“
Hope abides; therefore I abide.
Countless frustrations have not cowed me.
I am still alive, vibrant with life.
The black cloud will disappear,
The morning sun will appear once again
In all its supernal glory.
”
”
Sri Chinmoy (The Wings of Joy: Finding Your Path to Inner Peace)
“
Gareth sucked in a breath. Hyacinth’s brother wasn’t going to make this easy on him. But that didn’t matter. He had vowed to do this right, and he would not be cowed.
He looked up, meeting the viscount’s dark eyes with steady purpose. “I would like to marry Hyacinth,” he said. And then, because the viscount did not say anything, because he didn’t even move, Gareth added, “Er, if she’ll have me.”
And then about eight things happened at once. Or perhaps there were merely two or three, and it just seemed like eight, because it was all so unexpected.
First, the viscount exhaled, although that did seem to understate the case. It was more of a sigh, actually—a huge, tired, heartfelt sigh that made the man positively deflate in front of Gareth. Which was astonishing. Gareth had seen the viscount on many occasions and was quite familiar with his reputation. This was not a man who sagged or groaned.
His lips seemed to move through the whole thing, too, and if Gareth were a more suspicious man, he would have thought that the viscount had said, “Thank you, Lord.”
Combined with the heavenward tilt of the viscount’s eyes, it did seem the most likely translation.
And then, just as Gareth was taking all of this in, Lord Bridgerton let the palms of his hands fall against the desk with surprising force, and he looked Gareth squarely in the eye as he said, “Oh, she’ll have you. She will definitely have you.”
It wasn’t quite what Gareth had expected. “I beg your pardon,” he said, since truly, he could think of nothing else.
“I need a drink,” the viscount said, rising to his feet. “A celebration is in order, don’t you think?”
“Er…yes?”
Lord Bridgerton crossed the room to a recessed bookcase and plucked a cut-glass decanter off one of the shelves. “No,” he said to himself, putting it haphazardly back into place, “the good stuff, I think.” He turned to Gareth, his eyes taking on a strange, almost giddy light. “The good stuff, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Ehhhh…” Gareth wasn’t quite sure what to make of this.
“The good stuff,” the viscount said firmly. He moved some books to the side and reached behind to pull out what looked to be a very old bottle of cognac. “Have to keep it hidden,” he explained, pouring it liberally into two glasses.
“Servants?” Gareth asked.
“Brothers.” He handed Gareth a glass. “Welcome to the family.
”
”
Julia Quinn (It's in His Kiss (Bridgertons, #7))
“
If we have a positive mental attitude, then even when surrounded by hostility, we shall not lack inner peace.
”
”
Leonard Scheff (The Cow in the Parking Lot: A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger)
“
That's what it is. That's what my morning was like: all these real physical heavy positive vibrations, the soul of this tape. The fuzzy groove. The meaning of it all, if it has one: All love, all the time. Peace and happiness in every day. Peace and happiness with cow blood dripping from your hands, bright blood staining your fingerprints because you didn't glove up since you don't normally do prep work. Peace and happiness when you're making a list of everything that's wrong with the world and squinting your eyes tight trying to imagine your way out of it. Peace, peace, peace, happiness, happiness, happiness.
”
”
John Darnielle (Master of Reality)
“
The situation is established not only to provoke defensiveness but to sidetrack the reformer into answering the wrong questions.... In this, the pattern of discourse resembles that of dinnertime conversations about feminism in the early 1970s. Questions of definition often predominate. Whereas feminists were parlaying questions which trivialized feminism such as "Are you one of those bra burners?" vegetarians must define themselves against the trivializations of "Are you one of those health nuts?" or "Are you one of those animal lovers?" While feminists encountered the response that "men need liberation too," vegetarians are greeted by the postulate that "plants have life too." Or to make the issue appear more ridiculous, the position is forwarded this way: "But what of the lettuce and tomato you are eating; they have feelings too!"
The attempt to create defensiveness through trivialization is the first conversational gambit which greets threatening reforms. This pre-establishes the perimeters of discourse. One must explain that no bras were burned at the Miss America pageant, or the symbolic nature of the action of that time, or that this question fails to regard with seriousness questions such as equal pay for equal work. Similarly, a vegetarian, thinking that answering these questions will provide enlightenment, may patiently explain that if plants have life, then why not be responsible solely for the plants one eats at the table rather than for the larger quantities of plants consumed by the herbivorous animals before they become meat? In each case a more radical answer could be forwarded: "Men need first to acknowledge how they benefit from male dominance," "Can anyone really argue that the suffering of this lettuce equals that of a sentient cow who must be bled out before being butchered?" But if the feminist or vegetarian responds this way they will be put back on the defensive by the accusation that they are being aggressive. What to a vegetarian or a feminist is of political, personal, existential, and ethical importance, becomes for others only an entertainment during dinnertime.
”
”
Carol J. Adams (The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory)
“
And proceeded past Trevor Williams, former hunter, seated before the tremendous heap of all the animals he had dispatched in his time: hundreds of deer, thirty-two black bear, three bear cubs, innumerable coons, lynx, foxes, mink, chipmunks, wild turkeys, woodchucks, and cougars; scores of mice and rats, a positive tumble of snakes, hundreds of cows and calves, one pony (carriage-struck), twenty thousand or so insects, each of which he must briefly hold, with loving attention, for a period ranging from several hours to several months, depending on the quality of loving attention he could muster and the state of fear the beast happened to have been in at the time of its passing.
”
”
George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo)
“
I don’t like to think of my hips as a nuisance, but more of an asset. I mean, if this were, like 1642, my whole birthing hips would be worth many cows or something.
”
”
Julie Murphy (Dumplin' (Dumplin', #1))
“
In this world, women held a position somewhere between horses and cows. Aristocratic women were slightly better off.
”
”
Lina J. Potter (First Lessons (A Medieval Tale, #1))
“
Eventually I got the cow into position – although when I say I, there is some televisual evidence to suggest it was Kaleb
”
”
Jeremy Clarkson (Diddly Squat: ‘Til The Cows Come Home)
“
Feminists have often highlighted the “otherness” of nonhuman animals while highlighting similarities between women and the men who hold power. Biologically speaking, any two humans will be
more similar than a human and any other species. But the position of most women in patriarchal societies is closer to that of chickens and cows than it is to that of the men who hold power.
”
”
Lisa Kemmerer (Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices)
“
Power and influence in Congress," he explained, "are not obtained by promoting one's own measures. They come either from blocking measures others want enacted or sup- porting measures others oppose. As a member of the Agricul- ture Committee, Mrs. Chisholm would have been in an ideal position to make her presence felt. Without offending her own constituents, she could have voted against all of the bills introduced for the benefit of farmers. At the same time she could have introduced bills to scuttle price supports and other farm programs. Before long, farm belt congressmen would have been knocking on her door, asking favors." That kind of long-range Machiavellian strategy may be fine for a white, mid-western congressman whose district has more cows than voters, and who has all the time in the world to try to work himself up to that comfortable share of power that a House member can achieve if he plays by the rules, makes his district "safe," and lives long enough. What I can never forget, and what my friend the reporter apparently never knew, is that there are children in my district who will not live long enough for me to play it the way he proposes.
”
”
Shirley Chisholm (Unbought and Unbossed)
“
Position B: Wolves, as top predators, are a natural part of healthy, complex, self-regulating ecosystems, and removing most of them (the plans call for 80, even 100 percent reduction in certain management units) is only bound to screw things up. Without wolves, deer and moose numbers explode in unsustainable numbers, then crash, over and over. Wolves, too, are a valued resource on which trappers and subsistence hunters depend, and a multimillion-dollar cash cow attracting throngs of ecotourists and photographers. Their presence also offers inestimable aesthetic value to many residents, even if they never manage to see one. Besides that, shooting wolves from airplanes is just plain wrong and reflects horribly on the state’s image. Anyone who doesn’t see things that way is a nearsighted, beetle-browed, knuckle-dragging redneck.
”
”
Nick Jans (A Wolf Called Romeo)
“
What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the “lower” animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block?
”
”
Douglas R. Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop)
“
She has seen neighbouring women do it, has heard their cries rise into screams, smelt the rusty coin scent of new birth. She has seen the pig, the cow, the ewes birth their young; she has been the one called on by her father, by Bartholomew, when lambs were stuck. Her female fingers, slender, tapered, were required to enter that narrow, heated, slick canal, and hook out the soft hoofs, the gluey nose, the plastered-back ears. And she knows, in the way she always does, that she will reach the other side of birth, that she and this baby will live. Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the relentlessness of it. It is like trying to stand in a gale, like trying to swim against the current of a flooded river, like trying to lift a fallen tree. Never has she been more sensible of her weakness, of her inadequacy. She has always felt herself to be a strong person: she can push a cow into milking position, she can douse and stir a load of laundry, she can lift and carry her small siblings, a bale of skins, a bucket of water, an armful of firewood. Her body is one of resilience, of power: she is all muscle beneath smooth skin. But this is something else. Something other. It laughs at her attempts to master it, to subdue it, to rise above it. It will, Agnes fears, overtake her. It will seize her by the scruff of her neck and plunge her down, under the surface of the water.
”
”
Maggie O'Farrell (Hamnet)
“
All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, “We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit.” Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders’ clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive)
“
And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called "sage brush" appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
“
Sometimes chance is on the believer’s side and he or she does resolve the problems after praying or otherwise petitioning the supernatural, and that’s actually when the false connection between faith and good fortune (by definition a superstition) is fortified. The believer thanks their god or spiritual force of choice and thinks it can be counted on in the future. Furthermore, when someone credits their accomplishments to a god or other mystical force—whether it’s for helping them overcome an addiction or achieve something great—it pushes them further from reality. It not only takes away from the individual’s hard work that is likely responsible, but it also implies that person was somehow more important than anybody else who may have failed to accomplish the same feat. If you are considering expressing gratitude to an unseen and unproven force for positive developments in your life, remember that it can be equally (if not more so) rewarding to thank those who truly helped you accomplish whatever the positive action is. If it was your own hard work, acknowledge that. If it was someone else’s, let them know they are appreciated. If it was dumb luck, don’t count on it in the future but take advantage of it while it’s there. This is the beauty of reality.
”
”
David G. McAfee (No Sacred Cows: Investigating Myths, Cults, and the Supernatural)
“
Bhogpur is two kos from Bhagmalpur," he said. If Bhogpur is two kos from Bhagmalpur, then it may be possible to make a reasonable guess at our position. It depended on what he meant by a kos.
"There are seventy rassis in one kos," Karam Chand said.
"There are twelve hundred laggis in one kos," said Bhosla in a sudden garrulous outburst.
"There are three thousand six hundred gaj in one kos, said Jagganath, the youngest boatman.
"Now I am telling you," said G. "If one kos is three thousand six hundred gaj, there are three miles and eighty yards in one kos." If this was so, we had not travelled more than five miles since the previous morning.*
* There is also a gaukos, a rather vague measure - the distance a cow's bellow can be heard.
”
”
Eric Newby (Slowly Down the Ganges)
“
It did not take Bunch very long, amid the politicking and the revelry, to discover the darker side of life in Charleston’s homes. “The frightful atrocities of slaveholding must be seen to be described,” he wrote in a private letter that wound up prominently positioned in the official slave-trade correspondence of the Foreign Office. “My next-door neighbor, a lawyer of the first distinction and a member of the Southern Aristocracy, told me himself that he flogged all his own people—men and women—when they misbehaved. I hear also that he makes them strip, and after telling them that they were to consider it as a great condescension on his part to touch them, gives them a certain number of lashes with a cow-hide. The frightful evil of the system is that it debases the whole tone of society—for the people talk calmly of horrors which would not be mentioned in civilized society. It is literally no more to kill a slave than to shoot a dog.
”
”
Christopher Dickey (Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South)
“
They waited in position, bayonets fixed, on the morning of July 1st, and listened to the mines go, on schedule at 7.25 a.m. In the distant village of Fricourt, the church bell rang clamorously as the tower collapsed.
The weird sound unnerved the men as they waited in their trench, as if the clanging of the bell were the terrible gabble of their own mute fear. Then the whistle went, and they surged forward, over the top into a world of noise.
There was no logic that carried Perceval Lucas forth as he ran on those strong, lean legs of his; no discernible path that had taken him from his garden by the stream at Rackham Cottage to one of the bloodiest battles in human history, there on the upper reaches of the River Somme.
The following morning, his company entered the village square, and kicked away, underfoot, the stone fragments of saints. The church was a smoking stump, and they saw that its bell-tower had crushed two houses as it fell. Cows wandered the streets, mad and fevered with not having been milked.
”
”
Alison MacLeod
“
Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, “Stick it in!” With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer’s rectum. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t normal. At least it wasn’t for me. This was definitely against God’s plan.
I was supposed to check the monitor and announce if the temperature was above ninety-degrees. The first one was fine. But before I had a chance to remove the probe, Tim set the hot branding iron against the steer’s left hip. The animal let out a guttural Mooooooooooooo!, and as he did, the contents of its large intestine emptied all over my hand and forearm.
Tim said, “Okay, Ree, you can take it out now.” I did. I didn’t know what to do. My arm was covered in runny, stinky cow crap. Was this supposed to happen? Should I say anything? I glanced at my sister, who was looking at me, completely horrified.
The second animal entered the chute. The routine began again. I stuck it in. Tim branded. The steer bellowed. The crap squirted out. I was amazed at how consistent and predictable the whole nasty process was, and how nonchalant everyone--excluding my sister--was acting. But then slowly…surely…I began to notice something.
On about the twentieth animal, I began inserting the thermometer. Tim removed his branding iron from the fire and brought it toward the steer’s hip. At the last second, however, I fumbled with my device and had to stop for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that when I paused, Tim did, too. It appeared he was actually waiting until I had the thermometer fully inserted before he branded the animal, ensuring that I’d be right in the line of fire when everything came pouring out. He had planned this all along, the dirty dog.
Seventy-eight steers later, we were finished. I was a sight. Layer upon layer of manure covered my arm. I’m sure I was pale and in shock. The cowboys grinned politely. Tim directed me to an outdoor faucet where I could clean my arm. Marlboro Man watched as he gathered up the tools and the gear…and he chuckled.
As my sister and I pulled away in the car later that day, she could only say, “Oh. My. God.” She made me promise never to return to that awful place.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d found out later that this, from Tim’s perspective, was my initiation. It was his sick, twisted way of measuring my worth.
”
”
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
“
Most of the liberal defenses of pornography are equally muddled. Writers and university professors feel quite heroic in taking the witness stand to avow that some outrageously immoral book is somehow supremely moral. These men usually display two contradictory motives. First, they oppose the censorship of any book on any grounds as a matter of principle. Anything and everything should be freely published. Some would impose restraints on things that are Nazi, racist, or similarly tabooed, but many are earnest champions of unlimited freedom of publication. Unlimited freedom is for them a supreme good. Second, since unlimited freedom is seen as a supreme good, it follows that the results of such an unlimited freedom must somehow be good. They therefore feel it necessary to defend the moral integrity of such books as are attacked for their use of this license. As a result, these scholars and writers place themselves in a most amusing position: they are ready to defend anything attacked on moral grounds, as though freedom makes all its adherents good. No doubt if some avant-garde writer issued a book empty of everything save a cake of cow dung between its covers, scholars would not be lacking to interpret for a court what a profound and redeeming social commentary was at stake.
”
”
Rousas John Rushdoony
“
One day Marlboro Man invited my sister, Betsy, and me to the ranch to work cattle. She was home from college and bored, and Marlboro Man wanted Tim to meet another member of my family.
“Working cattle” is the term used to describe the process of pushing cattle, one by one, through a working chute, during which time they are branded, dehorned, ear tagged, and “doctored” (temperature taken, injections given). The idea is to get all the trauma and mess over with in one fell swoop so the animals can spend their days grazing peacefully in the pasture.
When Betsy and I pulled up and parked, Tim greeted us at the chute and immediately assigned us our duties. He handed my sister a hot shot, which is used to gently zap the animal’s behind to get it to move through the chute.
It’s considered the easy job.
“You’ll be pushing ’em through,” Tim told Betsy. She dutifully took the hot shot, studying the oddly shaped object in her hands.
Next, Tim handed me an eight-inch-long, thick-gauge probe with some kind of electronic device attached. “You’ll be taking their temperature,” Tim informed me.
Easy enough, I thought. But how does this thing fit into its ear? Or does it slide under its arm somehow? Perhaps I insert it under the tongue? Will the cows be okay with this?
Tim showed me to my location--at the hind end of the chute. “You just wait till the steer gets locked in the chute,” Tim directed. “Then you push the stick all the way in and wait till I tell you to take it out.”
Come again? The bottom fell out of my stomach as my sister shot me a worried look, and I suddenly wished I’d eaten something before we came. I felt weak. I didn’t dare question the brother of the man who made my heart go pitter-pat, but…in the bottom? Up the bottom? Seriously?
Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, “Stick it in!” With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer’s rectum. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t normal. At least it wasn’t for me. This was definitely against God’s plan.
”
”
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
“
Marlboro Man paused, his eyes piercing through to my marrow. We’d started out watching the sunset over the ranch, sitting on the tailgate of his pickup, legs dangling playfully over the edge. By the time the sun had gone down, we were lying down, legs overlapping, as the sky turned blacker and blacker. And making out wildly. Making out, oh, so very wildly.
I didn’t want to wait for him to bring it up again--the dreaded subject of Chicago. I’d avoided it like the plague for the past several days, not wanting to face the reality of my impending move, of walking away from my new love so soon after we’d found each other. But now the subject wasn’t so scary; it was safe. I’d made the decision, at least for now, to stay--I just had to tell Marlboro Man. And finally, in between kisses, the words bubbled suddenly and boldly to the surface; I could no longer contain them. But before I had a chance to say them, Marlboro Man opened his mouth and began to speak.
“Oh no,” he said, a pained expression on his face. “Don’t tell me--you’re leaving tomorrow.” He ran his fingers through my hair and touched his forehead to mine.
I smiled, giggling inside at the secret I was seconds away from spilling. A herd of cows mooed in the distance. Serenading us.
“Um…no,” I said, finding it hard to believe what I was about to tell him. “I’m not…I’m…I’m not going.”
He paused, then pulled his face away from mine, allowing just enough distance between us for him to pull focus. “What?” he asked, is strong fingers still grasping my hair. A tentative smile appeared on his face.
I breathed in a deep dose of night air, trying to calm my schoolgirl nervousness. “I, umm…” I began. “I decided to stick around here a little while.” There. I’d said it. This was all officially real.
Without a moment of hesitation, Marlboro Man wrapped his ample arms around my waist. Then, in what seemed to be less than a second, he hoisted me from my horizontal position on the bed of his pickup until we were both standing in front of each other. Scooping me off my feet, he raised me up to his height so his icy blue eyes were level with mine.
“Wait…are you serious?” he asked, taking my face in his hands. Squaring it in front of his. Looking me in the eye. “You’re not going?”
“Nope,” I answered.
“Whoa,” he said, smiling and moving in for a long, impassioned kiss on the back of his Ford F250. “I can’t believe it,” he continued, squeezing me tightly.
”
”
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
“
Now, there were large elements of coercion even in the most gentle moments of the Egyptian rule, and there were many joyful expressions of human co-operation and intellectual and emotional enrichment even under the most ruthless of totalitarian monarchs in Mesopotamia. In both cases, many of the higher functions of the city were promoted and enlarged. Neither Egyptian nor Mesopotamian form, then, was pure; for the more co-operative kind of local grouping had features that raised disturbing parallels with insect societies in their tendency to fixation and self-stultification; while in the communities most lamed by neurotic anxieties and irrational aggressive compulsions, there was nevertheless a sufficient cultivation of the more positive aspects of life to create a system of law and order, with reciprocal obligations, and to develop some degree of morality for insiders, even though a growing number of these insiders were slaves, captured in war, or remained the cowed inhabitants of villages compelled under threat of starvation to labor like slaves. So much for the forces that in the early stages of civilization brought the city into existence. We shall soon make a provisional appraisal of the cultural results.
”
”
Lewis Mumford (The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects)
“
Suppose Public Enemy No.16, has just held you up at the point of a gun; taken your wallet with all your ten singles in it, and is stalking away, his back turned to you with the contempt criminals have for cowed citizens. Now is your chance (if you have recovered your senses). You take one or two soft steps toward him. Steal your right arm over his right shoulder, across his neck, around it; and grasp the collar of his coat on the left side, holding firmly. Ball your left hand into a hard fist and slam it into his left buttock. This will force his body forward and his head backward. The bony part of your right wrist jams it's way into his Adam's Apple. This is just the beginning of the action. You then drop to your left knee, bending your right leg to form a stumbling block. You continue. Vigorously you press the right arm and wrist across his throat and pull him backward. He falls over the right knee you have just prepared for him. Normally he would fall on his back. But you have prepared a worse fate for him. As he falls he naturally stretches out his arms to balance himself. You seize his left arm with your left hand and bend it in such a way that his body is turned over—onto his face. You then disengage your right arm from under his throat, but only far enough to grasp his chin and twist it upward and away from the ground. To keep him passive in this punishing position, you lower your right knee to press into the small of his back. While further to imprison him, you grasp his right arm with your right and stretch it upward. (See Fig. 21) This is the most devastating and utterly demoralizing hold imaginable. If you study it carefully and learn to co-ordinate all the movements with speed and precision, you will most likely, by means of this one trick alone, justify all the energy and effort you have given to Jiu-jitsu. It will establish you at once as an athlete of no mean parts. You will be the terror of your enemies and the joy of your friends.
”
”
Louis Shomer (Police Jiu-Jitsu: and Vital Holds In Wrestling)
“
In the Hebrew Bible a story is told of Joseph (of Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat fame), who saved Egypt from a savage, seven-year famine. The Pharaoh had a dream he could not interpret and asked his wisest advisers to explain it correctly to him. They couldn’t interpret it either, but someone remembered that Joseph, who was in prison at the time, had a reputation for explaining the meaning of dreams, and thus he was called for. In the dream Pharaoh was standing by a river when he saw seven “fat-fleshed” kine (or cows) come out of the water and feed in a meadow. Then seven others came out that were “lean-fleshed.” The second set of cows ate the first set. Joseph explained that the dream meant there would be seven years of plenty in Egypt and then seven years of famine. Therefore, Joseph suggested that the Pharaoh appoint someone “discreet and wise” to take a fifth of the harvest every year for seven years and store it as a buffer for the years of famine. The plan was approved and Joseph was given the position of vizier, or second in command, over Egypt. He executed the plan perfectly so that when the seven years of famine arrived everyone in Egypt and the surrounding areas, including Joseph’s extended family, was saved. In this simple story is one the most powerful practices Essentialists employ to ensure effortless execution.
”
”
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
“
We should have gone little beyond the Yanomamo if the net outcome of the sexual revolution is a secure position for women at the head of mace squads or in the nuclear command posts.
”
”
Marvin Harris (Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture)
“
Expert positioning is bold, proud, and (nearly) permanent. That’s why it’s called branding, because real branding is what you do when you can’t tell the cows apart from each other (or all the experts look alike).
”
”
David C. Baker (The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth)
“
The trick was to have a portfolio rich with cash generators and with high opportunity cash users while maintaining a positive cash balance (Exhibit 1–6). Surprisingly, this is not much of a trick in the long run. Most companies develop balanced portfolios over time by default as severely disadvantaged businesses are closed or sold off under the continual pressure for profits and cash. The real challenge is to consciously manage the movement of businesses within the portfolio. Management must allocate the corporation’s resources to move question-marked businesses into the star position before the growth slows, to keep the stars advantaged so that when growth slows the stars become cash cows, and to manage the cash cows for cash. The dogs need to be worked out of the portfolio.
”
”
George Stalk Jr. (Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar)
“
That day I learned a great lesson of how the use of personal power is so much more effective than position power.
”
”
Steve Robinson (Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A: How Faith, Cows, and Chicken Built an Iconic Brand)
“
And proceeded past Trevor Williams, former hunter, seated before the tremendous heap of all the animals he had dispatched in his time: hundreds of deer, thirty-two black bear, three bear cubs, innumerable coons, lynx, foxes, mink, chipmunks, wild turkeys, woodchucks, and cougars; scores of mice and rats, a positive tumble of snakes, hundreds of cows and calves, one pony (carriage-struck), twenty thousand or so insects, each of which he must briefly hold, with loving attention, for a period ranging from several hours to several months, depending on the quality of loving attention he could muster and the state of fear the beast happened to have been in at the time of its passing. Being thus held (the product of time and loving attention and being found sufficient, that is), that particular creature would heave up, then drive or fly or squirm away, diminishing Mr. Williams heap by one.
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George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo)
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In 1956 a rather delicate assignment came my way. I visited Switzerland at the invitation of Nestle but with a very specific brief from the Ministry of Industries, Government of India. Industries and Commerce Minister, Manubhai Shah, wanted me to ask the executives at Nestle what they were up to in our country. Under the excuse of producing condensed milk, they were importing not just milk powder, but also sugar and the tin plate for the cans! On my arrival at the airport at Nestle’s headquarters at Vevey, a Nestle car, about a mile long, was waiting to whisk me off to the best hotel in town where they put me up. I met with Kreeber, one of their two managing directors, and some other officers. The discussions turned pretty heated. I told them that my government had given them a licence to set up a plant in India so that they would produce condensed milk from Indian milk, not from imported ingredients. The Managing Director told me that it was not possible to produce condensed milk from buffalo milk, which was available in India. I said to him, ‘If you don’t know how to make it, come to me. I will teach you because I believe we can make it out of buffalo milk. I know it is more complicated than making it from cow’s milk and there are problems, but they are not insurmountable problems.’ When I assured them that it could be done, they said that their experts would have to come and set up their plant. Then they wanted the entire share capital in their hands. In those days government allowed only 49 per cent share capital to foreigners; 51 per cent had to be Indian. Kreeber said they could not agree to that. So I showed them a way out of that too. I said that 49 per cent could be with Nestle Alimentana and 51 per cent could be owned by Nestle India and in this way the entire project could stay in their hands. I was, in fact, facilitating their entry here. Ultimately, the Director agreed to set up a plant in India. At this point I told him that they could bring in any number of foreign experts they liked but my government hoped that, in five years, Indians who would be trained for the purpose would replace these experts. Kreeber’s response to this was that the production of condensed milk was an extremely delicate procedure and they ‘could not leave it to the natives to make’. At this, I lost my temper. Getting to my feet, I thumped the table loudly and said: ‘Please remember that you are speaking to a damned “native”. If you are suggesting that even after five years of training, the “natives” are not fit to occupy any position of authority in Nestle you are insulting my country. My country knows how to do without you.’ And I stormed out of the meeting – which I hope was what any self-respecting Indian would have done.
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Verghese Kurien (I Too Had a Dream)
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A Lady wrote on a Forum
"after my body gets old or not and collapses my thoughts which r electrical impulses will cease my body blood etc will melt back into the soil....my last breath which sustains life will go back into the atmosphere so we will be around until our galaxy implodes..."
I concur. Who says we die...?
I found the epiphany a long time ago that nature is our supreme being and we are going to be here Forever. You die and the grass feeds off your flesh, the cow eats the grass, your children eat the cow and then your children dies and the cycle goes on again. Just as how the carbon dioxide you breathe out is what plants take in and we survive on the oxygen they give out. We are not separate and distinct from nature. We are one.
God is a metaphor for the Universe. We are the universe and the universe is in us. It is evident in how the dead meat of an animal or the offspring of a plant gives us life in the form of food then we die and our body deteriorates to fertilize the soil so the plants can survive.
The universe is everything. The air that we inhale, the various plants that cures ailments and alleviates various symptoms of diseases. It Should not be cryptic or alien to us to understand how a plant cell completely independent of us can affect our health in such a positive way. That is because the universe is in every one of us.
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Crystal Evans (Jamaican Acute Ghetto Itis)
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A ghost cow has at least some kind of reality, but a negative cow is less real than no cow. A cow from a cow leaves nothing, but adding a negative cow to a positive cow, causing both to vanish like a particle meeting its antiparticle,
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Scientific American (The Magic and Mystery of Numbers)
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Financial freedom is important.
MONEY IS GOOD. There is no doubt about it.
I have NO quarrel with things, with new cars (that smell so good!) or spacious houses. I believe in success, prosperity and abundance: it is what The Creator wants for everyone: part of our legitimate aspirations for a better life and a great help to fulfill our purpose.
Fat cows are better than skinny cows. I have been through fat cows, SO FAT they seemed to be on hormones; but have also experienced the lean cows, the scrawny and ugly ones! Worst, there was a time in my life when THERE WERE NO COWS!!! Times so bad that I became like a cow myself… Unable to think, just brooding and waiting for miracles!
So, believe me, I know and understand the importance of money.,.
However, to forget the real WHY’s and WHAT FOR’s of money, is a dangerous business...
The real problem, the terrible thing, is that too many are willing to do whatever it takes, even if they harm others, to find the dollar, to get the money, to obtain the cash…
Orison Swett Marden, father of personal motivation in the nineteenth century, masterfully warned us:
Often what is called success is failure. When men love money so much, that they sacrifice their friendships, their family, their home life; sacrifice position, honor, health, everything for the dollar, their life is a failure, although they may have accumulated money.
In other words, SUCCESS IS NOT how much money you have in the bank, with little care for anything else. “The greatest success, in the end, is to live a good life”, said Jim Rohn.
Just to accumulate things does not get you a happy and fulfilled life…
Those things come from living a balanced life.
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Mauricio Chaves Mesén (YES! TO SUCCESS)
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M’lady?” Eva glanced at the man on her left distractedly. Keddy, the redhead with an unfortunate blanket of freckles on his face, had urged his mount closer again to address her. “Aye?” “Why are you talking to your horse about our laird?” “Was I?” Eva asked, taken aback at the realization that she must have been muttering her displeasure with her new husband aloud. “Aye,” Keddy assured her, then glanced to the man riding on her other side. “Was she no’, Donaidh?” “Aye.” The large, dark-haired man urged his own mount closer again so that Eva was sandwiched between the two of them on Millie’s back. “And ye werenae soundin’ too pleased with him. Are ye no pleased to be the MacAdie’s bride?” Eva considered lying to avoid offending these men, but lying wasn’t in her nature. “I would be more pleased had he bothered to collect me himself, rather than having you collect me like a new cow for the fields,” she admitted bluntly. “Ah.” Ewan and Domhall had moved up again so that the four of them were crowding her once more. It was Ewan who decided to address this matter now, “Yer English, so ye wouldnae be understandin’, but Connall wouldnae send the six of us to collect a cow. He’d send one man, and it wouldnae be any o’ us.” “Aye,” the other men nodded their agreement. “So I should be flattered that he could not be bothered to come fetch me himself, but sent the six of you?” Eva asked dryly. “Aye.” Ewan nodded. “O’course,” Keddy agreed. “After all, he couldnae collect ye himsel’, so sent us in his stead. Six of us in his stead. It shows how important ye are. He even sent Ewan.” The way he said it made it sound like it was a huge honor, an opinion that was verified for Eva when Domhall added, “Aye, and Ewan is his first.” The way he said that suggested it was an important position to hold. Eva was less interested in that, however, than why the man couldn’t collect her himself, so asked, “Why could he not collect me himself?” “Well . . . That’d be difficult to explain, lass,” Ewan began slowly even as Keddy said, “It’s his condition.” “Condition?” she asked with a combination of concern and interest. “Aye, his condition,” Ewan muttered, but he was glaring at Keddy for interfering. “What condition, pray tell?” Ewan’s scowl became even more fierce on Keddy at this question, then he finally glanced at her and said, “Tis best to ask him that.” Eva
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Hannah Howell (The Eternal Highlander (McNachton Vampires, #1))
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But then, on a brisk February evening my junior year, I attended a free yoga class at the Harvard Divinity School Andover Chapel. I came in fully expecting to do cat, cow, and child’s pose. Our instructor, Nicholas, who was also a graduate student there, had us on our backs with taut abs, legs held in the air in a ninety-degree position, neck lifted off the ground, hands stretched above our heads. I had become the sleeping dragon. One minute in, my body was trembling. You can’t. I told myself I could. You can’t. I opened my eyes and saw everyone else peacefully holding their pose. This voice yelling at me wasn’t my own. So where was it coming from? You can’t. It was Hang telling me to dump my elementary school best friends who still played with toy horses at thirteen. He said I needed to be more strategic about my social ranking. You can’t be friends with them. My sister excluding me from her life when we became teenagers. You can’t hang out with us. Ba calling me pathetic when I told him I wasn’t pursuing med school. You can’t even try because you’re too dumb. I screamed, You can’t, right back inside of my head, telling all of them what I never had the courage to say. My body shuddered as the rage escaped my body like bats flying out from a cave. Hot tears fell from the sides of my eyes into the chapel carpet floor. And then I heard a clear voice inside of me speak. It was not mine, it was someone else’s. “All those times you’ve felt unloved or alone, you weren’t. God, through the presence of the body, has always been there for you.” Who was this voice? And how could my body be the key to loving myself? My body was always something I had seen as an inconvenience, a detached thing I had to fix. But tonight, I felt welcome to get to know my body.
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Susan Lieu (The Manicurist's Daughter)
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Gandhi’s defence of the killing of the maimed cow brought upon him a further torrent of criticism. He received so many hostile letters that, in a rare resort to sarcasm, he said his critics ‘seem bent upon improving the finances of the Postal Department’. Most letters were ‘full of abuse’; they were ‘practising himsa in the name of ahimsa’. But one letter deserved a reply; this had suggested that Gandhi’s position might lend itself to an argument in favour of the selective
assassination of tyrants and dictators. For, if ‘a man begins to oppress a whole people and there is no other way to stop his oppression’, then it would be ‘an act of ahimsa to rid society of his presence by putting him to death’. The correspondent added: ‘You say that there is no himsa in killing off animal pests that destroy a farmer’s crops; then why should it not be ahimsa to kill human pests that threaten society with destruction and worse?’
In response, Gandhi clarified that his definition of ahimsa did not in any way endorse manslaughter. The killing of the calf was undertaken for the sake of the animal itself. Recalling his earlier defence of killing monkeys that destroy crops, Gandhi noted that ‘society as yet knows of no means by which to effect a change of heart in the monkeys and their killing may therefore be pardonable, but there is no evil-doer or tyrant who can be considered beyond reform. That is why the killing of a human being out of self-interest can never find a place in the scheme of ahimsa.
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Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
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It is as simple as saying that nature has made birds to fly - therefore we should not raise them in cages for release at the pleasure of "gentleman hunters" positioned for the shot. Nature has made elephants and giraffe and rhinoceros to inhabit the plains - therefore we should not shoot them, stuff them, and stick them in our ballrooms for display. Nature has made whales and dolphins to swim the seas away from man - therefore we should not track them down by helicopters and attack or electrocute them from factory ships until they are almost gone from the waters. Nature has made pigs and cows and lambs and fowl to nurse from their mothers and walk and graze and mix with their kind - therefore we have no business confining and torturing and treating them like machines of our own inventions.
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Matthew Scully (Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy)
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I know you love to read and detest the rain,” she continued, watching his hands with fascination. “I know you can make a discarded fence post into a work of art with nothing more than a sharp knife. I know you treat your men like family, and they speak of you like a god. I know you’d rather be surrounded by cows than people. I know your mood goes positively foul whenever you’ve had too little sleep or gone too long without eating.” She paused. Swallowed a sudden lump.
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Elisa Braden (The Temptation of a Highlander (Midnight in Scotland, #3))
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It is as simple as saying that nature has made birds to fly - therefore we should not raise them in cages for release at the pleasure of "gentleman hunters" positioned for the shot. Nature has made elephants and giraffe and rhinoceros to inhabit the plains - therefore we should not shoot them, stuff them, and stick them in our ballrooms for display. Nature has made whales and dolphins to swim the seas away from man - therefore we should not track them down by helicopters and attack or electrocute them from factory ships until they are almost gone from the waters. Nature has made pigs and cows and lambs and fowl to nurse from their mothers and walk and graze and mix with their kind - therefore we have no business confining and torturing and treating them like machines of our own inventions.
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Matthew Scully (Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy)
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He was leading up to his favorite Christological position, which is that everything recognizable is inverted in the Christ-event: the strong are made weak, the prostitute is invited to the table, the Law is replaced with the Spirit, the sacrificial animals are set free. Christ’s task is immediacy, he doesn’t have time for anything but metaphor, he doesn’t have time for actual cows, to literally sacrifice is demonic (or as Tillich would say, to literalize any event in the myth of Jesus is idolatry).
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Haven Kimmel (The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel)
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Somehow, I simply felt it was wrong to lie about a Truth that was so serious, about an event that was so significant to our lives. Telling the truth seemed more important than averting suffering. Maybe suffering shouldn’t be avoided at all costs. Maybe if we would just face the horrors of our lives they wouldn’t be as horrible as we anticipate. And even if they are, maybe they should simply be respected and experienced as the horrors that they are. I suspect many readers have difficulty with this position, at least regarding some of the examples so far. But I also suspect everyone has a point at which the painful truth is preferred. Consider if your spouse or mate was cheating on you, like having an affair with someone at his or her office. Would you rather know, or would you rather live your life, and maybe even go to your grave, ignorant? It’s interesting: Romantic cheating is something that we’re usually more interested in knowing about. With cheating, we can’t tolerate—well, being cheated. Here, we are not merely out of touch with reality; someone to whom we’re emotionally attached is intentionally deceiving us, and we won’t be the object of that. Sure, we’ll deceive ourselves till the cows come home. As long as we’re in control of the deception, it’s okay. That said, we mustn’t forget Landers’s First Law of Psychology: “It depends; exceptions abound.” Ask Elvis: Honey, you lied when you said you loved me.
And I had no cause to doubt you.
But I'd rather go on hearing your lies,
Than go on living without you.8
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David Landers (Optimistic Nihilism: A Psychologist's Personal Story & (Biased) Professional Appraisal of Shedding Religion)
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As established at various points in this book, Walt was fond of animals. They inspired his most famous characters and works, such as Mickey Mouse, Bambi, The Jungle Book, and so forth. Therefore, Walt, WDAS, and Disney, owe their unique global success to animals. In a small way, WDAS does pay homage to animals, yet they have continuously ignored the harsh lives that most animals today experience. This text is of the opinion that all animals are sentient and can feel pain. However, given the reality and scale of animal harm today, one should hope that this position is incorrect. One should hope that WDAS is right; fish are objects, wild animals want to live in captivity, dogs desire human owners, cows are happy to lactate milk for other species, and so forth. Disney’s depictions of animal harm are hopefully the ones that are correct because if animals do have lives of their own, away from the selfishness of humans, then companies like Disney have made a huge mistake.
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Rebecca Rose Stanton (The Disneyfication of Animals (The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series))
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on a seagull poo–like texture when mixed into cold water. Amelia saved my palate and joints by introducing me to the Great Lakes hydrolyzed version (green label), which blends easily and smoothly. Add a tablespoon of beet root powder like BeetElite to stave off any cow-hoof flavor, and it’s a whole new game. Amelia uses BeetElite pre-race and pre-training for its endurance benefits, but I’m much harder-core: I use it to make tart, low-carb gummy bears when fat Tim has carb cravings. RumbleRoller: Think foam roller meets monster-truck tire. Foam rollers have historically done very little for me, but this torture device had an immediate positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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In their eyes, though he was now thirty-two, he did not have any regular, defined activity or position in society, whereas among his comrades one was already a colonel and imperial aide-de-camp, one a professor, one the director of a bank and a railway or the chief of an office like Oblonsky, while he (he knew very well what he must seem like to others) was a landowner, occupied with breeding cows, shooting snipe, and building things, that is, a giftless fellow who amounted to nothing and was doing, in society’s view, the very thing that good-for-nothing people do.
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Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
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Whenever an argument arose, a tactic that she had long practised was to imagine herself in the skin of the person disagreeing with her. It was a simple device—one she had learned from her father—and it seemed to work. Obed Ramotswe had employed it when negotiating the purchase of cattle. If you thought yourself into the skin of the other side, he said, then you might see the shortcomings of the cattle you were trying to sell. And if you did that, you could address those issues. Yes, that cow was a bit thin, but she had been in an overgrazed area and time was needed to get her back up to her proper weight; and yes, that bull was limping, but there was a positive side to it: a bull who limped would not wander, would not waste the energy he needed for his real task on pointless meandering through the bush—such a bull would be on permanent duty, and surely that was a good thing, was it not?
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Alexander McCall Smith (Precious and Grace (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #17))
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STYLE & STRUCTURE LANGUAGE Simple, clear; effectively creates the atmosphere of a world that, on the surface, is down-to-earth and unsophisticated, but that on a deeper level is complex and contains many conflicting forces. NARRATOR Invisible, third-person narrator who emphasizes the thoughts, feelings, and actions of animals. FABLE (Short tale that teaches a moral lesson, with animals as characters.) The animals act in accordance with their animal nature, but their ideas and emotions are those of human beings: Benjamin is skeptical about the chances of improving his lot and feels just as disillusioned about their new society as a human would; Clover, the gentle, patient elderly mare, reacts to tragic events with the compassionate tears of a human being. It is obvious that Orwell sympathizes with the plight of the animals, whether they are ruled by Jones or Napoleon. His treatment of animals makes them believable as individuals, not just as types. IRONY (Use of words to express a meaning opposite to the literal meaning.) Orwell sees the animals’ flaws as well as their positive qualities; treats circumstances of their lives with persuasive irony: the Rebellion occurs not merely because of a bloodthirsty desire for revenge on the animals’ part, but also because Jones has forgotten to feed them and they are desperately hungry. STRUCTURE Ten chapters. Rising action: First five chapters tell of the animals’ Rebellion. Crisis (turning point): Napoleon launches the surprise attack that drives Snowball into exile, thus eliminating a rival for the position of power. The novel’s second half tells how Napoleon firmly establishes his power by making clever use of propaganda and terrorist tactics. Several unexplained events are cleared up as the story develops: why Napoleon took puppies (he raises them as a police force); what happened to the cows’ milk (it is reserved exclusively for the pigs’ use); the reason for the pigs’ moving into farmhouse (they are secretly learning to acquire human habits); the strange negotiations with Foxwood and Pinchfield Farms (Napoleon attempts to deal with humans on terms advantageous to him).
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W. John Campbell (The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics)
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The guard stood up. The dots of light shielded by metal visors began blinking red. Two tall, thin vertical planks slowly lowered into horizontal position, blocking off oncoming cars. I heard a distant clanging, a clumsy chaotic bell, like a huge cow barreling down the tracks. The screaming of the horn shattered the air, the stabs of white light, the silver nose shooting into the intersection. An elongated silver body, belted with yellow windows, blurring and streaming into one strip of passengers’ heads, tilted this way and that, reading or eyes closed, blinking by, head head head head head, then gone. Stillness. A residual, clumsy banging of pots and pans. The planks gave a tremble and a lurch, rising to point up toward the sky, to announce the performance was over. The guard made a note on a clipboard, took his seat in the plastic chair, and all at once the red lights shut off, the intersection dark and quiet again.
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Chanel Miller (Know My Name: A Memoir)
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Cambodian dust whipped up in the wind and stuck to my clothes like clay. I put a hand between my face and the sun and blinked Phnom Penn dust from my tired eyes. One idea, drink, beamed light in all directions across my dark consciousness.
A slim lady walked toward me with a big smile and a bigger head. Her left hand rested on her waggling hips and her right hand rose above her head, limp-wristed, like she’d just thrown a winning ball toward a basket and was leaving her hand in the shot position. The lady walking toward me was a man. At least that much was clear, but the nature or our relationship was still a fog to me. She wore blue jeans and a white top accentuating her breasts, but her Adam’s apple and cow sized hands revealed more in daylight than she could hide at night.
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Craig Stone (Life Knocks)
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Truly fulfilled and thriving people don’t look within for answers. They find their joy in God’s law and meditate on it often. The Hebrew for “meditates” here has nothing to do with sitting in lotus position, thumbs to index fingers, and chanting “omm.” This is not the mind-emptying meditation of the East, but the mind-filling exercise of the ancient Jews. The root word means to mutter to oneself, chew like a cow chews its cud, and ponder what God says is true until his thoughts become our thoughts.
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Thaddeus Williams (Don't Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship)