School Entrance Quotes

The Night Vale PTA released a statement today saying that if the School Board could not promise to prevent children from learning about dangerous activities like drug use and library science during recess periods, they would be blocking all school entrances with their bodies. They pulled hundreds of bodies out from trucks, saying, “We own all of these bodies and we will not hesitate to use them to create great flesh barricades if that is what it takes to prevent our children from learning.

I've had it with both of you." He pulled his own bag higher on one shoulder and turned to me. "You let me know when you decide what the hell you want from me. I love you, and I miss you, and I'll be waiting, whenever you're ready. But don't spy on me again. Ever." I nodded miserably as he twisted to face Sabine. "And you! You come find me when you're ready to be my friend, because that's all I have to offer right now. But as badly as I need someone to talk to, I don't need another complication in my life. And as for the two of you!" He stepped away from us, already walking backward toward the school entrance. "Work it out. Or don't work it out. But leave me the hell out of it.

Please be aware that your exam scores provide you only with your entrance into the school. They do not ensure your ability to stay.

I used to think that when I grew up there wouldn't be so many rules. Back in elementary school there were rules about what entrance you used in the morning, what door you used going home, when you could talk in the library, how many paper towels you could use in the rest room, and how many drinks of water you could get during recess. And there was always somebody watching to make sure. What I'm finding out about growing older is that there are just as many rules about lots of things, but there's nobody watching.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

Let me be brutally honest. Being an insider, I know exactly how these MBA guys think. And because I know who they really are, I have nothing but utter contempt for these professionals. Now you might think I am stereotyping and generalizing. Yes, I am, indeed. But get this thing straight. Only highly competitive people prepare for these entrance exams to these top-notch B-schools. Only those who have excessive cupidity for money, power and status, only such people enter these highly reputed management colleges. These people don’t have friends, instead, they have connections. It’s all about Moolah. It’s all about usefulness. You scratch my back, and I will scratch yours. You be my ladder, and I will be yours.

Approximately eighteen hours after my kiss with Jack Campbell—my kiss with Jack Campbell—I am sitting at a card table with Pooja in the front entrance of the school behind our veritable army of baked goods, overanalyzing the situation to such an absurd degree, it is now less of a kiss and more of an FBI investigation.

I was convinced I would never even get through the first year at school, but I succeeded, I was even awarded a prize; but I would certainly never pass the grammar-school entrance exam, yet again I succeeded; but then I would certainly fail my year at school, but no, I did not fail, in fact I kept on succeeding. But this did not give me confidence, on the contrary, I became convinced - and your disapproving face was formal proof of this - that the more I succeeded, the worse my eventual downfall would be.

Vienna wasn't just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one's soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life. I was poor, but I was not alone, because I had a friend. And Vienna was like another friend. When it rained in the tropics, I always heard the voice of Vienna. And at other times too. Sometimes deep in the virgin forests I smelled the musty smell of the entrance hall in Hietzing. Music and everything I loved was in the stones of Vienna, and in people's glances and their behavior, the way pure feelings are part of one's very heart. You know when the feelings stop hurting. Vienna in winter and spring. The allés in Schönbrunn. The blue light in the dormitory at the academy, the great white stairwell with the baroque statue. Morning ridings in the Prater. The mildew in the riding school. I remember all of it exactly, and I wanted to see it again...

On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze. A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that? Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind. In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday. Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us. It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral. All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.

When you are getting on in years it is nice to sit by the fire and drink a cup of tea and listen to the school bell sounding dinner, call-over, prep., and lights out. Chips always wound up the clock after that last bell; then he put the wire guard in front of the fire, turned out the gas, and carried a detective novel to bed. Rarely did he read more than a page of it before sleep came swiftly and peacefully, more like a mystic intensifying of perception than any changeful entrance into another world. For his days and nights were equally full of dreaming.

The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic’. These differences between the pupils—for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences—must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud-pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have—I believe the English already use the phrase—‘parity of esteem’. An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma—Beelzebub, what a useful word!—by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age-group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coaeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.

The entrance His words find with me, will be the measure of the power of any words with Him.

JONAS RECEIVER OF MEMORY Go immediately at the end of school hours each day to the Annex entrance behind the House of the Old and present yourself to the attendant. Go immediately to your dwelling at the conclusion of Training Hours each day. From this moment you are exempted from rules governing rudeness. You may ask any question of any citizen and you will receive answers. Do not discuss your training with any other member of the community, including parents and Elders. From this moment you are prohibited from dream-telling. Except for illness or injury unrelated to your training, do not apply for any medication. You are not permitted to apply for release. You may lie.

Yet research shows that skill in reading, writing, and arithmetic, academic standing in high school, scores on college entrance tests and much more besides, are linked to sitting down to family dinner. The more meals you eat with your child, the larger the child’s vocabulary and the higher his or her grades, an effect that is exaggerated in girls. From

I was afraid that she would express herself in dialect, that she would say something vulgar, that it would become obvious that school for her had ended with an elementary-school diploma. I was afraid that, if she merely opened her mouth, everyone would be hypnotized by her intelligence and Professor Galiani herself would be entranced. I was afraid that the professor would find her both presumptuous and naïve and would say to me: Who is this friend of yours, stop seeing her. I was afraid she would understand that I was only Lila’s pale shadow and would be interested not in me any longer but in her, she would want to see her again, she would undertake to make her go back to school.

Kevin", his father began, "I've been thinking about it – I guess I was kind of carried away. It's just that I've waited so long for my old school to make it to the Regionals... I suppose I was living it vicariously through you. Keith says you're not going to fail, after all. Is that right?" "Looks like I'll make it. I know it's hard to believe..." "Yes, it is. I was hoping you could get a football scholarship, you know. Something to waive the entrance requirements, because I don't know what college would take you-" "Yeah. Thanks a lot Dad," Kevin said sarcastically. He already knew what his father thought of him and didn't need to be reminded yet again. "Oh, come on. You know perfectly well that you're too stupid to-" "That's not what my boyfriend says. Oh, by the way, Dad – I'm a faggot. Did I mention that?" "... Kevin – get your stuff, and get out." "Gladly.

Besides, school would be a complete change: it implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life. “I should indeed like to go to school,

And though I was graduating from our Ivy League school with all As and with honors … I couldn’t face the possibility of embarrassing myself on an entrance exam or being rejected.

She slid a sideways glance in his direction, trying to figure out just what it was that was making her so . . . so painfully self-conscious all of a sudden. He was looking right at her. Grinning. A big, stupid, self-satisfied grin, as if he had been eavesdropping on her all-too-embarrassing thoughts. “What?” She tried to defend herself, wishing she’d never looked his way as she felt her cheeks burning with shame. “What?” she asked again when he just laughed at her. “Were you planning to ditch school today, or should we turn around?” She looked up and realized that she’d just driven past the road that led to the school. “Why didn’t you say something?” she accused as she pulled a quick, and probably illegal, U-turn. The tops of her ears felt they were on fire now. “I just wanted to see where you were heading.” He shrugged. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t skip school. You just have to ask me first.” His new grown-up voice seemed to fill all the space of the small car, and Violet found even that annoying. “Shut up,” she insisted, even though she couldn’t help smiling now too. She couldn’t believe she’d passed the entrance to her own school. “Now we really are going to be late.

The trouble with purging the school curriculum of religious knowledge is that ultimate questions cannot be answered without reference to religious beliefs or at least to philosophy. With religion expelled from the schools, a clear field was left for the entrance of the mode of belief called humanitarianism, or secular humanism--the latter a term employed by the cultural historian Christopher Dawson. During the past four decades and more, the place that religion used to hold in American schooling, always a rather modest and non-dogmatic place, has been filled by secular humanism. Its root principle is that human nature and society may be perfected without the operation of divine grace. . . . In his book A Common Faith (1934), [John] Dewey advocated his brand of humanism as a religion. "Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race," he wrote. "Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant." Much more evidence exists to suggest that humanitarianism, or secular humanism, should be regarded in law as a religion, with respect to both establishment and free exercise in the First Amendment. It is this non-theistic religion, hostile to much of the established morality and many existing American institutions, that has come close to being established as a "civil religion" in American public schools.

Three or four years ago, a city education bureau announced a new measure to raise the quality of local teachers and enable graduating high school seniors to be more competitive in the university entrance examination.

It was in Nino’s Catholic education that he encountered, for the first time, a setback: he failed the entrance exam for Regis, the prestigious Catholic high school in Manhattan he was eyeing. A classmate from this period, who

Cathy was fourteen when she entered high school. She had always been precious to her parents, but with her entrance into the rarities of algebra and Latin she climbed into clouds where her parents could not follow. They had lost her.

My friendly, card-carrying cupids!” beamed Lockhart. “They will be roving around the school today delivering your valentines! And the fun doesn’t stop here! I’m sure my colleagues will want to enter into the spirit of the occasion! Why not ask Professor Snape to show you how to whip up a Love Potion! And while you’re at it, Professor Flitwick knows more about Entrancing Enchantments than any wizard I’ve ever met, the sly old dog!” Professor Flitwick buried his face in his hands. Snape was looking as though the first person to ask him for a Love Potion would be force-fed poison.

I swam underwater in a warm blue sea, gliding along a rocky seafloor. Colorful schools of fish scattered before me and dolphins swimming by my side struggled to keep up the pace. Picking up speed, I soared gracefully into the entrance of a sea cave, only to be engulfed by darkness and trapped in a small space. There was a sudden oppressive weight on my chest; I struggled to catch my breath as fear rose in my heart... ~ I woke to find the quilt pulled up over my head. Pushing it back, I came face to face with Charlie, sitting squarely on my chest with his eyes closed and paws curled up under his body.

teachers do not hold bombs or knives, they are still dangerous enemies. They fill us with insidious revisionist ideas. They teach us that scholars are superior to workers. They promote personal ambition by encouraging competition for the highest grades. All these things are intended to change good young socialists into corrupt revisionists. They are invisible knives that are even more dangerous than real knives or guns. For example, a student from Yu-cai High School killed himself because he failed the university entrance examination. Brainwashed by his teachers, he believed his sole aim in life was to enter a famous university and become a scientist—

Then the bandit turned tail and broke for the open. Greeley hit the sidewalk only seconds after him, big as he was and with a panic-stricken woman to detour around. A slice of hindmost heel was all he saw of the man. The store entrance adjoined a corner; that gave the fugitive a few added seconds of shelter, and as Greeley flashed around it in turn, again the breaks were the lawbreaker's. There was a school midway up the street toward the next avenue. It was a couple of minutes past three now, and a torrent of young humanity came pouring out of the building by every staircase and exit, flooding the street. In through them the sprinting man plunged, knocking over right and left the ones that didn't get out of his way quickly enough. If it had been hazardous to take a shot at him in the store, it would have been criminal out here. The kids parted, screaming in delighted excitement, as Greeley tore through them after the bandit with uptilted gun, but he couldn't just callously knock them flat like the man before him had. He sidestepped, got out of their way as often as they did his, and he began to fall behind the other, lose ground. The kids weren't just on that one street - they had dispersed over the entire vicinity by now, for a radius of a block or more in every direction, in frisky, milling, homeward-bound groups. Through them the quarry zigzagged, pulling slowly but surely away. He kept going in a straight line, because it was to his advantage to do so - the presence of these kids made for greater safety - but he was already far enough in the lead so that when he should finally decide to turn off - the answer was pretty obvious; a taxi or a doorway or a basement. Any of them would do. ("Detective William Brown")

And that other woman — the one with the goitre — Eulalie?’ ‘She died too. I told you.’ Madame de Lascabanes turned in extremis to her mother’s nurse. ‘That was my English aunt-by-marriage. At least, she was French, but married an Englishman who left her for the Côte d’Azur.’ Sister Badgery was entranced. ‘My husband was an Englishman — a tea planter from Ceylon. We passed through Paris, once only, on our honeymoon to the Old Country. Gordon was a public-school man — Brighton College in Sussex. D’you know it?’ The princess didn’t. Sister Badgery couldn’t believe: such a well-known school. ‘Sister Badgery, isn’t it time Mrs Lippmann gave you your tea — or whatever you take — Madeira. There’s an excellent Madeira in the sideboard; Alfred developed a taste for it.’ ‘You know I never touch a drop of anything strong.’ ‘I want to talk to my daughter — Mrs Hunter — privately,’ Mrs Hunter said.

Though White had fled from the world of school, he never escaped the models it had given him on how to conduct his life. At school you had to pass tests and ordeals to prove you were brave. You tested your bravery in the playing fields, and through the beatings by masters and prefects. And there were the ceremonies of cruelty of the boys themselves: the initiations and ordeals that were the price of entrance into the school, and later into boys’ secret societies

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.

Whatever any of us may have thought about Hatsumomo, she was like an empress in our okiya since she earned the income be which we all lived. And being an empress she would have been very displeased, upon returning late at night, to find her palace dark and all the servants asleep. That is to say, when she came home too drunk to unbutton her socks, someone had to unbutton them for her; and if she felt hungry, she certainly wasn't going to stroll into the kitchen and prepare something by herself--such as an umeboshi ochazuke, which was a favorite snack of hers, made with leftover rice and pickled sour plums, soaked in hot tea. Actually our okiya wasn't at all unusual in this respect. The job of waiting up to bow and welcome the geisha home almost always fell to the most junior of the "cocoons"--as the young geisha-in-training were often called. And from the moment I began taking lessons at the school, the most junior cocoon in our okiya was me. Long before midnight, Pumpkin and the two elderly maids were sound asleep on their futons only a meter or so away on the wood floor of the entrance hall; but I had to go on kneeling there, struggling to stay awake until sometimes as late as two o'clock in the morning. Granny's room was nearby and she slept with her light on and her door opened a crack. The bar of light that fell across my empty futon made me think of a day, not long before Satsu [Chiyo's sister] and I were taken away from our village, when I'd peered into the back room of our house to see my mother asleep there. My father had draped fishing nets across the paper screens to darken the room, but it looked so gloomy I decided to open one of the windows; and when I did, a strip of bright sunlight fell across my mother's futon and showed her hand so pale and bony. To see the yellow lights streaming from Granny's room onto my futon...I had to wonder if my mother was still alive. We ere so much alike, I felt sure I would have known if she'd died; but of course, I'd had no sign one way or the other.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled 'Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced though the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars--young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded--who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd) monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicioius jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

like a black tide. With the sound of a thousand skittering spiders, the specter fled through the main entrance of the school and then disappeared completely. “Holy shit. That was seriously gross,” Aphrodite said. I was going to agree with Aphrodite when I heard the first, terrible cough. I felt the circle break before I saw her fall to her knees. She looked up at me and coughed again. Blood sprayed from her lips. “Didn’t think it would end like this,” she rasped. “I’m getting Thanatos!” Aphrodite called as she sprinted away. “No! This can’t be happening,” Shaunee said, dropping to her knees beside the already blood-soaked Erin. “Twin! Please. You’ll be fine!” Erin fell into her arms. Damien, Stevie Rae, and I shared a look, and then as one, we joined Shaunee while she held her friend. “I’m so sorry,” Shaunee sobbed. “I didn’t mean anything bad that I said to you.” “It’s—it’s okay, Twin.” Erin spoke slowly between wracking coughs as the blood bubbled in her throat and streamed crimson from her eyes and ears and nose. “It was my fault. I—I forgot how to feel.” “We’re here with you,” I said, touching Erin’s hair. “Spirit, calm her.” “Earth, soothe her,” Stevie Rae said. “Air, envelop her,” Damien said. “Fire, warm her,” Shaunee spoke through her tears. Erin smiled and touched Shaunee’s face. “It already has warmed me. I—I don’t feel cold and alone anymore. Don’t feel anything except tired…” “Just rest,” Shaunee said. “I’ll stay with you while you sleep.” “We all will,” I said, wiping tears from my face with the back of my sleeve. Erin smiled one more time at Shaunee, and then she closed her eyes and died in her Twin’s arms.

Barbara and I had arrived early, so I got to admire everyone’s entrance. We were seated at tables around a dance floor that had been set up on the lawn behind the house. Barbara and I shared a table with Deborah Kerr and her husband. Deborah, a lovely English redhead, had been brought to Hollywood to play opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters. Louis B. Mayer needed a cool, refined beauty to replace the enormously popular redhead, Greer Garson, who had married a wealthy oil magnate and retired from the screen in the mid-fifties. Deborah, like her predecessor, had an ultra-ladylike air about her that was misleading. In fact, she was quick, sharp, and very funny. She and Barbara got along like old school chums. Jimmy Stewart was also there with his wife. It was the first time I’d seen him since we’d worked for Hitchcock. It was a treat talking to him, and I felt closer to him than I ever did on the set of Rope. He was so genuinely happy for my success in Strangers on a Train that I was quite moved. Clark Gable arrived late, and it was a star entrance to remember. He stopped for a moment at the top of the steps that led down to the garden. He was alone, tanned, and wearing a white suit. He radiated charisma. He really was the King. The party was elegant. Hot Polynesian hors d’oeuvres were passed around during drinks. Dinner was very French, with consommé madrilène as a first course followed by cold poached salmon and asparagus hollandaise. During dessert, a lemon soufflé, and coffee, the cocktail pianist by the pool, who had been playing through dinner, was discreetly augmented by a rhythm section, and they became a small combo for dancing. The dance floor was set up on the lawn near an open bar, and the whole garden glowed with colored paper lanterns. Later in the evening, I managed a subdued jitterbug with Deborah Kerr, who was much livelier than her cool on-screen image. She had not yet done From Here to Eternity, in which she and Burt Lancaster steamed up the screen with their love scene in the surf. I was, of course, extremely impressed to be there with Hollywood royalty that evening, but as far as parties go, I realized that I had a lot more fun at Gene Kelly’s open houses.

So it wasn’t a total surprise that Jay would turn a few heads while they were out tonight. She just hadn’t anticipated the power of the two of them together. Two good-looking guys more than doubled the attention they drew. Even among people they knew at the Java Hut that night, Violet and Chelsea became instantly invisible. Girls not only noticed the pair of boys but also giggled behind cupped hands and waved at the two of them. Jay was either unaware or chose to ignore them altogether. Mike, on the other hand, was not. And did not. Not only did he notice the interest he attracted, he seemed to enjoy it. Violet recognized it immediately for what it was: Mike was as much an attention whore as Chelsea. Violet was fine with that. Chelsea, not so much. Violet let Jay draw her through the crowds that bottlenecked near the entrance. She liked knowing that he belonged to her while all those envious eyes looked on. “I guess Chelsea’s not the only one who’s into Mike,” Violet whispered while Jay dragged her over to stand in line at the counter. Jay glanced back to where Chelsea stood on the outskirts of three girls from school who were animatedly chatting with Mike. “Yeah. She’s not doing too good, is she?” Jay agreed. “I thought she’d have him eating out of her hand by now.” Violet wrinkled her nose, worrying over her friend. “You mean like you have me doing?” Violet smiled up at him and then bumped him with her shoulder. “Yes. Exactly like that.” Chelsea caught the two of them spying on her, and Violet flashed an apologetic smile. Chelsea rolled her eyes in response. She sulked as she made her way over to join them. “Get me some fries.” The lack of a question in her statement was somewhat reassuring. She was still Chelsea. Disheartened but bossy.

As concerning marriage, besides that it is a covenant, the entrance into which only is free, but the continuance in it forced and compulsory, having another dependence than that of our own free will, and a bargain commonly contracted to other ends, there almost always happens a thousand intricacies in it to unravel, enough to break the thread and to divert the current of a lively affection: whereas friendship has no manner of business or traffic with aught but itself. Moreover, to say truth, the ordinary talent of women is not such as is sufficient to maintain the conference and communication required to the support of this sacred tie; nor do they appear to be endued with constancy of mind, to sustain the pinch of so hard and durable a knot. And doubtless, if without this, there could be such a free and voluntary familiarity contracted, where not only the souls might have this entire fruition, but the bodies also might share in the alliance, and a man be engaged throughout, the friendship would certainly be more full and perfect; but it is without example that this sex has ever yet arrived at such perfection; and, by the common consent of the ancient schools, it is wholly rejected from it.

The Indian government spent millions of rupees annually developing housing and job opportunities in villages heavily inhabited by untouchables. Moreover, the prime minister said, if two applicants compete for entrance into a college or university, one of the applicants being an untouchable and the other of high caste, the school is required to accept the untouchable. Professor Lawrence Reddick, who was with me during the interview, asked: “But isn’t that discrimination?” “Well, it may be,” the prime minister answered. “But this is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people.

The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic’. These differences between the pupils—for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences—must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time.

Now, Potter,” said McGonagall, “you and Miss Lovegood had better return to your friends and bring them to the Great Hall--I shall rouse the other Gryffindors.” They parted at the top of the next staircase, Harry and Luna running back toward the concealed entrance to the Room of Requirement. As they ran, they met crowds of students, most wearing traveling cloaks over their pajamas, being shepherded down to the Great Hall by teachers and prefects. “That was Potter!” “Harry Potter!” “It was him, I swear, I just saw him!” But Harry did not look back, and at last they reached the entrance to the Room of Requirement. Harry leaned against the enchanted wall, which opened to admit them, and he and Luna sped back down the steep staircase. “Wh--?” As the room came into view, Harry slipped down a few stairs in shock. It was packed, far more crowded than when he had last been in there. Kingsley and Lupin were looking up at him, as were Oliver Wood, Katie Bell, Angelina Johnson and Alicia Spinnet, Bill and Fleur, and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley. “Harry, what’s happening?” said Lupin, meeting him at the foot of the stairs. “Voldemort’s on his way, they’re barricading the school--Snape’s run for it--What are you doing here? How did you know?” “We sent messages to the rest of Dumbledore’s Army,” Fred explained. “You couldn’t expect everyone to miss the fun, Harry, and the D.A. let the Order of the Phoenix know, and it all kind of snowballed.” “What first, Harry?” called George. “What’s going on?” “They’re evacuating the younger kids and everyone’s meeting in the Great Hall to get organized,” Harry said. “We’re fighting.” There was a great roar and a surge toward the foot of the stairs; he was pressed back against the wall as they ran past him, the mingled members of the Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore’s Army, and Harry’s old Quidditch team, all with their wands drawn, heading up into the main castle.

A businessman buys a business and tries to operate it. He does everything that he knows how to do but just cannot make it go. Year after year the ledger shows red, and he is not making a profit. He borrows what he can, has a little spirit and a little hope, but that spirit and hope die and he goes broke. Finally, he sells out, hopelessly in debt, and is left a failure in the business world. A woman is educated to be a teacher but just cannot get along with the other teachers. Something in her constitution or temperament will not allow her to get along with children or young people. So after being shuttled from one school to another, she finally gives up, goes somewhere and takes a job running a stapling machine. She just cannot teach and is a failure in the education world. I have known ministers who thought they were called to preach. They prayed and studied and learned Greek and Hebrew, but somehow they just could not make the public want to listen to them. They just couldn’t do it. They were failures in the congregational world. It is possible to be a Christian and yet be a failure. This is the same as Israel in the desert, wandering around. The Israelites were God’s people, protected and fed, but they were failures. They were not where God meant them to be. They compromised. They were halfway between where they used to be and where they ought to be. And that describes many of the Lord’s people. They live and die spiritual failures. I am glad God is good and kind. Failures can crawl into God’s arms, relax and say, “Father, I made a mess of it. I’m a spiritual failure. I haven’t been out doing evil things exactly, but here I am, Father, and I’m old and ready to go and I’m a failure.” Our kind and gracious heavenly Father will not say to that person, “Depart from me—I never knew you,” because that person has believed and does believe in Jesus Christ. The individual has simply been a failure all of his life. He is ready for death and ready for heaven. I wonder if that is what Paul, the man of God, meant when he said: [No] other foundation can [any] man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he should receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire (1 Cor. 3:11-15). I think that’s what it means, all right. We ought to be the kind of Christian that cannot only save our souls but also save our lives. When Lot left Sodom, he had nothing but the garments on his back. Thank God, he got out. But how much better it would have been if he had said farewell at the gate and had camels loaded with his goods. He could have gone out with his head up, chin out, saying good riddance to old Sodom. How much better he could have marched away from there with his family. And when he settled in a new place, he could have had “an abundant entrance” (see 2 Pet. 1:11). Thank God, you are going to make it. But do you want to make it in the way you have been acting lately? Wandering, roaming aimlessly? When there is a place where Jesus will pour “the oil of gladness” on our heads, a place sweeter than any other in the entire world, the blood-bought mercy seat (Ps. 45:7; Heb. 1:9)? It is the will of God that you should enter the holy of holies, live under the shadow of the mercy seat, and go out from there and always come back to be renewed and recharged and re-fed. It is the will of God that you live by the mercy seat, living a separated, clean, holy, sacrificial life—a life of continual spiritual difference. Wouldn’t that be better than the way you are doing it now?

The main entrance reminded me of the Alamo, a place Chris had always loved. His fascination with history seemed to fit perfectly with the place. School kids came regularly to learn about our history, something I knew would appeal to him. It just felt like Chris. Still, I had to be sure. I excused myself and took a walk away from the others, moving down the hill to a spot where I could see the immense flag. “Okay, babe,” I said. “If you can talk to me, tell me what you think. I don’t know.” Bad-ass. The words flew into my head, bypassing my ears. Bad-ass. Bad-ass. Bad-ass. Over and over, I heard those words in my head. It was as if Chris was there, telling me yes, this is where I want to be buried. There were plenty of logical reasons to choose Austin-it’s much closer to the family, and I can be buried next to him when my time comes. But I truly felt that Chris had spoken at that moment to me. Walking back to the family, I felt his arm around me and his gentle lips on my temple. “Okay, babe. Austin.

A silver hairbrush, old and surely precious, with a little leopard's head for London stamped near the bristles. A white dress, small and pretty, the sort of old-fashioned dress Cassandra had never seen, let alone owned- the girls at school would laugh if she wore such a thing. A bundle of papers tied together with a pale blue ribbon. Cassandra let the bow slip loose between her fingertips and brushed the ends aside to see what lay beneath. A picture, a black-and-white sketch. The most beautiful woman Cassandra had ever seen, standing beneath a garden arch. No, not an arch, a leafy doorway, the entrance to a tunnel of trees. A maze, she thought suddenly. The strange word came into her mind fully formed. Scores of little black lines combined like magic to form the picture, and Cassandra wondered what it would feel like to create such a thing. The image was oddly familiar and at first she couldn't think how that could be. Then she realized- the woman looked like someone from a children's book. Like an illustration from an olden-days fairy tale, the maiden who turns into a princess when the handsome prince sees beyond her ratty clothing.

Ahmity reached out and created a ball of light in his hand sending it down past Jack and into the cave. He called out to Jack, “It will move as you command.” Jack frowned feeling a bit ridiculous talking to a ball of light and said, “Go three feet inside the cave and hover.” The ball floated quickly to the cave entrance and past the rushing water to hover just inside the cave entrance. “Move further in another 5 feet.” There was a large shadow to the right. “Move right 10 feet.” Jack commanded and the ball floated into a side tunnel and disappeared. Jack said, “Return to Ahmity.” The ball slowly accompanied Jack back up the cliff. When he reached the top Ahmity helped him up over the edge and waited for his report. Jack wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, “I could see a tunnel in the side of the cave about 10 feet inside the entrance. It’s large enough for the trolls pass through.” Ahmity shook his head and said, “If the trolls traveled back to the Netherworld from here then it’s possible the beasts escaped the same way.” Jack sighed and glanced back at the school then said, “Well there’s no way to know for sure unless we take a short trip down a black hole.” Coming soon--Vengeance's Fire

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel (145) And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, (150) Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, (155) Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pantaloon With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide (160) For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, (165) Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. All

The first movie star I met was Norma Shearer. I was eight years old at the time and going to school with Irving Thalberg Jr. His father, the longtime production chief at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, devoted a large part of his creative life to making Norma a star, and he succeeded splendidly. Unfortunately, Thalberg had died suddenly in 1936, and his wife's career had begun to slowly deflate. Just like kids everywhere else, Hollywood kids had playdates at each other's houses, and one day I went to the Thalberg house in Santa Monica, where Irving Sr. had died eighteen months before. Norma was in bed, where, I was given to understand, she spent quite a bit of time so that on those occasions when she worked or went out in public she would look as rested as possible. She was making Marie Antoinette at the time, and to see her in the flesh was overwhelming. She very kindly autographed a picture for me, which I still have: "To Cadet Wagner, with my very best wishes. Norma Shearer." Years later I would be with her and Martin Arrouge, her second husband, at Sun Valley. No matter who the nominal hostess was, Norma was always the queen, and no matter what time the party was to begin, Norma was always late, because she would sit for hours—hours!—to do her makeup, then make the grand entrance. She was always and forever the star. She had to be that way, really, because she became a star by force of will—hers and Thalberg's. Better-looking on the screen than in life, Norma Shearer was certainly not a beauty on the level of Paulette Goddard, who didn't need makeup, didn't need anything. Paulette could simply toss her hair and walk out the front door, and strong men grew weak in the knees. Norma found the perfect husband in Martin. He was a lovely man, a really fine athlete—Martin was a superb skier—and totally devoted to her. In the circles they moved in, there were always backbiting comments when a woman married a younger man—" the stud ski instructor," that sort of thing. But Martin, who was twelve years younger than Norma and was indeed a ski instructor, never acknowledged any of that and was a thorough gentleman all his life. He had a superficial facial resemblance to Irving Thalberg, but Thalberg had a rheumatic heart and was a thin, nonathletic kind of man—intellectually vital, but physically weak. Martin was just the opposite—strong and virile, with a high energy level. Coming after years of being married to Thalberg and having to worry about his health, Martin must have been a delicious change for Norma.

I was exhausted and had to rely on Herr Schreiner to help me and knew in my soul that God had sent him to my aid. As tired as I was, I couldn’t have handled my luggage alone. Finally another train did pull into the station but in stark contrast to the empty platform we were standing on, the train was completely full of people. Although he wasn’t that big of a man, Herr Schreiner pushed my suitcases up the two steps into the railway car, and I climbed up behind them. As the train left the station, he hung onto the two entrance handles right behind me and I pushed for space, trying to make enough room for him to get into the carriage. With every surge of the train I expected him to lose his grip but with what I am certain was superhuman strength, he hung on as the train picked up speed. Several of the people made snide remarks but I turned a deaf ear to this and pushed as hard as I could, so that he could also get in. With the help of another man pulling on his coat, Herr Schreiner finally managed to squeeze in far enough so that we could close the door behind him. Once safely on the train, someone from his school in Mannheim recognized him. Herr Schreiner had been a very popular, much admired school principal and seeing how tired and bedraggled we now looked, the passenger offered us his window seats and helped to make room so that we could store our suitcases in the luggage rack above our heads. The train didn’t make any more stops and continued east crossing the Rhine River Bridge, which miraculously was still there. I couldn’t believe that everything had come together as well as it had, and that I was on my way back to Überlingen and my children.

Six or seven minutes past 2 P.M. on September 11, 1973, an infiltration patrol of the San Bemardo Infantry School commanded by Captain Roberto Garrido burst into the second floor of the Chilean Presidential Palace, Santiago's Palacio de La Moneda. Charging up the main staircase and covering themselves with spurts from their FAL machine guns, the patrol advanced to the entrance of the Salon Rojo, the state reception hall. Inside, through dense smoke coming from fires elsewhere in the building and from the explosion of tear gas bombs, grenades, and shells from Sherman tank cannons, the patrol captain saw a band of civilians braced to defend themselves with submachine guns. In a reflex action, Captain Garrido loosed a short burst from his weapon. One of his three bullets struck a civilian in the stomach. A soldier in Garrido's patrol imitated his commander, wounding the same man in the abdomen. As the man writhed on the floor in agony, Garrido suddenly realized who he was: Salvador Allende. "We shit on the President!" he shouted. There was more machine-gun fire from Garrido's patrol. Allende was riddled with bullets. As he slumped back dead, a second group of civilian defenders broke into the Salon Rojo from a side door. Their gunfire drove back Garrido and his patrol, who fled down the main staircase to the safety of the first floor, which the rebel troops had occupied.
 Some of the civilians returned to the Salon Rojo to see what could be done. Among them was Dr. Enrique Paris, a psychiatrist and President Allende's personal doctor. He leaned over the body, which showed the points of impact of at least six shots in the abdomen and lower stomach region. After taking Allende's pulse, he signaled that the President was dead. Someone, out of nowhere, appeared with a Chilean flag, and Enrique Paris covered the body with it.

Interestingly enough, creative geniuses seem to think a lot more like horses do. These people also spend a rather large amount of time engaging in that favorite equine pastime: doing nothing. In his book Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius, John Briggs gathers numerous studies illustrating how artists and inventors keep their thoughts pulsating in a field of nuance associated with the limbic system. In order to accomplish this feat against the influence of cultural conditioning, they tend to be outsiders who have trouble fitting into polite society. Many creative geniuses don’t do well in school and don’t speak until they’re older, thus increasing their awareness of nonverbal feelings, sensations, and body language cues. Einstein is a classic example. Like Kathleen Barry Ingram, he also failed his college entrance exams. As expected, these sensitive, often highly empathic people feel extremely uncomfortable around incongruent members of their own species, and tend to distance themselves from the cultural mainstream. Through their refusal to fit into a system focusing on outside authority, suppressed emotion, and secondhand thought, creative geniuses retain and enhance their ability to activate the entire brain. Information flows freely, strengthening pathways between the various brain functions. The tendency to separate thought from emotion, memory, and sensation is lessened. This gives birth to a powerful nonlinear process, a flood of sensations and images interacting with high-level thought functions and aspects of memory too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. These elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Researchers emphasize that the entire process is so rapid the conscious mind barely registers that it is happening, let alone what is happening. Now a person — or a horse for that matter — can theoretically operate at this level his entire life and never receive recognition for the rich and innovative insights resulting from this process. Those called creative geniuses continuously struggle with the task of communicating their revelations to the world through the most amenable form of expression — music, visual art, poetry, mathematics. Their talent for innovation, however, stems from an ability to continually engage and process a complex, interconnected, nonlinear series of insights. Briggs also found that creative geniuses spend a large of amount of time “doing nothing,” alternating episodes of intense concentration on a project with periods of what he calls “creative indolence.” Albert Einstein once remarked that some of his greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while shaving that he was prone to cut himself with surprise.

Another episode startled Trump’s advisers on the Asia trip. As the president and his entourage embarked on the journey, they stopped in Hawaii on November 3 to break up the long flight and allow Air Force One to refuel. White House aides arranged for the president and first lady to make a somber pilgrimage so many of their predecessors had made: to visit Pearl Harbor and honor the twenty-three hundred American sailors, soldiers, and marines who lost their lives there. The first couple was set to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits just off the coast of Honolulu and straddles the hull of the battleship that sank into the Pacific during the Japanese surprise bombing attack in 1941. As a passenger boat ferried the Trumps to the stark white memorial, the president pulled Kelly aside for a quiet consult. “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Trump asked his chief of staff. Kelly was momentarily stunned. Trump had heard the phrase “Pearl Harbor” and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else. Kelly explained to him that the stealth Japanese attack here had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet and prompted the country’s entrance into World War II, eventually leading the United States to drop atom bombs on Japan. If Trump had learned about “a date which will live in infamy” in school, it hadn’t really pierced his consciousness or stuck with him. “He was at times dangerously uninformed,” said one senior former adviser. Trump’s lack of basic historical knowledge surprised some foreign leaders as well. When he met with President Emmanuel Macron of France at the United Nations back in September 2017, Trump complimented him on the spectacular Bastille Day military parade they had attended together that summer in Paris. Trump said he did not realize until seeing the parade that France had had such a rich history of military conquest. He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.” A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.” Tillerson developed a polite and self-effacing way to manage the gaps in Trump’s knowledge. If he saw the president was completely lost in the conversation with a foreign leader, other advisers noticed, the secretary of state would step in to ask a question. As Tillerson lodged his question, he would reframe the topic by explaining some of the basics at issue, giving Trump a little time to think. Over time, the president developed a tell that he would use to get out of a sticky conversation in which a world leader mentioned a topic that was totally foreign or unrecognizable to him. He would turn to McMaster, Tillerson

Are you Hilary Westfield?” She sounded like she hoped it wasn’t the case. Hilary nodded. “Oh. Well, I’m Philomena. I have to show you to your room.” Hilary looked wildly at Miss Greyson. “I’m Miss Westfield’s governess,” Miss Greyson said, to Hilary’s relief. Maybe talking politely to people like Philomena was something you learned at Miss Pimm’s, or maybe getting past Philomena was a sort of entrance exam. “Is there any chance we could see Miss Pimm? We’re old acquaintances. I used to go to school here, you see.” Miss Greyson smiled for the second time that day—the world was getting stranger and stranger by the minute—but Philomena didn’t smile back. “I’m terribly sorry,” said Philomena, “but Miss Pimm doesn’t receive visitors. You can leave Miss Westfield with me, and the porter will collect Miss Westfield’s bags.” She raised her eyebrows as the carriage driver deposited the golden traveling trunk on the doorstep. “I hope you have another pair of stockings in there.” “I do.” Hilary met Philomena’s stare. “I have nineteen pairs, in fact. And a sword.” Miss Greyson groaned and put her hand to her forehead. “Excuse me?” said Philomena. “I’m afraid Miss Westfield is prone to fits of imagination,” Miss Greyson said quickly. Philomena’s eyebrows retreated. “I understand completely,” she said. “Well, you have nothing to worry about. Miss Pimm’s will cure her of that nasty habit soon enough. Now, Miss Westfield, please come along with me.” Hilary and Miss Greyson started to follow Philomena inside. “Only students and instructors are permitted inside the school building,” said Philomena to Miss Greyson. “With all the thefts breaking out in the kingdom these days, one really can’t be too careful. But you’re perfectly welcome to say your good-byes outside.” Miss Greyson agreed and knelt down in front of Hilary. “A sword?” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Miss Greyson.” “All I ask is that you take care not to carve up your classmates. If I were not a governess, however, I might mention that the lovely Philomena is in need of a haircut.” Hilary nearly laughed, but she suspected it might be against the rules to laugh on the grounds of Miss Pimm’s, so she gave Miss Greyson her most solemn nod instead. “Now,” said Miss Greyson, “you must promise to write. You must keep up with the news of the day and tell me all about it in your letters. And you’ll come and visit me in my bookshop at the end of the term, won’t you?” “Of course.” Hilary’s stomach was starting to feel very strange, and she didn’t trust herself to say more than a few words at a time. This couldn’t be right; pirates were hardly ever sentimental. Then again, neither was Miss Greyson. Yet here she was, leaning forward to hug Hilary, and Hilary found herself hugging Miss Greyson back. “Please don’t tell me to be a good little girl,” she said. Miss Greyson sniffed and stood up. “My dear,” she said, “I would never dream of it.” She gave Hilary’s canvas bag an affectionate pat, nodded politely to Philomena, and walked down the steps and through the gate, back to the waiting carriage. “Come along,” said Philomena, picking up the lightest of Hilary’s bags. “And please don’t dawdle. I have lessons to finish.” HILARY FOLLOWED PHILOMENA through a maze of dark stone walls and high archways. From the inside, the building seemed more like a fortress

A man decides to be a lawyer and spends years studying law and finally puts out his shingle. He soon finds something in his temperament that makes it impossible for him to make good as a lawyer. He is a complete failure. He is 50 years old, was admitted to the bar when he was 30, and 20 years later, he has not been able to make a living as a lawyer. As a lawyer, he is a failure. A businessman buys a business and tries to operate it. He does everything that he knows how to do but just cannot make it go. Year after year the ledger shows red, and he is not making a profit. He borrows what he can, has a little spirit and a little hope, but that spirit and hope die and he goes broke. Finally, he sells out, hopelessly in debt, and is left a failure in the business world. A woman is educated to be a teacher but just cannot get along with the other teachers. Something in her constitution or temperament will not allow her to get along with children or young people. So after being shuttled from one school to another, she finally gives up, goes somewhere and takes a job running a stapling machine. She just cannot teach and is a failure in the education world. I have known ministers who thought they were called to preach. They prayed and studied and learned Greek and Hebrew, but somehow they just could not make the public want to listen to them. They just couldn’t do it. They were failures in the congregational world. It is possible to be a Christian and yet be a failure. This is the same as Israel in the desert, wandering around. The Israelites were God’s people, protected and fed, but they were failures. They were not where God meant them to be. They compromised. They were halfway between where they used to be and where they ought to be. And that describes many of the Lord’s people. They live and die spiritual failures. I am glad God is good and kind. Failures can crawl into God’s arms, relax and say, “Father, I made a mess of it. I’m a spiritual failure. I haven’t been out doing evil things exactly, but here I am, Father, and I’m old and ready to go and I’m a failure.” Our kind and gracious heavenly Father will not say to that person, “Depart from me—I never knew you,” because that person has believed and does believe in Jesus Christ. The individual has simply been a failure all of his life. He is ready for death and ready for heaven. I wonder if that is what Paul, the man of God, meant when he said: [No] other foundation can [any] man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he should receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire (1 Cor. 3:11-15). I think that’s what it means, all right. We ought to be the kind of Christian that cannot only save our souls but also save our lives. When Lot left Sodom, he had nothing but the garments on his back. Thank God, he got out. But how much better it would have been if he had said farewell at the gate and had camels loaded with his goods. He could have gone out with his head up, chin out, saying good riddance to old Sodom. How much better he could have marched away from there with his family. And when he settled in a new place, he could have had “an abundant entrance

There's no secret entrance into Blackcliff, Laia. Even if there was, I wouldn't be stupid enough to try to attack a school of Masks." "Then how--" "How?" he muses. "A good question. How do you get rid of a girl who blunders into your hideout at the most inopportune moment, claiming to be the long-lost daughter of the Lioness? How do you appear in essential faction in the Resistance when they stupidly insist you help her save her brother? How do you make it look like you're helping her when in fact you don't have the time or the men to do so?" My mouth goes dry. "I'll tell you how," Mazen says. "You give the girl a mission she won't come back from. You send her to Blackcliff, home of her parents' killer. You give her impossible tasks, like spying on the most dangerous woman in the Empire, like learning about the Trials before they even occur.

Why wouldn’t she settle down in Philadelphia and marry a nice, rich Catholic boy? “I hear some of your school chums are coming out,” Jack said to Grace, raising the prospect of the formal entrance into polite society that was common at the time. “Do you want to come out, too?” Her reply was firm: “I am out! Do you think that to get a date I have to use those women who sell mailing lists of boys’ names?” No, she had other plans and was not to be stopped.

My senior year flew by and before I knew it, I was graduating from high school. I was never really fired up about going to the Naval Academy, but that’s easy to say after bombing out on the math part of the entrance exam. Little did I know that eventually, I would become part of the Naval Academy’s “Blue & Gold Program!” In time I would become a Math Teacher and a part of the Naval Academy’s “Blue & Gold Program!” Never mind, I did make it into Maine Maritime Academy at Castine, Maine. My interest in the sea was always merchant ships like the blue ribbon ocean liners and the sea itself. I was never really interested in fighting wars, or in warships for that matter. Perhaps it was that I had lost so many of my family to war that I hated the thought of people killing each other for what they considered a righteous cause. In spite of these feelings, I wound up with over forty years of military service. I knew that I was on the right track and at last my parents were proud of me. I was about to graduate with good grades and was following in the footsteps of “those that go down to the sea in ships.

Birds— and Territory My dad and I designed a house for a wren family when I was ten years old. It looked like a Conestoga wagon, and had a front entrance about the size of a quarter. This made it a good house for wrens, who are tiny, and not so good for other, larger birds, who couldn’t get in. My elderly neighbour had a birdhouse, too, which we built for her at the same time, from an old rubber boot. It had an opening large enough for a bird the size of a robin. She was looking forward to the day it was occupied. A wren soon discovered our birdhouse, and made himself at home there. We could hear his lengthy, trilling song, repeated over and over, during the early spring. Once he’d built his nest in the covered wagon, however, our new avian tenant started carrying small sticks to our neighbour’s nearby boot. He packed it so full that no other bird, large or small, could possibly get in. Our neighbour was not pleased by this pre- emptive strike, but there was nothing to be done about it. “If we take it down,” said my dad, “clean it up, and put it back in the tree, the wren will just pack it full of sticks again.” Wrens are small, and they’re cute, but they’re merciless. I had broken my leg skiing the previous winter— first time down the hill— and had received some money from a school insurance policy designed to reward unfortunate, clumsy children. I purchased a cassette recorder (a high- tech novelty at the time) with the proceeds. My dad suggested that I sit on the back lawn, record the wren’s song, play it back, and watch what happened. So,

Lieutenant Fielding was a relatively young teacher who taught Latin and Greek History. He was friendlier than most teachers and encouraged his students to come back to his classroom after hours for additional insight. I remember him professing that the Greeks placed great emphasis on the human body, especially that of men. He also explained that students and teachers should develop a very special bond, supposedly for their enhanced mutual benefit. His philosophy was based on Pederasty as it was practiced in Ancient Greece and, for Fielding; it provided an entrance into a form of ritualistic military life, and the religion of Zeus. At the time I had no inkling what he was talking about, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that he was “gay,” a term not used at the time. However, some students didn’t mind his advances and got unusually high grades, until one day he left without notice. Some of those students who received the extra help were either pulled out of school by their parents or asked to leave by the school’s administrators. In 1952 there was little tolerance for the alternate life style that Lieutenant Fielding was promoting!

June 19: Sunday at 2:30 p.m., Reverend Benjamin Lingenfelder of the Christian Science church marries Norma Jeane and twenty-one-year-old James Dougherty at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Chester Howell. Chester is an attorney and friend of Grace, who chooses the Howell home at 432 South Bentley Avenue in West Los Angeles because it has a spiral staircase that Norma Jeane uses to make a dramatic entrance. Ana Lower makes Norma Jeane’s wedding gown and accompanies her to the altar. Norma Jeane has one bridesmaid, Lorraine Allen, a friend from University High School. No member of Norma Jeane’s family is present, but the Bolenders make an appearance. It is the last time they will see her. After a modest reception at the Florentine Gardens in Hollywood, Norma Jeane and Jim go to their home in Sherman Oaks. Jim Dougherty later recalled that his wife held on to him the entire afternoon. The young couple does not honeymoon but goes for a fishing weekend on Sherwood Lake. On Sundays they attend the Sherman Oaks Christian Science church.

When we first went to Provence, I assumed I would be observing a different culture. With attachment in mind, it became obvious to me that it is much more than a different culture — I was witnessing a culture at work and a culture that worked. Children greeted adults and adults greeted children. Socializing involved whole families, not adults with adults and children with children. There was only one village activity at a time, so families were not pulled in several directions. Sunday afternoon was for family walks in the countryside. Even at the village fountain, the local hangout, teens mixed with seniors. Festivals and celebrations, of which there were many, were all family affairs. The music and dancing brought the generations together instead of separating them. Culture took precedence over materialism. One could not even buy a baguette without first engaging in the appropriate greeting rituals. Village stores were closed for three hours at midday while schools emptied and families reconvened. Lunch was eaten in a congenial manner as multigenerational groupings sat around tables, sharing conversation and a meal. The attachment customs around the village primary school were equally impressive. Children were personally escorted to school and picked up by their parents or grandparents. The school was gated and the grounds could be entered only by a single entrance. At the gate were the teachers, waiting for their students to be handed over to them. Again, culture dictated that connection be established with appropriate greetings between the adult escorts and the teachers as well as the teachers and the students. Sometimes when the class had been collected but the school bell had not yet rung, the teacher would lead the class through the playground, like a mother goose followed by her goslings. While to North American eyes this may appear to be a preschool ritual, even absurd, in Provence it was selfevidently part of the natural order of things. When children were released from school, it was always one class at a time, the teacher in the lead. The teacher would wait with the students at the gate until all had been collected by their adult escort. Their teachers were their teachers whether on the grounds or in the village market or at the village festival. There weren't many cracks to fall through. Provençal culture was keeping attachment voids to a minimum.

As the economic writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a potential letter-writer,” because more than three-quarters of American undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants. Only 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and fewer than 1 percent attend elite schools that accept fewer than 10 percent of their applicants.3 Students at these less competitive institutions then struggle to finish, with only half completing a bachelor’s degree within six years. Many

Next I placed four statues of the four founders in the Entrance Hall, which came alive and selected students from the throng in front of them while the school watched.

Liberal politics is based on the idea that the voters know best, and there is no need for Big Brother to tell us what is good for us. Liberal economics is based on the idea that the customer is always right. Liberal art declares that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Students in liberal schools and universities are taught to think for themselves. Commercials urge us to ‘Just do it.’ Action films, stage dramas, soap operas, novels and catchy pop songs indoctrinate us constantly: ‘Be true to yourself’, ‘Listen to yourself’, ‘Follow your heart’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view most classically: ‘What I feel to be good – is good. What I feel to be bad – is bad.’ People who have been raised from infancy on a diet of such slogans are prone to believe that happiness is a subjective feeling and that each individual best knows whether she is happy or miserable. Yet this view is unique to liberalism. Most religions and ideologies throughout history stated that there are objective yardsticks for goodness and beauty, and for how things ought to be. They were suspicious of the feelings and preferences of the ordinary person. At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: ‘Know thyself!’ The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur.fn1 And so would Christian theologians. St Paul and St Augustine knew perfectly well that if you asked people about it, most of them would prefer to have sex than pray to God. Does that prove that having sex is the key to happiness? Not according to Paul and Augustine. It proves only that humankind is sinful by nature, and that people are easily seduced by Satan. From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts. Imagine that a psychologist embarks on a study of happiness among drug users. He polls them and finds that they declare, every single one of them, that they are only happy when they shoot up. Would the psychologist publish a paper declaring that heroin is the key to happiness? The idea that feelings are not to be trusted is not restricted to Christianity. At least when it comes to the value of feelings, even Darwin and Dawkins might find common ground with St Paul and St Augustine. According to the selfish gene theory, natural selection makes people, like other organisms, choose what is good for the reproduction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals. Most males spend their lives toiling, worrying, competing and fighting, instead of enjoying peaceful bliss, because their DNA manipulates them for its own selfish aims. Like Satan, DNA uses fleeting pleasures to tempt people and place them in its power.

After you’ve decided on a place to study MBBS abroad, the following step is to choose the best medical university. MBBS abroad offers its students a plethora of alternatives and chances. Here are some pointers to help you choose the top medical university in the world to study MBBS. Learn about the university’s rating. The university’s experience in teaching MBBS The university’s recognition Fees for tuition and living expenses Whether or if the university provides FMGE coaching Indian cuisine is available at the hostel canteen. Examine the number of Indian students enrolled at the university. Admission Procedures for MBBS Programs Abroad MBBS overseas is increasingly a popular option for thousands of students. It does not necessitate any difficult procedures or fees. Admission to medical schools in other countries is a pretty straightforward procedure. MBBS abroad offers a plethora of chances to its students. The student must send the necessary paperwork to us, and we will begin the admissions process right away. The admission letter is issued once the following papers are submitted: Results of the 12th grade with eligibility matching according to the university. Passport photocopy Following the submission of the required papers, the student will get an invitation from the Ministry of Education of the particular nation. A representative is on hand at the airport to meet the students, and another is on hand at the destination airport to greet them, The University provides lodging for its students. The Cost of a Medical Degree in Abroad MBBS overseas offers a viable option for medical education studies. The cost of MBBS in Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, China, Bangladesh, Guyana, and other such nations is substantially lower than that of private medical institutions in India. Furthermore, the cost of living in these nations is quite low for international students. These colleges also provide scholarships to deserving students. Criteria for Eligibility to Study medical Abroad: The following admission requirements are reserved for Indian candidates seeking admission to MBBS programs at any of the Best Medical Universities in the World: Firtly, A non-reserved Indian medical candidate must have obtained a minimum of 50% in their 12th grade in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Secondly, Medical aspirants from the restricted categories (SC/ST/OBC) can apply with a minimum of 40% marks in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, according to NMC/MCI criteria (Medical Council of India). Medical students must take the NEET (National Eligibility and Entrance Test) starting in 2019.

The issue of fortuitous encounters brings us to an interesting double standard here. We may recoil in horror at the thought of haphazard chance determining our future life partner, but label that chance `destiny` and we’re entranced by the prospect. On one hand we feel the need to be in control of our romantic choices; on the other hand the thought of losing control can be hugely seductive.

illegally double-parked near the entrance to the school playground, drones its slow maniacal song.

Hey, Lottie?" asked Claire. "Who are those girls?" She gawked at the entrance to the reception tent. I followed her gaze and we both laid eyes on two extremely tall and gorgeous women who had just strolled in. Who came to a wedding after the ceremony? (Tacky people, that's who.) The glamazons were dressed from head to toe in Valentino and looked like they came straight off the runway. I approached one of the young women, hoping to sniff out whether she was a wedding crasher or not. "Are you a friend of the bride or the groom?" "Neither!" she said with a toss of her thick, dark-brown hair. "We're Alfie's daughters. We weren't going to come, but we decided it would be more fun to actually show up and ruin the wedding." Talk about literal. Subtext and these girls were not friends. "Oh, hi," I replied. "Well, you missed the ceremony, but cocktail hour has begun. The first dance will be starting soon." "Perfect." She walked between Claire and me like we were a pair of black curtains. "Why is it that hot, mean girls are still intimidating, even a decade after high school?" I winced.

According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw.

the white tents. 17. Two views of The Wild West in Paris, igo5. Colonel Cody, a Hawkeye by birth, is personally lionized by the Parisians, and his unique exhibition, so full of historical and dramatic interest, made a wonderful impression upon the susceptible French public. The twenty lessons I took in French, at the Berlitz School of Languages, London, only gave me a faint idea of what the language was like, but as I was required to make my lectures and announcements in French, I had my speeches translated, and was coached in their delivery by Monsieur Corthesy, editeur, le journal de Londres. Well, I got along pretty fair, considering that I did not know the meaning of half the words I was saying. Anyway it amused them, so I was satisfied. I honestly believe that more people came in the side show in Paris to hear and laugh at my "rotten" French than anything else, and when I found that a certain word or expression excited their risibilities, I never changed it. I can look back now and see where some of my own literal translations were very funny. Colonel Cody's exhibition is unique in many ways, and might justly be termed a polyglot school, no less than twelve distinct languages being spoken in the camp, viz.: Japanese, Russian, French, Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, German, Italian, Spanish, Holland, Flemish, Chinese, Sioux and English. Being in such close contact every day, we were bound to get some idea of each other's tongue, and all acquire a fair idea of English. Colonel Cody is, therefore, entitled to considerable credit for disseminating English, and thus preserving the entente cordiale between nations. 18. Entrance to the Wild West, Champs de Mars, Paris, Igo5. The first place of public interest that we visited in Paris was the Jardin des Plantes (botanical and zoological garden) and le Musee d'Histoire Naturelle. The zoological collection would suffer in comparison with several in America I might mention, but the Natural History Museum is very complete, and is, to my notion, the most artistically arranged of any museum I have visited. Le Palais du Trocadero, which was in sight of our grounds and facing the

Be that as it may, the river proceeds like an unwilling boy to school: it deviates from a direct course on the slightest excuse. It prefers to loop, twist and curve, and often almost doubles back in its tracks, so that you may walk miles along its banks and find yourself after all not very far from where you started. On the map, it is a curling snake. And it is a snake that needs no occult power to keep a beholder entranced; it is itself a charmer.

Mid-June 2012 …Do you remember the arrogant male model who came to the Bahriji School to give a grooming course to us students when we were there? An evening after my return to London, while staying at Uncle James’ home, I visited one of the London sex clubs. Uncle James was in Hong Kong and I had his town house to myself before I moved to my own lodgings in Ladbroke Grove, recommended by the Nottinghill Methodist Church housing project. I was terribly lonely and needed company desperately. I ventured to “Heavens” located Under the Arches on Villiers Street, Charing Cross, a little before midnight. In 1972, this establishment was located in a large warehouse. For the uninitiated, the entrance was nondescript. It was dimly lit from the outside, and when a patron wished to gain entry, he pressed an obscure doorbell by the side of a huge aluminum sliding door. A pair of eyes would look through a peephole, checking to make sure that it was neither a police raid nor an underage client. If the patron was handsome and dressed like a macho gay man, he’d be asked for identification. Once approved, the green door would slide open to allow entry. Inside “Heavens” was a different world. Throngs of leather and denim-clad patrons checked their belongings in the tiny cloakroom next to the cashier’s booth. A small safety deposit box was then allocated upon request for each visitor to deposit his wallet or important documents for safekeeping. The safety deposit box key, attached to an elastic band together with the clothing claim tag, would then be handed to the patron to wear around his wrist or ankle. Most patrons were shirtless except for their jeans and leather pants. The uninhibited would strip down to their jock straps or sports undergarments. Their naked buttocks were ready to be in service for a night of unbridled debauchery.

As today’s young people seek a more coherent sense of identity, the stress that formerly hit them in college, or even after college, now begins in middle school (or younger). By high school, many middle- and upper-class teenagers juggle digital calendars jammed with extracurricular activities that begin as early as 6:00 a.m., after-school study sessions, college entrance exam tutoring, and sports team practices that leave them trailing home after 10:00 p.m.11 Followed by two to three hours of homework.12 Athletes used to specialize in a single sport in high school; now that starts in elementary school. Previously, musicians and artists could freely dabble in various media and instruments throughout high school; present-day teenagers have to claim their craft in middle school. No longer can a kid flirt with a handful of hobbies, discovering various facets of their personality and passions, before choosing what they love. There’s so little time for thoughtful and measured exploration in high school that young adults end up exploring their skills and passions well into their twenties. A recent study showed that 13- to 17-year-olds are more likely to feel “extreme stress” than adults.13 Even more alarming is that the adults closest to young people are often blind to their heightened stress levels. Approximately 20 percent of teenagers confess that they worry “a great deal” about current and future life events. But only 8 percent of the parents of these same teenagers report that their child is experiencing a great deal of stress.14 Parents often don’t realize the constant heat felt by adolescents, increasing the pressure for them to figure out who they are and what’s important to them. After adolescence, emerging adults race from the proverbial stress-filled pot into the stress-fueled fire.15 Fewer college students are reporting “above-average” health since this question was first asked in 1985.16

1977 Palawan Island, Philippines   Taer and Anak became our tour guides, accompanying us wherever we went. Although we did not pay for their services, we treated them to meals and paid their entrance fees to places of interest. Whenever I asked about their home and schooling schedules, they provided anomalous excuses.               The first few nights, they stayed at my hut. Since we had nothing in common besides unbridled sex, I soon grew weary of their presence. Moreover, I needed time alone, but they couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. They clung onto me as if I were their saviour.               I had no choice but to bid them to return home – and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They confided in me that they had run away from their dysfunctional families and were homeless before we met. They had been relying on me to provide for them. I now had a problem I hadn’t envisioned.               So, I consulted with my rowing buddies. These were their suggestions: ●       Without telling the boys, move to another part of the city. ●       Call it quits and compensate the boys with some financial aid. ●       Break off all ties with them. I ended up doing all three, but that was not the end of Taer and Anak. My saving grace was that I had not told the boys my return date to Canada. The rest of my Palawan Island vacation was spent avoiding the Filipino teenagers. More to the point, this was what transpired after my ‘Dear John’ conversation with them.

I moved closer to him. He did not back away, but stood entranced in the dark. I pulled him towards me. I heard his palpitating heart booming through the quiet night. Yet, I encountered no resistance. As I reached to unzip his jeans, his sinewy body trembled. His awkwardness was a sign of inexperience in the gutsy game of seduction, and I was eager to entice this callow Caucasian into my web of sensual delight.               Flashes of my Bahriji schooling rushed through my mind as my lips caressed the tautness of his comely mouth, teasing him open with my slithering tongue. Heartened by my gutsiness, his tension slowly melted to flames of sizzling arousal. I grabbed his wrist and led us deeper into the darken forest. Pinning him against a towering tree our twirling tongues coalesced wantonly. Our pent-up desires burst forth like torrid infernos, consuming our sanity to debaucherous lunacy. We tore at each other’s clothes, athirst to ravage our lusty lubriciousness within the stillness of this stifling forest. Fervent tongues caressed with yearning intimacy over, around and atop every desirous crevice of our fiery souls.               Our pulsating hardness drummed in capricious potency, demanding satisfaction within our forbidden orifices, where only sacred mystics dared to venture. Throwing caution to the wind, I suckled at his bulging protuberance. Beguiled by my prowess, he jabbed his bulbous rosiness down my craving throat while my pleasuring hand evoked a rhythmic carnality that had wooed mankind since the dawn of humanity.               The Caucasian unleashed his deliverance in a flourish of heaving crescendos. Jets of piquant liberation gushed down my yearning orifice, as I drank his nourishing fill with gusto.               Not much coaxing was needed to spew my abundance onto Jules’ athletic frame. My seething virility coated his musculature. We amalgamated in a passionate kiss before the instructor returned alone to camp. I stayed to gather myself, to cherish an end to a licentious evening with a closeted homosexual. He had spoken no words after our frenzied indulgence.               Little did I suspect a lurking snooper nearby when faint rustling sounds, muffled by the careening wind, tantalized the stillness of the night.

year before law school. I was heading down the entrance stairs when I first saw her; long dark hair, petite build, and the most gorgeous large round chocolate eyes I had ever seen. Smitten from the onset, I watched her stumble and fall as I raced to help her, making sure she wasn't hurt. She looked at me and I saw the emptiness behind those big brown eyes straight away. What had drained the sparkle from them? I wanted to find out. I picked her up off the stairs, asked her if there were any injuries but she just

The first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the Old Quad. I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery. All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith, Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic. Passing out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years, but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling that could well be music from another planet. The radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky. The city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from angles, darkening the corners of things. You would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel safe or comfortable there. I looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky, ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow descent back into town.

On a sunny, but still too cool Monday in May, Rey started his final week at the massive all boys Catholic high school by strutting into the main entrance. He surveyed his kingdom of backpacks and high fives. He was pleased.

What could I say about Bellingrath Junior High? Not much, except it was named after my secret hero, Bernard Bellingrath. But Barney wasn’t the kind of hero who rescued a kid from a burning building or found a cure for a disease. Barney dropped a big load of money on our school to build the gym, stadium, and later the library annex. As his reward, a faded portrait hung on the wall of the visitors’ area inside the main entrance. But that wasn’t the reason he was my hero. According to legend, Barney had been born with a tail. A tail. Grand-mere Robichaud, who’d once seen such a tail on a baby’s pink bottom, said he could’ve been mistaken for the main course at a cochon de lait—a Cajun pig roast. But Barney’s parents were very religious, so they refused to have the tail removed. In spite of that decision, Barney grew up to be the richest and most powerful man in town. But that still wasn’t the reason he was my hero. The fact that he decided to keep the tail anyway—that was the reason. Now, all these years later, you’d think physical imperfections would be tolerated at a school practically founded by someone with a tail. But no.

Past the bouncers outside and the girls smoking long, skinny cigarettes, past the tinted glass doors and the jade stone Novikov has put in near the entrance for good luck. Inside, Novikov opens up so anyone can see everyone in almost every corner at any moment, the same theatrical seating as in his Moscow places. But the London Novikov is so much bigger. There are three floors. One floor is “Asian,” all black walls and plates. Another floor is “Italian,” with off-white tiled floors and trees and classic paintings. Downstairs is the bar-cum-club, in the style of a library in an English country house, with wooden bookshelves and rows of hardcover books. It’s a Moscow Novikov restaurant cubed: a series of quotes, of references wrapped in a tinted window void, shorn of their original memories and meanings (but so much colder and more distant than the accessible, colorful pastiche of somewhere like Las Vegas). This had always been the style and mood in the “elite,” “VIP” places in Moscow, all along the Rublevka and in the Garden Ring, where the just-made rich exist in a great void where they can buy anything, but nothing means anything because all the old orders of meaning are gone. Here objects become unconnected to any binding force. Old Masters and English boarding schools and Fabergé eggs all floating, suspended in a culture of zero gravity.

Move along, children! If we don’t meet the rest of our class at the entrance soon, we’ll miss lunch!

I followed her. Only, since I now had ice skates on, I couldn’t follow very quickly. “Wait!” I called. Erica stopped by the entrance to the ice rink. We were now close enough to the guy with the newspaper that she had to resume her teenage girl act again. “What is it, pumpkin?” I lowered my voice. “The hotel is crawling with guards. You’ll never be able to get into Shang’s room.” Erica smiled at me in a way I knew was pretend but that still melted my heart. “Oh, sweetie.” She sighed. “You’re so cute when you worry about me. But I’ll be fine. They won’t see me because of the diversion.” “What diversion?” I asked, suddenly feeling very worried. “This one,” Erica said, and shoved me onto the ice. I had ice-skated a few times before, so I might have been all right if Erica hadn’t caught me so off guard. Or shoved me so hard. Or sent me onto the rink backward.

Murray made his dramatic entrance back into my life during breakfast.

I climbed out of the car, and before I turned back, I waited for it to disappear over by Port-Royal. Truth be told, I didn’t actually live in Val-de-Grâce, but a bit farther down in a building at 85, boulevard Saint-Michel, where I had miraculously found a room when I first arrived in Paris. From the window, I could see the dark façade of my school. That night, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that monumental façade or from the great stone stairs of the entrance. What would they think if they found out I took those steps almost every day and was a student at the École Supérieure des Mines?

Teaching the first lessons of elementary school to entrance exams through thousands of hours of educational videos in the Fab application, which is the first smart virtual education platform in Iran with the benefit of VR and AR technology faab.ir

According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month’s ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn? I waited for Leah and the other pupils to seize on this very obvious point of argument and jump in with their overflowing brace of words. To my dismay, they did not. Not even my own twin, who ought to know about unearned privilege. This was before Leah and I were gifted; I was still Dumb Adah. Slowpoke poison-oak running joke Adah, subject to frequent thimble whacks on the head. Miss Betty sent me to the corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God. The other children still did, apparently. As I limped back to my place, they turned their eyes away from my stippled sinner’s knees. How could they not even question their state of grace? I lacked their confidence, alas. I had spent more time than the average child pondering unfortunate accidents of birth.

Chick’s entrance into Ivy University Law School constituted an important step forward in his social and professional career. There was still a hard struggle ahead of him. The next few years would be decisive in determining his position in society. Against that background we can understand what the Italian Community Club meant to Chick Morelli.

Csikszentmihalyi goes on to share a personal story that helps explain his perspective. In Hungary, where he grew up, on the tall wooden gate at the entrance to the local elementary school, hung a sign that read: The roots of knowledge are bitter, but its fruits are sweet. This always struck him as deeply untrue: “Even when the learning is hard,” he writes, “it is not bitter when you feel that it is worth having, that you can master it, that practicing what you learned will express who you are and help you achieve what you desire.

Sophie Germain had taught herself calculus at a young age. The daughter of a wealthy family, she had become entranced by mathematics after reading a book about Archimedes in her father’s library. When her parents found out that she loved mathematics and was staying up late at night to work on it, they took away her candles, left her fire unlit, and confiscated her nightgowns. Sophie persisted. She wrapped herself in quilts and worked by the light of stolen candles. Eventually her family relented and gave her their blessing. Germain, like all women of her era, was not permitted to attend university, so she continued to teach herself, in some cases by obtaining lecture notes from the courses at the nearby École Polytechnique using the name Monsieur Antoine-August Le Blanc, a student who had left the school. Unaware of his departure, academy administrators continued to print lecture notes and problem sets for him. She submitted work under his name until one of the school’s teachers, the great Lagrange, noticed the remarkable improvement in Monsieur Le Blanc’s previously abysmal performance. Lagrange requested a meeting with Le Blanc and was delighted and astonished to discover her true identity.

Though it was known across the galaxy as a school, only a small percentage of its space was dedicated to educational facilities. The rest was taken up by housing, centers of magical research, manufacturing, food production, and everything else necessary for self-sufficiency. If the rest of the moon exploded, the Tower could float indefinitely until recovered. Its entrances would even seal in the event of an emergency, making it airtight.

She wrote about the apartheid wall, which, in a nonbinding decision, the International Court of Justice had declared illegal in 2004. We all knew firsthand that the wall cut right through Palestinian towns and villages, dividing communities and separating many farmers from their land. Israel contends that the wall is needed for security, to prevent attacks, but it didn’t construct the wall along the pre-1967 Green Line, which is recognized as the boundary between Israel and the West Bank. Rather, the wall was built deep within the West Bank, enabling Israel to annex even more Palestinian land. The same classmate also wrote about how Israel’s many permanent and temporary checkpoints prevent Palestinians from moving around freely and add painful delays to what should be short, direct journeys. She interviewed some of us about our own experiences with checkpoints. I told her about the spontaneous checkpoints the military regularly erect at the entrance to our village and how we’d sometimes sit in the car for hours trying to go to school or work or whatever appointment we had. Another aspect of her research project looked at the identification cards we are forced to carry at all times and present at the checkpoints. She interviewed some of our classmates from the West Bank about how they aren’t allowed to go to Jerusalem or any city inside ’48 without a permit from Israel, which isn’t easy to obtain.

At only eleven years old, Lucas would live through all the horrors the human being is capable of. He waved goodbye to his friends as he got off the school bus. The evening air brushed his cheeks and ruffled his brown hair. He walked a couple of blocks to the porch of his house, the smell of freshly cut lawn filling his lungs. The flowers that decorated the entrance shone thanks to the summer warmth.

When I took the entrance exam at the high school recruitment office, they put me into a special program. Officially the title on my pay stub says Information Analyst. I’m told there’s even a cubicle somewhere in an office building with my name on it. The more correct name for what I do is operative. I go to whatever country good old Uncle Sam wants me to go. I find out whatever he wants me to find.

The Sexual Episodes When folklore becomes degraded to a minor literary form, as the fairy-faith was degraded to the fairy tales we know today, it natualy loses much of its content: precisely those "adult" details that cannot be allowed to remain in children's books. The direct result of the censorship of spicy details in these marvelous stories is that they become mere occasions for amazement. The Villas-Boas case is hardly appropriate for nursery-school reading, but to eliminate the woman from the story would turn it into a tale without deep symbolic or psychological value. The sexual context is precisely what gives such accounts their significance and their impact. The sexual (and, in some cases mentioned by Budd Hopkins, the sadomasochistic) component of the abduction stories provides an emotional "encoding" that makes them unforgettable. Without the sexual context – without the stories of changelings, human midwives, intermarriage with the Gentry, of which we never hear in modern fairy tales – it is doubtful that the tradition about fairies would have survived through the ages. Nor is that true only of fairies: the most remarkable cases of sexual contact with nonhumans are not found in spicy saucer books, nor in fairy legends; they rest, safely stored away, in the archives of the Catholic Church. To find them, one must first learn Latin and gain entrance into the few libraries where these unique records are preserved. But the accounts one finds there make the Villas-Boas case and contemporary UFO books pale by comparison, as I believe the reader will agree before the end of this chapter.

the last of his water bombs into the air, and zoomed off up the marble staircase, cackling insanely. ‘Well, move along, then!’ said Professor McGonagall sharply to the bedraggled crowd. ‘Into the Great Hall, come on!’ Harry, Ron and Hermione slipped and slid across the Entrance Hall and through the double doors on the right, Ron muttering furiously under his breath as he pushed his sopping hair off his face. The Great Hall looked its usual splendid self, decorated for the start-of-term feast. Golden plates and goblets gleamed by the light of hundreds and hundreds of candles, floating over the tables in mid-air. The four long house tables were packed with chattering students; at the top of the Hall, the staff sat along one side of a fifth table, facing their pupils. It was much warmer in here. Harry, Ron and Hermione walked past the Slytherins, the Ravenclaws and the Hufflepuffs, and sat down with the rest of the Gryffindors at the far side of the Hall, next to Nearly Headless Nick, the Gryffindor ghost. Pearly white and semi-transparent, Nick was dressed tonight in his usual doublet, with a particularly large ruff, which served the dual purpose of looking extra festive and ensuring that his head didn’t wobble too much on his partially severed neck. ‘Good evening,’ he said, beaming at them. ‘Says who?’ said Harry, taking off his trainers and emptying them of water. ‘Hope they hurry up with the Sorting, I’m starving.’ The Sorting of the new students into houses took place at the start of every school year, but by an unlucky combination of circumstances, Harry hadn’t been present at one since his own. He was quite looking forward to it. Just then, a highly excited, breathless voice called down the table, ‘Hiya, Harry!’ It was Colin Creevey, a third-year to whom Harry was something of a hero. ‘Hi, Colin,’ said Harry warily. ‘Harry, guess what? Guess what, Harry? My brother’s starting! My brother Dennis!’ ‘Er – good,’ said Harry. ‘He’s really excited!’ said Colin, practically bouncing up and down in his seat. ‘I just hope he’s in Gryffindor! Keep your fingers crossed, eh, Harry?’ ‘Er – yeah, all right,’ said Harry. He turned back to Hermione, Ron and Nearly Headless Nick. ‘Brothers and sisters usually go in the same houses, don’t they?’ he said. He was judging by the Weasleys, all seven of whom had been put into Gryffindor. ‘Oh, no, not necessarily,’ said Hermione. ‘Parvati Patil’s twin’s in Ravenclaw, and they’re identical, you’d think they’d be together, wouldn’t you?’ Harry looked up at the staff table. There seemed to be rather more empty seats there than usual. Hagrid, of course, was still fighting

Abhijit The Useless (A Sonnet) At school I didn't even know the term neuroscience, Yet today I'm a symbol of neuroscience and psychology. As a kid I never even dreamed of becoming a scientist, I just wanted to observe the underpinnings of reality. After high school I failed my medical entrance exam, Yet to the world I am a vessel of ethics in medicine. I chose CS Engineering instead but soon dropped out, Yet today I am the epitome of responsible engineering. Failure and success are eternally entangled, Masses fear them while legends feast on failure. I never felt the urge for academic validation, Yet today I'm regularly cited in Springer. I never studied science in the pursuit of grades, I accidentally became a scientist by doing science. Grades and degrees are shortcut to social validation, But when you are a pioneer pushing the frontiers, all mortal validation turns null and void.

In a dear little village Remote and obscure A beautiful maiden resided As to whether or not Her intentions were pure Opinions were sharply divided She loved to lie Out 'neath the darkening sky And allow the night breeze To entrance her She whispered her dreams To the birds flying by But seldom received any answer Over the field and along the lane Gentle Alice would love to stray When it came to the end of the day She would wander away Unheeding Dreaming her innocent dreams she strode Quite unaffected by heat or cold Frequently freckled or soaked with rain Alice was out in the lane Who she met there Every day Was a question Answered by none But she'd get there And she'd stay there 'Til whatever she did Was undoubtedly done You might also like Mad Dogs And Englishmen Noël Coward You’re Losing Me (From The Vault) Taylor Swift Cupid (Twin Version) FIFTY FIFTY (피프티피프티) Over the field and along the lane Both her parents would call in vain Sadly, sorrowfully, they'd complain 'Alice is at it again.' Although that dear little village Surrounded by trees Had neither a school, nor a college Gentle Alice acquired From the birds and the bees Some exceedingly practical knowledge The curious secrets that nature revealed She refused to allow to upset her But she thought When observing the beasts of the field That things might have been organised better Over the field and along the lane Gentle Alice would make up And take up Her stand The road was not exactly arterial But it led to a town nearby Where quite a lot of masculine material Caught her rolling eye She was ready to hitchhike Cadillac or motorbike She wasn't proud or choosy All she Was aiming to be Was a pinked-up Minked-up Fly-by-night floozy When old Rogers Gave her pearls as large as Nuts on a chestnut tree All she'd say was 'Fiddle-di-dee! The wages of sin will be the death of me!' Over the field and along the lane Gentle Alice's parents Would wait Hand in hand Her dear old white-headed mother Wistfully sipping champagne Said 'We've spoiled our child Spared the rod Open up the caviar and say "Thank God!" We've got no cause to complain! Alice is at it again!

Conversations about politics are infrequent. [...] But they happen enough for me to know just how much of an outsider I am there-- how different my world is from theirs, and how my world exists within theirs-- and how this outsider status extends through the door to Paul's office; past the visitor lockers, urinals, and showers in the hallway leading to the gym's main entry; into the just-recemented parking lot; onto both the Fifth Avenue exit wrapped around the school's entrance and the Neville Street exit parked behind the gym; and wherever either of those paths take me. There is nowhere in America I can drive, walk, shit, write, scream, sleep, fuck, eat, sweat, lie, spit, die, conjure, see, touch, sit, dream, drink, run, jump, dunk, dribble, shoot, pass, steal, guard, catch, screen, block, lob, assist or win without a similar sense of estrangement.

Up ahead, a shadowy building loomed. It looked more like a gothic cathedral than a school, with grossly elongated black spires jutting into the night sky. They unnerved Tony. Somehow, they resembled horns silhouetted against the moon. He counted ten of these protuberances, each with an arrowhead as its tip. Tony found the structure difficult to make his mind up about. It was beautiful, that was for sure, but its beauty was intermingled with an ill-masked sense of horror. The black exterior had a pair of peculiar projections on either side of the building resembling a bat's wings. His feet on concrete now, he pulled up to a webbed gate— also reminiscent of a bats with the hind, bone-like array supporting an oily black, translucent texture. He saw some girls a few dozen feet from the gate at the entrance of the building. They were garbed in black sailor fuku skirts too high above the knees to facilitate concentration upon anything academic. The males were also dressed in black corduroy pants and black dress shirt. A throng by the massive doors stared holes through them as they approached. Up close, he noted some of the girls were quite pale, sporting piercings and tattoos on their necks and hands. He even saw one with a spider web inked on the side of her face. When he followed Silver Man into the building— his toes squeaking in his soaked shoes—he was awed by the aesthetics. There was a rather large gathering in the hall that looked more like large shadows with all the children in black. Tony felt out of place in his brown pants and long sleeved white shirt. The hall was bleak; the only source of illumination was a pair of horizontal cylindrical lamps set upon wooden rafters near the ceiling. Silver Man proceeded toward the platform where Tony could just make out the form of a thin man donning a monocle. He looked like an old scientist. He was sitting cross-legged, stroking his chest-length pearl white beard. The man appeared to be watching them as they progressed through the hall. Then he stood as they neared the stage, now caressing his bald head. He had a monkish appearance. His black robe— quite similar to the one Silver Man wore— was tied at the waist by a red cloth. The bald, monocled man extended a spindly hand which Silver Man gave a firm tug before leaning in and whispering something. The man nodded, turning to Tony. Tony flinched as he regarded him through his peculiar eyewear: a single gold-rimmed, circular lens. He now folded himself into an accentuated bow. "Listen up folks!" he shouted. Tony saw the students rushing inside the castle pell-mell, summoned by the voice of the bespectacled man. “We have a late recruit ladies and gentlemen,” the man said. His voice was much stronger than his thin frame suggested. “Join me as I induct him into the hallowed spirit of Imajinaereum.

Yurik's room became their love nest. And a messier room the world had never seen. It was a jumble of dirty socks strewn about the floor, sheet music, CDs, cigarette butts, paper plates, and half-filled cans of Coke. An old Hammond organ, left behind by former tenants, stood in the hallway, blocking half the entrance and leaving only a narrow space to squeeze through. This was the room where the young couple broadened their knowledge of the world, from time to time ingesting substances that took them to other places and realities. But when Laura finished high school, and showed her parents the report card with grades that would never get her admitted into a decent college, she announced to Yurik that he had no prospects, and danced off forever. After leaving Yurik and giving him his first broken heart, she went to California. Then she flew off to the places where fearless and brainless enthusiasts of dangerous journeys fly to.

Very well,’ Professor McGonagall prompted him, as he paused, ‘so you found out where the entrance was – breaking a hundred school rules into pieces along the way, I might add – but how on earth did you all get out of there alive, Potter?

She would not be here if she had not done so well on the entrance examination, if her father had not been determined that she would go to “a school that builds both character and career.