una Iglesia Católica, me dijo lo siguiente:
"¿Crees que tu papá es un buen químico? Ahí están convirtiendo galletas saladas en
carne. ¿Puede tu padre hacer eso?"
Cuando pasamos frente a una Iglesia de Pentecostés, afirmó: "Los gigantes mentales
ahí reunidos creen en cada una de las palabras incluidas en un libro compilado por un
montón de predicadores 300 años después del nacimiento de Cristo. Espero que, cuando
crezcas, no serás tan tonto como para creer en todas las palabras impresas.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Hocus Pocus)