Placeholder Quotes

And there - when he smiles, his whole faces lights up. It's like his other expressions are placeholders.

My body felt completely disposable, like a placeholder for something more valuable. I fantasized about taking it apart and lining my limbs up side by side to compare them.

The beginnings are so sparkly, so efortless. You can imagine the other person to be whoever you want. In all the gaps of your knowledge about them, you can paint in whatever qualities you like as placeholders. You can paint the other person into a dream impossible for them to live up to.

And I didn't need telepathy, either. Ask any woman you're ever had a relationship with: I guarantee she knew she was second best. A placeholder, till the one you actually wanted came home.

For so long, we woman have turned our anger inwards, redirecting it towards ourselves and allowing it to manifest as shame. We have told ourselves, instead, that we are sad or hormonal or stressed, but these have been placeholder emotions. And for so long we have been encouraged to do this by a misogynistic culture that realises female anger is dangerous not because it is the product of mental imbalance but because it is fuel. Female anger is power.

If I’m Romeo and she’s Juliet, maybe this is the fate I put on us that very first day. Love forbidden, but in our story, we’re forbidden by fate. Maybe I was the placeholder, as Mason wondered. Maybe I’m not the man of her dreams but the understudy who did the noble work. Who befriended a broken girl. Who showed her what it meant to matter to a man, how it felt to be loved. She knows now that she’s worth the world and deserves even more.

Tell me how you are." "I'm fine, Mother." "No one is fine. Fine is a placeholder.

A word is put down as a placeholder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries, no matter how many words accumulate, there is always that absence.

Scientists often invent words to fill the holes in their understanding. These words are meant as conveniences until real understanding can be found. Sometimes understanding comes and the temporary words can be replaced with words that have more meaning. More often, however, the patch words will take on a life of their own and no one will remember that they were only intended to be placeholders.

But what I’ve realized—what I think he already knew—is that we believed in the same thing. You could call it a trapdoor, a hidden compartment, or you could call it God: a placeholder for what we don’t know. A space where the impossible becomes possible.

It feels like I’m an actor in an Italian movie from the ’60s, saying the placeholder lines into the camera, waiting for the real ones that come later.

Every obstacle in life will fade away once success becomes the only goal allowed to enter your mind

As the actor who played Draco Malfoy, I see myself as a placeholder in people's memories. Seeing me transports them to a different time and place, in the same way that listening to a particular song can be evocative of something else. I've met with fans who have explained that the books and films have helped them through hard times. It's a humbling truth to hear.

In Ghana, it is said that a stranger is like water running over the ground after a rainstorm: it soon dries up and leaves behind no traces. “Stranger” is the X that stands in for a proper name. It is the placeholder for the missing, the mark of the passage, the scar between native and citizen. It is both an end and a beginning. It announces the disappearance of the known world and the antipathy of the new one. And the longing and the loss redolent in the label were as much my inheritance as they were that of the enslaved.

Other people are only as powerful as you allow them to be in your world. Shrink the thoughts you give them, and you will literally shrink their role in your life.

Women were more than placeholders for the men. Women were active war agents. Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on. This is an important truth, and it is one that often has been overlooked.

Really, weren't these facts just placeholders until the long view could really assert itself?

You did listen." He sat back, nodding his head. "Okay, then. Now tell me what you really thought." "I told you. It was interesting." "Interesting," he said, "is not a word." "Since when?" "It's a placeholder. Something you use when you don't want to say something else." He leaned a little closer to me. "Look, if you're worried about my feelings, don't be. You can say whatever you want. I won't be offended." "I did. I liked it." "Tell the truth. Say something. Anything. Just spit it out." "I—" I began, then stopped myself. Maybe it was the fact that he was so clearly on to me. Or my sudden awareness of how rarely I was honest. Either way, I broke. "I… I didn't like it," I said. He slapped his leg. "I knew it! You know, for someone who lies a lot, you're not very good at it." This was a good thing. Or not? I wasn't sure. "I'm not a liar," I said. "Right. You're nice," he said. "What's wrong with nice?" "Nothing. Except it usually involves not telling the truth," he replied. "Now. Tell me what you really thought.

Alex and Conner looked up and saw a large city-limits sign above them. The sign read: BIG CITY, USA POPULATION 7,654,321 Once the handwritten words finished constructing the new dimension, the twins saw that the highway led to an enormous city a couple of miles in the distance. It had the tallest and leanest skyscrapers Alex had ever seen; the skyline looked more lie a bundle of pencils and pens than a row of buildings. "Big City, USA?" Alex asked. "You couldn't come up with anything more original than that?" "It was supposed to be a placeholder until I came up with a better name, but Big City, USA, grew on me," Conner said.

I mean, are you even really gay?” I sighed. “Of course I’m gay. I’ve got something up my butt right now.” Twyla’s eyes widened in shock and her lips spread into a delighted grin. “You do? Oh, my God! What is it? Is it like a… place holder?” I shook my head and laughed into my hand. “There’s nothing up my butt. A placeholder? You’re nuts.

A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore--one that's only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like "this bit is a self-contained sub loop" or "Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit." The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders. My mother named me well.

I’ve never understood why when women marry, they’re expected to trade in their old names like used cars, losing their last and sometimes even their first—Mrs. John Adams! Mrs. Abe Lincoln!—as if their previous identities had just been twenty-odd-year placeholders before they became actual people. Mrs. Peter Dickman. It’s a life sentence.

What? Excuse me? “La, a note to follow so . . .” What kind of lame excuse for a line is that? Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is. It’s a placeholder.

I was your first and I’m going to be your fucking last, baby. The guys in between were just placeholders. It’s cool… it’s fine. They served their purpose.

my body felt completely disposable, like a placeholder for something more valuable

you can decide what, specifically, something means to you and what you intend to do about it, if anything; if you can use a placeholder as a reminder of what you need to attend to;

When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.

..people who stutter may be of above intellect but have trouble putting the many ideas they have into words in an easily understood order without stuttering on using some other form of place-holding mechanism.

Did it matter that we both drank coffee at night and both happened to go to Barcelona the summer after our senior year? In the long view, was it such a revelation that we were both ticklish and that we both liked dogs more than cats? Really, weren't these facts just placeholders until the long view could truly assert itself? We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favorite color. And this, we figured, had to mean something.

I’ve never understood why when women marry, they’re expected to trade in their old names like used cars, losing their last and sometimes even their first—Mrs. John Adams! Mrs. Abe Lincoln!—as if their previous identities had just been twenty-odd-year placeholders before they became actual people.

Dark-matter ignorance differs fundamentally from aether ignorance. The aether was a placeholder for our incomplete understanding, whereas the existence of dark matter derives not from mere presumption but from the observed effects of its gravity on visible matter. We’re not inventing dark matter out of thin space; instead, we deduce its existence from observational facts. Dark matter is just as real as the many exoplanets discovered in orbit around stars other than the Sun, discovered solely through their gravitational influence on their host stars and not from direct measurement of their light.

For months now she’s been fantasizing about being more than she is, but it isn’t coming true. What if she could step into the fast, fast world without being missed? What she wants now, more than anything, is a placeholder, someone to keep her life intact while she goes on a little reconnaissance trip.

You have made me whole and complete, fixed a brokenness I didn't think possible.

Exactly,” she said. “I’ve never understood why when women marry, they’re expected to trade in their old names like used cars, losing their last and sometimes even their first—Mrs. John Adams! Mrs. Abe Lincoln!—as if their previous identities had just been twenty-odd-year placeholders before they became actual people. Mrs. Peter Dickman. It’s a life sentence.

For me, it was the hibiscus flower, the petal red and fleshy as our mother trailed it over the tip of my nose, before she let me gum it to release its tart flavor. For Malina, it was a gleaming, perfect cherry, which Mama crushed into a paste that she let my sister suck from her ring finger. It was bad luck to name a daughter after the thing that first sparked the gleam, Mama said. So I was Iris, for a flower that wasn’t hibiscus, and my sister was Malina, for a raspberry. They were placeholder names that didn’t pin down our true nature, so nothing would ever be able to summon us. No demon or vila would ever reel us in by our real names. Even caught up in the story, Mama could never quite explain what the gleam looked like once she found it.

Truth is always a placeholder for something. For how we feel, or how we want to feel, how we wished we didn’t feel. Things we wish we’d done, or hadn’t done, hadn’t enjoyed doing. The way we handle or mishandle our wounds, and try to hold them up and look through them, like mirrors, to be seen, no matter how opaque and obstructed they are. You can’t trust truth. But then, even the word trust. . . what is that a placeholder for?

It's hard writing a love letter when I've never been in love, but love letters aren't really about love; they are about want, luring a future fantasy into the present, so you can feel it—between your fingers, against your lips. I have been looking at it all wrong. It isn't about what I have but what I'm missing. Like a prayer that has no god to hear it. Everyone calls it love, but I think it's something deeper, and the word "love" is just a placeholder.

Ersatz, adj. Sometimes we`d go to a party and I would feel like an artificial boyfriend, a placeholder, a boyfriend-shaped space where a charming person should be. Those were the only times when my love for you couldn`t overcome my shyness. And every degree of disappointment I`d feel from you – whether real or of my own invention – would make me disappear further and further, leaving the fake front to not, to sip, to say, “Finish drinking, we are leaving.

No, I'm standing here as a placeholder...It means I'm holding your place, until you are ready to stand for yourself. You don't need me to save you. I can help you save yourself, and you can save yourself. I'm not going to let them kill you. I'm not going to let you kill yourself. I'm going to show you an alternative. That's my job, to get you over the times when you believe there aren't any alternatives, to help you though the time you don't have any hope. To make you know that you can be happy again, and that you will be.

Women are taught to sacrifice, to play nice, to live an altruistic life because a good girl is always rewarded in the end. This is not a virtue; it is propaganda. Submission gets you a ticket to future prosperity that will never manifest. By the time you realize the ticket to success and happiness you have been sold isn’t worth the paper it was printed on, it will be too late. Go on, spend a quarter of your life, even half of your life, in the service of others and you will realize you were hustled. You do not manifest your destiny by placing others first! A kingdom built on your back doesn’t become your kingdom, it becomes your folly. History does not remember the slaves of Egypt that built the pyramids, they remember the Pharaohs that wielded the power over those laborers. Yet here you are, content with being a worker bee, motivated by some sales pitch that inspires you to work harder for some master than you work for yourself, with this loose promise that one day you will share in his wealth. Altruism is your sin. Selfishness is your savior. Ruthless aggression and self-preservation are not evil. Why aren’t females taught these things? Instead of putting themselves first, women are told to be considerate and selfless. From birth, they have been beaten in the head with this notion of “Don’t be selfish!” Fuck that. Your mother may have told you to wait your turn like a good girl, but I’m saying cut in front of that other bitch. Club Success is about to hit capacity, and you don’t want to be the odd woman out. Where are the powerful women? Those who refuse to play by those rules and want more out of life than what a man allows her to have? I created a category for such women and labeled them Spartans. Much like the Greek warriors who fought against all odds, these women refuse to surrender and curtsy before the status quo. Being

Did you know that it’s not mathematically impossible for two snowflakes to be identical? They’re made up of a quintillion molecules that can form in various geometries, so it’s just highly improbable.” “A quintillion?” “Picture a one and then add eighteen zeros.” She shrugs and I don’t think she pictures it. Which is too bad because the image of a quintillion looks just like a line of poetry. “The point is it’s totally possible. Unlikely, of course. The chances are like one in a gazillion. Which is not an actual number but an exaggerative placeholder, but you get my point. It’s possible.

I noticed on your profile that you said you loved Charlotte’s Web. So it was something we talked about on that first date, about how the word radiant sealed it for each of us, and how the most heartbreaking moment isn’t when Charlotte dies, but when it looks like all of her children will leave Wilbur, too. In the long view, did it matter that we shared this Did it matter that we both drank coffee at night and both happened to go to Barcelona the summer after our senior year? In the long view, was it such a revelation that we were both ticklish and that we both liked dogs more than cats? Really, weren’t these facts just placeholders until the long view could truly assert itself? We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favorite color. And this, we figured, had to mean something.

People talk about Eisenhower's golden age.... It all happened without me. What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us. What I remember is small pieces of the world: the West Wing, the insides of planes and hotel lobbies and conference rooms. My life was dinners with Pat and the children; airplane flights; placeholder meetings with foreign dignitaries during which I nodded and reminded them I had no power to make and agreement but would speak to the president. Stomach-turning formal breakfasts, speeches to party elders and tradesmen. I opened factories in Detroit and Akron, breathing the various stinks of canneries, slaughterhouses, or rubber plans and bestowing that vice presidential combination of glamour, flattery, and the tacit reminder that they didn't quite rate a visit from the top guy.

If you don't believe in God, then the God concept is a great placeholder for everything we don't know, which is exponentially more than we do know.

Our lives on earth aren’t just placeholders until we go to heaven. We are to create, cultivate, and redeem while we’re here. The misconception, I’ve realized, has come from a lack of knowledge of why we were created.

Can you expand on your answer concerning dark matter, which I asked about in a previous session?   It is a placeholder for the planets.

the abandoning of art, as a practice, as an idea, is also an abandonment of..as J. M. Bernstein put it: “its function as a form of resistance, a reminder, a placeholder, for the claim of sensuous particularity, and so nature, against the claim of self authorizing mindedness.

Every obstacle in life will fade away once express becomes the only goal allowed to enter your mind.

Live in the present, not in the future. Do things right now that make you happy, and don’t keep objects as placeholders for some perfect future that will never come.” Wishful

The buildings of the great city of Placeholder sprawled either side of the dark crack of the river like boils on buttocks. There

Occam's Razor is a term plagiarized by the fact it is not easy to find its source and meaning. My attempts to find an author lead me nowhere, and I can only find unsatisfactory descriptions of how it works. Therefore, it is meaningless to me and I will use it as a placeholder to define: That which is unnecessary tends to be false. Necessity is by purpose. Therefore, purpose writes itself. Now, I have a tool.

As life is a breath, savoring is a held exhale, a placeholder for joy.

Live in the present, not in the future. Do things right now that make you happy, and don’t keep objects as placeholders for some perfect future that will never come.

Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at Oxford University, was involved in the study of Bakhshali Manuscript. He realises the importance of the text and says[86], ‘Today we take it for granted that the concept of zero is used across the globe and is a key building block of the digital world. But the creation of zero as a number in its own right, which evolved from the placeholder dot symbol found in the Bakhshali manuscript, was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics.

Given all that, Tuesday was simply a placeholder.

My name itself has become a placeholder for the heritage and cultural grounding I never had. It’s a frightening prospect— every single thing I have ever known or will ever know about myself hinged in six letters.

THEIR FIRSTBORN DIES in infancy, killed by a thing that doesn’t yet have a name. There are no microbes, yet. God is the lone taker of children, snatching even placeholder souls from one world to the other, according to obscure timetables.

Conversations here follow the same pattern. An endless back-and-forth relay of absolute pointlessness. No question demands an honest answer. A question is asked as an exercise in formal behaviour. Questions that are greetings. Questions that are placeholders. Questions that fill awkward gaps. Questions to suggest an interest that does not exist. Questions that pretend to listen. Never, ever a question that seeks to know.

Kissinger observed, “Neither Churchill nor Lincoln nor Roosevelt was the product of a staff.” The modern bureaucracy simply rolled along according to its own predetermined rules, with no more head and no more heart than any other well-oiled machine. Kissinger called the ideal bureaucrat a “commissar,” and by that he didn’t mean only placeholders in the Soviet Union but bureaucrats in the United States as well. The commissar/bureaucrat was any administrator “whose world is defined by regulations, in whose making he had no part, and whose substance does not concern him, to whom reality is exhausted by the organization in which he finds himself.” The mentality of the commissar could result in the deaths of thousands, “without love and without hatred.” And even if the outcome was not murderous, the placeholder’s “impact on national policy is pernicious.” Standing against this entrenched bureaucracy was the autonomous intellectual. Some intellectuals insisted on preserving their freedom by remaining outside the governmental apparatus, but these people Kissinger criticized for “perfectionism,” or for engaging in protest that “has too often become an end in itself.” Kissinger preferred the collaborators who chose public service. Intellectuals, Kissinger insisted, should “not refuse to participate in policymaking, for to do so would confirm the administrative stagnation.” Still, those who did choose public service had their own problems to deal with.

I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place. I wrote my name in the dirt. I wrote my name in the dust. But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.

Hitler is still a historical figure, but he’s predominantly a placeholder for cognitive darkness; he’s the entity we use in the same way people once employed the devil. But the devil is no longer a villain in pop culture. The devil is sympathetic. He’s charming. If you’re making a movie about the devil, you cast Al Pacino. In the pop world, the devil is mostly depicted as a fair-minded gambler; if you’re a good enough musician, the devil will give you a golden fiddle and concede his defeat, allowing you to peacefully live the rest of your days in rural Georgia. There really isn’t “another category of radical evil.” That category has a population of one.

My whole marriage to her, I finally realized, was a placeholder, leading me to this very day.

But when you want to mark a number on an abacus, what do you do if there are no stones in a column? The number 60 is one wedge in the sixties column and no wedges in the ones column. How do you write “no wedges”? The Babylonians needed a placeholder that represented nothing. They had to, in effect, invent zero. And so they created a new character, with no value, to signify an empty column. They denoted it with two slanted wedges.

So that wasn’t much help. I was torn. I wanted to be judged on what I did, not on what I represented or what people projected onto me. But I understood how much this breakthrough would mean to the country, especially to girls and boys who would see that there are no limits on what women can achieve. I wanted to honor that significance. I just didn’t know the best way to do it. I carried all that uncertainty with me back from California, all the way to David Muir’s interview room in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Tuesday night. Results were starting to come in. I won the New Jersey primary. Bernie won the North Dakota caucus. The big prize, California, was still out there, but all signs pointed to another victory. Bill and I had worked hard on my speech, but I still felt unsettled. Maybe it was about not being ready to accept “yes” for an answer. I had worked so hard to get to this moment, and now that it had arrived, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. Then Muir walked me over to the window, and I looked out at that crowd—at thousands of people who’d worked their hearts out, resisted the negativity of a divisive primary and relentlessly harsh press coverage, and poured their dreams into my campaign. We’d had big crowds before, but this felt different. It was something more than the enthusiasm I saw on the trail. It was a pulsing energy, an outpouring of love and hope and joy. For a moment, I was overwhelmed—and then calm. This was right. I was ready. After the interview, I went downstairs to where my husband was sitting with the speechwriters going over final tweaks to the draft. I read it over one more time and felt good. Just as they were racing off to load the speech into the teleprompter, I said I had one more thing to add: “I’m going to talk about Seneca Falls. Just put a placeholder in brackets and I’ll take care of it.” I took a deep breath. I didn’t want the emotion of the moment to get to me in the middle of my speech. I said a little prayer and then headed for the stage. At the last moment, Huma grabbed my arm and

Goals function as placeholders that propel you forward when the daily systems that run your life are no longer fulfilling.

If your head is your only system for placeholding, you will experience an attempted multitasking internally, which is psychologically impossible and the source of much stress for many people.

I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place. I wrote my n name in the dirt. I wrote my name in the dust. But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.

Self-Portrait as Mango She says, Your English is great! How long have you been in our country? I say, Suck on a mango, bitch, since that’s all you think I eat anyway. Mangoes are what margins like me know everything about, right? Doesn’t a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isn’t a mango a placeholder in a poem folded with burkas? But this one, the one I’m going to slice and serve down her throat, is a mango that remembers jungles jagged with insects, the river’s darker thirst. This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds. Why use a mango to beat her perplexed? Why not a coconut? Because this “exotic” fruit won’t be cracked open to reveal whiteness to you. This mango isn’t alien just because of its gold-green bloodline. I know I’m worth waiting for. I want to be kneaded for ripeness. Mango: my own sunset-skinned heart waiting to be held and peeled, mango I suck open with teeth. Tappai! This is the only way to eat a mango.

One girl can stand in for any of them, can serve as the placeholder for the story, recount the history from the beginning, convey the knowledge of freedom disguised as jargon an nonsense. Few understand them, studied them like they are worth something, realized their inherent value. If you listen closely, you can hear the whole world in a bent note, a throwaway lyric, a singular thread of the collective utterance. Everything from the first ship to the young woman found hanging in herself. Marvel at their capacity to inhabit every woman's grief as their own. All these stories ever told rush from her opened mouth. A tome of philosophy in a moan

In this context, big is a placeholder for what you might call a leap of possibility.

Zero was the solution to the problem. By around 300 BC the Babylonians had started using two slanted wedges, , to represent an empty space, an empty column on the abacus. This placeholder mark made it easy to tell which position a symbol was in.

A lot of us have only the faintest traces of those childhood and early adult activities in our lives - what we might dare call hobbies. They largely exist as conversational markers and rhetorical placeholders of who we once were.

The biggest thing to remember is that numbers that end in 0 inevitably feel like temporary placeholders, guesstimates that you can easily be negotiated off of. But anything you throw out that sounds less rounded—say, $37,263—feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation. Such numbers feel serious and permanent to your counterpart, so use them to fortify your offers.

The grass around me is a sprawl of lives, the earth beneath me holds the dead, and each one is marked by a name that means everything and nothing. A placeholder for the story.

There are no microbes, yet. God is the lone taker of children, snatching even placeholder souls from one world to the other, according to obscure timetables.

I have eyes that see through eternity. I see though the eyes of a Juggernaut in my midnight dreams. When I look towards the black vault that lies gaping overhead, it is impossible to tell if I am looking up or down, because, when you have given yourself over to the abyss, comfortable placeholders like gravity cease to have any meaning. Center of gravity becomes a heretical absolute. When existence will not acknowledge yours, you lose all notions of absolute center. Therefore, I am no centrist.

I accepted these cheap placeholders for any kind of realer, deeper understanding of who I was or might be. You never got to choose freely. All you could do was pick from the options presented to you.

I decide while I can, I'll take what this group will give me, accept the scraps. Even if I'm a replacement, a convenient placeholder, I'll take the warmth and friendship they offer for now. Because a part of me, somewhere deep and dark, I know she's right. I don't fit. And if I never get this family for myself, never get that group of supportive people to spend the rest of my days with, at least I'll have these memories to keep me warm

Elle ducked low, peeking inside the carrier. It was difficult to see inside, with Cat tucked up in a tight little ball of dark, fluffy fur and glinting green eyes. “What’s her name?” Olivia blushed. “Cat.” Elle cocked her head, clearly confused. “How long have you had her?” “Um.” She did the math. “Almost eight months.” Elle frowned. “So . . . it’s not just a placeholder? Cat?” Margot huffed out a quiet laugh and Olivia’s stomach somersaulted at the sound. “It’s from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Holly Golightly names her—well, it isn’t hers, that’s the whole point. She names the cat Cat.” Margot’s lips twitched. “I’m assuming that’s where you got the name.

One of the problems with Slovenia’s international identity is that, when people think of Slovenia, there is no single, iconic image that comes to mind, one that acts as a badge or place-holder for this country or for its capital city. For those who have visited Slovenia, an aerial view of Lake Bled, with its island church and cliff-top castle, is probably the best, and most memorable, image of the country.

To spell it out in full: human sexuality is the placeholder of the missing signifier. It is a mess, but it is a mess that actually compensates for the sexual relation as impossible (to be written). This, I believe, is a crucial reversal of the common perception that we need to make: the messiness of our sexuality is not a consequence or result of there being no sexual relation, it is not that our sexuality is messy because it is without a clear signifying rule; it emerges only from, and at the place of, this lack, and attempts to deal with it. Sexuality is not ravaged by, or disturbed, because of a gap cutting deep into its “tissue,” it is, rather, the messy sewing up of this gap.

Placeholder theology is the very nature of theology. By it we acknowledge the human need to say something about ultimate meaning concerning the Creator and the creation while also understanding that what we say will never say it all.

Shakespeare is his texts, a man dissolved into language, word made flesh, flesh made word. One does not need to look for the author, for he is right there! In every line of his works. “Shakespeare” thus becomes a placeholder for the unknown, a name for an absence, even as inquiries into the absence are forbidden.

If we push to make Key Decisions too early, then we are likely to revisit them later when it ‘s more expensive and painful to undo them. If we guess, we are much more likely to be wrong because it’s new to us. We handle Key Decisions in deliverables with placeholders: “This decision will be made at the September 30 Integration Event.” We can also put in provisional decisions: “The current plan is to use XYZ supplier’s solution, and we will finalize that decision on September 30 after we receive and test samples.

Because I need you to see I’m more than capable of worshipping your body without reciprocation. You’re not a convenient placeholder for me to fuck.

She said I’m just a convenient placeholder for you to fuck.

was i just a placeholder, for his true love

You were never a placeholder,” I murmur beside his ear. “You weren’t.

If you look for Evil and believe in it, you accept the diabolical as natural and hence unchallengeable; and open yourself to becoming Evil yourself in the quest to defeat what you fear. Satan is the personified place-holder, the boogie monster, the conscious manipulator who is using this or that evil thing to wreak disaster and havoc on humanity. Thus “rock and roll” is Satanic, as is dancing, gay marriage, and in more conservative countries, revealed skin, holding hands, educated women—but these definitions are fluid. What definition applies completely to Satan himself; what is is evil by itself? What made Satan evil?

I've learned it's okay to love more than one person.

And without realizing it, I have become what he needs, not what I need, and now I'm in love with him...[and] I'm not his beloved.

you could just write (fileName, query) => fileName.endsWith(query). Since the parameters are each used only once in the body of the function (i.e., the first parameter, fileName, is used first in the body, and the second parameter, query, is used second), you can use the placeholder syntax: _.endsWith(_). The first underscore is a placeholder for the first parameter, the file name, and the second underscore a placeholder for the second parameter, the query string.

I grew up—as most women do—believing that the world was inherently dangerous. These narratives were most often pushed by people who had never truly gone out to see for themselves. Why would they? They had been traumatized by the nightly news and the horror movies and the wide-eyed stories whispered from one woman to another. It’s a profitable business, the business of fear. For every terrifying scenario, there is a strategically placed antidote for sale alongside it. I spent many nights alone in the van beneath streetlights or blackened desert skies wishing that I could snap my fingers and erase all the stories I’d been told, but I couldn’t. If I was going to do these things alone, I was going to have to do them afraid. I would not let societally induced fear be a placeholder for the kind of life I wanted to live,

The aspiring artists who are now a lawyer and a realtor – if there is some loss in their decisions, the loss should be put into a perspective. Arts are only placeholders for life. Some are masterful placeholders, some, less so; but all the same it is the life held by those holders that has to be lived through. One does not wrestle with life’s placeholders, but with life itself.

Krissi starts dancing toward me in a showy disco-jog. Still a bit hurt, I do vague, place-holding disco fingers at him.

Alpha: At this milestone, key gameplay functionality is implemented, assets are 40–50% final (the rest are placeholders), the game runs on the correct hardware platform in debug mode, and there is enough working to provide the team with a feel for the game. Features might undergo major adjustments at this point, based on play-testing results and other feedback. Alpha occurs 8 to 10 months before code release.

For better or for worse.” Better or worse what? I’d agreed to adjectives. I’d happily squeezed Mary’s hands and made vows with unknown placeholders for nouns. For someone who aspired to be an English professor, binding my life to someone else’s with a game of Mad Libs suddenly seemed like a terrible joke.

We don't really have to call it the Subs Club. That was just a lame placeholder title I put in." Kamen crossed his arms on the table. "It makes me want a sandwich.

The United States proclaimed its neutrality, but the president authorized moderate increases in the American armed forces; frighteningly, it had recently lagged behind Bulgaria as the 18th placeholder for the largest army in the world.[32]

R usually stores these tables as ‘data-frames’ when they are read into R. Special Values in R NA – ‘not available’, usually a default placeholder for missing values.