Original Trilogy Quotes

Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger. Travel too far that road and the way is lost.

Venkat was silent for a moment. “Jack, I’m going to buy your whole team autographed Star Trek memorabilia.” “I prefer Star Wars,” he said, turning to leave. “The original trilogy only, of course.

He’s looking at me like one would a painting—drinking in every detail, delighting in its originality, deeming it a work of art.

Evil contained is not evil destroyed.

You shouldn't believe everything you hear you're young, not stupid.

Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations. Their right to be free men, Their desire to live in peace, Their courage to seek out truth, Herein lies the Sword of Shannara.

Central governments have always been the greatest danger to mankind.

Will whistled appreciatively. “I bet many Bothans died to bring us this information.” Rachel stared at him. “What?” Nico sighed. “I’m guessing that was a Star Wars reference. My boyfriend is a Star Wars geek of the worst kind.” “Okay, Signor Myth-o-magic. If you would just watch the original trilogy…” Will looked at the rest of us for support and found nothing but blank expressions. “Nobody? Oh, my gods. You people are hopeless.

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

My love has eyes blue as the sky. Her warm, bright smile makes me want to try To give her the world, And when she's curled Up in my arms where I can feel her touch, I realize again that I love her so much. My world has turned from black to white. Kissing in starlight, basking in sunlight, dancing at midnight.' ~John's poem for Belle

Boudicca is the original goth. Ronan Lynch wishes he was that badass.

We should not be less than what we are.

Just like that?” “Just like that!” Venkat was silent for a moment. “Jack, I’m going to buy your whole team autographed Star Trek memorabilia.” “I prefer Star Wars,” he said, turning to leave. “The original trilogy only, of course.

Either you believed in something or you didn’t—you couldn’t have it both ways and be honest with yourself.

His gaze narrowed and she could see his hands twitching again like he’d love nothing more than to throttle her. She was beginning to think it was an affliction of his. Did he go around wanting to choke the life out of everyone or was she special in that regard? “I’m afraid ’tis an urge that is entirely original to you,” the laird barked. She clamped her mouth shut and closed her eyes. Mother Serenity had vowed one day Mairin would regret her propensity to blurt out her least little thought. Today just might be that day.

We build too many walls to be honest with ourselves. -Allanon

Roots, he wrote, symbolize more than underground strong-arms. Roots are also origins, the tendrils of a sprouting seed that give rise to life.

When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one.

Our problem is not one of ignorance; it is one of complacency. We are too quick to accept the life we know and not quick enough to embrace the life we only imagine. We think that events must proceed as we dictate, and that no other voice will ever have meaning but ours

... even a friendly smile shows the teeth behind!

In the interests of originality – not to mention verisimilitude – we’re skipping dinner and moving right on to the date.’ ‘Readers would love a vampire who said that!’ I said.

Jack, I’m going to buy your whole team autographed Star Trek memorabilia.” “I prefer Star Wars,” he said, turning to leave. “The original trilogy only, of course.

Jack, I’m going to buy your whole team autographed Star Trek memorabilia.” “I prefer Star Wars,” he said, turning to leave. “The original trilogy only, of course.” “Of course,” Venkat said.

Yes, but in spite of such a shady origin, it’s really quite good,” Luke told him. “It’s called hot chocolate.

Speed runs, Skywalker. Speed runs.

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” That’s from the original Godfather,

It was not so much a sense of failure that he had experienced as a sense of his own limitations. You cannot do everything you might wish that you could do.

Shea, particularly, had passed the point where his chief emotion was fear; now he felt only a sense of numbness that dulled his mind into self-imposed surrender, a robot-like acceptance of the fact that he was being led to the proverbial slaughter.

Of course, I’m referring to the original. With Gene Wilder. Not the lame re-make with Depp. I like Depp. Don’t get me wrong. However, that rendition was totally spoiled by the single Umpa-Lumpa multiplied by however many in computer graphics. Awful.

He was astonished to discover that I actually preferred the Special Edition version of the original Star Wars trilogy. He shook his head, eyes widened in mock horror. “I can’t even—” “Oh c’mon. Three words: better special effects.” His expression grew dead serious. “Three words: Greedo shoots first.” I grimaced. “Okay, you have a point there, but I’m not going to change my mind just because of that one little thing—” “One little thing?!” His mouth dropped. “That one moment changed the entire characterization of Han Solo.

His hands had been reddened, like all men's hands, in the slaying before the foundation of the world.

Better to stick with the original plan.

But your responsibilities are sometimes given you without choice, without consent.

Above all else, he loves trilogies. There has never been a trilogy he didn't like, and if you don't understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about "moral choices the Transformers are forced to make." At no point did I interrupt him to say, "But Dad, they're cars." This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.

Some decisions cannot be made in advance of the time that will demand them. We cannot always anticipate the way in which things will happen and therefore cannot anticipate what we will do. We must accept that.

Song-Mi Lee,...her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought.

We grow as best we can under the circumstances given us. What good does it do to second-guess ourselves years after the fact? Better that we simply try to understand why we are as we are and then better ourselves by learning from that.

Hindsight should have lent clarity to his actions; it did not. Rather, he felt a lingering sense of confusion. Everything seemed to jumble together in his mind--all the disparate incomplete reasoning, all the emotions that intertwined and colored. They would not sort themselves out for him; they would not arrange themselves in a neat orderly fashion. They merely shuffled about like stray sheep and he chased after them hopelessly.

Ronan's phone buzzed with a text: Gansey. Reached out to a few peers, it said, as if he were sixty instead of the same age as Ronan. Image you sent confirmed logo for Boudicca. All-lady group involved in the protection and organization of women in business. Henry says his mother thinks they're pretty powerful. Another text came in. Boudicca is actually a very interesting historical figure in her won right. Another: She was a warrior queen of the Celts around 60 CE and she fought against the Romans Another: Blue wants you to know Boudicca is Another: Sorry sent too soon quote is 'Boudicca is the original goth. Ronan Lynch wishes he was that badass' Another: Is badass one word or two Ronan's phone displayed ellipses to show that Gansey was about to shoot off another text. Ronan texted back hurriedly, If you have to ask you aren't one. Thanks old man. I'll wiki it.

He laughed in maddened frenzy, knowing somehow that he was no longer in a world of living creatures, but a world of death where soulless beings wandered in hopeless search of escape from their eternal prison. He stumbled on amidst them, laughing, talking, even singing gaily, his mind no longer a part of his mortal being. All about him, the creatures of the dark world followed in cringing companionship, knowing that the maddened mortal was almost one of them.

If the anti-gravity flying machines witnessed by so many in and around Area 51’s airspace are manmade then that confirms the Splinter Civilization are almost light years ahead of known science – and they have technologies the common man could scarcely comprehend. If on the other hand UFO’s are of alien origin, that implies the global elite are collaborating with an ET civilization – and this may explain why classified technology has progressed at such a rapid rate since around the time of Roswell.

We think that we are the victims of time. Actually the way of the world is not fixed anywhere. How would it be possible? We ourselves are our own journey. And that's why we are time too. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. ruthless. (translated from Spanish) Original quote: Pensamos, que somos las victimas del tiempo. En realidad la via del mundo no es fijada en nungun lugar. Como seria posible? Nosotros mismos somos nuestra propia jornada. Y por eso somos el tiempo tambien. Somos lo mismo. Fugitivo. Inescrutable. Desapiadado.

However much science and educational theory and advanced thinking you pump into a college or a university, it always retains a strong hint of its medieval origins.

Hurt gives way to bitterness, bitterness to anger. Travel too far that road and the way is lost.’ He

However, in the 16th century, in Afghanistan, the Illuminated Ones (Roshinaya) picked up the original tactics of the Order of Assassins. They were wiped

I ricordi non sono tesori di vetro da tenere conservati dentro una cassa. Sono nastri colorati da appendere al vento.

for better or worse, the 'spiritual' or 'psychic' side of humanity has been the greatest force for change acting on the world since the beginning of recorded history.

Build it and they will come' is one of the most idiotic ideas conceived by man.

Believe me, Kinson, the potensial for evil lodges deep in every man, myself included. We restrain it better, keep it buried deeper, but it lives within us.

We are not always properly equipped to face the difficulties life places in our path.

He retrieved his Moleskine and studied his original list of goals.

We originally meant each to write an excursionary “thriller:” a space-journey [his] and a timejourney (mine) each discovering Myth.

Amberle

To go back to the original hunger was impossible.

Violence was regarded as an acceptable solution to many problems which would never have originated had violence not been in the air in the first place.

Seek your origins, embrace the unknown.

as they approached the throne, Ali could not help but admire it. Twice his height and carved from sky blue marble, the throne originally belonged to the Nahids and looked it, a monument to the extravagance that had gotten them overthrown. It was designed to turn its occupant into a living shedu, the legendary winged lion that had been their family symbol. Rubies, carnelians, and pink and orange topaz were inlaid above the head to represent the rising sun, while the arms of the throne were similarly jeweled to imitate wings, the legs carved into heavy clawed paws.

There were three kinds of karma: the accumulated karma from all our past lives; the karma we created in this life; and the karma we stored to ripen in our future lives.” ― Alka Joshi, The Henna Artist

Peer review was an excellent system by which academics could either anonymously censor others with whom they disagreed, or hide from controversy after they signed off on truth that the public couldn't stomach. 

Then fingers catch my chin, and my breath catches in turn. Kai tilts my head up to meet his gaze, fingers dancing along my jaw. He’s looking at me like one would a painting – drinking in every detail, delighting in its originality, deeming it a work of art. He tilts my head to the side, turning my cheek the light. Instead, I watch him watch me. Watch his eyes roam over my face. Watch his chest heave with shaky breaths. Watch a muscle tick in his cheek. Watch a smile twitch his lips. His next words are a murmur, as if he’s muttering his innermost thoughts while his thumb continues to wander over my lip. “Will you forever be the prize I am aimlessly trying to win?” “Is that all I am to you? A trophy?” “Oh, darling, a trophy implies that I won it, earned it, deserve it. But if I get to have you, it will be because you let me.

The original eight cryptanalysts were supplemented, after Pearl Harbor, by some of the musicians from the band of the sunken battleship California. For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.

In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.

In order to know something, you must go back to the source. You have to be critical and wise what are the original roots and not the corrupted outcome but in order to know the truth, you have to examine all angles, all sides, all possible traces of deception, the fortress of protection of hidden elements camouflaged with what it seemed overlapping masks along a river of clear or dirty water. The water flows in varying speed depending on the atmospheric factors and men’s interventions in using the flowing water however, the stone remains. Think of the truth: many would hide it, distort it, change it, bury it, or even destroy it but the uncorrupted truth, the unparalleled truth shall always come out. How do you seek the truth? When you seek for the truth, are you guided with an honest heart? Why do you seek the truth? Or, are you among those folks who prefer to hide or bury the truth thinking that the majority won’t find it out? If and when the truth comes out, are you among those persons who will target sacrificial lambs for scapegoats? It is wise to remember that the truth however hidden shall eventually come out. A Cameroonian proverb says, "Water always finds a way out." The same thing I can say about the truth: the truth however hidden shall eventually come out. The water flows, the stones remain. The lies flow, the truth remains. The truth thrives forever." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from K.H. Trilogy

Then, at one particular corner of the gooseberry patch, the change came. What awaited her there was serious to the degree of sorrow and beyond. There was no form nor sound. The mold under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border, were not visibly changed. But they were changed. A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between. In the closeness of that contact she perceived at once that the Director’s words had been entirely misleading. This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand. It was the origin of all right demands and contained them. In its light you could understand them; but from them you could know nothing of it. There was nothing, and never had been anything, like this. And now there was nothing except this. Yet also, everything had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed. In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air. The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. And the making went on amidst a kind of splendor or sorrow or both, whereof she could not tell whether it was in the molding hands or in the kneaded lump.

Child,” said the Sand-fairy sleepily, “I can only advise you to think before you speak” – “But I thought that you never give advice.” “That piece doesn’t count,” it said. “You’ll never take it! Besides, it’s not original. It’s in all the copy-books.

My epic,” said Emily, diligently devouring plum cake, “is about a very beautiful high-born girl who was stolen away from her real parents when she was a baby and brought up in a woodcutter’s hut.” “One av the seven original plots in the world,” murmured Father Cassidy. “What?” “Nothing. Just a bad habit av thinking aloud. Go on.” “She had a lover of high degree but his family did not want him to marry her because she was only a woodcutter’s daughter—” “Another of the seven plots — excuse me.” “ — so they sent him away to the Holy Land on a crusade and word came back that he was killed and then Editha — her name was Editha — went into a convent—” Emily paused for a bite of plum cake and Father Cassidy took up the strain. “And now her lover comes back very much alive, though covered with Paynim scars, and the secret av her birth is discovered through the dying confession av the old nurse and the birthmark on her arm.” “How did you know?” gasped Emily in amazement. “Oh, I guessed it — I’m a good guesser.

The Elven people believe that preservation of the land and all that lives and grows upon it, plant and animal alike, is a moral responsibility. They have always held this belief foremost in their conduct as creatures of the earth. In the old world, they devoted the whole of their lives to caring for the woodlands and forests in which they lived, cultivating its various forms of vegetation, sheltering the animals that it harbored. Of course, they had little else to concern them in those days, for they were an isolated and reclusive people. All that has changed now, but they still maintain a belief in their moral responsibility for their world. Every Elf is expected to spend a portion of his life giving back to the land something of what he has taken out of it. By that I mean every Elf is expected to devote a part of his life to working with the land–to repairing damage it may have suffered through misuse or neglect, to caring for its animals and other wildlife, to caring for its trees and smaller plants where the need to do so is found.

A lot of people disparage the Star Wars prequels, and understandably so; they’re not nearly as good as the original trilogy. But in their own way, they’re not just beautiful; they’re also awfully clever. Here’s the best part: all of the choices in the first trilogy are precisely mirrored in the prequels. The two trilogies are about freedom of choice under nearly identical conditions. Lucas was entirely aware of this: “Luke is faced with the same issues and practically the same scenes that Anakin is faced with. Anakin says yes and Luke says no.

It’s as close to true freedom as I have come. Not freedom of, but freedom from; freedom from the debris of life that piles up and forces us to dig and dig for our original self, who we were once upon a time, innocent and wonderfully naïve, as authentically pure as a human can be.

People say young love or love of the moment isn't real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts.

the ancient Church of St Mary Axe.  The church was originally called St Mary, St Ursula and her 11,000 Virgins, a reference to an entourage including St Ursula and her handmaidens who were beheaded with axes in 451 AD.  Some thought the church itself was that old; others thought it was built a few hundred years later.

Wraeththu have been with me for the greater part of my life. My first rather ham-fisted (and half-finished) stories about them began in my mid-teens. It wasn't until I was twenty-six that I began work properly on the full-length novel that became The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, first volume of the Wraeththu trilogy, which was published in 1987. This was followed by The Bewitchments of Love and Hate and the Fulfilments of Fate and Desire.

My original intention with The 4-Hour Workweek (4HWW), The 4-Hour Body (4HB), and The 4-Hour Chef (4HC) was to create a trilogy themed after Ben Franklin’s famous quote: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” People constantly ask me, “What would you put in The 4-Hour Workweek if you were to write it again? How would you update it?” Ditto for 4HB and 4HC. Tools of Titans contains most of the answers for all three.

Il sole tramontava già fra le profondità verdi delle colline a ovest della vallata, e le sue ombre rosse e rosate sfioravano gli angoli più remoti della campagna, quando Flick Ohmsford cominciò la sua discesa. Il sentiero calava giù irregolarmente per il pendio settentrionale, serpeggiando attraverso i massi imponenti che costeggiavano il terreno, sparendo nelle folte foreste delle pianure per ricomparire a tratti nelle piccole radure e negli spazi liberi della zona dei boschi.

We are all effectively made of stardust: same atomic material, same physical properties, all linked by an energy and common origin, whether you call it faith or physics. For nearly fourteen billions years the universe has been expanding, from the Big Bang onward, always heading out, always seeking the new. Everything in the universe has mirrored this inherent nature - stars, planets, even humans. As a species we have spread, conquered, always looking beyond what we already have to what we might attain, even if we risk destroying ourselves in the process; it runs through everything, from an overreaching emperor destroying his empire for the sake of one more conquered land, to the happily married family man risking his happiness for the sake of an affair. Ours is a destructive nature, often a a violent one, but it's not really our fault, we are merely exhibiting the same nature as everything else, the universal urge to expand and ultimately pull ourselves apart.

The ‘Other Half’ is the word. The ‘Other Half’ is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the ‘Other Half’ is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common ‘hallucinations’ of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject’s body at an angle…yes quite an angle it is the ‘Other Half’ worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. ― William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded. (Grove Press January 12, 1994) Originally published 1962.

I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as “The Holy Trilogies”: Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. (Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones films, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn’t exist. I tended to agree.) I also absorbed the complete filmographies of each of his favorite directors. Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue.

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery? For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt - for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that.

But if you do not assert the superiority of the Catholic way the way your mother does, and I do not assert the superiority of the Jewish way the way my father does, I’m sure we’ll find plenty of people out here who won’t assert the superiority of the Protestant way the way their fathers and mothers did. Nobody dominates anybody anymore. That’s what the war was about. Our parents are not attuned to the possibilities, to the realities of the postwar world, where people can live in harmony, all sorts of people side by side no matter what their origins. This is a new generation and there is no need for that resentment stuff from anybody, them or us. And the upper class is nothing to be frightened of either. You know what you’re going to find once you know them? That they are just other people who want to get along. Let’s be intelligent about all this.

The very first dram Ronan had ever been truly proud of, truly euphoric over, had been a copy. It had been in high school. Ronan wasn't good at surviving high school and he wasn't good at surviving friendship, and so while his friend Gansey's back was turned, he'd stolen Gansey's car. It was a beautiful car. A 1973 bright orange Camaro with stripes right up its hood and straight down its ass. Ronan had wanted to drive it for months, despite Gansey forbidding it. Maybe because of him forbidding it. Within hours of stealing it, Ronan had totaled it. Gansey hadn't wanted him to drive it because he thought he'd grind the clutch, or curb it, or burn out the tires, or maybe, maybe blow the engine. And here Ronan had totaled it. Ronan had loved Richard C. Gansey III far more than he loved himself at that point, and he hadn't known how he was ever going to face him when he returned from out of town. And then, Joseph Kavinsky had taught him to dream a copy. Before that, all of Ronan's dreams--that he knew about, Matthew didn't count--had been accidents and knickknacks, the bizarre and the useless. When he'd successfully copied a car, an entire car, he'd been out of his mind with glee. The dreamt car had been perfect down to the last detail. Exactly like the original. The pinnacle of dreaming. Now a copy was the least impressive thing to him. He could copy anything he put his mind to. That just made him a very ethereal photocopier. A one-man 3-D printer. The dreams he was proud of now were the dreams that were originals. Dreams that couldn't exist in any other way. Dreams that took full advantage of the impossibility of dreamspace in a way that was cunning or lovely or effective or all of the above. The sundogs. Lindenmere. Dreams that had to be dreams. In the past, all his good dreams like this were gifts from Lindenmere or accidents rather than things he had consciously constructed. He was beginning to realize, after listening to Bryde, that this was because he'd been thinking too small. His consciousness was slowly becoming the shape of the concrete, waking world, and it was shrinking all his dreams to the probable. He needed to start realizing that possible and impossible didn't mean the same thing for him as they did for other people. He needed to break himself of the habit of rules, of doubts, of physics. His "what if" had grown so tame. "You are made of dreams and this world is not for you." He would not let the nightwash take him and Matthew. He would not let this world kill him slowly. He deserved a place here, too. He woke.

For clarity's sake, and before going further with this account, I shall identify true aesthetic sorrow a little more closely. Sorrow has the opposite movement to that of pain. So long as one doesn't spoil things out of a misplaced mania for consistency―something I shall prevent also in another way―one may say: the more innocence, the deeper the sorrow. If you press this too far, you destroy the tragic. There is always an element of guilt left over, but it is never properly reflected in the subject; which is why in Greek tragedy the sorrow is so deep. In order to prevent misplaced consistency, I shall merely remark that exaggeration only succeeds in carrying the matter over into another sphere. The synthesis of absolute innocence and absolute guilt is not an aesthetic feature but a metaphysical one. This is the real reason why people have always been ashamed to call the life of Christ a tragedy; one feels instinctively that aesthetic categories do not exhaust the matter. It is clear in another way, too that Christ's life amounts to more than can be exhausted in aesthetic terms, namely from the fact that these terms neutralize themselves in this phenomenon, and are rendered irrelevant. Tragic action always contains an element of suffering, and tragic suffering an element of action; the aesthetic lies in the relativity. The identity of an absolute action and an absolute suffering is beyond the powers of aesthetics and belongs to metaphysics. This identity is exemplified in the life of Christ, for His suffering is absolute because the action is absolutely free, and His action is absolute suffering because it is absolute obedience. The element of guilt that is always left over is, accordingly, not subjectively reflected and this makes the sorrow deep. Tragic guilt is more than just subjective guilt, it is inherited guilt. But inherited guilt, like original sin, is a substantial category, and it is just this substantiality that makes the sorrow deeper. Sophocles' celebrated tragic trilogy, *Oedipus at Colonus*, *Oedipus Rex*, and *Antigone*, turns essentially on this authentic tragic interest. But inherited guilt contains the self-contradiction of being guilt yet not being guilt. The bond that makes the individual guilty is precisely piety, but the guilt which he thereby incurs has all possible aesthetic ambiguity. One might well conclude that the people who developed profound tragedy were the Jews. Thus, when they say of Jehova that he is a jealous God who visits the sins of the fathers on the children unto the third and fourth generations, or one hears those terrible imprecations in the Old Testament, one might feel tempted to look here for the material of tragedy. But Judaism is too ethically developed for this. Jehova's curses, terrible as they are, are nevertheless also righteous punishment. Such was not the case in Greece, there the wrath of the gods has no ethical, but aesthetic ambiguity" (Either/Or).

Ronan's trying to wake up the world. I'm trying to think of how to talk him out of it, but what he's talking about is a world where she never fell asleep. A world where Matthew's just a kid. A world where it doesn't matter what Hennessy does, if something happens to her. A level playing field. I don't think it's a good idea, but it's not like I can't see the appeal, because now I'm biased, I'm too biased to be clear." Declan shook his head a little. "I said I would never become my father, anything like him. And now look at me. At us." Ah, there it was. It took no effort to remember the way he'd looked at her the first moment he realized she was a dream. "I'm a dream," Jordan said. "I'm not your dream." Declan put his chin in his hand and looked back out the window; that, too, would be a good portrait. Perhaps it was just because she liked looking at him that she thought each pose would make a good one. A series. What a future that idea promised, nights upon nights like this, him sitting there, her standing here. "By the time we're married," Declan said eventually, "I want you to have applied for a different studio in this place because this man's paintings are very ugly." Her pulse gently skipped two beats before continuing on as before. "I don't have a social security number of my own, Pozzi." "I'll buy you one," Declan said. "You can wear it in place of a ring." The two of them looked at each other past the canvas on her easel. Finally, he said, voice soft, "I should see the painting now." "Are you sure?" "It's time, Jordan." Putting his jacket to the side, he stood. He waited. He would not come around to look without an invite. It's time, Jordan. Jordan had never been truly honest with anyone who didn't wear Hennessy's face. Showing him this painting, this original, felt like being more honest than she had ever been in her life. She stepped back to give him room. Declan took it in. His eyes flickered to and from the likeness, from the jacket on Portrait Declan's leg to the real jacket he'd left behind on the chair. She watched his gaze follow the line edge she had taken such care to paint, that subtle electricity of complementary colors at the edge of his form. "It's very good," Declan muttered. "Jordan, it's very good." "I thought it might be." "I don't know if it's a sweetmetal. But you're very good." "I thought I might be." "The next one will be even better." "I think it might be." "And in ten years your scandalous masterpiece will get you thrown out of France, too," he said. "And later you can triumphantly sell it to the Met. Children will write papers about you. People like me will tell stories about you to their dates at museums to make them think they're interesting." She kissed him. He kissed her. And this kiss, too, got all wrapped up in the art-making of the portrait sitting on the easel beside them, getting all mixed in with all the other sights and sounds and feelings that had become part of the process. It was very good.

So...what are you working on now?" “Right now, an essay about Don Quixote.” “One of my favorite books.” “Mine too.” “What’s the gist?” “It has to do with the authorship of the books.” “Is there any question?” “I mean the book inside the book Cervantes wrote, the one he imagined he was writing.” “Ah.” “Cervantes claims he is not the author, that the original text was in Arabic.” “Right. It’s an attack on make-believe, so he must claim it was real.” “Precisely. Therefore, the story has to be written by an eyewitness yet Cid Hamete Benengeli, the acknowledged author, never makes an appearance. So who is he? Sancho Panza is of course the witness – illiterate, but with a gift for language. He dictated the story to the barber and the priest, Don Quixote’s friends. They had the manuscript translated into Arabic. Cervantes found the translation and had it rendered back into Spanish. The idea was to hold up a mirror to Don Quixote’s madness so that when he finally read the book himself, he would see the error of his ways. But Don Quixote, in my view, was no mad. He only pretended to be. He engineered the collaboration, and the translation from Arabic back into Spanish. I like to imagine Cervantes hiring Don Quixote in disguise to decipher the story of Don Quixote.” “But why did Quixote go to such lengths?” “He wanted to test the gullibility of man. To what extent would people tolerate blasphemies, lies, and nonsense if they gave them amusement? The answer: to any extent. For the book is still amusing us today. That’s finally all anyone wants out of a book. To be amused.

—a slave was owned by a Continental Army soldier who'd been killed in the French and Indian War. The slave looked after the soldier's widow. He did everything, from dawn to dark didn't stop doing what needed to be done. He chopped and hauled the wood, gathered the crops, excavated and built a cabbage house and stowed the cabbages there, stored the pumpkins, buried the apples, turnips, and potatoes in the ground for winter, stacked the rye and wheat in the barn, slaughtered the pig, salted the pork, slaughtered the cow and corned the beef, until one day the widow married him and they had three sons. And those sons married Gouldtown girls whose families reached back to the settlement's origins in the 1600s, families that by the Revolution were all intermarried and thickly intermingled. One or another or all of them, she said, were descendants of the Indian from the large Lenape settlement at Indian Fields who married a Swede—locally Swedes and Finns had superseded the original Dutch settlers—and who had five children with her; one or another or all were descendants of the two mulatto brothers brought from the West Indies on a trading ship that sailed up the river from Greenwich to Bridgeton, where they were indentured to the landowners who had paid their passage and who themselves later paid the passage of two Dutch sisters to come from Holland to become their wives; one or another or all were descendants of the granddaughter of John Fenwick, an English baronet's son, a cavalry officer in Cromwell's Commonwealth army and a member of the Society of Friends who died in New Jersey not that many years after New Cesarea (the province lying between the Hudson and the Delaware that was deeded by the brother of the king of England to two English proprietors) became New Jersey.

Gray burst into the galley. “Miss Turner is not eating.” The cramped, boxed-in nature of the space, the oppressive heat-it seemed an appropriate place to take this irrational surge of resentment. If only his emotion could dissipate through the ventilation slats as quickly as steam. “And good morning to you, too.” Gabriel wiped his hands on his apron without glancing up. “She’s not eating,” Gray repeated evenly. “She’s wasting away.” He didn’t even realize his knuckled cracked. He flexed his fingers impatiently. “Wasting away?” Gabriel’s face split in a grin as he picked up a mallet and attacked a hunk of salted pork. “Now what makes you say that?” “Her dress no longer fits properly. The neckline of her bodice is too loose.” Gabriel stopped pounding and looked up, meeting Gray’s eyes for the first time since he’d entered the galley. The mocking arch of the old man’s eyebrows had Gray clenching his teeth. They stared at each other for a second. Then Gray blew out his breath and looked away, and Gabriel broke into peals of laughter. “Never thought I’d live to see the day,” the old cook finally said, “when you would complain that a beautiful lady’s bodice was too loose.” “It’s not that she’s a beautiful lady-“ Gabriel looked up sharply. “It’s not merely that she’s a beautiful lady,” Gray amended. “She’s a passenger, and I have a duty to look out for her welfare.” “Wouldn’t that be the captain’s duty?” Gray narrowed his eyes. “And I know my duty well enough,” Gabriel continued. “It’s not as though I’m denying her food, now is it? I’m thinking Miss Turner just isn’t accustomed to the rough living aboard a ship. Used to finer fare, that one.” Gray scowled at the hunk of cured pork under Gabriel’s mallet and the shriveled, sprouted potatoes rolling back and forth with each tilt of the ship. “Is this the noon meal?” “This, and biscuit.” “I’ll order the men to trawl for a fish.” “Wouldn’t that be the captain’s duty?” Gabriel’s tone was sly. Gray wasn’t sure whether the plume of steam swirling through the galley originated for the stove or his ears. He didn’t care for Gabriel’s flippant tone. Neither did he care for the possibility of Miss Turner’s lush curves disappearing when he’d never had any chance to appreciate them. Frustrated beyond all reason, Gray turned to leave, wrenching open the galley door with such force, the hinges creaked in protest. He took a deep breath to compose himself, resolving not to slam the door shut behind him. Gabriel stopped pounding. “Sit down, Gray. Rest your bones.” With another rough sigh, Gray complied. He backed up two paces, slung himself onto a stool, and watched as the cook grabbed a tin cup from a hook on the wall and filled it, drawing a dipper of liquid from a small leather bucket. Then Gabriel set the cup on the table before him. Milk. Gabriel stared it. “For God’s sake, Gabriel. I’m not six years old anymore.” The old man raised his eyebrows. “Well, seeing as how you haven’t outgrown a visit to the kitchen when you’re in a sulk, I thought maybe you’d have a taste for milk yet, too. You did buy the goats.

Today, most nations now have laws requiring any health substance with medicinal claims to be legally defined as “drugs”. This includes herbal remedies and various other non-drug medicines of natural origins. Critics say such laws prevent wider distribution of

If that focus is off and you are easily distracted, then there is no redoubling of hard effort and extra pain. Instead there is a waking up to the fact that your mind has become distracted, a ‘remembering’ of who you are and what you consciously want, and a gentle re-direction of that distracted attention back to focusing on that original conscious desire. You then repeat this process over and over again, until a change is made which happens slowly sometimes, faster at other times, but whatever the case, it is not painful and it’s not hard, it just requires time and attention.

Actually,” said Kevin. “It’s a bit like Star Wars. Right near the end of Return of the Jedi Luke discovers that–” “Oh, will you stop your infernal wittering about that stupid film,” shouted Cassandra. “I watched the original trilogy with the Doctor on a girls’ night in and it was plagiarised from every myth and fairy story that was ever written. The Doctor and I had never laughed so much.

Oh, bluebottle, you would fare ill at a ball! There would be none who could dance better than you; but you would be shunned: you would be too original: you would be before your time.

What are you thinking about?” Grip’s whispered question mists the sensitive skin of my neck, and I scoot back to snuggle under the covers and against his hard, naked body. “‘Night on the Island.’” “Fitting.” He opens his mouth over the curve of my shoulder in a kiss. “Because you were definitely wild and sweet last night.’” “You weren’t so bad yourself.” I turn over to run my thumb over his full lips. “Neruda was so romantic. I’m glad you introduced me to him.” “Dude had serious game.” Grip laughs. “No one writes about love and sex and passion like Neruda.” He grins down at me, a hint of mischief in his eyes. “The original Chocolate Charm.” We both laugh at that. I haven’t heard it in so long. It’s our own inside joke, from the first day we met, but Grip really could charm lint from your pockets.

It was just forgery, after all. Forgery of people rather than art. The key was to remember to be better than a mere copy or mimic. If one painted exactly what one saw as accurately as possible, the result might be technically correct but was also stilted. Brittle. If one ran into a technical snag in its re-creation, the whole process ground to a halt. One had to stick to the script. But with forgery, the surface details were less important than the rules that proved them. Every work of art had rules: Paint was allowed to pool in the corners, lines were feathery at their ends as the brush was lifted, mouths were exaggerated for drama, blacks were unsaturated, so on, so forth. And if one learned enough of them, one could create endless new works based upon those rules and pass them off as creations by the original artist. Humans were the same. They had rules that proved their behavior. Discover the thesis and you had them.

Consciousness is the awareness of awareness.

Chili dogs, funnel cakes, fried bread, majorly greasy pizza, candy apples, ye gods. Evil food smells amazing—which is proof either that there is a Satan or some equivalent out there, or that the Almighty doesn’t actually want everyone to eat organic tofu all the time. I can’t decide.

Luke lifted his gaze to R2-D2 on the barge’s deck, then gave the droid a jaunty salute. It was the signal R2-D2 had been waiting for. A panel slid back from the astromech’s domed head, revealing Luke’s concealed lightsaber. Luke’s original lightsaber had been lost during his duel with Darth Vader on Cloud City, but he’d constructed a new one on Tatooine. He’d already used it, and knew that it worked.

A GLOSSARY OF IGBO WORDS AND PHRASES agadi-nwayi: old woman. agbala: woman; also used of a man who has taken no title. chi: personal god. efulefu: worthless man. egwugwu: a masquerader who impersonates one of the ancestral spirits of the village. ekwe: a musical instrument; a type of drum made from wood. eneke-nti-oba: a kind of bird. eze-agadi-nwayi: the teeth of an old woman. iba: fever. ilo: the village green, where assemblies for sports, discussions, etc., take place. inyanga: showing off, bragging. isa-ifi: a ceremony. If a wife had been separated from her husband for some time and were then to be re-united with him, this ceremony would be held to ascertain that she had not been unfaithful to him during the time of their separation. iyi-uwa: a special kind of stone which forms the link between an ogbanje and the spirit world. Only if the iyi-uwa were discovered and destroyed would the child not die. jigida: a string of waist beads. kotma: court messenger. The word is not of Igbo origin but is a corruption of “court messenger.” kwenu: a shout of approval and greeting. ndichie: elders. nna ayi: our father. nno: welcome. nso-ani: a religious offence of a kind abhorred by everyone, literally earth’s taboo. nza: a very small bird. obi: the large living quarters of the head of the family. obodo dike: the land of the brave. ocbu: murder or manslaughter. ogbanje: a changeling; a child who repeatedly dies and returns to its mother to be reborn. It is almost impossible to bring up an ogbanje child without it dying, unless its iyi-uwa is first found and destroyed.

Evil food smells amazing—which is proof either that there is a Satan or some equivalent out there, or that the Almighty doesn’t actually want everyone to eat organic tofu all the time. I can’t decide.

He pushed his mind back to the original scene. From the palace, they could see the same sunset, even if trees and buildings covered parts of it. In this version of his vision, he was with the same Nora. She was just wearing nicer clothes. She’s what’s important. He fixed his will on that thought, opened his eyes, and smiled at her. “You’re the only part of my dream that matters, Nora. Not the location.

HE HAD BEEN trained in a hidden monastery by the ninjas of Xi’en. He had studied yoga and meditation under an Avrantic guru. His strength, stamina and ability to withstand pain were legendary. He was as silent as a shadow of a black cat in the night, as deadly as a cobra’s fang. He moved like a panther, taut and sinuous. He could climb up rock-faces with his bare hands and stay underwater for hours without breathing. His skill and luck at love and cards was legendary, and he had almost beaten the Civilian at chess once. He was wondering what to wear. When in doubt, Black is the answer, the dance teacher in Ektara had said. He dressed, swiftly. It had been a long time since he had worn the original costume. Black silk clothes, padded boots. The cloth around the face, with slits for his eyes. The fire-resistant Xi’en lava-worm black silk cape. Of course, disguises and camouflage were fun, and often necessary, but this was his favourite. He strapped on his Necessity Belt. He had been all around the world and seen many beautiful things, but this was the finest example of vaman craftsmanship he had ever seen. He opened a trunk under his bed and started thinking about his assignment. His fingers, trained by years of practice, began sliding things into the right pockets on his belt. Into the little sheaths went the darts, the crossbow bolts and the blackened throwing knives. With practiced ease his fingers found the little pouches, side by side, one after the other, for the wires, the brass knuckles, the vial of oil, the sachet of poisonous powder and the shuriken, the little blackened poisoned-tipped discs the ninjas used. On his back was the slim bag that contained a little black chalk, his stamp and his emergency scarab. If he was killed or captured, it would fly to the Civilian. The message inside said Killed or captured. Sorry. He slung a pouch over his shoulder. It contained his blowpipes, ropes, strangling cords and cloth-covered grappling hooks. Over his other shoulder went the light and specially constructed crossbow. The flat bag filled with what he called his ‘special effects’ went on his back. He felt a little naked. He strapped on little black daggers in sheaths to his left arm and outer thighs. He tapped his left foot thrice on the floor and felt the blade slide to the front of the boot. He tapped again and it slid back to the heel. (...) He slipped on his gloves. Finally, he picked up the sheath that contained his first love. It was the one love he’d always been faithful to, the long, curved, deadly and beautiful Artaxerxian dagger that glittered and shone even in the candlelight as he pulled it out and held it lovingly. It was the only weapon he had never blackened. The Silver Dagger. He attached it to the Necessity Belt. Now he was dressed to kill.

May your tongue be tied to the truth!’ they used to curse, and a fearsome curse it was.

My feet are my chairs,” she answered crankily. “I feed on the air. I have nothing; therefore, I have everything.