River Tubing Quotes

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My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.
Ben Aaronovitch (Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London, #2))
Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Humans by ANN DRUYAN' 'CARL SAGAN (1992-05-03))
Leo gestured to the empty core. “The syncopator goes here. It’s a multi-access gyro-valve to regulate flow. The dozen glass tubes on the outside? Those are filled with powerful, dangerous stuff. That glowing red one is Lemnos fire from my dad’s forges. This murky stuff here? That’s water from the River Styx. The stuff in the tubes is going to power the ship, right? Like radioactive rods in a nuclear reactor. But the mix ratio has to be controlled, and the timer is already operational.” Leo tapped the digital clock, which now read 65:15. “That means without the syncopator, this stuff is all going to vent into the chamber at the same time, in sixty-five minutes. At that point, we’ll get a very nasty reaction.” Jason and Piper stared at him. Leo wondered if he’d been speaking English. Sometimes when he was agitated he slipped into Spanish, like his mom used to do in her workshop. But he was pretty sure he’d used English.
Rick Riordan (The Demigod Diaries (The Heroes of Olympus))
It's a sad fact of modern life that sooner or later you will end up on YouTube doing something stupid. The trick, according to my dad, is to make a fool of yourself to the best of your ability.
Ben Aaronovitch (Broken Homes (Rivers of London, #4))
Good-bye,” I say to Grandfather, and to my father, and I hold the tube in the river and pause a moment. We hold the choices of our fathers and mothers in our hands and when we cling on or let them slip between our fingers, those choices become our own.
Ally Condie (Reached (Matched, #3))
There's your problem," Leo announced. Jason scratched his head. "Uh.... what are we looking at?" Leo thought it was pretty obvious, but Piper looked confused too. "Okay," Leo sighed, " you want the full explanation or the short explanation?" "Short," Piper and Jason said in unison. Leo gestured to the empty core. "The syncopator goes here. It's a multi-access gyro-valve to regulate flow. The doxen glass tubes on the outside? Those are filled with powerful,dangerous stuff. That glowing red one is Lemnos fire from my dad's forges. This murky stuff here? That's water from the River Styx. The stuff in the tubes is going to power the ship, right? Like radioactive rods in a nuclear reactor. But the mix ratio has to be controlled, and the timer is already operational.... That means without the syncopator, this stuff is all going to vent into the chamber at the same time, in sixty-five minutes. At that point, we'll get a very nasty reaction." Jason and Piper stared at him. Leo wondered if he'd been speaking English. Sometimes when he was agitated he slipped into Spanish, like his mom used to do in her workshop. But he was pretty sure he'd used English. "Um..." Piper cleared her throat." Could you make the short explanation shorter?" Leo palm-smacked his forehead. "Fine. One hour. Fluids mix. Bunker goes ka-boom. One square mile of forest tuns into a smoking crater." "Oh," Piper said in a small voice. "Can't you just..... turn it off?" "Gee, I didn't think of that!" Leo said. "Let me just hit this switch and - No, Piper. I can't turn it off.
Rick Riordan (The Demigod Diaries (The Heroes of Olympus))
These people were building homes for the rich, but they lived in tents covered with blue tarpaulin sheets, and partitioned into lanes by lines of sewage. It was even worse than Laxmangarh. I picked my way around broken glass, wire, and shattered tube lights. The stench of feces was replaced by the stronger stench of industrial sewage. The slum ended in an open sewer - a small river of black water went sluggishly past me, bubbles sparkling in it and little circles spreading on its surface. Two children were splashing about in the black water.
Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)
Even in okay times, there is a subterranean river of melancholy in me, and sometimes a productive afternoon is comprised of using YouTube videos of varying qualities like divining rods.
R. Eric Thomas (Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays)
You Don't Know What Love Is But you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want to get into the fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she's headed, you know she'll wake up with an ache she can't locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.
Kim Addonizio
It was the satisfying crunch of a sharp knife cutting through ripe watermelon. It was green citronella spirals burning down and sunscreen squirting hot out of the tube. It was banana pancakes on repeat and the tang of river silt clinging to tanned skin. It was summer. And freedom. And youth. And heartbreak so hot it cauterized.
Breanne Randall (The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic)
selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough’s three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a parting in the curtains.
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up with an ache she can’t locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.
Kim Addonizio (What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems)
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats — the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill — The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it — and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit)
He watched from the boat as they sailed past the sights of London – the thrusting steel spires of Canary Wharf, the domed O2 arena, then Tower Bridge, and finally the London Eye and Westminster. The sky was deep blue and the sun’s heat intense, so the cooling river breeze had been heaven. After disembarking, he headed for the tube. The day in the capital had been enjoyable. But now the holiday was over, and the real business was just beginning. It was time. Soon she would know just how bad it felt.
Paul Pilkington (The One You Love (Emma Holden Suspense Mystery, #1))
of London – the thrusting steel spires of Canary Wharf, the domed O2 arena, then Tower Bridge, and finally the London Eye and Westminster. The sky was deep blue and the sun’s heat intense, so the cooling river breeze had been heaven. After disembarking, he headed for the tube. The day in the capital had been enjoyable. But now the holiday was over, and the real
Paul Pilkington (The One You Love (Emma Holden Suspense Mystery, #1))
MY DAD says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube, and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become Londoners. He said there were others, some of whom were born within the sound of the Bow Bells, who spend their whole life dreaming of an escape. When they do go, they almost always head for Norfolk where the skies are big, the land is flat, and the demographics are full of creamy-white goodness.
Ben Aaronovitch (Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London #2))
Bridge and, finally, the London Eye and Westminster. The sky was deep blue and the sun’s heat intense, so the cooling river breeze was heaven. After disembarking, he headed for the tube. The day in the capital had been enjoyable. But
Paul Pilkington (The One You Love (Emma Holden Suspense Mystery, #1))
This was like when you went tubing on the river and you drifted along, eyes closed, face turned up toward the sun, relaxed, warm and cold at the same time, aware of every sensation, fingers trailing behind in the murky water. Like each moment mattered, time caught in a mental camera roll, captured in sparkling perfection, time slow and easy, yet disappearing faster than you could have ever imagined.
Erin MacCarthy
She frowned as she looked at the bear, changed. He had a new leg, sewn out of blue-and-gray plaid. It wasn’t exactly the same shape as the surviving leg; it was just a stuffed flannel tube stuck on the bear, but he was symmetrical now. “What did you do?” she asked, taking the bear. Preacher shrugged. “I told him I’d give it a try. Looks pretty silly, I guess, but it was a good idea at the time.
Robyn Carr (Shelter Mountain (Virgin River, #2))
He watched from the boat as they sailed past the sights of London – the thrusting steel spires of Canary Wharf, the domed O2 Arena, then Tower Bridge and, finally, the London Eye and Westminster. The sky was deep blue and the sun’s heat intense, so the cooling river breeze was heaven. After disembarking, he headed for the tube. The day in the capital had been enjoyable. But now the holiday was over, and the real business was just
Paul Pilkington (The One You Love (Emma Holden Suspense Mystery, #1))
He watched from the boat as they sailed past the sights of London – the thrusting steel spires of Canary Wharf, the domed O2 Arena, then Tower Bridge and, finally, the London Eye and Westminster. The sky was deep blue and the sun’s heat intense, so the cooling river breeze was heaven. After disembarking, he headed for the tube. The day in the capital had been enjoyable. But now the holiday was
Paul Pilkington (The One You Love (Emma Holden Suspense Mystery, #1))
how sick I am of train and tube and bus filled with the world's workers! Oh dear Lord, make me more charitable and generous and loving. They do bore me these people. There they are, day in and day out on platforms, in carriages, in the streets, tramping, standing, sitting in crowds and crowds, moving all the time like one river there is no stopping - I cannot bear it! When much in London my dreams are always choked with these images.
Jean Lucey Pratt (A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt)
There was so much to think about and so much to do with all this activity and responsibility that he hardly had time to really consider how he missed London, the hum of it, the Brixton roar and the beloved river, the West Indian take aways, the glittering of the tower blocks at night, the mobile phone shacks, the Africans in Peckham, the common proximity of plantain, the stern beauty of church women on Sunday mornings, the West End, the art in the air, the music in the air, the sense of possibility. He missed the tube, the telephone boxes. He even missed, deep down, the wicked parking inspectors and the heartless bus drivers who flew past queues of freezing pedestrians out of spite. He missed riding from Loughborough to Surrey Quays on his bike with the plane trees whizzing by, the sight of some long-weaved woman walking along in tight jeans and a studded belt and look-at-me boots and maybe a little boy holding her hand. The skylines, the alleyways, and yes, the sirens and helicopters and the hit of life, all these things he knew so well. And the fact, most of all, that he belonged there in a way that he would never, could never, belong in Dorking. He was outside, displaced. He was off the A-Z. He felt, in a very fundamental way, that he was living outside of his life, outside of himself. And the problem was, if indeed it was a problem – how could you call something like this a problem when there were bills to pay and children to feed and a house to maintain? – the problem was that he did not know what to do about it, how to get rid of this feeling, how to get to a place where he felt that he was in the right place. And this not being such a serious problem, not really a problem at all, he had suppressed it and accepted things as they were.
Diana Evans (Ordinary People)
No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one; time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one-the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy or available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby cafe, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it-fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a sate of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world- this hollow, disenchanted world.
Maylis de Kerangal (The Heart)
Seven Most Powerful Lessons From River| Dr. Apj Abdul Kalam Motivational Video |Status| SRV Motivation channel - YouTube - my comment or opinion - This is exactly my attitude, so Kalam sir or myself or both are rivers?
Ganapathy K Siddharth Vijayaraghavan
She dropped to her knees, peering into the darkness. The lava-tube opening was about a dozen feet wide, and the person lay at the bottom of the deep, dark hole, almost hidden, but visible enough for Mercy to sense that something was very wrong.
Kendra Elliot (In the Pines (Columbia River, #3; Mercy Kilpatrick, #7))
Behind them, an otter in a reflective yellow vest loped past, a sealed wax message tube held in its fanged mouth. It barely glanced their way before leaping into the river and vanishing.
Sarah J. Maas (House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City, #1))
You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes--beyond logic--and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn't want to face, weren't sure you could. That's what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes-- to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.
Dennis Lehane (Mystic River)
Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.
Jacob Tomsky (Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality)
I wondered whether it was chance or the malign workings of the YouTube algorithm. Because you liked happy cat videos, you might also want to smite this man with furious vengeance.
Ben Aaronovitch (Amongst Our Weapons (Rivers of London, #9))
An otter shot past, yellow vest blazingly bright in the river water, a sealed tube clenched between his little fangs.
Sarah J. Maas (Crescent City Ebook Bundle: A 2-book bundle)
I remember standing in the bush above this unbelievably wild river, and thinking this is as good as it gets. Exquisite birdsong, jagged peaks of the Alps beckoning like the spires of mystical cathedrals, the smell of moisture in the beech forest like an elixir. Nature in its raw, unpredictable state – at an entirely different end of the spectrum from the confines of a test tube or comfort of a biotech lab.
Geoffrey Robert
Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.
Srikanth Reddy (Facts for Visitors)
You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes—beyond logic—and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could. That’s what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes—to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.
Dennis Lehane (Mystic River)
Blood is messy when it comes out. inside it runs clean and looks blue in tubes that line our bodies, that split and branch like earth's river systems. Blood is ninety percent water. And like water it must move. Blood must flow, never stray or split or clot or divide -- lose any essential amount of itself while it distributes evenly through our bodies. But blood is messy when it comes out. It dries, and cracks in the air. Native blood quantum was introduced in 1705 at the Virginia Colony. If you were at least half Native, you didn't have the same rights as white people. Blood quantum and tribal membership qualifications have since been turned over to individual tribes to decide.
Tommy Orange
Even in okay times, there is a subterranean river of melancholy in me, and sometimes a productive afternoon is comprised of using YouTube videos of varying qualities like divining rods. I watch these videos, some of which I could recite by heart, and I find the mouth of the river and I stoop down and place my hands in the sadness and it feels like, God, it feels like the truth. It feels like finally. It feels like for a moment I don’t have to walk around this world all neutral. Because as much as I was struggling, I didn’t look any different to the world. And sometimes when you don’t look different, you start to think maybe it’s not real. Maybe you’re faking it or deceiving yourself. Maybe this is just what neutral feels like.
R. Eric Thomas (Congratulations, the Best is Over!)