“
The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.
”
”
Owen Barfield (Worlds Apart)
“
...Opal is dead, and I don't see how a healer can change that! It's not something to joke about."
Joke?" Then Owen hit his forehead and cried, "That's right, you haven't heard!"
Heard what?" asked Adrien, who felt an insane glimmer of hope return to his heart.
Death is on strike! She hasn't done that for two centuries, and it's very annoying. Your friend is alive."
Very annoying?" repeated Amber. "I don't see what's so annoying about a miracle! What is Death on strike for?"
Everyone knows that Death lives in Fairytale-in an inaccessible area, obviously. And just a few hours ago, she decided to stop working. So, for now, no one can die.
”
”
Flavia Bujor
“
I believe I have already suggested that colour is the most obvious bridge between emotion and perception, that is, between subjective experience of the psyche and quality objective in nature. Both light up only between the extremes of light and darkness, and in their reciprocal interplay. Thus, outward the rainbow--or, if you prefer it, the spectrum--is the bridge between dark and light, but inwardly the rainbow is, what the soul itself is, the bridge between body and spirit, between earth and heaven.
”
”
Owen Barfield
“
I never knew the difference between loving someone and being in love,” he began. “I don’t know why, because now it seems so obvious. I mean, it’s in the name: in love. When you love someone that just means you care; but when you’re in love, that means you’re a part of it.” He scanned the audience and landed on Paxton and Jade holding hands in the third row. “The feeling consumes you,” he continued. “And when you’re surrounded by that want and that need to make that other person happy, you can’t see anything else. You’re blind to all of the hate and the hurt that’s waiting on the outside. None of it matters, because in here – in love – nothing hurts.” Larson watched as a drop of his own tears fell onto the surface in front of him. “I don’t care if I’m blind for the rest of my life. I loved Owen. I’m in love with him. And even though he’s gone, I’ll never leave this place we made.
”
”
Megan Duke (Small Circles)
“
She did ask where he’d been, though, and he obviously told the truth: He’d been helping Bethany, who was half-fictional, find her missing father in a superhero comic, only to be thrown into a Pick the Plot book by a fictional man named Nobody, who had then separated the fictional and nonfictional worlds and sent Owen and Bethany back to the nonfictional world through the last open portal between their worlds, the one that led to Neverland. And since that portal connected to London, that’s where they emerged.
”
”
James Riley (Worlds Apart (Story Thieves #5))
“
I can’t read Tess of the d’Urbervilles!” I cried. “It’s too hard!” “YOU MEAN IT’S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF READ IT, YOU MEAN IT’S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF PAY ATTENTION,” he said. “BUT IT’S NOT TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES THAT’S HARD. THOMAS HARDY MAY BORE YOU BUT HE’S VERY EASY TO UNDERSTAND—HE’S OBVIOUS, HE TELLS YOU EVERYTHING YOU HAVE TO KNOW.” “He tells me more than I want to know!” I cried. “YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM,” said Owen Meany. “IT’S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE’S A VICTIM; IF YOU’RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO’S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN’T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO’S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT’S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING! MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT’S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON’T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE—TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT’S SO EASY; I THINK THAT’S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS.” “It’s not easy for me!” I cried. “I hate reading this book!” “DO YOU HATE TO READ MOST BOOKS?” Owen asked me. “Yes!” I said. “DO YOU SEE THAT THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESS?” he asked me. “Yes,” I admitted. “NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE,” said Owen Meany—my friend, my teacher. Standing on the sidewalk with Mrs.
”
”
John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)
“
The language of the court was, of course, not as poetic as the language of the marsh. Yet Kya saw similarities in their natures. The judge, obviously the alpha male, was secure in his position, so his posture was imposing, but relaxed and unthreatened as the territorial boar. Tom Milton, too, exuded confidence and rank with easy movements and stance. A powerful buck, acknowledged as such. The prosecutor, on the other hand, relied on wide, bright ties and broad-shouldered suit jackets to enhance his status. He threw his weight by flinging his arms or raising his voice. A lesser male needs to shout to be noticed. The bailiff represented the lowest-ranking male and depended on his belt hung with glistening pistol, clanging wad of keys, and clunky radio to bolster his position. Dominance hierarchies enhance stability in natural populations, and some less natural, Kya thought.
”
”
Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing)
“
Emilio quit making exaggerated leering faces at Boyd and opened the door. "Hey sexy," he drawled, grabbing Owen's shirt and hauling him into the apartment. "Boyd is here, so I'll have to teach you about dick sucking another time. Actually, I dunno, maybe he wants to watch."
Owen looked startled while Boyd rolled his eyes.
"I could probably teach you pointers on that one," Boyd drawled to Emilio. "I don't need to watch anything."
Emilio shoved Owen in another step and kicked his door closed as he released what had once been his typical loud, charismatic laugh. "Believe me, baby, I sure as fuck know that," he said with a wink. "But I was talking about pointers for Owen here. I'm no joke at the trade myself."
"Whoa, whoa," Owen said, lifting his hands. "Information to place in the 'deleted' folder and recycled, man. Give a guy some notice." Even so, he didn't seem too bothered by the topic as he immediately perked up when he saw the coffee table. "Oh! Score, is that food? Well, obviously it is. Hey, can I have some?" He was already walking over as he asked.
"Unless Sir Sucks A Lot is sharing his shit, you better back off mine or I'll shoot you in the face," Emilio said as he flipped the locks to his door. "And why the fuck are you here, anyways?
”
”
Ais (Fade (In the Company of Shadows, #4))
“
Since participation is a way of experiencing the world in immediacy, and not a system of ideas about experience, or about the world, we obviously shall not find any contemporary description of it. When we come to contemporary philosophy and theories of knowledge, we shall indeed find explicit reference to participation, but for the moment we are concerned with the ordinary man's experience and not with what philosophers thought about that experience. Contemporary books were written, and contemporary science was expounded, for people assumed to share the collective representations of the writer, and accordingly our evidence must be sought more often in what is implied or assumed than in what is actually affirmed. We can only reconstruct the collective representations of another age obliquely.
”
”
Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry)
“
Those of us who have so-called normal lives without undue stress and fear and worry and pain rarely know how fortunate we are. Then we see a man like Adam who’s famous even if unemployed and who lives at his sister’s house and struggles to manage, and we’re tempted to think he should snap out of it. He’s obviously intelligent, and he has no apparent disabilities. So we think, you’re smart, go out and get a job, and make yourself a normal life. Then we learn that the man has Traumatic Brain Injury and medical issues that can rip normalcy in two, and we realize that one of the main problems is in ourselves for failing to consider that not all other people have our good fortune of functioning bodies and brains, with emotional and psychological landscapes that are level and fertile and stable and predictable.
”
”
Todd Borg (Tahoe Blue Fire (Owen McKenna #13))
“
Take a clever boy, who knows nothing about the principle of internal combustion or the inside of an engine, and leave him inside a motor-car, first telling him to move the various knobs, switches and levers about and see what happens. If no disaster supervenes, he will end by finding himself able to drive the car. It will then be true to say that he knows how to drive the car; but untrue to say that he knows the car. As to that, the most we could say would be that he has an 'operative' knowledge of it - because for operation all that is required is a good empirical acquaintance with the dashboard and the pedals. Whatever we say, it is obvious that what he has is very different from the knowledge of someone else, who has studied mechanics, though he has perhaps never driven a car in his life, and is perhaps too nervous to try. Now whether or no there is another kind of knowledge of nature, which corresponds to 'engine-knowledge' in the analogy, it seems that, if the first view of the nature of scientific theory is accepted, the kind of knowledge aimed at by science must be, in effect, what I will call 'dashboard-knowledge.
”
”
Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry)
“
The smoke stung at the corners of Uri’s eyes as he struggled to open them. He could hear the battle sounds all around him and smell the iron from the blood drenched warfare in the air. Much to his surprise, death had not yet claimed him. He could feel Raimie’s body under his own, no warmth came from him, however, and Uri feared the worse. Over his shoulder, he heard a large blast and the earth shook under him.
The trackers had obviously followed someone through. There were hundreds of designated transportation locations as part of the evacuation drill. Absolutely nobody was allowed to transport directly to a primary facility for this exact reason. If a tracker were to follow your transportation signature to the next facility, the Guardians could be nearly wiped out in one night. The secrecy of the facilities and cloaking spells were key in their safety.
Uri knew if he or Raimie had any chance of surviving, he needed to get clear of the fighting and find a healer. Attempting to sit up, he braced his weight on the earth just beside Raimie’s head. He quickly reconsidered as the unbearable pain shot through his side. Running his hand down to the source, he could feel the shaft of an arrow jutting out from his side; a warm wetness covered his fingertips.
In the distance, Uri could hear someone crying out in agony, not a voice he recognized, yet the pain in it seemed all too familiar. Another blast rang out from behind him as Uri slumped to the ground, groaning in pain.
”
”
Wendy Owens (The Guardians Crown Part One (The Sacred Guardians, #4))
“
There was a dreadful logic here - so obvious he had overlooked it. The real need was for a different kind of book altogether, a book for the times. Very well then, he would explore that infernal map, transcribe its morbid cartography; record the tale of a realm that was at once a city and Hell and himself.
In this way Owen Maddock turned his back on the light and sought out the oracles that lurk in darkness.
A feverish energy possessed him. He laboured as never before upon his given work. Now he would strive to be obscure, to lead his readers by crooked paths, baffle them with indecipherable mysteries. There would no delicacy of style, only 'thunder at midnight'. Little by little there rose up before his inner eye a new vision to replace that of the White Road that had led him nowhere: a Kingdom of Darkness, a crepuscular domain of monstrous cults that chanted, to the tolling of iron bells and the beating of brazen gongs, unpronounceable demonic litanies. He must familiarise himself with every aspect of this world, its endless roll-calls of Hell, the spells by which the doors of the pit might be opened. He must cast in awful detail the laws by which tortures were administered.
He would write for days in a frenzy, his mind ranging on raven's wings through skies black as pitch.
"The White Road
”
”
Ron Weighell (The White Road)
“
It is important to record that the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was never mass-produced until 2008. It is a historical object of a very peculiar sort. By 2009, when it had first become hugely popular, it seemed to respond to a particularly English malaise, one connected directly with the way Britain reacted to the credit crunch and the banking crash. From this moment of crisis, it tapped into an already established narrative about Britain’s ‘finest hour’ – the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940–41 – when it was the only country left fighting the Third Reich. This was a moment of entirely indisputable – and apparently uncomplicated – national heroism, one which Britain has clung to through thick and thin. Even during the height of the boom, as the critical theorist Paul Gilroy spotted in his 2004 book After Empire, the Blitz and the Victory were frequently invoked, made necessary by ‘the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings’. ‘1940’ and ‘1945’ were ‘obsessive repetitions’, ‘anxious and melancholic’, morbid fetishes, clung to as a means of not thinking about other aspects of recent British history – most obviously, its Empire. This has only intensified since the financial crisis began.
The ‘Blitz spirit’ has been exploited by politicians largely since 1979. When Thatcherites and Blairites spoke of ‘hard choices’ and ‘muddling through’, they often evoked the memories of 1941. It served to legitimate regimes which constantly argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, resources were scarce and there wasn’t enough money to go around; the most persuasive way of explaining why someone (else) was inevitably going to suffer. Ironically, however, this rhetoric of sacrifice was often combined with a demand that the consumers enrich themselves – buy their house, get a new car, make something of themselves, ‘aspire’.
”
”
Owen Hatherley (The Ministry of Nostalgia)
“
When additional emphasis is placed upon these officiants being celibate and male (to avoid the pollution of menstruation), then the importance of ritual purity for many Christians, though they may have become unaware of it through familiarity, becomes obvious. Perhaps no more need be said, but the Christian view of the Blessed Virgin Mary might be a fruitful area for further exploration.
”
”
W. Owen Cole (Sikhism - An Introduction: Teach Yourself)
“
Despite the obvious flaw that consumers of illegal substances have a natural incentive to lie about their habits, the NSDUH is the most comprehensive set of data available about drug use in America and is widely cited by both academics and journalists.
”
”
Frank Owen (No Speed Limit: Meth Across America)
“
It is at times like these that I have a powerful perceptual shift about luck and fate and the chaotic randomness of life. Those of us who have so-called normal lives without undue stress and fear and worry and pain rarely know how fortunate we are. Then we see a man like Adam who’s famous even if unemployed and who lives at his sister’s house and struggles to manage, and we’re tempted to think he should snap out of it. He’s obviously intelligent, and he has no apparent disabilities. So we think, you’re smart, go out and get a job, and make yourself a normal life. Then we learn that the man has Traumatic Brain Injury and medical issues that can rip normalcy in two, and we realize that one of the main problems is in ourselves for failing to consider that not all other people have our good fortune of functioning bodies and brains, with emotional and psychological landscapes that are level and fertile and stable and predictable.
”
”
Todd Borg (Tahoe Blue Fire (Owen McKenna #13))
“
Someone tall and tanned was standing just inside the doorway: Owen Walker had arrived. Obviously, she had known this was going to happen – he was one of the people she was setting up for – but she hadn’t anticipated him getting there so soon, while she was on her own, cheeks bulging like a hamster, stuffed with food.
”
”
Rosie Jamieson
“
In a way, they shared that unique connection: a mental limitation that wasn’t obvious but always evident to them. For Owen, it was being in the dark about what people were feeling or thinking. For Maya, it was being in the dark about her past.
”
”
A.G. Riddle (The Extinction Trials)
“
It's obvious that different players have different requirements. What I do in a game is maybe 50 sprints and walk; I hardly ever jog. My game is bang, go, whereas Didi Hamann would sprint maybe once in a game and jog around the rest of the time.
”
”
Michael Owen (Michael Owen: Off the Record)
“
As University of California, Los Angeles, professor Mark Kleiman has written on the realitybasedcommunity.netblog: “Meth is simply not a good enforcement target because it has no obvious ‘choke point.’ In
”
”
Frank Owen (No Speed Limit: Meth Across America)
“
As University of California, Los Angeles, professor Mark Kleiman has written on the realitybasedcommunity.netblog: “Meth is simply not a good enforcement target because it has no obvious ‘choke point.
”
”
Frank Owen (No Speed Limit: Meth Across America)
“
In a way, he wanted to run, so that no-one would know that Owen was waiting there for him. Another, braver part of him welcomed the moment of surprise when this fact became obvious.
”
”
Storm Constantine (Stalking Tender Prey (The Grigori Trilogy, #1))
“
He felt that he was donning his other-life attire, he was making some kind of obvious invitation, which Owen would scorn.
”
”
Storm Constantine (Stalking Tender Prey (The Grigori Trilogy, #1))
“
An excellent illustration of this notion comes from another intriguing experiment conducted on psychology students. In this case students were given, in advance of class, either a complete set of notes on the lecture for the day or a partial set of notes—one that consisted of “headings and titles of definitions and concepts, which required students to add information to complete the notes” (Cornelius & Owen-DeSchryver 2008, p. 8). So the students who received the full notes had the knowledge network for the day handed to them prior to class (through the course learning management system); the students who received the partial notes received only the frame of that knowledge network, and had to fill in the rest on their own. The students in both conditions performed comparably on the first two examinations for the course. On the third and final examinations, however, as the amount of course material increased and required deeper understanding, the students in the partial-notes condition outperformed their full-note peers. Especially relevant for the argument that connections improve comprehension, the students in the partial-notes condition outperformed their peers on conceptual questions on the final exam. As the authors explained, “On a [final] test that required knowledge of a large number of concepts, rote memorization was not feasible, so students who encoded the information by actively taking notes throughout the semester may have performed better because they had experienced better conceptual understanding” (p. 10). This experiment has obvious implications for classroom teaching, or even the creation of reading guides or lecture notes for an online courses. However, the important point for now is that the partial notes gave students an organized framework that enabled and encouraged them to see and make new connections on their own.
”
”
James M. Lang (Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning)
“
The rest of the day went by in a blur, mostly because Owen didn’t even bother trying to pay attention. Instead, he went through all his favorite books in his head, trying to pinpoint which one they should go into first. Obviously, Harry Potter would be near the top of the list. Not even to Hogwarts, just to Ollivanders for a wand. That’d be perfect. Next, The Lightning Thief. And The Graveyard Book, and a trip to Fablehaven,
”
”
James Riley (Story Thieves (Story Thieves, #1))
“
Ladon stepped into her path.
With a sneer, she ran her gaze over him, sizing him up. Then she lifted a single eyebrow, obviously having found him wanting.
Ladon shoved aside the irritation that unusual reaction drew from him. "You're not going near her."
She crossed her arms, clearly unimpressed.
"You're not going to stop me."
"Who the hell are you?" He didn't like repeating himself.
Skylar smiled, those fantasy-inducing lips tipping up in a grim delight. "I'm Kasia's sister.
”
”
Abigail Owen (The Rogue King (Inferno Rising, #1))
“
Back in London, on news of the atrocity, Dr Owen was asked to comment. He expressed reluctance to do so while awaiting confirmation as to the identity of the perpetrators. He was holding out the possibility the Rhode-sians had shot their own aircraft down then bayoneted the survivors to death. He refused to condemn the obvious and never did. It was an awkward situation in which he again found himself: the killers had acted on behalf of a leader who the British government refused to criticise.
”
”
Hannes Wessels (A Handful of Hard Men: The SAS and the Battle for Rhodesia)
“
The simple and obvious point is that not everything worth expressing can or should be expressed scientifically. Scientism is descriptively false and normatively false.
”
”
Owen J. Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World)