Parrot Sound Quotes

I was vanquished by a deer!' A giant magical flying deer with fangs,' Seth said, parroting a description Gavin had shared earlier. That sounds a little better,' Warren conceded. 'Seth is in charge of my tombstone.

Halt waited a minute or two but there was no sound except for the jingling of harness and the creaking of leather from their saddles. Finally, the former Ranger could bear it no longer. What?” The question seemed to explode out of him, with a greater degree of violence than he had intended. Taken by surprise, Horace’s bay shied in fright and danced several paces away. Horace turned an aggrieved look on his mentor as he calmed the horse and brought it back under control. What?” he asked Halt, and the smaller man made a gesture of exasperation. That’s what I want to know,” he said irritably. “What?” Horace peered at him. The look was too obviously the sort of look that you give someone who seems to have taken leave of his senses. It did little to improve Halt’s rapidly growing temper. What?” said Horace, now totally puzzled. Don’t keep parroting at me!” Halt fumed. “Stop repeating what I say! I asked you ‘what,’ so don’t ask me ‘what’ back, understand?” Horace considered the question for a second or two, then, in his deliberate way, he replied: “No.” Halt took a deep breath, his eyebrows contracted into a deep V, and beneath them his eyes with anger but before he could speak, Horace forestalled him. What ‘what’ are you asking me?” he said. Then, thinking how to make the question clearer, he added, “Or to put it another way, why are you asking ‘what’?” Controlling himself with enormous restraint, and making no secret of the fact, Halt said, very precisely: “You were about to ask me a question.” Horace frowned. “I was?” Halt nodded. “You were. I saw you take a breath to ask it.” I see,” Horace said. “And what was it about?” For just a second or two, Halt was speechless. He opened his mouth, closed it again, then finally found the strength to speak. That is what I was asking you,” he said. “When I said ‘what,’ I was asking you what you were about to ask me.” I wasn’t about to ask you ‘what,’” Horace replied, and Halt glared at him suspiciously. It occurred to him that Horace could be indulging himself in a gigantic leg pull, that he was secretly laughing at Halt. This, Halt could have told him, was not a good career move. Rangers were not people who took kindly to being laughed at. He studied the boy’s open face and guileless blue eyes and decided that his suspicion was ill-founded. Then what, if I may use that word once more, were you about to ask me?” Horace drew a breath once more, then hesitated. “I forget,” he said. “What were we talking about?

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, “Boom!” You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

Buttering a roll, my dad says, “I like Peter.” “You do?” I say. Daddy nods. “He’s a good kid. He’s really taken with you, Lara Jean.” “Taken with me?” I repeat. To me Kitty says, “You sound like a parrot.” To Daddy she says, “What does that mean? Taken by her?” “It means he’s charmed by her,” Daddy explains. “He’s smitten.” “Well, what’s smitten?” He chuckles and stuffs the roll in Kitty’s open, perplexed mouth. “It means he likes her.” “He definitely likes her,” Kitty agrees, her mouth full. “He . . . he looks at you a lot, Lara Jean. When you’re not paying attention. He looks at you, to see if you’re having a good time.” “He does?” My chest feels warm and glowy, and I can feel myself start to smile.

was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

It sounds strange to hear people talk about the delights and miracles of technology, when they do not even begin to compare with what you can find in a riverbed.

Using our explanations, we ‘see’ right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people’s behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That

While discussing the monster: "It sounds like the combination of water being poured into a glass," Miss Hawkline said, "A dog barking and the muttering of a drunk parrot. And very, very loud." "I think we're going to need the shotgun for this one," Cameron said.

We were happy enough; that's what people say, isn't it? How happy is happy enough? It sounds like a grammatical mistake - happy enough, like rather unique...

Kaboom.” “Kaboom?” I parroted. Greg made a mushroom cloud motion with his hands, his grin widening. “Big kaboom.” “Big kaboom? Is that the technical term?” Both Greg and I turned our attention back to the screen, finding Sandra’s face filling the window. “See, this is why I won’t let you play with Alex, Greg. He likes to blow things up figuratively, and you like to blow things up literally,” she chided. Alex was still smiling as he gently pushed her out of the way, “I like to blow things up literally, too.” “All men do.” She sounded exasperated.

Nothing Here is Enough” I need a parrot, identical days, a quantity of needles, and artificial ink to make history. I need veiled eyelids, black lines, and ruined puppets to make geography. I need a sky wider than longing, and water that is not H2O to make wings. The days are no longer enough to distinguish the missing. I no longer see you because I no longer dream. I offer a tear to the rain as if scattering you in the Dead Sea, and in order to sing you, I need glass to muffle the sound.

I wasn’t in the mood to talk. The mournful sound of the rubber wheels of the tea trolley squeaking on the lino floor was the right soundtrack for the end of the world. Sometimes the tea lady lost her grip and the trolley hit the corners of the walls and beds. It was the equivalent of waterfalls and parrots in my new terrible world.

The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words... "Mad" has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van.

There is a simple marketing trick that helps teams communicate as one: generate a brand. When you start a project, come up with a name for it, ideally something off-the-wall. (In the past, we've named projects after things such as killer parrots that prey on sheep, optical illusions, and mythical cities.) ...Use your team's name liberally when talking with people. It sounds silly, but it gives your team an identity to build on, and the world something memorable to associate with your work.

The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.

That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a sign of love, I maintain. It's similar with books. Not quite the same, of course (it never is); but similar. If you quite enjoy a writer's work, if you turn the page approvingly yet don't mind being interrupted, then you tend to like that author unthinkingly. Good chap, you assume. Sound fellow. They say he strangled an entire pack of Wolf Cubs and fed their bodies to a school of carp? Oh no, I'm sure he didn't; sound fellow, good chap. But if you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him -- despite edicts to the contrary -- then it's impossible to know too much. You seek the vice as well. A pack of Wolf Cubs, eh? Was that twenty-seven or twenty-eight? And did he have their little scarves sewn up into a patchwork quilt? And is it true that as he ascended the scaffold he quoted from the Book of Jonah? And that he bequeathed his carp pond to the local Boy Scouts? But here's the difference. With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst -- be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark -- you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment? With a writer you love, the instinct is to defend. This is what I meant earlier: perhaps love for a writer is the purest, the steadiest form of love. And so your defense comes the more easily. The fact of the matter is, carp are an endangered species, and everyone knows that the only diet they will accept if the winter has been especially harsh and the spring turns wet before St Oursin's Day is that of young minced Wolf Cub. Of course he knew he would hang for the offense, but he also knew that humanity is not an endangered species, and reckoned therefore that twenty-seven (did you say twenty-eight?) Wolf Cubs plus one middle-ranking author (he was always ridiculously modest about his talents) were a trivial price to pay for the survival of an entire breed of fish. Take the long view: did we need so many Wolf Cubs? They would only have grown up and become Boy Scouts. And if you're still so mired in sentimentality, look at it this way: the admission fees so far received from visitors to the carp pond have already enabled the Boy Scouts to build and maintain several church halls in the area.

He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper. Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound.

Dixie, Trixie, Buster, Sonny, Polly! — Sounds like four dogs and a parrot.

A parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn’t vocal.

I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves - but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn’t vocal. What, then, is so special about our language?

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me for ever. Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development. Months spent in holy Kandy, in Ceylon, the holy of holies of southern Buddhism, had not touched the great psyche of materialism and idealism which dominated me. And years, even in the exquisite beauty of Sicily, right among the old Greek paganism that still lives there, had not shattered the essential Christianity on which my character was established. Australia was a sort of dream or trance, like being under a spell, the self remaining unchanged, so long as the trance did not last too long. Tahiti, in a mere glimpse, repelled me: and so did California, after a stay of a few weeks. There seemed a strange brutality in the spirit of the western coast, and I felt: O, let me get away! But the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. There was a certain magnificence in the high-up day, a certain eagle-like royalty, so different from the equally pure, equally pristine and lovely morning of Australia, which is so soft, so utterly pure in its softness, and betrayed by green parrot flying. But in the lovely morning of Australia one went into a dream. In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.

There was such profusion of good things, such abundance of fruit and cake and wine, such glitter of glass upon the table, such smooth white napery, that it seemed hard the pound or two necessary for the music-master had to be given over to that extra bunch of grapes. A child’s nature is such that she accepted it as inevitable, and later in the day would hear from the privacy of her own room the clatter of the party below—that peculiar parrot sound, strained and shrill, that distorts the human voice when men and women come together.

There is no mistake,” says Herr Keller. “The extra lessons are necessary. We cannot hope to build a successful socialist state in this country if its citizens are not properly informed about socialist ideals.” He sounds as if he is repeating something he has been taught to say, parrot-fashion.

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken.

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, “Boom!” You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son.

The Sniper Bird by Stewart Stafford "Look out!" the crowd shouted to me, "There's a Sniper Bird in those trees!" A whooshing sound shot past my ears, Making me duck down to my knees. He must have gone rogue, I reckoned, Someone cheated him over birdseed, Then he took a squirrel as his hostage, Get a negotiator quickly up those trees. He threw up his wings and surrendered, They brought him down in a gilded cage, Never again sniping at innocent people, He studies elocution with a parrot sage. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

She does say the most amusing things, doesn’t she? ‘Pretty girl,’ and ‘yes,’ and—Do you hear that one? ‘Fancy a . . .’ what? I never can catch what she’s saying at the end. It’s certainly not biscuit. ‘Fancy a cuppa,’ perhaps? But who gives a parrot tea? It sounds a great deal like ‘fancy a foxglove,’ but that makes even less sense. I don’t mind saying the mystery is driving me a bit mad.” “Fuck.” She froze. “I’m not that upset about it.” He returned to the bedchamber, now clothed in a pair of trousers and an unbuttoned shirt. “It’s what the parrot’s saying. ‘Fancy a fuck, love.’ That bird came from a whorehouse.

I like Peter.” “You do?” I say. Daddy nods. “He’s a good kid. He’s really taken with you, Lara Jean.” “Taken with me?” I repeat. To me Kitty says, “You sound like a parrot.” To Daddy she says, “What does that mean? Taken by her?” “It means he’s charmed by her,” Daddy explains. “He’s smitten.” “Well, what’s smitten?” He chuckles and stuffs the roll in Kitty’s open, perplexed mouth. “It means he likes her.” “He definitely likes her,” Kitty agrees, her mouth full. “He…he looks at you a lot, Lara Jean. When you’re not paying attention. He looks at you, to see if you’re having a good time.” “He does?” My chest feels warm and glowy, and I can feel myself start to smile.

The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius –‘Merde pour la poésie’; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide –But one doesn’t have the right.

Reader, I married him. It turned out the sounds I heard coming from the attic weren't the screams of Mr Rochester's mad wife Bertha. It wasn't the wife who burned to death in the fire that destroyed Thornfield Hall and blinded my future husband when he tried to save her. After we'd first got engaged, he'd had to admit that he was already married, and we'd broken off our engagement. He'd asked me to run away with him anyway. Naturally, I'd refused. But later, after we were properly married, he insisted that it hadn't happened that way. It turned out there had been no wife. It turned out that it had been a parrot, screaming in the attic. The parrot had belonged to his wife. She had got it in the islands, where she had also contracted the tropical fever that killed her. She'd died long before I came to work for him as a governess. That was never Bertha, in the attic.

When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I’m worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city. The rains have finally decided to come. I sit down on the lawn, resting my back against the wall of the house, and light an aitch I’ve waited a long time to smoke. Suddenly the air is still and the trees are silent, and I can hear laughter from my neighbor’s servant quarters. A bicycle bell sounds in the street, reminding me of the green Sohrab I had as a child. Then the wind returns, bringing the smell of wet soil and a pair of orange parrots that swoop down to take shelter in the lower branches of the banyan tree, where they glow in the shadows.

Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty pure and simple--Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was straightness and emptiness of course. the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a ramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. And in the large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick, there were loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk up under the shower of a tree that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious. That was interesting. And so on into the flare and glare.

We have, as it seems to me, in this most mechanical and interlocking of civilizations, attempted to lop this creature down to the status of time-saving invention. He is, after all, not merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is—and how old-fashioned the words sound!—something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity—which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims. What is today parroted as his Responsibility—which seems to mean that he must make formal declaration that he is involved in, and affected by, the lives of other people and to say something improving about this somewhat self-evident fact—is, when he believes it, his corruption and our loss; moreover, it is rooted in, interlocked with and intensifies this same mechanization.

Thudd pointed out the birds that flashed through the trees—screaming orange-and-green king parrots, black riflebirds that made a sound like a gunshot, and green catbirds that meowed.

What's orange and sounds like a parrot?

What was wrong with people? Ashna didn't understand this obsession with other people's lives. Jonah pulled up Twitter and Instagram on his tablet and waved it about, parroting all the hashtags she and Rico now were: #knifegate #churrosolimp, and the one that made Jonah the giddiest: #Ashico, which when said out loud sounded far too much like the Hindi word ashiquo which, disastrously enough, meant "lovers.

As the Chinese translation of the name Sukhāvatī suggests, it is a land of supreme joy. The Sanskrit is of similar meaning: “that which possesses ease and comfort.” Sukhāvatī is not subject to the sufferings that plague this world and, furthermore, it is a land of surpassed beauty. It is described as having seven tiers of balustrades, seven rows of nets, and seven rows of trees, all adorned with four jewels (gold, silver, lapsis lazuli, and crystal). There is a lake of the seven jewels (gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, a kind of big shell [tridacna gigas], coral, and agate), filled with water having the eight virtues. The bottom of the lake is gold sand. On the four sides of the lake are stairs (galleries) made of the four jewels. Above are towers and palaces also adorned with the seven jewels. Above are towers and palaces also adorned with the seven jewels. In the lake bloom lotus flowers as large as chariot wheels. The blue lotus flowers emit a blue light, and the yellow, red, and white lotus flowers emit light of corresponding colors. They all give forth a sweet fragrance. The delightful sound of heavenly music can be hard, and in the morning, at noon, and in the evening mandārava flowers fall from the sky and gently pile up on the golden ground. Every morning the inhabitants of the Pure Land gather these flowers with the hems of their robes and make offerings of them to myriads of buddhas in other lands. At mealtime they return to their own land, where they take their meal and stroll around. There are many kinds of birds—swans, peacocks, parrots, sharikas, kalaviṅkas, and jīvaṃjīvakas, which sing with beautiful voices, proclaiming the teachings of the Buddha. When living beings hear this song, they think about the Buddha, Dharma (“law,” or his teachings), and Saṅgha (“community of believers”). When the gentle breezes blow, the rows of four-jeweled trees and jeweled nets give forth a gentle music, like a beautiful symphony. In this land dwell Amitābha Buddha and his two attendants, the bodhisattvas Avalokitśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta. At their feet are those virtuous beings who have been reborn in that land because of their ardent faith. All, however, are male; women of deep faith are reborn here with male bodies. The female sex, considered inferior and unfortunate, has no place in Sukhāvatī. All people, says Śākyamuni, should ardently wish for rebirth in that land and become the companions of the most virtuous of all beings. People cannot hope for rebirth there just by performing a few good deeds, however. If living beings meditate eagerly upon the name of Amitābha for even one day with an undisturbed mind, Amitābha and his holy retinue will appear before them to receive them at the end of Life. They will enter the Pure Land with unperturbed hearts.

are your career goals? This first question is powerful because it allows you to hear about a candidate’s goals and passions before you taint the discussion with your own comments. You give the candidate the first word, rather than telling the person about the company so he or she can parrot back what you just said. Ideally, a candidate will share career goals that match your company’s needs. If he or she lacks goals or sounds like an echo of your own Web site, screen the person out. You are done with the call. Talented people know what they want to do and are not afraid to tell you about it.

Wendell looked at the faerie stone in his hand, shrugged, and smashed it against the floor. Out burst a flock of parrots. The birds shrieked and squawked, and the sheerie were momentarily distracted--- not afraid, they lunged at them like cats. Each parrot seemed to be carrying a tropical flower in its beak. Wendell hurled another stone. When it smashed, glittering banners unfurled upon the museum walls, covered in the faerie script. The ceiling was suddenly painted in frescoes of Folk lounging in forest pools, surrounded by green foliage. Vases of unfamiliar flowers appeared on every surface next to bottles of wine in ice buckets, and the air filled with the muffled sound of violins, as if drifting in from the next room.

That’s me being in fucking love with you, you utter moron.” I stagger back against the sink. “What?” “You heard me.” “You love me?” I sound like a stupefied parrot. “Yes, Henry,” he yells. “I’m in love with you, and I’m pretty sure that you’re in love with me too.” “I am,” I shout back. “Of course I am. I’ve always loved you.

It's no coincidence that "aspiration" means both hope and the act of breathing. When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force. I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.

For some big-shot kingpin, he certainly sounds a lot like a parrot.

There’s no such thing as a timid fighter,” Henry parroted. “That’s what Tag says. And he says Amelie fights every damn day.” “Hallelujah and praise the Lord for that,” Georgia said, sounding just like my great-grandma Kathleen. They were both small-town Levan girls who had spent a good deal of their lives as neighbors. So I guess it wasn’t surprising. “Amen,” I agreed. “Muhammad Amelie,” Georgia joked. “Floats like a butterfly . . .” “Stings like a bee,” Henry and I finished.

Calm down, calm down. Deep breath,” Colleen whispered. “It's showtime. He's a nice guy, you're a nice woman.” “Hey, Paulie,” Bryce said as he loped over to Paulie's car. “Everything okay here? Our window just broke.” Paulie inhaled audibly, her breath hitching in her throat. “Oh! Wow. Hi. Your eyes are so...so...blue.” Colleen winced. “Stop that.” “Stop that,” echoed Paulie. Bryce stopped and tilted his head. “Paulie, relax. Just...just say hi to him.” Another shaking breath. “Hi, Bryce!” she said loudly. “What are you doing here?” Bryce laughed. “I live here. How about you?” A squeaky groan came over the wire. “I threw a pebble, I guess. I think I had a blowout,” Colleen whispered. “I threw a pebble, I guess,” Paulie parroted. “I think I had a blow job.” She clapped her hands over her mouth. “Out, out! I didn't mean blow job. I never had a blow job. I meant something else. Out. I had a blowout.” “Paulie, calm down,” Colleen whispered. “Jesus.” “Jesus, calm down,” Paulie said, then wiped her forehead with her arm. “Uh...I...I have a flat tire.” “Bummer,” Bryce said, not freaked out in the least by Paulie sounding as if she were possessed by a demon. “Can you help me change it, Bryce?” Colleen asked. “Can you help me change it? Bryce? Please? Please help me.” Dear Lord. This was going to be a long afternoon.

Effective Pauses: Silence is powerful. We told Benjie to use it for emphasis, to encourage Sabaya to keep talking until eventually, like clearing out a swamp, the emotions were drained from the dialogue. 2.​Minimal Encouragers: Besides silence, we instructed using simple phrases, such as “Yes,” “OK,” “Uh-huh,” or “I see,” to effectively convey that Benjie was now paying full attention to Sabaya and all he had to say. 3.​Mirroring: Rather than argue with Sabaya and try to separate Schilling from the “war damages,” Benjie would listen and repeat back what Sabaya said. 4.​Labeling: Benjie should give Sabaya’s feelings a name and identify with how he felt. “It all seems so tragically unfair, I can now see why you sound so angry.” 5.​Paraphrase: Benjie should repeat what Sabaya is saying back to him in Benjie’s own words. This, we told him, would powerfully show him you really do understand and aren’t merely parroting his concerns. 6.​Summarize: A good summary is the combination of rearticulating the meaning of what is said plus the acknowledgment of the emotions underlying that meaning (paraphrasing + labeling = summary). We told Benjie he needed to listen and repeat the “world according to Abu Sabaya.” He needed to fully and completely summarize all the nonsense that Sabaya had come up with about war damages and fishing rights and five hundred years of oppression. And once he did that fully and completely, the only possible response for Sabaya, and anyone faced with a good summary, would be “that’s right.

don’t have all day. It’s almost five, and I promised to fetch my fiancée home.” He smirked. “I’ll be renting a carriage from you for a few weeks, until after the wedding.” Ice raced through Curt’s veins. “Fiancée? Wedding?” He cursed himself for sounding like a parrot. “Your friend Faith Lindberg has accepted my proposal. Once we’re wed, we plan to take her old grandpappy and head for Oregon.” The words struck Curt with the force of a blow. “Congratulations. She’s a fine girl. You’re blessed.” His voice sounded as tight as a wagon spring. “Blessed, or lucky. Whatever you want to call it.” “I’ll

Even when behaviors are clearly stress-related, they can be difficult to interpret. Mel Richardson was once asked to examine a tree kangaroo at the San Antonio Zoo that the keepers said was acting bizarrely. With the ears of a teddy bear, the rounded chub of a koala, and the tail of a fuzzy monkey, tree kangaroos are very cute. But this female was acting vicious. She was attacking her babies, and the keepers had no idea why. Mel went to check on her. Sure enough, as soon as he approached, the kangaroo ran to her babies and started hitting and clawing at them with her paws. He stepped back, and she stopped. He walked forward, and she ran at the babies again. “I realized,” said Mel, “that she wasn’t viciously attacking her babies at all. She was trying to pick them up off the floor, but her little paws weren’t meant for that. In her native Australia and Papua New Guinea her babies never would have been on the ground. Her whole family would have been up in the trees.” The mother kangaroo wanted to move the babies away from the humans. What looked like abnormal attacks on her young were actually her way of trying to protect them. Her behavior wasn’t mental illness at all but a response to the stress of being a mother in an unnatural environment. After the keepers redesigned the kangaroos’ cage so that more of it was elevated and farther from the door, she relaxed and stopped hitting her babies. Mel explained, “As flippant as it might sound, the truth is that in order to know what’s abnormal, you must first know what’s normal. In this case in order to determine pathology, I had to understand the animal’s psychology. It’s pretty easy for people to get this wrong.

Q: What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A: A carrot.

I don’t have all day. It’s almost five, and I promised to fetch my fiancée home.” He smirked. “I’ll be renting a carriage from you for a few weeks, until after the wedding.” Ice raced through Curt’s veins. “Fiancée? Wedding?” He cursed himself for sounding like a parrot. “Your friend Faith Lindberg has accepted my proposal. Once we’re wed, we plan to take her old grandpappy and head for Oregon.” The words struck Curt with the force of a blow. “Congratulations. She’s a fine girl. You’re blessed.” His voice sounded as tight as a wagon spring. “Blessed, or lucky. Whatever you want to call it.

Of course I want you to go! Are you kidding? I’ve been so fucking worried that I would never get to see you again or if we didn’t see one another for a few weeks, that we would lose what we have.” “What do we have, Pete?” she asks, but she’s smiling. “You don’t know?” I ask. She shakes her head. “I’m not always good at reading people, Pete,” she admits, blushing. I tweak her nose and steel myself. “I think I’m falling in love with you, Reagan,” I say. I swallow hard because there’s suddenly a lump on my throat. I don’t know where it came from, and no matter how hard I swallow, it won’t go away. I wait. She has to say something, right? “Good,” she finally says. Good? That’s it? “Thanks for telling me.” She grins and spins to walk in the other direction. I grab her arm and pull her back to me, and my heart swells because she doesn’t punch me and drop-kick me or knee me in the chin when I jerk her to me and back her up against a tree. “That’s all I get?” I ask. My heart is thudding like crazy. Maybe I misread her. Maybe I’m way off base. Maybe I’m an idiot. “What do you want?” she whispers. I palm the side of her face and stare at her. She’s so fucking beautiful that I can barely think when I’m this close to her. “I want you to love me back,” I admit. “Done,” she says. A blush creeps up her cheeks, and I thought she couldn’t look any prettier than she did a minute ago. But I was wrong. “Done?” I parrot. God, now I sound like Link. She heaves a sigh. “Done. Gone. Don’t want to be away from you. Can’t breathe when I think about you leaving. Want to be with you all the time, gone. Done.” She blinks, and then she says, “You’re inside me, Pete. And I want to keep you there.” Fuck. That’s the best fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my life. And I can’t even put two thoughts together to tell her.

The Burglar Thinking that no one is home, a burglar breaks into a house.  He is very sneaky, quiet and doesn’t turn any lights on.  All of a sudden he hears a voice. The voice says, “I can see you and Jesus can see you.” Startled, the burglar stops in his tracks and listens.  He tries to figure out where the sound is coming from.   He doesn’t hear the voice again so he moves forward a couple of steps.  As soon as he does, he hears the same voice again, “I can see you and Jesus can see you.” The burglar decides to take out his flashlight.  He turns it on and points it in the direction of the voice.  He sees a parrot in a bird cage. “Was that you talking?” he says to the parrot. The parrot repeats, “I can see you and Jesus can see you.” Seeing this, the man says, “Ha, you are just a parrot. You can’t stop me.” “Yes, I am just a parrot,” the bird says.  “But Jesus is a Doberman!

First there were the indoor animals. Leeda took all five dogs out on their leashes, letting herself be dragged along as they sniffed at this rock, trotted to that tree, and wrestled with one another exuberantly. She smiled, watching them. They were like clowns. Constantly ridiculous. Once she managed to drag them back inside and foist each dog into its pen, she filled all the food and water bowls. She cleaned the parrot cage and managed not to feel like gagging. She rubbed the parrot on the back of his head, which she'd discovered was his favorite spot. She thought about Birdie catching impetigo from her chicken. She could see now how one might not be totally disgusted to kiss a bird. The parrot looked at her with such human curiosity. Birdie had named him Chiquito and had nuzzled her nose to his. Now Leeda tried it, half afraid she'd lose her nose. But Chiquito nestled into her and made a low sound of contentment in the back of his throat.

I think Claude was reluctant to leave this human world. He’s amassing money that could be working for him here while he’s in Faery. He’s been talking with lawyers about setting up a trust, or something like that. It would continue to earn him money even if he vanishes. That way if he wants to return to this world, he will be a rich man and able to live as he wants. And there are advantages, even when you live in Faery, to having financial assets here.” “Like what?” Dermot looked surprised. “Like having the ability to buy things that aren’t available in Faery,” he said. “Like having the wherewithal to make trips out here occasionally, to indulge in things that aren’t … acceptable in our own world.” “Like what?” I asked again. “Some of us like human drugs and sex,” Dermot said. “And some of us like human music very much. And human scientists have thought of some wonderful products that are very useful in our world.” I was tempted to say “Like what?” a third time, but I didn’t want to sound like a parrot.

Parrots can remember and repeat words and speak like human beings. But they do not understand what they are saying. As far as they are concerned, these are only sounds that humans have taught them to say.

A confession, if a faithful echo of what God already says, can guide us and shelter us from the disabilities of an age or locale. Confessions that parrot and lightly amplify the soundings of Scripture endure, while also equipping God’s family with strength and perspective to avoid the ditches of every fad or heresy. Confessions that stand on the shoulders of previous saintly exegetes are the advanced courses that settle certain matters and yield a head start.

In church, it has become commonplace to associate fixed and traditional text with insincerity, parroting by rote, and disengagement. Conversely, spontaneous (and often pseudo-spontaneous), freely composed words have come to be associated with simplicity and veracity. This is a fallacy, and a dangerous, damaging one.

He wants to make sure we understand each other, especially when we’re upset. So he gives me feedback. During arguments, he repeats or paraphrases what I say. He sounds like a parrot. I’ll say, ‘I’m furious.’ ‘You’re furious?’ ‘You’re making me crazy.’ ‘I’m making you crazy?’ ‘Stop it!’ ‘Stop it?’” —Marissa, Chicago, IL

Were you going to tell me you're coming to visit?" "Were you going to tell me you're banging my contractor?" "No. It's none of your business," I say firmly, trying not to sound shocked that he knows. I'm going to have to murder Sadie or Dixie later, whichever one told him. Maybe killing them both would be easiest. "Why are you coming?" "Why are you banging the contractor?" I grit my teeth. He's in one of those snarky moods that he's been perfecting since he was a preteen. Back then he used to parrot back everything I said on our twelve-hour drives to Maine from Toronto and it would get me so mad I would scream. If he wants to play, I'll play to win. "Well, where can I start ... he's built like a tank and hung like a horse." "Winnie!" "Not to mention that scruffy beard and the way it feels between my--

Gabrielle, my dear, my sweet, my flower, I, the King of Romance, have come for you!” The person who had appeared was wearing a white tuxedo that was different from everyone else’s plaid pants and blazer combination. He had bright blond hair that was slicked back. His eyes were blue. Gabrielle had seen him numerous times already, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember his name. The blond man walked up the stairs toward her, his hand extended in a grand gesture. “My love, you are the only one whose beauty can captivate me so. Please, allow me, the King of Love, the sweep you off your feet!” The blond knelt before Gabrielle and took her hand in his. He stared into her eyes. Why was he staring into her eyes so hard? It looked like he was trying to drill holes through her with his gaze. Creepy. Gabrielle responded to this man the same way she had done every time he appeared. “Who are you again?” The reaction around the room was instant. The whole class burst out laughing. Ryoko and Serah were the worst perpetrators, bent over the table and howling with laughter as they were, but even Kazekiri was snickering into her hand while trying to look stern. Gabrielle just smiled. She didn’t really know what was so funny. “W-why is it that you can never remember my name?” The blond cried out. “I’m Jameson de Truante, the most handsome man in this entire school. I am so handsome that people often call me the King of Good Looks.” “Hmm…” Gabrielle crossed her arms. That’s right. This boy was Jasmine’s older brother, wasn’t he? She remembered now. However… “I’m sorry, but you’re nowhere near as handsome as Alex.” “Hurk!” Jameson jerked backwards as though he’d been shot through the heart with something, though all this did was cause him to lose his balance. With a loud squawk that reminded her of an Angelisian parocetian (a lizard found on Angelisia that sounded like a parrot), he rolled down the stairs, bounced along the floor, and hit the stage with a harsh thud. And there he lay, insensate to the world around him. “Oh! That was rich!” Ryoko continued to laugh. “He keeps… keeps making passes at you… and you… you can’t even remember his name!! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” “Serves the jerk right,” Serah added. Kazekiri sighed. “I normally would not approve of such behavior, but Jameson has always been a problem child, so I will let this slide once.” “Um, thank you?” Gabrielle said, not quite sure if she should be grateful or not. “Don’t worry,” Selene said upon seeing her confused look. “You might not understand right now, but you did a very good thing.” “Oh.” Gabrielle paused, and then beamed brightly at her friend. “Okay!” Class eventually settled down, though Jameson remained lying on the floor. Students chatted about this and that. Gabrielle engaged in her own conversation with her friends, discussing the possibility of going to sing karaoke this weekend. Of course, she invited Kazekiri to come as well, to which the young woman replied that she would think about it. Gabrielle hoped that meant she would come. It wasn’t long before the students were forced to settle down as their teacher came in and barked at them. Their homeroom teacher, a stern-looking man with neatly combed gray hair named Mr. Sanchez, took one look at Jameson, sighed, and then said, “Does anyone want to explain why Mr. Truante is lying unconscious on the floor?

One African grey I know, Throckmorton, pronounces his name with Shakespearean precision. Named for the man who served as an intermediary for Mary, Queen of Scots (and was hanged in 1584 for conspiring against Queen Elizabeth I), Throckmorton has a wide repertoire of household sounds, including the voices of his family members, Karin and Bob, which he uses to his advantage. He calls out Karin’s name in a “Bob voice” that Karin describes as spot-on; she can’t tell the difference. He also mimics the different rings of Karin’s and Bob’s cell phones. One of his favorite ploys is to summon Bob from the garage by imitating his cell phone ring. When Bob comes running, Throckmorton “answers” the call in Bob’s voice: “Hello! Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.” Then he finishes with the flat ring tone of hanging up. Throckmorton imitates the glug, glug sound of Karin drinking water and the slurping sound of Bob trying to cool his hot coffee while he sips it, as well as the bark of the family’s former dog, a Jack Russell terrier dead nine years. He has also nailed the bark of the current family pet, a miniature schnauzer, and will join him in a chorus of barking, “making my house sound like a kennel,” says Karin. “Again, he’s pitch perfect; no one can tell it’s a parrot barking and not a dog.” Once, when Bob had a cold, Throckmorton added to his corpus the sounds of nose blowing, coughing, and sneezing. And another time, when Bob came home from a business trip with a terrible stomach bug, Throckmorton made sick-to-my-stomach sounds for the next six months. For one long stretch, his preferred “Bob” word was “Shhhhhhhhiiiit.

You don’t ever want to paraphrase while backtracking. Don’t mess with their words. Say EXACTLY what they said to you. Don’t paraphrase, “parrot-phrase.” The secret is using their exact words without sounding like you’re mocking them. Imagine if Sally had paraphrased Eric’s sentence and turned it into: “Oh, so you’ve failed before?” Eric hadn’t said anything about failing, and although “that road” means “failure” to Sally, it might mean something entirely different to Eric. Paraphrasing here is not likely to get the little yes that Sally is after. In fact, it might get her into trouble.

1.​Effective Pauses: Silence is powerful. We told Benjie to use it for emphasis, to encourage Sabaya to keep talking until eventually, like clearing out a swamp, the emotions were drained from the dialogue. 2.​Minimal Encouragers: Besides silence, we instructed using simple phrases, such as “Yes,” “OK,” “Uh-huh,” or “I see,” to effectively convey that Benjie was now paying full attention to Sabaya and all he had to say. 3.​Mirroring: Rather than argue with Sabaya and try to separate Schilling from the “war damages,” Benjie would listen and repeat back what Sabaya said. 4.​Labeling: Benjie should give Sabaya’s feelings a name and identify with how he felt. “It all seems so tragically unfair, I can now see why you sound so angry.” 5.​Paraphrase: Benjie should repeat what Sabaya is saying back to him in Benjie’s own words. This, we told him, would powerfully show him you really do understand and aren’t merely parroting his concerns.

What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? He shoved his notepad at me, snickering. “I dunno, Grudge. What?” A carrot!

It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing. When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force. I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this. There’s a pleasure that comes with shaping sounds with your mouth. It’s so primal and visceral that throughout their history, humans have considered the activity a pathway to the divine.

My preconceptions about nonhuman minds were fraying too. I was suddenly seeing Olivers and potential Olivers everywhere. It was as if my own dog's crisis had given me canine-tinted goggles that gave the world an anxiously doggish perspective. I still noted dogs doing dog things, but I was beginning to regard them as individuals with their own emotional weather systems that guided their behavior as they whizzed, panted, lolled, and humped. These weather systems could also compel them to do odd things. As I talked about Oliver's puzzling behavior with other dog owners at the park, at dinner parties, with people I'd just met and others I'd known for years, I started to collect their stories as well. It turns out that almost everyone has come across a disturbed animal at some point, and most people want to tell you about it. I've been pulled aside at almost every social gathering I've attended in the past six years to be regaled with tales of cats peeing only on left shoes or plucking their bellies bald while hidden under the bed, other dogs who've jumped from apartment buildings or reacted with mortal fear to stop signs or anything that makes a flapping sound, hamsters who wouldn't get off their wheels, and parrots who developed violent fixations on people who wear baseball caps or have long hair. Just how similar are these experiences to human ones? Extrapolating from a monkey's seeming depression to a human's, for example, may, because of our many primate similarities, be relatively easy. But what about the emotional experiences of other animals? Of dogs like Oliver? Was what he felt when left alone anything like the terror I remember feeling when I woke from a nightmare in the middle of the night at a friend's sleepover party, unable for the first few minutes to remember where I was or find my mother?

After decades of research, Panksepp is convinced that most animal brains, from Oliver's to a ticklish mouse's, likely have the capacity for dreaming, for taking pleasure in eating, for feeling anger, fear, love, lust, grief, and acceptance from their mothers, for being playful, and for some conception of selfhood, an argument that might have seemed painfully unscientific just forty years ago. Panksepp believes that emotional capacity evolved in mammals long before the emergence of the human neocortex and its massive powers of cognition. He is careful to say that this doesn't mean that all animal or even mammalian emotions are the same. And when it comes to complex cognitive skills, he believes that the human brain puts all others to shame. But he is convinced that other animals have many special abilities that we don't have and this may extend to emotional states. Rats, for example, have richer olfactory lives, eagles have impressive eyesight, and dolphins can sense the world via sight, sound, sonar, and touch. These abilities may translate into more and different feelings associated with their various sensory or cognitive experiences. Panksepp believes that rabbits, for example, may have bigger or different capacities for fear while cats may have larger capacities for aggression and anger. Over the past fifteen years the cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff has published accounts of many types of animal emotions, from compassionate chimps to contrite hyenas. The primatologist Frans de Waal has written of altruism, empathy, and morality in bonobos and other apes. An explosion of recent research on dogs plumbs their ability to mirror the emotions of their owners, and studies of hormonal fluctuations in baboons after the death of their troops' babies have shown monthlong spikes of glucocorticoid stress hormones in the mothers, chemical surges that point toward a long grieving process. A number of recent studies have gone far beyond our closest relatives to argue for the possible emotional capacities of honeybees, octopi, chickens, and even fruit flies. The results of these studies are changing debates about animal minds from "Do they have emotions?"What sorts of emotions do they have and why?" Perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio has argued, emotions are a necessary part of animal social behavior. Consciously or not, they guide our behavior, helping us to flee from danger, seek pleasure, avoid pain, or bond with the right fellow creatures. Both dolphins and parrots, for example, can exhibit symptoms similar to human sadness and depression after the loss of a companion. They might ignore food or refuse to play with others. Other social animals, like dogs, often do the same. These emotions are consequences of a very helpful evolutionary process: attaching to others who protect you, feed you, play with you, groom you, hunt or forage with you, or otherwise make your life more enjoyable or productive. Affective states, as the emotional expressions of animals are known, are useful whether you're a prairie dog collaborating with other prairie dogs on a tunnel extension or a harried human negotiating who is going to pick up dinner on the way home from work.

Daniel sees himself as an interpreter of these sorts of interspecies mysteries. He asks lots of questions, as nonjudgmentally as possible, and pays careful attention to the way a client's house is set up, the dynamics between the people who live there, and how a cat spends his time. They will tell me everything that I need to know, he says. For example, how do the cats like to use their environment, and are they being provided for in a way that makes them feel at ease? Do they have their own little areas that feel safe and controlled? Do they have the food and the cat litter they like? These things may sound small, but they have a huge impact on their mental health. To create an environment that encourages cat sanity, Daniel suggests his clients reserve places that are cat-only, such as cat trees. They're ugly, but cats like having things that are just theirs. This makes them feel protected. It's best if these places are also tall, like the top of a bookcase or refrigerator, because being able to look down on people and other animals in the house makes them feel secure. This was not particularly surprising. Also, these additions to their territory should not be tucked away from the action. They want to be part of everything that's going on. Daniel also encourages his clients to engage in play therapy with their cats, which is really just play. One of the most recommended cat toys for this is something called Da Bird, a miniature fishing pole dangling a garishly colored feather clump. You're meant to wave Da Bird in the air like a demented conductor or someone who's smoked too much of da herb as your cat chases it to and fro. If the original lure becomes boring, you can swap it out for an even more sparkly option that looks like it's been plucked from a Vegas showgirl. Still, no matter how many Da Birds a cat receives or how many scenic vistas they have to look down upon humans and dogs, they can still develop odd behaviors. Daniel's own cat, a Seal Point Siamese Munchkin named Cubby, has his own issues. He also has the watercolored face of a Siamese and the stubby paws of a Munchkin. Because of his short legs, Cubby can't swat, but he hisses, usually at other cats. To Daniel's dismay, Cubby suffers from feline hyperesthesia, a disorder defined by a sudden, intermittent desire to savagely attack his own tail. Cats with hyperesthesia stalk their twitching tails as if they are menacing objects or invaders and then they pounce so hard that they sometimes rip their own flesh. Daniel didn't know why Cubby was attacking himself. Their house, where Cubby rules the bedroom and sometimes the hallway and kitchen, has multiple cat trees, a tunnel for running back and forth, and private sleeping quarters in a closet. It is, in short, an ideal cat habitat, and Cubby could not find a human more attuned to his needs. Daniel decided to medicate Cubby. After thirty days on Prozac, the cat stopped acting as if he was possessed. A few years later, Cubby has recovered. He continues to take a small maintenance dose of Prozac, which limits his self-mutilating episodes to a mere thirty seconds or so per week. The rest of the time he sleeps in a sunny window, waiting for Daniel to come home and play Da Bird, or to watch him as he runs on his short little legs through his cat tunnel.

Turn-of-the-twentieth-century cases of nostalgia and heartbreak, for example, unfolded alongside an increasing tendency to medicalize and treat mental health. As the century wore on, physicians who treated various forms of insanity became specialists and the process of therapy became more rooted in individual patient-physician relationships. By early midcentury, these physicians were known as psychiatrists. Efforts to make sense of other animal minds often reflected these shifting ideas about human mental health. People use the concepts, language, and reasoning they have at hand to understand puzzling animal behavior. Disorders such as mortal heartbreak and nostalgia may sound quaint or old-fashioned today but contemporary Internet addictions and attention deficit disorders may, by the twenty-second or twenty-third centuries, seem antiquated. In this way, looking at instances of animal madness in history and how we've mapped ailments such as nostalgia, mortal heartbreak, melancholia, hysteria, and madness onto other creatures is like holding up a mirror to the history of human mental illness. The reflection isn't always flattering.

But AI language models, being mere parrots, do not have communicative intent. They neither represent an individual perspective nor model the perspective of a potential reader. They language they emit is all signifier, stripped of significance; any significance we perceive is a mirage. In the line of 'Ghosts' in which my sister holds my hand, it might seem, at first glance, that GPT-3 is conjuring my perspective. But there's a problem with that interpretation--because what it described never happened. I don't remember any moment when we were driving home from Clarke Beach and my sister took my hand. And it's not just that. The trust is that I can't even easily imagine something like it; my sister and I were never so sentimental. Maybe that's why I found myself so attracted ot the line. it was a kind of wish fulfillment. Yet it wasn't true, which is the reason that, with each iteration, I kept deleting GPT-3's words and replacing them with mind. The machine-generated falsehoods compelled me to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods. In 'Ghosts,' I diminished GPT-3's role over the course of the nine attempts, writing a growing proportion of the text myself. In the version of the essay published in The Believer, I gave GPT-3 the last lines. In the final paragraph, I wrote, 'Once upon a time, my sister taught me to read. She taught me to wait for a mosquito to swell on my arm and then slap it and see the blood spurt out. She taught me to insult racists back. To swim. To pronounce English so I sounded less Indian. To shave my legs without cutting myself. To lie to our parents believably.' GPT-3 continued, 'To do math. To tell stories. Once upon a time, she taught me to exist.' But after its publication and subsequent reception, I decided to revise the piece, reclaiming the last lines for myself. The revised version is the one in these pages. I wanted to make sure it came across that the essay is as much about what technological promises us as it is about the perversion, and ultimate betrayal, of that promise. GPT-3 couldn't satisfy me as a writer. That was, for me, the point.

But AI language models, being mere parrots, do not have communicative intent. They neither represent an individual perspective nor model the perspective of a potential reader. They language they emit is all signifier, stripped of significance; any significance we perceive is a mirage. In the line of 'Ghosts' in which my sister holds my hand, it might seem, at first glance, that GPT-3 is conjuring my perspective. But there's a problem with that interpretation--because what it described never happened. I don't remember any moment when we were driving home from Clarke Beach and my sister took my hand. And it's not just that. The truth is that I can't even easily imagine something like it; my sister and I were never so sentimental. Maybe that's why I found myself so attracted ot the line. it was a kind of wish fulfillment. Yet it wasn't true, which is the reason that, with each iteration, I kept deleting GPT-3's words and replacing them with mind. The machine-generated falsehoods compelled me to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods. In 'Ghosts,' I diminished GPT-3's role over the course of the nine attempts, writing a growing proportion of the text myself. In the version of the essay published in The Believer, I gave GPT-3 the last lines. In the final paragraph, I wrote, 'Once upon a time, my sister taught me to read. She taught me to wait for a mosquito to swell on my arm and then slap it and see the blood spurt out. She taught me to insult racists back. To swim. To pronounce English so I sounded less Indian. To shave my legs without cutting myself. To lie to our parents believably.' GPT-3 continued, 'To do math. To tell stories. Once upon a time, she taught me to exist.' But after its publication and subsequent reception, I decided to revise the piece, reclaiming the last lines for myself. The revised version is the one in these pages. I wanted to make sure it came across that the essay is as much about what technological promises us as it is about the perversion, and ultimate betrayal, of that promise. GPT-3 couldn't satisfy me as a writer. That was, for me, the point.

Sonja Buloh drove through them and into the sheep country, in which occasional ancient gum trees stood as if brooding survivors of some terrible massacre, sharing their melancholia only with the rainbow-coloured rosella parrots that briefly called in upon the trees before flitting off elsewhere, as though unable to bear the tales told them by those aching branches.