Pitch Quotes

They’re not hideous,” said Tessa. Will blinked at her. “What?” “Gideon and Gabriel,” said Tessa. “They’re really quite good-looking, not hideous at all.” “I spoke,” said Will, in sepulchral tones, “of the pitch-black inner depths of their souls.” Tessa snorted. “And what color do you suppose the inner depths of your soul are, Will Herondale?” “Mauve,” said Will.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe'er, But falls into abatement and low price, Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high fantastical.

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

You were the sun, and I was crashing into you. I'd wake up every morning and think, 'This will end in flames.

Sharing a room with the person you want most is like sharing a room with an open fire. He's constantly drawing you in. And you're constantly stepping too close. And you know it's not good--that there is no good--that there's absolutely nothing that can ever come of it. But you do it anyway. And then... Well. Then you burn.

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!' If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

No. No!” he says. “I . . .” He looks wildly around the room. For inspiration? For divine intervention? I don’t know. “You can’t go. Ana, I love you!” “I love you, too, Christian, it’s just—” “No . . . no!” he says in desperation and puts both hands on his head. “Christian . . .” “No,” he breathes, his eyes wide with panic, and suddenly he drops to his knees in front of me, head bowed, long-fingered hands spread out on his thighs. He takes a deep breath and doesn’t move. What? “Christian, what are you doing?” He continues to stare down, not looking at me. “Christian! What are you doing?” My voice is high-pitched. He doesn’t move. “Christian, look at me!” I command in panic. His head sweeps up without hesitation, and he regards me passively with his cool gray gaze—he’s almost serene . . . expectant. Holy Fuck . . . Christian. The submissive.

There were once two sisters who were not afriad of the dark because the dark was full of the other's voice across the room, because even when the night was thick and starless they walked home together from the river seeing who could last the longest without turning on her flashlight, not afraid because sometimes in the pitch of night they'd lie on their backs in the middle of the path and look up until the stars came back and when they did, they'd reach their arms up to touch them and did.

Valkyrie patted Fletcher’s arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “If the bad man comes, I’ll protect you.” “If the bad man comes,” Fletcher responded, “I’ll bravely give out a high-pitched scream to distract him. I may even bravely faint, to give him a false sense of security. That will be your signal to strike.” “We make a great team.” “Just don’t forget to stand in front of me the whole time,” he said.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Black Sea.

Carry on, Simon.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

I've been waiting a long time to run tests on someone like you, " he said to Daemon, voice high-pitched. Daemon arched a brow. "Another fanboy. I have them everywhere." I muttered, "Only you would see that as a good thing." He shot me a grin.

I watched him pitch the ball at a table neatly lined with six bowling pins, my stomach giving a little flutter when his T-shirt crept up in the back, revealing a stripe of skin. I knew from experience that every inch of him was hard, defined muscle. His back was smooth and perfect too, the scars from when he’d fallen once again replaced with wings—wings I, and every other human, couldn’t see. “Five dollars says you can’t do it again,” I said, coming up behind him. Patch looked back and grinned. “I don’t want your money, Angel.” “Hey now, kids, let’s keep this discussion PG-rated,” Rixon said. “All three remaining pins,” I challenged Patch. “What kind of prize are we talking about?” he asked. “Bloody hell,” Rixon said. “Can’t this wait until you’re alone?” Patch gave me a secret smile, then shifted his weight back, cradling the ball into his chest. He dropped his right shoulder, brought his arm around, and sent the ball flying forward as hard as he could. There was a loud crack! and the remaining three pins scattered off the table. “Aye, now you’re in trouble, lass,” Rixon shouted at me over the commotion caused by a pocket of onlookers, who were clapping and whistling for Patch. Patch leaned back against the booth and arched his eyebrows at me. The gesture said it all: Pay up. “You got lucky,” I said. “I’m about to get lucky.

Could you do a glamour and turn into something smaller?" I asked it. "Preferably not a chain, since it's no longer the 1990s?" The sword didn't reply (duh), but I imagined it was humming at a more interrogative pitch, like, Such as what? "I dunno. Something pocket-size and innocuous. A pen, maybe?" The sword pulsed, almost like it was laughing. I imagined it saying, A pen sword. That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

It isn't the height that scares me - the height makes me feel alive with energy, every organ and vessel and muscle in my body singing at the same pitch. Then I realize what it is. It's him. Something about him makes me feel like I am about to fall. Or turn to liquid. Or burst into flames.

He clapped his hands together, letting out a rather high-pitched squeal before grabbing my hand. “Oh, we are going to have so much fun! Aren’t we? Fun, Alex—we will have fun.

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.

What a ridiculous creature. Happy that I put butter on his sandwich. As if I wouldn't make the world spin backwards if I thought he'd like it better that way.

I g-g-guess...I'm dead?" she heard her own voice call out, strangely high-pitched and thin. For a long time, she heard nothing else. And then: "Hi, Dead. I'm Dan.

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don't have names.

His next words pitched low and rough. “Tell me what you want, Vivian. Do you want me on my knees?

Even some of our cookbooks are banned. (Though it's been centuries, at least, since the Pitches ate fairies.) (You can't even find fairies anymore.) (And it isn't because we ate them all.)

We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.

For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

Now for God's sake, will you two start behaving like a princess and a Courier?" Halt told them. "If you don't, I'll have to think about sending Will home.' 'Me?' Will said, his voice breaking into a high-pitched squeak of indignation. 'What's it got to do with me?' 'It's all your fault!' Halt shouted irrationally.

I feel like I am involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell me the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Alec isn’t happy,” said Magnus, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Of course he isn’t,” Isabelle snapped. “Jace—” “Jace,” said Magnus, and his hands made fists at his sides. Isabelle stared at him. She had always thought that he didn’t mind Jace; liked him, even, once the question of Alec’s affections had been settled. Out loud, she said: “I thought you were friends.” “It’s not that,” said Magnus. “There are some people — people the universe seems to have singled out for special destinies. Special favors and special torments. God knows we’re all drawn toward what’s beautiful and broken; I have been, but some people cannot be fixed. Or if they can be, it’s only by love and sacrifice so great it destroys the giver.” Isabelle shook her head slowly. “You’ve lost me. Jace is our brother, but for Alec — he’s Jace’s parabatai too —” “I know about parabatai,” said Magnus, his voice rising in pitch. “I’ve known parabatai so close they were almost the same person; do you know what happens, when one of them dies, to the one that’s left—” “Stop it!” Isabelle clapped her hands over her ears, then lowered them slowly. “How dare you, Magnus Bane,” she said. “How dare you make this worse than it is —” “Isabelle.” Magnus’ hands loosened; he looked a little wide-eyed, as if his outburst had startled even him. “I am sorry. I forget, sometimes . . . that with all your self-control and strength, you possess the same vulnerability that Alec does.” “There is nothing weak about Alec,” said Isabelle. “No,” said Magnus. “To love as you choose, that takes strength. The thing is, I wanted you here for him. There are things I can’t do for him, can’t give him . . .” For a moment Magnus looked oddly vulnerable. “You have known Jace as long as he has. You can give him understanding I can’t. And he loves you.” “Of course he loves me. I’m his sister.” “Blood isn’t love,” said Magnus, and his voice was bitter. “Just ask Clary.

I stared at them. Had that been their sales pitch? Look!We're really scary! Come be scary too!

In the turbulent art arena they all pitch in and do their dubious and mercantile part in the rocambolesque saga of the art since so many judge art with their ears and the sound of the money. (“When is art?”)

Simon Snow, it hurts to look at you when you’re this happy. And it hurts to look at you when you’re depressed. There’s no safe time for me to see you, nothing about you that doesn’t tear my heart from my chest and leave it breakable outside my body.

Thorne’s voice pitched high in imitation of the queen. “The impostor of my beloved niece is vanquished … Let us put this messiness behind us while we go forward with the coronations … I am a psychotic, power-hungry nut basket and my breath smells really bad under this veil.

Oh my gosh, is that an iPhone?!" Laurel asked, her voice unconsciously rising in pitch and volume. Tamani looked up at her, his expression blank."Yeah?" "He has an iPhone," Laurel said to David. "My faerie sentry who generally lives without running water has an iPhone. That's. Just. Great. Everyone in the whole world has a cell phone except me. That's awesome.

And sometimes holes want to get bigger, but Baz was wrong—sometimes they just want to be filled.

And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.

He will know from and early age that failure is not disgrace. It's just a pitch that you missed, and you'd better get ready for the next one. The next one might be the shot heard round the world. My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by failing until we don't.

It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again...When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.

Then he holds her and for a moment I hear total silence; that totally silent part of a cry that announces that the most horrible grief is going to follow. And it does, and he's muffling it, but I can hear and I want someone to come over and jab her with a sedative because its pitch pierces my soul.

Stars also symbolize the cycle of life, solitude and gravity. They glow in the dark energy that’s the majority of space, and remind us that even in the pitch black, there’s always something that can shine.

We're enveloped in pitch black. "Wait here," I whisper. "Are you getting your ax?" "Handcuffs." "Kinky. But, okay, I'll try it.

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.

So will I turn her virtue into pitch, And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all.

Avery's tone was grand and high-pitched." And, since I've been hanging out with you, Dad's decided I'm on good behavior now." "Poor oblivious bastard," murmured Christian.

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

It’s like losing gravity and falling into space – the moment of pitching headlong when the endlessness of space asserts itself and there is no more down, only an eternity of up, and you realize you can fall forever and never run out of stars.

Maybe she feels like a jerk about leaving him at Pitch Manor on Christmas Eve. I know I do. The vibe here is very, Let's kill a virgin and write a great Led Zeppelin album

If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.

Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.

[pitching the proposal for Mononoke-hime (1997)] There cannot be a happy ending to the fight between the raging gods and humans. However, even in the middle of hatred and killings, there are things worth living for. A wonderful meeting, or a beautiful thing can exist. We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation. What we should depict is, how the boy understands the girl, and the process in which the girl opens her heart to the boy. At the end, the girl will say to the boy, "I love you, Ashitaka. But I cannot forgive humans." Smiling, the boy should say, "That is fine. Live with me.

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Puck laughed, and it wasn't like that weird high-pitched giggle she'd heard out of children before, the one that begged the question: why would one possibly tickle a child just to elicit that noise?

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

The centipede was happy, quite, Until a toad in fun Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?” This worked his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to run.

It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.

Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade without anyone's noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it's pitch-black. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive.

When relationships lose their pitch through lack of interest and become stale or unbearable through enduring stealthy backbiting, the emotional house of cards is under attack. A painstaking reshuffle, however, may brand a new choice of life and create energy for positive thinking, whereas remaining bogged down in dispiriting situations and staying clogged up with immaterial hassle may only spawn forlorn deadlocks.. ("Mes cliques et mes claques")

Then I look over at Corey, who is watching me with a tenderness that makes me want to crawl inside his heart, pitch a tent, and set up camp forever.

Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.

Help out? What is it with you and ‘helping out?’ You’re going to ‘help out’ with chores. ‘Help out’ with raising our baby. ‘Help out’ with finding me a new job. Isn’t this your house, too? Your home? Your child? And if I work, don’t you spend my pay, too? Why do you keep saying ‘help out’ like you’re volunteering to pitch in on someone else’s work?

The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover

I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

Though Destiny a hundred times waylays you,in the end it pitches a tent for you in Heaven. It is God's loving kindness to terrify you,in order to lead you to His Kingdom of safety.

I’ve fought in three campaigns,” he began. “In seven pitched battles. In countless raids and skirmishes and desperate defences, and bloody actions of every kind. I’ve fought in the driving snow, the blasting wind, the middle of the night. I’ve been fighting all my life, one enemy or another, one friend or another. I’ve known little else. I’ve seen men killed for a word, for a look, for nothing at all. A woman tried to stab me once for killing her husband, and I threw her down a well. And that’s far from the worst of it. Life used to be cheap as dirt to me. Cheaper. “I’ve fought ten single combats and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been ruthless, and brutal, and a coward. I’ve stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I’ve run away myself more than once. I’ve pissed myself with fear. I’ve begged for my life. I’ve been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if I’d been killed years ago, but I haven’t been, and I don’t know why.” He looked down at his hands, pink and clean on the stone. “There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.

Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.

He studies me thoughtfully. "You are a beautiful queen, Elisa," he says voice pitched low. I never expected he would say such a thing. "A month or two of pastries will fix that," I say. Then I smile to show him I mean it flippantly. His expression does not change. "Even then.

You forget what it was like. You'd swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.

Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned.

You've been busy using your breaking and entering skills," I said. "I just enter. I don't usually break." "You broke down Pitch's door." "Lost my temper." -Ranger and Stephanie

The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.

He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

The Head Priest stared at him, “I’ve seen your future, and it’s pitch black.” Xie Lian looked him straight in the eyes and said, “You must’ve seen wrong. I only like to wear white.

Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental—the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.

When it's pitch dark and you are navigating through an unknown terrain, the flashlight in your hand doesn't illuminate the entire path. However, it lets you know enough about the immediate, to steer you safely towards the destination, one step at a time.

If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.

In making tactical dispositions, the highest pitch you can attain is to conceal them

Simon Snow is still going to die kissing me. Just not today.

Gin! Gin, are you here?” “Right behind you,” I said. Finn shrieked and whirled around. I winced at the high-pitched sound. “Dammit, woman.” He clutched the folder to his chest. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?

This thing between us didn't start with us dating. It didn't even start when you kissed me. You're in me so deep, I wouldn't know how to dig you out. I may get fed up with you... But, Simon, I'll never get tired of you.

I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoestring adorable. To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?

But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn't know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.

A gentleman can hardly continue to sit,' he explained, in his serenest and most level voice, 'when he asks a very remarkable young lady to do him the honor of marrying him. And - 'he somehow contrived to grin at me wickedly, 'I usually get what I want, Miss Grahame,' he added, and pitched over in a tangled heap on the floor.

Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds: And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave; Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.

You have to tell him ‘go toodles, Bits, go toodles for momma,’” I said, pitching my voice high in imitation, “or else he won’t go.” Blane looked at me. “I’m not doing that,” he said flatly. “But then he’ll go on the bed,” I protested. “How about I just point my gun at him,” he deadpanned.

Pitching always beats batting — and vice-versa.

Perfection was a surface thing. The epidermis. Cut a few layers deep, you begin to see some darker shades. Cut to the bone—pitch black.

The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.

It is only against the pitch blackness of the night that we see the glory of the stars. And it is only against the pitch blackness of man’s radical depravity that we can begin to see the glories of the gospel.

There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

George!' [Horace] said, the relief evident in his voice. 'Are you all right?' 'No! I am not!' George replied with considerable spirit. 'I have a whacking great arrow stuck through my arm and it hurts like the very dickens! How could anybody be all right in those circumstances?'... 'You saved my life, George,' Horace said gently... George grimaced. 'Well, if I'd known it was going to hurt like this, I wouldn't have! I would have just let them shoot you! Why do you live this way?' he demanded in a high-pitched voice. 'How can you bear it? This sort of thing is very, very painful. I always suspected that warriors are crazy. Now I know.

There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind Junior.

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.

The state preceptor stared hard at him. “I’ve seen your future, and it’s pitch black.” Xie Lian looked him straight in the eyes. “You must be mistaken. I only like to wear white.

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

I don't know what happens to our consciousness when we're unwound," says Connor. "I don't even know when that consciousness starts. But I do know this." He pauses to make sure all of them are listening. "We have a right to our lives!" The kids go wild. "We have a right to choose what happens to our bodies!" The cheers reach fever pitch. "We deserve a world where both those things are possible— and it's our job to help make that world.

Fern didn’t think she was good enough for you then, and you don’t think you’re good enough for her now. And both of you are wrong…and so stupid! Stuuupiiiid!” Bailey dragged the word out in disgust. “I’m ugly! I’m not worthy of love, waaa!” Bailey mimicked them in a whiny, high-pitched voice, and then shook his head as if he was thoroughly disappointed.

How do yo feel about her doing this?" That had to be Mahon. That low-pitched growl could only come from him. "We let each other be who we are," Curran said. "I don't have to like all of the things she has to do. I love her.

No, I’m surprised he didn’t say goodbye.” “Well, of course he didn’t say goodbye.” Heather put down her mug. “You would have convinced him to stay.” “That’s not true.” “Oh, please.” Heather rolled her eyes. “You would have been like Oh, Tristan, please don’t go. Stay with me so I can crush on you and giggle at everything you say.” Heather nodded. “That’s what it would have been like. In that high-pitched voice and everything.

Kitten, I’d break my fucking pitching arm if it meant keeping you safe.

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book. All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm out again, giving it the old try. And no one can help me. Not even you.

Baseball isn't just a game. It's the smell of popcorn drifting in the air, the sight of bugs buzzing near the stadium lights,the roughness of the dirt beneath your cleats. It's the anticipation building in your chest as the anthem plays, the adrenaline rush when your bat cracks against the ball, and the surge of blood when the umpire shouts strike after you pitch. It's a team full of guys backing your every move, a bleacher full of people cheering you on. It's...life

I thought we had the sort of love that you can't set down or walk away from. An undying fire. The love you hear about in the old stories. No one told Simon Snow the old stories.

He smiles, and he's made of trouble. We should have dropped him in the Thames in a bag of stones. We should have left him out for the fairies.

Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen

Don't say another goddamn word. Up until now, I've been polite. If you say anything else--word one--I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one. When it begins you will hear the sound of children screaming--as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth.

Before the first streaks of light at dawn on December 7, 275 miles north of Oahu, the six (Japanese) carriers of the Striking Force turned into the southeast wind. Pounding into heavy swells at high speed, the carriers pitched severely with thunderous impact. The wind, surging seas, and roar of warming aircraft engines made communications possible only by hand signals and handheld signal lamps. Salt spray reached the high flight decks, and Commander Fuchida, the group leader, was very concerned about the conditions for launching planes. If this had been a training exercise the launch might have been delayed until conditions improved. However, this was not an exercise, and there would be no delay.

...So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.

The best way to contribute to a brand-new environment is not by trying to prove what a wonderful addition you are. It’s by trying to have a neutral impact, to observe and learn from those who are already there, and to pitch in with the grunt work wherever possible.

And what if I never go of my own free will? Will you pitch me from some window so that I must fly or fall? Will you bolt all shutters after me? You had better, because I'll knock and knock and knock until I fall down dead. I'll have no wings that take me away from you.

The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Anges will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.

Go on, then," he says. "Carry on, Simon.

Simon Snow is grinning at me, holding out a live rat like a single-stemmed rose.

So initiate us," Claire said, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes in challenge. "Make us priests and priestesses of Apollo." "Say that again," Jason said, turning to Claire. He was so stunned there was almost no expression on his face. "That's the plan you've been working on for the past two days? The one you told us not to worry about?" Matt asked in an increasingly high-pitched voice. "Yup.

Mrrrp? To anyone else in the Cahill universe, the high-pitched sound of the pet Egyptian Mau had a hundred different meanings: the playful mrrp, the I-want-red-snapper mrrp, the that-wasn't-enough-red-snapper mrrp, the thank-you-for-the-meager-portion-of-red-snapper mrrp. And on and on. But to Ian Kabra's ears, each was the I-hate-you-with-all-my-soul mrrp.

Grace: Outside, deep in the woods, I heard a long keening wail, and then another, as the wolves began to howl. More voices pitched in, some low and mournful, others high and short, an eerie and beautiful chorus. I knew my wolf's howl; his rich tone sang out above others as if begging me to hear it. My heart ached inside me, torn between wanting them to stop and wishing they would go on for ever. I imagined myself there among them in the golden woods, watching them tilt their heads back and howl underneath a sky of endless stars. I blinked a tear away, feeling foolish and miserable, but I didn't go to sleep until every wolf had fallen silent.

What marriage offers - and what fidelity is meant to protect - is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence obviously cannot be continuous. No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments, which give us the highest joy we can know; that of union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment)... To forsake all others does not mean - because it cannot mean - to ignore or neglect all others, to hide or be hidden from all others, or to desire or love no others. To live in marriage is a responsible way to live in sexuality, as to live in a household is a responsible way to live in the world. One cannot enact or fulfill one's love for womankind or mankind, or even for all the women or men to whom one is attracted. If one is to have the power and delight of one's sexuality, then the generality of instinct must be resolved in a responsible relationship to a particular person. Similarly, one cannot live in the world; that is, one cannot become, in the easy, generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a "world citizen." There can be no such think as a "global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality. (pg.117-118, "The Body and the Earth")

The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there. No, it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle.

Well?” she asked. “Well, what?” “You’re not going to answer?” “You didn’t ask a question.” “I did too.” “A question is denoted by a higher pitched tone at the end of the sentence. Your voice never did that.” Curse him, his eyes glinted with amusement. “Sicarius! This isn’t the time for you to practice being whimsical.

You've walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Ayden and Blake stared each other down. "Oh. My. God," Luna blurted from Ayden's back seat. "It's a love triangle." We all looked at her like she'd sprouted an alien from her head. "it's just like in a book. Two guys after one girl and-" I groaned. "That's ridiculous, Luna, this is not a love triangle." "Says the girl in the middle of a love triangle. Luna ignored my protests and prattled on. "Not one Hexy Boy but two. I've got to call Danica. Oooo," she squealed and clapped her hands,"We could have teams. Team Ayden and Team Blake. With T-shirt and buttons and-" "I could make a website," Lucian offered. "No!" My voice pitched with panic. "No teams. No shirts. No-" "I'll get you some headshots," Blake said, turning his profile towards Luna and Lucian. "I've been told the left is my best side. What do you think?" "Aurora's right," Ayden said. "This is buts. Blake you can follow us-" "Dude, you know no one would pick Team Ayden. You're just jealous." "That's not true. My team would be way bigger than yours." "Dare to dream, little man, dare to dream." "Care to make a wager on it?" "Absolutely." "Fine. How about-" "You two shut up!" I shoved myself out of the car.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts

Her feelings of fear and helplessness had reached such a pitch that they were suddenly transformed into their opposites. Having overcome them, she felt corageous and self-confident enough to tackle any power on earth; more precisely, she had ceased to worry about herself.

At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself--one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.

You've always been there for me. Always. Even when I…" V "Even when you what?" B "You know." V "What?" B "Fuck. Even when I was in love with you. Or some shit." V Butch clasped his hands to his chest. "Was? Was? I can't believe you've lost interest." He threw one arm over his eyes, all Sarah Bernhardt. "My dreams of our future are shattered—" B "Shut it, cop." V Butch looked out from under his arm. "Are you kidding me? The reality show I had planned was fantastic. Was going to pitch it to VH1. Two Bites Are Better Than One. We were going to make millions ." B "Oh, for the love.

Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go so easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness

All the idylls of youth: beauty manifest in lakes, mountains, people; richness in experience, conversation, friendships. Nights during a full moon, the light flooded the wilderness, so it was possible to hike without a headlamp. We would hit the trail at two A.M., summiting the nearest peak, Mount Tallac, just before sunrise, the clear, starry night reflected in the flat, still lakes spread below us. Snuggled together in sleeping bags at the peak, nearly ten thousand feet up, we weathered frigid blasts of wind with coffee someone had been thoughtful enough to bring. And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered—pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.

Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.

The way you were before… Simon Snow, there wasn’t a day when I believed we’d both live through it.“ “Though what?” “Life. You were the sun, and I was crashing into you. I’d wake up every morning and think, ‘This will end in flames.

There’s an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can’t be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can’t add to it.

Oh, my God! Why are you in a towel?” Ayden sprang forward and ripped off his leather jacket. He led us both in an awkward sidestep to my closet. “Take your time. Get clothes on. Lots of them.” He shoved me inside and closed the door. In the pitch, dark I reached for the light switch, but the door opened again. “Sorry.” Ayden’s hand slid in, groping for the switch, found it, and flipped it on. “Don’t come out until… lots and lots of clothes.

What do you want from me, Snow?" "Nothing," he says. And he means it, the actual bastard.

Here's to real heroes, not the ones who carry us off into the sunset but the ones who help us choose our princes." - commentary on Castles on the Sand

Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testaments in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour. The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet. This proves two things: Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, [ie., everybody.] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. Secondly, the Earth's a Libra.

We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’ ‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie. ‘That, of course, is the other main difference.

You invented me. There is no such earthly being, Such an earthly being there could never be. A doctor cannot cure, a poet cannot comfort— A shadowy apparition haunts you night and day. We met in an unbelievable year, When the world's strength was at an ebb, Everything withered by adversity, And only the graves were fresh. Without streetlights, the Neva's waves were black as pitch, Thick night enclosed me like a wall ... That's when my voice called out to you! Why it did—I still don't understand. And you came to me, as if guided by a star That tragic autumn, stepping Into that irrevocably ruined house, From whence had flown a flock of burnt verse.

Childhood is bound like the Gordian knot with my memories of the Black Sea, and I still feel its waters welling up within me today. Sometimes these waters are leaden, as grey as the military ships that sail on their curved expanses, and sometimes they are blue as pigmented cobalt. Then would come dusk, when I would sit and watch the seabirds waver to shore, flitting from open waters to the quiet empty vastlands in darkening spaces behind me, the same birds Ovid once saw during his exile, perhaps; and the same waters the Argonauts crossed searching for the fleece of renewal. And out in the distance, invisible, the towering heights of Caucasus, where once-bright memories of the fire-thief have transmuted into something weird and many-faceted, and beyond these, pitch-black Karabakh in dolorous Armenia.

Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state of a football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.

All I have to say is - run, dive, pitch a tent... Spend hours on the phone with your best friend.... Wear bikinis. Drink tequila. Wake up in the morning happy for no good reason.... Lie in the grass, dream of your future, of your imperfect life & your imperfect marriage to your imperfect true love.... Because what else is there? Honestly, there's nothing else. Nothing else matters.

You.. love me?'' Snow nods. ''Yeah,'' he says, ''of course.'' Like it's obvious. It isn't obvious. It has not been obvious. ''You never said,'' I say. ''Haven't I?'' ''No.'' He frowns. ''I thought- I mean... I've killed so many things for you.'' I laught. It might be another sob, but mabe it's just a laugh. ''What are you, a house cat? Am I supposed to know how you feel because you brought me a mouse?'' The corner of Snow's mouth twitches. ''I brought you a cow once, remember? And I killed that chimera for you in fifth year.

We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?

I understand that you've lost something— a lot of things— but you're still the same person. I know, because I loved you then, and I love you now, and I know that's not enough to make you happy— to make anyone happy— but you're the same person, Simon. You're still you.'' ''It's enough,'' he finally grumbles. ''What is,'' I whisper. ''The fact that you love me. It does make me happy.

No flowers,'' He kisses my cheek. ''So noted, rosebud boy.'' I look up at him. ''That's what the ghost called me— your mother. That's what she said.'' Baz is looking in my eyes. ''I remember.'' He runs his thumb over my cheek. Then my bottom lip. ''My rosebud boy.

I want to breathe, I hate this night I want to wake up, I hate this dream I’m trapped inside of myself and I’m dead Don’t wanna be lonely Just wanna be yours Why is it so dark where you’re not here It’s dangerous how wrecked I am Save me because I can’t get a grip on myself Listen to my heartbeat It calls you whenever it wants to Because within this pitch black darkness You are shining so brightly Give me your hand save me save me I need your love before I fall, fall Give me your hand save me save me I need your love before I fall, fall Give me your hand save me save me Give me your hand save me save me Save me, save me Today the moon shines brighter on the blank spot in my memories It swallowed me, this lunatic, please save me tonight (Please save me tonight, please save me tonight) Within this childish madness you will save me tonight I knew that your salvation Is a part of my life and the only helping hand that will embrase my pain The best of me, you’re the only thing I have Please raise your voice so that I can laugh again Play on Listen to my heartbeat, it calls you whenever it wants to Because within this pitch black darkness, you are shining so brightly Give me your hand save me save me I need your love before I fall, fall Give me your hand save me save me I need your love before I fall, fall Give me your hand save me save me Give me your hand save me save me Thank you for letting me be me For helping me fly For giving me wings For straightening me out For waking me from being suffocated For waking me from a dream which was all I was living in When I think of you the sun comes out So I gave my sadness to the dog (Thank you. For being ‘us’) Give me your hand save me save me I need your love before I fall, fall Give me your hand save me save me I need your love before I fall, fall

As is well-known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, and the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen.

The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.

Do not mistake me, Inrithi. In this much Conphas is right. You are all staggering drunks to me. Boys who would play at war when you should kennel with your mothers. You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill not daring. It is not a trial of souls, nor the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them. You have offered me war, and I have accepted. Nothing more. I will not regret your losses. I will not bow my head before your funeral pyres. I will not rejoice at your triumphs. But I have taken the wager. I will suffer with you. I will put Fanim to the sword, and drive their wives and children to the slaughter. And when I sleep, I will dream of their lamentations and be glad of heart.

Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.

I know I'll never love anyone like I love Baz. I know he's the love of my life. Of all my lives. The Mage believed in reincarnation. Of a thousand lives stacked on top of each other. ''Some lives we squander,'' he said. ''And some we seize.'' This was my life to find love. The truest love. The biggest.

By now, the morning sun was just over the horizon and it came at me like a sidearm pitch between the houses of my old neighborhood. I shielded my eyes. This being early October, there were already piles of leaves pushed against the curb—more leaves than I remembered from my autumns here—andless open space in the sky. I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.

Lilies, I rule, heads, you do," he [the King] said, and threw the coin into the air. "Lilies, you rule, heads, you throw again," said Attolia. The coin dropped. Eugenides looked at it and then showed it to her. "No need," he said. The coin sat in his palm, obverse, showing the lilies of Attolia. He flipped it again and again and again. Each time it landed showing the lilies. ... (Relius) He wanted to dismiss the coin toss as slight of hand. Any circus performer could control the drop of a coin, but he'd been puzzled. The queen had been undismayed; she had seemed almost vindicated in her manner. It had been the King who was more disturbed with each toss of the coin. He'd looked almost sick, Relius thought, by the time he put the coin away. ... Walking away along the arcade that lay perpendicular to the one where Relius lurked, the king pulled the coin from his pocket. He looked at the gold stater in sudden disgust and pitched it hard between the columns of the arcade into the shrubbery.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief- woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing — Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'. O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

I was sorry to see the gloomy picture which you drew of the affairs of your Country in your letter of December; but I hope events have not turned out so badly as you then apprehended. Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes, that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far, that we should never again see their religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of Society. [Letter to Edward Newenham, 20 October 1792 about violence between Catholics and Protestants]

And oh, how she pitched herself into things. She would draw pictures all day long for weeks on end, then throw out the pencils and never draw another thing. Then it was embroidery with her, she had to learn it, and she'd make the most beautiful thing, fussing at herself for the least little mistake, then throw down the needles and be done with that forevermore. I never saw a child so changeable. It was as though she was looking for something to which she could give herself, and she never found it. Least ways not while she was a little girl.

There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.

All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.

Would you please just talk to me? Please?" Sally's voice was beginning to take on a high-pitched whine. "Oh, good grief. For the love of healthy ears everywhere, quit your belly aching," Jen snapped, the clothes in her hands growing more wrinkled by the second. "Sally, there is nothing to talk about, okay? It is what it is." Sally threw her hands up in the air as she exhaled loudly. "No, it is not what it is, whatever the hell that means. It's a whole freaking lot more complicated than 'it is what it is.

I wonder from these thousand of "me's", which one am I? Listen to my cry, do not drown my voice I am completely filled with the thought of you. Don't lay broken glass on my path I will crush it into dust. I am nothing, just a mirror in the palm of your hand, reflecting your kindness, your sadness, your anger. If you were a blade of grass or a tiny flower I will pitch my tent in your shadow. Only your presence revives my withered heart. You are the candle that lights the whole world and I am an empty vessel for your light. Rumi - "Hidden Music

She [Anita] turns back to Raffe, her face melting into a radiant smile. She puts her hand on his arm as he’s about to take off his pants. And that’s all the excuse I need. I grab the sudsy shirt out of the gray water and throw it at her. It makes a plop noise when it lands on her face, wrapping around her hair. Her perfect hair clumps into a stringy mass, and her mascara smears as the cloth slides wetly down her blouse. She emits a high-pitched squeal that turns every head within earshot. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I say in a sugary voice. “Did you not like that? I thought that’s what you wanted. I mean, why else would you be putting your paws on my man?

I turn away from the light to the holy, inexpressible, mysterious night. Far away lies the world − sunk into a deep vault, its place waste and lonely. Across my heart strings a low melancholy plays. I will fall in drops of dew and merge with the ashes. Distant memories, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a long life – all arise dressed in grey, like evening mist after sunset. In other lands light has pitched its merry tents. And if it never returned to its children, who would await its dawning with the innocence of faith?

More often than not, that was a tough sell. If you go to a business and tell it you can save it $50,000 per year in labor costs if it eliminates this one job, then your AI product better eliminate that entire job. Instead, what entrepreneurs found was that their product was perhaps eliminating one task in a person’s job, and that wasn’t going to be enough to save their would-be customer any meaningful labor costs. The better pitches were ones that were not focused on replacement but on value. These pitches demonstrated how an AI product could allow businesses to generate more profits by, say, supplying higher quality products to their own customers. This had the benefit of not having to demonstrate that their AI could perform a particular task at a lower cost than a person. And if that also reduced internal resistance to adopting AI, then that only made their sales task easier. The point here is that a value-enhancing approach to AI, rather than a cost-savings approach, is more likely to find real traction for AI adoption.

As that fucking chandelier twinkled overhead, Blay said roughly, "I'm still in love with him." Saxton dropped his eyes and brushed a the top of his thigh, as if there might have been a tiny piece of lint there. "I know. You thought you weren't?" As if that were rather stupid of him. "I'm so fucking tired of it. I really am." "That I believe." "Im so fucking..." God, those sounds, that muted pounding , that audible confirmation of what he had been ignoring for the past year-- On a sudden wave of violence, he pitched the brandy snifter at the marble fireplace, shattering the thing. "Fuck, Fuck!" If he'd been able to, he'd have jumped up and torn that goddamn cocksucking light fixture off the goddamn cocksucking ceiling.

Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “ ‘Schwer,’ ” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.

I feel like a pink worm in the core of this green room, as though I have eaten my way in and should be working on becoming a butterfly, or something. I’m not real awake, here, at the moment. I hear somebody coughing. I hear my heart beating and the high-pitched sound which is my nervous system doing its thing. Oh, God, let today be a normal day. Let me be normally befuddled, normally nervous; get me to the church on time, in time. Let me not startle anyone, especially myself. Let me get through our wedding day as best I can, with no special effects. Deliver Clare from unpleasant scenes. Amen.

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.

Rocky!' A crackle. My ears perk up. 'Rocky?!' 'Grace, question?' 'Yes!' I've never been so happy to hear a few musical notes! 'Yeah, buddy! It's me!' 'You are here, question?!' his voice is so high-pitched I can barely understand him. But I understand Eridian pretty well now. 'Yes! I'm here!' 'You are...' he squeaks. 'You...' he squeaks again. 'You are here!' 'Yes! Set up the airlock tunnel!' 'Warning! Taumoeba-82.5 is-' 'I know! I know. It can get through xeonite. That's why I'm here. I knew you'd be in trouble.' 'You save me!' 'Yes. I caught the Taumoeba in time. I still have fuel. Set up the tunnel. I'm taking you to Erid.' 'You save me and you save Erid!' he squeaks. 'Set up the damn tunnel!' 'Get back in you ship! Unless you want to look at tunnel from outside!' 'Oh, right!

I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore them or seize them.

The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life. For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.

My favourite part of kissing Simon when he’s cold is the way he goes warm in my hands. Like I’m the living campfire. Like I’m the one who lives. I warm him in my arms, and then he warms me in his. He gives it all back to me. I’d give him all that I am. I’d give him all that I was. I’d open up a vein. I’d tie our hearts together, chamber by chamber.

But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?

At that time, I well remember whatever could excite - certain accidents of the weather, for instance, were almost dreaded by me, because they woke the being I was always lulling, and stirred up a craving cry I could not satisfy. One night a thunder-storm broke; a sort of hurricane shook us in our beds: the Catholics rose in panic and prayed to their saints. As for me, the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was roughly roused and obliged to live. I got up and dressed myself, and creeping outside the basement close by my bed, sat on its ledge, with my feet on the roof of a lower adjoining building. It was wet, it was wild, it was pitch dark. Within the dormitory they gathered round the night-lamp in consternation, praying loud. I could not go in: too resistless was the delight of staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder, pealing out such an ode as language never delivered to man - too terribly glorious, the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced by white and blinding bolts.

No one who survives to speak new language, has avoided this: the cutting-away of an old force that held her rooted to an old ground the pitch of utter loneliness where she herself and all creation seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry to which no echo comes or can ever come. But in fact we were always like this, rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference. Birth stripped our birthright from us, tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves so early on and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears like midges, told us nothing, nothing of origins, nothing we needed to know, nothing that could re-member us.

I smelled smoke right before hearing the "pop" like a firecracker had gone off. Splatters of something thick coated my back even as a thud reverberated behind me. I whirled around to gape at what was left of the ghoul. His body pitched forward on the drive-way, nothing but a smoldering mess left where his head had been. Much slower, I turned around to see Vlad examining his fingernails, as if his hands weren't still ablaze in the flames that had blasted the ghoul's head off moments before. "What the hell was that?" I gasped. "Premature inflamation," he replied. "Happens sometimes. Very embarrassing. I don't like to talk about it.

Do you see that man in the black Porsche?" I asked the women. They squinted out at Ranger. "Yes," they said."Your partner." "He's homeless. He's looking for a place to stay and he might be interested in renting Singh's room." Mrs.Apusenja's eyes widened. "We could use the income."She looked at Nonnie and then back at Ranger. "Is he married?" "Nope. He's single. He's a real catch." Connie did something between a gasp and a snort and buried her head back behind the computer. "Thank you for everything." Mrs.Apusenja said. "I suppose you are not such a bad slut. I will go talk to your partner.: "Omigod," Connie said, when the door closed behind the Apusenja's. "Ranger's going to kill you." The Apusenjas stood beside the Porsche, talkig to Ranger for a few long minutes, giving him the big sales pitch. The pitch wound down, Ranger responded, and Mrs. Apusenja looked disappointed. The two women crossed the road and got into the burgundy Escort and quickly drove away. Ranger turned his head in my direction and our eyes met. His expression was still bemused, but this time it was the sort of bemused expression a kid has when he's pulling the wings off a fly. "Uh-Oh,"Connie said. I whipped around and faced Connie. "Quick, give me an FTA. You're backed up, right? For God's sake, give me something fast. I need a reason to stand here until he calms down!" Connie shoved a pile of folders at me. "Pick one. Any one! Oh shit, he's getting out of his car.".... He leaned into me and his lips brushed the shell of my ear. "Feeling playful?" "I don't know what you're talking about." "Watch your back babe. I will get even." -Ranger and Stephanie

In Summation A poem by Taylor Swift At this hearing I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department With a summary of my findings A debrief, a detailed rewinding For the purpose of warning For the sake of reminding As you might all unfortunately recall I had been struck with a case of a restricted humanity Which explains my plea here today of temporary i n s a n i t y You see, the pendulum swings Oh, the chaos it brings Leads the caged beast to do the most curious things Lovers spend years denying what’s ill fated Resentment rotting away galaxies we created Stars placed and glued meticulously by hand next to the ceiling fan Tried wishing on comets. Tried dimming the shine. Tried to orbit his planet. Some stars never align. And in one conversation, I tore down the whole sky Spring sprung forth with dazzling freedom hues Then a crash from the skylight bursting through Something old, someone hallowed, who told me he could be brand new And so I was out of the oven and into the microwave Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave How gallant to save the empress from her gilded tower Swinging a sword he could barely lift But loneliness struck at that fateful hour Low hanging fruit on his wine stained lips He never even scratched the surface of me. None of them did. “In summation, it was not a love affair!” I screamed while bringing my fists to my coffee ringed desk It was a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest. A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face Because it’s the worst men that I write best. And so I enter into evidence My tarnished coat of arms My muses, acquired like bruises My talismans and charms The tick, tick, tick of love bombs My veins of pitch black ink All’s fair in love and poetry Sincerely, The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department

We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Until then what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there? To become superb in our technology, knowledge and intellect, to itch with a desire for fulfilment that we can’t quite scratch; to look to the void (which still isn’t answering) and build spaceships anyway, and make countless circlings of our lonely planet, and little excursions to our lonely moon and think thoughts like these in weightless bafflement and routine awe. To turn back to the earth, which gleams like a spotlit mirror in a pitch-dark room, and speak into the fuzz of our radios to the only life that appears to be there. Hello? Konnichiwa, ciao, zdraste, bonjour, do you read me, hello?

When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minute Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?" That was very true, he thought. There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct in using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the party, and the party had turned it to account.

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organise anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a winter Saturday afternoon.

The hoopoe said: 'Your heart's congealed like ice; When will you free yourself from cowardice? Since you have such a short time to live here, What difference does it make? What should you fear? The world is filth and sin, and homeless men Must enter it and homeless leave again. They die, as worms, in squalid pain; if we Must perish in this quest, that, certainly, Is better than a life of filth and grief. If this great search is vain, if my belief Is groundless, it is right that I should die. So many errors throng the world - then why Should we not risk this quest? To suffer blame For love is better than a life of shame. No one has reached this goal, so why appeal To those whose blindness claims it is unreal? I'd rather die deceived by dreams than give My heart to home and trade and never live. We've been and heard so much - what have we learned? Not for one moment has the self been spurned; Fools gather round and hinder our release. When will their stale, insistent whining cease? We have no freedom to achieve our goal Until from Self and fools we free the soul. To be admitted past the veil you must Be dead to all the crowd considers just. Once past the veil you understand the Way From which the crowd's glib courtiers blindly stray. If you have any will, leave women's stories, And even if this search for hidden glories Proves blasphemy at last, be sure our quest Is not mere talk but an exacting test. The fruit of love's great tree is poverty; Whoever knows this knows humility. When love has pitched his tent in someone's breast, That man despairs of life and knows no rest. Love's pain will murder him and blandly ask A surgeon's fee for managing the task - The water that he drinks brings pain, his bread Is turned to blood immediately shed; Though he is weak, faint, feebler than an ant, Love forces him to be her combatant; He cannot take one mouthful unaware That he is floundering in a sea of care.

My life was awful. When I was a kid, I was fat, pretty ugly and had awful hair. I used to get teased every fucking day, slammed up against lockers, punched in the face - you name it. Hell, I had to go to prom with one of my female friends because I couldn’t even get a proper date. I can’t even look back at those photos because I look so bad. I transferred schools, but the teasing just got worse. After an, let’s say, ‘incident’ I had with the school play the bullying just got worse. But I made it through high school, only to find out that real life was pretty much the same. I just stayed in my dark room all day and didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t go outside. I just stayed inside and drew. I’d draw vampires, mummies, heroes, villains. Anything to help me escape all the bad in the world. I went to art school and didn’t really belong. All I could draw was comic book characters. I tried to put my only good talent to use by drawing a cartoon and pitching it - only to have it turned down. Life to me was just pointless. I started drinking, doing drugs and just generally wasting my life drawing.
Then one day, I saw bodies falling from the sky. I witnessed people dying. And that’s when I decided to turn my life around. I called up anyone I knew who had an instrument and we formed a band. Being on tour for the first few years was bad. All we’d do is get drunk and do drugs, but I loved it. Because I was doing something I loved with people I loved. And a few years ago I met the most perfect woman ever. It’s like we share a wave-link or something. She just knows me without even knowing me, if you understand. And now, 2011, I have a beautiful baby girl, a caring wife and I get to perform for my adoring fans everyday. I am living proof that no matter how bad it gets, it gets better. I am Gerard Way, and I survived.

Keep creating new chapters in your personal book and never stop re-inventing and perfecting yourself. Try new things. Pick up new hobbies and books. Travel and explore other cultures. Never stay in the same city or state for more than five years of your life. There are many heavens on earth waiting for you to discover. Seek out people with beautiful hearts and minds, not those with just beautiful style and bodies. The first kind will forever remain beautiful to you, while the other will grow stale and ugly. Learn a new language at least twice. Change your career at least thrice, and change your location often. Like all creatures in the wild, we were designed to keep moving. When a snake sheds its old skin, it becomes a more refined creature. Never stop refining and re-defining yourself. We are all beautiful instruments of God. He created many notes in music so we would not be stuck playing the same song. Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your journey and play on. Nobody will ever reach ultimate perfection in this lifetime, but trying to achieve it is a full-time job. Start now and don't stop. Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and never allow limitations implanted by society, tell you how your music is supposed to sound — or how your book is supposed to be written.

I detest love lyrics. I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics'. You're a young kid and you hear all those 'love lyrics', right? Your parents aren't telling you the truth about love, and you can't really learn about it in school. You're getting the bulk of your 'behaviour norms' mapped out for you in the lyrics to some dumb fucking love song. It's a subconscious training that creates desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something. What I think is very cynical about some rock and roll songs -- especially today -- is the way they say: "Let's make love." What the fuck kind of wussy says shit like that in the real world? You ought to be able to say "Let's go fuck", or at least "Let's go fill-in-the-blank" -- but you gotta say "Let's make love" in order to get on the radio. This creates a semantic corruption, by changing the context in which the word 'love' is used in the song. When they get into drooling about love as a 'romantic concept' -- especially in the lyrics of sensitive singer/songwriter types -- that's another shove in the direction of bad mental health. Fortunately, lyrics over the last five or six years have gotten to be less and less important, with 'art rock groups' and new wavers specializing in 'nonjudgemental' or 'purposely inconsequential' lyrics. People have stopped listening to the lyrics -- they are now only 'pitched mouth noises'.

Young Tchitcherine was the one who brought up political narcotics. Opiates of the people. Wimpe smiled back. An old, old smile to chill even the living fire in Earth’s core. "Marxist dialectics? That’s not an opiate, eh?" "It’s the antidote." "No." It can go either way. The dope salesman may know everything that’s ever going to happen to Tchitcherine, and decide it’s no use—or, out of the moment’s velleity, lay it right out for the young fool. "The basic problem," he proposes, "has always been getting other people to die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique—it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version—yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History’s changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it’s going to happen anyway, what does it matter?" "But you haven’t ever had the choice to make, have you." "If I ever did, you can be sure—" "You don’t know. Not till you’re there, Wimpe. You can’t say." "That doesn’t sound very dialectical." "I don’t know what it is." "Then, right up to the point of decision," Wimpe curious but careful, "a man could still be perfectly pure . . ." "He could be anything. I don’t care. But he’s only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter." "Real to a Marxist." "No. Real to himself." Wimpe looks doubtful. "I've been there. You haven't.

Absurdly, I haven't yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men … in a way that they can’t in other contact sports, and the way that t he best team does not necessarily win. And there’s the athleticism …, and the way that strength and intelligence have to combine. It allows players to look beautiful and balletic in a way that some sports do not: a perfectly-timed diving header, or a perfectly-struck volley, allow the body to achieve a poise and grace that some sportsmen can never exhibit.

Our lips just trespassed on those inner labyrinths hidden deep within our ears, filled them with the private music of wicked words, hers in many languages, mine in the off color of my own tongue, until as our tones shifted, and our consonants spun and squealed, rattled faster, hesitated, raced harder, syllables soon melting with groans, or moans finding purchase in new words, or old words, or made-up words, until we gathered up our heat and refused to release it, enjoying too much the dark language we had suddenly stumbled upon, craved to, carved to, not a communication really but a channeling of our rumored desires, hers for all I know gone to Black Forests and wolves, mine banging back to a familiar form, that great revenant mystery I still could only hear the shape of, which in spite of our separate lusts and individual cries still continued to drive us deeper into stranger tones, our mutual desire to keep gripping the burn fueled by sound, hers screeching, mine – I didn’t hear mine – only hears, probably counter-pointing mine, a high-pitched cry, then a whisper dropping unexpectedly to practically a bark, a grunt, whatever, no sense any more, and suddenly no more curves either, just the straight away, some line crossed, where every fractured sound already spoken finally compacts into one long agonizing word, easily exceeding a hundred letters, even thunder, anticipating the inevitable letting go, when the heat is ultimately too much to bear, threatening to burn, scar, tear it all apart, yet tempting enough to hold onto for even one second more, to extend it all, if we can, as if by getting that much closer to the heat, that much more enveloped, would prove … - which when we did clutch, hold, postpone, did in fact prove too much after all, seconds too much, and impossible to refuse, so blowing all of everything apart, shivers and shakes and deep in her throat a thousand letters crashing in a long unmodulated fall, resonating deep within my cochlea and down the cochlear nerve, a last fit of fury describing in lasting detail the shape of things already come. Too bad dark languages rarely survive.

Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from people who haven’t. Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin. Women who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse have smaller somatosensory cortices—the part of the brain that registers sensation in our bodies. Victims who were screamed at might have an altered response to sound. Traumatized brains can result in reductions in the parts of the brain that process semantics, emotion and memory retrieval, perceiving emotions in others, and attention and speech. Not getting enough sleep at night potentially affects developing brains’ plasticity and attention and increases the risk of emotional problems later in life. And the scariest factoid, for me anyway: Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning. Brains do have workarounds. There are people without amygdalae who don’t feel fear. There are people who have reduced prefrontal cortices who are very logical. And other parts of the brain can compensate, make up the lost parts in other ways. But overall, when I looked at the breadth of evidence, the results felt crushing. The fact that the brain’s cortical thickness is directly related to IQ was particularly threatening to me. Even if I wasn’t cool, or kind, or personable, I enjoyed the narrative that I was at least effective. Intelligent. What these papers seemed to tell me is that however smart I am, I’m not as smart as I could have been had this not happened to me. The questions arose again: Is this why my pitches didn’t go through? Is this why my boss never respected me? Is this why I was pushed to do grunt work in the back room?

...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.

I hope I’m being clear, I didn’t say I hate feminists, that would be weird. I said I hate feminist. I’m talking about the word. I have the privilege living my life inside of words and part of being a writer is creating entire universes, and that's beautiful, but part of being a writer is also living in the very smallest part of every word. ...But the word feminist, it doesn't sit with me, it doesn't add up. I want to talk about my problem that I have with it. ...Ist in it's meaning is also a problem for me. Because you can't be born an ist. It's not natural... So feminist includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state. That we don't emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that's imposed on us. That we are indoctrinated with it, that it's an agenda... ...My problem with feminist is not the word. It's the question. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a feminist?" The great Katy Perry once said—I'm paraphrasing—"I'm not a feminist but I like it when women are strong."...Don't know why she feels the need to say the first part, but listening to the word and thinking about it, I realize I do understand. This question that lies before us is one that should lie behind us. The word is problematic for me because there's another word that we're missing... ...When you say racist, you are saying that is a negative thing. That is a line that we have crossed. Anything on the side of that line is shameful, is on the wrong side of history. And that is a line that we have crossed in terms of gender but we don't have the word for it... ...I start thinking about the fact that we have this word when we're thinking about race that says we have evolved beyond something and we don't really have this word for gender. Now you could argue sexism, but I'd say that's a little specific. People feel removed from sexism. ‘I'm not a sexist, but I'm not a feminist.' They think there's this fuzzy middle ground. There's no fuzzy middle ground. You either believe that women are people or you don't. It's that simple. ...You don’t have to hate someone to destroy them. You just have to not get it. ...My pitch is this word. ‘Genderist.’ I would like this word to become the new racist. I would like a word that says there was a shameful past before we realized that all people were created equal. And we are past that. And every evolved human being who is intelligent and educated and compassionate and to say I don't believe that is unacceptable. And Katy Perry won't say, "I'm not a feminist but I like strong women," she'll say, "I'm not a genderist but sometimes I like to dress up pretty." And that'll be fine. ...This is how we understand society. The word racism didn't end racism, it contextualized it in a way that we still haven't done with this issue. ...I say with gratitude but enormous sadness, we will never not be fighting. And I say to everybody on the other side of that line who believe that women are to be bought and trafficked or ignored...we will never not be fighting. We will go on, we will always work this issue until it doesn't need to be worked anymore. ...Is this idea of genderist going to do something? I don't know. I don't think that I can change the world. I just want to punch it up a little.