Script To Escape Quotes

I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it. When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said "But I want to find out what happens next.") It was where I went and what I did to cope, and I was amazed, some weeks later when I pulled out that notebook to start typing, to find that I'd written pretty much the entire script in that six hour journey.

This was getting uglier by the minute, I thought. There really was no easy escape, since we were sitting far from the exit and the waiters knew me from prior dinner dates with Ashley and I hadn't paid the tab yet. From: "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story

We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we've all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can't properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing and what sort of behaviour the person before us is rightfully owed. WE can be a little tricky to be around.

Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes— so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside of the script.

Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes—so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

I needed a go-to script for this situation. So, I lowered my head and prayed, “God, I am at the end of my strength here. This is the moment I’ve got to sense Your strength stepping in. The Bible says Your power is made perfect in weakness. This would be a really good time for that truth to be my reality. Help me see something else besides this temptation looming so large in front of me it seems impossible to escape.

time is a fuel tank that perpetually burns, permanently sealed from measurement or manipulation. And while your total life rations are unknown, their daily dispensaries are not. Each of us is gifted with twenty-four hours or 86,400 seconds per day. No one gets more; no one gets less. How you honor (or dishonor) these life rations marks the difference between being further entrenched into SCRIPTED dogma or escaping it.

Caste is not a physical object, like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire. Caste is a notion, it is a state of mind. No one escapes its tentacles. No one escapes exposure to its message, that one set of people is presumed to be inherently smarter, more capable, and more deserving than other groups deemed lower. This program has been installed into the subconscious of every one of us. And high or low, without intervention or reprogramming, we act out the script we were handed.

a stage. The script gave meaning to their every word, tear and gesture – but placed strict limits on their performance. Hamlet cannot murder Claudius in Act I, or leave Denmark and go to an ashram in India. Shakespeare won’t allow it. Similarly, humans cannot live for ever, they cannot escape all diseases, and they cannot do as they please. It’s not in the script. In exchange for giving up power, premodern humans believed that their lives gained meaning. It really mattered whether they fought bravely on the battlefield, whether they supported the lawful king, whether they ate forbidden foods for breakfast or whether they had an affair with the next-door neighbour. This of course created some inconveniences, but it gave

I also saw that those charged with analyzing the import of Obama's blackness were, in the main, working off of an old script. Obama was dubbed "The new Tiger Woods of American Politics," as a man who wasn't exactly black. I understood the point. Obama was not black as these writers understood black. It wasn't just that he wasn't a drug dealer like most black men on the news, but that he did not hail from an inner city, he was not raise on chitlins, his mother had not washed white people's floors. But this confusion was a reduction of racism's true breadth, premised on the need to fix black people in one corner of the universe so that white people may be secure in all the rest of it. So to understand Obama, analysts needed to give him a superpower that explained how this self described black man escaped his assigned corner. That power was his mixed ancestry.

People of Earth know nothing about the heart. And the ones who do, address love as the need to bleed. And it is indeed so. This materialistic world of mentally-obsessed humanoids will never allow true love to show itself. The ones who possess a better understanding often walk alone, love alone, and feel alone, with their partners, groups and the world itself. Altruism is not a disease, a curse or a punishment, although it usually feels that way. Altruism is not even a price we pay for being spiritually free. Altruism, as death or birth, is just what it is. It just happens. The feelings attached to it are merely an awakening to the realization of the gap between oneself and the remaining of his prehistoric ancestors. One moves apart, into the future, in his evolution, and looks back at his brothers and sisters, trapped in the dogmas of the past, not realizing one can’t travel in time in body but only in spirit. And in this sense, none of us ever escapes the prison. Not in body. Only in mind. The mind has the key we look for outside ourselves. The heart helps the blind of spirit find it. And when humanity, as a whole, realizes this, it will ascend. But for now, unfortunately, many will have to suffer and pay with their own life, before this realization becomes common sense. Before the many books that have been written, are finally read by the masses and understood as they were intended by the creators. Before we realize that all the wars are being fought in our mind and merely being represented in the material playground like a theatrical play to which we all contribute with our own mental script, daily written and adjusted by the collective conscience and its concepts of right and wrong, true and false, justice and injustice, real and unreal.

In the last years of the Republic there were films such as Robert Siodmark's Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930)) and Gerhard Lamprecht's Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, 1931), which embraced the airy streets, light-dappled forests, and lakes surrounding Berlin. Billie Wilder, a brash young journalist and dance-hall enthusiast, worked on the scripts for both these films. While Kracauer and Eisner saw malevolence in the frequent trope of doubling (one being possessed by another and thus becoming two conflicting psychological presences), Wilder witnessed another form of doubling during the Weimer era: transvestitism, a staple of cabaret. Men dressing as women (as do Reinhold Schünzel in der Himmel auf Erden [Heaven on earth]) and Curti Bois in Der Fürst von Pappenheim [The Masked Mannequin][both 1927]) or women as men (as does Dolly Haas in Liebeskommando [Love's Command, 1931]), in order to either escape detection or get closer to the object of their affection, is an inherently comic situation, especially when much to his or her surprise the cross-dresser begins to enjoy the disguise. Billie left Germany before he directed a film of his own; as Billy he brought to Hollywood a vigorous appreciation of such absurdities of human behavior, along with the dry cynicism that distinguished Berlin humor and an enthusiasm for the syncopations of American jazz, a musical phenomenon welcomed in the German capital. Wilder, informed by his years in Berlin (to which he returned to make A Foreign Affair in 1948 and One, Two, Three in 1961), wrote and directed many dark and sophisticated American films, including The Apartment (1969) and Some Like it Hot (1959), a comedy, set during Prohibition, about the gender confusion on a tonal par with Schünzel's Viktor und Viktoria, released in December 1933, eleven months into the Third Reich and the last musical to reflect the insouciance of the late Republic.

Brennan often cited Goodbye, My Lady as one of his favorite films. Certainly it was a labor of love in the close collaboration with the director, William Wellman, better known for his action films and for The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Skeeter (Brandon DeWilde) lives with his none too ambitious uncle Jesse (Brennan) in a swamp, where they find a strange dog with a hyena-like laugh. (It is, in fact a basenji, bred in Africa). Jesse realizes the dog must have escaped from a very different environment, but Skeeter adopts the dog without thinking about the consequences should the dog’s true owner show up. Much of the picture is taken up with Skeeter training the dog to hunt better than other hounds. The deliberate and careful way Wellman paces the film makes it utterly absorbing, even as Brennan delivers one of his best understated performances. With its emphasis on rapport with nature and the land and taking responsibility for other animals, the inspirational script serves as Walter Brennan’s credo. And when the dog’s owner shows up, Skeeter has to learn how to let go of his creation, making for an ending far more real than those of most family films. Sidney Poitier has a small role as a neighbor, and though this story is set in Georgia, there is no evidence of segregation. To the contrary, Poitier’s character appears quite at home with his white neighbors, with whom he shares a bond with the land and its creatures.

Dallas. The scriptwriters have each of the actresses in the soap opera play the death scene in the swimming pool: they do not know which of them is to die, and hence disappear from the series. The 'soap' becomes their destiny. If they should die in reality, a way is devised for writing them out of the script. If they are sacrificed in the script, their stardom inevitably comes to an end in real life too, since they are identified with the characters they play. It is the same as in a ceremony: outside the ritual, you count for nothing, but the ritual is flexible enough to make use of all the chance happenings of life. Dallas 's secret lies in its closeness to tribal and initiatory stereotypes. That is why there is never any laughter in it: no wit, no humour, no comic episodes, no happy coincidences. It is a closed world in which everything leads inevitably to fatality, perfidy, sentimental incest or magical cannibalism. Such is the tribal law, of which J.R. is the emblem, which gives rise to the desperate efforts on the part of the women to escape from this archaic trap. In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any 'intelligent' critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobbery meets its match here. In a dream I saw the face of servitude. It is the face of a woman with heavy lidded, blue, expressionless eyes. The crescent shapes of her breasts are asymmetrical. She always has a smile for the poorest as she crawls off daintily towards infinity. Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

You will invariably face jobs that are associated with uncomfortable feelings, ranging from relatively minor annoyance (e.g., taking out the garbage in the rain) to more persistent and recurring feelings of stress and discomfort (e.g., dissertation, organizing income taxes) that activate your procrastination script. Even a minimal degree of stress or inconvenience (what we have come to describe as the feeling of “Ugh”) can be potent enough to make you delay action. Think about some of the mundane examples of procrastination, such as watching a boring television show because the remote control is out of reach (e.g., “It’s ALL THE WAY over there.”) or exercise (e.g., “I’m TOO TIRED to change into my workout clothes.”). The use of capital letters is meant to illustrate the tone of voice of your selftalk, which serves to exaggerate and convince you of the difficulty of what you want to do. You are capable to perform the action, but your thoughts and feelings (including feeling tired or “low energy”) makes you conclude that you are not at your best and therefore cannot and will not follow through (for seemingly justifiable reasons). You might think, “I have to be in the mood to do some things.” But, how often are any of us in the mood to do many of the tasks on which we end up procrastinating? The very fact that we have to plan them indicates that these tasks require some targeted planning and effort. When facing emotional discomfort, ADHD adults are particularly at risk for bolting to pleasant, easy, and yet often unsatisfying activities, such as eating junk food, watching television, social networking, surfing the Internet, etc. In fact, sometimes you may escape from stressful tasks by performing other, lower priority errands or chores. Thus, you rationalize violating your high-priority project plan in order to run out to fill your car with gas. This strategy can be seen as a form of “plea bargaining”—“I will do something productive in order to justify not doing the higher priority but less appealing task.” Moreover, these errands are often more discrete and time limited than the task you are putting off (i.e., “If I start mowing the lawn now, I will be done in 1 hour. I don’t know how long taxes will take me.”), which is often their appeal—even though they are low priority, you are more confident you will get them done. You need not be “in the mood” for a task in order to perform it. A useful reframe is the reminder that you have “enough” energy to get started and recall that once you get started on the first step, you usually feel better and more engaged. Breaking the task down into its discrete steps and setting an end time help you to reframe the plan (e.g., “I’m tired, but I have enough energy to do this task for 15 minutes.”). Rather than setting up the unrealistic expectation that you must be stress-free and 100% energized before you can do tasks, the notion of acceptance of discomfort is a useful mindset to adopt and practice.

TRANSFORM LOCAL DISCOVERIES INTO GLOBAL IMPROVEMENTS When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge. In other words, when teams or individuals have experiences that create expertise, our goal is to convert that tacit knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing) into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else’s expertise through practice. This ensures that when anyone else does similar work, they do so with the cumulative and collective experience of everyone in the organization who has ever done the same work. A remarkable example of turning local knowledge into global knowledge is the US Navy’s Nuclear Power Propulsion Program (also known as “NR” for “Naval Reactors”), which has over 5,700 reactor-years of operation without a single reactor-related casualty or escape of radiation. The NR is known for their intense commitment to scripted procedures and standardized work and the need for incident reports for any departure from procedure or normal operations to accumulate learnings, no matter how minor the failure signal—they constantly update procedures and system designs based on these learnings. The result is that when a new crew sets out to sea on their first deployment, they and their officers benefit from the collective knowledge of 5,700 accident-free reactor-years. Equally impressive is that their own experiences at sea will be added to this collective knowledge, helping future crews safely achieve their own missions.

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.

Are you always trying to get somewhere other than where you are? Is most of your doing just a means to an end? Is fulfillment always just around the corner or confined to short-lived pleasures, such as sex, food, drink, drugs, or thrills and excitement? Are you always focused on becoming, achieving, and attaining, or alternatively chasing some new thrill or pleasure? Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life? In the normal, mind-identified or unenlightened state of consciousness, the power and infinite creative potential that lie concealed in the Now are completely obscured by psychological time. Your life then loses its vibrancy, its freshness, its sense of wonder. The old patterns of thought, emotion, behavior, reaction, and desire are acted out in endless repeat performances, a script in your mind that gives you an identity of sorts but distorts or covers up the reality of the Now. The mind then creates an obsession with the future as an escape from the unsatisfactory present. What you perceive as future is an intrinsic part of your state of consciousness now.

Somos todas iguais, temos todas a mesma história pra contar. No trajeto, tentei recapitular minha própria história e descobrir em que momento resolvi que não faria parte do mundo, não do jeito que ele me convoca. Quando foi que me exilei, Lopes, e por quê? Nenhuma vida é original. Nascemos e morremos, e no espaço entre uma coisa e outra estudamos, trabalhamos, casamos, temos filhos e netos, praticamos exercícios, adoecemos. Ninguém escapa desse script, não há outras opções. Por isso o álcool, o jazz, o esoterismo, a religião, o Kama Sutra: é preciso encontrar alguma fresta, é preciso reinventar uma história que não seja cópia, que não entre para as estatísticas, que escape. Mas mesmo a marginalidade é rotulada, também ela é convencionada, estabelecendo códigos de parecença e grupos fechados onde todos têm, quem diria, a mesma história pra contar. Talvez isso explique aquela sensação de sermos estrangeiros na própria terra, e a paixão por viajar que a maioria tem. Talvez isso explique a insistência de todos falarem sempre a mesma coisa, fazerem as mesmas perguntas e esperarem pelas mesmas respostas, e satisfazerem assim suas necessidades de convivência social. Em que outro idioma nos faríamos entender, se não o da socialização? Lopes, preciso urgentemente reaprender esses códigos, tenho falado muito sozinha.

You know—you go through life telling yourself your story. You’ve got your script, and good lord, have you ever memorized your lines. What a surprise to realize you may have been in the wrong play all along.

It is surely significant that all of the known manuscripts are in Maghribi (or possibly Andalusian) script. Further, the manuscripts contain, in varying degrees, traces of Maghribi dialect and vocabulary. It is also curious that in all manuscripts the hero of Shahrazād’s first story is named Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Qayrawānī, i.e., “of Qayrawān,” or Kairouan in present-day Tunisia. This would be an unusual, though by no means implausible, choice of name for a story originating in the eastern part of the Arab-Islamic world. Such regional and dialectal features can creep into a tradition over time, but they are not definitive indications of the collection’s regional origins. The other reason for the claim that Miʾat laylah has North African or Andalusian origins is the predominance of figures from the Umayyad caliphate (661–750). The Umayyads were overthrown by the Abbasids (750–1258), who founded Baghdad and presided over one of the most glorious periods in Islamic history. A scion of the Umayyads managed to escape and founded a counter-caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula, based in Cordoba (756–1031). In al-Andalus, a nostalgia developed for the glories of Umayyad power and for memories of Damascus. In most of the Abbasid lands, however, the Umayyads were viewed less favorably overall. Thus the fact that A Hundred and One Nights features a number of Umayyad caliphs and notables as heros might be seen a sign of an Andalusian attitude. This is possible. But this interpretation neglects the fact that A Hundred and One Nights also contains stories featuring the Abbasids in contexts that are not unfavorable. One might note as well that most of the tales here involving the Umayyads are set in the lands of jihād, along the Byzantine frontier, or at least stem from that milieu, and that stories of Arab heroics in the Umayyad period are known also in Eastern sources. This is the case even in the Thousand and One Nights. In the present work, for instance, “Story of Maslamah ibn ʿAbd al-Malik” (d. 121/738) is set on the Byzantine frontier, and the historical Maslamah was renowned for leading an assault on Constantinople in 98–99/716–18.

Mrs Strange insisted that the entire class slant their lined paper to the left at a 45-degree angle so that our script lurched away from the centre as if keen to escape. They say your handwriting says a lot about you. I think mine says a lot about Mrs Strange.

The original outline for my midlife crisis was to take a break from a defunct business model and escape into a predictable job at a museum. The intriguing portion of my midlife crisis was to arrive in Argentina and chat it up with a handsome paleontologist while getting a predictable job done. Sitting dumbstruck, in a darkened library, after reading a stack of sultry love letters wasn't part of any script, but I liked intrigue.

Somewhere along the way you may have developed a script for perfectionism, one that says you are not doing enough, are not good enough, or don’t work hard enough. This script perpetuates the doing mode, as it creates a near-constant problem to be solved. If this is true for you at some level, you are living in a perpetual state of escaping the hawk ready to swoop in on you at any moment. This mind-set reduces your creativity, closes off your perspective from the big picture, and prevents you from finding solutions to your actual, solvable problems with any outside-the-box thinking.