Plant Stake Quotes

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Shanna planted her hands on her hips. "Getting drunk is not going to solve your problems." "Aye, but t'will make me no' give a damn."(Robby)
Kerrelyn Sparks (The Vampire and the Virgin (Love at Stake, #8))
But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them.... Chains rattle, rivers roll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Even a language won't stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze.... Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land.
Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)
Well, make up your mind. I don’t have all night.” Fidelia set her beer on the porch and removed a set of keys from her skirt pocket. She fumbled with the key, trying to release the trigger lock on her pistol. “Don’t do that,” Heather warned her. “You’ve had too much to drink.” Fidelia snorted. “I’m not drunk. I’m in complete control.” She tore off the trigger lock. Bang! The gun fired, ripping into a nearby oak tree. The women screamed. Jean-Luc winced. A squirrel plummeted from the tree and landed in the yard with a thud. Fidelia shrugged. “I meant to do that. Damned rodent’s been gnawing on the house. And stealing all the nuts from our pecan tree.” Heather planted her hands on her hips. “Haven’t I told you a million times to keep the locks on?” Fidelia hung her head, looking properly remorseful. “I’ll be more careful.” She switched on the safety, then shot Jean-Luc a pointed look. “I know how to deal with a scumbag with nuts.
Kerrelyn Sparks (The Undead Next Door (Love at Stake, #4))
How could everything go so wrong so fast? For goodness’ sake, she was only looking for a few plants. But instead, she’d found a whole village of mind-controlled slaves and a whole army of acrobatic kung fu vampires.
Kerrelyn Sparks (Sexiest Vampire Alive (Love at Stake, #11))
Cassivelaunus had prepared the river for Caesar, by planting it full of stakes (and had, no doubt, put up a notice-board).
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1))
In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun's and which will also be my death's. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there's nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.
Albert Camus
It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology…by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite… Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged, humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), “All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are—” We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid…we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function…zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coal-tars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling…this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others…
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Christians have been beaten, whipped, starved, humiliated, mutilated, tortured, hung, burned at the stake, crucified, and fed to lions; yet two thousand years after a man called Jesus of Nazareth walked the streets of Jerusalem, 1,734 million people alive on this earth today call themselves by the ever-dividing, ever-uniting word: Christian. God is still scattering the seeds a few righteous renegades planted in a city called Antioch. Had they only known what they were starting.
Beth Moore (To Live Is Christ: Joining Paul's Journey of Faith)
I could love you, I could kill you. I want this. This is how I make my mark, this is where I plant my flag, this is how I stake my claim, this is how I deny you, this is how I claim you, this is what you owe me, this is what I am taking, this is how I know I'm alive.
Louise Dean (This Human Season)
His wide mouth was firm as his lips met her own, and like an explorer planting a stake in new soil, he claimed her right then for the rest of her days.
Leslie Maitland (Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed)
Some things you carry around inside you as though they were part of your blood and bones, and when that happens, there’s nothing you can do to forget …But I had never been much of a believer. If anything, I believed that things got worse before they got better. I believed good people suffered... people who have faith were so lucky; you didn’t want to ruin it for them. You didn’t want to plant doubt where there was none. You had to treat suck individuals tenderly and hope that some of whatever they were feeling rubs off on you Those who love you will love you forever, without questions or boundaries or the constraints of time. Daily life is real, unchanging as a well-built house. But houses burn; they catch fire in the middle of the night. The night is like any other night of disaster, with every fact filtered through a veil of disbelief. The rational world has spun so completely out of its orbit, there is no way to chart or expect what might happen next At that point, they were both convinced that love was a figment of other people’s imaginations, an illusion fashioned out of smoke and air that really didn’t exist Fear, like heat, rises; it drifts up to the ceiling and when it falls down it pours out in a hot and horrible rain True love, after all, could bind a man where he didn’t belong. It could wrap him in cords that were all but impossible to break Fear is contagious. It doubles within minutes; it grows in places where there’s never been any doubt before The past stays with a man, sticking to his heels like glue, invisible and heartbreaking and unavoidable, threaded to the future, just as surely as day is sewn to night He looked at girls and saw only sweet little fuckboxes, there for him to use, no hearts involved, no souls, and, most assuredly no responsibilities. Welcome to the real world. Herein is the place where no one can tell you whether or not you’ve done the right thing. I could tell people anything I wanted to, and whatever I told them, that would be the truth as far as they were concerned. Whoever I said I was, well then, that’s who id be The truths by which she has lived her life have evaporated, leaving her empty of everything except the faint blue static of her own skepticism. She has never been a person to question herself; now she questions everything Something’s, are true no matter how hard you might try to bloc them out, and a lie is always a lie, no matter how prettily told You were nothing more than a speck of dust, good-looking dust, but dust all the same Some people needed saving She doesn’t want to waste precious time with something as prosaic as sleep. Every second is a second that belongs to her; one she understands could well be her last Why wait for anything when the world is so cockeyed and dangerous? Why sit and stare into the mirror, too fearful of what may come to pass to make a move? At last she knows how it feels to take a chance when everything in the world is at stake, breathless and heedless and desperate for more She’ll be imagining everything that’s out in front of them, road and cloud and sky, all the elements of a future, the sort you have to put together by hand, slowly and carefully until the world is yours once more
Alice Hoffman (Blue Diary)
Witches the Church simply burned at the stake, but something more interesting happened to the witches’ magic plants. The plants were too precious to banish from human society, so in the decades after Pope Innocent’s fiat against witchcraft, cannabis, opium, belladonna, and the rest were simply transferred from the realm of sorcery to medicine, thanks largely to the work of a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician named Paracelsus. Sometimes called the “Father of Medicine,” Paracelsus established a legitimate pharmacology largely on the basis of the ingredients found in flying ointments. (Among his many accomplishments was the invention of laudanum, the tincture of opium that was perhaps the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia until the twentieth century.) Paracelsus often said that he had learned everything he knew about medicine from the sorceresses. Working under the rational sign of Apollo, he domesticated their forbidden Dionysian knowledge, turning the pagan potions into healing tinctures, bottling the magic plants and calling them medicines.
Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)
The Kammerlicht: Explanations of the Impressions Left Upon Various and Sundry Natures by Dreams as Interpreted According to Tribe, and of the Numbers to be Staked in Lotteries in Conformity with the Meanings of Said Dreams .. says … there are eight ‘tribes’ of dreams and of the eight only the fifth is genuine. Tribe 8 are dreams emanating directly from evil spirits. Tribe 7 are dreams granted to the virtuous as direct revelations. Tribe 6 are dreams from roots planted in disease (fever and such). Tribe 5 are dreams that come to those who have taken no food before retiring and are of a healthy & tranquil disposition.
Jan Neruda (Prague Tales (Central European Classics))
Let us not, however, exaggerate our power. Whatever man does, the great lines of creation persist; the supreme mass does not depend on man. He has power over the detail, not over the whole. And it is right that this should be so. The Whole is providential. Its laws pass over our head. What we do goes no farther than the surface. Man clothes or unclothes the earth; clearing a forest is like taking off a garment. But to slow down the rotation of the globe on its axis, to accelerate the course of the globe on its orbit, to add or subtract a fathom on he earth's daily journey of 718,000 leagues around the sun, to modify the precession of the equinoxes, to eliminate one drop of rain--never! What is on high remains on high. Man can change the climate, but not the seasons Just try and make the moon revolve anywhere but in the ecliptic! Dreamers, some of them illustrious, have dreamed of restoring perpetual spring to the earth. The extreme seasons, summer and winter, are produced by the excess of the inclination of the earth's axis over the place of the ecliptic of which we have just spoken. In order to eliminate the seasons it would be necessary only to straighten this axis. Nothing could be simpler. Just plant a stake on the Pole and drive it in to the center of the globe; attach a chain to it; find a base outside the earth; have 10 billion teams, each of 10 billion horses, and get them to pull. THe axis will straighten up, ad you will have your spring. As you can see, an easy task. We must look elsewhere for Eden. Spring is good; but freedom and justice are beter. Eden is moral, not material. To be free and just depends on ourselves.
Victor Hugo (The Toilers of the Sea)
Their dad had just pulled up stakes, left the country—and us. He said that he no longer wanted a life with so much responsibility, so the responsibility was all mine.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
It does.” I scrunch my eyes tight. “It fucking sucks.” I didn’t know the power of those words. They fix nothing, do nothing, but just saying them feels like planting a stake into the ground, pinning us together at least for this moment. It sucks, and I can’t change that, but I’m here, with my sister, and somehow we’ll get through it. You can take the city person out of the city, but the city will always be in them. I think it’s the same for sisters. Anywhere we go, we won’t leave each other. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. And we don’t. We never will.
Emily Henry (Book Lovers)
But to know I’m the first to touch her makes me want to shoot off a cannon and plant a stake beside her that reads ‘This land is claimed.’ She’s an undiscovered country, and I wanna be the goddamn king of it.
Alexa Riley (Mechanic (Breeding, #2))
Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plans, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Of plants, tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover’s testicles in her hand.
John Updike (The Witches of Eastwick)
battle between Cæsar and Cassivelaunus.  Cassivelaunus had prepared the river for Cæsar, by planting it full of stakes (and had, no doubt, put up a notice-board).  But Cæsar crossed in spite of this.  You couldn’t choke Cæsar off that river.  He is the sort of man we want round the backwaters now.
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog))
They nailed their stakes into the earth of my life, those farmers. They knew the place in me where the river stopped, and they marked it with a new name. Shantaram Kishan Kharre. I don’t know if they found the name in the heart of the man they believed me to be, or if they planted it there, like a wishing tree, to bloom and grow. Whatever the case, whether they discovered that peace or created it, the truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.
Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
People can be threatened by someone with ambition, no matter how low the stakes or how small the rewards. And while lots of people will plant a smile on their face and say they’re pleased, behind closed doors the whispers form a kind of toxic cloud of gas that goes out on the wind and finds you eventually.
Julia Kent (Random Acts of Love (Random, #5))
I have traversed at least one part of this sphere where we are; I have studied the fecundation of plants and the point at which metals fuse; I have observed the stars and have examined the inside of bodies. From this brand that I lift here I can deduce a concept of weight, and from these flames the concept of warmth. What I do not know, I know full well that I do not know, and I envy those who will eventually know more; but I know also that, exactly like me, they will be obliged to measure, deduce, and then mistrust the deductions so produced; they will have to make allowance for the part which is true in any falsehood, and likewise reckon the eternal admixture of falsity in truth. I have never clung blindly to some idea for fear of the perplexity into which I should fall if I let it go. I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily. I have never misrepresented the views of my adversary to get the better of him more readily, not even the views of Bombastus during our debate on antimony (though he showed no gratitude for my restraint). Or perhaps, yes: I have caught myself in the act of such misrepresentation, and each time reprimanded myself as if I were scolding a dishonest valet; I could trust myself again only after promising myself to do better. I have dreamed my dreams, but I do not take them for anything more than dreams. I have refrained from making an idol of truth, preferring to leave to it its more modest name of exactitude. My triumphs and my dangers are not the ones that people suppose: there are other glories than fame and other fires than those of the stake. I have almost attained to the point of distrusting words. I shall die a little less witless than I was born.
Marguerite Yourcenar (L'Œuvre au noir)
Mostly, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can't you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor's birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.
Julie Otsuka (The Buddha in the Attic)
Arrive before your Husband. Not that I can See quite what good arriving first will do; But still arrive before him. When he's taken His place upon the couch and you go too To sit beside him, on your best behavior Stealthily touch my foot, and look at me, Watching my nods, my eyes, my face's language; Catch and return my signals secretly. I'll send a wordless message with my eyebrows; You'll read my fingers' words, words traced in wine. When you recall our games of love together, Your finger on rosy cheeks must trace a line. If in your silent thoughts you wish to chide me, Let your hand hold the lobe of your soft ear; When, darling, what I do or say gives pleasure, Keep turning to an fro the ring you wear. When you wish well-earned curses on your husband, Lay your hand on the table, as in prayer. If he pours you wine, watch out, tell him to drink it; Ask for what you want from the waiter there. I shall take next the glass you hand the waiter And I'll drink from the place you took your sips; If he should offer anything he's tasted, Refuse whatever food has touch his lips. Don't let him plant his arms upon your shoulders, Don't let him rest your gentle head on his hard chest, Don't let your dress, your breasts, admit his fingers, And--most of all--no kisses to be pressed! You kiss--and I'll reveal myself your lover; I'll say 'they're mine'; my legal claim I'll stake. All this, of course I'll see, But what's well hidden under your dress--blind terror makes me quake.
Ovid (The Love Poems)
Warren Buffett, the “Sage of Omaha” whose shrewd investments have made him one of the world’s richest men, has a stake in the marijuana industry via Cubic Designs, a company that provides mezzanine floor-space for warehouses. Cubic Designs dropped flyers off at 1,000 marijuana dispensaries, urging them to “double your growing space,” with a picture of metal flooring loaded with cannabis plants. The Sage himself made no comment.
Tom Wainwright (Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel)
Even time is not immune to time. Once the only times that mattered were the rhythms of the planet and the body. The first people on this island needed time four times a year: the solstices and the equinoxes, to avoid planting seed too early or too late. When the Church got here, it staked out Sundays, Christmases, Easter, and began colonizing the year with saints' days. The English brought short leases and tax deadlines. With the railway, the hours had to march in time. Now TV satellites beam the same six o'clock news everywhere at the same six o'clock. Science has been as busy splicing time into ever thinner slivers as it has matter... But nobody knows if time is slowing down or speeding up
David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)
Any Justification that does not lead to Biblical sanctification and mortification of sinful desires is a false justification no matter how many Solas you attach to it”. “See that your chief study be about the heart, that there God’s image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.” ~ Richard Baxter Never forget that truth is more important to the church than peace ~ JC Ryle "Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.” ~ Francis Schaeffer I am not permitted to let my love be so merciful as to tolerate and endure false doctrine. When faith and doctrine are concerned and endangered, neither love nor patience are in order...when these are concerned, (neither toleration nor mercy are in order, but only anger, dispute, and destruction - to be sure, only with the Word of God as our weapon. ~ Martin Luther “Truth must be spoken, however it be taken.” ~ John Trapp “Hard words, if they be true, are better than soft words if they be false.” – C.H. Spurgeon “Oh my brethren, Bold hearted men are always called mean-spirited by cowards” – CH Spurgeon “The Bible says Iron sharpens Iron, But if your words don't have any iron in them, you ain't sharpening anyone”. “Peace often comes as a result of conflict!” ~ Don P Mt 18:15-17 Rom 12:18 “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” ~ Martin Luther “The Scriptures argue and debate and dispute; they are full of polemics… We should always regret the necessity; but though we regret it and bemoan it, when we feel that a vital matter is at stake we must engage in argument. We must earnestly contend for the truth, and we are all called upon to do that by the New Testament.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Romans – Atonement and Justification) “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher “Truth bites and it stings and it has a blade on it.” ~ Paul Washer Soft words produce hard hearts. Show me a church where soft words are preached and I will show you a church of hard hearts. Jeremiah said that the word of God is a hammer that shatters. Hard Preaching produces soft hearts. ~ J. MacArthur Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified, prepare the soul for glory. ~ Richard Sibbes “Cowards never won heaven. Do not claim that you are begotten of God and have His royal blood running in your veins unless you can prove your lineage by this heroic spirit: to dare to be holy in spite of men and devils.” ~ William Gurnall
Various
Aryeh looked, and his head became light. How could he have not seen? The earth on which the Almighty created the plants and the animals—in each and every illumination, it was shown as an orb. That the earth was round, and not flat, was now the opinion of a majority of theologians. Interesting that this artist of a century earlier, when Christians were being sent to the stake for this belief, espoused it. But that, alone, would not condemn the book. The illuminator had ventured further into dangerous territory. In the top right corner of three of the paintings, above the earth, was a second gold-leafed orb, clearly meant to be the sun. Its placement was ambiguous. Aryeh looked up at Vistorini. “You believe this implies the heliocentric heresy?” “‘Implies’! Rabbi, don’t be disingenuous. This is clearly in support of the heresy of the Saracen astronomers, of Copernicus, whose book is on the Index, of that man in Padua, Galileo, who will soon enough be brought before the Inquisition to answer for his errors.
Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)
But perhaps an even greater principle was at stake, Bateson realized. The flow of biological information was not restricted to heredity. It was coursing through all of biology. The transmission of hereditary traits was just one instance of information flow-but if you looked deeply, squinting your conceptual lenses, it was easy to imagine information moving pervasively through the entire living world. The unfurling of an embryo; the reach of a plant toward sunlight; the ritual dance of bees-every biological activity required the decoding of coded instructions. Might Mendel, then, have also stumbled on the essential structure of these instructions? Were units of information guiding each of these processes? "Each of us who now looks at his own patch of work sees Mendel's clues running through it," Bateson proposed. "We have only touched the edge of that new country which is stretching out before us....The experimental study of heredity...is second to no branch of science in the magnitude of the results it offers.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
Ahead, a house sits close to the road: a small, single-story place painted mint green. Ivy grows up one corner and onto the roof, the green tendrils swaying like a girl's hair let loose from a braid. In front there's a full and busy vegetable garden, with plants jostling for real estate and bees making a steady, low, collective hum. It reminds me of the aunties' gardens, and my nonna's when I was a kid. Tomato plants twist gently skywards, their lazy stems tied to stakes. Leafy heads of herbs- dark parsley, fine-fuzzed purple sage, bright basil that the caterpillars love to punch holes in. Rows and rows of asparagus. Whoever lives here must work in the garden a lot. It's wild but abundant, and I know it takes a special vigilance to maintain a garden of this size. The light wind lifts the hair from my neck and brings the smell of tomato stalks. The scent, green and full of promise, brings to mind a childhood memory- playing in Aunty Rosa's yard as Papa speaks with a cousin, someone from Italy. I am imagining families of fairies living in the berry bushes: making their clothes from spiderweb silk, flitting with wings that glimmer pink and green like dragonflies'.
Hannah Tunnicliffe (Season of Salt and Honey)
Tell me about your adventures, Abigail. Any diabolical new cases to investigate?” “Yes, as a matter of fact—bones and bodies and everything. We’ll be leaving for Gad’s Valley tomorrow.” “Isn’t that where that handsome young policeman of yours got stationed? What’s his name?” I felt my cheeks flush, which made Jenny smile impishly. “Charlie is hardly my anything,” I said. “But yes, he’ll be involved. Not that there are enough flowers in the world to make that romance a reality.” “You don’t need flowers, dear. You need confidence. Next time you see him, you should just go right up to him and plant a kiss on that boy’s pretty face.” “Jenny!” “Fortune favors the bold, Abigail!” “Sure it does. The last time I was bold, I nearly got the man killed, and then he changed his name and moved a hundred miles away. That’s not exactly a strong start to a relationship.” “You silly girl. Of course it is—he risked his life for you!” “Oh, never mind about it, anyway. I’m not going to the valley looking for romance—there are more important matters at stake. I’m looking for a murderer.” “You should definitely have kissed him right after the big fight.” Jenny smiled, willfully ignoring my protests. She let her gaze drift to the window. “My fiancé got in a fight over me, once. He lost terribly, the poor man—he never was much of a pugilist. He looked like an absolute mess afterward, with gauze wadded up in each nostril and one eye all swollen, but it was still just the sweetest thing. And the stupidest. I told him as much . . . right before I kissed him.” She turned her eyes meaningfully back to me. “Because that’s what you do.
William Ritter (Beastly Bones (Jackaby, #2))
When you contribute to a safer world for the truth, contribute to help stop violence and help end impunity: be vigilant, be alert, stay safe, protect your emotions and health from aggressive troublemakers and manipulators, and have a strong, diplomatic, clear and firm boundaries. Be honest, be factual, and have an indestructible firm coping mechanism ways while you could experience waves of digital aggression as they would like to silence you, discredit you, and they try to ruin your integrity, persona, reputation and credibility. The deceptive, evil manipulators plant lies and create intrigues, polemics mongering, gossip-mongering, and calumny committed by abusive political harridans, bitches and assholes who can shame you privately and publicly. Group cyber lynching, group cyberbullying, defamatory libellous slander is committed by these cyber aggressors who are also financial-political abusive parasites, pathological liar cyberbullies toxic manipulators, and repetitive abusers. Usually when the stakes are high, these manipulative, deceptive, dishonest, unscrupulous aggressive and vindictive, abusive toxic people would resort to any forms of aggression/abuse: digital or cyber aggression, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and psychological abuse, financial/economic abuse, and/or physical aggression. When a group of habitual, deceptive, toxic netizens, digital aggressors send you threats, disturb your family member with their concocted destructive lies, and they took hold a copy of your passport or ID - change it immediately. Document the threats, the libellous slander, done by these aggressive and abusive people who took advantage of you, used you, and abused you, and do not hesitate to report them to the right authorities. You have to learn how to handle these scammers, habitual offensive abusive offenders/perpetrators, manipulators, bullies, digital aggressors/aggression, cyber lynchers, coward, pathological liars, opportunistic users, economic/financial abusers, emotional, psychological and verbal abusers, and repetitive abusers without breaking the law. Even if they dehumanised you, shamed you and abused you for several years, do not and never dehumanise them. Always remember the three Rs of life: 1. Respect for self 2. Respect for others 3. Responsibility for all your actions ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from The S. Trilogy
Angelica Hopes (Life Issues)
I DON'T WANT to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately-that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly ... anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there-some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers-well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out-maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out-such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party.
Joy Williams (Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals)
Because of the many casualties that had happened in homemade bunkers, we were warned to no longer use them. We were told that the homemade shelter we had laboriously constructed in the basement of our building was useless and now could not even give us the illusion of being a safe haven. Instead a massive new suburban air raid shelter had been built of reinforced concrete, which was eleven feet thick in places. The structure was near the tram stop where the Feudenheimer Strasse became the Haupt Strasse or Main Street. Even with a war going on with lives at stake, Nazi style commercialism was alive and well, as we rented a room in this nearby bunker for six Reichmarks a night. At the time $1 = RM 2.50. The small room had four beds and we were told to be there prior to 18:00 hours or six o’clock in the evening. Concussions from the bombs were of primary concern and everything was designed to minimize their effect. The pathway to the entrance of this bunker was a zigzagged concrete walk protected by sandbags, as this helped to reduce the concussion from an air blast. Tall bushes and grass as well as riverweed, were planted strategically to absorb the bomb bursts from across the river.
Hank Bracker
A title is nothing without an estate.” “You can’t afford the estate.” “Then I’ll have to find a way.” “How? You have no bloody idea how to manage complex finances. As for farming, you’ve never planted so much as a single turnip seed. Whatever you’re qualified for, which isn’t much, it’s certainly not running a place like this.” Oddly, the more that his brother echoed the doubts that were already in his mind, the more stubborn Devon became. “If Theo was qualified, I’ll be damned if I can’t learn to do it.” West shook his head incredulously. “Is that where this nonsense is coming from? You’re trying to compete with our dead cousin?” “Don’t be an idiot,” Devon snapped. “Isn’t it obvious there’s far more at stake than that? Look around you, for God’s sake. This estate supports hundreds of people. Without it, many of them won’t survive. Tell me you’d be willing to stand face-to-face with one of the tenants and tell him that he has to move his family to Manchester so they can all work in a filthy factory.” “How can the factory be any worse than living on a muddy scrap of farmland?” “Considering urban diseases, crime, slum alleys, and abject poverty,” Devon said acidly, “I’d say it’s considerably worse.
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
How to Plant a Container-Grown Fruit Tree or Shrub 1. Use a shovel or marking paint to mark the area for the hole. The planting hole should be at least twice as wide as the tree’s rootball. 2. Dig the planting hole. This hole should be just as deep as the rootball—no deeper! If you sharpen the spade before digging, this step will go faster. GROWING TIP Have you heard the saying, “plant ’em high”? Well, that refers to trees. Trees will settle a bit after planting. Always make sure that you finish the job with the top of the tree’s rootball about 3 inches above the soil line. If you plant a tree too deep, the place where the tree trunk and the tree roots meet can rot, which will kill the tree. 3. Set the tree in the planting hole to check the depth. If the top of the rootball is lower than the soil line around the edge of the planting hole, add some soil back into the hole, pull the tree out of the pot, and replace the tree in the hole. You never want the crown of the tree (the part where the tree trunk meets the tree roots) to be below the soil line. In clay soils, set the rootball so it is a few inches above the soil line. 4. Fill in around the tree with the same soil that you removed from the planting hole. Do not add fertilizer or new topsoil. Water will move more easily and the tree will root properly if the soil in and around the planting hole is the same. 5. Mulch around the tree, taking care to pull the mulch away from the tree trunk. Do not create a mulch “volcano” around the tree (by piling mulch up high around the trunk)—that just encourages insects and creatures that snack on tree bark to take up residence next to your delicious young tree. 6. Water the tree. Plan to water newly planted trees every three days (every other day if it is hot and dry). New trees don’t need to be staked unless they’re in areas prone to heavy rains and frequent winds. It can take a couple of years for newly planted trees to root into the surrounding soil, so continue to monitor your tree for signs that it needs water.
Katie Elzer-Peters (Carolinas Fruit & Vegetable Gardening: How to Plant, Grow, and Harvest the Best Edibles)
Certain vegetables will grow up trellises (wood, metal, or string). Certain plants need to have trellises to grow. Vegetables That Can Grow up Trellises Cucumber Pumpkin Squash Vegetables That Must Grow up Trellises or Lattices Pole bean Garden pea Vegetables That Need Stakes Eggplant Okra Pepper Vegetables That Need Cages Tomato
Katie Elzer-Peters (Carolinas Fruit & Vegetable Gardening: How to Plant, Grow, and Harvest the Best Edibles)
Maybe tangled will be a spectacular rump. maybe i will adore it: it could happen. But one thing is for sure: tangled will not be rapunzel. And thats too bad , because rapunzel is an specially layered and relevant fairytale, less about the love between a man and a woman than the misguided attempts of a mother trying to protect her daughter from (what she perceives ) as the worlds evils. The tale, you may recall, begins with a mother-to-bes yearning for the taste of rapunzel, a salad green she spies growing in the garden of the sorceress who happens to live next door. The womans craving becomes so intense , she tells her husband that if he doesn't fetch her some, she and their unborn baby will die. So he steals into the baby's yard, wraps his hands around a plant, and, just as he pulls... she appears in a fury. The two eventually strike a bargain: the mans wife can have as much of the plant as she wants- if she turns over her baby to the witch upon its birth. `i will take care for it like a mother,` the sorceress croons (as if that makes it all right). Then again , who would you rather have as a mom: the woman who would do anything for you or the one who would swap you in a New York minute for a bowl of lettuce? Rapunzel grows up, her hair grows down, and when she is twelve-note that age-Old Mother Gothel , as she calls the witch. leads her into the woods, locking her in a high tower which offers no escape and no entry except by scaling the girls flowing tresses. One day, a prince passes by and , on overhearing Rapunzel singing, falls immediately in love (that makes Rapunzel the inverse of Ariel- she is loved sight unseen because of her voice) . He shinnies up her hair to say hello and , depending on the version you read, they have a chaste little chat or get busy conceiving twins. Either way, when their tryst is discovered, Old Mother Gothel cries, `you wicked child! i thought i had separated you from the world, and yet you deceived me!` There you have it : the Grimm`s warning to parents , centuries before psychologists would come along with their studies and measurements, against undue restriction . Interestingly the prince cant save Rapuzel from her foster mothers wrath. When he sees the witch at the top of the now-severed braids, he jumps back in surprise and is blinded by the bramble that breaks his fall. He wanders the countryside for an unspecified time, living on roots and berries, until he accidentally stumbles upon his love. She weeps into his sightless eyes, restoring his vision , and - voila!- they rescue each other . `Rapunzel` then, wins the prize for the most egalitarian romance, but that its not its only distinction: it is the only well-known tale in which the villain is neither maimed nor killed. No red-hot shoes are welded to the witch`s feet . Her eyes are not pecked out. Her limbs are not lashed to four horses who speed off in different directions. She is not burned at the stake. Why such leniency? perhaps because she is not, in the end, really evil- she simply loves too much. What mother has not, from time to time, felt the urge to protect her daughter by locking her in a tower? Who among us doesn't have a tiny bit of trouble letting our children go? if the hazel branch is the mother i aspire to be, then Old Mother Gothel is my cautionary tale: she reminds us that our role is not to keep the world at bay but to prepare our daughters so they can thrive within it. That involves staying close but not crowding them, standing firm in one`s values while remaining flexible. The path to womanhood is strewn with enchantment , but it also rifle with thickets and thorns and a big bad culture that threatens to consume them even as they consume it. The good news is the choices we make for our toodles can influence how they navigate it as teens. I`m not saying that we can, or will, do everything `right,` only that there is power-magic-in awareness.
Peggy Orenstein (Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture)
I just picture him barging into Heaven,” I offered, “pushing right past the place where you get all the answers to the big questions, learn why there is so much suffering in the world and why we are here and all that, he just beelines to some corner, unrolls a length of rusty chicken wire, and stakes it down with old coat hangers so that he can start planting tomatoes.
Hope Jahren (Lab Girl)
The wildflowers are striving into October as sunlight still conspires with the soil, with the hidden in dark places. Those domesticated and once potted, are drying on top of the compost pile. I was out walking in the immediate and peculiar. I sensed within me a labyrinth unraveling, loosened out into a vast realm of the new earth. I said to the dogs, there will be a great accounting for the parts of ourselves we have planted in pots. When I worry should I go back to stake some claim in the depleted soil of convention, instead, the next step forward turns real and I must take it. When I doubt a warm love for a free faith something immediate and peculiar appears to bring me warmth in the hidden and dark places.
James Scott Smith (Water, Rocks and Trees)
It does.” I scrunch my eyes tight. “It fucking sucks.” I didn’t know the power of those words. They fix nothing, do nothing, but just saying them feels like planting a stake into the ground, pinning us together at least for this moment.
Emily Henry (Book Lovers)
What was at stake for him was not so much risk taking as the experiencing of the risk. He could bring the drama to climax—of fight or flight, as it were—but he was merely ridding himself of the drama. It was anticipation itself that had become a phobic object,because it ushered him towards a threshold of action. Between waiting and wanting and doing something about it there was a terror, a delay that seemed unbearable. There was a Jekyll of definite intent, and a Hyde fobbing him o with either satisfaction—the kiss “planted” as he would say—or evasion, the hurried (and harried) rush home.
Adam Phillips (Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape)
Don’t fix it. Just be here with me, and say it fucking sucks.” “It does.” I scrunch my eyes tight. “It fucking sucks.” I didn’t know the power of those words. They fix nothing, do nothing, but just saying them feels like planting a stake into the ground, pinning us together at least for this moment. It sucks, and I can’t change that, but I’m here, with my sister, and somehow we’ll get through it.
Emily Henry (Book Lovers)
Land is the most precious form of power on this planet. There’s only so much of it. When you buy it—” “—or steal it—” Lana nodded. “You stake a claim on its future. If you own the land, you can do what you want. You can plant trees, build skyscrapers, or plan a whole new city. You can shape the future you want for yourself and your family.
Nina Simon (Mother-Daughter Murder Night)
The Reformers set up the Bible, the Romanists planted the stake.
James Aitken Wylie (The History of Protestantism (Complete 24 Books in One Volume))
A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help. The day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over. Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources…of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. If
Sarah Chayes (On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake)
Halfway through the day, Megan started dicking around on the internet. She made her browser window as small as she could, paused for a second, and then looked up “Carrie Wilkins.” She found Carrie’s website, and on it, this bio: Hi, my name’s Carrie. I’m 26. I make things. I paint and I write, but mostly I design. I like to make things beautiful, or creative. I make my own food and I’m trying to grow my own beets. A lot of people around me seem unhappy and I don’t understand why. I freelance because I know I’d go insane if I couldn’t make my own schedule—I believe variety is the zest of life. I know I want a dog someday soon, and sometimes I make lunch at 3 a.m. I believe in the power of collaboration, and I’d love to work with you! What a total asshole. What does she have, some kind of a pact with Satan? The picture next to Carrie’s bio had some kind of heavy filter on it that made it look vintage, and she had a friendly but aloof look on her face. She was flanked on both sides by plants and was wearing an oxford shirt with fancy shorts and had a cool necklace. It was an outfit, for sure, like all of Carrie’s clothes were outfits, which Megan always thought of as outdated or something only children did. The website linked to a blog, which was mostly photos of Carrie doing different things. It didn’t take too long to find the picture of her with the llama with a caption about how she and her boss got it from a homeless guy. And then just products. Pictures and pictures of products, and then little captions about how the products inspired her. Motherfucker, thought Megan. She doesn’t get it at all. It was like looking at an ad for deodorant or laundry soap that made you feel smelly and like you’d been doing something wrong that the person in the ad had already figured out, but since it was an ad, there was no real way to smell the person and judge for yourself whether or not the person stank, and that was what she hated, hated, hated most of all. I make things, gee-wow. You think you’re an artist? Do you really thing this blog is a representation of art, that great universalizer? That great transmigrator? This isolating schlock that makes me feel like I have to buy into you and your formula for happiness? Work as a freelance designer, grow beets, travel, have lots of people who like you, and above all have funsies! “Everything okay?” asked Jillian. “Yeah, what?” “Breathing kind of heavy over there, just making sure you were okay and everything.” “Oh, uh-huh, I’m fine,” said Megan. “It’s not . . . something I’m doing, is it?” “What? No. No, I’m fine,” said Megan. How could someone not understand that other people could be unhappy? What kind of callous, horrible bullshit was that to say to a bunch of twenty-yearolds, particularly, when this was the time in life when things were even more acutely painful than they were in high school, that nightmare fuck, because now there were actual stakes and everyone was coming to grips with the fact that they’re going to die and that life might be empty and unrewarding. Why even bring it up? Why even make it part of your mini-bio?
Halle Butler (Jillian)
They nailed their stakes into the earth of my life, those farmers. They knew the place in me where the river stopped, and they marked it with a new name. Shantaram Kishan Kharre. I don’t know if they found that name in the heart of the man they believed me to be, or if they planted it there, like a wishing tree, to bloom and grow. Whatever the case, whether they discovered that peace or created it, the truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.
Gregory David Roberts
Likewise, when she sometimes found arrows stuck in the roots of trees, she quietly unscrewed the shafts and used them to stake plants in the poison garden, where Herself grew hemlock, tall thimbleweed, white snakeroot, swamp milkweed, poison sumac, and bloodroot. Poison ivy with its white berries was ubiquitous on the island and didn't need any special place. This morning the island was alive with flowery and moldy fragrances, alive with the urgent trills and chirps of birdsong, while more quietly, down low, sounds of scurrying and munching. The island was bursting with spring things to count and measure and eat--- ramps and wild onion sprouts, three-leaved trillium and speckled trout lily, dandelions, horse tails, tender new nettles for tea, pokeweed shoots to boil, fiddlehead ferns to fry.
Bonnie Jo Campbell (The Waters)
at Koch Industries, there was no such thing as a senior manager. Within the confines of Market-Based Management, Roos was known as a process owner, or someone who acted like they had an ownership stake in the company. The refinery at Pine Bend was divided into five groups, which were known as “profit centers.” Each profit center was like a separate piece of property owned by a boss who was responsible for everything that happened within their domain. Koch measured the financial results in each profit center, which, in turn, determined how much money would be steered toward that profit center in the future. Brian Roos was the process owner over the Utilities Profit Center, a division that included the refinery’s wastewater treatment plant, boiler house, cooling system, and other equipment that kept the cracking units running efficiently.
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
The planet does not bother if it is denuded, stripped of its plant, animal or human life; it does not care if it becomes barren or wasted or frozen, either in consequence of human greed and stupidity or on account of cosmic events; it is unconcerned that it may be inundated or submerged in the sea. It may become a ball of fire or sphere of ice or get vaporised. But we have to care: it is our survival at stake.
KRISHNA MURTHY ANNIGERI VASUDEVA RAO (FLOWERS OF STARDUST)
All of a sudden, Tesla had the chance to buy a 5.3-million-square-foot plant in its backyard. Just one month after the last Toyota Corolla went off the manufacturing line in April 2010, Tesla and Toyota announced a partnership and transfer of the factory. Tesla agreed to pay $42 million for a large portion of the factory (once worth $1 billion), while Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla for a 2.5 percent stake in the company. Tesla had basically secured a factory, including the massive metal-stamping machines and other equipment, for free.fn8
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
Thus, sometime in late April, Christian sailors found seventy warships descending on them to cries of “Allahu Akbar.”112 Fierce fighting followed, and ships foundered. When forty half-drowned Christian sailors managed to swim to shore, “by the Sultan’s orders these were fixed by the fundament [anus] upon sharp stakes, which pierced them to the top of their heads,” wrote an eyewitness.* “The stakes were planted, and they were left to die in full view of the guards on the walls.
Raymond Ibrahim (Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West)
When I was young, younger than Isabella, my father would walk me up in the mountains where he was tending to his coffee plants. Sometimes, he would come upon a plant that would not flourish. No matter what he did to it, it just produced no fruit. No coffee. So rather than just ripping it out by the root and throwing it off the mountain, he’d gingerly dig it up and transplant it to another place where the soil was different. Then, he’d stake it up with something stronger than itself, he’d water it, fertilize it, and give it a chance to put down roots someplace new. Sometimes
Charles Martin (Water from My Heart)
The following year, Low had arranged for $170 million from the Goldman-prepared power-plant bonds to fill Najib’s account. To avoid questions, Cheah and Low had seen to it the account was marked as one used for internal bank transfers, meaning it would not be visible to compliance staff. The Australian and New Zealand Banking Group, known as ANZ, owned a minority stake in AmBank, giving it the right to appoint executives and board members. But ANZ’s management had no idea about this secret account’s existence. Joanna Yu, a middle-level AmBank executive, was tasked with taking instructions from Low about incoming wires and outgoing checks. Najib had used most of the initial infusion to pay off crony politicians, as well as on jewelry and a $56,000 expense at Signature Exotic Cars, a high-end car dealership in Kuala Lumpur. Now, with the elections approaching, the account was about to become a lot more active.
Bradley Hope (Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World)
Among the most vocal part of the press spreading rumours about its negative effects were the outlets owned by William Randolph Hearst, a media tycoon who had invested heavily in the wood pulp industry. Since hemp paper posed direct competition to wood pulp paper, he had an economic stake in limiting hemp production, and recognised that if controls were placed on cannabis because of its psychoactive effects, it would become more difficult to grow the plant for other purposes. Hearst’s media empire spread stories about violent attacks on white women by Mexican immigrants intoxicated with marijuana, creating a sense of moral panic and support for controls on the drug, and therefore on the plant as well.
David Nutt (Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs)
Chess simulates a truth that we tend to suppress, namely that life is hazardous and we are always at risk. The game is fun but is not entirely innocent fun which is why we tend to reach for chess metaphors in tense situations with high stakes. Love for instance, is a tense situation with high stakes. Or at least it can be. Historically various works of art and literature associate chess with courtly love and by extension with love in general. However chess is a metaphor for love not because the players long for each another or want to knock down the pieces and make out on the board - though there is of course a time and place for that. The link between chess and love is much more oblique. The spirit of eros permeates the game in the forms of suffering and passion that characterise unrequited and unconsummated romantic love ... And shared attention of any process of co creation is a rare and profoundly intimate process. In fact the intimacy we feel through shared attention may be an unconscious emotional driver that keeps us coming back to the game. Moreover, chess thinking in some ways entails compassion because it is about cultivating order through chaos through caring about the felt significance of particular pieces and squares and ideas and outcomes … Caring is a fundamental feature of being in the world … Controlling for all other variables, those given a potted plant to look after consistently lived longer than those who were not.
Jonathan Rowson (The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life)
The rain-filled potholes, set in naked rock are usually devoid of visible plant life but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable microscopic creatures there may be certain amphibians like the spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in his fashion, mates with the handiest female and fills the pool with a swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral existence. But a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the pool dries up they dig into the sediment as their parents did before, making burrows which they seal with mucus in order to preserve that moisture necessary to life. There they wait, day after day, week after week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening - we can imagine - for the sounds of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust above their heads. If it comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; if not, this particular colony of Bufonidae is reduced eventually to dust, a burden on the wind. Rain and puddles bring out other amphibia, even in the desert. It's a strange, stirring, but not uncommon thing to come on a pool at night, after an evening of thunder and lightning and a bit of rainfall, and see the frogs clinging to the edge of their impermanent pond, bodies immersed in water but heads out, all croaking away in tricky counterpoint. They are windbags: with each croak the pouch under the frog's chin swells like a bubble, then collapses. Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night with tireless perseverance. To human ears their music has a bleak, dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their own existence, however brief it may be, and for the joy in the common life. Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kitfoxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness. What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of the second. Nothing is lost except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again. The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And again.
Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
Winegrowing lore said rosebushes were planted to serve as early-warning indicators of sickness in the vines. They supposedly were also a leftover tradition from the days when horse-drawn plows worked the vineyards—the thorns encouraged the beasts to make wide turns and thus reduce the potential damage to the stakes and wires that supported the rows.
Christie Ridgway (Can't Hurry Love (Three Kisses, #3))