“
Don't fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass.
”
”
P.C. Cast (Divine By Mistake (Partholon, #1))
“
It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down." -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76
”
”
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
“
Well, why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse
“
She had turned away and was watching a duck out on the lake. It was tucking into weeds, a thing I've never been able to understand anyone wanting to do. Though I suppose, if you face it squarely, they're no worse than spinach.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (Right Ho, Jeeves (Jeeves, #6))
“
Mr Pett, receiving her cold glance squarely between the eyes, felt as if he were being disembowelled by a clumsy amateur.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (Piccadilly Jim)
“
He gave them what they demanded of him, he obeyed the command, but not sullenly or diffidently, and not in shame. Rooted in the land of his fathers, standing before the home of his family he looked towards the sun and let a name burst forth from his soul.
'Tigana!' he cried that all should hear. All of them, everyone in the square. And again, louder yet: 'Tigana!' And then a third, a last time, at the very summit of his voice, with pride, with love, with a lasting, unredeemed defiance of the heart.
'TIGANA!'
Through the square that cry rang, along the streets, up to the windows where people watched, over the roofs of houses running westward to the sea or eastward to the temples, and far beyond all of these-- a sound, a name, a hurled sorrow in the brightness of the air.
”
”
Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana)
“
I hardly knew what to do. I wanted, of course, to rush down to Washington Square and grip the poor blighter silently by the hand; and then, thinking it over, I hadn't the nerve. Absent treatment seemed the touch. I gave it him in waves.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (My Man Jeeves (Jeeves, #1))
“
I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. - - - But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine-tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day. So my father gave me a palm-tree farm which was nine miles square and it contained 560,000 palm-trees, and this palm-wine tapster was tapping one hundred and fifty kegs of palm-wine every morning, but before 2 o’clock p.m., I would have drunk it all; after that he would go and tap another 75 kegs.
”
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Amos Tutuola (The Palm-Wine Drinkard)
“
Few things would gratify me as much as a rediscovered respect for things belonging to others. Not abusing the property of others (or that of the community) is one of the ways in which we respect others. It is an essential part of being considerate guests, no matter where we are: in an airplane, in a friend's home, in a movie theater, in a doctor's office, in a public library, or in a public square.
”
”
P.M. Forni (Choosing Civility)
“
If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an ‘oomph,’ this theory could explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it not? No. It is nowhere near as good as the proposition that the planets move around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly inversely as the square of the distance from the center. The second theory is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place, and, according to the first theory, you could say, ‘Well, that is the funny behavior of the ‘oomph.
”
”
Richard P. Feynman (The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist)
“
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
”
”
Richard P. Feynman (QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter)
“
P.S. I truly love every square inch of Australia. I look forward to when we realise that this country is our giver of life and will survive long after we have passed on. Maybe, then, we will each choose a life similar to that of our ancestors: one of leaving soft footprints and a light touch on this landscape, and with a kindness for each other.
”
”
Don Bemrose (Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia)
“
Don't blame me, Pongo,' said Lord Ickenham, 'if Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you. God bless my soul, though, you can't compare the lorgnettes of to-day with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holster and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes, as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.
”
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P.G. Wodehouse (Uncle Fred in the Springtime)
“
The square-paned windows were coated with a thick, dewlike moisture;
”
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H.P. Lovecraft (The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack: 40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Stories)
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I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.
”
”
Banana Yoshimoto (N.P)
“
She was to bashfulness what that Pythagoras chap was to sorting out the area of the She was to bashfulness what that Pythagoras chap was to sorting out the area of the square of the hypotenuse once and for all.
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P.J. Fitzsimmons (The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning (Anty Boisjoly Mysteries, #2))
“
Hainanese chicken rice, which could arguably be considered the national dish of Singapore. (And yes, Eleanor is ready for foodie bloggers to start attacking her restaurant choice. She chose Wee Nam Kee specifically because the United Square location is only five minutes from the Bao condo, and parking there is $2.00 after 6:00 p.m. If she took him to Chatterbox, which she personally prefers, parking at Mandarin Hotel would have been a nightmare and she would have had to valet her Jaguar for $15. Which she would RATHER DIE than do.)
”
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Kevin Kwan (China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians, #2))
“
The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all—he did not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft (Pickman's Model)
“
Kepler’s third or harmonic law states that the squares of the periods of the planets (the times for them to complete one orbit) are proportional to the cubes of their average distance from the Sun; the more distant the planet, the more slowly it moves, but according to a precise mathematical law: P2 = a3, where P represents the period of revolution of the planet about the Sun, measured in years, and a the distance of the planet from the Sun measured in “astronomical units.
”
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Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
“
Times Square, where Broadway crosses 7th Avenue, is known as the crossroads of the world. Millions
”
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F.P. Lione (The Deuce)
“
It was not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but ‘twas enough—it served. Stubbing it squarely with his toe, Henry shot forward, all arms and legs. It
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (The Man With Two Left Feet)
“
S-A-T-O-R
A-R-E-P-O
T-E-N-E-T
O-P-E-R-A
R-O-T-A-S
The palindrome means something like “The farmer Arepo works with his plow,” with rotas, literally “wheels,” referring to the back-and-forth motion that plows make as they till. This “magic square” has delighted enigmatologists for centuries ... The magic square also reportedly kept away the devil, who traditionally (so said the church) got confused when he read palindromes.
”
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Sam Kean (The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code)
“
The plot is deceptively simple. Condensed even fur- ther, it might read as a personal ad in some questfinder’s forum: Unlikely hero to save world from cataclysm. Seeks motley assortment of companions. Sidequests guaranteed.
”
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Michael P. Williams (Chrono Trigger (Boss Fight Books, #2))
“
What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them.
”
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Richard P. Feynman (Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher)
“
It was a morning when all nature shouted "Fore!" The breeze, as it blew gently up from the valley, seemed to bring a message of hope and cheer, whispering of chip-shots holed and brassies landing squarely on the meat. The fairway, as yet unscarred by the irons of a hundred dubs, smiled greenly up at the azure sky; and the sun, peeping above the trees, looked like a giant golf-ball perfectly lofted by the mashie of some unseen god and about to drop dead by the pin of the eighteenth.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (The Heart of a Goof)
“
My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft (He)
“
It serves to keep the records straight, and is a convenience to the public to whom one wants to do the square thing - affording as it does a bird's eye view of the position of affairs to those of his readers who, through no fault of their own, are not birds.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse
“
There you see two typical members of the class which has down-trodden the poor for centuries. Idlers! Non-producers! Look at the tall thin one with the face like a motor-mascot. Has he ever done an honest day's work in his life? No! A prowler, a trifler, and a blood-sucker! And I bet he still owes his tailor for those trousers!"
He seemed to me to be verging on the personal, and I didn't think a lot of it. Old Bittlesham, on the other hand, was pleased and amused.
"A great gift of expression these fellows have," he chuckled. "Very trenchant."
"And the fat one!" proceeded the chappie. "Don't miss him. Do you know who that is? That's Lord Bittlesham! One of the worst. What has he ever done except eat four square meals a day? His god is his belly, and he sacrifices burnt-offerings to it. If you opened that man now you would find enough lunch to support ten working-class families for a week."
"You know, that's rather well put," I said, but the old boy didn't seem to see it. He had turned a brightish magenta and was bubbling like a kettle on the boil.
"Come away, Mr Wooster," he said. "I am the last man to oppose the right of free speech, but I refuse to listen to this vulgar abuse any longer."
We legged it with quiet dignity, the chappie pursuing us with his foul innuendoes to the last. Dashed embarrassing.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (The Inimitable Jeeves (Jeeves, #2))
“
Don't you know how to square numbers near 50? He says 'You square 50- that's 2500- and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from 50.. If you want the correction, square the difference and add it on. That makes 2304'
(Hans Bethe to Feynman at Los Alamos)
”
”
Richard P. Feynman
“
How can we tell whether the rules which we "guess" at are really right if we cannot analyze the game very well? There are, roughly speaking, three ways.
First, there may be situations where nature has arranged, or we arrange nature, to be simple and to have so few parts that we can predict exactly what will happen, and thus we can check how our rules work. (In one corner of the board there may be only a few chess pieces at work, and that we can figure out exactly.)
A second good way to check rules is in terms of less specific rules derived from them. For example, the rule on the move of a bishop on a chessboard is that it moves only on the diagonal. One can deduce, no matter how many moves may be made, that a certain bishop will always be on a red square. So, without being able to follow the details, we can always check our idea about the bishop's motion by finding out whether it is always on a red square. Of course it will be, for a long time, until all of a sudden we find that it is on a black square (what happened of course, is that in the meantime it was captured, another pawn crossed for queening, and it turned into a bishop on a black square). That is the way it is in physics. For a long time we will have a rule that works excellently in an over-all way, even when we cannot follow the details, and then some time we may discover a new rule. From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are of course in the new places, the places where the rules do not work—not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.
The third way to tell whether our ideas are right is relatively crude but prob-ably the most powerful of them all. That is, by rough approximation. While we may not be able to tell why Alekhine moves this particular piece, perhaps we can roughly understand that he is gathering his pieces around the king to protect it, more or less, since that is the sensible thing to do in the circumstances. In the same way, we can often understand nature, more or less, without being able to see what every little piece is doing, in terms of our understanding of the game.
”
”
Richard P. Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics)
“
The silly ass had left the kitchen door open, and I hadn't gone two steps when his voice caught me squarely in the eardrum.
'You will find Mr Wooster', he was saying to the substitue chappie, 'an extremely pleasant and amiable young gentleman, but not intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible - quite negligible'.
Well, I mean to say. What!
I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought to have charged in and ticked the blighter off properly in no uncertain voice. But I doubht whether it is humanly possible to tick Jeeves off.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse
“
The world is not prepared yet to understand the philosophy of Occult Sciences- let them assure themselves first of all that there are beings in an invisible world, whether Spirits' of the dead or Elementals; and that there are hidden powers in man, which are capable of making a God of him on earth."
-H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891)
”
”
John Michael Greer (The Occult Book: A Chronological Journey from Alchemy to Wicca (Union Square & Co. Chronologies))
“
The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.
”
”
P.D. James (The Private Patient (Adam Dalgliesh, #14))
“
Every square inch of the wood-paneled walls is covered with photographs of cops, some black-and-white, some in color. Red-and-white Ws and America's Dairyland, old flaking signs for Lake Monona, Lake Mendota, and the U.P. Posters, with all kinds of beer, half-nude women holding giant mugs of it. All the color, words, images, the vibrant clutter of them, such a stark contrast to the spare tans, beiges, and wood of our home, our church, the school. My life.
”
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C.J. Leede (American Rapture)
“
I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window where I was rocked to sleep. And through the window was the street where the golden lights came, and where the shadows danced on houses of marble. I remember the square of moonlight on the floor, that was not like any other light, and the visions that danced in the moonbeams when my mother sang to me. And too, I remember the sun of morning bright above the many-coloured hills in summer, and the sweetness of flowers borne on the south wind that made the trees sing.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft (Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre)
“
Once upon a time there was erected in Longacre Square, New York, a large white statue, labelled 'Our City', the figure of a woman in Grecian robes holding aloft a shield. Critical citizens objected to it for various reasons, but its real fault was that its symbolism was faulty. The sculptor should have represented New York as a conjuror in evening dress, smiling blandly as he changed a rabbit into a bowl of goldfish. For that, above all else, is New York's speciality. It changes. Between 1 May, when she stepped off the train, and 16 May, when she received Eddy Moore's letter containing the information that he had found her a post as stenographer
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (The Man Upstairs and Other Stories (Golf Stories, #0.5))
“
From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations.
In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)
”
”
Christopher Kremmer (The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes)
“
At different spots in the room stood the six resident geniuses to whose presence in the home Mr. Pett had such strong objections, and in addition to these she had collected so many more of a like breed from the environs of Washington Square that the air was clamorous with the hoarse cries of futurist painters, esoteric Buddhists, vers libre poets, interior decorators, and stage reformers, sifted in among the more conventional members of society who had come to listen to them. Men with new religions drank tea with women with new hats. Apostles of Free Love expounded their doctrines to persons who had been practising them for years without realising it. All over the room throats were being strained and minds broadened.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (Piccadilly Jim)
“
For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth . . . the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily . . . this loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
“
They were flying back from a big show in London, the whole roster on the plane. The story goes that much alcohol was consumed and things quickly got uncomfortable: Hennig and Scott Hall went wild with some shaving cream; Dustin Rhodes awkwardly serenaded his ex-wife, Terri; the legendary wrestler turned booker Michael “P.S.” Hayes got punched out by JBL and later, after he had fallen asleep, had his ponytail chopped off by Sean Waltman; Ric Flair paraded in front of a flight attendant in nothing but his sequined ring robe; and, to top it all off, Hennig challenged collegiate wrestling star (and WWE golden boy) Brock Lesnar to a Greco-Roman wrestling match that ended when Lesnar tackled Hennig into the exit door, and they were pulled apart just before they jeopardized the flight.
”
”
David Shoemaker (The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling)
“
He retrieves a fluffy white robe from the bathroom and drapes me in it. Then he sits next to me and opens the black folder.
Inside, there’s a single sheet of paper, covered in words and symbols. There’s a rough square in the center of the page, surrounded by wavy lines. Is that supposed to be water? Inside the square, there are small symbols: cliffs, mountains, an oval lake. The symbols are labeled. The Pillowy Mountains. Shipwreck Cove. Bathtub Lake. Pirate’s Lookout. Rum-un Cliffs.
There are three fancy Xs on the map, drawn with curlicues and shaded in. One in Rum-un Cliffs, one in the Pillowy Mountains, and one in Pirate’s Lookout.
“Is this a treasure map?” I ask, tracing my fingers over it. “Did you draw this? It’s so cool.”
He nods. “X marks the spot, see? You have an hour to find the three treasures and bring them back to me.”
A treasure hunt? He’s made a treasure hunt for me?
A n4ked treasure hunt?
“Pirate treasure?” I ask, blinking up at him.
“Uh-huh.”
I can play pirates. I have the perfect thing.
”
”
E.J. Frost (Daddy P.I. (Daddy P.I. Casefiles, #1))
“
I feel so far away from them, on the top of this hill. It seems as though I belong to another species. They come out of their offices after their day of work, they look at the houses and the squares with satisfaction, they think it is their city, a good, solid, bourgeois city. They aren’t afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed, the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves the Hotel de Ville at 11.05 p.m. They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply, a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same. They scarcely doll it up a bit on Sundays. Idiots. It is repugnant to me to think that I am going to see their thick, self-satisfied faces. They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. And all this time, great, vague nature has slipped into their city, it has infiltrated everywhere, in their house, in their office, in themselves. It doesn’t move, it stays quietly and they are full of it inside, they breathe it, and they don’t see it, they imagine it to be outside, twenty miles from the city. I see it, I see this nature . . . I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow.
What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they’d think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present.
”
”
Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
“
Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: “There’s no danger.”
“No danger?” screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.
“Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!”
“The whole thing’s falling apart, Pointsman!”
“Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of our scheme, and there’ve been embarrassing inquires down from Duncan Sandys—“
“That’s the P.M.’s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!”
“We’ve already begun to run into a deficit—“
“Funding,” IF you can keep your head, “is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being ‘knocked out,’ is quite happily at work at Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active in the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal ’46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head.”
“Your Interested Parties again?” sez Rollo Groast.
“Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday,” Edwin Treacle mentions now. “Clive Mossmoon and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?”
“No,” smoothly, “Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I’m afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over the Schwarzkommando business.”
“The hell you were. I happen to know Clive’s at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research.”
They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great of bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. “I do wish ICI would finance part of this,” Pointsman smiles.
“Lame, lame,” mutters the younger Dr. Groast.
“What’s it matter?” cries Aaron Throwster. “If the old man gets moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang.”
“Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments,” Pointsman very steady, calm, “we have made arrangements with him. The details aren’t important.”
They never are, in these meetings of his.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
“
As holders of money, labourers are free to buy as they please, and they have to be treated as consumers with autonomous tastes and preferences. We should not make light of this (Grundrisse, p. 283). Situations frequently arise in which labourers can and do exercise choice, and the manner in which they do so has important implications. And even if, as is usually the case, they are locked into buying only those commodities capitalists are prepared to sell, at prices capitalists dictate, the illusion of freedom of choice in the market plays a very important ideological role. It provides fertile soil for theories of consumer sovereignty as well as for that particular interpretation of poverty that puts the blame fairly and squarely upon the victim for failure to budget for survival properly. There are, in addition, abundant opportunities here for various secondary forms of exploitation (landlords, retail merchants, savings institutions), which may again divert attention from what Marx considered to be the central form of exploitation in production.
”
”
David Harvey (The Limits to Capital)
“
Then the waves increased in strength, and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions that men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing—the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where ’Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality and brand thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft (The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories)
“
When there’s a knock at my door, I scream, “Go away!”
The knock gets more persistent.
“Fuckin’ leave me alone!”
As the door creaks open, I hurl a cup at the door. The cup doesn’t hit a hospital employee; it hits Mrs. P. squarely in the chest.
“Oh, shit. Not you,” I say.
Mrs. P.’s got new glasses, with rhinestones on them. “That’s not exactly the greeting I expected, Alex,” she says. “I can still give you a detention for cussing, you know.”
I turn on my side so I don’t have to look at her. “Did you come here to give me detention slips? ’Cause if you did, you can forget it. I’m not goin’ back to school. Thanks for visitin’. Sorry you have to leave so soon.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you hear me out.”
Oh, please no. Anything except having to listen to her lecture. I push the button that calls the nurse.
“Can we help you, Alex?” a voice bellows through the speaker.
“I’m bein’ tortured.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Mrs. P. walks over to me and pulls the speaker out of my hand. “He’s joking. Sorry to bother you.” She puts the remote speaker on the nightstand, deliberately out of my reach. “Don’t they give you happy pills in this place?”
“I don’t want to be happy.
”
”
Simone Elkeles (Perfect Chemistry (Perfect Chemistry, #1))
“
Come to my house right now, and I’ll let you sneak up to my room. I’ll be a sitting duck for you if it means I can see you again.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, I don’t want to win like that. When I get your name, I want to have the satisfaction of knowing I beat you fair and square. My first ever Assassins win can’t be tainted.” I pause. “And besides, your house is a safe zone.”
Peter lets out an aggravated sigh. “Are you at least coming to my lacrosse game on Friday?”
His lacrosse game! That’s the perfect place to take him out. I try to keep my voice calm and even as I say, “I can’t come. My dad has a date, and he needs me to watch Kitty.” A lie, but Peter doesn’t know that.
“Well, can’t you bring her? She’s been asking to go to one of my games.”
I think fast. “No, because she has a piano lesson after school.”
“Since when does Kitty play the piano?”
“Recently, in fact. She heard from our neighbor that it helps with training puppies; it calms them down.” I bite my lip. Will he buy it? I hurry to add, “I promise I’ll be at the next game no matter what.”
Peter groans, this time even louder. “You’re killing me, Covey.”
Soon, my dear Peter.
I will surprise him at the game; I’ll get all decked out in our school colors; I’ll even paint his jersey number on my face. He’ll be so happy to see me, he won’t suspect a thing!
”
”
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
“
When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings.
[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.]
— all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)
“
When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings.
[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.]
— all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)
“
When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings.
[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] — all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)
“
On the phone a few nights later, Peter suddenly says, “You have me, don’t you?”
“No!” I haven’t told him I took out John over the weekend. I don’t want him--or Genevieve, for that matter--to have any extra info. It’s down to the three of us now.
“So you do have me!” He lets out a groan. “I don’t want to play this game anymore. It’s making me lonely and really…frustrated. I haven’t seen you outside of school for a week! When is this going to be over?”
“Peter, I don’t have you. I have John.” I feel a little guilty for lying, but this is how winners play this game. You can’t second-guess yourself.
There’s a silence on the other end. Then he says, “So are you going to drive over to his house to tag him out? He lives in the middle of nowhere. I could take you if you want.”
“I haven’t figured out my game plan yet,” I say. “Who do you have?” I know it has to be me or Genevieve.
He gets quiet. “I’m not saying.”
“Well, have you told anyone else?” Like, say, Genevieve?
“No.”
Hmm. “Okay, well, I just told you, so you obviously owe me that same courtesy.”
Peter bursts out, “I didn’t make you, you offered up that information yourself, and look, if it was a lie and you have me, please just freaking take me out already! I’m begging you. Come to my house right now, and I’ll let you sneak up to my room. I’ll be a sitting duck for you if it means I can see you again.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, I don’t want to win like that. When I get your name, I want to have the satisfaction of knowing I beat you fair and square. My first ever Assassins win can’t be tainted.” I pause. “And besides, your house is a safe zone.
”
”
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
“
I spin around in a circle and sing, “Do you want to build a snowman?” And then we’re both giggling again.
“You’re going to get us kicked out of here,” he warns.
I grab his hands and make him spin around with me as fast as I can. “Quit acting like you really belong in a nursing home, old man!” I yell.
He drops my hands and we both stumble. Then he grabs a fistful of snow off the ground and starts to pack it into a ball. “Old man, huh? I’ll show you an old man!”
I dart away from him, slipping and sliding in the snow. “Don’t you dare, John Ambrose McClaren!”
He chases after me, laughing and breathing hard. He manages to grab me around the waist and raises his arm like he’s going to put the snowball down my back, but at the last second he releases me. His eyes go wide. “Oh my God. Are you wearing my grandma’s nightgown under your coat?”
Giggling, I say, “Wanna see? It’s really racy.” I start to unzip my coat. “Wait, turn around first.”
Shaking his head, John says, “This is weird,” but he obeys. As soon as his back is turned, I snatch a handful of snow, form it into a ball, and put it in my coat pocket.
“Okay, turn around.”
John turns, and I lob the snowball directly at his head. It hits him in the eye. “Ouch!” he yelps, wiping it with his coat sleeve.
I gasp and move toward him. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Are you okay--”
John’s already scooping up more snow and lunging toward me. And so begins our snowball fight. We chase each other around, and I get in another great hit square in his back. We call a truce when I nearly slip and fall on my butt. Luckily, John catches me just in time. He doesn’t let go right away. We stare at each other for a second, his arm around my waist. There’s a snowflake on his eyelashes. He says, “If I didn’t know you were still hung up on Kavinsky, I would kiss you right now.”
I shiver. Up until Peter, the most romantic thing that ever happened to me was with John Ambrose McClaren, in the rain, with the soccer balls. Now this. How strange that I’ve never even dated John, and he’s in two of my most romantic moments.
John releases me. “You’re freezing. Let’s go back inside.
”
”
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
“
Mr. Morales sidles up to the bar and says, “May I have this dance, Lara Jean?”
“You may,” I say. To John I warn, “Don’t you dare come close to me.”
He throws his hands out like he’s warding me off. “Don’t you come close to me!”
As Mr. Morales leads me in a slow dance, I press my face against his shoulder to hide my smile. I’m really quite good at this espionage thing. John McClaren is sitting on a love seat now, watching Stormy play and chatting with Alicia. I’ve got him right where I want him. I can’t even believe how lucky I am. I’d been planning on showing up at his next Model UN meeting, but this is so much better.
I’m thinking I’ll come up from behind him, take him by surprise, when Stormy stands up and declares she needs a piano break, she wants to dance with her grandson. I go turn on the stereo and cue up the CD we decided on for her break.
John is protesting: “Stormy, I told you I don’t dance.” He used to try and fake sick during the square-dancing unit in gym--that’s how much he hates dancing.
Stormy doesn’t listen, of course. She pulls him off the love seat and starts trying to teach him how to fox-trot. “Put your hand on my waist,” she orders. “I didn’t wear heels to sit behind a piano all night.” Stormy’s trying to teach him the steps, and he keeps stepping on her feet. “Ouch!” she snaps.
I can’t stop giggling. Mr. Morales is too. He dances us over closer. “May I cut in?” he asks.
“Please!” John practically pushes Stormy into Mr. Morales’s arms.
“Johnny, be a gentleman and ask Lara Jean to dance,” Stormy says as Mr. Morales twirls her.
John gives me a searching look, and I have a feeling he’s still suspicious of me and whether or not I have his name.
“Ask her to dance,” Mr. Morales urges, grinning at me. “She wants to dance, don’t you, Lara Jean?”
I shrug a sad kind of shrug. Wistful. The very picture of a girl who is waiting to be asked to dance.
“I want to see the young people dance!” Normal yells.
John McClaren looks at me, one eyebrow raised. “If we’re just swaying back and forth, I probably won’t step on your feet.”
I feign hesitation and then nod. My pulse is racing. Target acquired.
”
”
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
“
Just as it is commonly said that Asclepius has prescribed someone horse-riding, or cold baths, or walking barefoot, so we could say that the nature of the Whole has prescribed him disease, disablement, loss or any other such affliction. In the first case 'prescribed' means something like this: 'ordered this course for this person as conducive to his health'. In the second the meaning is that what happens to each individual is somehow arranged to conduce to his destiny. We speak of the fitness of these happenings as masons speak of the 'fit' of squared stones in walls or pyramids, when they join each other in a defined relation.
In the whole of things there is one harmony: and just as all material bodies combine to make the world one body, a harmonious whole, so all causes combine to make Destiny one harmonious cause. Even quite unsophisticated people intuit what I mean. They say: 'Fate brought this on him.' Now if 'brought', also 'prescribed'. So let us accept these prescriptions just as we accept those of Asclepius- many of them too are harsh, but we welcome them in the hope of health.
You should take the same view of the process and completion of the design of universal nature as you do of your own health: and so welcome all that happens to you, even if it seems rather cruel, because its purpose leads to the health of the universe and the prosperity and success of Zeus. He would not bring this on anyone, if it did not also bring advantage to the Whole: no more than any given natural principle brings anything inappropriate to what it governs.
So there are two reasons why you should be content with your experience. One is that this has happened to you, was prescribed for you, and is related to you, a thread of destiny spun for you from the first by the most ancient causes. The second is that what comes to each individual is a determining part of the welfare, the perfection, and indeed the very coherence of that which governs the Whole. Because the complete Whole is maimed if you sever even the tiniest of its constituent parts, and true likewise of its causes. And you do sever something, to the extent that you can, whenever you fret at your lot: this is, in a sense, a destruction. p37
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
The Israeli border police guarding the central region near the Jordanian border had been told to take all measures necessary to keep order that evening. The local colonel, Issachar Shadmi, decided that this meant setting a curfew for Palestinian Arab villages, from five p.m. to six a.m. The news of the curfew was broadcast over the radio the same day it went into force. The border police unit commanders in the region were informed of the order by their commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki. Malinki implied that, in the event of anyone breaking the curfew, the police could shoot to kill. Several platoons were charged with informing villagers in person. At the village of Kfar Kassem (or Kafr Qasim), close to the border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, a platoon arrived to announce the news—but too late in the day. They were told that many of the village’s agricultural workers were already out at work, mostly picking olives. After five p.m., the villagers returned as expected: a mixed crowd of men and women, boys and girls, riding on bicycles, wagons, and trucks. Even though he knew these civilians would not have heard about the curfew through no fault of their own, the unit commander Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan determined that they were in violation of it and therefore should be shot. Out of all the unit commanders given this order, Dahan was the only one to enforce it.16 As each small group of villagers arrived, the border police opened fire. Forty-three civilians were killed and thirteen injured. The dead were mostly children aged between eight and seventeen: twenty-three of them, plus fourteen men and six women. It was said that one nine-year-old girl was shot twenty-eight times. Another little girl watched as her eleven-year-old cousin was shot. He was dragged indoors and died in his grandfather’s arms, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest. Laborers were ordered off their trucks in small groups, lined up, and executed. There were clashes between Arabs and border police that evening in which six more Arabs were killed. The order to kill had not come from the top. It was traced back conclusively only as far as Major Malinki. When Ben-Gurion heard about the massacre, he was furious, telling his cabinet that the officers who had shot civilians should be hanged in Kfar Kassem’s town square.17 Yet the Israeli government covered the incident up with a press blackout lasting two months.
”
”
Alex von Tunzelmann (Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace)
“
Esther Agrees to Help the Jews ESTHER 4 When Mordecai learned all that had been done, Mordecai tore his clothes o and put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry. 2He went up to the entrance of the king’s gate, for no one was allowed to enter the king’s gate clothed in sackcloth. 3And in every province, wherever the king’s command and his decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews, p with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and many of them q lay in sackcloth and ashes. 4When Esther’s young women and her eunuchs came and told her, the queen was deeply distressed. She sent garments to clothe Mordecai, so that he might take off his sackcloth, but he would not accept them. 5Then Esther called for Hathach, one of the king’s eunuchs, who had been appointed to attend her, and ordered him to go to Mordecai to learn what this was and why it was. 6Hathach went out to Mordecai in the open square of the city in front of the king’s gate, 7and Mordecai told him all that had happened to him, r and the exact sum of money that Haman had promised to pay into the king’s treasuries for the destruction of the Jews. 8Mordecai also gave him s a copy of the written decree issued in Susa for their destruction, that he might show it to Esther and explain it to her and command her to go to the king to beg his favor and plead with him on behalf of her people. 9And Hathach went and told Esther what Mordecai had said. 10Then Esther spoke to Hathach and commanded him to go to Mordecai and say, 11“All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside t the inner court without being called, u there is but one law—to be put to death, except the one v to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live. But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days.” 12And they told Mordecai what Esther had said. 13Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. 14For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” 15Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai, 16“Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for w three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, x and if I perish, I perish.” 17Mordecai then went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.
”
”
Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
“
Continetti concludes:
"An intellectual, financial, technological, and social infrastructure to undermine global capitalism has been developing for more than two decades, and we are in the middle of its latest manifestation… The occupiers’ tent cities are self-governing, communal, egalitarian, and networked. They reject everyday politics. They foster bohemianism and confrontation with the civil authorities. They are the Phalanx and New Harmony, updated for postmodern times and plopped in the middle of our cities.
There may not be that many activists in the camps. They may appear silly, even grotesque. They may resist "agendas" and "policies." They may not agree on what they want or when they want it. And they may disappear as winter arrives and the liberals whose parks they are occupying lose patience with them. But the utopians and anarchists will reappear… The occupation will persist as long as individuals believe that inequalities of property are unjust and that the brotherhood of man can be established on earth."
You can see why anarchists might find this sort of thing refreshingly honest. The author makes no secret of his desire to see us all in prison, but at least he’s willing to make an honest assessment of what the stakes are.
Still, there is one screamingly dishonest theme that runs throughout the Weekly Standard piece: the intentional conflation of "democracy" with "everyday politics," that is, lobbying, fund-raising, working for electoral campaigns, and otherwise participating in the current American political system. The premise is that the author stands in favor of democracy, and that occupiers, in rejecting the existing system, are against it. In fact, the conservative tradition that produced and sustains journals like The Weekly Stand is profoundly antidemocratic. Its heroes, from Plato to Edmund Burke, are, almost uniformly, men who opposed democracy on principle, and its readers are still fond of statements like "America is not a democracy, it’s a republic." What’s more, the sort of arguments Continetti breaks out here--that anarchist-inspire movements are unstable, confused, threaten established orders of property, and must necessarily lead to violence--are precisely the arguments that have, for centuries. been leveled by conservatives against democracy itself.
In reality, OWS is anarchist-inspired, but for precisely that reason it stands squarely in the very tradition of American popular democracy that conservatives like Continetti have always staunchly opposed. Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy--or at least, any of the aspects of democracy that most American have historically liked. Rather, anarchism is a matter of taking those core democratic principles to their logical conclusions. The reason it’s difficult to see this is because the word "democracy" has had such an endlessly contested history: so much so that most American pundits and politicians, for instance, now use the term to refer to a form of government established with the explicit purpose of ensuring what John Adams once called "the horrors of democracy" would never come about. (p. 153-154)
”
”
David Graeber (The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement)
“
Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.
”
”
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
“
Located on 9th Avenue in New York City, B& H Photo is the largest non-chain photo and video equipment store in the United States and the second largest in the world —only Yodobashi Camera in downtown Tokyo is bigger. The owners, along with many of their employees, are Hasidic Jews who dress just as their eighteenth-century ancestors did in Eastern Europe. On any given day, 8,000 to 9,000 people pass through the front door. Yet 70 percent of their business is online, serviced by a 200,000-square-foot warehouse located nearby in Brooklyn. Even in a competitive marketplace, B& H won’t conduct business on the Sabbath or on about a half-dozen Jewish holidays during the year. They close their doors at 1 p.m. on Fridays and keep them closed all day Saturday, the biggest shopping day of the week. During Sabbath, customers can peruse the B& H website, but they can’t make an online order. Recently a customer asked the B& H director of communications how they could close not just the retail store but also the website on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the busiest shopping day of the year. The director simply replied, “We respond to a higher authority.” 17
”
”
Peter Scazzero (The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World)
“
As he stood, a single red petal fell from his black velvet cloak. “I’m glad you came out of your room. I hope to see you at supper.” Luca unfastened the cloak from around his neck and handed it to her. “Here. It’s getting dark. You might get cold.”
Cass accepted the cloak and draped it across her front like a blanket. A square of white cotton fell out of the pocket and she reached down and picked it up. Luca’s handkerchief. Her fingers stroked the embroidered initials--LdP. She thought back to her conversation with Madalena about dropping handkerchiefs. It seemed like the exchange had happened in another lifetime. She tucked the square of fabric back into the pocket of his cloak.
Luca smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “I manage to lose more of those than you can imagine.” He turned back toward the house.
The air turned cool as the stars came out, but Luca’s cloak kept Cass surprisingly warm. A blurry face appeared at one of the windows. Cass recognized Agnese’s favorite white cap. Cass gave her aunt a hesitant wave and the face vanished. Cass wondered if everyone had been worrying about her. She remembered the cautious way Luca had approached her, as if she were a wild horse that might spook and run off.
”
”
Fiona Paul (Venom (Secrets of the Eternal Rose, #1))
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The man of system ... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.... He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”12 Barbed wire always seems to be needed to keep the chessmen on their squares.
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P.J. O'Rourke (On the Wealth of Nations (Books That Changed the World))
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In the 1960s the journalists Henry Fairlie and Anthony Sampson had popularized the disdainful name that the historian A. J. P. Taylor had given it: ‘The Establishment’.
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Niall Ferguson (The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook)
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May 19: At 2:00 p.m., Marilyn arrives at Madison Square Garden for a brief rehearsal. She departs to have her hair styled by Kenneth Battelle at a cost of $150. Then she returns to her New York apartment for a $125 makeup session with Marie Irvine. Finally, her maid, Hazel Washington, helps hook Marilyn into her Jean Louis gown, and she arrives at Madison Square Garden approximately three hours before she is to perform. Introduced to an audience of fifteen thousand as the “late Marilyn Monroe” after she delays her entrance (all part of the carefully rehearsed show), Marilyn performs flawlessly as the last of twenty-three entertainers and is clearly the highlight of the evening. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen describes Marilyn as “making love to the president of the United States.” Marilyn also attends a party at the home of Arthur Krim, president of United Artists. She is photographed in a group of Kennedy supporters watching Diahann Carroll sing. To her right is Maria Callas and Arthur Miller’s father, Isidore. She is also photographed with both Robert and John Kennedy, as well as presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Schlesinger and Robert Kennedy playfully compete to dance with Marilyn. Contrary to sensationalistic reports, Marilyn spends the rest of the evening in her New York apartment with her friend Ralph Roberts and James Haspiel, one of her devoted fans.
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Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
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The bedding given to each monk is one broad futon or quilt wadded with cotton-wool, which is about six feet square in size. He wraps himself in this only, even in the midst of the cold winter, and sleeps from 9 p.m. till about 3.30 in the morning. For the pillow he uses a pair of small cushions, each about two feet square, on which during the daytime he sits and keeps up his meditation. As soon as he wakes, the bedding is put up to the common shelf overhead.
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Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (The Training Of The Zen Buddhist Monk)
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Rats exert roughly 150kg of biting force per square centimetre, which equates to around 2,000 p.s.i. For context, this is more powerful (relative to body weight) than a hyena, grizzly bear, bull shark or hippopotamus, and roughly 20 times the bite of a human.
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Joe Shute (Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat)
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Coast, endangering US shipping. But there is a problem. The American ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, is dazzled by Adolf Hitler. He reports back to the White House that he thinks German troops will soon march through Trafalgar Square. Roosevelt does not replace Kennedy, a powerful political force in his own right. However, he isolates the ambassador, refusing to give him any information from the White House.
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Bill O'Reilly (Confronting the Presidents: No Spin Assessments from Washington to Biden)
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Thus, multiple regression requires two important tasks: (1) specification of independent variables and (2) testing of the error term. An important difference between simple regression and multiple regression is the interpretation of the regression coefficients in multiple regression (b1, b2, b3, …) in the preceding multiple regression model. Although multiple regression produces the same basic statistics discussed in Chapter 14 (see Table 14.1), each of the regression coefficients is interpreted as its effect on the dependent variable, controlled for the effects of all of the other independent variables included in the regression. This phrase is used frequently when explaining multiple regression results. In our example, the regression coefficient b1 shows the effect of x1 on y, controlled for all other variables included in the model. Regression coefficient b2 shows the effect of x2 on y, also controlled for all other variables in the model, including x1. Multiple regression is indeed an important and relatively simple way of taking control variables into account (and much easier than the approach shown in Appendix 10.1). Key Point The regression coefficient is the effect on the dependent variable, controlled for all other independent variables in the model. Note also that the model given here is very different from estimating separate simple regression models for each of the independent variables. The regression coefficients in simple regression do not control for other independent variables, because they are not in the model. The word independent also means that each independent variable should be relatively unaffected by other independent variables in the model. To ensure that independent variables are indeed independent, it is useful to think of the distinctively different types (or categories) of factors that affect a dependent variable. This was the approach taken in the preceding example. There is also a statistical reason for ensuring that independent variables are as independent as possible. When two independent variables are highly correlated with each other (r2 > .60), it sometimes becomes statistically impossible to distinguish the effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable, controlled for the other. The variables are statistically too similar to discern disparate effects. This problem is called multicollinearity and is discussed later in this chapter. This problem is avoided by choosing independent variables that are not highly correlated with each other. A WORKING EXAMPLE Previously (see Chapter 14), the management analyst with the Department of Defense found a statistically significant relationship between teamwork and perceived facility productivity (p <.01). The analyst now wishes to examine whether the impact of teamwork on productivity is robust when controlled for other factors that also affect productivity. This interest is heightened by the low R-square (R2 = 0.074) in Table 14.1, suggesting a weak relationship between teamwork and perceived productivity. A multiple regression model is specified to include the effects of other factors that affect perceived productivity. Thinking about other categories of variables that could affect productivity, the analyst hypothesizes the following: (1) the extent to which employees have adequate technical knowledge to do their jobs, (2) perceptions of having adequate authority to do one’s job well (for example, decision-making flexibility), (3) perceptions that rewards and recognition are distributed fairly (always important for motivation), and (4) the number of sick days. Various items from the employee survey are used to measure these concepts (as discussed in the workbook documentation for the Productivity dataset). After including these factors as additional independent variables, the result shown in Table 15.1 is
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
“
Of the rise of this singular people few authentic records appear to exist. It is, however, probable that they represent a later wave of that race, whether true Sudras, or a later wave of immigrants from Central Asia, which is found farther south as Mahratta; and perhaps they had, in remote times, a Scythian origin like the earlier and nobler Rajputs. They affect Rajput ways, although the Rajputs would disdain their kinship; and they give to their chiefs the Rajput title of "Thakur," a name common to the Deity and to great earthly lords, and now often used to still lower persons. So much has this practice indeed extended, that some tribes use the term generically, and speak of themselves as of the "Thakur" race. These, however, are chiefly pure Rajputs. It is stated, by an excellent authority, that even now the Jats "can scarcely be called pure Hindus, for they have many observances, both domestic and religious, not consonant with Hindu precepts. There is a disposition also to reject the fables of the Puranic Mythology, and to acknowledge the unity of the Godhead." (Elliot's Glossary, in voce "Jat.") Wherever they are found, they are stout yeomen; able to cultivate their fields, or to protect them, and with strong administrative habits of a somewhat republican cast. Within half a century, they have four times tried conclusions with the might of Britain. The Jats of Bhartpur fought Lord Lake with success, and Lord Combermere with credit; and their "Sikh" brethren in the Panjab shook the whole fabric of British India on the Satlaj, in 1845, and three years later on the field of Chillianwala. The Sikh kingdom has been broken up, but the Jat principality of Bhartpur still exists, though with contracted limits, and in a state of complete dependence on the British Government. There is also a thriving little principality — that of Dholpur — between Agra and Gwalior, under a descendant of the Jat Rana of Gohad, so often met with in the history of the times we are now reviewing (v. inf. p. 128.) It is interesting to note further, that some ethnologists have regarded this fine people as of kin to the ancient Get¾, and to the Goths of Europe, by whom not only Jutland, but parts of the south-east of England and Spain were overrun, and to some extent peopled. It is, therefore, possible that the yeomen of Kent and Hampshire have blood relations in the natives of Bhartpur and the Panjab. The area of the Bhartpur State is at present 2,000 square miles, and consists of a basin some 700 feet above sea level, crossed by a belt of red sandstone rocks. It is hot and dry; but in the skilful hands that till it, not unfertile; and the population has been estimated at near three-quarters of a million. At the time at which our history has arrived, the territory swayed by the chiefs of the Jats was much more extensive, and had undergone the fate of many another military republic, by falling into the hands of the most prudent and daring of a number of competent leaders. It has already been shown (in Part I.) how Suraj Mal, as Raja of the Bhartpur Jats, joined the Mahrattas in their resistance to the great Musalman combination of 1760. Had his prudent counsels been followed, it is possible that this resistance would have been more successful, and the whole history of Hindustan far otherwise than what it has since been. But the haughty leader of the Hindus, Sheodasheo Rao Bhao, regarded Suraj Mal as a petty landed chief not accustomed to affairs on a grand scale, and so went headlong on his fate.
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H.G. Keene (Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan)
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suffered greater wetland loss than watersheds with smaller surrounding populations. Most watersheds have suffered no or only very modest losses (less than 3 percent during the decade in question), and few watersheds have suffered more than a 4 percent loss. The distribution is thus heavily skewed toward watersheds with little wetland losses (that is, to the left) and is clearly not normally distributed.6 To increase normality, the variable is transformed by twice taking the square root, x.25. The transformed variable is then normally distributed: the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic is 0.82 (p = .51 > .05). The variable also appears visually normal for each of the population subgroups. There are four population groups, designed to ensure an adequate number of observations in each. Boxplot analysis of the transformed variable indicates four large and three small outliers (not shown). Examination suggests that these are plausible and representative values, which are therefore retained. Later, however, we will examine the effect of these seven observations on the robustness of statistical results. Descriptive analysis of the variables is shown in Table 13.1. Generally, large populations tend to have larger average wetland losses, but the standard deviations are large relative to (the difference between) these means, raising considerable question as to whether these differences are indeed statistically significant. Also, the untransformed variable shows that the mean wetland loss is less among watersheds with “Medium I” populations than in those with “Small” populations (1.77 versus 2.52). The transformed variable shows the opposite order (1.06 versus 0.97). Further investigation shows this to be the effect of the three small outliers and two large outliers on the calculation of the mean of the untransformed variable in the “Small” group. Variable transformation minimizes this effect. These outliers also increase the standard deviation of the “Small” group. Using ANOVA, we find that the transformed variable has unequal variances across the four groups (Levene’s statistic = 2.83, p = .41 < .05). Visual inspection, shown in Figure 13.2, indicates that differences are not substantial for observations within the group interquartile ranges, the areas indicated by the boxes. The differences seem mostly caused by observations located in the whiskers of the “Small” group, which include the five outliers mentioned earlier. (The other two outliers remain outliers and are shown.) For now, we conclude that no substantial differences in variances exist, but we later test the robustness of this conclusion with consideration of these observations (see Figure 13.2). Table 13.1 Variable Transformation We now proceed with the ANOVA analysis. First, Table 13.2 shows that the global F-test statistic is 2.91, p = .038 < .05. Thus, at least one pair of means is significantly different. (The term sum of squares is explained in note 1.) Getting Started Try ANOVA on some data of your choice. Second, which pairs are significantly different? We use the Bonferroni post-hoc test because relatively few comparisons are made (there are only four groups). The computer-generated results (not shown in Table 13.2) indicate that the only significant difference concerns the means of the “Small” and “Large” groups. This difference (1.26 - 0.97 = 0.29 [of transformed values]) is significant at the 5 percent level (p = .028). The Tukey and Scheffe tests lead to the same conclusion (respectively, p = .024 and .044). (It should be noted that post-hoc tests also exist for when equal variances are not assumed. In our example, these tests lead to the same result.7) This result is consistent with a visual reexamination of Figure 13.2, which shows that differences between group means are indeed small. The Tukey and
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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Scheffe tests also produce “homogeneous subsets,” that is, groups that have statistically identical means. Both the three largest and the three smallest populations have identical means. The Tukey levels of statistical significance are, respectively, .725 and .165 (both > .05). This is shown in Table 13.3. Figure 13.2 Group Boxplots Table 13.2 ANOVA Table Third, is the increase in means linear? This test is an option on many statistical software packages that produces an additional line of output in the ANOVA table, called the “linear term for unweighted sum of squares,” with the appropriate F-test. Here, that F-test statistic is 7.85, p = .006 < .01, and so we conclude that the apparent linear increase is indeed significant: wetland loss is linearly associated with the increased surrounding population of watersheds.8 Figure 13.2 does not clearly show this, but the enlarged Y-axis in Figure 13.3 does. Fourth, are our findings robust? One concern is that the statistical validity is affected by observations that statistically (although not substantively) are outliers. Removing the seven outliers identified earlier does not affect our conclusions. The resulting variable remains normally distributed, and there are no (new) outliers for any group. The resulting variable has equal variances across the groups (Levene’s test = 1.03, p = .38 > .05). The global F-test is 3.44 (p = .019 < .05), and the Bonferroni post-hoc test similarly finds that only the differences between the “Small” and “Large” group means are significant (p = .031). The increase remains linear (F = 6.74, p = .011 < .05). Thus, we conclude that the presence of observations with large values does not alter our conclusions. Table 13.3 Homogeneous Subsets Figure 13.3 Watershed Loss, by Population We also test the robustness of conclusions for different variable transformations. The extreme skewness of the untransformed variable allows for only a limited range of root transformations that produce normality. Within this range (power 0.222 through 0.275), the preceding conclusions are replicated fully. Natural log and base-10 log transformations also result in normality and replicate these results, except that the post-hoc tests fail to identify that the means of the “Large” and “Small” groups are significantly different. However, the global F-test is (marginally) significant (F = 2.80, p = .043 < .05), which suggests that this difference is too small to detect with this transformation. A single, independent-samples t-test for this difference is significant (t = 2.47, p = .017 < .05), suggesting that this problem may have been exacerbated by the limited number of observations. In sum, we find converging evidence for our conclusions. As this example also shows, when using statistics, analysts frequently must exercise judgment and justify their decisions.9 Finally, what is the practical significance of this analysis? The wetland loss among watersheds with large surrounding populations is [(3.21 – 2.52)/2.52 =] 27.4 percent greater than among those surrounded by small populations. It is up to managers and elected officials to determine whether a difference of this magnitude warrants intervention in watersheds with large surrounding populations.10
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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COEFFICIENT The nonparametric alternative, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (r, or “rho”), looks at correlation among the ranks of the data rather than among the values. The ranks of data are determined as shown in Table 14.2 (adapted from Table 11.8): Table 14.2 Ranks of Two Variables In Greater Depth … Box 14.1 Crime and Poverty An analyst wants to examine empirically the relationship between crime and income in cities across the United States. The CD that accompanies the workbook Exercising Essential Statistics includes a Community Indicators dataset with assorted indicators of conditions in 98 cities such as Akron, Ohio; Phoenix, Arizona; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Seattle, Washington. The measures include median household income, total population (both from the 2000 U.S. Census), and total violent crimes (FBI, Uniform Crime Reporting, 2004). In the sample, household income ranges from $26,309 (Newark, New Jersey) to $71,765 (San Jose, California), and the median household income is $42,316. Per-capita violent crime ranges from 0.15 percent (Glendale, California) to 2.04 percent (Las Vegas, Nevada), and the median violent crime rate per capita is 0.78 percent. There are four types of violent crimes: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. A measure of total violent crime per capita is calculated because larger cities are apt to have more crime. The analyst wants to examine whether income is associated with per-capita violent crime. The scatterplot of these two continuous variables shows that a negative relationship appears to be present: The Pearson’s correlation coefficient is –.532 (p < .01), and the Spearman’s correlation coefficient is –.552 (p < .01). The simple regression model shows R2 = .283. The regression model is as follows (t-test statistic in parentheses): The regression line is shown on the scatterplot. Interpreting these results, we see that the R-square value of .283 indicates a moderate relationship between these two variables. Clearly, some cities with modest median household incomes have a high crime rate. However, removing these cities does not greatly alter the findings. Also, an assumption of regression is that the error term is normally distributed, and further examination of the error shows that it is somewhat skewed. The techniques for examining the distribution of the error term are discussed in Chapter 15, but again, addressing this problem does not significantly alter the finding that the two variables are significantly related to each other, and that the relationship is of moderate strength. With this result in hand, further analysis shows, for example, by how much violent crime decreases for each increase in household income. For each increase of $10,000 in average household income, the violent crime rate drops 0.25 percent. For a city experiencing the median 0.78 percent crime rate, this would be a considerable improvement, indeed. Note also that the scatterplot shows considerable variation in the crime rate for cities at or below the median household income, in contrast to those well above it. Policy analysts may well wish to examine conditions that give rise to variation in crime rates among cities with lower incomes. Because Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient examines correlation among the ranks of variables, it can also be used with ordinal-level data.9 For the data in Table 14.2, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient is .900 (p = .035).10 Spearman’s p-squared coefficient has a “percent variation explained” interpretation, similar
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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The prescribed setting is removed from the everyday world, but reminiscent of it in essentials: a tea house, just three meters square, set in a garden, with a stone water basin, lantern, and toilet. Entering the room, one becomes not a spectator but a participant. The smell of incense, the sight of a scroll hung in an alcove with a simple flower arrangement below, subtly stimulate the senses. The simmering of the iron kettle over a charcoal fire is likened to the sound of the wind in the pine trees. Tea—thick, green, and bitter—is made with the utmost economy of movement. After each participant has sipped a bowl of tea, the conversation turns to the quality of the tea bowl itself and associated subjects.
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Richard H.P. Mason (History of Japan)
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You run ahead and find a pay phone,” I said to Jezza. “Tell your mom we’re having a slumber party or something.” “A slumber p—? What the hell are you on about?” “I love you, man. So don’t take this wrong, but your mom’s an idiot. You’re an idiot. Your whole family is idiots. When Randall OD’d last year and we had to crash at your place, we told her he had the flu. She made him fucking Rice Krispies squares. I don’t give a shit what you tell her, just let her know we’re coming.” Jezza
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Robert Brockway (The Unnoticeables)
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Natasha tried to wedge herself into the conversation, but as usual the triangle would not widen into a square. p.302
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Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
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...but the problem was more fundamental. Powell and the State Department hoped an agreement with North Korea would be a positive step reducing the threat of nuclear war. Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans, wedded to a view of the world as a Manichean contest between good and evil, rejected the idea of negotiating with a state they deemed immoral. If the United States had brought the evil empire of the Soviet Union to its knees, why deal with a state vastly smaller, weaker, and more repressive?
Bush's response to Kim Dae-Jung's visit set the tone for the administration. The United States would not enter into an agreement that kept a brutal regime in power. For Bush, foreign policy was an exercise in morality. That appealed to his religious fervor, and greatly simplified dealing with the world beyond America's borders. 'I've got a visceral reaction to this guy...Maybe it's my religion, but I feel passionate about this.' Bush's personalization of foreign policy and his refusal to deal with North Korea was the first of a multitude of errors that came to haunt his presidency. Instead of bringing a denuclearized North Korea peacefully into the family of nations, as seemed within reach in 2001, the Bush administration isolated the government in Pyongyang hoping for its collapse. In the years following, North Korea continued to be an intractable problem for the administration. By the end of Bush's presidency, North Korea had tested a nuclear device and was believed to have tripled its stock of plutonium, accumulating enough for at least six nuclear weapons.
Aside from their attachment to the idea of American hegemony, the worldview of Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans was predicated on a false reading of history. A keystone belief was that Ronald Reagan's harsh rhetoric and policy of firmness had forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. In actuality, Ronald Reagan's harsh rhetoric during his first three years in office actually intensified the Cold War and heightened Soviet resistance. Not until Reagan changed course, replaced Alexander Haig with George Schultz, and held out an olive branch to the Soviets did the Cold War begin to thaw. Beginning with the Geneva summit in 1985, Reagan would meet with Gorbachev five times in the next three years, including a precedent-shattering visit to the Kremlin and Red Square. What about the 'evil empire' the president was asked. 'I was talking about another time, another era,' said Reagan. President Reagan deserves full credit for ending the Cold War. But it ended because of his willingness to negotiate with Gorbachev and establish a relationship of mutual trust. For Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans, this was a lesson they had not learned. (p.188-189)
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Jean Edward Smith (Bush)
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now that was a lie, wasn't it? The tube journey back to South Kensington took another twenty minutes. He'd better get some milk. Some bread. Something to eat tonight. What would the flat be like now? What state had the police left it in? It would be weird walking up the steps and in through the front door. He'd honestly thought that he would never be back. That his life in St Cecilia's Square was over. Perhaps it was. Maybe now he would sell it, and move somewhere else. Letting himself in with his key at the main door, he checked for letters and bills in his mail box, and then walked slowly up the stairwell. Strangely, there was no mail at all. Not even junk-mail. Maybe the police or the Security Service had put a divert on it, so that they could read all his letters and pry into his life. He'd have to call them - who would he call? - to get it changed back? Ray Luck was still alive. He was free. He was home. At the top of the stairs, he stopped.
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Ian C.P. Irvine (I Spy, I Saw Her Die)
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That is, he would have started over from the beginning to solve with, again, both p and q non-negative. This is totally unnecessary, however, as at no place in the solution to x3 + px = q did he ever actually use the non-negativity of p and q. That is, such assumptions have no importance, and were explicitly made simply because of an unwarranted aversion by early mathematicians to negative numbers. This
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Paul J. Nahin (An Imaginary Tale: The Story of i (square root of minus 1))
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Billy Joel was supposed to have a triumphant first on Sunday night, April 14. The Piano Man was headed to high time for his first- ever broadcast network performance special, The 100th Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, following fifty times in the music business. still, his broadcast was cut short by CBS.
Why did CBS cut short Billy Joel’s broadcast?
The event, which was supposed to state on CBS from 9 to 11p.m., was blazoned before this time’s Super Bowl and taped on March 28 during Joel’s 100th performance at the fabled New York City theatre. Unfortunately, the Joel musicale’s airing was delayed due to the network’s live content of the Masters golf event. As a result, numerous observers missed the show’s dramatic conclusion and were forced to switch to the original news.
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abdurrafy
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So DCI Hudson explained the legal niceties to me, and warned that he would be forced to arrest anyone who blocked the diggers. I said that I was sure he wouldn’t actually arrest anyone, and he agreed that this was true. So there we were, back to square one. Ron then asked DCI Hudson if he was proud of himself, and DCI Hudson replied that he was an overweight fifty-one-year-old divorcé, and so, by and large, no, he wasn’t. This made Donna smile. She likes him—not like that, but she likes him. I do too. I was going to say to him that he wasn’t overweight, but he actually is a bit, and as a nurse, it’s best to never sugarcoat things, even when your instinct is to be protective. Instead I told him he should never eat after six p.m.—that’s the key if you don’t want diabetes—and he thanked me. That’s when Ibrahim joined us and suggested that DCI Hudson might try Pilates, and Donna said that was something she would pay to see. Ian Ventham didn’t want to join in the fun, and told Donna and DCI Hudson that he paid their wages. Donna said in that case could she ask him about a pay rise, and that’s when Ventham started shouting the odds about this, that, and the other. People without a sense of humor will never forgive you for being funny. But that’s an aside. Anyway, Ibrahim, who is very good with this sort of thing—conflict and inadequate men and stalemates and so on—stepped in and offered to “thin the crowd out” to give everyone a bit of breathing space.
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Richard Osman (The Thursday Murder Club)
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I remember the square of moonlight on the floor, that was not like any other light, and the visions that danced on the moonbeams when my mother sang to me. And too, I remember the sun of morning bright above the many-coloured hills in summer, and the sweetness of flowers borne on the south wind that made the trees sing.
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H.P. Lovecraft (The Quest of Iranon)
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second aspect of European anti-Americanism after 1918 was a pronounced aversion to certain American politicians; this, too, proved to be a quite durable prejudice.With the major exception of John F. Kennedy (and, to a lesser extent, Bill Clinton), all other twentieth-century American presidents were frowned upon by European elites—either disliked (Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush fils, Bush pe`re) and/or not taken seriously as political persons and ridiculed (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush fils, Bush p[egrave]re).53 In the interwar period, animosity was focused on Woodrow Wilson. The European Right treated him as the prototype of the wimpy internationalist, pursuing self-serving American interests under the hypocritical guise of national self-determination as a general principle.
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Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
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However, the E=mc2 does not take into account the momentum, which is also a form of energy, and in 1905 Einstein added the momentum (p), thus obtaining the energy-momentum-mass equation (E2=m2c4+p2c2). Since energy is squared (E2) and in the momentum (p) there is time, a square root is used and there are two solutions: negative time energy and positive time energy. Positive time energy implies causality, whereas negative time energy implies retrocausality: the future that acts backwards into the past. This was considered impossible and to solve this paradox Einstein removed the momentum, given the fact that it is practically equal to zero compared to the speed of light (c). In this way, he returned to the E=mc2.
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Ulisse Di Corpo (Syntropy, Precognition and Retrocausality)
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Je le [monsieur de La Fontaine] salue bien bas, il reste de bronze, avec son renard, son livre sous le bras et le corbeau au fromage. Nous sommes square du Ranelagh, dans le seizième arrondissement.
Coup d’œil à la Sorbonne, là où je n’ai pas étudié. La façade est en rénovation. Dans la rue, librement, des étudiants parlent roumain aussi. C’est le temps d’Erasmus.
Je suis arrivée trop tard.
(p. 11)
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Alina Dumitrescu (Le cimetière des abeilles (French Edition))
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Beginning at Tiananmen Square, the CCP sought to prove that even the newest information technology could be subverted to tyrannical ends, and that ideas really could be killed with the right amount of violence
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Michael P. Senger (Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World)
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Just so! I can take joy in every leaf, every twig, every beam of light, every shadow. There isn’t a hill so barren, nor a turf-pit so square, nor a road so monotonous, that I cannot for a moment fall in love with it.
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Jens Peter Jacobsen (Mogens, and Other Stories)
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Xora's P.A.S.S.A.G.E. XP: Sage, Gift, Pass, Staff Of Apocalypse, Sacred Globes, Light, Resistance, Square Abstract, Quad, Circle, Rectangle.
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Jonathan Roy Mckinney
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Looking Glass Of Light Expansion S.e.t.s.P.a.s.s.a.g.e. : Xora's Water, Earth's Sage, Fire's Gift, Wind's Passage, Resistance, Staff Of Apocalypse, Sacred Globes, Quad Abstract, Square, Circle, Rectangle.
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Jonathan Roy Mckinney
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Xora's P.a.s.s.a.g.e. XP S.E.T. Space element time : Looking Glass : Water Earth's Sage, Fire's Gift, Wind's Passage, Resistance, Light, Staff Of Apocalypse, Sacred Globes, Quad, Square Abstract, Circle, Rectangle
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Jonathan Roy Mckinney
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English professor Carolyn Kane wrote an article in Newsweek about the loss of thinking in American culture generally. After putting her finger squarely on the problem, Kane identified her solution in front of both God and the Newsweek readership: “But how can we revive interest in the art of thinking? The best place to start would be in homes and churches of our land.
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J.P. Moreland (Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul)
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At one point the Fox News PR department dispatched an intern to strike up a relationship with me. We went out a couple of times in New York City—we went to the late great Coffee Shop restaurant in Union Square, we rode the subway uptown, we even spent a late evening on her rooftop. There were moments when I thought these were dates—but her flirtatiousness was all part of the ruse. Years later I found out the intern was assigned to take copious notes and feed information back to her bosses. One email I viewed, dated Tuesday, September 6, 2005, was delivered at 11: 30 p.m. and listed what I told her during our faux-date; who called me during dinner (a PR person from a rival network); and what I said on the phone. Early the next morning the young woman was hauled into Ailes’s office because he wanted a full debrief. She was also tasked with friending me on Facebook and scouring my page for any evidence of anti-Fox bias or other material that could be used against me.
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Brian Stelter (Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth)
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Why's it square?” Matthew asked. Jenkins pursed his lips. “Blow'd if I knows. Easier to make, p'raps? But when you gets three servins in a day, that makes the three square meals they promises in the Rondey.
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Alaric Bond (His Majesty's Ship (Fighting Sail, #1))
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The most obvious stylistic feature common to both Poe and Lovecraft is the use of adjectives. In Lovecraft’s case this has been derisively termed “adjectivitis,” as if there is some canonical number of adjectives per square inch that are permissible and that the slightest excess is cause for frenzied condemnation. But this sort of criticism is merely a holdover from an outmoded and superficial realism that vaunted the barebones style of a Hemingway or a Sherwood Anderson as the sole acceptable model for English prose.
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S.T. Joshi (I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft)
“
I looked at Poppy. “She still wins hands down as president of this club. She can’t even call it sex, yet.”
Cali rolled her eyes. “I’m just bein’ polite.”
“Say sex,” Poppy dared her.
“I can say the word,” she grumbled. “You’re bein’ ridiculous.”
I saw Nate heading for the kitchen and smiled. This should be good.
“Then say Devin and I have hot, sweaty sex before we go to sleep each night.”
She glowered at me.
“You can’t, can you?” Poppy dared.
Cali squared her shoulders like she was getting ready to do battle, then spit out quickly, just as Nate stepped through the wall. “Devin and I have hot, sweaty, mind-blowin’, off the charts, sometimes deviant, SEX before bed each night. Are you happy now?”
“Good to know,” Nate stated as he walked through the kitchen and into the living room, unfazed by our conversation. “Thanks for the update.
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C.P. Smith (Double Trouble (Wallflowers #2))
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PSJ Kumar's Laws of gravity and gravitational force
Law 7:
"If any object enters into the gravitational field of any planet, the increase in the velocity of the object is directly proportional to the linear least square of its shortest distance and the maximum gravity from the surface of that planet
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P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar
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By now I’d noticed the rest of the room. Mostly it was just dusty shelves and boxes, with a bare brick floor that sloped down towards the middle. Stood over this was a huge, square table, which was covered in notes – handwritten, scribbled ones, done on little scraps of paper and weighed down by a huge grey pebble. There were also maps, a compass and an old brass pocket watch that did seem to be ticking.
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Emma Carroll (Letters from the Lighthouse)
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Honey Chicken Servings: 4-6 What you need: · 4 chicken breasts · 1/3 cup melted butter · 1/3 cup honey · 2 tbsp spicy brown mustard · 1/4 tsp salt What to do: Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F. Place the chicken breasts in a shallow square baking pan. Combine the butter, honey, mustard, and salt in a small bowl. Pour this mixture over the chicken. Bake for 1 hour or to a minimal internal temperature of 165 degrees F. Baste every 15 minutes while baking.
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Hannie P. Scott (Five Ingredient Cookbook: Easy Recipes in 5 Ingredients or Less)
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The saying goes that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I disagree. Keep your friends closest, so that each of you can keep the enemy squarely in the sights of your deadliest weapons.
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John P. Logsdon (Sinister: Unrighteous (Black Ops Paranormal Police Department, #5))
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They were used to punish those who, by their words, had transgressed against the prevailing conventions. In the course of four centuries, countless women decried as ‘scolds’ and ‘shrews’ because domestic slavery and incessant pregnancy reduced them to neurasthenia and frenzy were thus humiliated and tortured; political power thus held up to public ridicule the petty disobedient and the nonconformists; ecclesiastical power thus punished a long list of lesser infractions. The overwhelming majority of victims were always women, and the operative principle was mulier taceat in ecclesia, ‘Let the woman be silent in church’ – ‘church’ here meaning the ruling ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies, both constitutionally gynaecophobic. The sense was thus: ‘Let the woman be silent in the presence of the male’. The victims, locked into the masks and staked out in the town square, were also treated roughly by the crowd. Painful beatings, besmearing with faeces and urine, and serious, sometimes fatal wounding (especially in the breasts, anus and vagina) was their lot.
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Mark P. Donnelly (The Big Book of Pain: Torture and Punishment Through History)
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Meet Olivier Cheval:
When I looked up our eyes met and I felt my heart stop. They were the deepest forest green, encircled in thick, long lashes and placed in round, wide eyes that were so expressive I immediately knew he was aware of, and amused at, my staring. I blinked longer than necessary to collect my thoughts and when I reopened my eyes I took in the rest of him. He was about my age, tall, around six seven, with brown hair that was long but trim and neat. The angular features of his face were slightly hidden by a bit of a five o’clock shadow. His broad nose was somewhat crooked, like it had been broken in the past; supporting a pair of square, slim eye glasses. He was trim and muscular with broad shoulders which couldn’t be hidden under the button up shirt and sports coat, which fit him perfectly. He wore jeans on the absolute longest legs I’d ever seen on a man. While any woman would be excused for momentarily losing her wits at the sight of him, what took me most by surprise was the overwhelming feeling of comfort and calm I felt in his presence. I instantly knew he was right for so much more than just our teacher position and he hadn’t even said a word.
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P.M. Briede (Smoldering Embers (Charlotte Grace #1))
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Is Lavos a selfish conqueror of the world, or a planetary farmer simply following its instincts? How sentient is Lavos, and if it can speak to us, why won’t it? Do apiarists palaver with their bees, or do they just mind the hives and collect the honey? It’s painful to imagine our species as insects, as fodder for something bigger, more powerful. Something that could plummet from above and ruin us in the blink of an eye.
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Michael P. Williams (Chrono Trigger (Boss Fight Books, #2))