“
In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.
”
”
Anne Rice (The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2))
“
One person simply can’t be all things to another person – sexually or otherwise—and unmet needs, unfulfilled desire, and unexplored possibilities are prices we pay to be in LTRs (long –term relationships). Monogamous, polyamorous, Femdom, or whatever: All couples people walk around feeling a little unfulfilled. (Single people, too). Because no one gets everything they want.
”
”
Dan Savage
“
There are approximately nine trillion cells in my body and every single one of them hates hiking. And walking. Just moving for extended periods of time in general, really. All nine trillion of us would rather be in bed.
”
”
Sara Wolf (Savage Delight (Lovely Vicious, #2))
“
We’re tear-stained savages, sharing a single breath of life, death, and love.
”
”
E.K. Blair (Echo (Black Lotus #2))
“
It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,
Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
”
”
Wallace Stevens
“
Maybe it was a blessing of childhood that most people couldn’t remember much before they were five—what good would it do to remember life as a savage toddler, totally divorced from societal norms? It was as if each human evolved from being a chimpanzee in a single lifetime. No one wanted to remember the jungle.
”
”
Emma Straub (All Adults Here)
“
I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety- nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise--perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it--and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.
Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race--the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
”
”
Mark Twain (The Mysterious Stranger)
“
There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.
All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth. All the others have stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived. The American struggles against the obstacles which nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained with the ploughshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.
”
”
Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
“
Dina, I’m bored,” Caldenia announced.
Too bad. I guaranteed her safety, not entertainment. “What about your game?”
Her Grace gave me a shrug. “I’ve beaten it five times on the Deity setting. I’ve reduced Paris to ashes because Napoleon annoyed me. I’ve eradicated Gandhi. I’ve crushed George Washington. Empress Wu had potential, so I eliminated her before we even cleared Bronze Age. The Egyptians are my pawns. I dominate the planet. Oddly, I find myself mildly fascinated by Genghis Khan. A shrewd and savage warrior, possessing a certain magnetism. I left him with a single city, and I periodically make ridiculous demands that I know he can’t meet so I can watch him squirm.
”
”
Ilona Andrews (Sweep in Peace (Innkeeper Chronicles, #2))
“
The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.
”
”
Philipp Meyer (The Son)
“
If anyone attempted to rule the world by the gospel and to abolish all temporal law and sword on the plea that all are baptized and Christian, and that, according to the gospel, there shall be among them no law or sword - or need for either - pray tell me, friend, what would he be doing? He would be loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everyone, meanwhile insisting that they were harmless, tame, and gentle creatures; but I would have the proof in my wounds. Just so would the wicked under the name of Christian abuse evangelical freedom, carry on their rascality, and insist that they were Christians subject neither to law nor sword, as some are already raving and ranting.
To such a one we must say: Certainly it is true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law nor sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and first fill the world with real Christians before you attempt to rule it in a Christian and evangelical manner. This you will never accomplish; for the world and the masses are and always will be unchristian, even if they are all baptized and Christian in name. Christians are few and far between (as the saying is). Therefore, it is out of the question that there should be a common Christian government over the whole world, or indeed over a single country or any considerable body of people, for the wicked always outnumber the good. Hence, a man who would venture to govern an entire country or the world with the gospel would be like a shepherd who should put together in one fold wolves, lions, eagles, and sheep, and let them mingle freely with one another, saying, “Help yourselves, and be good and peaceful toward one another. The fold is open, there is plenty of food. You need have no fear of dogs and clubs.” The sheep would doubtless keep the peace and allow themselves to be fed and governed peacefully, but they would not live long, nor would one beast survive another.
For this reason one must carefully distinguish between these two governments. Both must be permitted to remain; the one to produce righteousness, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds. Neither one is sufficient in the world without the other. No one can become righteous in the sight of God by means of the temporal government, without Christ's spiritual government. Christ's government does not extend over all men; rather, Christians are always a minority in the midst of non-Christians. Now where temporal government or law alone prevails, there sheer hypocrisy is inevitable, even though the commandments be God's very own. For without the Holy Spirit in the heart no one becomes truly righteous, no matter how fine the works he does. On the other hand, where the spiritual government alone prevails over land and people, there wickedness is given free rein and the door is open for all manner of rascality, for the world as a whole cannot receive or comprehend it.
”
”
Martin Luther (Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought))
“
Not long afterwards we were married. The joy I obtained as a result of this action was not necessarily great or savage, but the suffering which ensued was staggering—so far surpassing what I had imagined that even describing it as “horrendous” would not quite cover it. The “world,” after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a single then-and-there decision.
”
”
Osamu Dazai (No Longer Human)
“
And just to see what he’d do, she palmed him through his pants. Rowan barked a curse. She laughed quietly, kissed his newest scar again, and dragged a finger down lazily, indolently, holding his gaze for every single inch she touched. And when Aelin laid her palm flat on him again, she said, “You are mine.” Rowan’s breathing started again, jagged and savage as the waves breaking around them. She flicked open the top button of his pants. “I’m yours,” he ground out. Another button popped free. “And you love me,” she said. Not a question. “To whatever end,” he breathed. She popped the third and final button free, and he let go of her to toss his pants into the sand nearby, taking his undershorts with them. Her mouth went dry as she took in the sight of him. Rowan had been bred and honed for battle, and every inch of him was pure-blooded warrior. He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Hers—he was hers, and— “You are mine,” Rowan breathed, and she felt the claiming in her bones, her soul. “I am yours,” she answered. “And you love me.” Such hope and quiet joy in his eyes, beneath all that fierceness. “To whatever end.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5))
“
We will never have any memory of dying.
We were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don’t remember a single detail
and haven’t kept even a trace
of your first light.
It’s well known that we are born.
It’s well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
a woman prepares to give birth.
It’s well known that we were all born.
But if that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,
nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.
The only thing you remember is your life."
-"Births
”
”
Pablo Neruda (Fully Empowered)
“
Is it unnatural that I should have absorbed these things and have become what I am today, a treacherous, degenerate, brutal, human savage, devoid of all decent feeling, without conscience, morals, pity, sympathy, principle or any single good trait? Why am I what I am?
”
”
Carl Panzram
“
To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanisation. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense - the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilisation within a few months. Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.
”
”
George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier)
“
Beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and as lawless as it had been eons before man had a single coherent thought in his head.
”
”
Anne Rice (The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2))
“
Faces had so many features, infinitely divisible, and yet they all added up to single, identifiable expressions like pride, disgust, frustration, fatigue
”
”
Victoria E. Schwab (This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1))
“
He had never fled from a single foe, and had the thought occurred to him he would have flushed with shame.
”
”
Robert E. Howard (The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane)
“
a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term for "family" is fjölskylda; the etymology is eloquent: skylda means "obligation"; fjöl means "multiple." Family is thus "a multiple obligation." Icelanders have a single word for "family ties": fjölskyldubönd: "the cords (bönd) of multiple obligations." Thus in the big family that is a small country, the artist is bound in multiple ways, by multiple cords. When Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when Stendhal announced that he preferred Italy to his homeland, no German or Frenchman took offense; if a Greek or a Czech dared to say the same thing, his family would curse him as a detestable traitor.
”
”
Milan Kundera (Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts)
“
My hips bristle with totems and talismans, proof that I am not simply a character in a fixed book or film. I am no single narrative. As neither Rebecca de Winter nor Jane Eyre, I am free to revise my story, to reinvent myself, my world, at any given moment. Advancing beside Archer, I am resplendent in my savage finery of seized power. In my service charge the collected blackguards of a dozen tyrants now dispatched to a lesser oblivion. My fingers, stained crimson with the blood of despots, are not the fingers which paged through the paper lives of helpless romantic heroines. No more am I a passive damsel who waits for circumstance to decide her fate; now have I become the scalawag, the swashbuckler, the Heathcliff of my dreams bent on rescuing myself. For now do I embody all the traits I had so hoped to find in Goran. Meaning: No longer am I limited.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk
“
The volunteers merely dropped in for a summer, then went home to question America. Some would spearhead the events that defined the 1960s—the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement. Others, spreading ideals absorbed in Mississippi, would be forever skeptical of authority, forever democrats with a small d, and forever touched by this single season of their youth. But first, they had to survive Freedom Summer.
”
”
Bruce Watson (Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy)
“
In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’47 He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.48 And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her.49 ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?
”
”
Rutger Bregman (Humankind: A Hopeful History)
“
Those who’ve left their bootprints in the trenches are those who value human life most. They get unwanted glimpses into the savage nature we really have underneath all the expensive clothes and moisturized skin. This of course, rules out the politicians, feminists, and liberals who are far too cozy hiding behind their daddies’ wallets and sophomoric mentalities as those who feign having tasted the true consequence of a single blood-drop darkening the sand.
”
”
Bruce Crown (Forlorn Passions)
“
Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or now we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others an ourselves.
”
”
Valarie Kaur (See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love)
“
do not think I have ever met with a single fact which seems to me to justify the theory, of which Dr. von Martius is perhaps the leading advocate, that the ordinary condition of the savage is the result of degeneration from a far higher state.
”
”
Edward Burnett Tylor (Researches into the early history of mankind and the development of civilization)
“
If you’ve ever grown zucchini, you know they all ripen the same day. You wait all of June and July for zucchini. August rolls around, and one day—bam! You have more zucchini than you know what to do with. You start handing them out to your neighbors and friends at work because there’s no way any single person can handle all that zucchini. Not even if you’re smart and resourceful and have accumulated dozens of good recipes, not even a person who likes zucchini as much as I do.--Grace Savage
”
”
Gale Martin (Grace Unexpected)
“
The tokens of wealth that we civilized people covet are largely irrelevant to success and survival in the tribal world and were irrelevant during most of human history. But women have always been the most valuable single resource that men fight for and defend.
”
”
Napoleon A. Chagnon (Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists)
“
Their triumphant histories portrayed the sachem as having almost single-handedly led his people into a misguided rebellion by virtue of his supposedly savage pride and susceptibility to the devil, only to be crushed by a superior, civilized people favored by God.
”
”
David J. Silverman (This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving)
“
Now I love lists. I like long detailed lists. I like big unruly lists. I like sorting unsorted lists into outline form, then separating out their topics into lists of their own. Every single project I do involves the making of lists. I make them for organization, of course, but I also make them for assessment, for momentum as a stress reliever, and, counterintuitively, as a means to improve my creativity and free my thinking. There are daily lists, there are project lists. There are “things to order” lists. I make lists of pieces of research that I want together, lists of people I am collaborating with . . . . I make lists of things I need to purchase, things I need to find, and when all of those objects are going to get to me. And hopefully, finally, there are “homestretch” lists, that tell me I’m reaching the end.
”
”
Adam Savage (Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It)
“
The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.
”
”
Thomas Ligotti (My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror)
“
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of
everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment.
I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to
the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history?
By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb
my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.
”
”
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
“
...whether you're talking about boners, infidelities, late rent, or the Democratic primary: a single plausible excuse will sound like a credible explanation while a basket full of excuses—even a basket stuffed with equally legitimate, plausible/probable excuses—will sound like a desperate/unbelievable lie.
”
”
Dan Savage
“
What did you do to me?” she asks, as if I’m the reason she enjoys doting on me. “I should be asking you the same thing, since you broke through every single one of my defenses.” “Yeah, well you deserve it,” she breathes. “And why the hell is that?” She turns her head to lay a soft kiss at my wrist. “Because you broke me first.
”
”
Danda K. (You Broke Me First (The Savage Love Duet, #1))
“
Dina, I’m bored,” Caldenia announced.
Too bad. I guaranteed her safety, not entertainment. “What about your game?”
Her Grace gave me a shrug. “I’ve beaten it five times on the Deity setting. I’ve reduced
Paris to ashes because Napoleon annoyed me. I’ve eradicated Gandhi. I’ve crushed George Washington. Empress Wu had potential, so I eliminated her before we even cleared Bronze Age. The Egyptians are my pawns. I dominate the planet. Oddly, I find myself mildly fascinated by Genghis Khan. A shrewd and savage warrior, possessing a certain magnetism. I left him with a single city, and I periodically make ridiculous demands that I know he can’t meet so I can watch him squirm.
”
”
Ilona Andrews (Sweep in Peace (Innkeeper Chronicles, #2))
“
If you want to maximize minimal potential and become great in any field, you must embrace your savage side and become imbalanced, at least for a period of time. You'll need to funnel every minute of every single day into the pursuit of that degree, that starting spot, that job, that edge. Your mind must never leave the cockpit. Sleep at the library or the office. Hoop long past sundown and fall asleep watching film of your next opponent. There are no days off, and there is no downtime when you are obsessed with being great. That is what it takes to be the baddest motherfucker ever at what you do.
Know that your dedication will be misunderstood. Some relationships may break down. The savage is not a socialized beast, and an imbalanced lifestyle often appears selfish from the outside. But the reason I've been able to help so many people with my life story is precisely because I embraced being that imbalanced while I pursued the impossible dream of becoming the hardest motherfucker ever. That's a mythical title, but it became my compass bearing, my North Star. p111
”
”
David Goggins (Never Finished)
“
You taste like every single one of my nightmares.” I lick her again, this time sneaking the tip of my tongue inside her entrance. “Should I be insulted it’s not your dreams?” She moans, pressing her hips into my face. “Fuck no.” I skip the gentle and shove two fingers inside her in one hard thrust. “Dreams can be forgotten, but you never forget your nightmares.
”
”
Danda K. (You Broke Me First (The Savage Love Duet, #1))
“
Having learnt from experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man indubitably believes this, and always expects the law he has learnt to be fulfilled.
But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it.
However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the same conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as before, yet when, under the same conditions and with the same character, he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine two different courses of action in precisely the same conditions, feels that without this irrational conception (which constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels that, however impossible it may be, it is so, for without this conceptions of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single moment.
He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.
A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.
If the conception of freedom appears to reason a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
“
On Fiction:
(Martin) had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. Both god and clod schools erred, in Martin's estimation, and erred though too great singleness of sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, "Adventure," which had dragged Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, "God and Clod," that he had expressed his views on the whole subject.
”
”
Jack London (Martin Eden)
“
In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.
”
”
Anne Rice (The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2))
“
They were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world, drifting they knew not where, without a hope of rescue, subsisting only so long as Providence sent them food to eat.
And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances. On November 4, Macklin wrote in his diary: "It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think we are in a frightfully precarious situation."
It was an observation typical of the entire party. There was not a hero among them, at least not in the fictional sense. Still not a single diary reflected anything beyond the matter-of-fact routine of each day's business.
”
”
Alfred Lansing (Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage)
“
As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.
”
”
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
“
Living in this mixed pot of people, you saw every single being had a life, feelings, family, friends, hopes, and dreams. We weren’t different at all; circumstances made our goals on how to achieve those things different. The anger toward each other, the drive to eradicate someone else hoping it would ease your life and burdens... .it was disgusting and totally wrong. It only made life that much tougher for all. Heavy, insufferable, and dark.
”
”
Stacey Marie Brown (Dead Lands (Savage Lands, #3))
“
The summer stretch had come into the evenings: it was gone seven, but the sky was a soft clear blue and the light flooding through the open windows was pale gold. All around us the Place was humming like a beehive, shimmering with a hundred different stories unfurling. Next door Mad Johnny Malone was singing to himself, in a cheerful cracked baritone: “Where the Strawberry Beds sweep down to the Liffey, you’ll kiss away the worries from my brow . . .” Downstairs Mandy shrieked delightedly, there was a tumble of thumping noises and then an explosion of laughter; farther down, in the basement, someone yelled in pain and Shay and his mates sent up a savage cheer. In the street, two of Sallie Hearne’s young fellas were teaching themselves to ride a robbed bike and giving each other hassle—“No, you golf ball, you’ve to go fast or you’ll fall off, who cares if you hit things?”—and someone was whistling on his way home from work, putting in all the fancy, happy little trills. The smell of fish and chips came in at the windows, along with smart-arse comments from a blackbird on a rooftop and the voices of women swapping the day’s gossip while they brought in their washing from the back gardens. I knew every voice and every door-slam; I even knew the determined rhythm of Mary Halley scrubbing her front steps. If I had listened hard I could have picked out every single person woven into that summer-evening air, and told you every story.
”
”
Tana French (Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3))
“
Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.
”
”
Anne Rice (The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2))
“
The greatest masters have only made single statues, groups are always inferior; that is why Carpeaux, big though he was, is less so than Rodin, for he never knew how to make single statues. He did not know how to find his rhythm in the arrangement of the shapes of one body, but obtained it by the disposition of several. The great sculptors are there to prove it. Think of the masterpieces which we like most, all standing or seated, and one at a time, and they are not in the least monotonous. The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure.
”
”
H.S. Ede (Savage Messiah)
“
The various tribes of Britons possessed valour without conduct, and the love of freedom without the spirit of union. They took up arms with savage fierceness, they laid them down, or turned them against each other with wild inconstancy; and while they fought singly, they were successively subdued. Neither the fortitude of Caractacus, nor the despair of Boadicea, nor the fanaticism of the Druids, could avert the slavery of their country, or resist the steady progress of the Imperial generals, who maintained the national glory, when the throne was disgraced by the weakest or the most vicious of mankind.
”
”
Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (The Modern Library Collection))
“
The seafood is so fresh it is otherworldly! Their rich umami flavors swirl together in my mouth like a whirlpool!
The pike is transcendental fresh, yes? It's tender and fatty and melty sweet!"
"I'm impressed he had the strength to cram this much powerful umami into a single dish! So refined, yet utterly savage. Ryo Kurokiba has reached a new pinnacle!"
"That looks sooo good!"
"But still, do all Japan pike have this much flavor in season?"
"Good point. Not all do.
How did he manage to create this strong of a flavor while using hardly any seasonings?
Hm?
Wait... it's faint, but I smell hints of a refreshing scent. A scent that is not seafood!"
"It is the fragrance of herbs."
"Exactly! I added a pat of this to the dish!"
"Aha!
Herb butter!
Finely chopped herbs and spices are mixed into softened butter...
... and then wrapped up and chilled in the refrigerator for a day to allow the flavors to meld."
"I stuck a pat of homemade herb butter into each wrap right before I put 'em in the oven. Baking on low heat made the butter melt slowly...
... allowing its richness to seep into every nook and cranny of the entire dish!"
Both flavor and fragrance have the punch of an exploding warhead! What an impeccably violent dish!
”
”
Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 12 [Shokugeki no Souma 12] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #12))
“
Out of a hundred people:
Those who always know better- 52
Doubting every step- all the rest
Glad to lend a hand if it doesn’t take too long- as high as 49
Always good, because they can’t be otherwise- 4 maybe 5
Able to admire without envy- 18
Living in constant fear of something or someone- 77
Capable of happiness- 20 something tops
Harmless singly, savage in crowds- half at least
Wise after the fact- just a couple more than wise before it
Taking only things from life- 30 (I wish I were wrong)
Righteous- 35, which is a lot
Righteous and understanding- 3
Worthy of compassion- 99
Mortal- 100 out of 100 (Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.)
A Contribution to Statistics
”
”
Wisława Szymborska
“
Yes, God saved us because He loved us. But He is God. He has infinite imagination. Couldn’t He have dreamed up a different redemption? Couldn’t He have saved us with a smile, a pang of hunger, a word of forgiveness, a single drop of blood? And if He had to die, then for God’s sake—for Christ’s sake—couldn’t He have died in bed, died with dignity? Why was He condemned like a criminal? Why was His back flayed with whips? Why was His head crowned with thorns? Why was He nailed to wood and allowed to die in frightful, lonely agony? Why was the last breath drawn in bloody disgrace, while the world for which He lay dying egged on His executioners with savage fury like some kind of gang rape by uncivilized brutes in Central Park?
”
”
Brennan Manning (The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out)
“
It was a stick-figure drawing. Two people holding hands. A thin man in black and a girl, half his height with short hair, and wide eyes. The stick-girl’s head was cocked slightly, and a small red spot marked her arm. Three similar spots, no bigger than periods, dotted the stick-man’s chest. The stick-man’s mouth was nothing more than a faint grim line.
Beneath the drawing ran a single sentence: I made a friend.
Victor.
“You okay?”
Eli blinked, felt the cop’s hand on his arm. He slid free, folded the paper, and put it in his pocket before anyone could see or say otherwise…Eli went back the way he’d come. He didn’t stop, not until he was safely in his car. In the relative privacy of the side street in Merit, he pressed his hand against the drawing in his pocket, and a phantom pain started in his stomach.
”
”
Victoria E. Schwab (Vicious (Villains, #1))
“
Keith’s fractures came at the hand of such savage instruments that he steps on shards nearly every step he takes. He told me once, “Lizabeth, life is harder for some people than others.” I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to say how everyone had the same opportunity to be happy in Jesus. I wanted to ask him why the blessings of the present couldn’t make up for the curses of the past. I wanted to ask him why I wasn’t enough to make him too glad to be sad, but I knew I’d be talking like a fool. Life is harder for some people than others. Shadows follow me often enough, but not incessantly. Not everywhere I go. I’ve not spent a single night’s sleep in a burning garage. I deal with bouts of anxiety and depression, but they don’t chase me down constantly like ravenous wolves after a bleating sheep. I wondered sometimes, as most kids do, if my parents really loved me, but never once was I faced with circumstances wooing me to wonder if my parents wished their other child had been the one to survive.
”
”
Beth Moore (All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir)
“
There is, perhaps, no class of men on the face of the earth, says Captain Bonneville, who lead a life of more continued exertion, peril, and excitement, and who are more enamored of their occupations, than the free trappers of the West. No tail, no danger, no privation can turn the trapper from his pursuit. His passionate excitement at times resembles mania. In vain may the most vigilant and cruel savages best his path, in vain may rocks and precipices and wintry torrents oppose his progress, let but a single track of a beaver meet his eye, and he forgets all the dangers and defies all difficulties. At times, he may be seen with his traps on his shoulder, buffeting his way across rapid streams, amidst floating blocks of ice: at other times, he is to be found with his traps swung on his back clambering the most rugged mountains, scaling or descending the most frightful precipices, searching, by routes inaccessible to the horse, and never before trodden by white man, for springs and lakes unknown to his comrades, and where he may meet with his favorite game. Such is the mountaineer, the hardy trapper of the West, and such, as we have slightly sketched it, is the wild, Robin Hood kind of life, with all its strange and motley populace, now existing in full vigor among the Rocky Mountains.
”
”
Washington Irving
“
Sgt. Jack was a hard-ass teacher, but kids need hard-ass teachers sometimes. I know that might hurt your ears because things are different now. We are warned of the lasting effects of stress on children, and to compensate, parents strategize about how to make their children’s lives comfortable and easy. But is the real world always comfortable? Is it easy? Life is not G-rated. We must prepare kids for the world as it is. Our generation is training kids to become full-fledged members of Entitlement Nation, which ultimately makes them easy prey for the lions among us. Our ever-softening society doesn’t just affect children. Adults fall into the same trap. Even those of us who have achieved great things. Every single one of us is just another frog in the soon-to-be-boiling water that is our soft-ass culture. We take unforeseen obstacles personally. We are ready to be outraged at all times by the evil bullshit of the world. Believe me, I know all about evil and have dealt with more bullshit than most, but if you catalog your scars to use them as excuses or a bargaining chip to make life easier for yourself, you’ve missed an opportunity to become better and grow stronger. Sgt. Jack knew what awaited me as an adult. He was preparing me for the grip of life. Whether he knew it or not, the man was training me to be a savage.
”
”
David Goggins (Never Finished)
“
The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters;716 and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-laborer, the ox, in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater, difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce, that without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life. Of
”
”
Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)
“
She was a good person and a beautiful woman, but what she was for me was my own creation. I needed her to be perfect and couldn’t allow her to be anything less.
I attributed to her everything I didn’t find in life, but without which I couldn’t live. I even belittled myself to her, so that she should appear greater and I, too, only through her. I gave to her generously, so I might take. Where I was frustrated, she was realised, and this was my compensation. She returned what I’d lost, and I gained more than I thought to gain. My desires had been obscure and disparate, now they were united in a single name, in a single character, more real and more attractive than imagination. I recognised in her everything I was not, yet in rejecting myself I lost nothing. Weak and helpless when faced with people and the world, I gained significance through my creation, which was more valuable than either. Uneasy before the uncertainty of all things, I was sure in the love that was self-creating, for it was need transformed into feeling. Love is both sacrifice and violence; it offers and demands, it begs and scolds. I needed this woman, my entire world, to admire and feel my power over her. I’d created her, as a savage creates his idol, to stand above his cave fire, his defence from thunder, enemies, wild beasts, people, the heavens, and loneliness, from whom he might seek the usual things but also demand the impossible, feel ecstasy, but also bitterness, whom he might both thank and scold, ever aware that, without it, his fears would be unbearable, his hopes without foundation, his joys without permanence.
Solely because of her, even people seemed closer to me.
”
”
Meša Selimović (The Fortress)
“
(about Pilgrims) It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet, between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower's manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper and a hatter- occupations whose importance is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment. Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as "Captain Shrimpe" hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives from whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labelled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterwards, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.
They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigours ahead, and they demonstrated their manifest incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toe-hold into a self-sustaining colony.
”
”
Bill Bryson (Made in America an Informal History Of)
“
You can't let him get away with this!" Penny shrieked.
Caine wasn’t having it. “You stupid witch,” he yelled back. “No one told you to let it go that far!”
“He was mine for the day,” Penny hissed. She pressed a rag to her nose, which had started bleeding again.
“He tore his own eyes out. What did you think Quinn would do? What do you think Albert will do now?” He bit savagely at his thumb, a nervous habit.
“I thought you were the king!”
Caine reacted without thinking. He swung a hard backhand at her face. The blow did not connect, but the thought did. Penny flew backward like she’d been hit by a bus. She smacked hard against the wall of the office.
The blow stunned her, and Caine was in her face before she could clear her thoughts.
Turk came bursting in, his gun leveled. “What’s happening?”
“Penny tripped,” Caine said.
Penny’s freckled face was white with fury.
“Don’t,” Caine warned. He tightened an invisible grip around her head and twisted it back at an impossible angle.
Then Caine released her.
Penny panted and glared. But no nightmare seized Caine’s mind. “You’d better hope Lana can fix that boy, Penny.”
“You’re getting soft.” Penny choked out the words.
“Being king isn’t about being a sick creep,” Caine said. “People need someone in charge. People are sheep and they need a big sheepdog telling them what to do and where to go. But it doesn’t work if you start killing the sheep.”
“You’re scared of Albert.” Penny followed it with a mocking laugh.
“I’m scared of no one,” Caine said. “Least of all you, Penny. You live because I let you live. Remember that. The kids out there?” He waved his hand toward the window, vaguely indicating the population of Perdido Beach. “Those kids out there hate you. You don’t have a single friend. Now get out of here. I don’t want to see you back here in my presence until you’re ready to crawl to me and beg my forgiveness.
”
”
Michael Grant (Fear (Gone, #5))
“
Then when I’d thought nothing else could possibly startle or surprise me, the Lord Master had taken one look at Barrons—and walked away.
That worried me. A lot. If the Lord Master walked away from Barrons, how much danger was I in on a daily basis? I’d been feeling invincible up until those last few moments in the cave. Until one man in the room with me had stripped away my will with mere words, and the other man in the room with me had apparently intimidated that one into leaving. Bad and badder.
I glanced across the front seat at badder. I opened my mouth. He looked at me. I closed it.
I don’t know how he continued driving, because we stared at each other for a long time. The night whizzed by, the air inside the speeding car pregnant with all the things we weren’t saying. We didn’t even have one of our wordless conversations this time; neither of us was willing to betray a single thought or feeling.
We looked at each other like two too-intimate strangers who’ve woken after the lovemaking and don’t know quite what to say to each other, so they say nothing at all and go their separate ways, promising, of course, that they’ll call, but each time they look at the phone over the next few days, the discomfort and mild embarrassment of having taken off their clothing in front of someone they didn’t really even know rises up, and the phone call never gets made.
Barrons and I had taken our skins off around each other tonight. Shared too many secrets, and none of them the important ones.
I was about to look away when he reached across the seat ,touched my jaw with his long, strong, beautiful fingers, and caressed my face.
Being touched by Jericho Barrons with kindness makes you feel like you must be the most special person in the world. It’s like walking up to the biggest, most savage lion in the jungle, lying down, placing your head in its mouth and, rather than taking your life, it licks you and purrs.
I turned away.
He returned his attention to the road.
We completed the drive in the same strained silence it had begun.
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Bloodfever (Fever, #2))
“
Dammit, Holly, I'd never have believed you'd do something so harebrained. Do you understand that the building could have collapsed around you and those henwits? I know what condition those places are in, and I wouldn't let a dog of mine venture past the threshold, much less my wife. And the men—good God, when I think of the low-living bastards who were in your vicinity, it makes my blood curdle! Sailors and drunkards on every corner—do you know what would happen if one of them took it into his head to snap up a little treat like you?” As the thought seemed to temporarily render him incapable of speech, Holly took the opportunity to defend herself. “I was with companions, and—” “Ladies,” he said savagely. “Armed with umbrellas, no doubt. Just what do you think they would have been able to do, had you met with bad company?” “The few men we encountered in the neighborhood were harmless,” Holly argued. “In fact, it was the very same place you lived in during your childhood, and those men were no different from you—” “In those days, I'd have played merry hell with you, if I'd managed to get my hands on you,” he said harshly. “Have no illusions, milady… you'd have ended face-to-the wall in Maidenhead Lane with your skirts around your waist. The only wonder is that you didn't meet that fate with some randy sailor yesterday.” “You're exaggerating,” Holly said defensively, but that only roused his temper to a higher pitch. He continued to blister her ears with a lecture that was furious and insulting by turns, naming the various diseases she could have contracted and the vermin she had likely encountered, until Holly couldn't bear another word. “I've heard enough,” she cried hotly. “It's clear to me that I'm not to make a single decision without asking your permission first—I'm to be treated as a child, and you will act as a dictator.” The accusation was unfair, and she knew it, but she was too incensed to care. Suddenly his fury seemed to evaporate, and he stared at her with an inscrutable gaze. A long moment passed before he spoke again. “You wouldn't have taken Rose to such a place, would you?” “Of course not! But she is a little girl, and I'm—” “My life,” he interrupted quietly. “You're my entire life. If anything ever happens to you, Holly, there is nothing left for me.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Where Dreams Begin)
“
When we are young, we yearn for battle. In the firelit halls we listen to the songs of heroes; how they broke the foemen, splintered the shield wall, and soaked their swords in the blood of enemies. As youngsters we listen to the boast of warriors, hear their laughter as they recall battle, and their bellows of pride when their lord reminds them of some hard-won victory. And those youngsters who have not fought, who have yet to hold their shield against a neighbour's shield in the wall, are despised and disparaged. So we practise. Day after day we practise, with spear, sword, and shield. We begin as children, learning blade-craft with wooden weapons, and hour after hour we hit and are hit. We fight against men who hurt us in order to teach us, we learn not to cry when the blood from a split skull sheets across the eyes, and slowly the skill of the sword-craft builds.
Then the day comes when we are ordered to march with the men, not as children to hold the horses and to scavenge weapons after the battle, but as men. If we are lucky we have a battered old helmet and a leather jerkin, maybe even a coat of mail that hangs like a sack. We have a sword with a dented edge and a shield that is scored by enemy blades. We are almost men, not quite warriors, and on some fateful day we meet an enemy for the first time and we hear the chants of battle, the threatening clash of blades on shields, and we begin to learn that the poets are wrong and that the proud songs lie. Even before the shield walls meet, some men shit themselves. They shiver with fear. They drink mead and ale. Some boast, but most are quiet unless they join a chant of hate. Some men tell jokes, and the laughter is nervous. Others vomit. Our battle leaders harangue us, tell us of the deeds of our ancestors, of the filth that is the enemy, of the fate our women and children face unless we win, and between the shield walls the heroes strut, challenging us to single combat, and you look at the enemy's champions and they seem invincible. They are big men; grim-faced, gold hung, shining in mail, confident, scornful, savage.
The shield wall reeks of shit, and all a man wants is to be home, to be anywhere but on this field that prepares for battle, but none of us will turn and run or else we will be despised for ever. We pretend we want to be there, and then the wall at last advances, step by step, and the heart is thumping fast as a bird's wing beating, the world seems unreal. Thought flies, fear rules, and then the order to quicken the charge is shouted, and you run, or stumble, but stay in your rank because this is the moment you have spent a lifetime preparing for, and then, for the first time, you hear the thunder of shield walls meeting, the clangour of battle swords, and the screaming begins.
It will never end.
Till the world ends in the chaos of Ragnarok, we will fight for our women, for our land, and for our homes. Some Christians speak of peace, of the evil of war, and who does not want peace? But then some crazed warrior comes screaming his god's filthy name into your face and his only ambitions are to kill you, to rape your wife, to enslave your daughters, and take your home, and so you must fight.
”
”
Bernard Cornwell (The Flame Bearer (The Saxon Stories, #10))
“
AJ huffed a heavy sigh. “I’m not good at this.”
She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands tucked under her legs. “Good at what?”
“This…” he motioned between them “…this relationship stuff. I should care enough to ask you more about your past, the blood thing, the ridiculous profession you’ve chosen, the reason why you’re living with your brother … but I’m too fucking selfish. I can barely deal with my own pathetic life, I just—”
She shook her head. “It’s fine. I have nothing to tell.”
His head jerked back a fraction as his eyelids fluttered with rapid blinks. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Jillian lifted a single shoulder. “You act like I’m on a cliff’s edge just waiting, begging you to ask me about my past and my ‘issues,’ but I’m not. The fact that you don’t ask me about it is why this…” she mimicked his motion between them “…relationship works.”
He nodded with an absent stare.
She’d gone too far. It was a slippery balance between too much and not enough. It’s human nature to desire what’s perceived as the unattainable. Was she making her past seem too unattainable?
“Don’t.”
AJ’s gaze snapped to hers. “Don’t what?”
“I was simply stating a fact. Don’t interpret it as a game. I’m not playing hard to get with my emotions. It’s not a trap.”
He rested his hands on his hips and stared at his feet.
“It’s a gift, AJ. You will never have to be my gallant knight on his trusty steed, drawing your sword to defend my honor. I will never gawk at sparkly diamonds in the jewelry store window or ask you where you see our relationship going.”
“You sound callous, but I know you’re not. I’ve experienced your compassion.”
“That’s a gift too. I’ve never been compassionate toward you with an ulterior motive. I’m not callous. I’m strong. It takes a lot of strength to give unconditionally because the ego is a savage, demanding beast.”
He narrowed his eyes a bit. “So nothing … you don’t want anything from me in return.”
Jillian smirked, prowling toward him. “I’m compassionate, not a saint.” She slid her hands under his shirt, tracing the definition of each firm plane of muscle.
He quirked a brow. “So you want me for my body?”
A provocative smirk stole her lips as she pushed up his shirt and teased her teeth over his skin. “I think we both know it’s not for your stellar personality.”
“You’re such a bitch,” he growled, grabbing her ass and lifting her up.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and laughed. “But an honest bitch.
”
”
Jewel E. Ann (End of Day (Jack & Jill, #1))
“
Brooke is the enforcer. She’s pretty when she sleeps, but as soon as she wakes up, she works her face into a permanent don’t fuck with me expression, that may or may not be the cause of her being single at age twenty-six,
”
”
Penelope Bloom (Savage)
“
He found a single fat and sassy salmon then caught two more smaller morsels, perfect for his guest’s healthy appetite. He grinned. He’d expected her to eat like a dainty human, only for her to put away enough food to put him to shame.
”
”
Vivienne Savage (Goldilocks and the Bear (Once Upon a Spell, #3))
“
Ramsay gave the contents a single sniff then took a tentative swallow. His reluctance reminded Victoria of when she tried to convince her cousin’s toddler to try new foods at the dinner table. After his first taste, he stared at the cup’s dark contents again, then
”
”
Vivienne Savage (Goldilocks and the Bear (Once Upon a Spell, #3))
“
In 1821, the American Colonization Society bought a piece of Africa. In Washington the new country was christened Liberia and its capital was called Monrovia, in honor of James Monroe, who at the time was president of the United States. Also in Washington, they designed the flag to be just like their own, except with a single star, and they elected the country’s government. Harvard drew up the constitution. The citizens of the newborn nation were freed slaves, or rather slaves expelled from the plantations of the southern United States. No sooner did they set foot in Africa than those who had been slaves became masters. The native population, “those jungle savages,” owed obedience to the newcomers, who had suddenly risen from the bottom to the top. Backed
”
”
Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
“
Were you really going to challenge a dragon to save me?” Sorcha asked. “I was.” Overwhelmed by a surge of emotion, she grabbed a fistful of his tartan and kissed him. Conall made a single sound of surprise then wrapped his arms around her waist. He dragged her close, their surroundings spun, and then soft furs were suddenly beneath her and Conall’s hard body stretched above her.
”
”
Vivienne Savage (Red and the Wolf (Once Upon a Spell, #2))
“
In recent years there has been a tendency by some Western historians and politicians to look back at the aftermath of the Second World War through rose-tinted spectacles. Frustrated with the progress of rebuilding and reconciliation in the wake of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they pointed to the success of similar projects in Europe in the 1940s. The Marshall Plan in particular was singled out as the template for postwar economic reconstruction. Such politicians would have done well to remember that the process of rebuilding did not begin straight away in Europe – the Marshall Plan was not even thought of until 1947 – and the entire continent remained economically, politically and morally unstable far beyond the end of the decade. As in Iraq and Afghanistan more recently, the United Nations recognized the need for local leaders to take command of their own institutions. But it took time for such leaders to emerge. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the only people who had the moral authority to take charge were those with proven records of resistance. But people who are skilled in the arts of guerrilla warfare, sabotage and violence, and who have become used to conducting all their business in strict secrecy, are not necessarily those best suited to running democratic governments.
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Keith Lowe (Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II)
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In the ensuing anarchy the bad drove out the good, the big drove out the small, and the brawn drove out the brains. There was a single trait common to denizens of the back row, though I doubt it ever occurred to anyone: They sensed that they needed to shed whatever refinements of personality and intellect they had brought with them to Salomon Brothers. This wasn’t a conscious act, more a reflex. They were the victims of the myth, especially popular at Salomon Brothers, that a trader is a savage, and a great trader a great savage. This wasn’t exactly correct. The trading floor held evidence to that effect. But it also held evidence to the contrary. People believed whatever they wanted to.
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Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street)
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I never thought I’d live long enough to see my twentieth birthday after that disaster raged back in Miami years ago. I dig my fingernails into my palms as I stomp toward my office, the only place where I can get any bit of peace and quiet. It’s not in the basement like Nate’s. Mine is upstairs, tucked away from the rest of the club, and the only way you can get to it is by using a hidden staircase. I force a smile for the patrons guzzling expensive liquor and champagne, swaying into each other, drunk, high, and without a single care in the world
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Kristen Luciani (Savage Liar (Sinfully Savage #2))
“
When I wanna pen something extremely personal, without actually revealing anything, I just write it in spanish or turkish. If you wanna study the mountain, study the mainstream work - but if you wanna learn about the person, study the turkish and spanish portion of my work.
That's why most of the titles of my works are in turkish or spanish - because I can't write a single word unless I feel the title boiling in my blood - and although English is unofficially the first language of earth, because of its savage imperialist history, it is neither the profoundest nor the most beautiful language on earth.
Does that mean, we should wipe out english from the world altogether? Of course not - that would be yet another boneheaded exercise in bigotry and intolerance. Instead, what's really needed is a genuine humane intention to create a truly magnificent
multilingual society - towards a multicultural world. Learn to look beyond the puny confines of one petty language, because the world is too grand to be wasted in the gutter of one language and one culture. Every culture is my culture, every country is mine - defiant descendants of divided ancestors, hand in hand we shall fly.
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Abhijit Naskar (Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect)
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Living in this mixed pot of people, you saw every single being had a life, feelings, family, friends, hopes, and dreams. We weren’t different at all; circumstances made our goals on how to achieve those things different.
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Stacey Marie Brown (Dead Lands (Savage Lands, #3))
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His eyes fell on the still, upright, and rigid form of the “Indian runner,” who had borne to the camp the unwelcome tidings of the preceding evening. Although in a state of perfect repose, and apparently disregarding, with characteristic stoicism, the excitement and bustle around him, there was a sullen fierceness mingled with the quiet of the savage, that was likely to arrest the attention of much more experienced eyes than those which now scanned him, in unconcealed amazement. The native bore both the tomahawk and knife of his tribe; and yet his appearance was not altogether that of a warrior. On the contrary, there was an air of neglect about his person, like that which might have proceeded from great and recent exertion, which he had not yet found leisure to repair. The colors of the war-paint had blended in dark confusion about his fierce countenance, and rendered his swarthy lineaments still more savage and repulsive than if art had attempted an effect which had been thus produced by chance. His eye, alone, which glistened like a fiery star amid lowering clouds, was to be seen in its state of native wildness. For a single instant, his searching and yet wary glance met the wondering look of the other, and then changing its direction, partly in cunning, and partly in disdain, it remained fixed, as if penetrating the distant air.
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Book House (100 Books You Must Read Before You Die - volume 1 [newly updated] [Pride and Prejudice; Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; Tarzan of the Apes; The Count of ... (The Greatest Writers of All Time))
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The audience clapped and cheered as if witnessing a gladiatoress in combat with a savage brute. The Lion’s throbbing penis was clearly visible against his mistress’s G-string as the couple rolled around the dance floor, desperately trying to subjugate each other. Pinning her wrists above her head, the beast penetrated her moistness in a single stroke, causing her to moan in waves of ecstasy before she reluctantly relinquished herself to the animal she was trying to tame. Tilting her hips to receive his unrestrained pounding, she enjoyed the animalistic dance. Waves of orgasm traversed her capitulating body. Her sublime submissiveness aroused his raw animal instinct to tactile heights of pre-ejaculatory stimulation. His bouncing buttocks intimated his imminent climax. No longer able to stave off his insistent emissions he erupted jets of oozing intoxicants into her luscious sex.
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Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
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Deerfield, Massachusetts
February 29, 1704
Temperature 0 degrees
Mercy could not keep up the pace. Gradually the line passed her by, until she was walking with Eben Nims, and she must not fall farther behind than that, because the Indians behind Eben were the end of the line. Daniel held tight and sucked his thumb. But not only did Marah refuse to walk, she kept yelling that her feet were cold, and she wanted Stepmama, and she needed her mittens, and she was hungry.
Mercy could walk, though not fast enough, and she could carry, though not easily. But she could not supply food, warmth or Stepmama.
Mercy tried to believe that Stepmama was up ahead of her with the baby; that it was so crowded and chaotic Mercy could not spot her. But in her heart, she did not think Stepmama had left the stockade.
“The savage put food in my pack, Mercy,” said Eben quietly. “If you slip your hand into the opening near my left shoulder, there’s a loaf of bread on top.”
They walked on, considering whether the Indians would tomahawk her for stealing Eben’s own bread. Well, they’d shortly tomahawk Marah for whining, so Mercy might as well get on with it. She set the two children down, and Eben bent his knees so she could reach and Mercy fished around in the pack. She slid the loaf out. It was long and fat and crusty.
Her Indian was watching. Mercy looked straight at him while she ripped off a chunk for Marah. He did nothing. Mercy decided to give some to Jemima too, which would give her something to do besides whine. She would give bread to Eliza and hope food would break Eliza’s grieving stupor.
Marah didn’t take a single bite. She threw the bread across the snow. “I want Mama!” she said fiercely. She glared at Mercy, as if all this hiking and shivering were Mercy’s fault.
Mercy could not abandon the bread out there in the snow. She was going to need that bread. It was all they had, and somehow Mercy had become responsible for Marah and Daniel and Ruth and Eliza and Jemima, and probably even for Eben. Mercy stepped off the trodden path to retrieve the crust, but her Indian stopped her, shaking his head.
On his face was no expression but the one painted in black. His arms were tattooed with snakes that curled their fangs when he tightened his muscles. How could he go half bare in this weather? she thought, and then remembered that she wore his rabbit-lined cloak.
Daniel, sitting happily on her hip, reached out from under the rabbit fur and patted the snake. The Indian tensed his upper arm to make the snake slither. Daniel giggled, so the Indian did it again, and it seemed to Mercy that he actually smiled at Daniel.
Then, blessedly, he took Marah for her.
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Caroline B. Cooney (The Ransom of Mercy Carter)
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Then, in a single movement, he pulled himself cleanly up and through the window, and drawing his cutlass, leapt into the room with a savage, bloodcurdling yell. “Aaaarrrrrrghhhhhh!” “Eeeeeaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!” An elderly woman, in slippers and nightgown. “SHIT!” Gray cried, and bolted for the door. “Thief! Intruder! Somebody, help!” Cutlass in hand, he tore frantically down the hall, the old woman’s screams echoing in the corridor behind him. How could he have chosen the wrong room?! He tripped, nearly fell, cut himself on the blade of the sword, and finding speed, darted away from an opening door, when he heard more calls and shouts ringing out behind him.
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Danelle Harmon (My Lady Pirate (Heroes of the Sea #3))
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despite his single-minded determination, he forced himself to give her one last opportunity to escape what he could no longer control himself.
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Johanna Lindsey (Savage Thunder (Wyoming, #2))
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Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual.” Moneo
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Frank Herbert (God Emperor of Dune (Dune, #4))
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John’s bulk hampered his attempt to reach the sliders before the enormous jaws of the beast clamped on his right ankle and snapped it in a single bite like a dry twig. The humongous doglike thing the size of a small pony went immediately for Broadback’s neck and ripped his throat out. Martha stood behind the glass but couldn’t bear to watch the savage attack
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Billy Wells (Don't Look Behind You)
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You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice. And my husband stood stock-still, as if she had been Medusa, the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs.
And then it was as though a curious child pushed his centime into the slot and set all in motion. The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury, and, wielding the honourable sword as if it were a matter of death or glory, charged us, all three.
On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head.
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Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories)
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I didn’t hear a single story about the people who are disproportionately at risk of homicide: sex workers, the homeless, young men of color, trans women. Instead, there were more teaser-trailers for TV specials about murdered moms, or moms who murdered.
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Rachel Monroe (Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession (For True Crime Fans))
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Those days spent with Aero alone at his cabin were nothing short of an educational experience set to bring me to this moment. We wasted not a minute of time spent together. I’d learned a lifetime of information crammed into a single week. Everything was a game to him, or so I’d thought. The chase into the woods, being tied up and used at his mercy, being cared for afterwards as everything I’d learned during our lessons was broken down. From the flick of my wrist throwing the blades to the ability to escape his traps, here I sit, contorted into the back of this trunk, sitting on a gold mine of skills set to free us. To free him. He’d always known it’d come to this moment. The moment he’d finally let go and watch as his bud bloomed into his savage rose, bleeding nothing but strength and courage from her petals. The stem, built with the most destructive thorns of empowerment they’d ever known. A warrior arising from the soiled dirt of the institution meant to choke me dry.
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Jescie Hall (That Sik Luv)
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Alan Moorehead saw the Army Group commander and was reminded of when Alex had turned up at the front the previous February, in Tunisia, and had spread calm assurance, confidence and singleness of purpose.
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James Holland (The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943)
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It’s tempting to picture these early foragers as savage and uncivilized, because they were too ignorant to, say, live in overcrowded cities, fill oceans with single-use plastic containers, and breed animals in dark, crowded cages amid their own feces after cutting off their beaks, horns, and testicles without anesthetics.
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Matt Siegel (The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat)
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Looking back on my days I can say that I do not regret a single hour that I have passed in the company of children.
-From his Autobiography of a Poet (unpublished) as reported in Henry Savage's Richard Middleton: The man and his work
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Richard Middleton
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It seems obvious that not only the feeling but also the consciousness of national unity, in the sense of intercourse of thought, which is achieved through unity of language, is a very ancient phenomenon; moreover, the time of its origin cannot be determined with accuracy. In contrast, we hear that the idea of nationality was born for the first time at the beginning of our century. Further, it stimulated “the gradual singling out of the personalities of civilized peoples” “from the original indifference of savage peoples.” And “the great service of the communication of this stimulus” may be credited to certain individuals — “in Germany, among others, to [Johann Gottlieb] Fichte the elder; among us, to the Slavophiles” (Gradovskii 246). Such opinions are voiced by others as well, but only partially with justification. Of course, unlike Ecclesiastes, we believe that everything under the sun is new and that events do not repeat themselves.
Our age’s idea of nationality bears an imprint of originality, but similar ideas appeared earlier as well. Their generic similarity seems to me to turn on the following. Such an idea is not a necessary feature of a people but a design of individuals and circles that arises from time to time. It is their intention to make certain qualities that are ascribed to the people the guiding principle of the purposeful activity of individuals, societies, and governments of that people — to impart greater energy of activity by exalting its principles. Accordingly, this idea is partly a certain content of thought, partly a general emotional temper of an individual, a circle, a society, and sometimes, in rare critical moments of national life, of a significant portion of the people. In this sense, we see this idea wherever there arises in the people, in response to conflict with other peoples, an apotheosis of certain national features and there is written on a banner something like “God is with us: understand, O nations, and submit,” or “civilization is with us,” and for this reason, again, “submit.
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Oleksander Potebnja (Language and Nationality)
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It is strange that he should have wished to convert these savage foes. Baptism as a penalty of defeat might lose its spiritual quality. The workings of the spirit are mysterious, but we must still wonder how the hearts of these hard-bitten swordsmen and pirates could be changed in a single day. Indeed these mass conversions had become almost a matter of form for defeated Viking armies. It is reported that one old veteran declared he had been through this washing twenty times, and complained that the alb with which he was supplied was by no means up to the average standard. But Alfred meant to make a lasting peace with Guthrum.
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Winston S. Churchill (The Birth of Britain (A History of the English Speaking Peoples #1))
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Bella was dolled up to the nines, in an outfit that probably cost five figures. And all I could think was that she looked cheap and fake next to Camille. The lacquered nails, the pushed-up cleavage, the bleached hair, the shiny new purse the size of an atlas . . . it was all too much. I just wanted to look at the single curl falling down over Camille’s forehead, and the way she brushed it back with one slim little hand.
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Sophie Lark (Savage Lover (Brutal Birthright, #3))
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At any moment, she could trigger the start of the once-in-a-century tribute that the House of Night staged in her honor. A savage tournament of five trials over four months, resulting in only one winner, and granting the most precious prize the world has ever known: a single gift from the Goddess herself.
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Carissa Broadbent (The Serpent and the Wings of Night (Crowns of Nyaxia, #1))
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When I get up in the morning, a single long-stemmed white rose rests on the pillow beside my head.
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J.T. Geissinger (Savage Hearts (Queens & Monsters, #3))
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one tool really helped us progress more quickly toward reconciliation: me taking personal responsibility for causing her to feel as she does. The truth is it’s your fault your wife feels so insecure. If she asks the same question a thousand times, you have to humbly answer her question, every single time, without frustration.
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Phil Fretwell (Savage Marriage: Triumph over Betrayal and Sexual Addiction)
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Though the distance was still considerable, they could see quite clearly a circle of colossal boulders, hewn into the shape of massive columns, linked together by a line of long beams of stone running from one top of a column to the next. They noticed two or three of these rings in all and also a few individual boulders upon the confines of the summit, each one a mighty column pushing up towards the heavens like a solitary tower. “What is it?” whispered Perilavos. “A temple? It cannot be, for it has no roof, and there is no settlement nearby over which a deity could rule! And where are the people? Surely we would have seen them wandering about!”“That is true,” Harmostayos nodded. This time, he did not smile, as was his custom. “But remember, Perilavos, that whoever arranged this formidable ring is undoubtedly a nation both numerous and powerful, not a tribe of savage barbarians which would be too weak and ignorant to drag those boulders along and arrange them with such ingenuity. Moreover, if yonder columns are hewn out of single pieces of rock, which appears to be the case, it would take hundreds of men to break them free, shape them, bring them here, raise them high, and then place them on top of one another!” He fell silent.
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Joe Alex (The Ships of Minos 5: A Bronze Age Saga Classic)
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I knew you were a fighter from the first moment I saw you, little fox. And you’ve proved me right every single fucking day since.
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Eva Ashwood (Empire of Ruin (Dirty Broken Savages, #4))
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Earle was the single exception to this rule, the only other adult she seemed fully at ease with. Of course, having just turned twenty-two, he was a child by comparison to the aged Mary.
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Harold Schechter (Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster)
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The Mega Powers exploded and squared off at WrestleMania V, where Hogan beat Savage to win the title. The show did the biggest wrestling gate up to that point in history, $1.6 million (keep in mind, in the entire history of WCW, even at its peak in 1997 and 1998, it never broke a $1 million gate even a single time) and 760,000 buys, the all-time record that stood until WWF’s peak year of the Monday Night Wars in 2000.
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Bryan Alvarez (100 Things WWE Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (100 Things...Fans Should Know))
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So what happened? How did we go from leader of the pack to lost and left behind? It’s hard to determine a single cause for any event in this complex world, of course, but forced to choose, the answer is best summed up as follows: $ Sure, plenty of people will throw up excuses about Kenyans having some kind of mutant muscle fiber, but this isn’t about why other people got faster; it’s about why we got slower. And the fact is, American distance running went into a death spiral precisely when cash entered the equation. The Olympics were opened to professionals after the 1984 Games, which meant running-shoe companies could bring the distance-running savages out of the wilderness and onto the payroll reservation. Vigil could smell the apocalypse coming, and he’d tried hard to warn his runners. “There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.
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Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
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But the bullet that killed Herbert Lee set off a string of firecrackers that clustered in a single summer, a season so radically different, so idealistic, so savage, so daring, that it redefined freedom in America.
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Bruce Watson (Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy)
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This was Scotland in 1950: coast to coast Jock Tamson's bairns stood or sat, lugs cocked to the wireless for news from home and abroad, from Borlanslogie, from Korea, or tuned in for The McFlannels on a Saturday night, or It's All Yours on a Monday with young Jimmy Logan doing the daft laddie Sammy Dreep, sluttering 'Sausages is the boys!' This was Scotland in 1950: land of 250 pits and 80,000 colliers, 100,000 farmworkers and four universities: land of Singer sewing machines in Clydebank, the Saxone Shoe Company in Kilmarnock, Cox Brothers jute mills in Dundee and the North British Locomotive Company in Springburn, every town and city and every part of every city with it own industries and hard-won skills... This was the land of Leyland Tiger buses from Thurso to Dalbeattie, and double-deckers crowding the city trams towards oblivion, or grandiose department stores and miserable slums, tearooms and single-ends, savage sectarianism and gloomy gentility, no-quarter football and stultifying Sundays.
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James Robertson (And the Land Lay Still)
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Considered interrupting them to note that the entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement—from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.
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Philipp Meyer (The Son)
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Burlic screamed. He threw back his head and roared a single furious word into the night: “Waeccan.” The name erupted from him in a savage wail that rasped at his throat, over and over until he could shout no more.
His howls echoed along the valley. In the village, the other hunters heard and exchanged glances, shook their heads and said nothing. The women clutched their talismans, told the children to go inside. They had tried to help, but there was nothing they could do for Burlic now.
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Mikey Campling (Trespass (The Darkeningstone, #1))