Nesting Doll Quotes

My love is like one of those wooden Russian nesting dolls (matryoshka doll). I know, because your heart fits perfectly inside mine.


People were like Russian nesting dolls - versions stacked inside the latest edition. But they all still lived inside, unchanged, just out of sight.

I was impressed, and also unnerved. Being around Nikolai was always like this, watching him shift and change, revealing secrets as he went. He reminded me of the wooden nesting dolls I'd played with as a child. Except instead of getting smaller, he just kept getting grander and more mysterious. Tomorrow, he'd probably tell me he'd built a pleasure palace on the moon. Tough to get to, but quite a view.

You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?" "There's no self to hate. It's like, when I look into myself, there's no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine. They're not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I do look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It's like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there's a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it's solid all the way through. But with me, I don't think there is one that is solid. They just keep getting smaller.

It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it's all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It's our choice.

Being around Nikolai was always like this, watching him shift and change, revealing secrets as he went. He reminded me of the wooden nesting dolls I'd played with as a child. Except instead of getting smaller, he just kept getting grander and more mysterious.

I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.

I was thinking. What if the world was like one of those Russian nesting dolls? What if we only saw one surface of it, the outside, but there was all kinds of other stuff going on, too? All the time. Underneath. But we just don't see it, even if we're part of it? Even if we're in it? And what if you had a chance to see a different layer, like flipping a channel or something? Would you want to look? Even if what you saw looked like hell? Or worse?

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

the voices of culture influence our parents’ inner voices, which in turn influence our own, and so on through the many cultures and generations that combine to tune our minds. We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was. Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

People were like Russian nesting dolls—versions stacked inside the latest edition. But they all still lived inside, unchanged, just out of sight.

I learned vulnerability is a bit like those Russian nesting dolls, the ones that get smaller and smaller in size when you twist the top off and pull another one out. In the end, you’re left with the tiniest dull, that one nugget. No more layers to take off. Nothing left but a surprise, the surprise of finding out the littlest doll is the most solid of them all. It doesn’t hide inside of itself.

L'union libre [Freedom of Love]" My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes With the tongue of an unbelievable stone My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof And of steam on the panes My wife with shoulders of champagne And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice My wife with wrists of matches My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts With fingers of mown hay My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut And of Midsummer Night Of privet and of an angelfish nest With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill My wife with legs of flares With the movements of clockwork and despair My wife with calves of eldertree pith My wife with feet of initials With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking My wife with a neck of unpearled barley My wife with a throat of the valley of gold Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent With breasts of night My wife with breasts of a marine molehill My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days With the belly of a gigantic claw My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically With a back of quicksilver With a back of light With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking My wife with hips of a skiff With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers And of shafts of white peacock plumes Of an insensible pendulum My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos My wife with buttocks of swans' backs My wife with buttocks of spring With the sex of an iris My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat My wife with a sex of mirror My wife with eyes full of tears With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle My wife with savanna eyes My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.

Most of us are like those Russian nesting dolls, presenting a slightly different visage to the world depending on which world we're dealing with at the time. The outermost doll isn't a lie; mine still offers part of who I am, but it's not all of who I am. As I get closer to people, the nesting dolls open and the masks change. But it's a rare person whom I allow to see what's at my core: my innermost thoughts and fears, my dreams and desires, my pettiness and peevishness.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction--in short, belief--grows ever "truer." The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to "landscape" the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up--a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows--the actual past--from another such simulacrum--the actual future? One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of "now"likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.

What is a turducken? An exclusive culinary creation available by special order from some little Cajun town down south. Entirely deboned, a turducken consists of a turkey, stuffed with duck, stuffed with a chicken, like an edible Russian nesting doll. Some were stuffed with alligator, crap, shrimp; my favorite was the traditional cornbread variety.

I'd understood that grief is a Russian nesting doll: it never ends, it just hides inside new grief, and every new instance of grief contains all the previous ones. So my grief was invisible but it was there, inside every stupid daily disappointment.

Gust used to explain the whole world that way: the mind as a house living in the house of the body, living in the house of a house, living in the larger house of the town, in the larger house of the state, in the houses of America and society and the universe. He said these houses fit inside one another like the Russian nesting dolls they bought for Harriet.

play has become too domesticated and regimented while playgrounds themselves have become more and more barren. May today are devoid of vegetation with which to form nests, shelters, wands, dolls, or other playthings...These concerns are best explored in a heterogeneous habitat, where several secret niches are harbored, the kinds that can no longer be found on prefabricated metal and plastic jungle gym.

Russian Dolls: How we hide those parts of ourselves, the ones that we can conceal, is by constructing an elaborate emotional infrastructure not unlike nested Russian dolls. True healing requires going through all the hidden layers.

If that moment was a Russian nesting doll, I was paying attention to the smallest figurine. I did not see all the other metaphorical dolls. The one wrapped around the smallest one, and the one wrapped around the next-smallest one and the next and the next after that. What neurotypical people call the context.

Have you ever seen Russian nesting dolls?” Thrown by the questions, she opened her eyes. Why would he suddenly speak about a child’s toy? “I own a few of them.” “Then you must understand that undressing you is like playing with one of those dolls. I open one to find another beneath it. I took away your gown to find you are still as clothed as you were a moment ago and I wonder how many more layers I will have to work through to get down to you—the doll I’m searching for.

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka “nested dolls” that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

(a Russian nesting doll of a sentence if I ever heard one).

Memories. They are like matryoshka dolls, yes?" [Lily] looked at Mr. Martin again, brows knit. "What kind of dolls?" He cupped his hands, then brought them closer together. "They...nest. Nesting dolls? You know them by this name, perhaps?" "Oh! Yes, of course. ...Memories /are/ like that, to be sure. As soon as you peek at one, another reveals itself, and then another.

Then there was the church and the villagers on the sidewalks, the red geraniums on the graves in the cemetery, Perez fainting (he crumpled over like a rag doll), the blood-red earth spilling over Maman's casket, the white flesh of the roots mixed in with it, more people, voices, the village, waiting in front of a cafe, the incessant drone of the motor, and my joy when the bus entered the nest of lights that was Algiers and I knew I was going to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours.

Arya was a trial, it must be said. Half a boy and half a wolf pup. Forbid her anything and it became her heart’s desire. She had Ned’s long face, and brown hair that always looked as though a bird had been nesting in it. I despaired of ever making a lady of her. She collected scabs as other girls collected dolls, and would say anything that came into her head. I think that she must be dead too.

Marriages are nesting dolls, too. We carry each iteration: the marriage we had before the children, the marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France; the marriage we had after the children, the marriage of tenderness but transactional communication—who’s doing what, and when, and how—and early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied; the marriage we had toward the end before we knew there was an end, the marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.

It's like a nesting doll of imagination! It's like a painting of a painting! It's like the wind catching a chill from the wind, or a wave taking a dip in the ocean. It's like reading a novel that merely describes another novel. It's like music tapping its foot to a tune and saying 'Oh! I love this song!

Maybe we are always all of our ages at once, like nesting matryoshka dolls?

I learned vulnerability is a bit like those Russian nesting dolls, the ones that get smaller and smaller in size when you twist the top off and pull another one out. In the end, you’re left with the tiniest doll, that one nugget. No more layers to take off. Nothing left but a surprise, the surprise of finding out the littlest doll is the most solid of them all. It doesn’t hide inside of itself.

I used to picture time as a rope you followed along, hand over hand, into the distance, but it's nothing like that. It moves outward but holds everything that's come before. Cut me open and I'm a tree trunk, rings of nostalgia radiating inward. All the years are nested inside me like I'm my own personal one-woman matryoshka doll. I guess that's true for everybody, but then I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness. I am bittersweet personified.

InnoCentive works in part because, as specialists become more narrowly focused, “the box” is more like Russian nesting dolls. Specialists divide into subspecialties, which soon divide into sub-subspecialties. Even if they get outside the small doll, they may get stuck inside the next, slightly larger one. Cragin and Davis were outside the box to begin with, and saw straightforward solutions that eluded insiders with seemingly every training and resource advantage.

I wrote to them about our unfolding line of mothers and daughters. How we’d nested in one another and birthed one another. I told them we were connected not only through blood, tissue, and female likeness, but through feminine heart, memory, and soul. I spoke of the mystery of being inseparable but separate. I was thinking of the dolls but also of Jung’s words: “Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.

It’s no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it’s all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It’s our choice. But

-Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction--in short, belief--grows ever 'truer.' The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. -The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to 'landscape' the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) -Symmetry demands an actual + virtualfuture, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up--a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. -Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows--the actual past--from another such simulacrum--the actual future? -One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of 'now' likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. -Proposition: I am in love with Luisa Ray.

Then there was the church and the villagers on the sidewalks, the red geraniums on the graves in the cemetery, Pérez fainting (he crumpled like a rag doll), the blood-red earth spilling over Maman’s casket, the white flesh of the roots mixed in with it, more people, voices, the village, waiting in front of a café, the incessant drone of the motor, and my joy when the bus entered the nest of lights that was Algiers and I knew I was going to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours.

They have found a house in the stay-away zone, under the barrage balloons south of London. The town, evacuated in ’40, is still “regulated”—still on the Ministry’s list. Roger and Jessica occupy the place illegally, in a defiance they can never measure unless they’re caught. Jessica has brought an old doll, seashells, her aunt’s grip filled with lace knickers and silk stockings. Roger’s managed to scare up a few chickens to nest in the empty garage. Whenever they meet here, one always remembers to bring a fresh flower or two. The nights are filled with explosion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over the downs a last smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette over a little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally, with brown twine. There’s never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly—most times they’re too paranoid to risk a fire—but it’s something they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.

They have found a house in the stay-away zone, under the barrage balloons south of London. The town, evacuated in '40, is still "regulated"—still on the Ministry's list. Roger and Jessica occupy the place illegally, in a defiance they can never measure unless they're caught. Jessica has brought an old doll, seashells, her aunt's grip filled with lace knickers and silk stockings. Roger's managed to scare up a few chickens to nest in the empty garage. Whenever they meet here, one always remembers to bring a fresh flower or two. The nights are filled with explosion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over the downs and a smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette over a little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally, with brown twine. There's never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly-most times they're too paranoid to risk a fire—but it's something they want to keep, so much that to keep it, they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.

III. Ah Vastness of Pines Ah vastness of pines, murmur of waves breaking, slow play of lights, solitary bell, twilight falling in your eyes, toy doll, earth-shell, in whom the earth sings! In you the rivers sing and my soul flees in them as you desire, and you send it where you will. Aim my road on your bow of hope and in a frenzy I will free my flock of arrows. On all sides I see you waist of fog, and yousilence hunts my afflicted hours; my kisses anchor, and my moist desire nests in you with your arms of transparent stone. Ah your mysterious voice that love tolls and darkens in the resonant and dying evening! Thus in deep hours I have seen, over the fields, the ears of wheat tolling in the mouth of the wind.

At the beginning of the twentieth century we understood the workings of nature on the scales of classical physics that are good down to about a hundredth of a millimetre. The work on atomic physics in the first thirty years of the century took our understanding down to lengths of a millionth of a millimetre. Since then, research on nuclear and high-energy physics has taken us to length scales that are smaller by a further factor of a billion. It might seem that we could go on forever discovering structures on smaller and smaller length scales. However, there is a limit to this series as with a series of nested Russian dolls. Eventually one gets down to a smallest doll, which can’t be taken apart any more. In physics the smallest doll is called the Planck length and is a millimetre divided by a 100,000 billion billion billion. We are not about to build particle accelerators that can probe to distances that small.

What is especially striking about the earth is the way in which it contains time capsules nested within time capsules, like a Russian doll. Individual biological cells (properly interpreted) are time capsules from which biologists read genetic time. Organs within the body are again time capsules, and contain traces of the history and morphogenesis of our bodies. The body itself is a time capsule. History is written in a face, which carries a date - the approximate date of our birth. We can all tell the rough age of a person from a glance at their face. Wherever we look, we find mutually consistent time capsules - in grains of sand, in ripe cherries, in books in libraries. This consistent meshing of stories even extends far from the Earth and into the outermost reaches of the universe. The abundances of the chemical elements and isotopes in the gas of stars and the waters of the oceans tell the story of the stars and a Big Bang that created the lightest elements. It all fits together so well.

EAGLE The East direction is represented by eagle and condor, who bring vision, clarity, and foresight. Eagle perceives the entire panorama of life without becoming bogged down in its details. The energies of eagle assist us in finding the guiding vision of our lives. The eyes of condor see into the past and the future, helping to know where we come from, and who we are becoming. When I work with a client who is stuck in the traumas of the past, I help her to connect with the spirit of eagle or condor. As this energy infuses the healing space, my client is often able to attain new clarity and insight into her life. This is not an intellectual insight, but rather a call, faint at first, hardly consciously heard. Her possibilities beckon to her and propel her out of her grief and into her destiny. I believe that while everyone has a future, only certain people have a destiny. Having a destiny means living to your fullest human potential. You don’t need to become a famous politician or poet, but your destiny has to be endowed with meaning and purpose. You could be a street sweeper and be living a destiny. You could be the president of a large corporation and be living a life bereft of meaning. One can make oneself available to destiny, but it requires a great deal of courage to do so. Otherwise our destiny bypasses us, leaving us deprived of a fulfillment known by those who choose to take the road less traveled. Eagle allows us to rise above the mundane battles that occupy our lives and consume our energy and attention. Eagle gives us wings to soar above trivial day-to-day struggles into the high peaks close to Heaven. Eagle and condor represent the self-transcending principle in nature. Biologists have identified the self-transcending principle as one of the prime agendas of evolution. Living molecules seek to transcend their selfhood to become cells, then simple organisms, which then form tissues, then organs, and then evolve into complex beings such as humans and whales. Every transcending jump is inclusive of all of the levels beneath it. Cells are inclusive of molecules, yet transcend them; organs are inclusive of cells, yet go far beyond them; whales are inclusive of organs yet cannot be described by them, as the whole transcends the sum of its parts. The transcending principle represented by eagle states that problems at a certain level are best solved by going up one step. The problems of cells are best resolved by organs, while the needs of organs are best addressed by an organism such as a butterfly or a human. The same principle operates in our lives. Think of nested Russian dolls. Material needs are the tiny doll in the center. The larger emotional doll encompasses them, and both are contained within the outermost spiritual doll. In this way, we cannot satisfy emotional needs with material things, but we can satisfy them spiritually. When we go one step up, our emotional needs are addressed in the solution. We rise above our life dilemmas on the wings of eagle and see our lives in perspective.

I wish I understood it,” she said. “It’s okay,” I said. “Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.” “You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?” “There’s no self to hate. It’s like, when I look into myself, there’s no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don’t feel like they’re mine. They’re not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It’s like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there’s a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it’s solid all the way through. But with me, I don’t think there is one that’s solid. They just keep getting smaller.” “That reminds me of a story my mom tells,” Daisy said. “What story?” I could hear her teeth chattering when she talked but neither of us wanted to stop looking up at the latticed sky. “Okay, so there’s this scientist, and he’s giving a lecture to a huge audience about the history of the earth, and he explains that the earth was formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust, and then for a while the earth was very hot, but then it cooled enough for oceans to form. And single-celled life emerged in the oceans, and then over billions of years, life got more abundant and complex, until two hundred fifty thousand or so years ago, humans evolved, and we started using more advanced tools, and then eventually built spaceships and everything. “So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’ “The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but if that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’ “And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’ “And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?’ “And the old woman says, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’” I laughed. “It’s turtles all the way down.” “It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.” “Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction - in short, belief - grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up - a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows - the actual past - from another such simulacrum - the actual future? One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. Proposition: I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey.

She was familiar with this immaterial hunger. There had been times when her entire life had seemed characterized by this craving. By this compelling, incessant desire for something. Maybe it was like that for everyone. Surely it was for some people. It was the reason they ate too much, drank too much, and became deliberately self-destructive. But what was it they wanted? Was it different for everyone? And what was she really craving?

How can one know good and evil when events nest themselves one within the other, like hollow wooden dolls?

People are animists by nature, always interpreting reality in their own image. It starts early when children freely ascribe inner lives to clouds, trees, dolls, and other objects. This tendency is commercially exploited with pet rocks, chia pets, and Tamagotchi, which show remarkably little resemblance to the usual recipients of human love. The phenomenon is not even limited to our species; chimpanzees, too, care for imaginary young. Richard Wrangham observed a six-year-old juvenile, Kakama, carry and cradle a small wooden log as if it were a newborn. Kakama did so for hours on end, one time even building a nest in a tree and putting the log into it on its own. Kakama's mother was pregnant at the time. The field-worker notes: "My intuition suggested a possibility that I was reluctant, as a professional skeptical scientist, to accept on the basis of a single observation: that I had just watched a young male chimpanzee invent and then play with a doll in possible anticipation of his mother giving birth.

Joanna Stern was blunt: “I don’t love Apple Music.” She said it “lacks polish and simplicity” and compared its lists and menus to Russian nesting dolls.

It was the law of the matryoshka—the Russian nesting doll—out of each, a girl is born; the girl grows up and produces a girl who one day becomes a mother by giving birth to yet another girl who eventually bears one, too. The infinite thread of life renewing the kinfolk. I wondered if the moms came here to save one of us or to find salvation for themselves.

The folk-like crafted goods of Sergei Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention. Maliutin was the creator of the first matrioshka, or Russian nesting doll, in 1891. At that time he was working at the Moscow zemstvo’s craft workshops at Sergiev Posad which specialized in making Russian toys. Contrary to the popular belief today, the matrioshka has no roots in Russian folk culture at all. It was dreamed up in response to a commission from the Mamontovs to make a Russian version of the Japanese nesting doll. Maliutin created a red-cheeked peasant girl in the shape of a barrel with a chicken underneath her arm. Each smaller doll portrayed a different aspect of peasant life; and at the core was a baby tightly swaddled in the Russian style. The design became immensely popular and by the end of the 1890s several million dolls were being manufactured every year. The myth was then established that the matrioshka was an ancient Russian toy.

The question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the question I keep insisting upon, is this: How can this story—this experience—be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use? To talk back to myself: experience is instructive. People make connections on their own. When I make a metaphor, I offer the comparison, but the distance between vehicle and tenor is distance the reader must cross. I can’t carry you from one to the other. I can’t carry you from the nesting doll to the self, or from the boat to the life—you have to get yourself there. I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it. Here, take it. Is this enough? This is my material.

whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it's always to improve the voodoo doll. Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap as $30 (£22), far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home.

That evening, doodling in her book of True Things in the henhouse, Donkey drew a snake who had eaten another snake just barely smaller than itself and so was entirely full, from tip to tail. Then she decided that this snake-eating snake would actually be inside another snake, a rattlesnake, so she drew a third snake around it. And she knew that a king snake, immune to venom, would eat a rattlesnake, so she put a fourth snake around the others. She considered then that the snake doodle moved back in time. Before the biggest snake could eat the second-biggest snake, all the inside eating had to have happened already. What she had drawn could not logically be older snakes eating younger snakes but precisely the opposite. The younger snake grew up big enough to devour the older snake, who'd already devoured its elder, and so on back in time. The nested dolls Rose Thorn had given her were perhaps not mothers with babies inside them, but babies grown large enough to eat their mothers. All her life she was afraid of Herself eating her, but maybe there was--- also or instead--- an opposite problem.

Identity in Biology is a matter of nesting dolls

I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it’s all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It’s our choice. But if tennis is life, then what follows tennis must be the unknowable void. The thought makes me cold.

I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it’s all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It’s our choice.

Neil was like a Russian nesting doll whose good qualities got smaller the more you uncover him. But Daniel was the oppsite. The more I knew, the better he became.

What?” Willa says. She’s looking at my face. “What’s going on with you, besides being concussed or whatever you are?” How are you an adult? is one question I don’t ask. Are all those little girls nested inside you like matryoshka dolls? is another. All those summers of the kids with their sticky hands and sticky faces and excitedness! “Just sentimental,” I say instead, and kiss her perfect rosy empath cheek.

Joy, with her ancestors residing within her like nesting dolls, is a brave, flaming heart, born to face the wound of the world, and one day she will be one among the wave to heal it.

At Ogilvy & Mather, founder David Mather established the practice of sending each new branch head a nested set of wooden dolls—each doll opens to reveal a smaller replica of the doll. Inside the smallest is a message: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs; but if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, Ogilvy & Mather will become a company of giants.”1

Grief, I believe, is cumulative-each experience of loss shaping the size and scope of the next, each loss holding reverberations of the losses a person has experienced over a lifetime. The pain of grief is real, but it's also an echo and an aftershock, the spirits of past emotions rising up to grip your hand again. Examine one loss and you're likely to find another inside of it, and then another inside of that one, all that grief repeating like a set of Russian nesting dolls.

Life is a hierarchy of nested levels, like Russian dolls: genes within chromosomes within cells within individual organisms within hives, societies, and other groups.

The first stacked dolls better known as Russian Nesting Dolls, matryoshka dolls or Babushka Dolls, were first made in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin. Much of the artistry is in the painting of the usual 5 dolls, although the world record is 51 dolls. Each doll, which when opened reveals a smaller doll of the same type inside ending with the smallest innermost doll, which is considered the baby doll and is carved from a single piece of wood. Frequently these dolls are of a woman, dressed in a full length traditional Russian peasant dress called a sarafan. When I served with the Military Intelligence Corps of the U.S.Army, the concept of onion skins was a similar metaphor used to denote that we were always encouraged to look beyond the obvious. That it was essential to delve deeper into a subject, so as to arrive at the essence of the situation or matter. This is the same principle I employed in writing my award winning book, The Exciting Story of Cuba. Although it can be considered a history book, it is actually a book comprised of many stories or vignettes that when woven together give the reader a view into the inner workings of the Island Nation, just 90 miles south of Key West. The early 1950’s are an example of this. At that time President Batista was hailed a champion of business interests and considered this a direct endorsement of his régime. Sugar prices remained high during this period and Cuba enjoyed some of its best years agriculturally. For those at the top of the ladder, the Cuban economy flourished! However, it was during this same period that the people lower on the economic ladder struggled. A populist movement was started, resulting in a number of rebel bands to challenge the entrenched regime, including the followers of autocrats such as Fidel and Raul Castro. Castro’s M 26 7 militia had a reputation of indiscriminately placing bombs, one of which blew a young woman to pieces in the once-grand theater, “Teatro America.” A farmer, who failed to cooperate with Batista’s army, was locked into his home with his wife and his daughter, which was then set on fire killing them all. What had been a corrupt but peaceful government, quickly turned into a war zone. Despite of Batista’s constitutional abuses and his alliance with the Mafia, the years under his régime were still the most prosperous ones in Cuba’s history. Of course most of the money went to those at the top of the economic ladder and on the lower end of the scale a house maid was lucky to make $25 to $30 a month.

I began to see this as a series of dilemmas nested like Russian dolls. Can today’s SETI community agree on a policy about active SETI? Even if collectively forged and broadly ratified, would such an agreement actually control or change global behavior, as perceived from the outside? How would you get everyone to go along? Can human society in some sense agree on active SETI? Should we, as a species, cautiously try to hide our presence, or hopefully announce ourselves to the universe?

Encapsulation is almost always a good thing to do, but sometimes information can be hidden in the wrong place. This makes the code difficult to understand, to integrate, or to build behavior from by composing objects. The best defense is to be clear about the difference between the two concepts when discussing a design. For example, we might say: • “Encapsulate the data structure for the cache in the CachingAuctionLoader class.” • “Encapsulate the name of the application’s log file in the PricingPolicy class.” These sound reasonable until we recast them in terms of information hiding: • “Hide the data structure used for the cache in the CachingAuctionLoader class.” • “Hide the name of the application’s log file in the PricingPolicy class.” Context independence tells us that we have no business hiding details of the log file in the PricingPolicy class—they’re concepts from different levels in the “Russian doll” structure of nested domains. If the log file name is necessary, it should be packaged up and passed in from a level that understands external configuration.

Keep in mind this Edicule has been built and rebuilt four times over the centuries and the church around it has also undergone enormous periodic changes. This structure we’re in is from the nineteenth century. Essentially the Edicule is like a Russian nesting doll, one building inside another inside another. The actual tomb is probably below us but it would take an earthquake literally to get the church authorities to agree to any kind of modern archaeological exploration.

Picture the four essential parts of every human like Russian nesting dolls. The smallest is the body, which is essentially a spacesuit that allows us to survive in the Earth environment. Then the ego, which, in its healthy state, gives us the focus and confidence to function in the human world. The soul is an eternal, individualized creation that grows, learns and seeks ever-closer union with God. And Spirit—present in everything, everyone, everywhere—is God, the One, the same for all of us and always available as the essence of who we are.

We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside….

I reflect that the mitochondria that process energy from food to animate our tissues are inherited entirely from our mothers, passed down through millennia in an endless progression of nesting dolls along a matrilineal line. The mitochondria from the sperm essentially melt upon fertilization with an egg, while our mother’s mitochondria persist and create all the energy we need to do everything.

Addie softens, takes his hand. "Of course it does. Your deal and mine, they nest like Russian dolls together in a shell. I look at you, and I see exactly what I want. It's just that what I want has nothing to do with looks, or charm, or success.

Paul chafed at this second coming out, at being in<\i> again at all, and so suddenly. Is it endless? he thought, like Russian nesting dolls, with no tiny solid center?

Paul chafed at this second coming out, at being in again at all, and so suddenly. Is it endless? he thought, like Russian nesting dolls, with no tiny solid center?

Life has never given me what I wanted. But it has, once in a while, given me what I needed.

The womanly softness is melting away. And i love it. This is none of that Instagram bollocks about 'strong not skinny' which just really hides an eating disorder in an obsessive excersice regimen - a Russian nesting doll of neuroses - i have this growing sensation of hardness, or armour, of being able to physically hurt someone with only my body and not just my wits. Men must feel this from birth. If i'd known how to use my physiciality to take out my family, would i have gone a different way? Would it have been easier or more rewarding?

We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

The second, but more visible, untruth is the claim that for 23 years, EIC officials throughout the territory sponsored violent actions such as chopping off hands to force natives to collect rubber, leaving millions dead in a horror that should be directly compared to the Holocaust. There are about a dozen little cheats here, one embedded in the other like Russian nesting dolls.

We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.

Gabriel. Her other uncle is so rarely here, but whenever he visits, the rooms seem brighter, warmer, as though the house itself recognizes the return of its wayward inhabitant. He never comes empty-handed, either, bringing gifts that are as magical as they are beautiful. Clockwork statues of princes and knights, fairies and queens, with intricate workings and gossamer wings stretched taut along thin wire. Or, for her sixth birthday, a set of nesting dolls that never revealed the same object in its innermost hold. On his last visit, he gave her a dim light to read by, which never went out and yet never seemed to need batteries, either.

I clutched my little pen case covered with smiling matryoshka dolls. The nesting doll, a self inside a self inside a self, my own personal symbolism.

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was. Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

The house enchanted me. I felt a mix of awe and longing and embarrassment at the awe and longing. I wondered how many kitchens there could be, whether the huge outer house contained several others, nested one inside another, like Russian dolls, each smaller and more primitive than the one immediately encapsulating it, until, arriving at the center, one would find a mud hut, and in the middle of its earth floor a charred depression in which sat ashes, dead to appearance, but from which the gentle breath from someone kneeling in the dirt and putting his face to them, close enough to whisper a confession, would arouse an orange ember, crystalline, nuclear, at the very heart of Enon’s greatest virtues and its innermost corruptions.

Ms. Coron went on, “A recursive function works like nesting dolls. To solve a bigger problem, a recursive function calls on itself to solve a smaller version of the same problem.” Ona wished she could call on a smaller version of herself to solve her problems. She imagined that nested inside her was Obedient Ona, who enjoyed diagramming Classical Computer Languages and studying prosody in Archaic English.

Where inside them does awe arise? Soul is a place- the innermost Russian nesting doll.

Due to the Swedish Barmaid falling off her bike pissed and the boss selling sexual favors in warmer climates, Café Bottoms Up will be closed for the rest of the week.

split the omelet in half and served the eggs on some smashing Villeroy and Bach plates with a farmhouse design.

RUSSIAN NESTING DOLLS Have you ever seen these things? They’re these little egg-shaped, hand-painted, wooden dolls that split in half to reveal a smaller doll inside, and another inside that, all the way down to an adorable, itty-bitty little doll nugget. Yeah, so . . . that’s your brain.

I've already told her I love her. I love this nesting doll of souls that rides beside me. And I'll show her every way I can until she believes me...And if I'm careful, or lucky, someday I might manage to dodge the needles on the cactus and hold her hand. Just the thought of watching the sunset while holding Fury's hand has a goofy smile sliding onto my face.

A veritable nesting doll of nurture—house, me, baby—in sweet placental drift.

To explain the origins of physical order, Ludwig connected phenomena occurring at different spatial scales, mainly atoms and gases.1 Although it makes sense today, in Ludwig’s time working across spatial scales was a practice that violated an implicit contract among scientists. Many of Ludwig’s colleagues saw science as a hierarchy of Russian nesting dolls, with new structures emerging at each level. In this hierarchy, transgressing boundaries was thought unnecessary. Economics did not need psychology, just as psychology did not need biology. Biology did not need chemistry, and chemistry did not need physics. Explaining gases in terms of atoms, although not as preposterous as explaining human behavior in terms of biology, was seen as a betrayal of this implicit deal.

People were like Russian nesting dolls—versions stacked inside the latest edition.

The nesting doll of memory collapses into its component pieces, each leading someplace smaller and smaller [...]

Nesting like Russian dolls. Each larger creation becomes more than the sum of its parts yet remains entirely dependent on them.

But more important, he also spotted an encrypted block of code that turned out to be Stuxnet’s mother lode—a large .DLL file (dynamic link library) that contained about three dozen other .DLLs and components inside, all wrapped together in layers of encryption like Russian nesting dolls.

It's a nesting-doll question, concealing other, unspoken ones inside. If I crack open 'Will I meet Jeff?' I'll find 'Do you like me?' Out of which pops 'Are we becoming friends?' Inside that is the most compact, most important question. The heart of the matter: 'Are we the same?

In short, the voices of culture influence our parents’ inner voices, which in turn influence our own, and so on through the many cultures and generations that combine to tune our minds. We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

Does time nest like Russian dolls?