Renovation Sayings Quotes

We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.

A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?

Rev. Pat Robertson says that if more states legalize gay marriage, God will destroy America. He did say that afterwards, gays will come in and do a beautiful renovation.

Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

Modern prophets say that our economics have failed us. No! It is not our economics which have failed; it is man who has failed-man who has forgotten God. Hence no manner of economic or political readjustment can possibly save our civilization; we can be saved only by a renovation of the inner man, only by a purging of our hearts and souls; for only by seeking first the Kingdom of God and His Justice will all these other things be added unto us.

St. Maximus the Confessor: “In no way will I say anything of my own, but what I have learned from the Fathers, altering nothing of their teaching.

We must flatly say that one of the greatest contemporary barriers to meaningful spiritual formation in Christlikeness is overconfidence in the spiritual efficacy of “regular church services,” of whatever kind they may be. Though they are vital, they are not enough. It is that simple. Individuals and local congregations of disciples must discover and effectively implement whatever is required to bring about the inner transformations of those who have really become apprentices of Jesus and who really do gather in immersion in the Trinitarian presence. In doing so they will have put in place the principles and absolutes of the New Testament churches, and they will certainly see the corresponding fruits and effects. Jesus did not give us a plan for spiritual formation that will fail, and he has the resources to see to it that it does not.

It really is a helluva fiver-upper," Henry said, because someone had to say it. "I feel like they should possibly renovate this basement if they want to get a good sale price. Hardwood floors, update the doorknobs, maybe put the wall back.

I write a few lines in haste to say that I am safe—and well advanced on my voyage. This letter will reach England by a merchantman now on its homeward voyage from Archangel; more fortunate than I, who may not see my native land, perhaps, for many years. I am, however, in good spirits: my men are bold and apparently firm of purpose, nor do the floating sheets of ice that continually pass us, indicating the dangers of the region towards which we are advancing, appear to dismay them. We have already reached a very high latitude; but it is the height of summer, and although not so warm as in England, the southern gales, which blow us speedily towards those shores which I so ardently desire to attain, breathe a degree of renovating warmth which I had not expected.

Awareness of the past is an antidote to both egotism and shallow optimism. It restrains optimism because it teaches us to be cautious about man’s perfectibility and to put a sober estimate on schemes to renovate the species. What coursebook in vanity and ambition is to be compared with Plutarch’s Lives? What more soundly rebukes the theory of automatic progress than the measured tread of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall? The reader of history is chastened, and, as he closes his book, he may say, with Dante, in the Inferno: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Among

Nothing has changed. Many say there is a new system that was born in America. Nah, it is not new. The system never died. It is more of a shady renovation, if you will. It reminds me of a reality TV show; however, it has been renewed with over 400 new seasons. It is now what I call the new Jim Crow.

My roommate calls a meeting while I’m out falling from my bike into a customer’s cheesecake, and as soon as I climb the stairs she is there with a suitcase, saying she’s moving to a gut-renovated building in Harlem with her boyfriend as 'send me a picture of your pussy' pings onto my screen. As I watch my roommate leave, the idea that I have a pussy seems preposterous. I move through the apartment and try to reconcile the existence of the clitoris with the broccoli smell my roommate left behind. I rinse the cheesecake from my hair and get back out on my route, where the men who line the street remind me that technically yes, I do have a pussy, and that I will live with the terror of protecting it for the rest of my life.

Aren’t the trunks stupid?” she whispered. “He says it gives the place a little authenticity. He didn’t like the renovation.” So the house had been a compromise: The husband wanted vintage, Susan wanted new, so they thought this outside/inside split might settle things. But the Burkes ended up more resentful than satisfied. Millions of dollars later, and neither of them were happy. Money is wasted on the rich.

Today we as a culture are schizophrenic on such matters. We want to say it doesn’t make any difference what we look at or hear. This, no doubt, is because we want to be “free” to show anything and to see anything—no matter how evil and revolting. But businesses still pay millions of dollars to show us something for thirty seconds on television. They do that because they know that what we repeatedly see and hear affects what we do. Otherwise they would go out of business.

I have used the theologians and their treatment of apocalypse as a model of what we might expect to find not only in more literary treatments of the same radical fiction, but in the literary treatment of radical fictions in general. The assumptions I have made in doing so I shall try to examine next time. Meanwhile it may be useful to have some kind of summary account of what I've been saying. The main object: is the critical business of making sense of some of the radical ways of making sense of the world. Apocalypse and the related themes are strikingly long-lived; and that is the first thing to say tbout them, although the second is that they change. The Johannine acquires the characteristics of the Sibylline Apocalypse, and develops other subsidiary fictions which, in the course of time, change the laws we prescribe to nature, and specifically to time. Men of all kinds act, as well as reflect, as if this apparently random collocation of opinion and predictions were true. When it appears that it cannot be so, they act as if it were true in a different sense. Had it been otherwise, Virgil could not have been altissimo poeta in a Christian tradition; the Knight Faithful and True could not have appeared in the opening stanzas of "The Faerie Queene". And what is far more puzzling, the City of Apocalypse could not have appeared as a modern Babylon, together with the 'shipmen and merchants who were made rich by her' and by the 'inexplicable splendour' of her 'fine linen, and purple and scarlet,' in The Waste Land, where we see all these things, as in Revelation, 'come to nought.' Nor is this a matter of literary allusion merely. The Emperor of the Last Days turns up as a Flemish or an Italian peasant, as Queen Elizabeth or as Hitler; the Joachite transition as a Brazilian revolution, or as the Tudor settlement, or as the Third Reich. The apocalyptic types--empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe--are fed by history and underlie our ways of making sense of the world from where we stand, in the middest.

We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific truth with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

As Thomas Watson beautifully wrote long ago: The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind upon God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God. “When I awake, I am still with thee” (Ps. 139:18). The thoughts are as travellers in the mind. David’s thoughts kept heaven-road, “I am still with Thee.” God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory? Oh, how far are they from being lovers of God, who scarcely ever think of God! “God is not in all his thoughts” (Ps. 10:4). A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge.

bank robber was standing in the center of the apartment, surrounded by Stockholmers, both figurative and literal. “Stockholm” is, after all, an expression more than it is a place, both for men like Roger and for most of the rest of us, just a symbolic word to denote all the irritating people who get in the way of our happiness. People who think they’re better than us. Bankers who say no when we apply for a loan, psychologists who ask questions when we only want sleeping pills, old men who steal the apartments we want to renovate, rabbits who steal our wives. Everyone who doesn’t see us, doesn’t understand us, doesn’t care about us. Everyone has Stockholmers in their life, even people from Stockholm have their own Stockholmers, only to them it’s “people who live in New York” or “politicians in Brussels,” or other people from some other place where people seem to think that they’re better than the Stockholmers think they

Seventy thousand years ago the Cognitive Revolution transformed the Sapiens mind, thereby turning an insignificant African ape into the ruler of the world. The improved Sapiens minds suddenly had access to the vast intersubjective realm, which enabled us to create gods and corporations, to build cities and empires, to invent writing and money, and eventually to split the atom and reach the moon. As far as we know, this earth-shattering revolution resulted from a few small changes in the Sapiens DNA, and a slight rewiring of the Sapiens brain. If so, says techno-humanism, maybe a few additional changes to our genome and another rewiring of our brain will suffice for launching a second cognitive revolution. The mental renovations of the first Cognitive Revolution gave Homo sapiens access to the intersubjective realm and turned us into the rulers of the planet; a second cognitive revolution might give Homo deus access to unimaginable new realms and turn us into the lords of the galaxy.

We did every part of this renovation together with our bare hands. Chip restored all of the wood floors, all the tile work--everything. I was learning as we went, but I definitely did my part. That house was gorgeous. Jo did an awesome job helping fix it up, and her ideas were great. There was a moment in the kitchen when I smarted off, though. I don’t even remember what I said, to be honest, but Jo got real mad and started yelling. She was carrying this five-gallon bucket of primer. She slammed it down on the ground to make a point, and it splashed right back up in her face. It was dripping off her eyelashes and her nose. Whenever something like that happened in my family, we’d all just laugh, you know? So I laughed, even though she was mad at me, and that made her even angrier. She started yelling again with the primer dripping all over, and I just had this moment where I looked at her and everything seemed to be going in slow motion and I thought, I love this woman. She is tough! Oh, this is gonna work. That was our first real “fight,” and even now we both agree it was our biggest. Chip had smarted off about something, so my blood was already boiling, but when I slammed that bucket down, Chip says I became a ninja--the kind you don’t want to mess with. Yet he still laughed, against his better judgment. We joke about it now, like, “Well, I’m mad, but I’m not primer-in-the-face mad.

The holy Scriptures speak of us as fallen creatures: in almost every page we shall find something that is calculated to abate the loftiness and silence the pretensions of man. “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” “What is man, that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous[5].” “How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water[6]?” “The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. They are all gone aside; they are altogether become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no not one[7].” “Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin[8]?” “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it.” “Behold, I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin hath my mother conceived me.” “We were by nature the children of wrath, even as others, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind.” “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!”—Passages might be multiplied upon passages, which speak the same language, and these again might be illustrated and confirmed at large by various other considerations, drawn from the same sacred source; such as those which represent a thorough change, a renovation of our nature, as being necessary to our becoming true Christians; or as those also which are suggested by observing that holy men refer their good dispositions and affections to the immediate agency of the Supreme Being.

Soon it was time for us to leave; the clock had struck midnight, and we had miles to go before we slept. After throwing my bouquet and saying good-byes, Marlboro Man and I ran through the doors of the club and climbed into the back of a smoky black limousine--the vehicle that would take us to the big city miles away, where we’d stay before flying to Australia the next day. As we pulled away from the waving, birdseed-throwing crowd at the front door of the club, we immediately settled into each other’s arms, melting into a puddle of white silk and black boots and sleepy, unbridled romance. It was all so new. New dress…new love…a new country--Australia--that neither of us had ever seen. A new life together. A new life for me. New crystal, silver, china. A newly renovated, tiny cowboy house that would be our little house on the prairie when we returned from our honeymoon. A new husband. My husband. I wanted to repeat it over and over again, wanted to shout it to the heavens. But I couldn’t speak. I was busy. Passion had taken over--a beast had been unleashed. Sleep deprived and exhausted from the celebration of the previous week, once inside the sanctity of the limousine, we were utterly powerless to stop it…and we let it fly. It was this same passion that had gotten us through the early stages of our relationship, and, ultimately, through the choice to wave good-bye to any life I’d ever imagined for myself. To become a part of Marlboro Man’s life instead. It was this same passion that assured me that everything was exactly as it should be. It was the passion that made it all make sense.

to say that I saw ways to connect with Americans that Barack and his West Wing advisers didn’t fully recognize, at least initially. Rather than doing interviews with big newspapers or cable news outlets, I began sitting down with influential “mommy bloggers” who reached an enormous and dialed-in audience of women. Watching my young staffers interact with their phones, seeing Malia and Sasha start to take in news and chat with their high school friends via social media, I realized there was opportunity to be tapped there as well. I crafted my first tweet in the fall of 2011 to promote Joining Forces and then watched it zing through the strange, boundless ether where people increasingly spent their time. It was a revelation. All of it was a revelation. With my soft power, I was finding I could be strong. If reporters and television cameras wanted to follow me, then I was going to take them places. They could come watch me and Jill Biden paint a wall, for example, at a nondescript row house in the Northwest part of Washington. There was nothing inherently interesting about two ladies with paint rollers, but it baited a certain hook. It brought everyone to the doorstep of Sergeant Johnny Agbi, who’d been twenty-five years old and a medic in Afghanistan when his transport helicopter was attacked, shattering his spine, injuring his brain, and requiring a long rehabilitation at Walter Reed. His first floor was now being retrofitted to accommodate his wheelchair—its doorways widened, its kitchen sink lowered—part of a joint effort between a nonprofit called Rebuilding Together and the company that owned Sears and Kmart. This was the thousandth such home they’d renovated on behalf of veterans in need. The cameras caught all of it—the soldier, his house, the goodwill and energy being poured in.

That picture of the soldiers? Miranda’s right. I’m sure that’s Hayes House in the background.” Without a word, everyone looked warily toward the front door, as if half expecting the house to come alive. “Why didn’t you say something before?” Miranda glared at him. “‘Cause I needed to think about it. And”--he hesitated, almost sheepish--“I didn’t want you freaking out any more than you were already.” “I’m more freaked out that you didn’t say anything.” “Sorry. But it is the same house--the way it was originally.” Now it was Parker who groaned. “Oh, don’t tell me. The house contacted you. You talk to dead houses.” “The thing is,” Etienne continued, unfazed, “I’ve worked plenty construction, and I’ve done plenty work on this house--I know good renovation when I see it.” Roo cast Miranda a bland look. “Construction sites are popular in this town. A chance to see Etienne Boucher without his shirt on. Very hot.” The others could hardly keep from laughing.

It interests me that there is no end of fictions, and facts made over in the forms of fictions. Because we class them under so many different rubrics, and media, and means of delivery, we don't recognize the sheer proliferation and seamlessness of them. I think at some level of scale or perspective, the police drama in which a criminal is shot, the hospital in which the doctors massage a heart back to life, the news video in which jihadists behead a hostage, and the human-interest story of a child who gets his fondest wish (a tourist trip somewhere) become the same sorts of drama. They are representations of strong experience, which, as they multiply, began to dedifferentiate in our uptake of them, despite our names and categories and distinctions... I say I watch the news to "know". But I don't really know anything. Certainly I can't do anything. I know that there is a war in Iraq, but I knew that already. I know that there are fires and car accidents in my state and in my country, but that, too, I knew already. With each particular piece of footage, I know nothing more than I did before. I feel something, or I don't feel something. One way I am likely to feel is virtuous and "responsible" for knowing more of these things that I can do nothing about. Surely this feeling is wrong, even contemptible. I am not sure anymore what I feel. What is it like to watch a human being's beheading? The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundredth are—like one's own experiences—retained, recountable, real, and yet dreamlike. Some describe the repetition as "numbing". "Numbing" is very imprecise. I think the feeling, finally, is of something like envelopment and even satisfaction at having endured the worst without quite caring or being tormented. It is the paradoxically calm satisfaction of having been enveloped in a weak or placid "real" that another person endured as the worst experience imaginable, in his personal frenzy, fear, and desperation, which we view from the outside as the simple occurrence of a death... I see: Severed heads. The Extra Value Meal. Kohl-gray eyelids. A holiday sale at Kohl's. Red seeping between the fingers of the gloved hand that presses the wound. "Doctor, can you save him?" "We'll do our best." The dining room of the newly renovated house, done in red. Often a bold color is best. The kids are grateful for their playroom. The bad guy falls down, shot. The detectives get shot. The new Lexus is now available for lease. On CNN, with a downed helicopter in the background, a peaceful field of reeds waves in the foreground. One after another the reeds are bent, broken, by boot treads advancing with the camera. The cameraman, as savior, locates the surviving American airman. He shoots him dead. It was a terrorist video. They run it again. Scenes from ads: sales, roads, ordinary calm shopping, daily life. Tarpaulined bodies in the street. The blue of the sky advertises the new car's color. Whatever you could suffer will have been recorded in the suffering of someone else. Red Lobster holds a shrimp festival. Clorox gets out blood. Advil stops pain fast. Some of us are going to need something stronger.

Everyone is winning at the game of life, and I’m always left holding the crappiest hand. It’s not fair . . . I’m so sick of hearing about everybody else’s fast metabolism, relaxing vacations, fancy home renovations, and amazing dogs who don’t chew the couch . . . I wanted ALL that. Oh! Here she is again with her “I’ve lost the weight and I’ve got it all” posts . . . If I had a trainer, I’d look like that too . . . If he says “It’s so easy for me” one more time . . . I had the idea to start Uber 10 YEARS ago. I was getting around to it . . . It’s so much easier when you don’t have kids . . . If only my husband understood me . . . I’ve had a much harder life, and I don’t go flaunting it . . . Anyone can use a social media filter, try showing up IRL looking that good . . . Everyone is outdoing me and there’s no room for me to shine. It’s all over for me. I realize, now, that I wanted their success to be MY success. But they’ve grabbed

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

Caretaking in a relationship is not flowers or date night—necessary as these are, they are the equivalent of a new color painted on your walls. Delightful, but not structural. Structural is unloading the dishwasher when it’s your partner’s turn, or making sure whoever gets home last from work is greeted with dinner. It’s learning about mushroom hunting or musical theater or rugby because your spouse loves it. It is talking about the best of your partner in public, not the worst. It’s listening to stories we have heard a hundred times before as if they are new. Often, it is just listening, period. My father always washed the car by hand before he took my mother out on a date, even after they were married. He would say he wanted it clean “for his girl.” That is the part she remembered, not where they went or what they did. As psychologist John Gottman, who has studied countless married couples, will tell you, it is the presence of respect and an abiding willingness to support each other, more than romance, that indicates whether a marriage will last. Couples that exhibit these qualities tend to stay together, creating the marital equivalent of firmitas.

It was hard to invest in a person when one saw how things passed. Take the ball player, for example, who dedicates his life, gets injured, and then watches the sport proceed without him. He sits on his leather couch, watching better athletes run across his television screen, younger ones on renovated fields. And he, who sacrificed his sweat, youth, and sanity to the sport and knew coaches, teammates, and even janitors at the stadium like brothers—is forced to still live afterward. His teammates said kind words before a match, hugged him after a goal, but now seem to be focused on new seasons and new goals. He gets left behind. Did none of it mean anything? He cries for the fast world to stop and says, “Slow down. This pains me. We were just here. I used to joke with you. We said we loved each other. Wait for me. Will you just wait for me?” Those hands he shook after a victory could not care for the weeping, broken-footed man hiding in the shadows of his home, once lit by the sun, once the life of the party. When Andrei walked into a job now, or even met someone for the first time, he thought: How long will it take you to forget me?

What Gehry means by questioning isn’t doubting or criticizing, much less attacking or tearing down. He means asking questions with an open-minded desire to learn. It is, in a word, exploration. “You’re being curious,” he says. That’s the opposite of the natural inclination to think that What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI), the fallacy we saw in the previous chapter. In contrast, Gehry assumes that there must be more to learn. By making that assumption, he avoids the trap of the fallacy.

The Elvis people last night were saying, ‘No it was fate.’ But I know it was an accident. Like driving down a backroad out in the country and going through a ghost town and you think, ‘This is the way it used to be,’ and you never forget the sight because it’s a perfectly shaped moment in time and space and like a vision of the distant future that will never be and you know it as you dream it, and you think, ‘We can renovate one of these old store fronts and move out here,’ and, of course, you know you never will but the vision has power because it answers a need. Some people find what they need in the darkness. Some people are transfixed by light. We checked in and we’ll check out.” •

It doesn’t matter what you say if you can’t back it up with what you do. They crave a holiness orthopraxy that is as strong as our orthodoxy.

This used to be a commercial building,” says Fernando, “but Erudite converted it into a school, for post-Choosing education. After the major renovations in Erudite headquarters about a decade ago--you know, when all the buildings across from Millennium were connected?--they stopped teaching there. Too old, hard to update.” “Thanks for the history lesson,” says Christina.

He pulled her upright and they stood facing each other, her hands in his. Again with the held breaths, the locked gazes. Twice in a row. It was almost too much! And Jane wanted to stay in that moment with him so much, her belly ached with the desire. “Your hands are cold,” he said, looking at her fingers. She waited. They had never practiced this part and the flimsy play gave no directions, such as, Kiss the girl, you fool. She leaned in a tiny bit. He warmed her hands. “So…” she said. “I suppose we know our scene, more or less,” he said. Was he going to kiss her? No, it seemed nobody ever kissed in Regency England. So what was happening? And what did it mean to fall in love in Austenland anyway? Jane stepped back, the weird anxiety of his nearness suddenly making her heart beat so hard it hurt. “We should probably return. Curtain, or bedsheet, I should say, is in two hours.” “Right. Of course,” he said, though he seemed a little sorry. The evening had pulled down over them, laying chill like morning dew on her arms, right through her clothes and into her bones. Though she was wearing her wool pelisse, she shivered as they walked back to the house. He gave her his jacket. “This theatrical hasn’t been as bad as you expected,” Jane said. “Not so bad. No worse than idle novel reading or croquet.” “You make any entertainment sound like taking cod liver oil.” “Maybe I am growing weary of this place.” He hesitated, as though he’d said too much, which made Jane wonder if the real mad had spoken. He cleared his throat. “Of the country, I mean. I will return to London soon for the season, and the renovations on my estate will be completed by summer. It will be good to be home, to feel something permanent. I tire of the guests who come and go in the country, their only goal to find some kind of amusement, their sentiments shallow. It wears on a person.” He met her eyes. “I may not return to Pembrook Park. Will you?” “No, I’m pretty sure I won’t.” Another ending. Jane’s chest tightened, and she surprised herself to identify the feeling as panic. It was already the night of the play. The ball was two days away. Her departure came in three. Not so soon! Clearly she was swimming much deeper in Austenland waters than she’d anticipated. And loving it. She was growing used to slippers and empire waists, she felt naked outside without a bonnet, during drawing room evenings her mouth felt natural exploring the kinds of words that Austen might’ve written. And when this man entered the room, she had more fun than she had in four years of college combined. It was all feeling…perfect.

The conversations we had about, say, when Grandpa Myrt fell off his porch roof while cleaning the gutters, were not just debriefings about the hazards of home renovation but celebrations—full of laughter, tears, and sometimes laughter and tears at the same time—of how much we loved each other. So you could say that nothing was about what it superficially seemed to be about. Which in another context might make it sound all just a bit sinister. But obviously it was nothing of the kind. We all got it. You’d have gotten it too.

Always,’ said Evie and Max together. Points for harmony. In truth, in the six years she’d known him, Max had barely mentioned his mother other than to say she’d never been the maternal type and that she set exceptionally high standards for everything; be it a manicure or the behaviour of her husbands or her sons. ‘No engagement ring?’ queried Caroline with the lift of an elegant eyebrow. ‘Ah, no,’ said Evie. ‘Not yet. There was so much choice I, ah...couldn’t decide.’ ‘Indeed,’ said Caroline, before turning to Max. ‘I can, of course, make an appointment for you with my jeweller this afternoon. I’m sure he’ll have something more than suitable. That way Evie will have a ring on her finger when she attends the cocktail party I’m hosting for the pair of you tonight.’ ‘You didn’t have to fuss,’ said Max as he set their overnight cases just inside the door beside a wide staircase. ‘Introducing my soon-to-be daughter-in-law to family and friends is not fuss,’ said Max’s mother reprovingly. ‘It’s expected, and so is a ring. Your brother’s here, by the way.’ ‘You summoned him home as well?’ ‘He came of his own accord,’ she said dryly. ‘No one makes your brother do anything.’ ‘He’s my role model,’ whispered Max as they followed the doyenne of the house down the hall. ‘I need a cocktail dress,’ Evie whispered back. ‘Get it when I go ring hunting. What kind of stone do you want?’ ‘Diamond.’ ‘Colour?’ ‘White.’ ‘An excellent choice,’ said Caroline from up ahead and Max grinned ruefully. ‘Ears like a bat,’ he said in his normal deep baritone. ‘Whisper like a foghorn,’ his mother cut back, and surprised Evie by following up with a deliciously warm chuckle. The house was a beauty. Twenty-foot ceilings and a modern renovation that complemented the building’s Victorian bones. The wood glowed with beeswax shine and the air carried the scent of old-English roses. ‘Did you do the renovation?’ asked Evie and her dutiful fiancé nodded. ‘My first project after graduating.’ ‘Nice work,’ she said as Caroline ushered them into a large sitting room that fed seamlessly through to a wide, paved garden patio.

HELL THUS NO ONE CHOOSES in the abstract to go to hell or even to be the kind of person who belongs there. But their orientation toward self leads them to become the kind of person for whom away-from-God is the only place for which they are suited. It is a place they would, in the end, choose for themselves, rather than come to humble themselves before God and accept who he is. Whether or not God’s will is infinitely flexible, the human will is not. There are limits beyond which it cannot bend back, cannot turn or repent. One should seriously inquire if to live in a world permeated with God and the knowledge of God is something they themselves truly desire. If not, they can be assured that God will excuse them from his presence. They will find their place in the “outer darkness” of which Jesus spoke. But the fundamental fact about them will not be that they are there, but that they have become people so locked into their own self-worship and denial of God that they cannot want God. A well-known minister of other years used to ask rhetorically, “You say you will accept God when you want to?” And then he would add, “How do you know you will be able to want to when you think you will?” The ultimately lost person is the person who cannot want God. Who cannot want God to be God. Multitudes of such people pass by every day, and pass into eternity. The reason they do not find God is that they do not want him or, at least, do not want him to be God. Wanting God to be God is very different from wanting God to help me.

the situations in which we find ourselves are never as important as our responses to them, which come from our “spiritual” side. A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?

I imagine you walked up to the jewelers at Cartier and said ‘the biggest one, please. No, bigger. Do you have something really ostentatious?’”. He shakes his head. “I had to call the owner of Cartier to open the store for me. They were closed for renovations.” “It’s good to be you,” I say blandly. “Even if this ring is fucking ugly and I want to throw it at your head most of the time.” “Oh, sweetheart, you say the nicest things.

we passed in front of the grand, 1960s-vintage presidential residence, which I’d been told stood empty, awaiting badly needed repairs. “The Liberians would like China to renovate it, but they haven’t said so directly,” Li told me. “There is a difference of psychology at play in this. China knows they want it fixed, but it is waiting for some kind of expression—a request. It’s a matter of face. Liberians haven’t yet understood the workings of face.” With little forewarning, Li began to riff on politics. “Liberia is a country that is controlled by the United States,” he told me. Perhaps that was true sometime in the past, I replied. “No, it is still the case,” he said. “There are Americans in every section of government here. At least one. You could say that Liberians are your cousins,” he said between laughs. “The Americans give a lot of money to this country, but it just gets wasted. It never reaches the people. China has learned from that. We don’t give away money. We build things. That way, the people can see some impact. This government is very close to the Americans, but the people don’t like your country very much. They feel that in all of these years you have never achieved much of anything here.

See, most people who remain emotionally immature are hung up on a lot of really bad stuff. And that often expresses itself in a secret life that they have to hide from others. But healthy people—people who are spiritually and emotionally mature, people who are following Jesus—don’t live there. So Paul can say in verse 9 of Philippians 4, “The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

There are two Gods,” Tolstoy once said. “There is the God that people generally believe in—A God who has to serve them (sometimes in very refined ways, say by merely giving them peace of mind). This God does not exist. But the God whom people forget—the God whom we all have to serve—exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive.”3

HIRE A MASTERBUILDER I sometimes say that this is my only heuristic because the masterbuilder—named after the skilled masons who built Europe’s medieval cathedrals—possesses all the phronesis needed to make your project happen. You want someone with deep domain experience and a proven track record of success in whatever you’re doing,

SAY NO AND WALK AWAY Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused. At the outset, will the project have the people and funds, including contingencies, needed to succeed? If not, walk away. Does an action contribute to achieving the goal in the box on the right? If not, skip it. Say no to monuments. No to untested technology. No to lawsuits. And so on. This can be difficult, particularly if your organization embraces a bias for action.

Beth taught me this lesson too, years ago, when she developed another important list (she loves lists), this one being her “list of interests.” She came up with this concept after she got tired of people asking her if she was going to renovate her house. She worked out the best way to shut down these conversations was simply to say: “Renovation is not on my list of interests.” It wasn’t figurative. She actually created a list of interests so “home renovation” could, specifically, not be on it.

You’re being curious,” he says. That’s the opposite of the natural inclination to think that What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI), the fallacy we saw in the previous chapter. In contrast, Gehry assumes that there must be more to learn. By making that assumption, he avoids the trap of the fallacy.

say why they felt the way they did.[22] This is “skilled intuition,” not garden-variety gut feelings, which are unreliable. It is a powerful tool available only to genuine experts—that is, people with long experience working in their domain of expertise.[23]

But when you work on a joint project with people from many companies, which squad are you playing for? Who are your teammates? Teams are identities. To truly be on one, people must know it. So BAA gave everyone working on T5, including its own employees, a clear and emphatic answer: Forget how things are usually done on big projects. Your team is not your company. Here, your team is T5. We are one team. Wolstenholme is an engineer with decades of experience in construction, but he started his career in the British military, where the squad you play for is literally on your forehead—in the form of your unit’s “cap badge.” When people came to T5, Wolstenholme says, they were told, “Take off your cap badge and throw it away, because you work for T5.” That message was explicit, blunt, and repeated. “We had posters on the walls of people with lightbulbs going on, and they were saying, you know, ‘I get it. I work for T5.’ ” MAKING HISTORY Identity was the first step.

Think slow, act fast” may not be a new idea. It was on grand display back in 1931, after all, when the Empire State Building raced to the sky. You could even say that the idea goes at least as far back as Rome’s first emperor, the mighty Caesar Augustus, whose personal motto was “Festina lente,” or “Make haste slowly.

Repetition also generates experience, making your performance better. This is called “positive learning,” as we saw earlier. Repetition rockets you up the learning curve, making each new iteration better, easier, cheaper, and faster. As the old Latin saying goes, “Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.” Yes, I wrote that in chapter 4. But repetition is the mother of learning.

Hello, date money.” Asher sipped at his coffee before waving at the money. “You keep saying that, but where are we going on a date? You have a plan?” I gave him the most innocent expression I could muster. Kinda hard, though, as I knew he'd love what I was about to say. “I thought I’d take you to the bookstore and turn you loose.” Asher’s eyes went heart shaped. “You do love me.

Solar power is the king of modularity. It is also the lowest-risk project type of any I’ve tested in terms of cost and schedule. That’s no coincidence. Wind power? Also extremely modular. Modern windmills consist of four basic factory-built elements assembled on-site: a base, a tower, the “head” (nacelle) that houses the generator, and the blades that spin. Snap them together, and you have one windmill. Repeat this process again and again, and you have a wind farm. Fossil thermal power? Look inside a coal-burning power plant, say, and you’ll find that they’re pretty simple, consisting of a few basic factory-built elements assembled to make a big pot of water boil and run a turbine. They’re modular, much as a modern truck is modular. The same goes for oil- and gas-fired plants. Electricity transmission? Parts made in a factory are assembled into a tower, and factory-made wires are strung along them. Repeat. Or manufactured cables are dug into the ground, section by section. Repeat again.

Ries wrote that startups operate in an environment of “extreme uncertainty” in which it is impossible to know whether the product they have developed is one that consumers will value. “We must learn what customers really want,” he advised, “not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” The only way to do that is to “experiment.” Create a “minimum viable product,” put it in front of consumers, and see what happens. With lessons learned, change the product, ship again, and repeat the cycle. Ries called this the building phase, as multiple iterations gradually build the final product. I would call it the planning phase, as the design of the product evolves following the dictum “Try, learn, again.” Semantics aside, the only real difference is the method of testing.

To pitch a new project at Amazon, you must first write a PR and FAQ, putting the goal smack in the opening sentences of the press release. Everything that happens subsequently is working backwards from the PR/FAQ, as it is called at Amazon. Critically, the language of both documents must be plain. “I called it ‘Oprah-speak,’ ” says Ian McAllister, a former Amazon executive

As the old Latin saying goes, “Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.” A good plan is one that meticulously applies experimentation or experience. A great plan is one that rigorously applies both.

When the prophet Jeremiah, for example, says, “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick: Who can understand it?” we have to recognize from our heart that we are the ones spoken of, that, indeed, I am the one described. Only then is a foundation laid for spiritual formation into Christlikeness.

You should go to the gardens,” the king says after a long moment. “They’re far more cheerful than a hall of dead kings.” “I don’t know the way. Perhaps you would walk me there?” I ask hesitantly. “You can tell me about your family. I would like to know more of my new people.” It’s a subtle offer of peace, one that I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to offer. The king turns to me. We study each other, coming to a silent understanding. He doesn’t particularly like me. I don’t particularly like him. But perhaps we can be civil. After a moment, he nods. “I’ll show you the tree Rhys first climbed as a child. Coincidentally, that was also the day he first broke his arm.” I laugh, startled by the change in the king’s demeanor. He pauses, looking at me as if he’s unsure of something. I didn’t say anything, so I couldn’t have offended him yet. “Perhaps we’ll bring Julia? She hasn’t taken a walk through the garden in too long.” He gives me a wry smile. “And Cassia isn’t here to tell her she can’t.” “Rhys spoke of his mother while in Renove,” I say softly. “He cares for her greatly.” “I know.” “I’m sorry you felt as if he betrayed you both,” I whisper. “I believe that apology should come from my son.” He then clears his throat. “But I appreciate it all the same.” I follow him down the hall, nervous about meeting the queen again. I’m certain I didn’t make a good first impression. “I should apologize as well,” King Egan says, looking straight ahead. “It’s easy to make decisions when you’re dealing with faceless individuals. They’re like pieces on an Echelon board. But then you meet your pawns, and you begin to feel remorse and second-guess your choices. It’s not a dignified state for a king.” I nod, unsure how to answer, so we continue down the hall in near silence. “I do have a question,” I finally say. “It’s something that’s been bothering me since we arrived back at the castle in the rain.” Though he looks hesitant, Rhys’s father nods for me to continue. “If the aboveground water in your kingdom has become toxic, where did Rhys learn to swim?” The king barks out an unexpected laugh. “That, ironically, brings us to the place where Rhys broke his arm for a second time.

The Cynecure. Looking for the Cynecure (in the palinody of my cenesthesias, as Segalen would say). The Sabbatical form. What was the Stoic dream of our adolescence - detachment - suddenly materializes in maturity. I now find myself out on my own, within a rainbow-hued research structure. Towns are never left alone; there are always works going on - digging, demolition, construction. Knocking down, building up again. Perhaps only certain places in California, completely anaesthetized by domestic luxury and suburban comfort, seem to have come to rest in a fixed and lasting ambience, beyond this perpetual deconstruction. Works are always going on in our bodies too. They are constantly being disturbed, tortured, renovated. Never at rest, never serene. Peace of mind - impossible to keep it more than a few hours. Impatience always gets the upper hand. Everyone aspires to peace and quiet, but they do so today in a thoroughly derisory manner, wherein we see the last moments of the contemplative soul. In the countryside there is always a dog howling. And sterility is hereditary.

I remain silent for a few minutes as I scroll through everything about Miles that I love. Then I think about everything he loves, and my eyes alight when I recall the night we shared in his grandpa’s truck. “His grandpa has this old truck that he’s dying to fix up. But he’s dumping all his money into house renovations, so he’s holding off on it for now. He said the carburetor needed replacing.” Dean’s eyes brighten at this revelation. “You just had seven months’ worth of rent open up.” “You think this is a good idea?” I ask, chewing on my thumbnail nervously. “Can you just buy a carburetor for a car? Wouldn’t he have to like…I don’t know…repair it or something?” “That’s what Google is for!” Lynsey squeals and reaches out to grab my computer. “Wait, will this be emasculating?” I say, stopping her mid-Google. “If I buy some expensive part for his grandpa’s truck, is he going to be like, ‘Fuck you bitch, I pay my own way?’” Lynsey and I both look at Dean for an answer. “Not if you give it to him naked.” He simply shrugs. My first reaction is to laugh, but when Dean doesn’t join in, my face drops. “Wait, seriously?” He lifts his brows and pins me with a look. “I’m not even into cars, but if you came at me naked with a carburetor in your hand, I’d probably be all over that.” I look over at Lynsey, who gives me a shrug as well. “We’ll figure that part out later

We can re-hijack the anger of the critic’s attack, and forcefully redirect it at the critic instead of ourselves. We can then silently and internally say “No!” or “Stop!” or “Shut Up!” to short-circuit drasticizing and perfectionistic mental processes. Angrily saying “No!” to the critic sets an internal boundary against unnatural, anti-self processes. It is the hammer of self-renovating carpentry that rebuilds our instinct of self-protection.

New bet. Hundred quid says Donovan gets caught in another scandal by summer’s end.” “What do you mean ANOTHER scandal? I feel targeted.” “Remember what happened with your Lambo? That wasn’t a scandal. That was a tragedy.” “A tragic scandal.” “I think they finally rebuilt that wall you destroyed It was overdue for a renovation anyway.” “I did them a favor.” “Ask the National Historic Society if they agree.

was locking up at the local mosque for which I am a trustee when an elderly frail gentleman approached me and quietly asked if I could help raise money to repair the roof of the local synagogue. He went on to explain that he was one of only 200 Jews left in Bradford and there was only one old and small synagogue standing in the city which needed repairs as the roof was leaking badly. The small Jewish community he went on to say was not wealthy but was trying to raise funds for the repair. I was taken aback at a Jewish man approaching a mosque to help repair a synagogue. I responded that I would like to visit the synagogue to see what needed doing which I did the next day to find the roof was indeed in bad shape with buckets kept in various places in the prayer area to catch the leaks. The following Friday before Friday prayers I briefed the Imam who leads the prayers with this story who recounted it to the congregation attending Friday prayers and to my surprise £130,000 in donations was raised from two weekly Friday prayers supported with a few significant value donations from local Pakistani businessmen. The funds were used not just to renovate the roof but to carry out badly needed structural repairs and repaint the entire synagogue. The letters of thanks from the Jewish community were touching and were posted on the mosque notice boards. There is a significant proportion of the 200 Jews in the city now attending our Eid gatherings at the mosque to have a meal together and join in Eid celebrations and similarly Muslims from the mosque visit the synagogue on Jewish celebratory days.” I asked if this beautiful incident of religious tolerance had been covered in the press. “The mainstream media looks for sensational stories more than such human stories, maligning the Muslim community without broadcasting the good progress being made on inter-faith relations and integration.

Lostness is a factual condition of the self, of the ruined soul. You either have it or not, just as you either have or do not have a certain physical disease that can kill you. If you have that condition of lostness, you may not know it. Indeed, it is most likely you will not know it, because it is inherently a condition of self-blindness. You need treatment nevertheless, if you are not to be lost forever; and being informed of your condition and what to do about it can help you find relief. Should I say nothing to you merely because you might find it insulting? I must think more highly of you than that. The reality of evil in the human heart is not something to be ignored or treated lightly.

Given the vision, the taking of this intention [to have God a constant presence in our minds] is something each of us must do or not do. "Just do it." If you say, "I can't," remember, God will help you carry out the decision and form a solid intention. But he will not do it for you. Have you decided to have God a constant presence in your mind or not?

Those who are not genuinely convinced that the only real bargain in life is surrendering ourselves to Jesus and his cause, abandoning all that we love to him and for him, cannot learn the other lessons Jesus has to teach us. They cannot proceed to anything like total spiritual transformation. Not that he will not let us, but that we simply cannot succeed. If I tell you that you cannot drive an automobile unless you can see, I am not saying I will not let you, but that you cannot succeed even if I do.