Sentence Patterns Quotes

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns the wind makes in dry sand and you’ll see how syllables in a sentence should fall. Arthur Gordon

If a man is only as good as his word, then I want to marry a man with a vocabulary like yours. The way you say dicey and delectable and octogenarian in the same sentence — that really turns me on. The way you describe the oranges in your backyard using anarchistic and intimate in the same breath. I would follow the legato and staccato of your tongue wrapping around your diction until listening become more like dreaming and dreaming became more like kissing you. I want to jump off the cliff of your voice into the suicide of your stream of consciousness. I want to visit the place in your heart where the wrong words die. I want to map it out with a dictionary and points of brilliant light until it looks more like a star chart than a strategy for communication. I want to see where your words are born. I want to find a pattern in the astrology. I want to memorize the scripts of your seductions. I want to live in the long-winded epics of your disappointments, in the haiku of your epiphanies. I want to know all the names you’ve given your desires. I want to find my name among them, ‘cause there is nothing more wrecking sexy than the right word. I want to thank whoever told you there was no such thing as a synonym. I want to throw a party for the heartbreak that turned you into a poet. And if it is true that a man is only as good as his word then, sweet jesus, let me be there the first time you are speechless, and all your explosive wisdom becomes a burning ball of sun in your throat, and all you can bring yourself to utter is, oh god, oh god.

Men that had understanding of the times." 1 Chr. 12:32 I cannot doubt that this sentence, like every sentence in Scripture was written for our learning. These men of Issachar are set before us as a pattern to be imitated, and an example to be followed, for it is a most important thing to understand the times in which we live, and to understand what those times require. Next to our Bibles and our own hearts, our Lord would have us study our own times.

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.

How I'm rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagina-tion—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why ? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it ? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together) Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph. And any action Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them. We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree Are of equal duration. A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England.

there are two types of codes, ciphers, and true codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation.

The answer to all questions of life and death, "the absolute solution" was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realising that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language... Thus the traveller spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters. And the word, the meaning which appears is astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the course of one's earthly existence, with one's brain encompassed by an iron ring, by the close-fitting dream of one's own personality - one had not made by chance that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and granted it the great understanding.

Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.” “Snap ending.” Mildred nodded. “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.” Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down. Beatty ignored her and continued: “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it nicely and put it back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down her hand and say, “What’s this?” and hold up the hidden book with touching innocence. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

A good sentence in English has a structure that begins with the second most important element, moves to the least important element, and ends with the strongest element. The pattern is 2-3-1.

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.  Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

Today the tower's flock, the usual birds, flew in a kind of scatter pattern, their paths intricately chaotic, the bunch parting and interweaving like boiling pasta under a pot's lifted lid. It appeared someone had given the birds new instructions, had whispered that there was something to avoid, or someone to fool. I once heard Perkus Tooth say that he'd woken that morning having dreamed an enigmatic sentence: "Paranoia is a flower in the brain." Perkus offered this, then smirked and bugged his eyes--the ordinary eye, and the other. I played at amazement (I was amazed, anyway, at the fact that Perkus dreamed sentences to begin with). Yet I hadn't understood what the words meant to him until now, when I knew for a crucial instant that the birds had been directed to deceive me. That was when I saw the brain's flower. Perkus had, I think, been trying to prepare me for how beautiful it was.

The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed.

After a breakup, you may also feel physically and mentally incapacitated in some way. You have trouble sleeping, or you sleep too much. You become accident-prone. You have trouble putting a sentence together. You feel scattered and overwhelmed by feelings. You may doubt your ability to function, and maybe your sanity. The emotions seem so big and so unmanageable that you may be afraid that expressing your feelings will result in complete loss of function. This is normal. Grieving causes confusion and disorganization, as well as disturbance in appetite and sleep patterns. It may disrupt even the most benign daily activities. Grief continually calls attention to itself, and being in disarray is one of those attention-getting devices. It is also a result of your mind’s attempt to reorder the world, because the one it knew, the one it was structured around, is now gone.

The 1994 Crime Bill, sponsored by Democratic senator Joe Biden, went even further, calling for more juveniles to be tried as adults, the building of more prisons, an end to the Pell Grants that had allowed inmates to earn college degrees while in prison, a “three strikes” provision mandating a life sentence upon conviction for a third federal crime, and a provision making gang membership a crime in and of itself. When Bill Clinton signed the measure into law, he ensured that the pattern of mass incarceration started by his predecessors would continue well past the end of his presidency.

Pattern recognition is so basic that the brain's pattern detection modules and its reward circuitry became inextricably linked. Whenever we successfully detect a pattern-or think we detect a pattern-the neurotransmitters responsible for sensations of pleasure squirt through our brains. If a pattern has repeated often enough and successfully enough in the past, the neurotransmitter release occurs in response to the mere presence of suggestive cues, long before the expected outcome of that pattern actually occurs. Like the study participants who reported seeing regular sequences in random stimuli, we will use alomst any pretext to get our pattern recognition kicks. Pattern recognition is the most primitive form of analogical reasoning, part of the neural circuitry for metaphor. Monkeys, rodents, and birds recognize patterns, too. What distinguishes humans from other species, though, is that we have elevated pattern recognition to an art. "To understand," the philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed, "is to perceive patterns." Metaphor, however, is not the mere detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns, too. When Robert Frost wrote, "A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain" his brain created a pattern connecting umbrellas to banks, a pattern retraced every time someone else reads this sentence. Frost believed passionately that an understanding of metaphor was essential not just to survival in university literature courses but also to survival in daily life.

These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse.  Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable.  The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature.  The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs.  He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they don't bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing - Mr. and Mrs. Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they don't agitate my home. There's room for all of us in this neighborhood.

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

It was a long head. It was a wedge, a sliver, a grotesque slice in which it seemed the features had been forced to stake their claims, and it appeared that they had done so in a great hurry and with no attempt to form any kind of symmetrical pattern for their mutual advantage. The nose had evidently been first upon the scene and had spread itself down the entire length of the wedge, beginning among the grey stubble of the hair and ending among the grey stubble of the beard, and spreading on both sides with a ruthless disregard for the eyes and mouth which found precarious purchase. The mouth was forced by the lie of the terrain left to it, to slant at an angle which gave to its right-hand side an expression of grim amusement and to its left, which dipped downwards across the chin, a remorseless twist. It was forced by not only the unfriendly monopoly of the nose, but also by the tapering character of the head to be a short mouth; but it obvious by its very nature that, under normal conditions, it would have covered twice the area. The eyes in whose expression might be read the unending grudge they bore against the nose were as small as marbles and peered out between the grey grass of the hair. This head, set at a long incline upon a neck as wry as a turtle's cut across the narrow vertical black strip of the window. Steerpike watched it turn upon the neck slowly. It would not have surprised him if it had dropped off, so toylike was its angle. As he watched, fascinated, the mouth opened and a voice as strange and deep as the echo of a lugubrious ocean stole out into the morning. Never was a face so belied by its voice. The accent was of so weird a lilt that at first Steerpike could not recognize more than one sentence in three, but he had quickly attuned himself to the original cadence and as the words fell into place Steerpike realised he was staring at a poet.

And while I’m reading, the new words I’m taking in will connect to others already taken in. That reference to blue is the third this chapter, and it always goes with wealth. That phrase is from the poem earlier. Deeper. That’s a reference to the myth of Orpheus. That’s a pairing of two words that don’t usually go together. Wider. That’s a symbol Dickens employs often. That typifies Said’s writings on Orientalism. Points of light. They make a map, or a pattern, or a constellation. Formless, intricate, infinitely complex, and lovely. And then, at once, they’ll connect. They’ll meet, and explode. Of course. That’s the entire point. That’s how the story works, the way each sentence and metaphor and reference feeds into the other to illuminate something important. That explosion of discovery, of understanding, is the most intoxicating moment there is. Emotional, intellectual, aesthetic. Just for a moment, a perfect moment, a small piece of the world makes perfect sense.

Like first language learners, second language learners do not learn language simply through imitation and practice. They produce sentences that are not exactly like those they have heard. These new sentences appear to be based on internal cognitive processes and prior knowledge that interact with the language they hear around them. Both first and second language acquisition are best described as developing systems with their own evolving rules and patterns, not simply as imperfect versions of the target language.

Humans are supposedly able to get at the “content” of utterances, being genuine language-users, while apes are not. But ape-language research clearly shows that there is some kind of in-between world, where a certain degree of content can be retrieved by a being with reduced mental capacity. If mental capacity is equated with potential processing depth, then it is obvious why it makes no sense to draw an arbitrary boundary line between the form and the content of a sentence. Form blurs into content as processing depth increases.

Yes, I do think the ruling class in America would like to grab everything for themselves, because they were brought up that way, and early American Puritans somehow had it wired into their religion that poverty is a sign that God doesn't like you, that you're not "saved," that money, on the other hand, is a sign of God's approval. They say the middle class in this country is shrinking, but I don't really know who the "they" is in that sentence. I tend to think there's a natural process of balances -- that when the very rich press their luck too far, there's a danger of a backlash, and the rich know it. There's often a time when the bully on the playground does one bad thing too many and all the little weaklings gang up on him, and that's the end of that particular pattern. I look at that stuff as a novelist, and as a human being, but I try not to get too worked up about it. I think of myself as wearing the invisible tee shirt with "You can kill me but you can't impress me" printed on it. Every second I spend laughing is a second I don't have to think about Vice President Cheney, for instance.

Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.

What lights you up? Inspires you? Energizes you? When do you find yourself losing track of time because you are so absorbed in an activity and can’t wait to get back to it and do it again? What would you love to do even if you didn’t get paid to do it? Fast-forward to your golden years. What might you wish you had done more of? Now take a moment to compare your lists. What common themes do you see in your answers? What words get repeated? What activities keep getting mentioned? What threads are woven consistently throughout your story? Summarize the patterns you see by circling common words or writing a few summary sentences below both lists.

To realize we love another to get love because we do not love our own self is one of our core human wounds. For each of the two parts of this prayer meditation, express out loud or silently these sentences. Let the feelings and memories come. Express the feelings intuitively, changing and adding to the sentences if it helps. You can repeat one sentence several times in a row until you feel it, or go straight into the next one. You can improvise sentences that may better fit your feelings. One may also experience spirit interference in this prayer meditation. This can manifest as voices and feelings disagreeing with it. Unless you are living as unconditional love, you can be sure these are negative spirits trying to dissuade you from traveling deeper into your own wounds to release them, thereby banishing these spirit influences forever. Do each part for one hour. This meditation prayer can be about two hours long. Center yourself and drop into a prayerful, silent heartful space. Ask to become vulnerable and open your heart. Part One: I am not loved I am not loved I am not loved I have never been loved My parents did not love me I need love I need love I need love Please love me My quest for love has never worked My quest for love will never work Nobody really loves me Nobody really loved me How do you feel? Part Two: I am love I am love I am love God loves me God loves me God loves me God desires me God desires me God desires me I am love I am love I am love (from your heart) I am not loved I have never been loved I am not loved I am not LOVED I am just not loved No one has ever loved me No one loves me I am not loved I am not loved I do not love myself I do not love myself I do not love myself I am loved I am loved I am loved I am LOVED God is not here for me God has never been here for me God is not here for me God has left me I am not loved I have never been loved No one loves me God loves me God LOVES me God wants me God wants me God LOVES me God WANTS me God desires me I don’t want God I don’t want God I don’t want God I want fear I want fear I want fear I AM LOVED I AM LOVED I AM LOVED God wants me God desires me God loves me What does this make you feel? The experience of love and need in co-dependent relationships In such a relationship, one or both partners cover each others emotions by giving false comfort, false ‘love’ and other placating behaviors that prevent the other in deeply feeling and owning their own emotions. When you want to get out of this pattern, this prayer meditation will help. It will let both partners feel the truth of the unspoken demand of love and how they respond to it. Simply sit in front of your partner and express out loud these sentences as a way to reveal the unconscious behavior that is being played out between you both.

All of our memories are, like S’s, bound together in a web of associations. This is not merely a metaphor, but a reflection of the brain’s physical structure. The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed.

Then let me tell you this. Basically .General Forester, there are two types of codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation.

Whites generally are unable or unwilling to acknowledge how structural patterning generates white bias and responsibility for that structural patterning. Perhaps it is Mumia Abu-Jamal who again has deftly and complexly summarized the phenomenon of viciously racist bias in relation to African American experience of “criminal justice.” Contemplating Pennsylvania’s death row population which was 60 percent black at the time of his writing in a state where blacks make up only 11 percent of the population, Abu-Jamal reflects: Does this mean that African-Americans are somehow innocents, subjected to a set up by state officials? Not especially. What it does suggest is that state actors, at all stages of the criminal justice system, including slating at the police station, arraignment at the judicial office, pretrial, trial and sentencing stage before a court, treat African-American defendants with a special vengeance not experienced by white defendants.[94] Hence, we have the prison house and criminal justice structures as a bastion of white racism, displaying severe racial disparities, unequally disseminating terror and group loss for racialized groups in the US. It is a bitter fruit of the nation’s legacy of four centuries of slavery in North America, of the Jim Crow rollback of Reconstruction that often was reinforced by lynching practices. Some of today’s prisons are, in fact, built on sites of former slave plantations.[95] More importantly, prisons today are institutions that preserve a white society marked by white dominance and the confinement of nonwhite bodies, especially black bodies, exposing those bodies to commodification, immobilization, and disintegration.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

1. As we’ll explore in chapter 10, the brain is wired to hunt for meaningful patterns in everything, the better to predict what will happen next based on the repetition or the alteration of the pattern (which means, first and foremost, that there need to be meaningful patterns for the reader to find).8   2. We run the scenario on the page through our own personal experience of similar events, whether real or imagined, to see whether it’s believable (which gives us the ability to infer more information than is on the page—or go mad when there isn’t enough information for us to infer anything at all).9   3. We’re hardwired to love problem solving; when we figure something out, the brain releases an intoxicating rush of neurotransmitters that say, “Good job!”10 The pleasure of story is trying to figure out what’s really going on (which means that stories that ignore the first two facts tend to offer the reader no pleasure at all).

Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm [...]. [...] Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. [...] Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet [...] was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: "now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors". Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more. [...] Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought! [...] School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? [...] The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour. [...] Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff, and wow!

ACCIDENTS are no accident. Like everything else in our lives, we create them. It’s not that we necessarily say, “I want to have an accident,” but we do have the mental thought patterns that can attract an accident to us. Some people seem to be “accident prone,” and others go for a lifetime without ever getting a scratch. Accidents are expressions of anger. They indicate built-up frustrations resulting from not feeling the freedom to speak up for one’s self. Accidents also indicate rebellion against authority. We get so mad we want to hit people, and instead, we get hit. When we are angry at ourselves, when we feel guilty, when we feel the need for punishment, an accident is a marvelous way of taking care of that. It seems as though any accident is not our fault, that we are helpless victims of a quirk of fate. An accident allows us to turn to others for sympathy and attention. We get our wounds bathed and attended to. We often get bedrest, sometimes for an extended period of time. And we get pain. Where this pain occurs in the body gives us a clue to which area of life we feel guilty about. The degree of physical damage lets us know how severely we felt we needed to be punished and how long the sentence should be.

To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was get rid of my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature.” In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. Since I was willing to try anything, I figured, why not give that a shot? Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape. Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed.

Every act of communication is a miracle of translation. At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potentials in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up optic nerves, cross the chasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional. Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.

passing current that does not affect you.  When a thought arises, a careful approach would be to simply “watch” the thought without judging it. When one becomes adept in mindfulness meditation, thoughts and feelings tend to seem like patterns, and this leads to the awareness of how such patterns can be eliminated and how balance can be achieved.   TIP: Mindfulness meditation can be practiced alongside concentration meditation, and there is no rule of thumb that one should be practiced without the other. However, there are certain schools of meditation that like to adhere to one particular form, while others practice a fusion of various techniques. Choosing one of the other is thus not essential.   Other Types of Meditation   While Concentration/Zen Meditation and Mindfulness Meditation are the most common forms practiced today, there are other sub-types of meditation that can encompass their core techniques.    A sub-form of Concentration Meditation, such as, is Mantra Meditation. A mantra is a sound, sentence, or a series of words with a positive resonance to them, which

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you're Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6—right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds. That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene's book The Number Sense. As Dehaene explains: Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is "si" and 7 "qi"). Their English equivalents—"four," "seven"—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits. It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and five- teen. But we don't. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the "decade" first and the unit number second (twentyone, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two- tens-four and so on. That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don't reach forty until they're five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills. The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-yearold to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37+22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tensseven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine. "The Asian system is transparent," says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist who has closely studied Asian-Western differences. "I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there's a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it's sensible. For fractions, we say three-fifths. The Chinese is literally 'out of five parts, take three.' That's telling you conceptually

I have come across this deterrent phenomenon many times in my own work. While serving as chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during the late 1980s, I read hundreds of trial transcripts in which criminals testified against their accomplices. So many cases fit the exact same pattern. These criminals were frequently asked the exact same questions about why they had chosen a particular victim. Robbers would relate how they had considered several opportunities for stealing a lot of money, such as a drug dealer who had made a big score or a taxi cab driver who would have cash on him. But the criminals would then decide against those options because the drug dealer would naturally be well armed, or the cab driver would possibly have a gun. Frequently the criminals would then relate how they had come across a potential victim viewed as an easy target, a male of unimpressive build, or a woman, or an elderly person—all of them far less likely than the drug dealer or cab driver to be carrying a weapon.

[Flowy]'d undertaken this mainly because he'd known that going to public school, with girls, would sentence him to fatherhood by age sixteen, and he wanted to evade that pattern, one from which he himself had been born.

findings suggested that the type of instruction students had experienced—isolated pattern practice drills—resulted in a developmental sequence that appeared to be different from that of learners in more natural learning environments. For a time after their instruction had focused on it, learners reliably produced a particular grammatical morpheme in its obligatory contexts. For example, after weeks of drilling on present progressive, students usually supplied both the auxiliary be and the -ing ending (for example, ‘He’s playing ball’). However, they also produced one or more of the morphemes in places where they did not belong (‘He’s want a cookie’). The same forms were produced with considerably less accuracy in obligatory contexts when they were no longer being practised in class and when the third person singular simple present -s was being drilled instead. At this point, many students appeared to revert to what looked like a developmentally earlier stage, using no tense marking at all (for example, ‘He play ball’). These findings provided evidence that an almost exclusive focus on accuracy and practice of particular grammatical forms does not mean that learners will be able to use the forms correctly outside the classroom drill setting, nor that they will continue to use them correctly once other forms are introduced. Not surprisingly, this instruction, that depended on repetition and drill of decontextualized sentences, did not seem to favour the development of comprehension, fluency, or communicative abilities either.

In addition to a greater understanding of secular subjects, the invention of cryptanalysis aslo depended on the growth of religious sholarship. Major theological schools were established in Basra, Kufa and Baghdad, where thelogians scrutinized the revelations of Muhammad as contained in the Koran. The theologians were interested in establishing the chronology of the revelations, which they did by counting the frequencies of words contained in each revelation. The theory was that certain words had evolved relatively recently, and hence if a revelation contained a high number of these newer words, this would indicate that it came later in the chronology. Theologians also studied the Hadith, which consists of the Prophet's daily utterances. They tried to demonstrate that each statement was indeed attributable to Muhammad. This was done by studying the etymology of words and the structure of sentences, to test whether particular texts were consistent with the linguistic patterns of the Prophet.

action. We must discover the patterns, customs, and even the habits around which they organize their lives. If we look at them and see only our own reflection, we do not know them. If we look at them and see only an “other,” an object of our scrutiny, we do not know them. Only when we know who they are with us can we claim really to know them. An exegetical process introduces us to the text. It provides some crucial biographical information, and it even discloses some of the text’s secrets. It is up to the preacher, then, to bring the life of the congregation into the text’s presence, to dwell there long and prayerfully, and to discern the reality of this text as it is with us. This is eventful. Something happens between text and people: a claim is made, a voice is heard, a textual will is exerted, and the sermon will be a bearing witness to this event. As the final step in the exegetical process, the preacher throws the first cord across the gap between text and sermon by describing the text’s claim upon the hearers, including the preacher. We are ready to move on to the creation of the sermon itself only when we can finish the following sentence: “In relation

For proficient speakers, choosing words, pronouncing them, and stringing them together with the appropriate grammatical markers is essentially automatic. Furthermore, much of what these speakers say is drawn from predictable patterns of language that are at least partly formulaic. That is, fluent speakers do not create new sentences by choosing one word at a time but rather by using strings of words that typically occur together. This use of patterns applies not only to idiomatic expressions, but also to much conversational language and written language in a specific genre (Ellis, Simpson-Vlach, and Maynard 2008).

The song of the Canadian dialect is referred to, by linguists, as the Canadian rise. In the Canadian accent, there is a tonal rise at the end of each sentence, until the last sentence, which returns to the Canadian monotone. The rise at the end of the sentence is an indication that the speaker intends to continue. The end of the final sentence has no rise, which tells the listener, “Now it’s your turn to speak” … Essentially, we Canadians have encoded, “after you”, into our speech patterns. It’s subliminal etiquette.

If you have the tendency to give too much information, the Two Sentence Principle might be for you. Speak two sentences and then observe or listen to your audience (whether one person or many). Do they want more? Do they look bored or want to leave?

On average, each judge approved parole for only about one of every three prisoners, but there was a striking pattern to the decisions of all the judges, as the researchers found. The prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 65 percent of the time. Those who appeared late in the day won parole less than 10 percent of the time. Thus, the odds favored the prisoner in our Case 1, who appeared at 8:50 A.M., the second case of the day—and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the prisoner in Case 4 was serving the same sentence for the same crime—fraud—the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 P.M. Like most of the other prisoners who appeared late in the afternoon, he was denied parole.

composition in dissarythm, the new quarter-tone dance music in which chorded woodwinds provided background patterns for the mad melodies pounded on tuned tomtoms. Between each number and the next a frenetic announcer extolled the virtues of a product. Munching a sandwich, Roger listened appreciatively to the dissarhythm and managed not to hear the commercials. Most intelligent people of the nineties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loudspeaker, although they could hear and enjoy the then-infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully-cultivated partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of that concerted assault upon their senses. For that reason a good part of the newscast which followed the dissarhythm program went, as it were, into one of Roger’s ears and out the other before it occurred to him that he was not listening to a panegyric on patent breakfast foods. He thought he recognized the voice, and after a sentence or two he was sure that it was that of Milton Hale, the eminent physicist whose new theory on the principle of indeterminacy had recently occasioned so much scientific controversy. Apparently, Dr.

SCENE WEAVE—WRITING EXERCISE 8 • Scene List List every scene in your story. Try to describe the scene in one sentence. • Twenty-two-Step Tags Tag any scene that includes one of the twenty-two structure steps. If your story has more than one plotline or subsection, label each scene with the appropriate plotline. • Ordering Scenes Study the order of scenes. Make sure the scene sequence builds by structure, not chronology. 1. See if you can cut scenes. 2. Look for opportunities to combine two scenes into one. 3. Add a scene wherever there are gaps in the story’s development. Because scene weave can best be understood by practicing it, I’d like to change our usual pattern of ending the chapter with a single example and look at the scene weaves of a number of stories. Of course, each scene weave is unique to that story and its requirements. But as you look at each example, notice how the different genres present various scene weave challenges that the writers must solve.

Really no one have ever thought about what i want to express? Why i cannot find someone suffering from the samething At first i was certain there is someone out there Familiar with the pain But as the days went on I started to feel lonelyness And now there i am Enjoying the harmony trying to disrupt What a fool of me How great it is How can i put life in my sentences? Some may say it's soon For i have not learnd yet But wait Is this supposed to be teached? How awesome it is to be idiot The more i try to stay in the line as you do while trying to express something The more i get far from it It is it's nature The thing i tried to know in my lovely foolish way Once more i lost the false way Once more i am at the right path Once more i'm typing quickly And once more the music continued by it's end End is diffrent from the meaning When i talk about this beautiful fuck In this shithole Nothing is better than itself Nonsense vanishes what you think of as regulated and appropriate You cannot control anything even the others You just feel You most feel the pattern You must see it You have these You will be having yourself as yourself will be having yourself A great everything tried to show itself through My nonsenses. Having this greateness, still weak to be felt. At last take this from someone Do not assume reason and logic apart from feeling You have got your wisdom through your feelings. And now I wipe out what i said Becouse i cannot understand it. Goodbye lovely fuck. By the way I saw the greatness of life in shit. How alive it is...

This child-directed speech may be characterized by a slower rate of delivery, higher pitch, more varied intonation, shorter, simpler sentence patterns, stress on key words, frequent repetition, and paraphrase. Furthermore, topics of conversation emphasize the child’s immediate environment, picture books, or experiences that the adult knows the child has had. Adults often repeat the content of a child’s utterance, but they expand or recast it into a grammatically correct sentence. For example, when Peter says, ‘Dump truck! Dump truck! Fall! Fall!’, Lois responds, ‘Yes, the dump truck fell down.

There are three categories of criteria that an individual must meet in order to be diagnosed with ASD. The categories are listed below along with the typical traits, which may indicate whether the individual needs further assessment: 1.Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across contexts, not accounted for by general developmental delays: lack of friends and social life friends often much older or younger mumbling and not completing sentences issues with social rules (such as staring at other people) inability to understand jokes and the benefit of ‘small talk’ introverted (shy) and socially awkward inability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings uncomfortable in large crowds and noisy places detached and emotionally inexpressive. 2.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: obsession with ‘special interests’ collecting objects (such as stamps and coins) attachment to routines and rituals ability to focus on a single task for long periods eccentric or unorthodox behaviour non-conformist and distrusting of authority difficulty following illogical conventions attracted to foreign cultures affinity with nature and animals support for victims of injustice, underdogs and scapegoats. 3.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: inappropriate emotional responses victimised or bullied at school, work and home overthinking and constant logical analysis spending much time alone strange laugh or cackle inability to make direct eye contact when talking highly sensitive to light, sound, taste, smell and touch uncoordinated and clumsy with poor posture difficulty coping with change adept at abstract thinking ability to process data sets logically and notice patterns or trends truthful, naïve and often gullible slow mental processing and vulnerable to mental exhaustion intellectual and ungrounded rather than intuitive and instinctive problems with anxiety and sleeping visual memory.

使う日本語表現文型辞典』の文型レベル表示を改め（１級～４級を★１～★５に変更）、それに伴い、例文や解説を改良したものです。

Many of the one-liners teach volumes. Some summarize excellence in an entire field in one sentence. As Josh Waitzkin (page 577), chess prodigy and the inspiration behind Searching for Bobby Fischer, might put it, these bite-sized learnings are a way to “learn the macro from the micro.” The process of piecing them together was revelatory. If I thought I saw “the Matrix” before, I was mistaken, or I was only seeing 10% of it. Still, even that 10%—“ islands” of notes on individual mentors—had already changed my life and helped me 10x my results. But after revisiting more than a hundred minds as part of the same fabric, things got very interesting very quickly. For the movie nerds among you, it was like the end of The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects: “The red door knob! The fucking Kobayashi coffee cup! How did I not notice that?! It was right in front of me the whole time!” To help you see the same, I’ve done my best to weave patterns together throughout the book, noting where guests have complementary habits, beliefs, and recommendations. The completed jigsaw puzzle is much greater than the sum of its parts.

And then. Astonishing. Again. As she was skipping up the back stairs on her way to the attic bedroom to fetch something, something innocent - a book, a handkerchief, afterwards she would never remember what - she was almost sent flying by Howie on his way down. 'I was looking for a bathroom,' he said. 'Well, we only have one,' Ursula said, 'and it's not up these-' but before the sentence was finished she found herself pinned awkwardly against the neglected floral wallpaper of the backstairs, a pattern that had been up since the house was built. 'Pretty girl,' he said. His breath smelt of mint. And then again she was again subjected to pushing and shoving from the outsized Howie. But this time it was not his tongue trying to jam its way into her mouth but something inexpressibly more intimate. She tried to say something but before a sound came out his hand clamped over her mouth, over half her face in fact, and he grinned and said 'Ssh,' as if they were conspirators in a game. With his other hand he was fiddling with her clothes and she squealed in protest. Then he was butting up against her, the way the bullocks in the Lower Field did against the gate. She tried to struggle but he was twice, three times her size even and she might as well have been a mouse in Hattie's jaws. She tried to see what he was doing but he was pressed so tightly against her that all she could see was his big square jaw and the slight brush of stubble, unnoticeable from a distance. Ursula had seen her brothers naked, knew what they had between their legs - wrinkled cockles, a little spout - and it seemed to have little to do with this painful piston-driven thing that was now ramming inside her like a weapon of war. Her own body breached. The arch that led to womanhood did not seem so triumphal any more, merely brutal and completely uncaring. And then Howie gave a great bellow, more ox than Oxford man, and was hitching himself back together and grinning at her. 'English girls,' he said, shaking his head and laughing. He wagged his finger at her, almost disapproving, as if she had engineered the disgusting thing that had just happened and said, 'You really are something!' He laughed again and bounded down the stairs, taking them three at a time, as though his descent had been barely interrupted by their strange tryst. Ursula was left to stare at the floral wallpaper. She had never noticed before that the flowers were wisteria, the same flower that grew on the arch over the back porch. This must be what in literature was referred to as 'deflowering', she thought. It had always sounded like a rather pretty word. When she came back downstairs a half-hour later, a half-hour of thoughts and emotions considerably more intense than was usual for a Saturday morning, Sylvie and Hugh were on the doorstep waving a dutiful goodbye to the disappearing rear end of Howie's car. 'Thank goodness they weren't staying,' Sylvie said. 'I don't think I could have been bothered with Maurice's bluster.' 'Imbeciles,' Hugh said cheerfully. 'All right?' he said, catching sight of Ursula in the hallway. 'Yes,' she said. Any other answer would have been too awful.

That pattern can be defined in a number of ways, but most fundamentally it is a conflict between those forces that Freud called the superego and the id. The superego – the self’s “harsh master,” Freud called it – is the angel guarding the door to Eden with a flaming sword; its archetypal religious expression is Christianity, that most social of all religions, which asks each individual to consider all others before himself. The id – the primordial raw power of instinct itself – is the force that sends us around to the back of Eden, looking for another entrance; its archetypal religious expression is Dionysianism, the cult of deliriant drugs that burst into Athens from somewhere in the East during Greece’s prehistoric period, approximately between 1000-900 BC. The German philosopher Nietzsche said that history is coming, in our time, to take the form of a final conflict between Christ and Dionysus, and that certainly seems to be the case in America today. The Reverend Billy Graham, the classic “pale Christian,” sits as an adviser to Presidents, while Dr. Timothy Leary, the Dionysian spirit of dope and ecstasy is sentenced to 40 years and flees into exile, only to be recaptured.

In l982, however, the success of the KFAC broadcasts was so apparent that I dropped all newspaper advertising and put the money into outright commercials for Trader Joe’s. These were broadcast on demographically suited radio stations: mostly all-news or all-classical. This is still the pattern followed by Trader Joe’s. About the format of the sixty-second radio spots, which has attracted a lot of attention in media circles: I think that most radio commercials are terrible. They have too many “production values.” Even worse, they issue commands to the listener: “Buy this!” “Shop now!” “Hurry!” One should never use a mandatory sentence in addressing a customer; should never give orders. The subliminal message of a Trader Joe’s commercial is, “We’re gonna be around for a long time. If you miss out on this bargain, there’ll be another. If you have the time and inclination . . .” Most supermarket radio spots are paid for by cooperative advertising allowances from manufacturers. The supermarkets jam as many brands into sixty seconds as possible, because it maximizes their revenue. Information be damned! In sharp contrast, each Trader Joe’s spot was devoted to a single product, about which we tried to develop a story.

Time is in-form-ation. Fuller simplifies Einstein into a one-sentence poem: "Matter is knots in energy." Matter is interference patterns. All radiations travel in geodesics, due to gravity which curves their trajectories. Where these trajectories cross, interference results: knots in energy, perceived by us as "matter." The world of matter is the tuned-in. The not-yet-tuned-in is not not, it is merely not knot. Dig?

The story of my life in two sentences: I need time to sort all this out. I’m not going to get it. It was one of those patterns that just kept cropping up. Every time it showed its ugly face, it won.

For example, what should you do when the person seems stuck on repeating a word, activity, or sentence over and over again? Repetition is common in the disease's later stages. The person is searching for familiarity and comfort as the brain continues its malicious march forward in decline. One of the ways to respond in addition to being calm and patient is to engage the person in an activity to break the pattern of repetition.

The hardest foreign language you will ever learn is your first one. And the second hardest foreign language you will ever learn is your second one. In other words, language learning gets easier with each subsequent iteration. This phenomenon owes to the fact that languages, especially those belonging to the same family, share a great deal in terms of grammar, syntax, phonetics, and vocabulary. . . Not only are many of the concepts repetitive across languages, but learners become more adept at recognizing patterns, formulating sentences, and memorizing information.

Imagine darkness. In the darkness that faces outward from the sun a mute spirit woke. Wholly involved in chaos, he knew no pattern. He had no language, and did not know the darkness to be night.

He had said these sentences so many times before that the words seemed to have lost their vitality and meaning, in the way that over-washed patterns of colour maintain only a pale impression of what they must have been,

Points of light. They make a map, or a pattern,or a constellation. Formless, intricate, infinitely complex, and lovely. And then, at once, they'll connect. They'll meet, and explode. Of course. That's the entire point. That's how the story works, the way each sentence and metaphor and reference feeds into the other to illuminate something important. That explosion of discovery, of understanding, is the most intoxicating moment there is. Emotional, intellectual, aesthetic. Just for a moment, a perfect moment, a small piece of the world makes perfect sense. And it's beautiful. It's a moment of pure joy, the kind that brings pleasure like pain.

Time credits can be complicated since they aren’t guaranteed and can be awarded or denied seemingly at the whim of corrections officers and circumstances beyond any rational control or prediction. However, there has been a long-standing pattern in Illinois of people sentenced to a year in prison actually serving only sixty-one days. To explain this, there was a rumor about obscure accounting bureaucracy. Apparently, state government budgetary months were rounded to thirty days. Once a prisoner was in for any amount of time longer than two months, the Illinois Department of Corrections (or maybe the specific institution) was eligible to, and in fact did, receive funds from the State to feed and house that person for a whole year. Therefore, the hustle by IDOC was to get as many nonviolent inmates as possible who were sentenced to one-year terms (primarily low-level drug possession convicts), kick them out on the sixty-first day, and take the money and run. It was so common that defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges all over the state routinely stretched ethical boundaries to dangle that number to defendants as a plea incentive.

There are fortunate men to whom life is a continuous developing pattern, whose education leads them on to a career that carries them, almost in spite of themselves, to a place in the world from which, as their powers desert them, they withdraw to ease and seclusion, and whose final demise is as quiet and completing as the full stop at the end of a long and well-constructed sentence. None of these lives has been mine.

One tiny insight is not enough. But it's a start. It gives me confidence. I want this sudden confidence to stay. To go on and on, spreading and changing and growing to become something beautiful, strong, clear, enduring . . . something tells me if I continue to turn my insights into adjectives I'll turn into a criminal. I'll steal the splendor of this moment and commit it to a long, sorry sentence. I'll murder people and bury them in gorgeous metaphors. I'll mutilate events and objects, cut and arrange everything into pretty patterns. Into spectacular empty images.

There is no such tiny “Cartesian Theater” in the brain; conscious experience is generated by a vastly complex, distributed network that synchronizes and adjusts its activity by the millisecond. As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory information. The experience you have right now is a unique creation of your brain that has transformed data from your body into something closer to a hallucination. To break down this seemingly obvious point that we will deal with very often in this book and that I myself struggle to understand: the existence of our experience is real, but the contents of this experience exist only in your brain. Some philosophers call this “irreducible subjectivity,” which means that no totally objective theory of human experience may be possible. The contents of your experience are not representations of the world, but your experience is part of the world. By altering this process with molecules like psilocybin or LSD we can become aware of different aspects of our perceptions. By perturbing consciousness and observing the consequences, we can gain insight into its normal functioning. This is again not to say that consciousness is not real; there can be no doubt that I am conscious as I write this sentence. However, it is the relationship between consciousness and the external world that is more mysterious than one might assume. It is often supposed that cognition and consciousness result from processing the information from our sensory systems (like vision), and that we use neural computations to process this information. However, following Riccardo Manzotti and others such as the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, I will argue that computations are not natural things that can cause a physical phenomenon like consciousness. When I read academic papers on artificial or machine intelligence, or popular books on the subject, I have not found anyone grappling with these strange “facts” about human consciousness. Either consciousness is not mentioned, or if it is, it is assumed to be a computational problem.

we can explore shaping new patterns by taking the original sentences and writing companion statements for each, keeping the feeling (I’m so) but changing the action (I could). The goal is to bring enough regulating energy to the writing to soften the two survival pathways and deepen the pathway of safety and connection.

The step-well was big and beautiful. An asymmetric pattern within which were smaller patterns, all made of blue tiles, different shades. It could have been a word or many words, a sentence perhaps a script I was unfamiliar with. Maybe it is a spell in some ancient forgotten language. Now I will have to recite it, I thought trying to grasp the significance of the things I was seeing. Surely, everything that comes to you has meaning. What if I don't get the meaning?" —'Master O

The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they don’t bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing—Mr. and Mrs. Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they don’t agitate my home. There’s room for all of us in this neighborhood.

semiquaver skinned the feelings of the manifold.” Certainly the division of words into grammatical categories such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs is not our sole guide concerning the use of words in producing English text. What does influence the choice among words when the words used in constructing grammatical sentences are chosen, not at random by a machine, but rather by a live human being who, through long training, speaks or writes English according to the rules of the grammar? This question is not to be answered by a vague appeal to the word meaning. Our criteria in producing English sentences can be very complicated indeed. Philosophers and psychologists have speculated about and studied the use of words and language for generations, and it is as hard to say anything entirely new about this as it is to say anything entirely true. In particular, what Bishop Berkeley wrote in the eighteenth century concerning the use of language is so sensible that one can scarcely make a reasonable comment without owing him credit. Let us suppose that a poet of the scanning, rhyming school sets out to write a grammatical poem. Much of his choice will be exercised in selecting words which fit into the chosen rhythmic pattern, which rhyme, and which have alliteration and certain consistent or agreeable sound values. This is particularly notable in Poe’s “The Bells,” “Ulalume,” and “The Raven.

Grammar includes all the principles that guide the structure of sentences and paragraphs: syntax-the flow of language; usage-how we use words in different situations; and rules-predetermined boundaries and patterns that govern language in a particular society. Mechanics, on the other hand, are ways we punctuate whatever we are trying to say in our writing: punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, formatting.

fluent.’ As one of the subjects reported, ‘through reciting those lessons, he gained mastery of many collocations, phrases, sentence patterns and other language points.

The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all that unusual. Welsh is like Shakespearean English on acid: the verb always - not just in questions - moves to the beginning. Alternatively, it can be viewed as taking the French grammar a step further. While the verb stops at tense in French, it moves further in Welsh to a position that traditional grammarians call the complementizer (don't ask).

Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analyzed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to determine the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over a hundred thousand brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.

In his book How the Mind Works, the linguist Steven Pinker gives a wonderful example of this. Pinker tells a simple three-sentence story: “Janie heard the jingling of the ice cream truck. She ran upstairs to get her piggy bank. She shook it till some money came out.”2 By themselves these three sentences don’t tell you much. But because of your patterns, without consciously thinking about it, you construct a meaning for the story that makes sense. You probably have some idea of how old Janie is. It’s unlikely that you picture her as someone in her thirties; you probably assume she’s 9 or 10. It’s unlikely you think bills came out when she shook her piggy bank; you probably heard coins. And you certainly don’t assume that she wanted the money to invest in Enron. None of this meaning is contained in the original three sentences, but because of your patterns, you impose meaning—your meaning—on the story.

I remember a woman called Máirín na Yanks Ni Mhurchú, who owned a shop near Mrs Hurley's.... I used to buy chocolate from her when I first came here, and sometimes we'd meet on the roads, picking blackberries. A few years ago, shortly before she died, she was interviewed for an Irish language television series. It was called Bibeanna, which is the Irish word for the wraparound aprons women here used to wear in the house and the farmyard. They were made of dark fabric, patterned with little flowers. I remember watching the series on television and thinking that Máirín's quiet voice hadn't changed since I'd first heard it. Sitting by her fire, wrapped in her flowery apron, she described her life, looking back on her childhood and the years she'd spent in her shop. She talked about the pleasure she took in the company of neighbours who'd drop in for a chat. Then she summed it all up in a sentence. 'I'm calm and easy in myself; I take each day as it comes and I keep my door open.

The second route that motor commands from the cortex can take out towards the muscles is called the multineuronal pathway. The initial cell bodies of the pathway are also in the motor cortex, but they immediately synapse to long chains of internuncial neurons descending from the motor cortex to other cortical areas, to the lower brain, and on down the cord. The final links in these chains end not directly upon the neurons of the motor units, but rather upon the spinal internuncial circuits which organize the patterns of stereotyped spinal reflexes. Thus instead of bypassing the intermediate net, this pathway channels motor commands all the way through it. Impulses take longer to travel from the cortex to the motor unit, since they pass through many more synapses and are influenced by input from many other sources along their way. This arrangement makes possible the second kind of motor control—the setting into motion of the stereotyped reflex units of movement that are organized in the subconscious levels of the lower brain and spinal cord. For instance, the individual circuits and the overall sequential arrangements which control walking or swallowing are in the cord; the multineuronal pathway has only to stimulate these sequences into activity, and then steer their general course without the cortex having to pay attention to the details involved in each separate step. All coordinated movements require the interaction of both of these pathways. The conscious mind is not competent to direct every single muscular adjustment involved in general movements, and the reflexes are powerless to arrange themselves into new, finely controlled sequences. Successfully integrated, the two of these paths together provide the best aspects of millions of years of repetitive practice and of moment to moment changes in intent or shifts in the surrounding environment. One is basic vocabulary, the other is variable sentence structure; the language of coordinated movement cannot go forward without both working together.

Are our lives like car-worn ruts In the face of the ground Created through habitual use And so set in place that they dictate An unalterable course of drudgery, Complaints, and same 'ol same 'ol, Which if bucked threatens our security? That is one long sentence, isn't it? You can change it.

When we reflect that “sentence”10 means, literally, “a way of thinking” . . . we realize that . . . a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought. . . . It is a pattern of felt sense. —Wendell Berry

In 1884 the editor of the Daily Picayune wrote that it would be 'more humane to punish with death all prisoners sentenced to a longer period than six years,' because the average convict lived no longer than that. At the time, the death rate of six prisons in the Midwest, where convict leasing was nonexistent, was around 1 percent. By contrast, in the deadliest year of Louisiana's lease, nearly 20 percent of convicts perished. Between 1870 and 1901, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under James's regime. Before the war, only a handful of planters owned more than one thousand slaves, and there is no record of anyone allowing three thousand valuable human chattel to die. The pattern was consistent throughout the South, where annual convict death rates ranged from about 16 percent to 25 percent, a mortality rate that would rival the Soviet gulags to come. Some American camps were far deadlier than Stalin's: In South Carolina the death rate of convicts leased to the Greenwood and Augusta Railroad averaged 45 percent a year from 1877 to 1879. In 1870 Alabama prison officials reported that more than 40 percent of their convicts had died in their mining camps. A doctor warned that Alabama's entire convict population could be wiped out within three years. But such warnings meant little to the men getting rich off of prisoners. There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. In 1883, eleven years before Samuel L. James's death, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: 'Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don't own 'em. One dies, get another.

They are also born to listen. But that does not come as automatically. Quick wit, even eloquence, is far more available to the Twins than attentiveness. In the context of a hard, direct birth chart, they may interrupt and finish other people’s sentences for them. In a softer, more interpersonally sensitive chart, the pattern may be less obvious. We find them quiet, appearing to be fascinated by our ideas. But their minds have raced ahead. Despite the eye contact and nodding head, they are oblivious to what we are saying. In reality they have already decided what we are going to say. They are now absorbed in studying our nose, thinking of how much it reminds them of a nose they once knew in high school.

Paolo and Cass stood facing each other for a moment. The tall boy made an effort to smile, but couldn’t manage it. Cass’s heart still thrummed in her chest. “He’s not a bad person,” Paolo said abruptly. “Sometimes I think that I am, but he isn’t.” He looked away into the darkness. “What you do…,” Cass croaked out. “What I saw…” She focused on the outline of the closest rosebush, its naked branches crooked as a witch’s fingers. “Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice--” Cass finished his sentence. “For indeed, it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country in which we live.” It was another quote from Michel de Montaigne. “Do you really think that applies in this instance?” Paolo looked up. His dark eyes looked a little sad. “We live in the same place--you, me, Falco. But we live in very different worlds. Surely you understand that?” Cass didn’t know what to say. Paolo went on, a little defensively, “We have reasons. It’s not for you to judge us.” He thrust a square parcel, wrapped in rough muslin, into her arms. “There’s a note in there,” Paolo said, gesturing at the bundle. “I’m sure he’d rather you hear from him, not me.” He bowed slightly, his inky black hair falling forward to obscure part of his face. “Buona notte, Signorina Cassandra.” With that, he turned away, disappearing into the darkness in just a few long strides.

She’d learned quickly what words older men used when they preyed on younger girls, what phrases they trotted out when trying to pretend to be cool college-aged bad boys rather than the sad fiftysomethings they were in real life. Can you keep a secret? they asked her, time and again. But she’d also learned slang, learned how it could sound lead-heavy in the wrong voice, clunky and obvious. She learned she could tell the age of a person from their pop culture references or punctuation use, the location of a person by what they called a water fountain or soda. The gender of a person by how they talked about women. She learned how to find the patterns. She began to read sentences as if they were fingerprints, the construction of each as distinct as the whorls on skin.

No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I never had a desire to display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with such spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax. My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results. I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* [*Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find new definitions I have not known: ‘panoply’ meaning ‘a full set of armor’, ‘calendar’ meaning ‘a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers’. —Chapter IX “Intellectual Equipment”, page 306

In Ephesians 2:10, Paul uses the Greek word poiema, which literally means God’s poetry. When poiema is translated as “handiwork” or “workmanship” it misses the following important point. Poetry in scripture does not rhyme sounds; it follows the Hebrew pattern and rhymes thoughts. This means that as God’s poetry, our thoughts can rhyme with our Heavenly Father’s. That is amazing! How can it work? We know that as we become intimate with someone, we begin to finish each other’s sentences and thoughts. In a deep, authentic, mutual-mind state, we actually don’t know where our thoughts stop and the other person’s thoughts begin. This is exactly what can happen between God and us too. A mutual-mind state with God results in an emulation of His character and heart; we are showing the world the poet behind the poetry. As our mutual-mind state becomes stronger, we are able to live out our purpose of being created for good works.

I invite you to use Janet Hurley's feedback wheel, a form of speaking that has four parts. It is a structure you can use to organize your thoughts and more skillfully speak up when you are hurt. 1. This is what I recollect happened. 2. This is what I made up about it. 3. This is what I felt. And that all-important fourth step most speakers leave out: 4. This would help me feel better. In other words, this is what repair might look like. ... 1. Terry, you said you'd be home by six and you arrive at 6:45, no message or text, while I sat with the kids waiting for dinner. 2. What I make up about that is that you still have some narcissistic traits and that you value your time over ours. 3. I felt sad lonely, fearful of the impact on our children, hurt, and angry. 4. What I'd like now is for you to apologize to the kids, and to me for that matter. And tell me what you're going to do to not repeat this pattern. Notice that each step of the wheel is complete in just a few sentences. Be concise. And here are two more important tips. First, when you share your feelings, be sure to share your feelings, not your thoughts - keep them separate. "I feel like you're angry" doesn't cut it. Better would be "I make up that you're angry and about that I feel.

On the TV a politician Attila recognised was speaking. He was a heavyweight man wearing a suit that looked like a huge black bag. His hair was parted low on one side from where the mass of it surged forward lika an ocean braker onto the beach of his forehead where it was cast backwards onto the crown of his head, finally spilling over the back of his collar. That he was vexed was evidenced by the way he held up his hand, thumb and forefinger formed into the shape of an O which almost exactly mirrored the shape of his mouth; his face seemed to pulsate with fury. (...) Attila strained to listen. He had seen the politician on television before, had been compelled by his speech patterns, marked by half-sentences, the man left one thought unfinished as he rushed on to the next, he talked about himself in the third person. He raged, he shouted. All that, plus the laquered hair. Many politicians were narcissists, it came with the territory, the self-belief required. Narcissists weren't so bad, most great artists were narcissists too. This man though, in Attila's professional opinion, displayed many of the traits of hypomania.