Migration Book Quotes

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Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
Graham Chapman (Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Book): Mønti Pythøn Ik Den Hølie Gräilen (Bøk))
I want to take my rightful share of life by force, I want to give lavishly, I want love to flow from my heart, to ripen and bear fruit. There are many horizons that must be visited, fruit that must be plucked, books read, and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand.
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
Have you not noticed that the wild flowers are becoming scarcer every year? It may be that their wise men have told them to depart till man becomes more human. Perhaps they have migrated to heaven.
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he's reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off?
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
Migration is the most natural thing people do, the root of how civilizations, nation-states, and countries were established. The difference, however, is that when white people move, then and now, it’s seen as courageous and necessary, celebrated in history books. Yet when people of color move, legally or illegally, the migration itself is subjected to question of legality. Is it a crime? Will they assimilate? When will they stop?
Jose Antonio Vargas (Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen)
The only sign of war was a cloud of dust migrating from east to west. It looked through the windows, trying to find a way inside, and as it simultaneously thickened and spread, it turned the trail of humans into apparitions. There were no people on the street anymore. They were rumors carrying bags.
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.
Rebecca Solnit (A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland)
Like all empires, the harsh and violent forms of control that have been used on the “wretched of the earth,” have migrated back to the homeland in a time of decay to keep the population in check. The tyranny we have imposed on others is now being imposed on us.
Mumia Abu-Jamal (Murder Incorporated - Dreaming of Empire: Book One (Empire, Genocide, and Manifest Destiny 1))
In my dreams I come face to face with myriad reflections of myself, all unknown and passing strange. They speak unending in languages not my own and walk with companions I have never met, in places my steps have never gone. In my dreams I walk worlds where forests crowd my knees and half the sky is walled ice. Dun herds flow like mud, vast floods tusked and horned surging over the plain, and lo, they are my memories, the migrations of my soul.
Steven Erikson (Memories of Ice (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #3))
Why were the flowers born so beautiful and yet so hapless? Insects can sting, and even the meekest of beasts will fight when brought to bay. The birds whose plumage is sought to deck some bonnet can fly from its pursuer, the furred animal whose coat you covet for your own may hide at your approach. Alas! The only flower known to have wings is the butterfly; all others stand helpless before the destroyer. If they shriek in their death agony their cry never reaches our hardened ears. We are ever brutal to those who love and serve us in silence, but the time may come when, for our cruelty, we shall be deserted by these best friends of ours. Have you not noticed that the wild flowers are becoming scarcer every year? It may be that their wise men have told them to depart till man becomes more human. Perhaps they have migrated to heaven. Much may be said in favor of him who
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
Among the many things that people don't understand about migration is this: No one wants to leave the people they love. Most people don't want to leave the land where they were born, or the soil where their umbilical cord was buried. If they believed that staying would ensure survival, they would never set off on such a treacherous journey.
Rosayra Pablo Cruz (The Book of Rosy: A Mother's Story of Separation at the Border)
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.
Neil Gaiman
Gradually the idea for a book began to take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of 'Anatomy of Restlessness' that would enlarge on Pascal's dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room. The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and, that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers - Buddha, Lao-tse, St Francis - had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way.
Bruce Chatwin (Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989)
This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.
Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality)
We think of agents, traffickers and facilitators as the worst abusers of refugees, but when they set out to extort from their clients, when they cheat them or dispatch them to their deaths, they are only enacting an entrepreneurial version of the disdain which refugees suffer at the hands of far more powerful enemies – those who terrorise them and those who are determined to keep them at arm’s length. Human traffickers are simply vectors of the contempt which exists at the two poles of the asylum seeker’s journey; they take their cue from the attitudes of warlords and dictators, on the one hand, and, on the other, of wealthy states whose citizens have learned to think of generosity as a vice. [from the London Review of Books Vol. 22 No. 3 · 3 February 2000]
Jeremy Harding
Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike? Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?
Rebecca Solnit (A Book of Migrations)
Enterprise architects in the cloud enterprise should depart from prescriptive roles to become cloud advocates in the boardroom and sparring partners in the engine room.
Gregor Hohpe (Cloud Strategy: A Decision-based Approach to Successful Cloud Migration (Architect Elevator Book Series))
Another name for migration is hope.
The Philosopher Orod Bozorg
Imperialism [...] also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world.
Rebecca Solnit (A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland)
To be real on this path you must be humble -- If you look down at others you'll get pushed down the stairs. If your heart goes around on high, you fly far from this path. There's no use hiding it -- What's inside always leaks outside. Even the one with the long white beard, the one who looks so wise -- If he breaks a single heart, why bother going to Mecca? If he has no compassion, what's the point? My heart is the throne of the Beloved, the Beloved the heart's destiny: Whoever breaks another's heart will find no homecoming in this world or any other. The ones who know say very little while the beasts are always speaking volumes; One word is enough for one who knows. If there is any meaning in the holy books, it is this: Whatever is good for you, grant it to others too -- Whoever comes to this earth migrates back; Whoever drinks the wine of love understands what I say -- Yunus, don't look down at the world in scorn -- Keep your eyes fixed on your Beloved's face, then you will not see the bridge on Judgment Day.
Yunus Emre (The Drop That Became the Sea: Lyric Poems)
The only sign of war was a cloud of dust migrating from east to west. It looked through the windows, trying to find a way inside, and as it simultaneously thickened and spread, it turned the trail of humans into apparitions.
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
The several tribes cultivated their own soil just enough to obtain a maintenance from it. But they had no accumulations of wealth, and did not plant the ground; for, being without walls, they were never sure that an invader might not come and despoil them. Living in this manner and knowing that they could anywhere obtain a bare subsistence, they were always ready to migrate; so that they had neither great cities nor any considerable resources. (Book 1 Chapter 2.2)
Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War: Books 1-2)
Sandra L. West and Aberjhani have compiled an encyclopedia that makes an important contribution to our need to know more about one of modern America’s truly significant artistic and cultural movements. It helps us to acknowledge the complexity of African American life at a time when the nation’s culture was taking on a recognizable shape, when race was becoming less of a crushing burden and more of a challenge to progressive people and their ideals, and when cities and their inhabitants symbolized the end of the past and the seductiveness of the new.
Clement Alexander Price (Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File Library of American History))
There are methods that can be used to discover how different species migrate, for example, and then to duplicate such feats technologically if you want to. These methods do not include dissection, for what you learn that way you will not be able to use (deeper and much louder).
Jane Roberts (The “Unknown” Reality, Volume One (A Seth Book) (Seth Books))
I'm not one of those pious types who spend their whole lives hunched on prayer rugs while their eyes and hearts remain closed to the outside world. They read the Qur'an only on the surface. But I read the Qur'an in the budding flowers and migrating birds. I read the Brething Qur'an secreted in human beings. Every man is an open book, each and every one of us a walking Qur'an. The quest for God is ingrained in the hearts of all, be it prostitute or a saint. Love exists within each of us from the moment we are born and waits to be discovered from then on.
Elif Shafak (The Forty Rules of Love)
Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Michael Finkel (The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit)
The difference, however, is that when white people move, then and now, it’s seen as courageous and necessary, celebrated in history books. Yet when people of color move, legally or illegally, the migration itself is subjected to question of legality. Is it a crime? Will they assimilate? When will they stop?
Jose Antonio Vargas (Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen)
Understand that all absurdities only have free rein because the European is no longer able to react. For 70 years, it has been put into his head that his people have subjected Africa to the slave trade, colonization, the spoliation of natural resources and all the miseries of the world, and that as such they owe reparations to the African. The European, ashamed, must beat his culp! My book is a book of political combat, intended to free the European from these false accusations which imprison him in this inhibiting repentance. It is also for me to bring the African to reason, instead of abandonment in the comfort of the irresponsibility that has been instilled in him.
Tigori Ernest Kakou (L'Afrique a desintoxiquer)
The passage that he had found in the book had been riddled with ambiguities and contradictions only reserved for those most valiant in overriding their legalistic forbearance into a necessary frenzy that would allow them to suitably work up a case for one side or the other on how the Law, without the possibility of misinterpretation, states If ABC, then DEF—or for the sake of acknowledging the counterargument first as a courtroom tactic, the case might also be made that the Law states the antithesis of the aforementioned If ABC, then DEF, but gives allowance within reasonable parameters for a provisional XYZ to be granted in exceptional cases. And thus, it was a matter not so much of making one’s case in a clear and logical sense, but one for the lawyers to battle out in the arena of pathos, as it was clearly the emotional pleas that could evoke a sense of sympathy in the courtroom and overturn otherwise painstaking endeavors at using the tools at hand to make pleas based upon incontrovertible facts.
Ashim Shanker (Don't Forget to Breathe (Migrations, Volume I))
The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery’s becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War. What
Nicholas Lemann (The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (Helen Bernstein Book Award))
AMERICANS ARE imbued with the notion that social systems proceed from ideas, because that is what happened at the founding of our country. The relationship of society and ideas can work the other way around, though: people can create social systems first and then invent ideas that will fulfill their need to feel that the world as it exists makes sense.
Nicholas Lemann (The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (Helen Bernstein Book Award))
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me over twenty years before digital books showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old : there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.
Neil Gaiman (Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World)
One of the West's singular migrations--from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley--is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read...
Gerald Haslam (The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland (A Centennial Book))
Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as “stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks” or “trying to act like a white person.”18 Sixty-six were killed after being accused of “insult to a white person.”19 One was killed for stealing seventy-five cents.20 Like the cotton growing in the field, violence had become so much a part of the landscape that “perhaps most of the southern black population had witnessed a lynching in their own communities or knew people who had,” wrote the historian Herbert Shapiro.21 “All blacks lived with the reality that no black individual was completely safe from lynching.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
Matthew Rose Sorenson is the English son of a half-Danish, half-Scottish father and a Ghanaian mother. He originally studied mathematics, but his interest soon migrated (via the philosophy of mathematics and the history of ideas) to his current field of study: transgressive thinking. He is writing a book about Laurence Arne-Sayles, a man who transgressed against science, against reason and against law.
Susanna Clarke (Piranesi)
Dallas pointed out to me once that there is a world of difference between being busy and being hurried. Being busy is an outward condition, a condition of the body. It occurs when we have many things to do. Busy-ness is inevitable in modern culture. If you are alive today in North America, you are a busy person. There are limits to how much busy-ness we can tolerate, so we wisely find ways to slow down whenever we can. We take vacations, we sit in a La-Z-Boy® with a good book, we enjoy a leisurely meal with friends. By itself, busy-ness is not lethal. Being hurried is an inner condition, a condition of the soul. It means to be so preoccupied with myself and my life that I am unable to be fully present with God, with myself, and with other people. I am unable to occupy this present moment. Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives. Note the differences between the two: Busy Hurried A full schedule Preoccupied Many activities Unable to be fully present An outward condition An inner condition of the soul Physically demanding Spiritually draining Reminds me I need God Causes me to be unavailable to God I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul. I cannot rest in God with a hurried soul.
John Ortberg (Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You)
J.K. watches a storm rage into the crimson afternoon. The sky is electric. Rain whips her bare arms and legs. Dustbins are hauled into the air, caught on the wind’s curve. Bags and pillowcase unpacked for a while, toothbrush, perfume, books, a little pile of yellow feathers, J.K. knows she too is caught in the wind. She is Europe’s eerie child, and she is part of the storm." (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)
Deborah Levy
The depopulation of rural America at the time, accelerated by the technological revolution that was rendering farm labor superfluous, was one of the most harrowing and large-scale demographic developments of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Because relatively few American officials attended to the problems of these people in the 1950s, the mass migrations set the stage for social and racial dynamite that exploded in the cities after 1965.73
James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.
Henry David Thoreau
The juggler seemed worried. "Throw it a book," he said. I threw it a book, and it tore into it, like a cat ripping a small animal apart; and while the creature ate its book the juggler pushed the door open. He nearly fell into a deep chasm on the other side. "Not a disaster," he said, as if he was trying to convince himself. "We need more books. Big books." It didn't seem like a good time for reading, but I pulled two huge old books off the shelf in the corner and carried them over to him. He took one, but didn't read it. He told it what a bad book it was and threw it on the ground. The book bounced in the air and hung there quivering, and the juggler man jumped onto it and began to float away. "As long as they think you don't like them," said the juggler, "they migrate back to the library. And we get a free ride." I rode next to him on my book, and we crossed the chasm safely. The books floated away and I waved them good-bye.
Neil Gaiman (MirrorMask)
As we mine out the landfills (at least they left us a lot of plastic to reuse; that was thoughtful) and burrow into basements and archives seeking the books that our ancestors did not burn to survive winters, you feel it sometimes, rage filling you like an updraft of hot air from a fire, lifting you from the shoulders or blowing through you like a tornado—rage that we missed it, missed it all, and rage at those who got to have it in the specific way that took it from us.
Premee Mohamed (The Annual Migration of Clouds (The Annual Migration of Clouds, #1))
Like a Buddhist master, Rheginos’ teacher, himself anonymous, goes on to explain that ordinary human existence is spiritual death. But the resurrection is the moment of enlightenment: “It is … the revealing of what truly exists … and a migration (metabolē—change, transition) into newness.”45 Whoever grasps this becomes spiritually alive. This means, he declares, that you can be “resurrected from the dead” right now: “Are you—the real you—mere corruption? … Why do you not examine your own self, and see that you have arisen?
Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books))
Even though this book examines a singular period of history, it reveals the manifold differences and conflicts that exist within even a small segment of one city's population. As the stories of "hot" and "cold" war experiences show, to label all the people of a country or culture as the same is a folly with potentially global consequences. This alone is a valuable lesson of the Shanghai exodus, a simple insight that bears repeating, especially when migrants and refugees everywhere are still often painted in one dismissive stroke.
Helen Zia (Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution)
The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period.
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
Robert Frost at Eighty" I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known. I would like to find them. They are not on the greying paper of old books or chanted on obscure lips. They are not in the language of mermaids or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing. They run like torn threads along paving stones. They are cracked as the skull of an old man. They stir in the mirror at fifty, at eighty. My ear keeps trying to hear them but the seafront is cold. The tide moves in. They migrate like crows at a cricket ground. They knock at the door when I am out. I have done with craft. How can I front ghosts with cleverness, the slick glide of paradox and rhyme that transforms prejudice to brittle gems of seeming wisdom? Though I bury all I own or hold close though my skin outlives the trees though the lines fall shattering the stone I cannot catch them. They have the lilting accent of a house I saw but never entered. They are the sounds a child hears – the water, the afternoon, the sky. I watch them now trickling through the open mirror. Sometimes, but almost never we touch what we desire.
Peter Boyle
Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust the Process” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy. Once this became clear to me, I began telling people that the phrase was meaningless. I told our staff that it had become a crutch that was distracting us from engaging, in a meaningful way, with our problems. We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool—a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals. Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face of it, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, we don’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase. Once you’re aware of the suitcase/handle problem, you’ll see it everywhere. People glom onto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning. Advertisers look for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself. Companies constantly tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this means they will make only top-shelf products. Words like quality and excellence are misapplied so relentlessly that they border on meaningless. Managers scour books and magazines looking for greater understanding but settle instead for adopting a new terminology, thinking that using fresh words will bring them closer to their goals. When someone comes up with a phrase that sticks, it becomes a meme, which migrates around even as it disconnects from its original meaning. To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
Community is also under assault because we’ve outsourced care. As Peter Block and John McKnight argue in their book, The Abundant Community, a lot of the roles that used to be done in community have migrated to the marketplace or the state. Mental well-being is now the job of the therapist. Physical health is now the job of the hospital. Education is the job of the school system. The problem with systems, Block and McKnight argue, is that they depersonalize. These organizations have to operate at scale, so everything has to be standardized. Everything has to follow rules. “The purpose of management is to create a world that is repeatable,” they write. But people are never the same.
David Brooks (The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life)
The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta. Though old, the hotel is marvelously kept up and, in certain portions, even modernized. Its business now is mainly conventions and, in the summer, tours, but there is still a thin migration of old clients, ancient couples and remnants of families who ask for certain rooms when they come and sometimes certain maids. For Nabokov, a man who rode as a child on the great European express trains, who had private tutors, estates, and inherited millions which disappeared in the Russian revolution, this is a return to his sources. It is a place to retire to, with Visconti's Mahler and the long-dead figures of La Belle Epoque, Edward VII, d'Annunzio, the munitions kings, where all stroll by the lake and play miniature golf, home at last.
James Salter
Thanks in part to the rapid mechanization of cotton production in the early 1940s, which ultimately threw millions of farm laborers out of work, and in part to the opening up of industrial employment in the North during the wartime boom, roughly a million blacks (along with even more whites) moved from the South during the 1940s. Another 1.5 million Negroes left the South in the 1950s. This was a massive migration in so short a time—one of the most significant demographic shifts in American history—and it was often agonizingly stressful.22 The black novelist Ralph Ellison wrote in 1952 of the hordes of blacks who "shot up from the South into the busy city like wild jacks-in-the-box broken loose from our springs—so sudden that our gait becomes like that of deep-sea divers suffering from the bends."23
James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
Most people have heard of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who led India to independence from British rule. His life has been memorialized in books and film, and he is regarded as one of the great men in history. But did you know Gandhi did not start out as a great hero? He was born into a middle-class family. He had low self-esteem, and that made him reluctant to interact with others. He wasn’t a very good student, either, and he struggled just to finish high school. His first attempt at higher education ended in five months. His parents decided to send him to England to finish his education, hoping the new environment would motivate him. Gandhi became a lawyer. The problem when he returned to India was that he didn’t know much about Indian law and had trouble finding clients. So he migrated to South Africa and got a job as a clerk. Gandhi’s life changed one day while riding on a train in South Africa in the first-class section. Because of his dark skin, he was forced to move to a freight car. He refused, and they kicked him off the train. It was then he realized he was afraid of challenging authority, but that he suddenly wanted to help others overcome discrimination if he could. He created a new vision for himself that had value and purpose. He saw value in helping people free themselves from discrimination and injustice. He discovered purpose in life where none had existed previously, and that sense of purpose pulled him forward and motivated him to do what best-selling author and motivational speaker Andy Andrews calls “persist without exception.” His purpose and value turned him into the winner he was born to be,
Zig Ziglar (Born to Win: Find Your Success Code)
consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support. Wilson’s
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
The ghostly movement of the Parisian tribes. Watch the crowd rushing out in the (cold and rainy) spring night towards the urban deserts of La Villette to attend the inaugural cult of the Biennale and then, when that is ended, flowing back in great waves towards the inauguration of the Book Fair at the Grand Palais, crossing Paris in a tide of two thousand people (always the same ones) who, after having communed in fairground thronging and bookish vanity will meet up again around midnight at the end of a third collective migration, in the small number of Montparnasse restaurants marked with the sign of the tribe. Preceded perhaps by some minister or other, followed as ever by a horde of journalists. You can mark out the trajectory of this fauna culturalis every evening in advance, working from the order of the invitations, as in days gone by you could follow popular gatherings from place to place with certainty.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
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.
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
Remember that craze a few years back in the BookWorld for sending chain letters? Receive a letter and send one on to ten friends? Well, someone has been overenthusiastic with the letter U—I’ve got a report here from the Text Sea Environmental Protection Agency saying that reserves of the letter U have reached dangerously low levels—we need to decrease consumption until stocks are brought back up. Any suggestions?” “How about using a lower-case n upside down?” said Benedict. “We tried that with M and W during the great M Migration of ’62; it never worked.” “How about respelling what, what?” suggested King Pellinore, stroking his large white mustache. “Any word with the our ending could be spelt or, don’tchaknow.” “Like neighbor instead of neighbour?” “It’s a good idea,” put in Snell. “Labor, valor, flavor, harbor—there must be hundreds. If we confine it to one geographical area, we can claim it as a local spelling idiosyncrasy.
Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots (Thursday Next, #3))
That seems reasonable,” I agreed. “My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already … and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as there’s a digital world—a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine—for it to colonize when it gets there. And that’s why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life.” There was a long, drawn-out pause. “Look,” Teller finally said, lowering his voice to a raspy whisper, “may I suggest that instead of explaining this, which would be hard … you write a science-fiction book about it.” “Probably someone has,” I said. “Probably,” answered Teller, “someone has not.
George Dyson (Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe)
Harold did not miss a beat. “Of course our government is self-serving. I don’t think that there is any difference between our government and other governments. They are always self-serving.” “Then you don’t even think about the fact that Herr Hitler can say what he wants, but that we citizens are in jeopardy if we don’t agree with him.” Herr Veth wanted to turn this conversation into a lesson. Harold showed that he was indeed already too long in the rain. “No Herr Veth, Herr Hitler does not say what he wants. He is only taking measures to assure that we are building an eternal empire. It will last at least a 1,000 years because we will eradicate the mentally ill by not permitting them to reproduce and also by sterilizing their roots. We will also abolish any vagrants and quacks, regardless of their faith, by sending them to labor camps. If any nonproductive person does not like our restraints they are free to migrate to other countries, which will suffer by this fact and therefore will never be of any competition to our disciplined nation.
Horst Christian (Children to a Degree: Growing Up Under the Third Reich: Book 1)
One has to imagine the impact of Paddy on an old count from eastern Europe, barely able to live off his much-diminished lands and keep the roof on a house stocked with paintings and furniture that harked back to better days. His children might take a certain pride in their ancient lineage, but they also made it clear that the world had moved on and they planned to move with it. Then a scruffy young Englishman with a rucksack turns up on the doorstep, recommended by a friend. he is polite, cheerful, and cannot hear enough about the family history. He pores over the books and albums in the library, and asks a thousand questions about the princely rulers, dynastic marriages, wars and revolts and waves of migration that shaped this part of the world. He wants to hear about the family portraits too, and begs the Count to remember the songs the peasants used to sing when he was a child. Instead of feeling like a useless fragment of a broken empire, the Count is transformed. This young Englishman has made him realize that he is part of living history, a link in an unbroken chain going back to Charlemagne and beyond.
Artemis Cooper (Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure)
It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.10 A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book Crowds and Power, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support. Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities.
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE LEMBA       One of the most outstanding cases of  Black diaspora Jewry is the case of the Lemba of southern Africa. The Lemba have long claimed that they are Jews or Israelites who migrated to Yemen and from there to Africa as traders. Amazingly, DNA evidence has backed the Lemba claim of Jewish ancestry.   Today, the Lemba can be found in southern Africa countries like Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Many of their customs are similar to Jews such as the wearing of  yarmulke-like skull cups and observing kosher laws such as the requirement not to eat pork. Interestingly they also avoid eating rabbits, scaleless fish, hares and carrion. In short, the Lemba follow the requirements in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Old Testament.     The Lemba claim that about 2500 years ago, their ancestors left Judea for Yemen. Only males are said to have sailed to Africa by boat. The migrants took local wives for themselves. They built a city in Yemen called Sena. From Sena they traveled to Africa where they dispersed. Some remained in East Africa and others traveled to southern Africa. Lemba women do not have 'Semitic' admixture, and this is in line with their oral history.     Professor Tudor Vernon Parfitt, a professor of Jewish Studies then at the University of London, spent several months among the Lemba. He later travelled to Yemen and to his
Aylmer Von Fleischer (The Black Hebrews and the Black Christ)
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.
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
Undoubtedly, my dear Dick. Just note the progress of events: consider the migrations of races, and you will arrive at the same conclusion assuredly. Asia was the first nurse of the world, was she not? For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil where the golden harvests sung by Homer had flourished, her children abandoned her exhausted and barren bosom. You next see them precipitating themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to die out; her productive powers are diminishing every day. Those new diseases that annually attack the products of the soil, those defective crops, those insufficient resources, are all signs of a vitality that is rapidly wearing out and of an approaching exhaustion. Thus, we already see the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America, as a source of help, not inexhaustible indeed, but not yet exhausted. In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through having too fully produced what had been demanded of it. Where two harvests bloomed every year, hardly one will be gathered from a soil completely drained of its strength. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast. Those climates now so fatal to strangers will be purified by cultivation and by drainage of the soil, and those scattered water supplies will be gathered into one common bed to form an artery of navigation. Then this country over which we are now passing, more fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest, will become some grand realm where more astonishing discoveries than steam and electricity will be brought to light.
Jules Verne (Jules Verne: The Extraordinary Voyages Collection (The Greatest Writers of All Time Book 42))
Many real-world Northwestern endonyms have European origins, such as “Portland,” “Victoria,” “Bellingham,” and “Richland.” To address this phenomenon while also contributing a sense of the fantastic, I chose to utilize a forgotten nineteenth century European artificial language as a source. Volapük is clumsy and awkward, but shares a relationship with English vocabulary (upon which it is based) that I was able to exploit. In my fictional universe, that relationship is swapped, and English (or rather, “Vendelabodish”) words derive from Volapük (“Valütapük”). This turns Volapük into an ancient Latin-like speech, offering texture to a fictional history of the colonizers of my fictional planets. Does one have to understand ancient Rome and medieval Europe and America’s Thirteen Colonies to understand the modern Pacific Northwest? Nah. But exploring the character and motivations of a migrating, imperial culture certainly sets the stage for explaining a modernist backlash against the atrocities that inevitably come with colonization.             The vocabulary of Volapük has also given flavor that is appropriate, I feel, to the quasi-North American setting. While high fantasy worlds seem to be built with pillars of European fairy tales, the universe of Geoduck Street is intentionally built with logs of North American tall tales. Tolkien could wax poetic about the aesthetic beauty of his Elvish words all he wanted, since aesthetic beauty fits the mold of fairies and shimmering palaces, but Geoduck Street needed a “whopper-spinning” approach to artificial language that would make a flapjack-eating Paul Bunyan proud. A prominent case in point: in this fictional universe, the word “yagalöp” forms the etymological root of “jackalope.” “Yag,” in the original nineteenth century iteration of Volapük, means “hunting,” while “löp” means “summit.” Combining them together makes them “the summit of hunting.” How could a jackalope not be a point of pride among hunting trophies?
Sylvester Olson (A Detective from Geoduck Street (The Matter of Cascadia Book 1))
Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard E. Byrd. Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih. It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates, comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermit-only chat groups. My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time. Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.
Michael Finkel (The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit)
At the time your book was written, the full story of the monarch migration was unknown to humanity." "When did they find it out?" Preston asked. The answer, to Dellarobia's astonishment, was within Ovid's lifetime. He had been just a bit older than Preston when the discovery was announced in the National Geographic, in 1976. A Canadian scientist chased the mystery his whole life, devising a tag that would stick to butterfly wings, recruiting volunteers to help track them, losing the trail many times. And then one winter's day, as an old man on shaky legs, he climbed a mountain in Michoacan to see what must have looked like his dream of heaven... Ovid could still quote passages of the article from memory: They carpeted the ground in their tremulous legions. He said he remembered exactly where he was when he read that article, and how he felt. "Where were you?" "Outside the post office, sitting on a lobster crate. I spent a lot of Saturdays there. My mother let me read the magazines before they went to their subscribers. I was so excited by the photos in that article, I ran all the way down Crown Street, all the way to West End and out a sandy road called Fortuna to the sea. I must have picked up a stick somewhere, because I remember jumping up and whacking every branch I passed, leaving a trail of flying leaves. When I got to the sea I didn't know what to do, so I threw the stick in Perseverance Bay and ran back. It was the happiest day of my life." Dellarobia wanted, of course, to know why. "Why," he repeated, thinking about it. "It was just like any schoolboy. I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.
Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behavior)
1They raised me up into a certain place, where there was the appearance of a burning fire; and when they pleased they assumed the likeness of men. 2They carried me to a lofty spot, to a mountain, the top of which reach to heaven. 3And I beheld the receptacles of light and of thunder at the extremities of the place, where it was deepest. There was a bow of fire, and arrows in their quiver, a sword of fire, and every species of lightning. 4Then they elevated me to a babbling stream, and to a fire in the west, which received all the setting of the sun. I came to a river of fire, which flowed like water, and emptied itself into the great sea westwards. 5I saw every large river, until I arrived at the great darkness. I went to where all of flesh migrate; and I beheld the mountains of the gloom which constitutes winter, and the place from which issues the water in every abyss. 6I saw also the mouths of all the rivers in the world, and the mouths of the deep.
Enoch (The Book of Enoch)
Giannis Antetokounmpo was born in Athens, Greece on December 6, 1994, to Charles and Veronica Antetokounmpo, who migrated from Nigeria all the way to Greece. Charles was a former soccer player while Veronica was a high-jumper. However, both Charles and Veronica were illegal immigrants to Greece. As such, Giannis and two of his other brothers, who were also born in Greece, had no citizenship and were neither Nigerian nor Greek.
Clayton Geoffreys (Giannis Antetokounmpo: The Inspiring Story of One of Basketball's Rising Superstars (Basketball Biography Books))
Most living entities and systems on this planet obviously do not live by the Western human clock (though some, like the crows who memorize a city's daily garbage truck route, do of course adapt to the timing of human activities). To watch a brown creeper as it inches up and down, peering into crevices and extracting bugs with its little dentist beak, is thus a way of catching a ride out of the grid and toward a time sense so different that it is barely imaginable to us. In Jennifer Ackerman's book The Bird Way, I learned that the male black manakin, a South American songbird, can do somersaults so fast that a human can see them only in slowed-down video. Some birdsong contains notes that are sung too quickly or are too high-pitched for us to hear. Veeries, a species related to the American robin, can predict hurricanes months in advance and adjust their migration route accordingly, and no one currently knows how. Birds own bodies and their movements are an entanglement of time and space: If a loon is in the higher latitudes, it's summer, and the bird is mostly black with a striking pattern of white stripes. If the same loon is near my studio in Oakland, it's winter, and the bird is almost unrecognizably different, a dull grayish brown.
Jenny Odell (Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock)
We expect the cybereconomy to evolve through several stages. 1. The most primitive manifestations of the Information Age involve the Net simply as an information medium to facilitate what are otherwise ordinary industrial-era transactions. At this point, the Net is no more than an exotic delivery system for catalogues. Virtual Vineyards, for example, one of the first cybermerchants, simply sells wine from a page on the World Wide Web. Such transactions are not yet directly subversive of the old institutions. They employ industrial currency, and take place within identifiable jurisdictions. These uses of the Internet have little such megapolitical impact. 2. An intermediate stage of Internet commerce will employ information technology in ways that would have been impossible in the industrial era, such as in long-distance accounting or medical diagnosis. More examples of these new applications of advanced computational power are spelled out below. The second stage of Net commerce will still function within the old institutional framework, employing national currencies and submitting to the jurisdiction of nation-states. The merchants who employ the Net for sales will not yet employ it to bank their profits, only to earn revenues. These profits made on Internet transactions will still be subject to taxation. 3. A more advanced stage will mark the transition to true cybercommerce. Not only will transactions occur over the Net, but they will migrate outside the jurisdiction of nation-states. Payment will be rendered in cybercurrency. Profits will be booked in cyberbanks. Investments will be made in cyberbrokerages. Many transactions will not be subject to taxation. At this stage, cybercommerce will begin to have significant megapolitical consequences of the kind we have already outlined. The powers of governments over traditional areas of the economy will be transformed by the new logic of the Net. Extraterritorial regulatory power will collapse. Jurisdictions will devolve. The structure of firms will change, and so will the nature of work and employment.
James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
Indeed, both life and time-receptivity—in their intimacy and congenitality—can be mutually defined as nothing but self-interments.1 Only by retreating inwards, into fluency with its own system-states, does the organism progressively separate itself from the causal absolutism of the surrounding milieu, obtaining ever more functional leeway and behavioural lability via increasing delamination from its immediate environs. (This is why the CNS has long been seen as the organ of individuation.) The ability to do things is arrived at in this way: this goes for the capacity to digest the outside world as much as the possibility of motile—rather than sessile—modes of life within it. Locomotive autonomy—across all relevant modalities, whether bioenergetic or biomechanical—is bequeathed by potentiating implosivity. First emerging as the outpouching of a complexifying gut, then as the innervating escape into the organism’s own CNS-simulation, and finally as the deposition of an empowering yet finitude-entrenching recognitive encasement, evolution’s ongoing investment into its own systemic insularity migrates outwards from gastronomic, to phaneroscopic, to juridical domains—all in step with incremental chronognostic range.
Thomas Moynihan (Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (Urbanomic / Mono Book 7))
I was ten years old. I packed a satchel filled only with books and I heaved it over my shoulder and set off, just briefly, just for just to nose about, a wee adventure, nothing more.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
Well, after all, in what language do we talk with ourselves and others? I like the language of conversational speech: it’s unencumbered, it lacks any external, imposed burdens. Everything rambles in discursive, exuberant style: syntax, intonation, accents – and feeling is reconstructed precisely. What I track is the feeling, not the event. The way our feelings have developed, not the events. Perhaps what I do is similar to the work of a historian, but I am a historian of the untraceable. What happens to great events? They migrate into history, while the little ones, the ones that are most important for the little person, disappear without a trace. Today one boy (so frail and sickly that he didn’t look much like a soldier) told me how strange and at the same time exhilarating it feels to kill together. And how terrifying it is to shoot someone. Is that really going to go down in history? I strive desperately (from book to book) to do one and the same thing – reduce history to the human being.
Svetlana Alexievich
We had no money, but we went often to the library. According to Mam, inside the pages of a novel lived the only beauty offered up by the world. Mam would set the table with plate, cup, and book. We’d read through meals, while she bathed me, while we lay shivering in our beds, listening to the scream of wind through the cracked windows. We’d read while we balanced on the low rock walls that Seamus Heaney made famous in his poetry. A way to leave without really leaving.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The
Michael Finkel (The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit)
Migration from Eastern to Western Europe under Cold War conditions was restricted, because socialist states generally did not allow emigration, and the—not only metaphorical—Iron Curtain provided a very real obstacle to mobility. The main legal way to permanently emigrate from one’s homeland was through what this book refers to as ethnically coded family reunification, available mainly for citizens identified as Germans and Jews. In the highly regulated and strictly supervised East–West migration system that had been established by the early 1960s, legal emigration followed a prestructured path that led from the official exit gate of the country of origin to the official external immigration gate of the receiving country, passing through certain fixed routes and nodal points on the way. As long as people went through these official channels, control procedures were relatively simple. As a rule, an exit visa entitling its holder to enter Germany or Israel signaled to the receiving state that the sending state considered the migrant either German or Jewish.
Jannis Panagiotidis (The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany)
The German Jews migrating to central and eastern Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were already specialized in moneylending. At the same time, the backwardness of central and eastern Europe brought them more opportunities to engage in a wider spectrum of urban high-skill occupations, including crafts and trade.
Maristella Botticini (The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 42))
As I wrote this book, though, I realized that m joy at these two inheritances came at other people’s expense; that the land that allowed the Chickasaws to become two of the wealthiest and most influential tribes in Oklahoma came from other Native peoples who previously had lived upon it; that the land that allowed my family and hundreds of others in Indian Territory to become Black property owners was part of the broader theft of Indian land that also led to the loss of much Native sovereignty, culture, and language. I characterize the different protagonists that populate my book as settlers because my perspective as their descendant has helped me to see how their freedoms and opportunities were begotten by impeding the freedoms and opportunities of others. The sources I’ve analyzed demonstrate that my ancestors’ involvement and investment in this settler colonial process made their lives subtly easier and helped them survive. They were in difficult circumstances—forced migrations across oceans and across lands—but they were not forced to use the specific language and actions they chose. Though they were limited by their circumstances, as we all are, they actively chose their path in the midst of a myriad of difficult decisions. I few looked at just this, would it not be clear? Would we not consider them settlers? Reconciling divergent histories has granted me another way of looking at these peoples and places: a as heightened example of how oppressed people can oppress other people—no matter how trite that may seem.
Alaina E. Roberts (I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land)
The biggest challenge for communicators today is found in the story of the loneliest whale in the world. This whale—nicknamed Blue 52 by scientists in the early nineties—was discovered traversing the seas and singing on a unique frequency. Year after year, its migration pathway took it across several thousand miles but, no matter how many signals it sent out, those signals failed to evoke a response from any of its own kind.
Anaik Alcasas (Sending Signals: Amplify the Reach, Resonance and Results of Your Ideas)
Page 550: CG Darwin—grandson of the great Charles—argued in The Next Million Years (1978), an important book, that if humankind as a whole comprised two subtypes, Homo contracipiens (contraceptive practitioners) and Homo progenitivus (non- or lower-practitioners), then the second type would inevitable come to dominate, and finally exclude, the first. Once H. progenitivus had ousted H. contracipiens, the group would increase with even greater intensity until it hit some barrier; an effective population control policy; lack of food or some other basic resource.
Jack Parsons (Human Population Competition: A Study of the Pursuit of Power Through Numbers (Edwin Mellen Press Symposium Series))
I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
autumn Look, the migrating birds Are leaving us, small souls That brave three thousand miles To Africa, to warmth; They populate the sky, They take the last Attributes of summer; They are gone, and now The winds will have them, Their journey starts In the knowledge that this, Like the seasons, has to be. Autumn is a time of reflection; Of the making of lists, Of books to be read now That the nights are drawing in; Of letters to be written, Friends to be remembered, The things they said To be thought about further. Perhaps, in short, to think About what it is that makes This life so precious Of what it is that breaks the heart.
Alexander McCall Smith (In a Time of Distance: and Other Poems)
Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
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. When
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
Food, like language, is always in motion, propelled by the same events that fill our history books. Wars, advances in science and technology, and shifting patterns of migration and commerce are continuously shaping and reshaping the foods that sustain us.
Jane Ziegelman (A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression)
Now, in this generation, the entirety of the globe is facing an ideological and socio-political collapse on a grand scale. This is by design, it is man-made. The outcome is still carefully assessed with little room for error or improvement. There is only one flaw: the divine element in humanity. Our sentient consciousness bestows with the capacity to support the freedom of thought and movement with the inherent awareness that both come at a cost. When we speak our minds, we are going to offend and be offended. There are no safe spaces in conversation. People will say things we don't like. We have to accept this is the price of freedom of speech. When we allow for freedom of movement during times of war, we have to accept that we are inviting in enemies as well as refugees, especially when we don't bother to discern which is which. Even the best, most selfless intentions can pave the way to our downfall...
Anita B. Sulser (We Are One (Light Is... Book 1))
Jeremy Corbyns actions have led a significant percentage of his followers to believe that his words serve a higher purpose than the complete religious or social indoctrination of the British people. He deliberately disregards the historical fact that multiculturalism only works when both parties are willing to find a compromise they can live with. When multiculturalism becomes a matter of sacrificing your way of life to accommodate mass migration, it paves the way to genocide.
Anita B. Sulser (We Are One (Light Is... Book 1))
Perhaps they had tried to migrate in the past but had found either their winter habitat destroyed or the path so fragmented and fraught with danger that it made more sense—to these few birds—to ignore the tuggings of the stars and seasons and instead to try to carve out new lives, new ways of being, even in such a stark and severe landscape: or rather, in a stark and severe period—knowing that lushness and bounty were still retained with that landscape, that it was only a phase, that better days would come. That in fact (the snipe knowing these things with their blood, ten million years in the world) the austere times were the very thing, the very imbalance, that would summon the resurrection of that frozen richness within the soil—if indeed that richness, that magic, that hope, did still exist beneath the ice and snow. Spring would come like its own green fire, if only the injured ones could hold on. And
Lex Williford (The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 50 North American Stories Since 1970 (Touchstone Books (Paperback)))
The general public typically traces the death of Jim Crow to Brown v. Board of Education, although the institution was showing signs of weakness years before. By 1945, a growing number of whites in the North had concluded that the Jim Crow system would have to be modified, if not entirely overthrown. This consensus was due to a number of factors, including the increased political factor of blacks due to migration to the North and the growing membership and influence of the NAACP, particularly its highly successful legal campaign challenging Jim Crow laws in federal courts. Far more important in the view of many scholars, however, is the influence of World War II. The blatant contradiction between the country's opposition to the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and the continued existence of a racial caste system in the United States was proving embarrassing, severely damaging the nation's credibility as leader of the "free world." There was also increased concern that, without greater equality for African Americans, blacks would become susceptible to communist influence, given Russia's commitment to both racial and economic equality. In Gunnar Myrdal's highly influential book The American Dilemma, published in 1944, Myrdal made a passionate plea for integration based on the theory that the inherent contradiction between the "American Creed" of freedom and equality and the treatment of African Americans was not only immoral and profoundly unjust, but was also against the economic and foreign-policy interests of the United States.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
In his groundbreaking book Guns, Germs, and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond poses the question: Why did Old World diseases devastate the New World and not the other way around? Why did disease move in only one direction?* The answer lies in how the lives of Old World and New World people diverged after that cross-continental migration more than fifteen thousand years ago.
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
Issues such as universal freedom of migration, international security, terrorism, internet policing, climate crisis, ecological sustainability, stabilizing international finance and banking, global poverty, basic material security, basic income, labor rights, human and animal rights all share one fundamental trait: they are transnational by nature.
Hanzi Freinacht (The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One)
In combination, these political and economic forces suggest that globalization, at least of the post-Columbus kind, is simply not inevitable. In this book – a deliberate mixture of economics, history, geography and political philosophy – I make six key claims: •First, economic progress that reaches beyond borders is not, in any way, an inescapable truth. Globalization can all too easily go into reverse. •Second, technology can both enable globalization and destroy it. •Third, economic development that reduces inequality between nation states but appears to increase it within those states inevitably creates a tension between a desire for overall gains in global living standards and a yearning for economic and social stability at home. •Fourth, the desire for domestic stability may be undermined by huge twenty-first-century migration flows. •Fifth, the international institutions that have helped govern globalization’s advance are losing their credibility: rightly or wrongly, globalization is increasingly seen to work for the few, not the many. Creating new twenty-first-century institutions to combat this perception will not be easy, however, particularly given the potential clash in values between what might be described as Western democracies and Eastern autocracies. •Sixth (and as the Western powers are belatedly beginning to recognize), there is more than one version of globalization. As US relative economic power declines, so other nascent superpowers will be looking to reshape the world around them in ways that serve their own interests and reflect their own histories. If the Cold War was ultimately a binary rivalry, the twenty-first century is likely to see multiple rivalries, closer in nature to the imperial disputes of the nineteenth century. Indeed, President Xi’s speech in Davos in January 2017 only served to reinforce the sense that globalization is up for grabs.
Stephen D. King (Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History)
Mormon-black relations. This work’s central thesis was that two factors drove Brigham Young to implement the Church’s black ban by 1852. Most important was a developing sense of Mormon “whiteness” wherein Latter-day Saints identified themselves as a divinely “chosen” people, while conversely labeling blacks a biblically cursed race, given their skin color and alleged descent from the accursed biblical counter-figures of Cain, Ham, and Canaan. Further motivating Young was his embrace of black slavery, which he considered divinely sanctioned. Thus as Utah Territorial Governor he called for its legalization—this occurring in February 1852, shortly following Mormon migration to the Great Basin. Utah became the only western territory to approve slavery. Young in calling for this statute claimed a divinely sanctioned link between black servitude and black priesthood denial—the latter practice made public for the first time in his 1852 statement calling for black slavery. The dissertation also drew a number of conclusions relative to the perpetuation of the black priesthood and temple ban. The ban was firmly established by the time of Brigham Young’s death in 1877, given that the Mormon leader repeatedly affirmed its divine legitimacy over the previous quarter century. Further assuring perpetuation of the ban was official LDS embrace of the historical myth that Joseph Smith established the restriction. Such mythmaking received scriptural justification through canonization of the Pearl of Great Price in 1880, a work consisting of the Books of Moses and Abraham. All such developments made the subordinate status of Mormon blacks virtually “irreversible by 1880,” enabling the ban to continue unchanged into the mid-1970s.13
Newell G. Bringhurst (Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.)
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Anonymous
order a bottle of wine, drink a toast to his wife’s pregnancy, and forget all about Jackson for a few hours. Instead, he paid his bill and headed out. The warrant for Logjam was a month old and no dealer could stay out of sight much longer than that before his customers migrated to a new supplier. Logjam would have resurfaced by now. The first place he visited was a washout. So was the second. He moved on to a zydeco joint. It stank of flat beer and stale smoke. The customers paid him little heed as he nursed a Canadian Club and ginger at the bar. He hadn’t long to wait until he spotted who held the concession. The bartender handed three customers a complimentary book of matches each as he set down their drinks. Two of them already had cigarettes lit, their lighters squared neatly on top of their cigarette packets. Val called him over. “I’m looking for a friend of mine.” The man eyeballed him. “A guy like you has no friends.” “His name’s Logjam. Have you seen him recently?” The bartender wiped the zinc counter with a sponge cloth. “Never heard of him. Does he come in here?” Val set his shield on the bar. “Have you
A.J. Davidson (An Evil Shadow (Val Bosanquet Mystery #1))
The problem of rapidly evolving technologies or “digital migration” was rather alarmingly illustrated in England in the 1980s with a considerably larger amount of information. Actually, it began in 1086 with the Domesday Book. The first public record ever made in England, the Domesday Book was instigated by William the Conqueror, who wished to take a census of his people and, more specifically, their possessions.
Christine Kenneally (The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures)
Perhaps the most telling criticism of suburban migration focused on an expanding racial divide between the heavily white suburbs and the increasingly black inner cities. Clearly, some new suburbanites, and the developers catering to them, shared a deep-seated racism: In 1970, nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white.
Joel Kotkin (The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21))
Every chapter of the book ends with a "Tasks to Complete" section. By completing these tasks, you'll not only become proficient at using WordPress, you'll become confident & enjoy using WordPress too. Search Amazon for B009ZVO3H6   CSS For
Andy Williams (Migrating to Windows 8.1)