Rotten Mind Quotes

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

No, he's trying to worm into my mind and shackle me down with morals, so he can feel more comfortable about my existence. Too bad. I am exactly the kind of ice-blooded, rotten-hearted girl he fears I am. And I am fine with that. May he stay unsettled.

Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.

But feelings, no matter how strong or “ugly,” are not a part of who you are. They are the radio stations your mind listens to if you don’t give it something better to do. Feelings are fluid and dynamic; they change frequently. Feelings are something you HAVE, not something you ARE. Like physical beauty, a cold sore, or an opinion. Admitting you feel rage or terrible pain or regret or some old, rotten blame does not mean these feelings are part of who you are as a person. What these feelings mean is, you have to change your thinking to be free of them.

A calm and undisturbed mind and heart are the life and health of the body, but envy, jealousy, and wrath are like rottenness of the bones. Proverbs 14:30

Not only are mortals rotten, the very atmosphere in which we live is materially and physically rotten, swarming with maggots, with obscene appearances, poisonous minds, and foul organisms.

Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect

If you have strength of character, you can use that as fuel to not only be a survivor but to transcend simply being a survivor, use an internal alchemy to turn something rotten and horrible into gold.

If I’m not back in a few hours…well, I don’t want to think about that. I might change my mind about doing this. I’m thinking happy thoughts. Creamed dog innards and rotten steak. Yeah. Yum! (Asmodeus)

Just spunk won't be enough; you've got to have gumption. You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off of pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and you can too. You'll bear it because there isn't any choice--except to go to pieces. . . It's kind of a test, Mary, and it's the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens. Then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That's all.

When I am dead and in my head And all my bones are are rotten, Take this book and think of me And mind I'm not forgotten.

In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners and smiling faces; 99 per cent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self. It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal. In the fantasy, you observe a scene in your mind’s eye or on the computer screen. You see yourself standing on a tropical beach, the blue sea behind you, a big smile on your face, one hand holding a cocktail, the other arm around your lover’s waist. Paradise. What the picture does not show is the annoying fly that bites your leg, the cramped feeling in your stomach from eating that rotten fish soup, the tension in your jaw as you fake a big smile, and the ugly fight the happy couple had five minutes ago. If we could only feel what the people in the photos felt while taking them! Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just as you are not the winds, so also you are not the jumble of thoughts, emotions and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitised story you tell about them with hindsight. You experience all of them, but you don’t control them, you don’t own them, and you are not them. People ask ‘Who am I?’ and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.

The lack of mindfulness often makes us carry the unnecessary possessions, stale ideologies and rotten relationships along, which unnecessarily clutter our lives and consciousness, and stagnate our growth.

You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and that you will too.

What?” The word exploded out of me. “What do you want me to tell you? You want to hear about how they tied us up like animals to bring us into the camp—or, hey! How about that time a PSF once beat in a girl’s skull so badly she actually lost an eye? You want to know what it was like to drink rotten water for an entire summer until new pipes finally came? How I woke up afraid and went to bed in terror every single day for six years? For God’s sake, leave me alone! Why do you always have to dig and dig when you know I don’t want to talk about it?

I find myself drunk in the streets again. A glass of wine and so my thoughts begin. I smile at passersby to and fro, Faces like blank slates minutes ago, Now emotions readily painted on canvases: Grief, despair, joy, and madnesses. At this time, the clouds are sweating sweet water And you can smell the scent of each corner: Fish, dirt, rotten apples, and burning tires. Close your eyes here to smell all your heart desires. Everything is more colourful when you're not yourself. So long as you’re sound body and mind, you have your wealth. I am now treading almost fleeting. Birds singing, bicycle bells ringing. I have lost my way but not my heart. Have my head, those two are apart. Take care dear city, I must soon head home. Until tomorrow evening when again I will roam.

Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable.

In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Dore. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.

In her anniversary card, Daisy wrote: If they say we don't exist, that they can't see us anywhere except rotten corners, in perverse bodies, how come I can see you and hold you and you're holy; how come I can love you and home you and you're there, in flesh, in my mind, in my blood; how come I keep waking up in this love and feel rested? What else to do now then, when a love like this finds you? What else but praise? What else but dance?

Careful minds build durable buildings; careless minds build rotten buildings!

Literacy rots the brain, I'm afraid. And a rotten mind is of no use to the New Order. Sadly, there must be consequences.

What great minds lie in the dust,” said Guyal in a low voice. “What gorgeous souls have vanished into the buried ages; what marvellous creatures are lost past the remotest memory … Nevermore will there be the like; now in the last fleeting moments, humanity festers rich as rotten fruit. Rather than master and overpower our world, our highest aim is to cheat it through sorcery.

We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ... Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).

The danger came from the white dragon. This was Father, some kind of partner to the dragon who cared. The newly hatched dragonet could hardly look at him without seeing a spiral of confusing flashes: pain, fury, screaming dragons, and blood, everywhere, blood. This white dragon had done something terrible that haunted him, and he might do worse someday. Father’s mind had patches of damp, rotten vileness all over it.

The nine in our list are based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders. For more on CBT—how it works, and how to practice it—please see Appendix 1.) EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.” CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.” OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.” DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.” MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.” LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.” NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.” DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.” BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”11

The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that can respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated by a possibly apocryphal story of the early computer that was given the task of translating the homily „The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.“ into Russian and then back to English. According to the story, it came out: „The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.

The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will. Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart. Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savanna and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.

There’s no practical difference in the mind of the slighted between a real slight and a perceived slight.

They won't mind takin' you in as well, they'll spoil you rotten they will, Christ but a young boy like you? You'll be that mothered to death you'll be glad to leave.

Think of the rotten time Alice would have had in Wonderland if she hadn't been broad-minded. Take it as it comes.

One word came to mind: pee-yew. Evan tried to place the odor; it wasn’t a heap of decayed garbage or that of a spoiled fish. Truth be told, he smelled like rotten cheese.

Asthmatic spewer of filth gasps, but clean air does not suffice To fuel fires fueled by thoughts got rotten Lest we all be forgotten things That sit like dust upon the mantel of her mind

When one rotten apple is exposed to ones that are not, it will cause the fruit to ripen faster and eventually rot. This is because as apples ripen, they give off a hormone in a gaseous form called ethylene which is a catalyst for ripening fruit. So too, life, when you are surrounded by people who have a bad influence on you, their negative energy will sooner or later affect you.

Jericho stopped him before he left. He slid the ring off his finger and handed it to him. "Take this." Asmodeus curled his lip as he shrank back from it. "I'm not about to marry your ugly ass, boy. No offense, but you ain't my type. I like my dates with less body hair... and with female parts attached by nature." Jericho let out an aggravated growl. "It's not a wedding ring, asshole. It's Berith's ring. You get into trouble you can summon him to help you get out of there." That completely changed his attitude. "Oh, hey, that could be worth an engagement to you." Asmodeus grinned as he palmed it. "If I'm back in a few hours... well, I don't want to think about that. I might change my mind about doing this. I'm thinking happy thoughts. Creamed dog innards and rotten steak. Yeah. Yum." He vanished.

In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.

When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. It is at such a juncture that their chief mission is plainly visible, and that for a while the philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of history.

One note of caution: Do not use words describing your emotional reactions in the Automatic Thought column. Just write the thoughts that created the emotion. For example, suppose you notice your car has a flat tire. Don’t write “I feel crappy” because you can’t disprove that with a rational response. The fact is, you do feel crappy. Instead, write down the thoughts that automatically flashed through your mind the moment you saw the tire; for example, “I’m so stupid—I should have gotten a new tire this last month,” or “Oh, hell! This is just my rotten luck!” Then you can substitute rational responses such as “It might have been better to get a new tire, but I’m not stupid and no one can predict the future with certainty.” This process won’t put air in the tire, but at least you won’t have to change it with a deflated

Because Wade had thrown everything away - drawings, clothes, toys - each accidental remnant loomed in Ann's mind with unspeakable importance. Four moldy dolls buried in the sawdust of a rotten stump. A high-heeled Barbie shoe that fell from the drainpipe. A neon toothbrush in a doghouse. Then, finally, the half-finished drawing in a book. Artifacts heavy with importance they didn't deserve, but which they took on because of their frightening scarcity; they built up against her, making stories of themselves, memories inside her head that should have remained in Wade's.

Amazing. Chamberlain let his eyes close down to the slits, retreating within himself. He had learned that you could sleep on your feet on the long marches. You set your feet to going and after a while they went by themselves and you sort of turned your attention away and your feet went on walking painlessly, almost without feeling, and gradually you closed down your eyes so that all you could see were the heels of the man in front of you, one heel, other heel, one heel, other heel, and so you moved on dreamily in the heat and the dust, closing your eyes against the sweat, head down and gradually darkening, so you actually slept with the sight of the heels in front of you, one heel, other heel, and often when the man in front of you stopped you bumped into him. There were no heels today, but there was the horse he led by the reins. He did not know the name of this horse. He did not bother any more; the horses were all dead too soon. Yet you learn to love it. Isn’t that amazing? Long marches and no rest, up very early in the morning and asleep late in the rain, and there’s a marvelous excitement to it, a joy to wake in the morning and feel the army all around you and see the campfires in the morning and smell the coffee… … awake all night in front of Fredericksburg. We attacked in the afternoon, just at dusk, and the stone wall was aflame from one end to the other, too much smoke, couldn’t see, the attack failed, couldn’t withdraw, lay there all night in the dark, in the cold among the wounded and dying. Piled-up bodies in front of you to catch the bullets, using the dead for a shield; remember the sound? Of bullets in dead bodies? Like a shot into a rotten leg, a wet thick leg. All a man is: wet leg of blood. Remember the flap of a torn curtain in a blasted window, fragment-whispering in that awful breeze: never, forever, never, forever. You have a professor’s mind. But that is the way it sounded. Never. Forever. Love that too? Not love it. Not quite. And yet, I was never so alive.

Patrick's handsome face descended toward mine. He stopped when he was just a whisper away. "You have a beautiful mouth." God, he was magnificent. Such harsh, sensual beauty. The luck of genetics and vampirism and gym time? Who knew? He watched me watching him and I knew he was probably in my head, listening in on my thoughts, my confusion. He grinned, just a little, and I knew that rotten, ugly, fat troll was reading my mind. He laughed, unrepentant, and his breath plumed my lips. How the hell did he do that? How could he pretend to breathe? Or better yet, why did he pretend to breathe?

rotten as the minds of those who believe they can learn all that exists to be known and can control anything they wish to control, who believe that it is their right, above the rights of all other men and women, to shape the destinies of their neighbors, cities, nations, and the Earth entire, according to their whims.

The forward momentum of British educations cannot be resisted: a relentless fascist machine that will spit them out the other side as soldiers or sexless governors-general and the like. All he can do is plant some small seed of independent thought in their minds. He is sorry for them and what is coming: every rottenness and corruption.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

All right, you conniving little punks, I'll play ball, but I'm going to make up a lot of rules you never heard of. You think I'm cornered and it'll be a soft touch. Well, you won't be playing with a guy who's a hero. You'll be up against a guy with a mind gone rotten and a lust for killing! That's the way I was and that's the way I like it!

And the dog episode?" He tried for innocence, but his laughter was echoing in her mind. "What do you mean?" "You know very well what I mean," she insisted. "When Dragon walked me home." "Ah,yes,I seem to recall now. The big bad wolf decked out in chains and spikes, afraid of a little dog." "Little? A hundred-and-twenty-pound Rottweiler mix? Foaming at the mouth. Roaring.Charging him!" "He ran like a rabbit." Gregori's soft, caressing voice echoed his satisfaction. He had taken great pleasure in running that particular jackass off.How dare the man try to lay a hand on Savannah? "No wonder I couldn't touch the dog's mind and call him off. You rotten scoundrel." "After Dragon left you,I chased him for two blocks, and he went up a tree. I kept him there for several hours, just to make a point.He looked like a rooster with his orange comb." She laughed in spite of her desire not to. "He never came near me again." "Of course not.It was unacceptable," he said complacently,with complete satisfaction, the warmth of his breath heating her blood. His mouth touched, skimmed, moved across her nipple, branding her with his heat, with flame, before finding the underside of her breast. Savannah closed her eyes against a need so intense that she shook with it. How could she want something that hurt so terribly? No pain,ma petite,only pleasure. His tongue created an aching void in her. I swear it on my life. His mouth was hot velvet closing over her breast. Fire danced over her skin, invading her body, melted her insides so that she was liquid heat, pulsing with need for him, only for him.

I knew it was my duty to my own legend to survive this trial. But I was still crippled by my own devices. Imagine me as a great fully-rigged man-of-war. Four masts, great bulwarks of oak and five score cannon. All my life I have sailed smooth seas and waters that parted for me by virtue of my own splendor. Never tested. Never riled. A tragic existence, if ever there was one. “But at long last: a storm! And when I met it I found my hull . . . rotten. My planks leaking brine, my cannon brittle, powder wet. I foundered upon the storm. Upon you, Darrow of Lykos.” He sighs. “And it was my own fault.” I war between wanting to punch him in the mouth and surrendering into my curiosity by letting him continue. He’s a strange man with a seductive presence. Even as an enemy, his flamboyance fascinated me. Purple capes in battle. A horned Minotaur helmet. Trumpets blaring to signal his advance, as if welcoming all challengers. He even broadcast opera as his men bombarded cities. After so much isolation, he’s delighting in imposing his narrative upon us. “My peril is thus: I am, and always have been, a man of great tastes. In a world replete with temptation, I found my spirit wayward and easy to distract. The idea of prison, that naked, metal world, crushed me. The first year, I was tormented. But then I remembered the voice of a fallen angel. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.’ I sought to make the deep not just my heaven, but my womb of rebirth. “I dissected the underlying mistakes which led to my incarceration and set upon an internal odyssey to remake myself. But—and you would know this, Reaper—long is the road up out of hell! I made arrangements for supplies. I toiled twenty hours a day. I reread the books of youth with the gravity of age. I perfected my body. My mind. Planks were replaced; new banks of cannon wrought in the fires of solitude. All for the next storm. “Now I see it is upon me and I sail before you the paragon of Apollonius au Valii-Rath. And I ask one question: for what purpose have you pulled me from the deep?” “Bloodyhell, did you memorize that?” Sevro mutters.

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the Land Tax Act which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which gives you your army? or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber. All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

I had to watch my uncle get strung up when I was a child,” she finally said after she returned from the faraway place in her mind. “The white man would only sell us the rotten fruit and vegetables from their bug-infested baskets. We had to collect that mess from the back of the store like we were a pack of wild mutts picking through garbage. My uncle had had enough of his apples having maggots crawling out of them, so he started farming his own vegetables for us to eat. The white man didn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. It’s amazing how their minds work. The way their minds work is the reason we call them devils because only a devil could think the way they do. They were mad about the loss of profit because they no longer had us buying the filthy rot they peddled. “My uncle produced such a high quality of fruits and vegetables that he had white folks coming to buy from him. It wasn’t too long after this started, those devils came in their white hoods and burned his garden to ash. Then they strung him up. We were forced to watch my uncle dangle from the neck while he pissed and shit himself. God will forgive my mouth saying it because he knows I only speak the truth. The evilness that resides inside the mind of those devils still exists in the minds of the ones who wear cop’s uniforms and judge’s robes. This is what our boys are up against. Our boys are at war! They freed us from our chains, so that they could lock us in their jails.

soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.’ It was one of Caleb’s quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction which he associated with various points of view or states of mind; and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was haunted by a sense of Biblical phraseology, though he could hardly have given a strict quotation.

We went from rotten sinners to born-again saints in a single moment when we accepted salvation. Once the blood of Jesus has wiped out sin, you can’t get any cleaner. That doesn’t mean we can avoid the hurdles and issues that come with changing your life and renewing your mind. Maturity is a process. But as my associate Kris says, “You are not a sinner; you are a saint. It doesn’t mean that you can’t sin; it just means that you are no longer a professional.” That’s the story of your life.

French said: “It’s like this with us, baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts. And as if we didn’t have enough trouble, we have to have you. As if we didn’t get pushed around enough by the guys in the corner offices, the City Hall gang, the day chief, the night chief, the Chamber of Commerce, His Honor the Mayor in his paneled office four times as big as the three lousy rooms the whole homicide staff has to work out of. As if we didn’t have to handle one hundred and fourteen homicides last year out of three rooms that don’t have enough chairs for the whole duty squad to sit down in at once. We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don’t get all the way up, and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don’t come home any more. And nights we do come home, we come home so goddam tired we can’t eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us. So we lie awake in the dark in a cheap house on a cheap street and listen to the drunks down the block having fun. And just about the time we drop off the phone rings and we get up and start all over again. Nothing we do is right, not ever. Not once. If we get a confession, we beat it out of the guy, they say, and some shyster calls us Gestapo in court and sneers at us when we muddle our grammar. If we make a mistake they put us back in uniform on Skid Row and we spend the nice cool summer evenings picking drunks out of the gutter and being yelled at by whores and taking knives away from greaseballs in zoot suits. But all that ain’t enough to make us entirely happy. We got to have you.” He stopped and drew in his breath. His face glistened a little as if with sweat. He leaned forward from his hips. “We got to have you,” he repeated. “We got to have sharpers with private licenses hiding information and dodging around corners and stirring up dust for us to breathe in. We got to have you suppressing evidence and framing set-ups that wouldn’t fool a sick baby. You wouldn’t mind me calling you a goddam cheap double-crossing keyhole peeper, would you, baby?” “You want me to mind?” I asked him. He straightened up. “I’d love it,” he said. “In spades redoubled.

Therefore let's live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten show. But mind you, it's like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. you've severed the connexion between the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are the plucked apple...you've fallen off the tree. And then it is logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.

My God, the world needs criticizing to death. Therefore let’s live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it’s like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection. And if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple… you’ve fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it’s a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.

I’d be sixteen by now,” he said slowly. "Oh, Magnus!” Ragnor wailed. “That’s disgusting! How could you? Have you lost your mind?” “What?” Magnus asked again. “We agreed eighteen was the cutoff age,” said Ragnor. “You, I, and Catarina made a vow.” “A v— Oh, wait. You think I’m dating Raphael?” Magnus asked. “Raphael? That’s ridiculous. That’s—” “That’s the most revolting idea I’ve ever heard.” Raphael’s voice rang out to the ceiling. Probably people in the street could hear him. “That’s a little strong,” said Magnus. “And, frankly, hurtful.” “And if I did wish to indulge in unnatural pursuits— and let me be clear, I certainly do not,” Raphael continued scornfully, “as if I would choose him. Him! He dresses like a maniac, acts like a fool, and makes worse jokes than the man people throw rotten eggs at outside the Dew Drop every Saturday.” Ragnor began to laugh. “Better men than you have begged for a chance to win all this,” Magnus muttered. “They have fought duels in my honor. One man fought a duel for my honor, but that was a little embarrassing since it is long gone.” “Do you know he spends hours in the bathroom sometimes?” Raphael announced mercilessly. “He wastes actual magic on his hair. On his hair!” “I love this kid,” said Ragnor.

Because, even if my corrupt body is rotten and wracked with pain, even if all my senses have departed from me, leaving only agony and decay, my Mind is still blessed with Life. And, as in the long nights of my Youth, when I could find no sleep, I lie here . . . and think of Numbers. For Numbers are the bridge between the World of Perfection and this fallen, foolish vale of tears. They exist both in the purity of abstraction, and in the concrete, solid, sinful world. They exist in the ten fingers of my twitching, clutching hands, in the spidery numeric scrawls in Schäffer’s books of accounts, they exist in that vision of perfection in this fallen world, the Cathedral, in its circles, in its triangles, in the parabolae of its curls and curves, a beauteous image of the Godhead as a finite, geometrical and comprehensible idea. And they exist also in pure conception, in the flights of numerical beauty that my mind conceives. Can one set a limit on numbers? Can one imagine where the line could be drawn and say . . . after this count, one may reckon no further? No. They have no beginning and have no end. Numbers stretch out, beyond our human limits, beyond our comprehension, to a boundless Infinity. This physical world, my body, my life, will come to an end, but numbers count onwards for ever, towards the greatest of all reckonings that can never, ever be reached.

It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal. In the fantasy, you observe a scene in your mind's eye or on the computer screen. You see yourself standing on a tropical beach, the blue sea behind you, a big smile on your face, one hand holding a cocktail, the other arm around your lover's waist. Paradise. What the picture does not show is the annoying fly that bites your leg, the cramped feeling in your stomach from eating that rotten fish soup, the tension in your jaw as you fake a big smile, and the ugly fight the happy couple had five minutes ago. If we could only feel what the people in the photos felt while taking them!

I wasn't taught to hate white people. That dead body hanging from the platform broke the heart and wounded the spirit of every black man and woman who passed by. But I suspected that it also hurt right-thinking white people. Both parents had spoken well of fair-minded white people - my namesake, Jim O'Reilly, and Flake Cartledge - so I knew better than to blame a whole race for the rotten deeds of a few. When some blacks talked about whites as devils, I could see the source of their wrath. I could still see the dead man outside the courthouse on the square. But I couldn't turn the fury into hatred. Blind hatred, my mother had taught me, poisons the soul. I kept hearing her say, 'If you're kind to people, they'll be kind to you.

It was all beginning to run together in the back of Eleanor's mind, and the things that had probably really happened were confused with the things that probably hadn't. And every day everything in her whole past life - the real things and the imaginary things - was being pushed farther and farther back, because going to high school was so enormous, so vast! so different from all of Eleanor's life before. The milling crowds in the hall between classes, all those jostling elbows and swollen shoulders and bosoms, all those enormous hands and feet, they pushed and thumped and shoved at Eleanor's childhood, until there was no room anymore for anything but now, right now, a hurrying rushing now that was just incredibly thrilling, or absolutely rotten and just disgusting, this heaving present moment, right now.

It’s so cute, isn’t it?” Arianna said dreamily. “Are we seeing the same creature? It’s like a demented goat with a bone growth.” “You’re going to hurt its feelings! Now shut up and sit on the ground.” I did as I was told, sticking my ankle out. “How is it going to heal me?” I asked, suddenly nervous. I pictured it licking my ankle and gagged. I could only imagine the diseases unicorn saliva had or what it carried around in its filthy, matted beard and hair. Bleating reproachfully, it stared at me with its doleful, square-pupiled brown eyes. “Oh, fine. Great, glorious unicorn, beloved of oblivious girls everywhere, please heal me. Now, if you don’t mind.” With one last bat of its gunk-crusted eyelashes, it lowered its head and put its stubby horn against my ankle. I cringed, waiting for pain, but felt instead tingling warmth spread out, almost like having butterflies in my stomach. Only in my ankle. Butterflies . . . with rainbows. The feeling of wholeness and well-being spread up my leg and into my entire body, and I couldn’t stop grinning. The forest was beautiful! The tree branches, naked against the brightening sky, held unimaginable wonders. The hard-packed dirt beneath me was a treasure trove of unrealized potential, lovely for what it could eventually give life to. I could sit out here forever and just enjoy nature. I was so happy! And rainbows! Why did I keep thinking of rainbows? Who cared! Rainbows were totally awesome! And the unicorn! I beamed at it, reaching out my hand to stroke it. There was never a creature more beautiful, more majestic. I’d spend the rest of my life out here, and we’d prance around the forest, worship the sunlight, bathe in the moonlight, and . . . I shook my head, scattering the idiotic warm fuzzies that had invaded. “Whoa,” I said, shoving the unicorn’s head away. “That’s enough of that.” I looked down at my ankle, which was now completely healed, not even a scar left. I fixed a stern look on the unicorn. “I am not going to frolic in an eternal meadow of sunshine and moonlight with you, you rotten little fink. But thanks.” I smiled, just enough to be nice without being too encouraging, and patted it quickly on the head. I was going to soak that hand in bleach. “Okay, let’s get out of here.” I stood, testing my ankle and relieved with the utter lack of pain. I still had an irrational desire to do an interpretive dance about rainbows, but it was a small price to pay for being healed.

I remember a time when my mind wouldn’t have been able to shut down, my cases churning so relentlessly that I could barely see the person standing right in front of me. I remember when it had to be me who solved the case, who figured out the riddle. Now I didn’t care who did it, how it came about, just as long as it was over. I’m tired of seeing all the rotten things one person does to another person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to open a flower shop. But this is my dream: One day, I leave my job at my office and it doesn’t follow me home and haunt me in my sleep. Another dream: I don’t live in my brother’s basement apartment. After everything I’ve seen and done and mused about endlessly, I’m convinced of one thing: There’s more to life than this, and sometimes when I picture more, it looks like something so simple, like so much less.

Neon Gods Neon Gods have drawn me to their altar With the promise that a better life won’t come. Now high on drugs my mind begins to falter, My body aches with phony martyrdom. Where are the friends that swore they’d be there? Where is the love that promised not to die? And when I’m gone, will anybody be here? And when I’m dead, will anybody cry? Sure times are low, and life seems hard and rotten. But up’s the only way there’s left to go. Though my friends have left me I have not forgotten That loving is the only way to grow. I can hope that I will have new things to dream of. I can hope that there’s a better life to come. Though I know it ain’t easy to find new love, I know that loving is the only way to grow. I’m still alive, I will survive. I’ll be there tomorrow, I will arrive. I’m a man, and you can plan I’ll be there tomorrow, I will arrive.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.

Mankind - proud conqueror and king swings its flag of primal glory to the winds Titans of the power-myth that failed Neanderthal hunger for the flesh of war so frail So weak, so hollow-minded the primat flock responds the jester race submits For each day of war is a failure for man, enslaved in her mordial genes Illusions bleed from their fetid cores, bent to their rotten extremes We, the plague of Terra Firma, nature's grand and last mistake plant the poisoned seed of cancer, set the severed fruits awake Burning like frozen relics in god's archaic graveland Burn the visionaire Kill the ideaologies Mankind must die The doves and the angels return to their graves with flames on their pestilent wings while mushroom-clouds haunt their virginwhite skies to rape their utopian dreams Living the last days of evolution's end from the nest of humanity, the graveland vultures rend

There is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this verse. It is the evolutionary and natural view. Of what use is it to perpetuate the misery of tuberculosis, and such diseases, as we now do? Nature's way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the Lions! Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the King must die. The King is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment. We must therefore go back to Spartan ideas of education; and the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations. The Christians to the Lions! Let weak and wry productions go back into the melting-pot, as is done with flawed steel castings. Death will purge, reincarnation make whole, these errors and abortions. Nature herself may be trusted to do this, if only we will leave her alone. But what of those who, physically fitted to live, are tainted with rottenness of soul, cancerous with the sin-complex? For the third time I answer: The Christians to the Lions! Hadit calls himself the Star, the Star being the Unit of the Macrocosm; and the Snake, the Snake being the symbol of Going or Love, the Dwarf-Soul, the Spermatozoon of all Life, as one may phrase it. The Sun, etc., are the external manifestations or Vestures of this Soul, as a Man is the Garment of an actual Spermatozoon, the Tree sprung of that Seed, with power to multiply and to perpetuate that particular Nature, though without necessary consciousness of what is happening. (―New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis III:48)

Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticize, and make a deadness. I say allthey can do. It is vastly important. My God, the world needs criticizing today...criticizing to death. Therefore let's live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it's like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an Organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You've severed the connexion between, the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple...you've fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.

She took out her chest of gold, and flung a handful of it or so into the fire, and the gold boiled up and poured out over the whole of the hut, until every part of it both inside and out was gilded. But when the gold began to bubble up the old hag grew so terrified that she fled as if the Evil One himself were pursuing her, and she did not remember to stoop down as she went through the doorway, and so she split her head and died. This whole sequence is just deeply bizarre. Mind you, I’d try to avoid wildly spewing molten gold myself, so I can’t argue with the crone. But seriously, if the house was filthy and she gilded it, wouldn’t that still be pretty nasty? Have you ever seen when people paint over a surface without cleaning it first, and you get weird dust lumps and gunk? I’m seeing an episode of Hoarders with every surface gilded. Rotten fruit? Gild it! Back issues of Hag Quarterly? Gild ’em! Dress you wore to the troll-prom twenty-seven years ago? Gild it! Cockroaches? Gild them and use them as festive napkin rings!

(1) I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves. As yet I had never been in love and I longed to love; and from a subconscious poverty of mind I hated the thought of being less inwardly destitute. I sought an object for my love; I was in love with love, and I hated safety and a path free of snares (Wisd. 14: 11; Ps. 90: 3). My hunger was internal, deprived of inward food, that is of you yourself, my God. But that was not the kind of hunger I felt. I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became. So my soul was in rotten health. In an ulcerous condition it thrust itself to outward things, miserably avid to be scratched by contact with the world of the senses. Yet physical things had no soul. Love lay outside their range. To me it was sweet to love and to be loved, the more so if I could also enjoy the body of the beloved. I therefore polluted the spring water of friendship with the filth of concupiscence.

They worked at the ivy with their hands and with Peter’s pocket-knife till the knife broke. After that they used Edmund’s. Soon the whole place where they had been sitting was covered with ivy; and at last they had the door cleared. “Locked, of course,” said Peter. “But the wood’s all rotten,” said Edmund. “We can pull it to bits in no time, and it will make extra firewood. Come on.” It took them longer than they expected and, before they had done, the great hall had grown dusky and the first star or two had come out overhead. Susan was not the only one who felt a slight shudder as the boys stood above the pile of splintered wood, rubbing the dirt off their hands and staring into the cold, dark opening they had made. “Now for a torch,” said Peter. “Oh, what is the good?” said Susan. “And as Edmund said--” “I’m not saying it now,” Edmund interrupted. “I still don’t understand, but we can settle that later. I suppose you’re coming down, Peter?” “We must,” said Peter. “Cheer up, Susan. It’s no good behaving like kids now that we are back in Narnia. You’re a Queen here. And anyway no one could go to sleep with a mystery like this on their minds.

But what does that mean, protect, it’s only a word. I could make you, now, a detailed list of all the coverings, large and small, that I constructed to keep myself hidden, and yet they were of no use to me. Do you remember how the night sky of Ischia horrified me? You all said how beautiful it is, but I couldn’t. I smelled an odor of rotten eggs, eggs with a greenish-yellow yolk inside the white and inside the shell, a hard-boiled egg cracked open. I had in my mouth poisoned egg stars, their light had a white, gummy consistency, it stuck to your teeth, along with the gelatinous black of the sky, I crushed it with disgust, I tasted a crackling of grit. Am I clear? Am I making myself clear? And yet on Ischia I was happy, full of love. But it was no use, my head always finds a chink to peer through, beyond—above, beneath, on the side—where the fear is. In Bruno’s factory, for example, the bones of the animals cracked in your fingers if you merely touched them, and a rancid marrow spilled out. I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind.

The fury which destroys an opponent’s character, would stop at nothing, if barriers were thrown down. That which is true of the leaders in politics, is true of subordinates. Political dishonesty in voters runs into general dishonesty, as the rotten speck taints the whole apple. A community whose politics are conducted by a perpetual breach of honesty on both sides, will be tainted by immorality throughout. Men will play the same game in their private affairs, which they have learned to play in public matters. The guile, the crafty vigilance, the dishonest advantage, the cunning sharpness;—the tricks and traps and sly evasions; the equivocal promises, and unequivocal neglect of them, which characterize political action, will equally characterize private action. The mind has no kitchen to do its dirty work in, while the parlor remains clean. Dishonesty is an atmosphere; if it comes into one apartment, it penetrates into every one. Whoever will lie in politics, will lie in traffic. Whoever will slander in politics, will slander in personal squabbles. A professor of religion who is a dishonest politician, is a dishonest Christian. His creed is a perpetual index of his hypocrisy.

This was the first time that Buck had failed, in itself a sufficient reason to drive Hal into a rage. He exchanged the whip for the customary club. Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows which now fell upon him. Like his mates, he was barely able to get up, but, unlike them, he had made up his mind not to get up. He had a vague feeling of impending doom. This had been strong upon him when he pulled into the bank, and it had not departed from him. What of the thin and rotten ice he had felt under his feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster close at hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive him. He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went down. It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away. And then, suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang upon the man who wielded the club. Hal was hurled backward, as though struck by a falling tree. Mercedes screamed. Charles looked on wistfully, wiped his watery eyes, but did not get up because of his stiffness. John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too convulsed with rage to speak. "If you strike that dog again, I'll kill you," he at last managed to say in a choking voice. p63

Animals are the lower intelligent of creatures, yet God illustrates man as one of them. Why? To demonstrate to us how careless, how thoughtless, and sometimes how cruel and low-life we can be without him. Without God, we go through a hard, disappointing, and dreadful life. We are like fearful, untrained, and bitter children that have played all day and are afraid to go to sleep at night, thinking we are going to miss out or be left out of things. A sailor out on a stormy sea needs a strong sail and anchor for the days and a lighthouse for the nights to survive. This is a good illustration of witnessing. We draw from one another’s strength for the day and mediate on it in the nights in accordance with God’s Word. God has faded out of the mind of this generation, we like immature children, believe that the Toyland of material wealth is a sufficient world. Yet houses, cars, and money really do not fulfill. Abraham begot Isaac, and Isaac begot Jacob – a generation of God-fearing men. But in the next generation, God was not the God of Isaac. He had faded and became second place in their lives. Even in the mother’s womb, there was a struggle for honor and success. Jacob stole his brother’s birthright. Morals were decaying, rottenness appeared. The same things have happened with us. Our whole nation is reaping the results of a fading faith and trust, which is producing decaying morals and a decaying country. We are morally out of control. Unless we, like Jacob, who when frightened for his life desired a moral renewal, acknowledge that we are wrong and find God in the process. We must seek God with our whole hearts. The future of this world is in the hands of the believers. God has left everything in the hands of the church. Therefore, we must witness. An evangelical team must go out and bring the people back to the Garden of Eden as God had originally planned. Grace is always available!

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires—the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise—and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation who for a short time believe and make others believe that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.

Eighteen centuries have now passed away since God sent forth a few Jews from a remote corner of the earth, to do a work which according to man's judgment must have seemed impossible. He sent them forth at a time when the whole world was full of superstition, cruelty, lust, and sin. He sent them forth to proclaim that the established religions of the earth were false and useless, and must be forsaken. He sent them forth to persuade men to give up old habits and customs, and to live different lives. He sent them forth to do battle with the most grovelling idolatry, with the vilest and most disgusting immorality, with vested interests, with old associations, with a bigoted priesthood, with sneering philosophers, with an ignorant population, with bloody-minded emperors, with the whole influence of Rome. Never was there an enterprise to all appearance more Quixotic, and less likely to succeed! And how did He arm them for this battle? He gave them no carnal weapons. He gave them no worldly power to compel assent, and no worldly riches to bribe belief. He simply put the Holy Ghost into their hearts, and the Scriptures into their hands. He simply bade them to expound and explain, to enforce and to publish the doctrines of the Bible. The preacher of Christianity in the first century was not a man with a sword and an army, to frighten people, like Mahomet,—or a man with a license to be sensual, to allure people, like the priests of the shameful idols of Hindostan. No! he was nothing more than one holy man with one holy book. And how did these men of one book prosper? In a few generations they entirely changed the face of society by the doctrines of the Bible. They emptied the temples of the heathen gods. They famished idolatry, or left it high and dry like a stranded ship. They brought into the world a higher tone of morality between man and man. They raised the character and position of woman. They altered the standard of purity and decency. They put an end to many cruel and bloody customs, such as the gladiatorial fights.—There was no stopping the change. Persecution and opposition were useless. One victory after another was won. One bad thing after another melted away. Whether men liked it or not, they were insensibly affected by the movement of the new religion, and drawn within the whirlpool of its power. The earth shook, and their rotten refuges fell to the ground. The flood rose, and they found themselves obliged to rise with it. The tree of Christianity swelled and grew, and the chains they had cast round it to arrest its growth, snapped like tow. And all this was done by the doctrines of the Bible! Talk of victories indeed! What are the victories of Alexander, and Cæsar, and Marlborough, and Napoleon, and Wellington, compared with those I have just mentioned? For extent, for completeness, for results, for permanence, there are no victories like the victories of the Bible.

When he lifted his head, Savannah nearly pulled him back to her. He watched her face, her eyes cloudy with desire, her lips so beautiful, bereft of his. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are, Savannah? There is such beauty in your soul, I can see it shining in your eyes.” She touched his face, her palm molding his strong jaw. Why couldn’t she resist his hungry eyes? “I think you’re casting a spell over me. I can’t remember what we were talking about.” Gregori smiled. “Kissing.” His teeth nibbled gently at her chin. “Specifically, your wanting to kiss that orange-bearded imbecile.” “I wanted to kiss every one of them,” she lied indignantly. “No, you did not. You were hoping that silly fop would wipe my taste from your mouth for all eternity.” His hand stroked back the fall of hair around her face. He feathered kisses along the delicate line of her jaw. “It would not have worked, you know. As I recall, he seemed to have a problem getting close to you.” Her eyes smoldered dangerously. “Did you have anything to do with his allergies?” She had wanted someone, anyone, to wipe Gregori’s taste from her mouth, her soul. He raised his voice an octave. “Oh, Savannah, I just have to taste your lips,” he mimicked. Then he went into a sneezing fit. “You haven’t ridden until you’ve ridden on a Harley, baby.” He sneezed, coughed, and gagged in perfect imitation. Savannah punched his arm, forgetting for a moment her bruised fist. When it hurt, she yelped and glared accusingly at him. “It was you doing all that to him! The poor man— you damaged his ego for life. Each time he touched me, he had a sneezing fit.” Gregori raised an eyebrow, completely unrepentant. “Technically, he did not lay a hand on you. He sneezed before he could get that close.” She laid her head back on the pillow, her ebony hair curling around his arm, then her arm, weaving them together. His lips found her throat, then moved lower and found the spot over her breast that burned with need, with invitation. Savannah caught his head firmly in her hands and lifted him determinedly away from her before her treacherous body succumbed completely to his magic. “And the dog episode?” He tried for innocence, but his laughter was echoing in her mind. “What do you mean?” “You know very well what I mean,” she insisted. “When Dragon walked me home.” “Ah, yes, I seem to recall now. The big bad wolf decked out in chains and spikes, afraid of a little dog.” “Little? A hundred-and-twenty-pound Rottweiler mix? Foaming at the mouth. Roaring. Charging him!” “He ran like a rabbit.” Gregori’s soft, caressing voice echoed his satisfaction. He had taken great pleasure in running that particular jackass off. How dare the man try to lay a hand on Savannah? “No wonder I couldn’t touch the dog’s mind and call him off. You rotten scoundrel.” “After Dragon left you, I chased him for two blocks, and he went up a tree. I kept him there for several hours, just to make a point. He looked like a rooster with his orange comb.” She laughed in spite of her desire not to. “He never came near me again.” “Of course not. It was unacceptable,” he said complacently, with complete satisfaction, the warmth of his breath heating her blood.

Temperance Portrayals of my rotten kin were found in the waste-lord's ache. Did he not save it in TIME, the revenging host of mine? As to where they sought and gathered up the gold. We may never know, we may never so wish to in fact; Brothers of the calm sun ran about with displeasure. Had we no wish to proclaim our own disposition. Provision . Shall we all, beneath the rail, disfrock the cynical mind?

Women have been hassling Fletcher ever since his book came out. Some want to convert him, and some want to kill him. Besides that, the book racked up a bunch of terrible reviews. Not that any of us care.” “Book?” Cleo was trying to change the direction of her mind in mid-thought. The man was a writer. An unmarried writer. His book had gotten rotten reviews. The poor guy. A writer herself, Cleo felt an instant affinity. Bev thrust a thin volume in Cleo’s direction. Cleo glanced at the title. For Men Only. 101 Ways to Stay Married. In very small print—and Still Do What You Want by Fletcher Fremont Maitland.

When I am feeling rotten, I like to walk. When you walk, there’s a kind of rhythm. Your mind slows down to match your body. Your thoughts start to go in lazy, comfortable circles.

Then what had been at the bottom of his mind all along surfaced, like a rotten log in a swamp brought up by its own putrescent gases. A headline from last summer’s newspaper: LOCAL MAN INDICTED FOR MURDER. A measure of peace returned to him. A feeling of self-confidence, of being in good hands. Granville Sutter, he thought.

The other approach, taken by survivors of the old Madrasa i-Rahimiyya, was to reject the West in toto and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots. For this reason, disillusioned pupils of the school of Shah Waliullah, such as Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi – who in 1857 had briefly established an independent Islamic state north of Meerut at Shamli in the Doab – founded an influential but depressingly narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north of the former Mughal capital. With their backs to the wall, they reacted against what the founders saw as the degenerate and rotten ways of the old Mughal elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.

Humanity A to Z (The Poem) A for assimilation is the way, B for bigotry must be thrown away. C for conscience when at play, D for delusions all run away. E for equality once brought to life, F for fears can no longer survive. G for greed when let not to thrive, H for humility won't be caught in strife. I for integrity mustn't be compromised, J for justice will then prevail alright. K for kindness must never run tight, L for life can then be lived upright. M for mercy can never be forgotten, N for naivety keeps you from being rotten. O for oppression when is begotten, P for patience must be overridden. Q for questions when let fly, R for rigidity will weaken and die. S for serenity will go awry, T for tradition if obeyed dry. U for unity is our supreme mission, V for vanity leads only to destruction. W for wholeness is our salvation, X for xenophobia is no civilization. Y for yield we must never to separation, Z for zeal we mustn't lose for ascension.

What're you going to write about for English?" Vicky asked. "They're a rotten lot of subjects. I don't want to do any of them." "I don't mind the one on Macbeth." "You must be crazy! It doesn't mean a thing." "What is it?" Mrs. Stanford asked. "About how the witches knew Macbeth was going to kill Duncan," Chris said. "No it isn't. It's whether Macbeth would have done anything about it if he hadn't been told he was going to be king," Vicky said. "What's the difference? They told him the future, didn't they?" "But what's interesting is whether he'd have murdered Duncan if they hadn't said anything." "But he did murder Duncan. He couldn't have been king without it," Chris said. "Only did the witches make him do it by telling him first?

It was fascinating. It was a lesson that no book taught. It was a spy-cam straight into the human soul. Everyone flinched when they saw her, that was to be expected, that was inevitable. How could they not? The human mind was prepared to see certain things and not others. So it wasn,'t the shocked looks that fascinated 2Face, rather it was what came next: the pity, the anger, the poor attempts to conceal disgust, the dishonesty, the bending over backward to pretend it wasn't there, and the outright ridicule and anger. The anger was most interesting. People were outraged that she would dare show them something ugly. It was a social sin. Her existence forced people to confront the uncertainty of life. And of course the irony disturbed people most of all: the pretty girl turned ugly. Like they would have understood if she'd been ugly to begin with. But a beauty turned hideous? What kind of rotten trick was that?

Many people often ask me, "Is it better to be single or married?", To which I answer, single if you do not find the right person and married if you do. They also ask, "Is it better to have a business or a job", to which I reply whatever makes you happier and feel fulfilled. They then ask why I have decided to become a writer, to which I reply that it was never a decision, and it was never mine either. It is more correct to say that I learned to accept myself. This doesn't mean I won't change. Any circumstance in life is the result of many decisions and it shouldn't trouble your mind. But quite often, what troubles you is not life itself but the judgement of others. Yet you look at their judgements rather than their lack of capacity to make proper judgements. I never listen to what fools say because they can only say foolishness. People create that which is rooted in their being and if their nature is of immense ignorance, their advice to you will be as useful as a rotten apple falling from a tree with no life. The fact that you shouldn't eat rotten apples should be as obvious as the fact that you shouldn't listen to fools.

I find it hilarious when someone says "science has proven this" and "science did not prove that". As a teacher, I was always proving my students wrong whenever they said those things. But I can't do the same with the many stupid from the western world who are obsessed with the appearances of the physical world. They shout louder when someone proves them wrong, like a little child would if confronted with a lie. People know nothing about science. The real scientists hate people like me, because I ask questions they never considered. You see, science evolves at the exact same level as consciousness, and if your consciousness is not evolved enough, you will think that you can make gold out of iron or that maggots appear spontaneously out of rotten meat. The great philosopher Aristotle believed that life can arise from nonliving matter. There was an equal level of stupidity and absurdity to his rationalizations, albeit often wise. Until a few centuries ago, it was scientifically proven that the earth was not round but was the center of the universe. It was also scientifically proven that if you are cut and bleed when sick, that will make you feel better, unless, of course, you die. Today, everyone tells me that learning disabilities have no cure and that intelligence can't be increased, even though I have always proven those beliefs to be false. Does anyone care? No! Because science is never scientific but a rationalization at the exact same level of consciousness of a people. If consciousness evolves nearly everything that you are being told now will be proven to be false, and scientists are afraid of that, which is why they stop any among them from being an heretic and prove the religious science of today to be wrong. Now, that requires quite a high level of consciousness, to not be emotionally affected by the fact that you have been fooled by everyone on almost everything you consider to be true, and worse - restart again!

Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind's eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.

Is There More (The Sonnet) Is there more to life than mere eating! Is there more to existence than mere fighting! Is there more to progress than mere greed! Is there more to administration than controlling! Is there more to health than mere pills! Is there more to knowledge than mere facts! Is there more to character than mere outfits! Is there more to development than cruel tact! Is there more to communication than mere talking! Is there more to tradition than ancient habits! Is there more to a person than skin and bones! Is there more to learning than rotten beliefs! Even the sky is no limit for a mind that expands, Whereas the savage mind of rigidity is forever bland.

You know, the most poisonous thing about the camps wasn’t really our time there,” she begins slowly, “it’s how they tricked us into being afraid of the world outside of them.” “The world is kind of rotten, as far as I can tell,” I argue. “It is and it isn’t, but it’s always been that way, even before all this. We just were conditioned into a routine, so everything else feels overwhelming in comparison.

Doubt is a rotten seed in the mind that must be cast aside in order to reach the promised land of success.

Counterfeit revolutionaries give in to the comfort and security of authoritarian life, the moment they come to power themselves. Upon coming to power, the most outspoken activist no longer minds getting acquainted with the nuclear codes of inhumanity, in the name of national security. If asked why, their usual answer is - it's a necessary evil. Thus, an activist is only activist till they come to power. Once in power, most of them turn into the same kind of rotten politicians, that they have been fighting against. That's human behavior 101 in relation to political revolution.

When I have pictorially captured smell, the most palpable of the senses, the next thing will be to imprison sound- vulgarly speaking, to bottle it. Just think a moment. Force is as imperishable as matter; indeed, as I have been somewhat successful in showing, it is matter. Now, when a sound wave is once started, it is only lost through an indefinite extension of its circumference. Catch that sound wave, sir! Catch it in a bottle, then its circumference cannot extend. You may keep the sound wave forever if you will only keep it corked up tight. The only difficulty is in bottling it in the first place. I shall attend to the details of that operation just as soon as I have managed to photograph the confounded rotten-egg smell of sulphydric acid." The professor stirred up the offensive mixture with a glass rod, and continued: "While my object in bottling sound is mainly scientific, I must confess that I see in success in that direction a prospect of considerable pecuniary profit. I shall be prepared at no distant day to put operas in quart bottles, labeled and assorted, and contemplate a series of light and popular airs in ounce vials at prices to suit the times. You know very well that it costs a ten-dollar bill now to take a lady to hear Martha or Mignon, rendered in first-class style. By the bottle system, the same notes may be heard in one's own parlor at a comparatively trifling expense. I could put the operas into the market at from eighty cents to a dollar a bottle. For oratorios and symphonies I should use demijohns, and the cost would of course be greater. I don't think that ordinary bottles would hold Wagner's music. It might be necessary to employ carboys. Sir, if I were of the sanguine habit of you Americans, I should say that there were millions in it. Being a phlegmatic Teuton, accustomed to the precision and moderation of scientific language, I will merely say that in the success of my experiments with sound I see a comfortable income, as well as great renown. A SCIENTIFIC MARVEL By this time the professor had another negative, but an eager examination of it yielded nothing more satisfactory than before. He sighed and continued: "Having photographed smell and bottled sound, I shall proceed to a project as much higher than this as the reflective faculties are higher than the perceptive, as the brain is more exalted than the ear or nose. "I am perfectly satisfied that elements of mind are just as susceptible of detection and analysis as elements of matter. Why, mind is matter. "The soul spectroscope, or, as it will better be known, Dummkopf's duplex self-registering soul spectroscope, is based on the broad fact that whatever is material may be analyzed and determined by the position of the Frauenhofer lines upon the spectrum. If soul is matter, soul may thus be analyzed and determined. Place a subject under the light, and the minute exhalations or

Filthy-minded old bastard,' he muttered viciously under his breath. No wonder the world such a rotten place, rotten and filthy and cheap and smelly. Where is that place they talk of and paint nice pictures of and described in all the homey magazines? Where is that place with the clean, white cottages surrounding the new, red brick church with the clean, white steeple, were the families all have two children, one boy and one girl, and a shiny new car in the garage and a dog and a cat and life is like living in the land of the happily-ever-after? Surely it must be around here someplace, someplace in America. Or is it just that it's not for me? Maybe I dealt myself out, but what about that young kid on Burnside who was in the army and found it wasn't enough so that he has to keep proving to everyone who comes in for a cup of coffee that he was fighting for his country like the button on his shirt says he did because the army didn't do anything about his face to make him look more American? And what about the poor niggers on Jackson Street who can't find anything better to do than spit on the sidewalk and show me the way to Tokyo? They're on the outside looking in, just like that kid and just like me and just like everybody else I’ve ever seen or known. Even Mr. Carrick. Why isn't he in? Why is he on the outside squandering his goodness on outcasts like me? Maybe the answer is that there is no in. Maybe the whole damn country is pushing and shoving and screaming to get into some place that doesn't exist, because they don't know that the outside could be the inside if only they would stop all this pushing and shoving and screaming, and they haven't got enough sense to realise that. That makes sense. I've got the answer all figured out, simple and neat, and sensible.

Her mind is a rotten, infected lump, but her heart beats strong with the pulse of dangerous dreams.

She can't enter into things that interest me; but I can, I could enter into things that interest her. Why don't I? Of course I can see perfectly clearly how she looks at things. It's just as rotten for her that I can't talk with her about her ideas as it is rotten for me that she doesn't see my ideas. And it isn't rotten for me. I don't mind it. I don't expect it. I don't expect it....

Most Italians consume alcohol every day, but it’s not what we call drinking. For Americans and northern Europeans alcoholic beverages are mind-altering drugs, used as tranquilizers, sleeping potions, inhibition-looseners (“Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker”—Ogden Nash), or roads to inebriation. That is to say, to getting tipsy, high, drunk, plastered, smashed, sloshed, sozzled, soused, crocked, wrecked, juiced, stinko, tight, pie-eyed, crosseyed, shit-faced, blitzed, fried, wasted, gassed, polluted, pissed, tanked up, ripped, loaded, pickled, bombed, blasted, blooey, blotto, blind drunk, roaring drunk, dead drunk, falling down drunk, drunk as a lord, stewed to the gills, or feeling no pain—and that’s just my own personal vocabulary. Italians reach that state so infrequently that their language provides only a few tame options—ubriaco (drunk), brillo (tipsy), alticcio (high), sbronzo (drunk)—with at most perso (lost) or fradicio (rotten) tacked on for a touch of color. They don’t even have a proper word for a hangover, though if pressed they’ll come up with the stately postumi della sbornia, aftereffects of overindulgence. For Italians, wine and beer are foods. If they provide a little buzz that’s just a pleasant side benefit, improving the sparkle of the conversation. When I first traveled in Italy, parents regularly fed wine-laced water to their kids (“acquavino”), vaccinating them against later dipsomania. And at lunchtime in the cafeteria of my Nuovo Regina Margherita Hospital the docs would jostle to sit at the chaplain’s table, because he’d always bring a bottle of good country wine. Even the harder stuff fits into a culinary protocol: a seven p.m. Campari is meant to whet the appetite, and the cognac or amaro at the end of a large meal to aid digestion. Which is why, in proportion, Italy has one-tenth as many problem drinkers as America.

The individual soul must be awakened from the deep sleep it is immersed in. One who considers the Self to be the body cannot accomplish anything great. So long as his mind dwells on the body, he will not be able to think of anything other than his own body and his own nation. The reason we consider many of the people of Western nations to be uncivilized is their identification of the Self with the body. When someone with such an outlook joins a religious order, he turns the ashrama into his home and yoga into a job. Even Sri Ramakrishna, the God of Love, has been turned into a zemindar by them. He is being served with great pomp throughout the country—he must have a fancy bed, a beautiful house, and good food! If the mind cannot accept abstract ideas, then what is the point of coming into the circle of Sri Ramakrishna? This worn-out baggage was present in the religion of old. Haven't you seen people take rotten fish, fry it in spices, and kill the smell with onions before they eat it? This is the same thing. The spice of social service has been added to the decaying religion of the olden days—that is all.

Spending more time in nature and cultivating our mystic-sensibilities are two effective joy-promoting strategies. But these strategies can prove futile if our morbidness becomes so excessive that we adopt what William James called “the dust-and-ashes state of mind”. This mindset is defined by the dreadful suspicion that evil and futility lurk behind all experiences, and that the greatest goods of life are rotten with a worm at the core. James was no stranger to this mindset and as a young man he confessed in a letter to his brother: “I cannot bring myself, as so many seem able to do, to blink the evil out of sight, and gloss it over.

Defiled or immaculate. Dirty or pure. These are concepts we form in our mind. A beautiful rose we have just cut and placed in our vase is pure. It smells so good, so fresh. A garbage can is the opposite. It smells horrible, and it is filled with rotten things. But that is only when we look on the surface. If we look more deeply we will see that in just five or six days, the rose will become part of the garbage. We do not need to wait five days to see it. If we just look at the rose, and we look deeply, we can see it now. And if we look into the garbage can, we see that in a few months its contents can be transformed into lovely vegetables, and even a rose. If you are a good organic gardener, looking at a rose you can see the garbage, and looking at the garbage you can see a rose. Roses and garbage inter-are. Without a rose, we cannot have garbage; and without garbage, we cannot have a rose. They need each other very much. The rose and the garbage are equal.

Cheapest of heart wears priciest of clothes, to cover up the stink of a rotten soul.

Hand that stretched - continued...... Trying to understand who acts how, what happens to human emotions now, casting them in the crucible of endless strifes, Forcing them to walk on the edges of sharp knives, and making them battle against their own lives, Whereas in reality it plays this out at its own will, creating situations that save and many that kill, For life is like a river endlessly trying to perfect the human desires and human will, Without knowing one true aspect of human life, that life which represents everything, Will never understand, because human mind and heart are unlike anything; like it there is nothing, So the man may keep stretching his hand and people may offer him different glances, But I know just like few others, that it is life perfecting what it calls “chances!” For it does not like to be blamed for human pain or misery, Then it would evolve into a guilt becoming the graveyard of its acts so unsavory, So it has invented a perfect cliche called chance and fate, To evade cosmic prosecution of its actually diabolic actions and its rotten state, But the pain of the stretched hand will one day become its cause of doom, I can already see the clouds of change, and clouds of grotesque gloom that over it already loom!