Most Unused Quotes

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Common sense is one of the most unused commodities available to man.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery. People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.
Zoë Heller (What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal])
Aubade I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Philip Larkin (Collected Poems)
It's a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren't ready to go; that we weren't smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.
Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts)
David Cutler wrote in MIT Technology Review, “the single most unused person in health care” is the patient.
Eric J. Topol (The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands)
Dear Mama, I am most certainly not dead. Thank you for your tender concern. I will try to write more often so you don’t have to worry so between letters. (Because a week’s silence surely means I have fallen prey to a wasting illness or been murdered in these boring, gray streets.) School is going well. I am excelling in all of my classes. (Apparently, some things never change, and girls are not challenged in Albion in the same way they weren’t on Melei.) My professors are all intelligent and kind. (Kind of horrible.) None stand out. (I refuse to mention him by name, no matter how many obviously “subtle” questions you ask.) The other students are also quite focused on their schooling, and none of us has much time for socializing. Boys and girls attend separate classes as well, so no, I have not met many interesting young men. (I am neither courting nor being courted. Please stop hoping.) Tell Aunt Li’ne thank you for the mittens. They are very much appreciated in this cold, damp climate I am so unused to. And please tell the sun hello and I miss her very much! I also miss you, of course. (I do. Very much.) All my love, Jessamin
Kiersten White (Illusions of Fate)
Most EOs are the result of accidents," he said, studying the snow. "But Eli and I were different. We set out to find a way to effect the change. Incidentally, it's remarkably difficult to do. Dying with intent, reviving with control. Finding a way to end a life but keep it in arm's reach, and all without rendering the body unusable. On top of that, you need a method that strips enough control from the subject to make them afraid, because you need the chemical properties induced by fear and adrenaline to trigger a somatic change.
V.E. Schwab (Vengeful)
In every big transaction,” said Leech, “there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient’s blubbering thanks.” The
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
Small, forthright words, used in the service of condensing experience, might have an idea buried in them as large as the most expansive work that wears its intellectualism on its sleeve. The unshed tears of the deeply felt are akin to the unused large words in the service of a thought.
Sarah Ruhl (100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater)
That’s why, when I worry about the estuary’s diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity—about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
70 percent of long-term gym memberships are mostly unused, but a dog needs walking every day.
Gretchen Rubin (Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life)
I've noticed that most retired old men feel like that: the world simply cannot function minus their services. It's not that they feel useless; they feel unused.
Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder and Other Stories)
In one of history's most bizarre chains of causation, the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens.
William J. Bernstein (A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World)
Since the basic cause of man’s anxiety is the possibility of being either a saint or a sinner, it follows that there are only two alternatives for him. Man can either mount upward to the peak of eternity or else slip backwards to the chasms of despair and frustration. Yet there are many who think there is yet another alternative, namely, that of indifference. They think that, just as bears hibernate for a season in a state of suspended animation, so they, too, can sleep through life without choosing to live for God or against Him. But hibernation is no escape; winter ends, and one is then forced to make a decision—indeed, the very choice of indifference is itself a decision. White fences do not remain white fences by having nothing done to them; they soon become black fences. Since there is a tendency in us that pulls us back to the animal, the mere fact that we do not resist it operates to our own destruction. Just as life is the sum of forces that resist death, so, too, man’s will must be the sum of the forces that resist frustration. A man who has taken poison into his system can ignore the antidote, or he can throw it out the window; it makes no difference which he does, for death is already on the march. St. Paul warns us, “How shall we escape it we neglect so great a salvation” (Heb 2:3). By the mere fact that we do not go forward, we go backward. There are no plains in the spiritual life, we are either going uphill or coming down. Furthermore the pose of indifference is only intellectual. The will must choose. And even though an “indifferent” soul does not positively reject the infinite, the infinite rejects it. The talents that are unused are taken away, and the Scriptures tell us that, “But because though art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16).
Fulton J. Sheen (Peace of Soul: Timeless Wisdom on Finding Serenity and Joy by the Century's Most Acclaimed Catholic Bishop)
Frugal is an old-fashioned, mostly unused word and frugality is is an old-fashioned mostly unused virtue that has been waiting for hard times to come back. The Scots have another word for it - canny. Keith Smith, Hard Times Handbook, 1984
Keith Smith
She was so unused to conversation in the accepted sense that most of her spoken words were almost meaningless. They were a gesture, like that of a hostess arranging loose covers on the furniture of her room in order to assure herself that everything was prepared for her guests.
Janet Frame (Towards Another Summer)
C.-C.: My dear Arnold, we all hope that you have before you a distinguished political career. You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. ARNOLD: But supposing it doesn't come off? Women are incalculable. C.-C.: Nonsense! Men are romantic. A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence. ARNOLD: I never know whether you're a humorist or a cynic, father. C.-C.: I'm neither, my dear boy; I'm merely a very truthful man. But people are so unused to the truth that they're apt to mistake it for a joke or a sneer.
W. Somerset Maugham (The Circle: A Comedy in Three Acts)
My mother named me Vivia Perpetua because she believed naming me after some long-dead, mostly forgotten saint would motivate me to spend my life collecting unused eyeglasses for the blind or doling out mosquito netting to malaria-plagued Africans. Not that there is anything wrong with those efforts, but please." Vivia in Faking It
Leah Marie Brown (Faking It (It Girls, #1))
Emily was five months pregnant when she decided to open the bookstore. Friendship didn’t have one, and it would be a way for Emily to read more and farm less. She sold off her farm equipment at a 50 percent loss and she rented out her unused land to Alabaster. Emily allocated most of her remaining gold to the construction of a small building in town. She named the store Friendship Books.
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
Trying to separate myself from the thing I loved most in the world. It was doomed to fail, just as it always is. Every moment of every day, in every theatre and bedroom and brothel, I found myself bored and restless, never fully present, never truly able to be there, in the room, with everybody else. At balls I would only feel myself when I slipped away to the bathroom, or slunk into an unused bedroom to smoke a cigarette, for in there I could sit down, and be silent, and be sad, and think of my loss and my misery and my overwhelming sense of ennui.
Dorian Bridges (The Putrescent Vein)
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of careful training for Indian girls,” a U.S. government official had stated, adding, “Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle, with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor?…It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of careful training for Indian girls," a U.S. government official had stated, adding, "Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle, with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor?...It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
There are these fading, ageing girls who constantly let themselves go over the edge without resisting, strong girls, still unused in their innermost selves, who have never been loved. Perhaps, Lord, you mean me to leave everything and go love them. Otherwise why is it so difficult for me not to follow them when they pass me in the street? Why do I suddenly invent the sweetest, most nocturnal words, and why does my voice settle sweetly inside me between my throat and heart? Why do I imagine how I, with unutterable caution, would hold them to my breath, these dolls that life has been playing with, flinging their arms apart springtime after springtime for nothing, and again for nothing, until they became slack in the shoulders. They've never fallen from a very high hope, so they're not broken; but they're badly chipped already and too far gone. Only stray cats come to them in the evening in their rooms and keep giving them furtive scratches and then sleep on top of them. Sometimes I follow one of them down a couple of streets. They walk past the houses, people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on fading until they are nothing.
Rainer Maria Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)
By definition, a tool exists to improve something you are already doing. If you're not doing formal data governance yet, or if you are doing it poorly, then casting about for a tool to help you deploy DG is a waste of time. This flies in the face of typical IT philosophy, where the tool is usually acquired first. This is a notoriously silly thing to do. However, our work always has us putting the brakes on a tool selection project. It is easy to buy a tool and install it. However, most of the time we witness new tools for data management sitting unused or poorly deployed. This is because no one has mastered the process the tool is supporting.
John Ladley (Data Governance: How to Design, Deploy and Sustain an Effective Data Governance Program (The Morgan Kaufmann Series on Business Intelligence))
Though all the brilliant intellects of the ages were to concentrate upon this one theme, never could they adequately express their wonder at this dense darkness of the human mind. Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates, and they rush to stones and arms if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands, yet they allow others to trespass upon their life—nay, they themselves even lead in those who will eventually possess it. No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life! In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal. And so I should like to lay hold upon someone from the company of older men and say: "I see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life, you are pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it; come now, recall your life and make a reckoning. Consider how much of your time was taken up with a moneylender, how much with a mistress, how much with a patron, how much with a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in punishing your slaves, how much in rushing about the city on social duties. Add the diseases which we have caused by our own acts, add, too, the time that has lain idle and unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count. Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!"7 What, then, is the reason of this? You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals. You will hear many men saying: "After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties." And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!
Seneca (On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It (Penguin Great Ideas))
There is an inherent, humbling cruelty to learning how to run white water. In most other so-called "adrenaline" sports—skiing, surfing and rock climbing come to mind—one attains mastery, or the illusion of it, only after long apprenticeship, after enduring falls and tumbles, the fatigue of training previously unused muscles, the discipline of developing a new and initially awkward set of skills. Running white water is fundamentally different. With a little luck one is immediately able to travel long distances, often at great speeds, with only a rudimentary command of the sport's essential skills and about as much physical stamina as it takes to ride a bicycle downhill. At the beginning, at least, white-water adrenaline comes cheap. It's the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns. The river seems all smoke and mirrors, lots of bark (you hear it chortling away beneath you, crunching boulders), but not much bite. You think: Let's get on with it! Let's run this damn river! And then maybe the raft hits a drop in the river— say, a short, hidden waterfall. Or maybe a wave reaches up and flicks the boat on its side as easily as a horse swatting flies with its tail. Maybe you're thrown suddenly into the center of the raft, and the floor bounces back and punts you overboard. Maybe you just fall right off the side of the raft so fast you don't realize what's happening. It doesn't matter. The results are the same. The world goes dark. The river— the word hardly does justice to the churning mess enveloping you— the river tumbles you like so much laundry. It punches the air from your lungs. You're helpless. Swimming is a joke. You know for a fact that you are drowning. For the first time you understand the strength of the insouciant monster that has swallowed you. Maybe you travel a hundred feet before you surface (the current is moving that fast). And another hundred feet—just short of a truly fearsome plunge, one that will surely kill you— before you see the rescue lines. You're hauled to shore wearing a sheepish grin and a look in your eye that is equal parts confusion, respect, and raw fear. That is River Lesson Number One. Everyone suffers it. And every time you get the least bit cocky, every time you think you have finally figured out what the river is all about, you suffer it all over again.
Joe Kane (Running the Amazon)
Of course they had heard that the buffalo were being wiped out, but with the memory of the southern herd so vivid, they had hardly credited the news. Discussing it in Lonesome Dove they had decided that the reports must be exaggerated — thinned out, maybe, but not wiped out. Thus the sight of the road of bones stretching out over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel. With those millions of animals gone, and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed. Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants – of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.
Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1))
The final misconception is that evolution is “just a theory.” I will boldly assume that readers who have gotten this far believe in evolution. Opponents inevitably bring up that irritating canard that evolution is unproven, because (following an unuseful convention in the field) it is a “theory” (like, say, germ theory). Evidence for the reality of evolution includes: Numerous examples where changing selective pressures have changed gene frequencies in populations within generations (e.g., bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance). Moreover, there are also examples (mostly insects, given their short generation times) of a species in the process of splitting into two. Voluminous fossil evidence of intermediate forms in numerous taxonomic lineages. Molecular evidence. We share ~98 percent of our genes with the other apes, ~96 percent with monkeys, ~75 percent with dogs, ~20 percent with fruit flies. This indicates that our last common ancestor with other apes lived more recently than our last common ancestor with monkeys, and so on. Geographic evidence. To use Richard Dawkins’s suggestion for dealing with a fundamentalist insisting that all species emerged in their current forms from Noah’s ark—how come all thirty-seven species of lemurs that made landfall on Mt. Ararat in the Armenian highlands hiked over to Madagascar, none dying and leaving fossils in transit? Unintelligent design—oddities explained only by evolution. Why do whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones? Because they descend from a four-legged terrestrial mammal. Why should we have arrector pili muscles in our skin that produce thoroughly useless gooseflesh? Because of our recent speciation from other apes whose arrector pili muscles were attached to hair, and whose hair stands up during emotional arousal.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.
Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
Diddy, not really alive, had a life. Hardly the same. Some people are their lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives. Like insecure tenants, never knowing exactly the extent of their property or when the lease will expire. Like unskilled cartographers, drawing and redrawing erroneous maps of an exotic continent. Eventually, for such a person, everything is bound to run dow. The walls sag. Empty spaces bulge between objects. The surfaces of objects sweat, thin out, buckle. The hysterical fluids of fear deposited at the core of objects ooze out along the seams. Deploying things and navigating through space becomes laborious. Too much effort to amble from kitchen to living room, serving drinks, turning on the hi-fi, pretending to be cheerful . . . Everything running down: suffusing the whole of Diddy's well-tended life. Like a house powered by one large generator in the basement. Diddy has an almost palpable sense of the decline of the generator's energy. Or, of the monstrous malfunctioning of that generator, gone amok. Sending forth a torrent of refuse that climbs up into Diddy's life, cluttering all his floor space and overwhelming his pleasant furnishings, so that he's forced to take refuge. Huddle in a narrow corner. But however small the space Diddy means to keep free for himself, it won't remain safe. If solid material can't invade it, then the offensive discharge of the failing or rebellious generator will liquefy; so that it can travel everywhere, spread like a skin. The generator will spew forth a stream of crude oil, grimy and malodorous, that coats all things and persons and objects, the vulgar as well as the precious, the ugly as well as what little still remains beautiful. Befouling Diddy's world and rendering it unusable. Uninhabitable. This deliquescent running-down of everything becomes coexistent with Diddy's entire span of consciousness, undermines his most minimal acts. Getting out of bed is an agony unpromising as the struggles of a fish cast up on the beach, trying to extract life from the meaningless air. Persons who merely have a life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing. But when this fluid evaporates, an uncensored, fetid, appalling underlife is disclosed. Lost continents are brought to view, bearing the ruins of doomed cities, the sparsely fleshed skeletons of ancient creatures immobilized in their death throes, a landscape of unparalleled savagery.
Susan Sontag (Death Kit)
Rollo cleared his throat. “If you will excuse me, Princess Gwendafyn, Her Majesty Queen Luciee has some questions for you.” “I’ll translate for her,” Benjimir said in Elvish. “No,” Queen Luciee said in Calnoric, her voice encased in ice. “….don’t trust you…change words.” “Rollo, did the queen just imply Benjimir might not tell her the truth?” Gwendafyn murmured. “Um…yes,” the translator said. A muscle in Gwendafyn’s eyebrow jumped in irritation. “I see.” It’s a shame Queen Luciee was not bonded to Aunt Lorius. I’m certain they would get along splendidly. No, she is worse than my aunt. At least Aunt Lorius believes in what she presses upon me. Queen Luciee enjoys crushing the spirit of others. Gwendafyn had not missed the way the queen had shot down Princess Claire… “….Unnecessary, Luciee,” King Petyrr said. “Benjimir and Gwendafyn married….love each other,” he said. Queen Luciee narrowed her eyes. “I’ve thought…suspicious…an elf could love Benjimir.” Benjimir stiffened next to her, the expression on his face unreadable. In that moment, Gwendafyn wished she could wipe the smug look off the queen’s face. She knows Benjimir loves Yvrea—she must have been informed of it when he was sent into exile. How could she say such a hurtful thing to him when she is his mother? Anger rolled off Gwendafyn in waves. It was only years of experience in shoving her rage down that kept her from glaring. Instead, she fixed an unconcerned smile on her lips. Rollo cleared his throat. “Queen Luciee wishes to ask if it is true you sing a ballad to Prince Benjimir after lunch every day.” Benjimir squeezed her hand, but Gwendafyn ignored it and made a show of widening her eyes and fluttering them. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I’m not going to let her try and make Benjimir look like an idiot. “Of course,” she said in Calnoric. When she glanced from Queen Luciee to King Petyrr she saw their look of confusion. Bother the grunts of Calnoric! They are so hard to achieve. I must be mangling this. “Rollo, could you tell them I said of course?” Rollo nodded. “Yes, Princess Gwendafyn.” He addressed the royal family across the table in flawless Calnoric. “In fact,” Gwendafyn continued in Elvish. “It is one of the most enjoyable parts of my day. We laugh—and once he even cried over a tragic ballad, though he will deny it—and enjoy each other’s company. I love spending time with Ben.” Benjimir twitched at the as-of-yet-unused nickname, but he managed to stare adoringly at her. Yvrea placed a hand over her heart. “How touching! I know you do not normally like to sing for others, sister. It is a testament to your love for Benji,” Yvrea said. “Yes,
K.M. Shea (Royal Magic (The Elves of Lessa, #2))
Now, there are a few dryadologists who could resist the opportunity to sample faerie food, the enchanted sort served at the tables of the courtly fae---I know several who have dedicated their careers to the subject and would hand over their eye teeth for the opportunity. I stopped at a stand offering toasted cheese---a very strange sort of cheese, threaded with glittering mold. It smelled divine, and the faerie merchant rolled it in crushed nuts before handing it over on a stick, but as soon as it touched my palm, it began to melt. The merchant was watching me, so I put it in my mouth, pantomiming my delight. The cheese tasted like snow and melted within seconds. I stopped next at a stand equipped with a smoking hut. The faerie handed me a delicate fillet of fish, almost perfectly clear despite the smoking. I offered it to Shadow, but he only looked at me with incomprehension in his eyes. And, indeed, when I popped it into my mouth, it too melted flavorlessly against my tongue. I took a wandering course to the lakeshore, conscious of the need to avoid suspicion. I paused at the wine merchant, who had the largest stand. It was brighter than the others, snow piled up behind it in a wall that caught the lantern light and threw it back in a blinding glitter. I had to look down at my feet, blinking back tears, as one of the Folk pressed an ice-glass into my hand. Like the food, the wine smelled lovely, of sugared apples and cloves, but it slid eerily within the ice, more like oil than wine. Shadow kept growling at it, as he had not with the faerie food, and so I tipped it onto the snow. Beside the wine merchant was a stand offering trinkets, frozen wildflowers that many of the Folk threaded through their hair or wove through unused buttonholes on their cloaks, as well as an array of jewels with pins in them. I could not compare them to any jewels I knew; they were mostly in shades of white and winter grey, hundreds of them, each impossibly different from the next. I selected one that I knew, without understanding how, was the precise color of the icicles that hung from the stone ledges of the Cambridge libraries in winter. But moments after I pinned it to my breast, all that remained was a patch of damp.
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1))
Irony in postwar art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom. So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” 32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed. Think, for a moment, of Third World rebels and coups. Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in other words, they just become better tyrants. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
Your Computer Screen Computers, even with all their time-saving devices, can actually become one of the most distracting things in our life. In order to keep your computer use stream-lined, I recommend these simplifying techniques: • Clear your email inbox every day. • Uninstall unused software. • Use folders to sort documents. • Hide desktop icons. • Use a simple word-processor. • Limit your time on social networking sites.
Joshua Becker (Simplify: 7 Guiding Principles to Help Anyone Declutter Their Home and Life)
I want to become the favorite song of my own uprising. I want to see the most forgotten, unused part of my soul the one which for years I kept closed out of spite, find the courage to go up to my mind and start writing liberation slogans across its highest fences.
Angelos Michalopoulos (The man who has only one truth in him)
PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
The most unknown, unused and unrecognised tool of the human mind, is the recognition that attitude is always a choice.
Mark Horton
From the earliest times until the recent past, the vast majority of people have believed in some form of survival after death. It is only in modern times that uncertainty about an afterlife or even complete disbelief in one has gained common consideration. Yet we are all faced by the same dilemma that tormented Hamlet as he contemplated suicide. Most of us really do not know what to believe anymore. Life itself can be bad enough but what if still worse awaits us after we have died? Inevitably, all religions, from the great world religions such as Christianity and Buddhism down to the myriads of small local cults, attempt to give answers to this mystery. They all claim to describe the events which will follow the moment of death and what the outcome will be according to our fate. Even if we ourselves adhere to one of these religions, most of us would rather not think too much about our own deaths. It is not surprising, therefore, that any spiritual teachings our particular religion might offer generally remain unheeded and unused.
Stephen Hodge (The Illustrated Tibetan Book of the Dead: A New Reference Manual for the Soul)
When Chen Guangcheng was released in September 2009, he had served his full term. There were no more charges against him. And yet he returned to Dongshigu village to find that the local government had prepared for his arrival. They had installed steel shutters on the windows of his house, floodlights around the dirt yard, and cameras to keep an eye on the place twenty-four hours a day. They formed a revolving crew of guards to work in shifts. At one point, Cohen and Chen did their best to estimate the cost of the guards, meals, and other expenses required to keep the blind lawyer isolated from the world around him, and it came to seven million dollars. But as far as Chen was concerned, most of the punishment was mental: now and then, the guards would carry every object from the house out into the courtyard and leave them there for him and his family to bring back in. The guards confiscated his phone and computer and bent the prongs of the television plug so that it was unusable. At one point, Chen managed to smuggle out a short video describing his conditions, but when that was discovered, the guards punished him by rolling him in a blanket and beating him.
Evan Osnos (Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China)
A long time ago I heard a story that stars are the remains of a tribe of evil deities banished by the sun goddess. The blue of the cup makes the green of the tea look more inviting, he explained. A white cup makes the tea look pinkish and muddy. Autumn was arrogant that year. I had always considered autumn's nature to be darkly yin, compared to spring's clear masculine character, but a bright yang pervaded that fall. I didn't like a room where everything was brand new and unused. The problem all along was how to reconcile a woman's need for constancy with a man's desire for novelty. Contentment is its own reward; unhappiness pushes one to write. The most interesting part of an intimate relationship is how a person comes to appreciate unnoticed qualities in another. Nothing awakens old memories like the moon. Flattery is a fine way to win over a person harboring a grudge. She felt that another's envy proved one's superiority. It is well known that at age thirty-six a woman is vulnerable. She is open to evil influences and must take special precautions to preserve her physical and spiritual balance during this year.
Liza Dalby (The Tale of Murasaki)
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We North Americans are fortunate that our ancestors, frontier colonists and emigrants, were forced to develop for survival a pragmatic, positive attitude toward inventions and mechanisms. It helped us a great deal to make the most out of the first centuries of industrialization. Unfortunately, the cultural heritage in some of the nations that need industrialization most is very different and constitutes a barrier to urgently needed technical development. Throughout India, for example, so many young people choose to be educated for "clean" desk jobs that the nation now has an unusable surplus of office workers, and many civil servants face mandatory retirement at the age of fifty.
Gerard K. O'Neill (2081)
Perhaps the most famous of these experiments was the 1988 Morris Worm – the first worm to spread over the internet. The supposed intent of this worm was to gauge the number of machines connected to the network. However, the result was to slow down the operation of infected machines to the point of being unusable. Worms continue to represent a major threat, as shown by the case of the Conficker Worm of 2008.
The Open University (Introduction to cyber security: stay safe online)
The American embassy in Moscow is situated at No. 8 Bolshoy Deviatinsky Pereulok in a towering glass and stone edifice that took some twenty-seven tortured years to complete. In 1985, during the final act of the Cold War, counterintelligence uncovered that the KGB had honeycombed the chancery building’s steel skeleton with listening devices to such a degree that it essentially rendered the half-built embassy unusable. A quarter-century of head-scratching and diplomatic gridlock later, the top two floors of the embassy were dissembled brick-by-brick and replaced with four new floors, constructed to the most stringent security standards. Although their present adversaries now operated under a different alphabet soup of three-letter acronyms, the elements of the US intelligence community in Moscow had considerably turned the tables on their host
Matt Fulton (Active Measures: Part I (Active Measures Series #1))
Fate and Future (The Sonnet) Fate and future both are servant to the determined, For they are nothing but creation of human determination. Yet most of humanity remain oblivious to this simple fact, For they’re born and raised in a society run by indoctrination. Reason and questions are seen as treason against heritage, Submission and guilt are praised as honorable righteousness. Calling ignorance as righteousness doesn't make one righteous, You are righteous when you have the guts to mend mistakes. Ignorance is part of life, so is our drive for self-aggrandizing, It's human to make mistakes, what's not, is their glorification. Acknowledge your mistakes, biases, ignorance and prejudice, We start to rise when we acknowledge our degradation. Our ancestors were primitive humans with unused goodness. If we die primitive like they did, why live in the first place!
Abhijit Naskar (Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World)
natives who were laughing with that light, eternal laughter which is their way of enduring all things I don’t know where the English dug up all that damned self-assurance, but T imagine it’s just part of their sense of humor. the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us There's one merit nobody will ever be able to take away from the Communists: that of having looked man in the face. They didn't send him to Eton to learn protective coloration. Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge on an island and behaving like an ostrich— being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins. Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its tnink inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid? that spark of misanthropy which most people carry in them, a presentiment of some different and better company than their own kind, He had spent five years in the Sahara himself, at the head of a Camel Corps unit, and those years had been the happiest of his life.It was true that in the desert a man felt less lonely than elsewhere, perhaps because he lived there in constant, almost physical contact with the sky, and so had all the company he needed. For what remained, a pipe was enough. He wanted to say all this to Haas, but his years in the desert hadn’t made him very talkative, and he also noticed that certain things which he felt deeply changed their meaning at the touch of words, so that he could no longer recognize them himself as he spoke. So that indeed he often wondered whether thinking were enough, whether thoughts were not a mere groping for something that was forever out of reach, whether days of real vision were not still ahead, and whether the mysterious cells which lay still unused in man’s brain would not, one day, lead toward light. he felt less and less need to exchange ideas with other men, because essentially they no longer came to him as questions, but as certainties. the man who changed species’ and of the last ‘fighter for dignity.’ Men are dying to preserve a certain splendor of life. Call it freedom, or dignity . . . They are dying to preserve a certain natural splendor.” people who mistake their private neurosis for a philosophical outlook.” Men are dying to preserve a certain splendor of life. Call it free- dom, or dignity . . . They are dying to preserve a certain natural .splendor.
Romain Gary
You are still here, so make the most of it. Make the most of you.
Vincent H. O'Neil (The Unused Path: Skills for living an authentic life)
When you've got your devices down to the ideal number, use these tips to minimize them and prevent distractions: - Remove as many icons from your desktop as possible. - Uninstall software you don't need. - Delete unneeded files from your Documents folder. (If you don't want to delete them completely, at least move them to an archive folder so they don't clutter your most-used folder anymore.) - Develop a simple but logical folder structure so that you can find documents you want easily. - Unsubscribe to blogs, email newsletters, and advertisements that no longer serve your interests. - Delete internet bookmarks, cookies, and temporary internet files you no longer need. - Delete apps you don't need, remembering that if you need them later, you can always download them again. Put only your most crucial apps (such as your calendar and your phone) on your home screen. Put the rest in folders on your second screen. - Turn off notifications, including social media push notifications and email audio alerts. - Make sure your spam filters are working. - Delete photos that are of poor quality or that you don't need. - Delete unused music and movies. - Subscribe to a password manager so that you don't have to keep track of a bunch of passwords.
Joshua Becker (The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life)
The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.
Mattew Ball
She sat alone at a table in the corner and looked down at her tray, sampling the rice and beans, and poking idly at the enchilada with her fork. Danny came and sat at her table a moment later. He’d begun to sit with her at lunch these last few weeks, though he hadn’t quite figured out how to speak to her with any degree of comfort since the concert. No one else even had the temerity to approach her on most days. If it was raining and the patio was unusable, it would be more crowded inside, and other kids would have to squeeze in at her table. But today, for some reason, Billy Codrow plumped down across from her, and Wayne Turley came in right behind him. She knew them all from the dojo, but Billy and Wayne had never sat with her before.
Jacques Antoine (Girl Fights Back (The Emily Kane Adventures, #1))
During the long winters, when all around is white, geothermal energy keeps many of the mini-pitches green. In Reykjavík 99.9 per cent of properties are heated by scalding water that rises from the earth. Most of the waste water – that which is unused by houses – heats the streets in the centre of town. The rest keeps mini-pitches around the capital free from snow.
Matt McGinn (Against the Elements: The Eruption of Icelandic Football)
The first time I attended an Anglican church, the most surprising part of the service was when they lifted the physical book of the Bible into the air and carried it down the aisle. People turned and bowed their heads as it moved past them. Their reverence for Scripture captivated my imagination. I had taken for granted that I could hold the Bible in my hands at home, fall asleep reading it in bed. Growing up, some of my friends had Bibles decorated with cartoons. But there, the people of God stood for the processon of the Bible. They stood for the reading of the Word. I felt as thought I had been pulled back in time to when Ezra read the law to the returning Israelites, and they all stood to hear it. Going back to Christianity’s Jewish roots, the Torah was carried with worshipers all around it. The people stood for the procession of the sacred word. Jews kissed —and some still kiss—the sacred book when they opened it and closed it. If the scroll of the Torah became unusable, they would bury it like a loved one rather than destroy it. The word of God was central to their worship, their culture, their very identity. (p. 12)
Jessica Hooten Wilson (Reading for the Love of God)
Among the three types of autophagy, macroautophagy is the main and most important process or pathway. The primary use of macroautophagy is to get rid of non-functioning cell organelles or proteins that remain unused in the body.
Patricia Cook (Autophagy: Learn How To Activate Autophagy Safely Through Intermittent Fasting, Exercise and Diet. A Practical Guide to Detox Your Body and Boost Your Energy)
Gregori’s pale silver eyes examined every inch of Jacques. “You look better. How are you feeling?” Jacques nodded slowly. “Much better. Thank you.” “You need to feed. Your woman is still pale and worn. She should be resting. If you like, I could heal her bruises.” Gregori made the offer in his casual, indifferent way. His voice was so compelling, so beautiful, it was nearly impossible to deny him anything. There was a purity in his voice, a whisper of black velvet. He never raised his tone or appeared anything but calm and unruffled. Shea’s heart gave a leap, then settled into a hard, rhythmic pounding. She found herself listening intently, wanting him to go on speaking, wanting to do whatever he asked. Mentally, she shook her head. Gregori’s abilities intrigued her, but he was far too powerful. He had not used any kind of mental enhancement, no compulsion, no hypnotic suggestions. His voice was a weapon in itself. She sensed he was the most dangerous Carpathian in the room. She had not been in such close proximity with so many people in a very long time. She needed to be alone with Jacques, to give herself time to adjust. “We thank you for the offer, healer, but Shea is unused to our ways.” Jacques couldn’t remember most of them himself.
Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
We thank you for the offer, healer, but Shea is unused to our ways.” Jacques couldn’t remember most of them himself.
Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
We thank you for the offer, healer, but Shea is unused to our ways.” Jacques couldn’t remember most of them himself. He was as uneasy in the presence of the Carpathian as Shea. His black eyes glittered like ice, caught and trapped the reflection of a lightning whip as it sizzled across the dark sky. “The other male is not with you.” “Byron,” Mikhail supplied. “He has been a good friend to you for centuries. He is aware that you completed the ritual and this woman is your true lifemate. Search your mind, Jacques. Remember how difficult this time is on our unattached males.” Shea’s face went crimson under the unearthly paleness. The reference to the ritual had to mean they were aware Jacques had made love to her. The lack of privacy disturbed her immensely. She went to move around Jacques, strongly objecting to the this woman label. She did have a name. She was a person. She had a feeling they all thought her the hysterical type. She certainly hadn’t managed to show them her normal calm self. Jacques stepped backward and his arm swept behind him to pin her against the wall. He never took his eyes from the trio before them. He knew he was unstable, still fighting to hold on to reason when his every instinct was to attack. He trusted none of them and would not allow Shea to be put in any danger. Shea retaliated with a hard pinch. She was not going to cower behind her wild man like some seventeenth-century heroine fainting with the vapors. So she was surrounded by a few vampires. Big deal. Carpathians. Jacques sounded amused. If you laugh at me, Jacques, I might find another wooden stake and come after you myself, she warned him silently. “Well, for heaven’s sake.” Shea sounded exasperated as she addressed the group. “We’re all civilized, aren’t we?” She shoved at Jacques’ broad back. “Aren’t we?” “Absolutely.” Raven stepped forward, ignoring Mikhail’s restraining hand. “At least the women are. The men around here haven’t quite graduated from the swinging-through-trees stage yet.” “I owe you an apology for last night, Miss O’Halloran,” Mikhail said with far too much Old World charm. “When I saw you crouched over my brother, I thought…” Raven snorted. “He didn’t think, he reacted. He really is a great man, but overprotective with the people he loves.” There was a wealth of love in her teasing tone. “Honestly, Jacques, you can’t keep her prisoner, locked up like some nun in a convent.” Shea was mortified. Jacques, move! You’re embarrassing me.
Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
But there is something to shake even that one, to shake us all as surely as if the ground beneath our feet began to tremble and break away. Change. In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so completely that we cannot even truly predict where it will lead us. Change. Uncertainty. It is the very root of our most primal fear—the fear of death—that one change, that one unknown against which we construct elaborate scenarios and “truisms” that may or may not be true at all. These constructions, I think, are an extension of the routines of our lives. We dig ruts with the sameness of our daily paths, and drone and rail against those routines while we, in fact, take comfort in them. We awake and construct our days of habit, and follow the norms we have built fast, solid, and bending only a bit in our daily existence. Change is the unrolled die, the unused sava piece. It is exciting and frightening only when we hold some power over it, only when there is a potential reversal of course, difficult though it may be, within our control. Absent that safety line of real choice, absent that sense of some control, change is merely frightening. Terrifying, even.
R.A. Salvatore (The Orc King (Transitions, #1; The Legend of Drizzt, #20))
Three of the most unused critical tools in the arsenal for growth of new managers are listening, observing and failing.
Debashis Chatterjee (Karma Sutras : Leadership and Wisdom in Uncertain Times)
Gorbachev was still in power, and Soviet troops marched on the streets of many cities. The Soviet economy had crashed, and the government was rationing the most basic products, such as sugar, milk, butter, flour, and meat. Automobiles sat unused in garages because there was no gasoline to purchase. It was an economic mess so terrible that only a fiction writer could have dreamed up so frightful a scenario.
Rick Renner (Chosen By God: God Has Chosen You for a Divine Assignment — Will You Dare To Fulfill It?)
Paired with loitering laws and sit-lie ordinances, hostile architecture aims to make public space unusable for those who need it most. It cruelly harms the homeless, without addressing the root causes of their predicament, and it makes the city feel unwelcome to all. Its effect, in other words, is the opposite of its foul intention.
Evan Puschak (Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions)
are a lazy, undisciplined and, worst of all, high-maintenance lot, annoyingly opinionated, possessed of egos requiring constant stroking and tune-ups, and, as members of a privileged and wealthy population, unused to the kind of 'disrespect' a busy chef is inclined to dish out. No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I've worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks.
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
are scripts for introducing PNP Time: For younger kids: “Let’s have some PNP Time! I’m going to put my phone in another room so I can really focus on being with you. It’ll be just us, and you can choose what we do!” For older kids: “Hey, sweetie. You know what? I need PNP Time with you—just you and me, with my phone far away—because I know it’s annoying when it makes noise and distracts me. How about later today we get some time just us? It will last for ten to fifteen minutes, and you can pick what we do.” Remember, PNP Time is focused on your child’s world. Try to avoid asking questions; instead, join in your child’s ideas. If this feels unnatural, that’s okay! Most parents are unused to engaging in this way.
Becky Kennedy (Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be)
Turkey is the main course in more Christmas dinners than any other meat or fowl. The high proportion of meat to unusable bone and fat makes it an ideal bird for a feast. Turkeys were domesticated in Mexico long before Spanish explores found them and introduced them into their homeland. From there they spread throughout Europe and gradually replaced most of the native Christmas feast foods.
Patricia Del Re (The Christmas Almanack)
Developing the courage to think negatively allows us to look at ourselves as we really are. There is a remarkable consistency in people’s coping styles across the many diseases we have considered: the repression of anger, the denial of vulnerability, the “compensatory hyperindependence.” No one chooses these traits deliberately or develops them consciously. Negative thinking helps us to understand just what the conditions were in our lives and how these traits were shaped by our perceptions of our environment. Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and autoimmune disease. The purpose is not to blame parents or previous generations or spouses but to enable us to discard beliefs that have proved dangerous to our health. “The power of negative thinking” requires the removal of rose-coloured glasses. Not blame of others but owning responsibility for one’s relationships is the key. It is no small matter to ask people with newly diagnosed illness to begin to examine their relationships as a way of understanding their disease. For people unused to expressing their feelings and unaccustomed to recognizing their emotional needs, it is extemely challenging to find the confidence and the words to approach their loved ones both compassionately and assertively. The difficulty is all the greater at the point when they have become more vulnerable and more dependent than ever on others for support. There is no easy answer to this dilemma but leaving it unresolved will continue to create ongoing sources of stress that will, in turn, generate more illness. No matter what the patient may attempt to do for himself, the psychological load he carries cannot be eased without a clear-headed, compassionate appraisal of the most important relationships in his life. “Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,” wrote Hans Selye. The power of negative thinking requires the strength to accept that we are not as strong as we would like to believe. Our insistently strong self-image was generated to hide a weakness — the relative weakness of the child. Our fragility is nothing to be ashamed of. A person can be strong and still need help, can be powerful in some areas of life and helpless and confused in others. We cannot do all that we thought we could. As many people with illness realize, sometimes too late, the attempt to live up to a self-image of strength and invulnerability generated stress and disrupted their internal harmony.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
The Doors music has been included in movies and their career has inspired feature films. Chapter 8 - The Doors at The Movies Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison were film students at UCLA when they met. They both had an abiding interest in film and the past masters as well as creating a new cinema. Through The Doors they did create cinema. At first, one strictly of The Doors, but as their influence and legend spread through culture they, in turn, inspired those that were creating movies.   The Doors Film Feast of Friends Late in March 1968 (the exact date is unknown) The Doors decided to film a documentary of their forthcoming tour. The idea may have come about because Bobby Neuwirth, who was hired to hang out with Jim and try to direct his energies to more productive pursuits than drinking, produced a film Not to Touch the Earth that utilized behind the scenes film of The Doors. The band set up an initial budget of $20,000 for the project. Former UCLA film students Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek hired film school friends Paul Ferrara as director of photography, Frank Lisciandro as editor, and Morrison friend Babe Hill as the sound recorder. The first show shot, for what would be later named Feast of Friends, was the April 13th performance at the Santa Rosa Fairgrounds. Overall shooting of the film lasted for five months between March and September, and captured the riots in Cleveland and the Singer Bowl. Filming culminated in Saratoga Springs, New York, where backstage Morrison goofed around on a warm up piano and improvised a hilarious ode to Frederick Nietzsche. After filming started, the concept grew and Feast of Friends was to incorporate fictional scenes (some version of HWY?). But problems started to arise. The live sound, in parts, was unusable so the decision was made to use the album cuts of Doors songs. The budget grew by another $10,000 and the film still wasn’t finished. A decision was made by Ray, Robby and John to pull the plug on the film, but Paul Ferrara appealed to Jim and a compromise was worked out. The fictional scenes would be dropped and another $4,000 was added to the budget to complete the editing. The completed film runs to about thirty-eight minutes and is mostly images taken from different shows, or the band prior to a show. It has some footage of the Singer Bowl riot, which shows the riot in full flower, the stage crowded with policemen and fans. Occasionally, Morrison comes out of nowhere to encourage it all. The centerpiece of the film is The End from the Hollywood Bowl show. The film suffers a bit from not using live sound, the superimposition of album cuts of songs (except the Hollywood Bowl footage) removes the viewer from the immediacy and impact of The Doors. Feast of Friends was later accepted at five major film festivals, including the Atlanta International Film Festival that Frank Lisciandro describes in An Hour For Magic. In later years Feast of Friends was shelved, missing the late 70’s midnight movie circuit showing rock films. In the 80’s with the advent of MTV, Ray Manzarek started producing videos of Doors songs for showing on MTV and they relied heavily on the Feast of Friends footage. Chances are that even if you haven’t seen Feast of Friends you’ve seen a lot of the footage.   Jim Morrison Films HWY The Doors had laid low for just over a month. On March 1, 1969, the ‘Miami Incident’ had occurred, at first with no reaction more than any other Doors show, and the band went off on a prearranged Jamaican vacation in anticipation
Jim Cherry (The Doors Examined)
Everything posted is picturesque because most people only share their highlight reels and never the ugly, unusable footage that lands on the cutting room floor. It’s the exact opposite of the evening news. It’s always sunny on Instaface, even if that sun is artificial.
Minka Kent (The Memory Watcher)
If you ever visit Fulda, ask for the old Zollamt. Beneath a large office building that was the old custom house you may find the smallest and most unknown and unused Jewish prayer house in the world.
Tom Hofmann (Benjamin Ferencz, Nuremberg Prosecutor and Peace Advocate)