Sampler Quotes

What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.

I can smell the smoke now. I can see tendrils of it comin' up between the cracks in the shrikin' floorboards. There she is, calmly taking down the framed examples of fine embroideries, samplers, and needlework from teh hallway wall and tucking them under her arm. "Mistress! Come on! You've got to leave!" She calmly turns and faces me. "Why?" she asks. "The British are coming?" "Only one, Mistress," I say

Would you please do me the honor of telling me WHAT THE BLAZES IS GOING ON?

I know I'm supposed to be a good girl. I know I'm supposed to be happy doing needlework samplers and baking potatoes in coal and whatnot. But Lord, I love running from the law.

What’s the point of becoming mind-numbingly drunk if it doesn't even give you the balls to talk to the girl you like?

I figure guys are like Whitman's Samplers. I like to take a little bite out of each and then move on before the whole box gets stale.

I’m bored to death. Perhaps I should pillage one of my neighbors for my own amusement. It seems to work for Drowden.

writing was like breathing.

You know, Ava, it’s good to be smart, but kindness is more important. Oh dear, another old-lady chestnut to stitch on a sampler. Or maybe one of those cute little throw pillows.

It’s a good thing while you have superior hearing, I possess superior abilities to keep my mouth shut.

Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.

He's like a cesspool in the midst of my creative writing oasis.

History has to repeat itself,” said Woody Allen, “because nobody was listening the first time around.

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favorite aunt in our favorite poker parlor) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favorite poker in our favorite aunt). I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris's front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs. Virtue's sewing class. Mrs. Virtue should either have had the imagination to commend me for my effort in context, or the farsightedness to realize there is a debate going on as to whether something has an absolute as well as a relative value; given that, she should have given me the benefit of the doubt. As it was, she got upset and blamed me for her headache.

Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked, rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical, monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic, blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the /impudence!/ We have /nothing/ in this life of suffocating obligation but our own motherfucking impudence! For God's sake, give us this day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!!

That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

There was a picture over the bed, a framed sampler in red and blue cross-stitch, with the words Hold fast that which is Good embroidered over a blue anchor. Anna looked at this with mistrust. It was the word “good”. Not that she herself was particularly naughty, in fact her school reports quite often gave her a “Good” for Conduct, but in some odd way the word seemed to leave her outside. She didn’t feel good…

Sometimes what you’re most afraid of doing is the very thing that will set you free. —

No wonder Satan wants to convince us that we are weak, because once a believer finds strength in prayer, the game is over for Satan.

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred and we are better thruout the year for having in spirit become a child again at Christmas time.

"never trust a duck"

Now there are many Shaftoes—mostly in Tennessee—but the Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross-stitch sampler.

After all, as it says on a needlepoint sampler or throw pillow or the occasional bumper sticker: Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere. In high heels. Or mules by Manolo Blahnik, the strappy, tangly kind that give you blisters. And when their feet start to hurt, they bitch about it a lot, until someone agrees to carry them home. Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done? We women still only make seventy-one cents, on average, for every man's dollar. We still have to listen to studies telling us that a single woman over the age of 35 had best avoid airplanes because she is more likely to die in a terrorist attack than get married.

He’s already run the standard battery of questions, checked the check boxes, computed the data: hears voices = schizophrenic; too agitated = paranoid; too bright = manic; too moody = bipolar; and of course everyone knows a depressive, a suicidal, and if you’re all-around too unruly or obstructive or treatment resistant like a superbug, you get slapped with a personality disorder, too. In Crote Six, they said I “suffer” from schizoaffective disorder. That’s like the sampler plate of diagnoses, Best of Everything. But I don’t want to suffer. I want to live.

Injurious Hermia! most ungrateful maid! Have you conspired, have you with the contrived To bait me with this foul derision? Is all the counsel that we two have shared, The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent, When we have chid the hasty-footed time For parting us,-O, and is all forgot? All school=days' friendship, childhood innocence? We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our neelds created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key; As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds, Had been incorporate. So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition; Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart, Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, Due but to one, and crowned with one crest, And will you rent our ancient love asunder, To join with men in scorning your poor friend? It is not friendly, 'tis not maidenly: Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it, Though I alone do feel the injury.

Even as he said my most private thoughts, even as I burned with outrage and shame, I trembled at the grip still on my mind. Rhysand turned to the High Lord. "I'm curious: Why did she wonder if it would feel good to have you bite her breast the way you bit her neck?" "Let. Her. Go." Tamlin's face was twisted with such feral rage that it struck a different, deeper chord of terror in me.

King Drowden has given his men instructions to infiltrate the town, bribe townspeople for the secrets of their neighbors, steal the neighbors’ hidden treasures. Much more subtle than Drowden’s usual smash and burn technique. We do hope Drowden isn’t growing a brain.

Please don’t interpret the presence of your disease as the absence of God’s love. I pray he heals you. And he will, ultimately.

Your mine, Angel, and don't you forget that.

Historically, the most dangerous men on earth were men of God … especially when their gods became threatened.

Mesmerizing—the lethal, gentle beauty of the snow.

also believe that generally there are three types of people in this world. Those who make things happen, those who watch what happens, and those who wonder, ‘What happened?

Have we spent so long seeing each others vulnerabilities that we forgot each others strenghts?

I like Hazelle. Respect her. The explosion that killed my father took out her husband as well, leaving her with three boys and a baby due any day.

Several times we had been very close to "it," but "it" just never quite happened. She always drew back, and I never pressed her. God help me, I was being gallant. I have wondered often since what would have changed (for good or for ill) had I not been. What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.

A sampler of England's hottest 'chefs' would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he's a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his 'mates'. He's a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I've never seen him naked. I believe the 'Naked' refers to his 'simple, straightforward, unadorned' food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school.

Silence, her mother liked to say, could heal you or it could make you go crazy. It all depended on how you listened to it.

while Tolkien’s stories were not historically real, they were true

What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen. ♥

She looked down at the hand and saw that it was clutching instead a handful of perfume card samplers, each one sprayed with a different scent.

Remember what it was like on Christmas when you woke up before your parents, and had to sit there until they were ready, knowing that just a few rooms away there was something awesome waiting for you? For the next thirty minutes, I felt that way, while I waited for them to call me back up to the set.

God is unchanging. The weather changes. Fashion changes. Even change changes. God has not changed and cannot and will not ever change. He is always the same—yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Heb. 6:17–18).

Sample device radio signal strong.' Rocky says. 'Getting closer. Be ready.' 'I'm ready.' 'Be very ready.' 'I am very ready. Be calm.' 'Am calm. You be calm.' 'No, you be cal- wait. I see the sampler!

Apart from the sampler, though, I still hadn’t heard the songs that were on the short-list for Frank and Amy seemed a bit reticent about letting me listen to them. Maybe she thought lyrics like ‘the only time I hold your hand is to get the angle right’ might shock me or that I’d embarrass her. I teased her after I’d finally heard the song. ‘I want to ask you a question,’ I said. ‘That song “In My Bed” when you sing—’ ‘Dad! I don’t want to talk about it!

Kirsch planned to go public with this presentation in a stunning, meticulously choreographed event. When he did, people across the world would realize that the teachings of all religions did indeed have one thing in common. They were all dead wrong.

Tranquility is the soul of our community.” Not a quarter mile’s distance away, Susanna Finch sat in the lace-curtained parlor of the Queen’s Ruby, a rooming house for gently bred young ladies. With her were the room house’s newest prospective residents, a Mrs. Highwood and her three unmarried daughters. “Here in Spindle Cove, young ladies enjoy a wholesome, improving atmosphere.” Susanna indicated a knot of ladies clustered by the hearth, industriously engaged in needlework. “See? The picture of good health and genteel refinement.” In unison, the young ladies looked up from their work and smiled placid, demure smiles. Excellent. She gave them an approving nod. Ordinarily, the ladies of Spindle Cove would never waste such a beautiful afternoon stitching indoors. They would be rambling the countryside, or sea bathing in the cove, or climbing the bluffs. But on days like these, when new visitors came to the village, everyone understood some pretense at propriety was necessary. Susanna was not above a little harmless deceit when it came to saving a young woman’s life. “Will you take more tea?” she asked, accepting a fresh pot from Mrs. Nichols, the inn’s aging proprietress. If Mrs. Highwood examined the young ladies too closely, she might notice that mild Gaelic obscenities occupied the center of Kate Taylor’s sampler. Or that Violet Winterbottom’s needle didn’t even have thread.

I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanese chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain's home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched by unmarried sisters, the smell of whale oil burning in the evenings, the stillness of growing old.

The early Seventies were a gold rush for double-vinyl samplers from Sixties heavyweights—the Stones’ 1971 Hot Rocks, the Kinks’ 1972 Kink Kronikles, the Doors’ 1972 Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, the Beach Boys’ 1974 Endless Summer. Best of all: Bob Dylan’s 1971 Greatest Hits Volume II, with virtually no hits, just deep cuts chosen by the artist.

The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member or bookstore employee. That process is called word of mouth. Savvy publishers understand its power and try to facilitate its effect with advance reading copies (ARCs), samplers, first chapters circulated by e-mail, Web sites and the like.

Life Savers and Black Jack and Chiclets and Baby Ruths and Whitman’s Sampler’s boxes of chocolates; soaps from Ivory, which was 9944/100% pure, to Lava, which scoured away grease with a stony abrasion, to the ferocious 29-Mule Team Borax; and magazines, on a rack just beside the diagonal entrance, Liberty and Collier’s and the Post and Ladies’ Home Journal

Apocalypse Hal was on the corner by the Laundromat. Hal was a neighborhood street preacher who worked at the fish and crab place next door. He wore a sandwich board sign of Bible verses and shouted angry things at passersby like “The end times are near” and “Seafood sampler $5.99.” Now his sign just read “TOLD YOU SO,” and he looked more anxious than angry.

Reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give

I wanted to speak my conscience and have it matter.

Just an observation, that's all. Yeah a damn good one.

Because the most random things get her way too full of love.

Consortium

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high, which

The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well.

Tutti abbiamo bisogno di sentire che c'è qualcuno per noi, e che ci siamo per qualcuno.

Welp I'm fucked, how am I meant to do that?! “Dilmore?

how well you protect and use your attention determines your success.

She wanted to burn the whole place to ashes but, at the same time, it would be kind of nice to see it again. Home.

I wondered how it was possible I had found words out there in the world but could lose them in the house where I was born--Sarah Grimke

going, but that was OK. Good, honest hard work: burying the dead. Took an hour to dig a hole

So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

...trust is not something you win once, but is instead something you must earn over and over again.

This is a book for anyone undertaking an adventure and leaving behind a life that has been familiar, comfortable, and predictable.

Her small bedroom was decorated with cheerfully embroidered samplers, which she had stitched herself, and a shelf containing an intricate shellwork tableau. In her parlor, the chimneypiece was crammed with pottery owls, sheep, and dogs, and dishes painted with blue and white Chinoiserie fruits and flowers. Along the picture rail of one wall was an array of brightly colored plates. Dotted about the other walls were half a dozen seascape engravings showing varying climactic conditions, from violent tempest to glassy calm. To the rear was an enormous closet that she used as a storeroom, packed with bottled delicacies such as greengage plums in syrup, quince marmalade, nasturtium pickles, and mushroom catsup, which infused all three rooms with the sharp but tantalizing aromas of vinegar, fruit, and spices.

I shook my head. “After a while, quantum mechanics starts to affect your worldview.” “What does this mean?” “The more research I did, the less I believed.” “In quantum mechanics?” “No,” I said. “In the world.

It must be thirty-eight, thirty-nine degrees, when we head out for our walk, the kind of day that teenagers foolishly rush out in shorts and t-shirts, forgetting that in October we were aghast at temperatures like this.

The truth is, life has a way of accumulating treasures which you cannot part with and yet have no place for. This is also true of memories, I think. There are some you cannot part with but that have no place in your present life.

My own literary work, on the contrary, was always done as quietly and methodically as a piece of tapestry. I knew exactly what I had got to say, put the words firmly in their places like so many stitches, hemmed the edges of the chapters round with what seemed to me graceful flourishes, touched them finally with my cunningest points of colour, and read the work to papa and mamma at breakfast next morning, as a girl shows her sampler. Praeterita, Volume 2

(Dude, how come the Greeks don’t get a goddess of chocolate? No fair.) The Maya also have shape-shifters, demons, magicians, giants, demigods, and an underworld that may or may not be accessible from the back of a local taco shop.

enough for the Republic—but the Empire is order from chaos. What we do here—and in thousands of systems just like this one—brings us closer to our ultimate goal.” Sloane thought for a moment. “Perfection?” “Whatever the Emperor wants.

Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul. They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our lives—usually by finding all we aren't, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up.

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was. We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.” The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.

alice, i think i've also experienced that sensation you had in the convenience shop. for me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that i'm standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth. and i always end up thinking: i don't even want to be up here. i don't need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, i don't even think they improve my life. they just create waste and make me unhappy anyway.

The next day came bright, sunny and beautiful – a real hay-making day. I started chopping. I went about a hundred yards, and then my hay head quit working. Was I surprised and disappointed! Here I had this large amount of hay down, and I barely get started, and my hay head quits working. Well, I got off the tractor

8. Quoted in Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend (Wellingborough, Northants: Aquarian Press, 1985), p. 80. 9. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1898), Book II, Ch. II, p. 202. 10. Ibid., pp. 201, 200. 11. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 192. 12. On this important subject, see Daniel Pick’s Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c. 1848 – c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and his ‘ “Terrors of the night”: Dracula and “Degeneration” in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Critical Quarterly (Winter 1988). 13. For an account of and extracts from books such as these, see The Victorian Imagination: A Sampler, ed. Richard Manton (New York: Grove

Tragically, much of Christianity today is wandering around in the wilderness of man’s good intentions and has never been able to enter into the promised land of God’s rest where God fights our battles, where God opens the doors, where God leads the way, where God miraculously breaks the power of the enemy, and where we come along behind Him and possess the land in His Name.

She didn’t run. Gideon never ran unless she had to. In the absolute darkness before dawn she brushed her teeth without concern and splashed her face with water, and even went so far as to sweep the dust off the floor of her cell. She shook out her big black church robe and hung it from the hook. Having done this every day for over a decade, she no longer needed light to do it by. This

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you're clean and don't even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain. They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. [178: A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.’] It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

Kill a Mockingbird’s small-town setting is what stuck with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who grew up in small towns throughout South Dakota and knew “not just the pressures that [Atticus] was under, but the magnifying glass that he lived in. This all takes place in a very small environment. People who live in big cities don’t have any idea of what the pressures can be like in a small town when there’s something controversial going on.” When Allan Gurganus read To Kill a Mockingbird,

This butterfly forest was a great breathing beast. Monarchs covered the trunks like orange fish scales. Sometimes the wings all moved slowly in unison. Once while she and Ovid were working in the middle of all that, he had asked her what was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it. Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reefs, he meant. What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park? He had confessed these were not scientific thoughts.

Can I make you a cup of tea?” He says that would be wonderful, and she smiles handsomely; then her face darkens in terrible sorrow. “And I am so sorry, Mr. Arthur,” she says, as if imparting the death of a loved one. “You are too early to see the cherry blossoms.” After the tea (which she makes by hand, whisking it into a bitter green foam—“Please eat the sugar cookie before the tea”) he is shown to his room and told it was, in fact, the novelist Kawabata Yasunari’s favorite. A low lacquered table is set on the tatami floor, and the woman slides back paper walls to reveal a moonlit corner garden dripping from a recent rain; Kawabata wrote of this garden in the rain that it was the heart of Kyoto. “Not any garden,” she says pointedly, “but this very garden.” She informs him that the tub in the bathroom is already warm and that an attendant will keep it warm, always, for whenever he needs it. Always. There is a yukata in the closet for him to wear. Would he like dinner in the room? She will bring it personally for him: the first of the four kaiseki meals he will be writing about. The kaiseki meal, he has learned, is an ancient formal meal drawn from both monasteries and the royal court. It is typically seven courses, each course composed of a particular type of food (grilled, simmered, raw) and seasonal ingredients. Tonight, it is butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. Less is humbled both by the exquisite food and by the graciousness with which she presents it. “I most sincerely apologize I cannot be here tomorrow to see you; I must go to Tokyo.” She says this as if she were missing the most extraordinary of wonders: another day with Arthur Less. He sees, in the lines around her mouth, the shadow of the smile all widows wear in private. She bows and exits, returning with a sake sampler. He tries all three, and when asked which is his favorite, he says the Tonni, though he cannot tell the difference. He asks which is her favorite. She blinks and says: “The Tonni.” If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.

The Greek name for a butterfly is Psyche, and the same word means the soul. There is no illustration of the immortality of the soul so striking and beautiful as the butterfly, bursting on brilliant wings from the tomb in which it has lain, after a dull, grovelling, caterpillar existence, to flutter in the blaze of day and feed on the most fragrant and delicate productions of spring. Psyche, then, is the human soul, which is purified by sufferings and misfortunes, and is thus prepared for the enjoyment of true and pure happiness.

She stared out at the gloaming and didn't care that it might be the last twilight she ever saw. She cared only that she had spent too much of her twenty-six years alone, with no one at her side to share the sunsets, the starry skies, the turbulent beauty of storm clouds. She wished that she had reached out to people more, instead of retreating inward, wished that she had not made her heart into a sheltering closet. Now, when nothing mattered any more, when the insight couldn't do her any damn good at all, she realized that there was less hope of survival alone than with others. She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well. Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance that she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you're clean and don't even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain. They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. [178: A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.’] It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

I also learned that prayer is not as much about getting God to act in certain ways as it is about getting to the heart of God and getting my heart to reflect His heart.

the ghost

She told me that you may stitch your wishes, but God has his own pattern for you,” Tante Hannah said. “When I started mine, she said I should create scenes I hoped would be God’s Providence. Lettie, someday you’ll want to make one of your own.” Her own sampler was on the wall of her bedroom. The scene was dominated by a low, red-roofed house with two children and two sheep in the yard, and a tree abundant with colorful fruit. It looked nothing like her life.

sister Robin

And then he realised then that he had not lost all those times in the training square because he had lacked the skill, or the strength, or even a hand. He had lacked the will.

Enter ye in at the narrow gate, for the way that leads to destruction is wide and spacious, and those who follow it are many; because narrow is the gate, and confined is the way which leads unto life, and there are few that find it (Matthew 7:13-14).

We planned an Utsunomiya gyōza crawl, but when we emerged from the train station into 92-degree weather, we abandoned the idea and just went to the place with (Iris counted) seventy-four types of gyōza, including yogurt, coffee, tea, chocolate, liver, mochi, squid-octopus, sausage, curry, and whale. You can order a whole plate of your favorite variety or a sampler platter; we ordered a sampler (no whale) with a small order of regular pork gyōza as insurance. The dumplings didn't come with labels, so we were left to guess at their identities. The salted fish roe and curry were easy to pick out, as was the sausage, which had a tiny hot dog inside. After polishing off the sampler, we asked for a plate of yuba gyōza, filled with the tofu skin Iris and I like to make at home. I went spelunking inside the dumplings and found that the pork filling was wrapped in yuba; the snap of fresh yuba was missing, but the dumplings were excellent. I regret missing out on the chocolate gyōza. I don't regret missing out on the whale, yogurt, or Doritos Locos gyōza.

SHE NEEDED HIM. AND HE WAS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. (P:7)

To unfold everything neatly, so that I know how to fold it away again if it all gets too much.

Mihil nodded “Alright, who is this 'we'?” “Like I said before a friend.