Overture Quotes

Who hurt you, once, so far beyond repair that you would meet each overture with curling lip? While we, who knew you well, your friends, (the focus of your scorn) could see your courage in the face of fear, your wit, and thoughtfulness, and will remember you with something close to love.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light, They'd rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake 'till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints... So far I've had no complaints.

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

No affair that begins with such an orchestrated overture can end on a simple note.

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

Thank you, but we respectfully decline your overture, being more enjoyably occupied at present.

How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.

Because it is the nature of Dreams, and ONLY of Dreams, to define Reality. Destiny is bound to existence. Death is limited by what she will or will not accept.

The first time I met him, I accidentally turned his nose into a penis. I was young and thought about dick a lot.” Ryan almost fell down. For no apparent reason. He wasn’t even walking. I arched an eyebrow at him. “You okay?” “I just…,” Ryan started. “I don’t….Sam.” “That pretty much sums up how we all feel about Sam,” Gary said. “Fond with strong overtures of horror.

Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

In June we picked the clover, And sea-shells in July: There was no silence at the door, No word from the sky. A hand came out of August And flicked his life away: We had not time to bargain, mope, Moralize, or pray.

I am NOT alone. I am accompanied by a large cat and a small girl.

Who hurt you once, / so far beyond repair / that you would greet each overture / with curling lip?

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's 'The Thieving Magpie,' which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

Who hurt you once so far beyond repair / That you would greet each overture with curling lip.

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his-- the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing-- he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air.

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

The tree made it's first move, the first overture of friendship. It allowed a leaf to fall.

It's like one of those affairs in books," said Bailey disgustedly."Someone trying to think up a new way to do a murder. Silly, I call it." "What do you say, Roper?" said Alleyn. "To my way of thinking, sir," said Sergeant Roper, "these thrillers are ruining our criminal classes.

The Gedalists were nearly run down by a Dodge truck on which two grand pianos had been loaded: two uniformed officers were playing, in unison, with gravity and commitment, the 1812 Overture of Tchaikowsky, while the driver wove among the wagons with brusque swerves, pressing the siren at full volume, heedless of the pedestrians in his way.

...the overture began. God! Strings! Oboes! Timpani! Are you fucking kidding me? Why, when we know what human beings are capable of doing, do we not turn our collective heads in shame at the sight of rich housewives screaming at each other on television?

Kay sat gazing out the window of her bedroom, trying to understand the mesmerizing blue of the sky overhead. She was sure there was a scientific explanation having to do with the angle of the sun this time of year, or some other equally-as-boring reason for its uniqueness. But Kay preferred to imagine it like a divine (either small or big “d”) overture playing a sentimental recap of summer which gracefully segued to a seductive preview of the coming autumn.

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment… (…) Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss… What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under…

I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And then there was old Felix M. with his "Midsummer Night's Dream" Overture. And there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age then. But what was I going to do?

Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again?

But I didn't. I didn't say anything, if only because I had no idea how to respond to such an overture. If my experience with friends was sparse, what I knew about boys- other than a competitors for grades or class rank- was nonexistent

I'll be damned if I'm going to miss the overture and finale when I've payed good money for it... You can go, but I'm staying.

How am I supposed to be interested in boys who are dancing in clubs, when this man has kissed me? How can I be satisfied with warmth when I know how it feels to burn?

The spiritual leader will not procrastinate when faced with a decision, nor vacillate after making it. A sincere but faulty decision is better than weak-willed "trial balloons" or indecisive overtures. To postpone decision is really to decide for the status quo. In most decisions the key element is not so much knowing what to do but in living with the results.

Cunnilingus is not a three-minute twerking fad, here today junked tomorrow. It is Tchaikovsky. An overture. An operatic experience that makes you high, then takes you higher. Orgasm is the waft of smoke seen at the top of the volcano. As we know, the journey is pure pleasure, the arrival like the Big Bang that created the universe.

She waited for a man who would marvel her with his intellect, wit and physique, all at the same time. Someone who would beguile her, unnerve her, possess her, and claim her and then make her jealous with deceit and accusations. Someone who wouldn’t bore her after a few hours of company. Someone who wouldn’t be distracted by someone younger than her - even at that age, she had her insecurities........ She waited for a man who would be worth a chase and a challenge, who would beguile her and ravage her, and be true to her. She was no fool. She knew the limitations of affectation and ceremonial overtures between husband and wife. She knew the limits of compatibility, being put off by a few of her suitors instantly. She knew that love was not a guarantee to lifetime of happiness. She knew the importance of money and it’s effect on men. She knew the value of having the best in jewelry, clothes and company, for a person was judged accordingly, and if one wished to be a success, one had to look the part. And that required continuity of resources, not affection. But still she waited. She waited for a man who would surprise her beyond her expectations. She waited for a man who would be magical. She waited for a man who would never come.

Our lives were short, brutal, and would never have enough music.

Introspection is the overture to one’s true character.

Who hurt you once / so far beyond repair / that you would greet each overture / with curling lip? It

There were tightly wound strings shivering in the air as the overture began in full.

Who hurt you, once, so far beyond repair that you would greet each overture with curling lip?

Come into my world. I will show you the phenomenon that Stendhal experienced. I will help you feel the cascading arpeggios of Wagner's overture. I will dance to Doga’s waltzes with you. A day spent without appreciating the beauty surrounding us is a waste. Let me appreciate you

Who hurt you once, so far beyond repair / that you would greet each overture with curling lip? The lines from Ruth Zardo’s poem exploded in his head. In his chest. Me, he realized with horror. I did.

He didn't call me for a few weeks. This was customary within our friendship, confide and retreat, but I wondered. I wondered if perhaps our last conversation had been an overture. Not the conversation, exactly, but the silences within it. There had been many dark pits of tea-sipping silence; looking back, I could imagine placing my hand on his hand while kneeling in one of these dark pits. And in such a pit could one even be sure what one was doing? One might seek solace in a friend and literally go inside this friend to get the solace; and the friend, being old and familiar, might give especially good solace.

Wasn't she a good person? She felt a dim awareness of something almost shameful about the way she'd lived her life. Wasn't there something closed off, even small-minded and mean, about the way she cut herself off from people, ducking down behind the convenient wall of her shyness, her social anxiety? When she sensed the overtures of friendship, she took too long to respond to phone calls and e-mails, and eventually people gave up, and Tess was always relieved.

So, dragons." Fayden shook his head. "Yet another thing that wants to kill us.

Something in us recognizes magic when we encounter it. Whether we believe in it consciously or not. It affects us and the choices we make.

I am the Dream of Cats, and I walk by myself.

An aircraft operated by a woman was unheard of in the sky. Women were bad luck, started fires, caused fights.

The more you say goodbye, the stupider you’ll feel when we’re blitzed as bats at the victory party.

These overtures of peace, translated into the servile and flattering language of Asia, were transmitted to the camp of the Great King; who resolved to signify, by an ambassador, the terms which he was inclined to grant to the suppliant Romans.

It felt like drama of the vastest heights, his kiss the overture of all the greatest operas—the summit of every landscape’s peak, a rush of tides and fates and furies—and she melted in his arms, warmed by more than just the spell at the tips of her fingers.

By the time I had gathered my wits sufficiently to press the point the lamps had guttered out and Brisbane was sleeping heavily fatigued by his effortshighly successful efforts I must confessto divert me from the investigation. I lay awake physically satisfied but deeply annoyed. Even after nine months of marriage I was still not entirely comfortable with my responses to his physical overtures. The merest touch from him and all reasonable though seemed to fly out of my head. It was most disconcerting and more so because he apparently knew it I thought irritable.

Let us say it again: The Universal Presence is a fact. God is here. The whole universe is alive with His life. And He is no strange or foreign God, but the familiar Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whose love has for these thousands of years enfolded the sinful race of men. And always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but respond to His overtures. (And this we call pursuing God!) We will know Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by faith and love and practice.

Frantic smiles at parties, overtures that have desperation behind them, miasmic reaches of talk with the lost bore, short cuts to approach through staring, squeezing or kissing all indicate that one cannot live alone. Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Saddam's politics was the politics of the thug, of violence from the outset of his reign. Realism suggests that some people are not going to be tractable in response to purely peaceable overtures. Indeed, it certainly appears that some individuals, including notably Saddam Hussein, will cheerfully help themselves to a yard for every inch offered by well-meaning peacemakers. When we are dealing with customers as tough as that, there is no alternative to being tough ourselves.

In that moment, I understood powerfully the cost to a child who had to be the one to make the overture of repair. If I hadn’t gone in there, my son would have had to ingest his fear that I did not want to be his father any longer. The worst part of it, however, is that he would have felt it was his fault—if he hadn’t been so exuberant, so needy for my attention, I might still hold him in my heart. He would feel he had to restrain these parts of himself in the future if he was to receive my love once again.

Upon the whole, I commend my own conduct in this affair extremely, and regard it as a very happy instance of circumspection and tenderness. Some mothers would have insisted on their daughter's accepting so good an offer on the first overture; but I could not reconcile it to myself to force Frederica into a marriage from which her heart revolted, and instead of adopting so harsh a measure merely propose to make it her own choice, by rendering her thoroughly uncomfortable till she does accept him--but enough of this tiresome girl.

There was musuc in me, but in this post-Cataclysm world, that didn't matter very much.

Growing up isn’t about learning something new. It’s about unlearning the fairy tales you believe as a child.

Obama's rhetorical overtures to democracy, it turned out, were just a decoy to conceal his unwavering determination to govern from the far left.

Unfortunately, Susan was not the only one who noticed Ricky's eyes on her; Patty was growing increasingly frustrated by his failure to respond to her overtures, or the reason

V. R. Lang You are so serious, as if a glacier spoke in your ear or you had to walk through the great gate of Kiev to get to the living room. I worry about this because I love you. As if it weren't grotesque enough that we live in hydrogen and breathe like atomizers, you have to think I'm a great architect! and you float regally by on your incessant escalator, calm, a jungle queen. Thinking it a steam shovel. Looking a little uneasy. But you are yourself again, yanking silver beads off your neck. Remember, the Russian Easter Overture is full of bunnies. Be always high, full of regard and honor and lanolin. Oh ride horseback in pink linen, be happy! and ride with your beads on, because it rains.

Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement—such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind? It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all. Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own. In Wagner’s overture to Rienzi, one can almost trace this emergence. There are echoes, imitations, paraphrases, pastiches of Rossini, Meyerbeer, Schumann, and others—all the musical influences of his apprenticeship. And then, suddenly, astoundingly, one hears Wagner’s own voice: powerful, extraordinary (though, to my mind, horrible), a voice of genius, without precedent or antecedent. The essential element in these realms of retaining and appropriating versus assimilating and incorporating is one of depth, of meaning, of active and personal involvement.

The slow overture of rain, each drop breaking without breaking into the next, describes the unrelenting, syncopated mind. Not unlike the hummingbirds imagining their wings to be their heart, and swallows believing the horizon to be a line they lift and drop. —Jorie Graham, from “Mind,” Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts. (Princeton University Press; First Edition edition June 21, 1980)

Rather than sweeping romantic gestures or grand overtures, it is these tiny courtesies that create the foundation for the love we seek. If they are missing, the foundation will weaken over time.

would not, could not, make a significant overture. My pride depended on this. She would have needed to make the effort, enough to be openly vulnerable; she would have had to risk my revenge. I like to think I wouldn’t have rebuffed her, but it’s possible that I would have. It’s possible that I would have felt the need to exercise the power if I’d had it. But she didn’t grant me the opportunity

The dust made Lily cough. She buried her face in the crook of her arm to muffle the noise. But behind all that wood, they probably could play the 1812 Overture with real cannons and nobody would hear them.

One day, perhaps, we will have become legends. We'll pass this way outside of space or time, When what they'll know of us will be just questions They'll carve our deeds in stone. Build us in rhyme. The things they'll tell about us will be lies But lies of such a kind as tell a truth Perpetual. Our lives will be revised. Preserved, we'll mouth the epics of our youth. Actors will play us, braver than we are, More funny, deeper, prettier by far. Their lines will be more resonant and wise Than anything we said. Majestic lies. So wait. Such tales might be the truth one day. For now, alive, we huddle, ache and pray.

What is this place?" "This is the afterlife of your people, only permitted to those who died before adulthood." "Then how did you get here?" "Have you ever tried to keep a cat out of anywhere it wanted to be?

Light takes darkness vanish and worlds reappear. Light opens each day with a blaring overture, then throws its wands to earth and casts diamonds on lakes and oceans. Each night, lights tricks make the stars seem alive.

Destiny sees things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. He knows there are no stories, only the illusion of stories: threads and patterns that seem to appear in the pages of existence given meaning and significance by the observer. Destiny observes worlds and molecules like motes of dust hanging in a sunbeam: every movement, every moment inevitable. Destiny walks the paths of his garden, a place of forks and paths which combine and part, seeing only what is. He is surprised by nothing. There is nothing that can surprise him, nothing that was not already written in his book.

Are you a virgin, Clikk?...I’ve noticed you never visit the brothels when we hit the port…' 'I have standards. Women are like locks. If they give too easy, they aren’t worth the trouble. The ones that require precision, effort and clever maneuvering, are those that hold the greatest treasures.' 'True, true,' he said, 'And women are also like light. Go long enough without them and you start to go mad, to the point you contrive disturbing metaphors about women and locks.

What kind of opera was The Thieving Magpie? I wondered. All I knew about it was the monotonous melody of its overture and its mysterious title. We had had a recording of the overture in the house when I was a boy. It had been conducted by Toscanini.

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh.

Soaring at this altitude, I saw Elsace as something so much cleaner. Lakes turned to puddles, cities into toys. The squalor of the slums went invisible and everything smelled fresh like rain. It was one of the reasons I loved the Wastrel. I felt so far away from all that misery down below.

Our deal's over," said Charlie. "I brought your feather. I want my brother. You took him. I want him back. Anansi's bloodline was not mine to give." "And if I no longer have your brother?" It was hard to tell, in the firefly light, but Charlie did not believe that her lips had moved. Her words surrounded him, however, in the cries of nightjars, and in the owls' shrieks and hoots. "I want my brother back," he told her. "I want him whole and in one piece and uninjured. And I want him now. Or whatever went on between you and my father over the years was just the prelude. You know. The overture.

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.

But out under the Moon, Chestnut Ridge and Cheat behind them, and Monongahela to cross, into an Overture of meadow to the Horizon, low-lands become to them a dream whilst under a Spell, the way it gives back the Light, the way it withholds its Shadows,— who might not come to believe in an Eternal West? In a Momentum that bears all away? “Men are remov’d by it, and women, from where they were,— as if surrender’d to a great current of Westering. You will hear of gold cities, marble cities, men that fly, women that fight, fantastickal creatures never dream’d in Europe,— something always to take and draw you that way,

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

Exactly who Merowdis was referring to when she said ‘just us’ wasn’t clear. The dogs and Apple assumed she meant them. The trees were quite sure she was addressing them. A spider making a web in a patch of bramble thought she must be addressing him and that this was, in some sense, an overture of friendship. In reply he left off the first web and began another, the second web being a well-argued treatise on the importance of friendship and what friends owed each other. That Merowdis could not read what he had written, indeed was not capable of distinguishing it from any other spider web in the woods, did not occur to him. (If you ever get a chance to learn what is written in spider webs, take it. Spiders have been writing since the world began and know many interesting things.)

Thought, in and of itself, has no external consequences-although it may be an indispensable overture to action: one may, for example, plan, rehearse, or muster the resolve for action. Action extends one beyond oneself; it involves interaction with one's surrounding physical or interpersonal world. Action need not entail gross, or even observable, movement. A slight gesture or glance toward another may be action of momentous import.

I love mockingbirds, but I cannot rehab them because they imprint, or bond, or whatever you choose to call it. Young ravens and crows are worse. In their quest for attention and affection, they are akin to domestic dogs. And when you placate young wild animals with a tender human touch, it changes them forever. So rehabbers have to reject the overtures of creatures who attempt to bond, to ensure they retain their wild nature. Some people are good at this. I am not. I have too much of what John Keats called negative capability as well as a close corollary, empathy. When birds arrive at my door lost, broken, and terrified, the distinctions between us fall away, and they are no longer wild animals separate from my humanity. Instead, I am right there with them, sharing their troubles, fear, and pain. I see myself in them and want to protect, love, and reassure them.

Even in 2018, eighty per cent of victims of reported kidnapping and abduction cases were women. Between 2001 and 2017, data published by the Indian National Crime Records Bureau showed that ‘love’ was a far more frequent reason for the murder of women than terrorism. Beyond honour killings, it remains common for us to read reports of young single women being murdered for simply rejecting the romantic overtures of men interested in them.

It remained dark. Outside the window, the balcony was grey. Suddenly, on its sullen stone, I did not indeed see a less negative colour, but I felt as it were an effort towards a less negative colour, the pulsation of a hesitating ray that struggled to discharge its light. A moment later the balcony was as pale and luminous as a standing water at dawn, and a thousand shadows from the iron-work of its balustrade had come to rest on it. A breath of wind dispersed them; the stone grew dark again, but, like tamed creatures, they returned; they began, imperceptibly, to grow lighter, and by one of those continuous crescendos, such as, in music, at the end of an overture, carry a single note to the extreme fortissimo, making it pass rapidly through all the intermediate stages, I saw it attain to that fixed, unalterable gold of fine days, on which the sharply cut shadows of the wrought iron of the balustrade were outlined in black like a capricious vegetation, with a fineness in the delineation of their smallest details which seemed to indicate a deliberate application, an artist’s satisfaction, and which so much relief, so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of their somber and happy mass that in truth those large and leafy shadows which lay reflected on that lake of sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges of happiness and peace of mind.

You’re a trigger finger dug into the starting gun, the smack as it fires, the tense stroke of hooves pressing into a fresh track. You’re the curiosity of a flashbulb nibbling air, tricky camera lens grabbing a mane as it quivers back. I’m a rising overture of thighs. I’m dirt exploding midair —sand fireworks. I’m the impulse to grab hold: the jockey’s knees clenching as he rocks above the heaving saddle. You’re the bit I can’t keep from tasting, and I, the clench of jaws, willing to split in two for the shiver of collision, tooth on tooth. Darling, you’re a wager: the whole wad riding on one last leap, but then you’re abrupt: an ankle’s vomity pop. And I’m the entire crowd grunting to its feet. You’re one blossoming moment of unstoppable collapse: the bracing limbs, the beveling slide, the shriek of submission to gravity, a hard landing. From the stands, I’m a hush: hand to mouth. I’m needles of heat, a gut sinking over a lost life savings. You’re someone else’s carnation wreath, red as a bitemark necklace.

I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And then there was old Felix M. with his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture. And then there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age, then. But what was I going to do?

Look! when I am in a drawing room, a church, a station; on the terrasse of a cafe, at the theatre or wherever crowds pass or loiter, I enjoy considering faces from a strictly homicidal point of view. For you may see by the glance, by the back of the neck, the shape of the skull, the jaw bone and zygoma of the cheeks, or by some part of their persons that they bear the stigmata of that psychological calamity known as murder. It is scarcely an aberration of my mind, but I can go nowhere without seeing it flickering beneath eyelids, or without feeling its mysterious contact in the touch of every hand held out to me. Last Sunday I went to a town on the festival day of its patron saint. In the public square, which was decorated with foliage, floral arches, and poles draped with flags, was grouped every kind of amusement common to that sort of public celebration—And beneath the paternal eye of the authorities, a swarm of good people were enjoying themselves. The wooden horses, the roller-coaster and the swings drew a very meagre crowd. The organs wheezed their gayest tunes and most bewitching overtures in vain. Other pleasures absorbed this festive throng. Some shot with rifles, pistols, or the good old crossbow at targets painted like human faces; others hurled balls, knocking over marionettes ranged pathetically on wooden bars. Still others, mallet in hand, pounded upon a spring which animated a French sailor who patriotically transfixed with his bayonet a poor hova or a mocking Dahomean. Everywhere, under tents or in the little lighted booths, I saw counterfeits of death, parodies of massacre, portrayals of hecatombs. And how happy these good people were!

LONG, LONG AGO IN the Incubation Period of Man—long before booking agents, five-a-days, theatrical boarding houses, subway circuits, and Variety—when Megatherium roamed the trees, when Broadway was going through its First Glacial Period, and when the first vaudeville show was planned by the first lop-eared, low-browed, hairy impresario, it was decreed: “The acrobat shall be first.” Why the acrobat should be first no one ever explained; but that this was a dubious honor every one on the bill—including the acrobat—realized only too well. For it was recognized even then, in the infancy of Show Business, that the first shall be last in the applause of the audience. And all through the ages, in courts and courtyards and feeble theatres, it was the acrobat—whether he was called buffoon, farceur, merry-andrew, tumbler, mountebank, Harlequin, or punchinello—who was thrown, first among his fellow-mimes, to the lions of entertainment to whet their appetites for the more luscious feasts to come. So that to this day their muscular miracles are performed hard on the overture’s last wall shaking blare, performed with a simple resignation that speaks well for the mildness and resilience of the whole acrobatic tribe.

Emily of a warm feeling of pleasure about the request to call. Don had always just dropped in, indifferent to her convenience. Cab had only taken her to dances. There was a flattering formality, an indication of a genuine wish to get acquainted, about Jed Wakeman's overture. It gratified her. The ungratifying though occurred that he might be coming just to talk about the Syrians. "What makes me have ideas like that?" she asked herself. "There's a side of my nature that's always trying to pull me down - the way Don does. Well, I won't allow it! He asked to call because he likes me. And I like him. And I'm glad he's coming.

The death and resurrection of Christ mark the incursion of the future new age into the present old age (cf de Boer 1989:187, note 17; Duff 1989:285-289). This event signifies the inauguration and the anticipation of the coming triumph of God, the overture to it, and its guarantee. It is a decisive sign, which determines the character of all future signs and indeed of the Christian hope itself. Paul can therefore designate Christ as the “first fruits” of the final resurrection of the dead, or the “first-born among many brethren” (1 Cor 15:20, 23; Rom 8:29). The resurrection of Christ necessarily points to the future glory of God and its completion.

Several Obama administration officials sympathetic to Holbrooke said they felt that antipathy toward him and his campaign for diplomacy may have squandered the United States’ period of maximum potential in the region. When US troop deployments were high, both the Taliban and the Pakistanis had incentives to come to the table and respond to tough talk. Once we were leaving, there was little reason to cooperate. The lack of White House support for Holbrooke’s diplomatic overtures to Pakistan had, likewise, wasted openings to steel the relationship for the complete collapse that followed. Richard Olson, who took over as ambassador to Pakistan in 2012, called the year after Holbrooke’s death an “annus horribilis.” We lost the war, and this is when it happened.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (November 11 [O.S. October 30] 1821 – February 9 [O.S. January 28] 1881) is considered one of two greatest prose writers of Russian literature, alongside close contemporary Leo Tolstoy. Dostoevsky's works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century thought and world literature. Dostoevsky's chief ouevre, mainly novels, explore the human psychology in the disturbing political, social and spiritual context of his 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the anonymous, embittered voice of the Underground Man, is considered by Walter Kaufmann as the "best overture for existentialism ever written." Source: Wikipedia

Life is a collection of memories and feelings. Mawkish sentimentally urges us to engage in artistic overtures, we yearn to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. We walk in parallel strides with our brethren seeking out equivalent affirmations of our being. We long to shout out to the world that we once walked this earth; we seek to leave in our wake traces of our pithy habitation. Our unfilled longing propels us into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then we desperately seek redemption from our slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. We employ a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to our temporal existence. We labor on the canvas of our choosing to scrawl our inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with our impending mortality.

and there is dishonest men plenty to guide them to the devil, scoundrels that reckons to be the ‘people’s friends,’ and that knows nought about the people, and is as insincere as Lucifer. I’ve lived aboon forty year in the world, and I believe that ‘the people’ will never have any true friends but theirseln and them two or three good folk i’ different stations that is friends to all the world. Human natur’, taking it i’ th’ lump, is nought but selfishness. It is but excessive few, it is but just an exception here and there, now and then, sich as ye two young uns and me, that, being in a different sphere, can understand t’ one t’ other, and be friends wi’out slavishness o’ one hand or pride o’ t’ other. Them that reckons to be friends to a lower class than their own fro’ political motives is never to be trusted; they always try to make their inferiors tools. For my own part, I will neither be patronized nor misled for no man’s pleasure. I’ve had overtures made to me lately that I saw were treacherous, and I flung ’em back i’ the faces o’ them that offered ‘em.

I woke a few moments ago from a fever and a host of interlocking fever dreams, one after the next. There was one where I was in London, walking through old abandoned formerly beautiful buildings, all of them about to be demolished. Sometimes I'd find myself walking past the enormous line of people waiting to attend the television memorial for a dead author friend of mine, but his memorial was a television spectacular with comedians and big band music. There was the one where I had accidentally connected my bank card to a portable printer and the little printer kept printing cash but on the wrong paper and at the wrong size, so my money had huge, incredibly detailed faces on it, works of art that could not be spent. Then I woke from one dream into another: I was asleep in the passenger seat of the car, and saw that we were driving through a densely populated town, and that the driver was also asleep. I tried hard to wake her up and failed, and knew that no one was in control, no one was at the wheel, and soon someone was going to be killed, and I was shouting and calling without effect; but I whimpered and snuffled enough in the real world that my wife stroked my face and said, "Honey? You're having a nightmare," and, finally, I woke for real. But I woke into a world in which, somewhere, I am still being driven through my life by a sleeping driver, in which money is only good as art, in which we can write the finest books but at the end the crowds will come out and say good-bye for the entertainment, in which the buildings and cities we inhabit will relentlessly be destroyed by progress and time: a world colored by dreams and illuminated by them, too.

That they were false, the general had learnt from the very person who had suggested them, from Thorpe himself, whom he had chanced to meet again in town, and who, under the influence of exactly opposite feelings, irritated by Catherine’s refusal, and yet more by the failure of a very recent endeavour to accomplish a reconciliation between Morland and Isabella, convinced that they were separated forever, and spurning a friendship which could be no longer serviceable, hastened to contradict all that he had said before to the advantage of the Morlands—confessed himself to have been totally mistaken in his opinion of their circumstances and character, misled by the rhodomontade of his friend to believe his father a man of substance and credit, whereas the transactions of the two or three last weeks proved him to be neither; for after coming eagerly forward on the first overture of a marriage between the families, with the most liberal proposals, he had, on being brought to the point by the shrewdness of the relator, been constrained to acknowledge himself incapable of giving the young people even a decent support. They

Muslim acknowledgement of the positive aspects of female sexuality has historically coexisted with two views that challenge it in different ways. First, certain elements of the classical Muslim tradition treat female sexuality as dangerous, with potentially disruptive and chaotic effects on society. Historians have demonstrated how anxieties about temptation and female sexuality translated into insistence (never fully achieved in reality) on restricting the appearance of women in public spaces. Muslim worry over fitna – chaos and disorder – has often focused on the sexual temptation caused both by women’s unregulated desires and the troublesome desire that women provoke in men. Second, and in a paradoxical relationship to this view of women as sexually insatiable and thus prone to create social chaos, Muslim authorities have stressed the importance of the fulfillment of male sexual needs, especially in the context of marriage. Drawing particularly on several hadith delineating dire consequences for women who refuse their husbands’ sexual overtures, the insistence on men’s sexual needs and wives’ responsibility to fulfill them has competed for prominence in modern intra-Muslim discourses on sex with the recognition of female sexual needs.

The music of cri-cri and cigales droned on in a hypnotic rhythm, punctuated by the occasional croon of the nightingale. I thought of lullabies and how as a child they would placate my disappointment that another day had ended. I was used to sleeping in strange places, and would always focus on sound to relax. In the pawnshop, it was the ticking of grandfather clocks or the tuning of antique instruments. In the thieves’ den, it was striking of a match, the bubbling of a water pipe and the gentle murmur floating in off the streets. On the Wastrel, it was the wind or the creaking wood. It was important to me to find lullabies where I could. If death came with a lullaby, perhaps fewer men would fear it.

The Comte de Chagny was right; no gala performance ever equalled this one. All the great composers of the day had conducted their own works in turns. Faure and Krauss had sung; and on that evening, Christine Daaé had revealed her true self, for the first time, to the astonished and and enthusiastic audience. Gounod had conducted the Funeral March of a Marionette; Reyer, his beautiful overture to Siguar; Saint Saëns, the Danse Macabre and a Rêverie Orientale, Massenet, an unpublished Hungarian march; Guiraud, his Carnaval; Delibes, the Valse lente from Sylvia and the Pizzicati from Coppelia. Mlle. Krauss had sung the bolero in the Vespri Siciliani; and Mlle. Denise Bloch the drinking song in Lucrezia Borgia. But the real triumph was reserved for Christine Daaé, who had begun by singing a few passages from Romeo and Juliet. It was the first time that the young artist sang in this work of Gounod, which had not been transferred to the Opera and which was revived at the the old Theatre Lyrique by Mme. Carvalho. Those who heard her say that her voice, in these passages, was seraphic; but this was nothing to the superhuman notes that she gave forth in the prison scene and the final trio in Faust, which she sang in the place of La Carlotta, who was ill. No one had ever heard or seen anything like it. Daaé revealed a new Margarita that night, a Margarita of a splendor, a radiance hitherto unsuspected. The whole house went mad, rising to it its feet, shouting, cheering, clapping, while Christine sobbed and fainted in the arms of her fellow-singers and had to be carried to her dressing-room. A few subscribers, however, protested. Why had so great a treasure been kept from them all that time? Till then, Christine Daaé had played a good Siebel to Carlotta's rather too splendidly material Margarita. And it had needed Carlotta's incomprehensible and inexcusable absence from this gala night for the little Daaé, at a moment's warning, to show all that she could do in a part of the programme reserved for the Spanish diva! Well, what the subscribers wanted to know was, why had Debienne and Poligny applied to Daaé, when Carlotta was taken ill? Did they know of her hidden genius? And, if they knew of it, why had they kept it hidden? And why had she kept it hidden? Oddly enough, she was not known to have a professor of singing at that moment. She had often said she meant to practice alone for the future. The whole thing was a mystery.

After loud overtures from his daughters, Anthony finally left the house and went up the winding path to the “museum,” to the mobile home where he and his parents had lived from 1949 to 1958. It has been left untouched. The furniture, tables, the paint on the walls, the ’50s cabinets, the dressers, the closets, are all unchanged, remaining as they once were. And in her closet in the bedroom, past the nurse’s uniform, far away in the right-hand corner on the top shelf, lies the black backpack that contains Tatiana’s soul. Every once in a while when she can stand it—or when she can’t stand it—she looks through it. Alexander never looks through it. Tatiana knows what Anthony is about to see. Two cans of Spam in the pack. A bottle of vodka. The nurse’s uniform she escaped from the Soviet Union in that hangs in plastic in the museum closet, next to the PMH nurse’s uniform she nearly lost her marriage in. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal in the pack, in a hidden pocket. The letters she received from Alexander—including the last one from Kontum, which, when she heard about his injuries, she thought would be the last one. That plane ride to Saigon in December 1970 was the longest twelve hours of Tatiana’s life. Francesca and her daughter Emily took care of Tatiana’s kids. Vikki, her good and forgiven friend, came with her, to bring back the body of Tom Richter, to bring back Anthony. In the backpack lies an old yellowed book, The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems. The pages are so old, they splinter if you turn them. You cannot leaf, you can only lift. And between the fracturing pages, photographs are slotted like fragile parchment leaves. Anthony is supposed to find two of these photographs and bring them back. It should take him only a few minutes. Cracked leaves of Tania before she was Alexander’s. Here she is at a few months old, held by her mother, Tania in one arm, Pasha in the other. Here she is, a toddler in the River Luga, bobbing with Pasha. And here a few years older, lying in the hammock with Dasha. A beaming, pretty, dark-haired Dasha is about fourteen. Here is Tania, around ten, with two dangling little braids, doing a fantastic one-armed handstand on top of a tree stump. Here are Tania and Pasha in the boat together, Pasha threateningly raising the oar over her head. Here is the whole family. The parents, side by side, unsmiling, Deda holding Tania’s hand. Babushka holding Pasha’s, Dasha smiling merrily in front.

She thinks no one would ever marry ‘a reckless society miss’ and a ‘troublemaker.’” He winced to hear his own words thrown back at him. Celia was all that…and so much more. Not that he dared tell her. Bad enough that he’d revealed too much of how he felt yesterday. For now, she could chalk it up to mere desire. If he started paying her compliments, she might guess how far his feelings went, and that wouldn’t do. So he tempered his remarks. “Your grandmother is merely worried that you will waste yourself on some man who doesn’t deserve you.” Like a bastard Bow Street Runner. “I suspect that if you tell her you’re going to marry the duke, she won’t be a bit surprised. And she certainly won’t agree to rescind the ultimatum, now that she’s finally achieved what she wanted.” “Yes, I’ve come to that conclusion myself. And besides…well…it wouldn’t be fair to involve him in such a plot behind his back when he’s a genuinely nice man offering marriage. If word got out that he had offered and I’d accepted, only to turn him down, people would assume I’d done it because of the madness in his family. That would just be cruel.” Now that Jackson knew she wasn’t actually going to marry the duke, he could be open-minded. “It certainly wouldn’t be kind,” he agreed. “But I’d be more worried that if word got out, you’d be painted as the worst sort of jilt.” She shrugged that off. “I wouldn’t care, as long as it freed me from Gran’s ultimatum.” It took him a moment to digest that. “So you lied when you said at our first discussion of your suitors that you had an interest in marriage?” “Of course I didn’t lie.” Her cheeks pinkened again. “But I want to marry for love, and not because Gran has decided I’m taking too long at it. I want my husband to genuinely care for me.” Her voice shook a little. “And not just my fortune.” She cut him a sidelong glance. “Or my connections.” He stiffened in the saddle. “I understand.” Oh yes, he understood all right. Any overtures he made would be construed as mercenary. Her grandmother had made sure of that by telling her of his aspirations. Not that it mattered. If he married her, he risked watching her lose everything. A Chief Magistrate made quite a lofty sum for someone of Jackson’s station, but for someone of hers? It was nothing. Less than nothing. “So what do you plan to do?” he asked. “About your grandmother’s ultimatum, I mean.” She shook her head. “If presenting her with an offer and begging her forbearance didn’t work, my original plan was just to marry whichever of the three gentlemen had offered.” “And now?” “I can’t bring myself to do it.” He stopped clenching the reins. “Well, that’s something then.” “So I find myself back where I started. I suppose I shall have to drum up some more suitors.” She slanted a glance at him. “Any ideas?