“
I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
Much of what we called "depression" was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures we weren't willing to work for.
”
”
Mitch Albom (Have a Little Faith: a True Story)
“
By confusing strategy with tactics and mixing up “what” and “how”, we may have a hard time staying on point. ”What” we want, on the one hand, and “how” we want to achieve it, on the other, needs a careful reading and a singular approach. (“When the bar is set too high”)
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
So, we're in agreement. That's a crazy idea and we will never have one like that again."
"Cook, all our ideas are crazy. That's setting the bar a little high, don't you think?
”
”
Darynda Jones (Eighth Grave After Dark (Charley Davidson, #8))
“
Does it make sense to boycott ourselves? Does it hold water to boycott the fluid course of our life? Is it consistent to commit self-sabotage by destroying wittingly our corporeal and mental structure?
Those are the questions thousands of people may ask as they are confronted with the schizophrenic dilemma on the point of smoking, boozing, doping, sexual transgressing or environmental polluting. Many seem to be aware of their problem. Many have decided to stop from tomorrow on. But when tomorrow and after tomorrow come many tend to let slip their vow and their self-sabotage goes on to rule their life. Their dissonant behavior transforms them into social losers or hopeless patsies and depresses them into the class of forlorn pariahs. They realize, as such, that self-handicapping makes no sense, but are not able to protect themselves from themselves since they haven’t got the muscle to live down the spell of addiction.
Thousands of people may feel having set the bar too high and recognize they are are failing to find the right angle and are missing sufficient insight to steer their life.
If, however, they decide to give it a try they should be aware that the road may be very bumpy and that they have to be prepared for disappointments and regressions, that they might have to deal with very slowly crescent improvements, that they shouldn’t take themselves for a ride and that they could only possibly succeed by focusing painfully on the path to breaking free from the hornet's nest they have got themselves into.
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
Your family is badass,” Sam says. “They set a high bar of badassery.
”
”
Holly Black (Black Heart (Curse Workers, #3))
“
Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.
”
”
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1))
“
He wondered if perhaps, subconsciously, he was trying to sabotage her efforts by setting the bar too high, trying to keep her with him longer; but surely his subconscious wasn't that stupid?
”
”
Dianne Sylvan (Queen of Shadows (Shadow World, #1))
“
I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she'd just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and thought, I'm not that bad. This is where the bar is set.
”
”
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
“
You see, people in the depressive position are often stigmatised as ‘failures' or ‘losers'. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If these people are in the depressive position, it is most probably because they have tried too hard or taken on too much, so hard and so much that they have made themselves ‘ill with depression'. In other words, if these people are in the depressive position, it is because their world was simply not good enough for them. They wanted more, they wanted better, and they wanted different, not just for themselves, but for all those around them. So if they are failures or losers, this is only because they set the bar far too high. They could have swept everything under the carpet and pretended, as many people do, that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds. But unlike many people, they had the honesty and the strength to admit that something was amiss, that something was not quite right. So rather than being failures or losers, they are just the opposite: they are ambitious, they are truthful, and they are courageous. And that is precisely why they got ‘ill'. To make them believe that they are suffering from some chemical imbalance in the brain and that their recovery depends solely or even mostly on popping pills is to do them a great disfavour: it is to deny them the precious opportunity not only to identify and address important life problems, but also to develop a deeper and more refined appreciation of themselves and of the world around them—and therefore to deny them the opportunity to fulfil their highest potential as human beings.
”
”
Neel Burton
“
Are you going to give a speech?' she asked gaily.
He gave a choked laugh. 'Of course not,' he said. 'Not for ages.'
'My cousin Davey gave one on his very first day!' ...
'In the Lords, I remember. It was about how he didn't like strawberry jam.'
'Be nice, Charles! It was a speech about fruit importation, which I admit devolved into something of a tirade.' She couldn't help but laugh. 'Still, you could talk about something more important.'
'Than jam? Impossible. We mustn't set the bar too high, Jane.
”
”
Charles Finch (The Fleet Street Murders (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #3))
“
When I became convinced that the Universe is natural – that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world -- not even in infinite space. I was free -- free to think, to express my thoughts -- free to live to my own ideal -- free to live for myself and those I loved -- free to use all my faculties, all my senses -- free to spread imagination's wings -- free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope -- free to judge and determine for myself -- free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past -- free from popes and priests -- free from all the "called" and "set apart" -- free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies -- free from the fear of eternal pain -- free from the winged monsters of the night -- free from devils, ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought -- no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings -- no chains for my limbs -- no lashes for my back -- no fires for my flesh -- no master's frown or threat – no following another's steps -- no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.
And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain -- for the freedom of labor and thought -- to those who fell on the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains -- to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs -- to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn -- to those by fire consumed -- to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.
”
”
Robert G. Ingersoll
“
I like to read great books not because I’m hoping to imitate them but because I want to remind myself how good you have to be to be any good at all. We won’t be read in the light of other writers in our zip code or decade but as we compare to Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov. History has set the bar very high, and one must jump over it, not do the limbo under it.
”
”
Edmund White (The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading)
“
You know, you’re setting a pretty damn high bar for my future husband to live up to. He’s going to have to be a rock star in the sack to even come close to this.
”
”
Katee Robert (Falling for His Best Friend (Out of Uniform, #2))
“
Anytime you make the work public, set the bar high, and are transparent about the steps to make a high-quality product, kids will deliver.
”
”
Ron Berger (Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools Through Student-Engaged Assessment)
“
Human drivers in the United States suffer roughly one fatal accident per one hundred million miles traveled, which sets a high bar. Autonomous vehicles, to be accepted, will need to be much better than that: perhaps one fatal accident per billion miles, or twenty-five thousand years of driving forty hours per week.
”
”
Stuart Russell (Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control)
“
I realized that with Chance and me, there were no secrets. Or at least none that I could otherwise explain.
I said, "I trust you more than I trust my own family, you know that?"
"Well, they don't set the bar real high." He smiled at me, a silly, playful smile. The kind of smile shared by people with a lot of history.
”
”
Barbra Annino (Emerald Isle (A Stacy Justice Mystery #5))
“
Some shoot for the stars. I shoot for the transdimensional multiverse. That’s me. I take things too far, too fast. I set my personal bar high. I didn’t come to try in this world. I came to conquer this world – and the next
”
”
Aaron Kyle Andresen (How Dad Found Himself in the Padded Room: A Bipolar Father's Gift For The World (The Padded Room Trilogy Book 1))
“
The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muffling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a man and a brother--or father, or master, or what you will--to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but, in time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
The mountains that enfold the vale
With walls of granite, steep and high,
Invite the fearless foot to scale
Their stairway toward the sky.
The restless, deep, dividing sea
That flows and foams from shore to shore,
Calls to its sunburned chivalry,
"Push out, set sail, explore!"
And all the bars at which we fret,
That seem to prison and control,
Are but the doors of daring, set
Ajar before the soul.
Say not, "Too poor," but freely give;
Sigh not, "Too weak," but boldly try,
You never can begin to live
Until you dare to die.
”
”
Henry Van Dyke
“
It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music...but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.
Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint.
The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.
The man had true-red hair, red as flame. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty that comes from knowing many things.
The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.
”
”
Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle #1))
“
It is a very long story, and I promise I’ll spill all later. Condensed version: my mom is a Brannick, I am the unholy love child of a Brannick and a demon, and the bar for family dysfunction is now set super high.”
Jenna, to her credit, knew when to just roll with it. “Okay, then.”
“The more pressing question right now is, why are we back at Hex Hall?”
Jenna looked around, taking in the unnatural fog, the dilapidated (well, more dilapidated) feel of the house. “Something tells me it’s not for a class ruinion.”
“Did you get pulled through some kind of magic tornado, too?” I asked her.
“No, I flew in here as a bat. It’s a new thing I learned from Byron.”
“Ha ha,” I said, swatting at her arm.
”
”
Rachel Hawkins (Spell Bound (Hex Hall, #3))
“
Conventional statistics is set up to be skeptical and avoid type 1 errors. The 95 percent confidence standard means that there is only 1 chance in 20 that you believe something that isn’t true. That is a very high bar. It reflects a scientific worldview in which skepticism is a virtue, credulity is not.90 As one Web site puts it, “A type I error is often considered to be more serious, and therefore more important to avoid, than a type II error.”91 In fact, some statisticians claim that type 2 errors aren’t really errors at all, just missed opportunities.
”
”
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
“
There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
“
If I am to believe everything that I see in the media, happiness is to be six foot tall or more and to have bleached teeth and a firm abdomen, all the latest clothes, accessories, and electronics, a picture-perfect partner of the opposite sex who is both a great lover and a terrific friend, an assortment of healthy and happy children, a pet that is neither a stray nor a mongrel, a large house in the right sort of postcode, a second property in an idyllic holiday location, a top-of-the-range car to shuttle back and forth from the one to the other, a clique of ‘friends’ with whom to have fabulous dinner parties, three or four foreign holidays a year, and a high-impact job that does not distract from any of the above. There are at least three major problems that I can see with this ideal of happiness. (1) It represents a state of affairs that is impossible to attain to and that is in itself an important source of unhappiness. (2) It is situated in an idealised and hypothetical future rather than in an imperfect but actual present in which true happiness is much more likely to be found, albeit with great difficulty. (3) It has largely been defined by commercial interests that have absolutely nothing to do with true happiness, which has far more to do with the practice of reason and the peace of mind that this eventually brings. In short, it is not only that the bar for happiness is set too high, but also that it is set in the wrong place, and that it is, in fact, the wrong bar. Jump and you’ll only break your back.
”
”
Neel Burton (The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide)
“
It’s pointless to focus on others, as we can only control ourselves. I set a high bar and then it is my own private race. No one knows I’m winning or losing but me.
”
”
Jewel (Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story)
“
A beam of moonlight shone through a barred window set high in the wall and fell on her face. A single tear rolled down her cheek, like a liquid diamond.
”
”
Christopher Paolini (Eragon (Inheritance, #1))
“
. . . family is a thing you have to put up with. You hope to respect them, even like them, but it’s better not to set the bar too high.
”
”
Hannah Rothschild (House of Trelawney)
“
A person can't value you more than you value yourself. Set the self worth value bar high and make others meet you there.
”
”
Germany Kent
“
I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
If you did, it would be in such a grave, quiet manner, I should mistake it for sense. Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre? Don’t trouble yourself to answer—I see you laugh rarely; but you can laugh very merrily: believe me, you are not naturally austere, any more than I am naturally vicious. The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muffling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a man and a brother—or father, or master, or what you will—to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but, in time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. You are still bent on going?
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she’d just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and I thought, I’m not that bad. This is where the bar is set.
”
”
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
“
In a valley shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with meltwater splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half, hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below.
The woods were full of sound: the stream between the rocks, the wind among the needles of the pine branches, the chitter of insects and the cries of small arboreal mammals, as well as the birdsong; and from time to time a stronger gust of wind would make one of the branches of a cedar or a fir move against another and groan like a cello.
It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled. Shafts of lemon-gold brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant, because drifting mist would often float among the treetops, filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine cone with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted. Sometimes the wetness in the clouds condensed into tiny drops half mist and half rain, which floated downward rather than fell, making a soft rustling patter among the millions of needles.
There was a narrow path beside the stream, which led from a village-little more than a cluster of herdsmen's dwellings - at the foot of the valley to a half-ruined shrine near the glacier at its head, a place where faded silken flags streamed out in the Perpetual winds from the high mountains, and offerings of barley cakes and dried tea were placed by pious villagers. An odd effect of the light, the ice, and the vapor enveloped the head of the valley in perpetual rainbows.
”
”
Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3))
“
It was soothing to sit with life-long friends, the cacophony of bar sounds around us while we caught up on our lives and talked about the glory days of high school. My life since then had been on an accelerated trajectory, not always aimed in the best direction. I acquired a sense of well-being from those friends who married their high school sweethearts, set up housekeeping a stone's throw from where they grew up, and kept the heartbeat of small-town living beating rhythmically.
”
”
Debi Tolbert Duggar (Riding Soul-O)
“
There is a vast difference between being a Christian and being a disciple. The difference is commitment.
Motivation and discipline will not ultimately occur through listening to sermons, sitting in a class, participating in a fellowship group, attending a study group in the workplace or being a member of a small group, but rather in the context of highly accountable, relationally transparent, truth-centered, small discipleship units.
There are twin prerequisites for following Christ - cost and commitment, neither of which can occur in the anonymity of the masses.
Disciples cannot be mass produced. We cannot drop people into a program and see disciples emerge at the end of the production line. It takes time to make disciples. It takes individual personal attention.
Discipleship training is not about information transfer, from head to head, but imitation, life to life. You can ultimately learn and develop only by doing.
The effectiveness of one's ministry is to be measured by how well it flourishes after one's departure.
Discipling is an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip, and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ. This includes equipping the disciple to teach others as well.
If there are no explicit, mutually agreed upon commitments, then the group leader is left without any basis to hold people accountable. Without a covenant, all leaders possess is their subjective understanding of what is entailed in the relationship.
Every believer or inquirer must be given the opportunity to be invited into a relationship of intimate trust that provides the opportunity to explore and apply God's Word within a setting of relational motivation, and finally, make a sober commitment to a covenant of accountability.
Reviewing the covenant is part of the initial invitation to the journey together. It is a sobering moment to examine whether one has the time, the energy and the commitment to do what is necessary to engage in a discipleship relationship.
Invest in a relationship with two others for give or take a year. Then multiply. Each person invites two others for the next leg of the journey and does it all again. Same content, different relationships.
The invitation to discipleship should be preceded by a period of prayerful discernment. It is vital to have a settled conviction that the Lord is drawing us to those to whom we are issuing this invitation. . If you are going to invest a year or more of your time with two others with the intent of multiplying, whom you invite is of paramount importance.
You want to raise the question implicitly: Are you ready to consider serious change in any area of your life? From the outset you are raising the bar and calling a person to step up to it. Do not seek or allow an immediate response to the invitation to join a triad. You want the person to consider the time commitment in light of the larger configuration of life's responsibilities and to make the adjustments in schedule, if necessary, to make this relationship work.
Intentionally growing people takes time. Do you want to measure your ministry by the number of sermons preached, worship services designed, homes visited, hospital calls made, counseling sessions held, or the number of self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus?
When we get to the shore's edge and know that there is a boat there waiting to take us to the other side to be with Jesus, all that will truly matter is the names of family, friends and others who are self initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus because we made it the priority of our lives to walk with them toward maturity in Christ. There is no better eternal investment or legacy to leave behind.
”
”
Greg Ogden (Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time)
“
I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. You are still bent on going?” “It has struck nine, sir.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre: The Original 1847 Unabridged and Complete Edition (Charlotte Brontë Classics))
“
Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre? Don’t trouble yourself to answer—I see you laugh rarely; but you can laugh very merrily: believe me, you are not naturally austere, any more than I am naturally vicious. The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muffling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a man and a brother—or father, or master, or what you will—to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but, in time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
THE MEETING"
"Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun
Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn,
That August nightfall, as I crossed the down
Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence
Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited
Motionless in the mist, with downcast head
And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name
And why he lingered at so lonely a place.
“I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons
I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock.
No fences barred our progress and we’d travel
Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought
I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top
To find a missing straggler or set snares
By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March
I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs.
“I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year
I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts,
Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead,
Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song
Of lark and pewit melodied my toil.
I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn
To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end
My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint.
“And then I was a carter. With my skill
I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay
From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time,
My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses
Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses
Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days
On this same slope where you now stand, my friend,
I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields.
“My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts
Few folk remember me: and though you stare
Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding
The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team.
Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers:
Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble,
On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur,
In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.”
My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward
Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme;
From far across the down a barn owl shouted,
Circling the silence of that summer evening:
But in an instant, as I stepped towards him
Striving to view his face, his contour altered.
Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood
Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.
”
”
John Rawson (From The English Countryside: Tales Of Tragedy: Narrated In Dramatic Traditional Verse)
“
Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about.
They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three.
There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters.
They'll stop you at the river, he says.
The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me?
At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man.
Who will?
The United States Army. General Worth.
They hell they will.
Pray that they will.
He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man?
Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye'll not cross it back.
Don't aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora.
What's it to you, old man?
The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be?
How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.
”
”
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
“
...We hold ourselves to a high standard. Our country sets it even higher. They always want more... You can always give more. It doesn't mean what you're giving is enough. Take it from me, every time you defy expectations, they set the bar higher. That isn't failure. It's faith."
Sophie takes some time to digest that. It's nothing new to her. Hockey has always been about reaching one milestone and looking toward the next. Settling leads to complacency, her dad tells her. And complacency leads to stagnation. He was always there to push her if she grew too comfortable resting on her accomplishments.
”
”
K.R. Collins (Home Ice Advantage (Sophie Fournier, #4))
“
In fairness, the bar for Leavitt had been set pretty high. In 1983, a mathematician named Andrew Hodges published Alan Turing: The Enigma, which is one of the finest scientific biographies ever written and has remained an essential resource for all subsequent accounts of Turing’s life. In 1987, Hugh Whitemore’s superb play about Turing, Breaking the Code, opened on Broadway, with Derek Jacobi in the starring role. Both of these works not only captured the pathos of Turing’s life; they also gave a lucid account of his technical achievement. Whitemore’s play miraculously compressed the decision problem and the Enigma decoding
”
”
Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
“
The Proposal The diamond industry has pulled a fast one over on us. It has convinced us that there is no way to make public a lifetime commitment to another person without a very large, sparkly rock on a very slim band. This is, of course, nonsense. Often wedding books have engagement chapters that read like diamond-buying guides. But the truth is, the way to get engaged is for the two of you to decide that you want to get married. So the next time someone tries to imply that you are not engaged because you don’t have a dramatic enough engagement story or a ring, firmly say, “You know, I like to think of my partner as my rock,” and slowly raise your eyebrow. The modern wedding industry—along with a fair share of romantic comedies—has set a pretty high bar for proposals. We think they need to be elaborate and surprising. But they don’t. A proposal should be: • A decision to get married • Romantic (because you decide to spend the rest of your lives together, not necessarily because of its elaborate nature) • Possibly mutual • Possibly discussed in advance • Possibly instigated by you • Not used to judge the state of your relationship • An event that may be followed by the not-at-all-romantic kind of sobbing, because you realize your life is changing forever It’s exciting to decide to get married. And scary. But the moment of proposal is just that: a moment. It moves you to the next step of the process; it’s not the be-all, end-all. So maybe you have a fancy candlelight dinner followed by parachutists delivering you a pear-shaped, seven-carat diamond. Or maybe you decide to get married one Sunday morning over the newspaper and a cup of coffee. Either way is fine. The point is that you decided to spend your life with someone you love.
”
”
Meg Keene (A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration)
“
Running a restaurant means setting a stage. The believability hinges on the details. We control how they experience the world: sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. That starts at the door, with the host and the flowers.” And then, the bar. Timeless: long, dark mahogany, with stools high enough to make you feel like you were afloat. The bar had soft music, dim lighting, tinkling layers of noise, the bumps of a neighbor’s knee, the reach of someone’s arm by your face to take a glittering martini, the tap of a hostess as she escorted guests behind your back, the blur of plates being passed, the rattle of drinks, the virtuoso performance of bartenders slapping bottles into the back bar while also delivering bread, while also taking an order with the requisite substitutions and complications. All the best regulars came in and greeted the hostess saying, Any space at the bar tonight?
”
”
Stephanie Danler (Sweetbitter)
“
From the hills behind, came the solitary voice of a girl. She must have been bringing down the goats, and she was singing wildly. At the limit of her uninhibited voice, without any recognizable melody in Turkish Muslim intervals. It sounded disembodied, of place, not person. I remembered having heard a similar voice, perhaps this same girl's, singing one day on the hill behind the school. It had drifted down the hill into the classroom, and the boys had begun to giggle. But now, it seemed intensely mysterious, welling out of a solitude and suffering that made mine trivial and absurd. It held me under a spell. I sat with the gun across my knees, unable to move while the sound floated down through the evening air. I don't know how long she sang for, but the sky darkened, the sea paled to anachronous grey. Over the mountains, there were pinkish bars of high cloud and still strong light from the set sun. All the land and the sea held light, as if light was warmth, and did not fade as soon as the source was removed. But the voice dwindled towards the village, then died into silence.
”
”
John Fowles (The Magus)
“
Cages of women. Women and girls of all ages. Lining downtown streets behind The Great Barrier Walls. Passersby prodding at them with canes, sticks, and whatever they could find. Spitting on them through the bars, as law and culture required.
“Cages of women who had disobeyed their husbands, or sons, their preachers, or some other males in their lives. One or two of them had been foolish and self-destructive enough to have reported a rapist.
“A couple of them had befriended someone higher or lower than their stations, or maybe entertained a foreigner from outside the community, or allowed someone of a lesser race into their homes. A few may have done absolutely nothing wrong but for being reported by a neighbor with a grudge.
“For the most part they had disobeyed or disrespected males.
“Watching from behind tinted and bullet-proof windows at the rear of his immaculate stretch limo, the Lord High Chancellor of PolitiChurch, grinned the sadistic grin of unholy conquest. A dark satisfaction only a deeply tarred soul could enjoy.” …
… “Caged women and young girls at major street corners in even the worst weather. Every one of them his to do with, or dispose of, as he would.
“In this world – in His world – He was God.”
- From “The Soul Hides in Shadows”
“It is the year 2037. What is now referred to as ‘The Great Electoral Madness of ’16’ had freed the darkest ignorance, isolationism, misogyny, and racial hatreds in the weakest among us, setting loose the cultural, economic, and moral destruction of America. In the once powerful United States, paranoia, distrust, and hatred now rage at epidemic levels.
”
”
Edward Fahey (The Soul Hides in Shadows)
“
AFTER THE DELUGE AS SOON as the idea of the Deluge had subsided, A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flower-bells, and said a prayer to the rainbow, through the spider’s web. Oh! the precious stones that began to hide,—and the flowers that already looked around. In the dirty main street, stalls were set up and boats were hauled toward the sea, high tiered as in old prints. Blood flowed at Blue Beard’s,—through slaughterhouses, in circuses, where the windows were blanched by God’s seal. Blood and milk flowed. Beavers built. “Mazagrans” smoked in the little bars. In the big glass house, still dripping, children in mourning looked at the marvelous pictures. A door banged; and in the village square the little boy waved his arms, understood by weather vanes and cocks on steeples everywhere, in the bursting shower. Madame *** installed a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the hundred thousand altars of the cathedral. Caravans set out. And Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night. Ever after the moon heard jackals howling across the deserts of thyme, and eclogues in wooden shoes growling in the orchard. Then in the violet and budding forest, Eucharis told me it was spring. Gush, pond,—Foam, roll on the bridge and over the woods;—black palls and organs, lightning and thunder, rise and roll;—waters and sorrows rise and launch the Floods again. For since they have been dissipated—oh! the precious stones being buried and the opened flowers!—it’s unbearable! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her fire in the earthen pot will never tell us what she knows, and what we do not know.
”
”
Arthur Rimbaud (Illuminations: Prose poems (New Directions Paperbook, No. 56))
“
She'd loved birds long before her physical limitations kept her grounded. She'd found a birding diary of her grandmother's in a trunk in the attic when she was Frankie's age, and when she asked her father about it, he dug through boxes on a shelf high above her head, handing down a small pair of binoculars and some field guides.
She'd seen her first prothonotary warbler when she was nine, sitting alone on a tupelo stump in the forest, swatting at mosquitoes targeting the pale skin behind her ears. She glanced up from the book she was reading only to be startled by an unexpected flash of yellow. Holding her breath, she fished for the journal she kept in her pocket, focusing on the spot in the willow where he might be. A breeze stirred the branches, and she saw the brilliant yellow head and underparts standing out like petals of a sunflower against the backdrop of leaves; the under tail, a stark white. His beak was long, pointed and black; his shoulders a mossy green, a blend of the citron yellow of his head and the flat slate of his feathers. He had a black dot of an eye, a bead of jet set in a field of sun. Never had there been anything so perfect. When she blinked he disappeared, the only evidence of his presence a gentle sway of the branch. It was a sort of magic, unveiled to her. He had been hers, even if only for a few seconds.
With a stub of pencil- 'always a pencil,' her grandmother had written. 'You can write with a pencil even in the rain'- she noted the date and time, the place and the weather. She made a rough sketch, using shorthand for her notes about the bird's coloring, then raced back to the house, raspberry canes and brambles speckling bloody trails across her legs. In the field guide in the top drawer of her desk, she found him again: prothonotary warbler, 'prothonotary' for the clerks in the Roman Catholic Church who wore robes of a bright yellow. It made absolute sense to her that something so beautiful would be associated with God.
After that she spent countless days tromping through the woods, toting the drab knapsack filled with packages of partially crushed saltines, the bottles of juice, the bruised apples and half-melted candy bars, her miniature binoculars slung across one shoulder. She taught herself how to be patient, how to master the boredom that often accompanied careful observation. She taught herself how to look for what didn't want to be seen.
”
”
Tracy Guzeman (The Gravity of Birds)
“
But if the same man is in a quiet corner of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.2 Here’s another example. One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”—where there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose that you are a successful professional comedian. The world thinks you are very funny. You think you are very funny. If you get drunk, you don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can resolve. But suppose you think you are very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact, whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thought of that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback regarding your bad jokes. Now it is possible for you to believe that you are actually funny. When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes. This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self—without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.” But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self. So who were the Camba, in reality? Heath says their society was marked by a singular lack of “communal expression.” They were itinerant farmworkers. Kinship ties were weak. Their daily labor tended to be solitary, the hours long.
”
”
Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
“
BUTTERSCOTCH BONANZA BARS Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. ½ cup salted butter (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) 2 cups light brown sugar*** (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 beaten eggs (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 and ½cups flour (scoop it up and level it off with a table knife) 1 cup chopped nuts (optional) 2 cups butterscotch chips (optional) ***- If all you have in the house is dark brown sugar and the roads are icy, it’s below zero, and you really don’t feel like driving to the store, don’t despair. Measure out one cup of dark brown sugar and mix it with one cup regular white granulated sugar. Now you’ve got light brown sugar, just what’s called for in Leslie’s recipe. And remember that you can always make any type of brown sugar by mixing molasses into white granulated sugar until it’s the right color. Hannah’s Note: Leslie says the nuts are optional, but she likes these cookie bars better with nuts. So do I, especially with walnuts. Bertie Straub wants hers with a cup of chopped pecans and 2 cups of butterscotch chips. Mother prefers these bars with 2 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips and no nuts, Carrie likes them with 2 cups of mini chocolate chips and a cup of chopped pecans, and Lisa prefers to make them with 1 cup of chopped walnuts, 1 cup of white chocolate chips, and 1 cup of butterscotch chips. All this goes to show just how versatile Leslie’s recipe is. Try it first as it’s written with just the nuts. Then try any other versions that you think would be yummy. Grease and flour a 9-inch by 13-inch cake pan, or spray it with nonstick baking spray, the kind with flour added. Set it aside while you mix up the batter. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat on the stovetop, or put it in the bottom of a microwave-safe, medium-sized mixing bowl and heat it for 1 minute in the microwave on HIGH. Add the light brown sugar to the mixing bowl with the melted butter and stir it in well. Mix in the baking powder and the salt. Make sure they’re thoroughly incorporated. Stir in the vanilla extract. Mix in the beaten eggs. Add the flour by half-cup increments, stirring in each increment before adding the next. Stir in the nuts, if you decided to use them. Mix in the butterscotch chips if you decided to use them, or any other chips you’ve chosen. Spoon the batter into the prepared cake pan and smooth out the top with a rubber spatula. Bake the Butterscotch Bonanza Bars at 350 degrees F. for 20 to 25 minutes. (Mine took 25 minutes.) When the bars are done, take them out of the oven and cool them completely in the pan on a cold stove burner or a wire rack. When the bars are cool, use a sharp knife to cut them into brownie-sized pieces. Yield: Approximately 40 bars, but that all depends on how large you cut the squares. You may not believe this, but Mother suggested that I make these cookie bars with semi-sweet chocolate chips and then frost them with chocolate fudge frosting. There are times when I think she’d frost a tuna sandwich with chocolate fudge frosting and actually enjoy eating it!
”
”
Joanne Fluke (Devil's Food Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #14))
“
You’re going to do great,” Lizzy said as they reached the mini Tiki bar. The air was cool in the high fifties and the scent of various meats on the grill filled the air. Even though they’d had the party catered, apparently Grant had insisted on grilling some things himself. “I wouldn’t have recommended you apply for it otherwise.”
Athena ducked behind the bar and grinned at the array of bottles and other garnishes. She’d been friends with Lizzy the past couple months and knew her friend’s tastes by now. As she started mixing up their drinks she said, “If I fail, hopefully they won’t blame you.”
Lizzy just snorted but eyed the drink mix curiously. “Purple?”
“Just wait. You’ll like it.” She rolled the rims of the martini glasses in sugar as she spoke.
“Where’d you learn to do this?”
“I bartended a little in college and there were a few occasions on the job where I had to assist because staff called out sick for an event.” There’d been a huge festival in Madrid she’d helped out with a year ago where three of the staff had gotten food poisoning, so in addition to everything else she’d been in charge of, she’d had to help with drinks on and off. That had been such a chaotic, ridiculous job.
“At least you’ll have something to fall back on if you do fail,” Lizzy teased.
“I seriously hope not.” She set the two glasses on the bar and strained the purple concoction into them. With the twinkle lights strung up around the lanai and the ones glittering in the pool, the sugar seemed to sparkle around the rim. “This is called a wildcat.”
“You have to make me one of those too!” The unfamiliar female voice made Athena look up.
Her eyes widened as her gaze locked with Quinn freaking Brody, the too-sexy-man with an aversion to virgins. He was with the tall woman who’d just asked Athena to make a drink. But she had eyes only for Quinn. Her heart about jumped out of her chest. What was he doing here of all places? At least he looked just as surprised to see her.
She ignored him because she knew if she stared into those dark eyes she’d lose the ability to speak and then she’d inevitably embarrass herself.
The tall, built-like-a-goddess woman with pale blonde hair he was with smiled widely at Athena. “Only if you don’t mind,” she continued, nodding at the drinks. “They look so good.”
“Ah, you can have this one. I made an extra for the lush here.” She tilted her head at Lizzy with a half-smile. Athena had planned to drink the second one herself but didn’t trust her hands not to shake if she made another. She couldn’t believe Quinn was standing right in front of her, looking all casual and annoyingly sexy in dark jeans and a long-sleeved sweater shoved up to his elbows. Why did his forearms have to look so good?
“Ha, ha.” Lizzy snagged her drink as Athena stepped out from behind the bar. “Athena, this is Quinn Brody and Dominique Castle. They both work for Red Stone but Dominique is almost as new as you.”
Forcing a smile on her face, Athena nodded politely at both of them—and tried to ignore the way Quinn was staring at her. She’d had no freaking idea he worked for Red Stone. He looked a bit like a hungry wolf. Just like on their last date—two months ago. When he’d decided she was too much trouble, being a virgin and all. Jackass. “It’s so nice to meet you both.” She did a mental fist pump when her voice sounded normal. “I promised Belle I’d help out inside but I hope to see you both around tonight.” Liar, liar.
“Me too. Thanks again for the drink,” Dominique said cheerfully while Lizzy just gave Athena a strange look.
Athena wasn’t sure what Quinn’s expression was because she’d decided to do the mature thing—and studiously ignore him.
”
”
Katie Reus (Sworn to Protect (Red Stone Security, #11))
“
Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Paxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions more are spent purchasing them. You don’t even need a specific trauma; just “general depression” or “anxiety,” as if sadness were as treatable as the common cold. I knew depression was real, and in many cases required medical attention. I also knew we overused the word. Much of what we called “depression” was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures that we weren’t willing to work for. I knew people whose unbearable source of misery was their weight, their baldness, their lack of advancement in a workplace, or their inability to find the perfect mate, even if they themselves did not behave like one. To these people, unhappiness was a condition, an intolerable state of affairs. If pills could help, pills were taken. But pills were not going to change the fundamental problem in the construction. Wanting what you can’t have. Looking for self-worth in the mirror. Layering work on top of work and still wondering why you weren’t satisfied—before working some more. I knew. I had done all that. There was a stretch where I could not have worked more hours in the day without eliminating sleep altogether. I piled on accomplishments. I made money. I earned accolades. And the longer I went at it, the emptier I began to feel, like pumping air faster and faster into a torn tire.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Loomis was not any easier a father than he was a husband. He set the bar very high when it came to his three sons. After he cashed out of Bonbright, he awarded each of the three boys a substantial share of their inheritance - roughly $1 million - on the theory that it was never too early to begin charting one's own course. The youngest, Henry, was only fourteen when he was given complete financial independence.
”
”
Jennet Conant (Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II)
“
Beyond mass incarceration, beginning in the 1990s we adopted a new set of criminal justice strategies that further punish poor people for their poverty. Low-income people are arrested for minor violations that are only annoyances for people with means but are disastrous for the poor and near poor because of the high fines and fees we now almost routinely impose. Poor people are held in jail to await trial when they cannot afford bail, fined excessive amounts, and hit with continuously mounting costs and fees. Failure to pay begets more jail time, more debts from accumulated interest charges, additional fines and fees, and, in a common penalty with significant consequences for those living below or near the poverty line, repeated driver's license suspensions. Poor people lose their liberty and often lose their jobs, are frequently barred from a host of public benefits, may lose custody of their children, and may even lose their right to vote. And immigrants, even some with green cards, can be subject to deportation. Once incarcerated, impoverished inmates with no access to paid work are often charged for their room and board. Many debtors will carry debts to their deaths, often hounded by bill collectors and new prosecutions.
”
”
Peter Edelman (Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America)
“
Selim?” “Dropped in at Kuwait twelve hours ago, collected his car and set off north. It’s a long, hard drive to Baghdad these days, Sean. Sharif is meeting you at the hotel early evening.” “Thanks.” “Have fun.” Dillon replaced the phone. Billy said, “What was that?” Dillon told him. Billy was highly amused. “What are we going to do about Novikova? Have a drink in the bar?” “Who
”
”
Jack Higgins (Dark Justice (Sean Dillon #12))
“
Do not try to do everything at the same time. Do not overload yourself with too many goals. Do not overwhelm yourself with too many responsibilities. Do not set the bar too high. Be gentle with yourself. Your peace is more important than your achievements. If things can wait, let them wait. Do not rush. Do one thing at a time. Love yourself.
”
”
Kevin Keenoo
“
Seek out the truth. The truth will set you free. Set your bar, high and higher. Keep your eyes on the prize. Sting like a bee, sweet as honey. Turn your disappointments into wisdom. See the sunshine through the storm, love the rain. Be a light for others, make your life count. Connect yourself to the greater power, like it is your umbilical cord to your life. Be grateful for all of your blessings. Your health is your wealth. Praises to the most high.
”
”
Brenda Rae Schoolcraft
“
People like to set the bar high. I like to put the bar on the ground and barely step over it. I like to keep the expectations really low.
”
”
Kevin Smith
“
The sole purpose of these two teams is to ensure that we stay true to the high-quality bar set by the founders. If you start a company or team, you know exactly what you are looking for in a new hire: someone just as motivated, clever, interesting, and passionate as you are about the new venture. And the first few people you hire will meet that standard. But they in turn won’t uniformly hire to the same standard as you, not because they are bad or incompetent people, but because they won’t have precisely the same understanding of what you are looking for.
”
”
Laszlo Bock (Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead)
“
We are very lucky to have her. Lucky to have had our dad, too. Together they were something. I think that’s why none of us have gotten close to marriage yet. They set the bar pretty damn high and none of us want to settle for anything less.
”
”
Lucy Score (No More Secrets (Blue Moon, #1))
“
As negotiations seemed to be grinding to a halt, we were all feeling frustrated. Steve looked around at John, Judi, and the others. He could see that everybody had gotten a bit stretched on all our various projects. He decided we needed a break.
He didn’t lead us into the bush this time. Instead, Steve said a magic word. “Samoa.”
“Sea snakes?” I asked.
“Surfing,” he said. He planned a ten-day shoot for a surfing documentary.
Steve loved surfing almost as much as he loved wildlife. The pounding his body had taken playing rugby, wrestling crocs, and doing heavy construction at the zoo had left him with problem knees and a bad shoulder. He felt his time tackling some of the biggest surf might be nearing an end.
In Samoa, Steve didn’t spend just a few hours out in the waves. He would be out there twelve to fourteen hours a day. I didn’t surf, but I was awestruck at Steve’s ability to stare down the face of a wave that was as high as a building. He had endurance beyond any surfer I had ever seen. Steve had a support boat nearby, so he could swim over, get hydrated, or grab a protein bar. But that was it. He didn’t stop for lunch. He would eat breakfast, surf all day, and then eat a big dinner.
I knew this was the best therapy for him. Surfing at Boulders was downright dangerous, but Steve reveled in the challenge. He surfed with Wes, his best mate in the world. I sat on a rocky point with my eye glued to the camera so I wouldn’t miss a single wave. While Bindi gathered shells and played on the beach under her nanny’s watchful eye, I admired Steve with his long arms and broad shoulders, powerfully paddling onto wave after wave.
Not even the Pacific Ocean with its most powerful sets could slow him down. He caught the most amazing barrels I have ever seen, and carved up the waves with such ferocity that I didn’t want the camera to miss a single moment.
On the beach in Samoa, while Bindi helped her dad wax his board, I caught a glimpse of joy in eyes that had been so sad.
”
”
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
“
Cameron’s parents are the type of couple that fairytales are made of. Every woman in the city of Charleston wanted a love like Shelby James had, and every man cursed the ground Eli James walked on for setting the bar so high.
”
”
Tara Sivec (Wish You Were Mine)
“
I went into the bar and sank into a leather bar seat packed with down. Glasses tinkled gently, lights glowed softly, there were quiet voices whispering of love, or ten per cent, or whatever they whisper about in a place like that.
A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up from a small table by the wall and walked over to the bar and started to curse one of the barmen. He cursed him in a loud clear voice for a long minute, calling him about nine names that are not usually mentioned by tall fine-looking men in well cut gray suits. Everybody stopped talking and looked at him quietly. His voice cut through the muted rhumba music like a shovel through snow.
The barman stood perfectly still, looking at the man. The barman had curly hair and a clear warm skin and wide-set careful eyes. He didn’t move or speak. The tall man stopped talking and stalked out of the bar. Everybody watched him out except the barman.
The barman moved slowly along the bar to the end where I sat and stood looking away from me, with nothing in his face but pallor. Then he turned to me and said:
“Yes, sir?”
“I want to talk to a fellow named Eddie Prue.”
“So?”
“He works here,” I said.
“Works here doing what?” His voice was perfectly level and as dry as dry sand.
“I understand he’s the guy that walks behind the boss. If you know what I mean.”
“Oh. Eddie Prue.” He moved one lip slowly over the other and made small tight circles on the bar with his bar cloth. “Your name?”
“Marlowe.”
“Marlowe. Drink while waiting?”
“A dry martini will do.”
“A martini. Dry. Veddy, veddy dry.”
“Okay.”
“Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?”
“Cut it in strips,” I said. “I’ll just nibble it.”
“On your way to school,” he said. “Should I put the olive in a bag for you?”
“Sock me on the nose with it,” I said. “If it will make you feel any better.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “A dry martini.”
He took three steps away from me and then came back and leaned across the bar and said: “I made a mistake in a drink. The gentleman was telling me about it.”
“I heard him.”
“He was telling me about it as gentlemen tell you about things like that. As big shot directors like to point out to you your little errors. And you heard him.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how long this was going to go on.
“He made himself heard—the gentleman did. So I come over here and practically insult you.”
“I got the idea,” I said.
He held up one of his fingers and looked at it thoughtfully.
“Just like that,” he said. “A perfect stranger.”
“It’s my big brown eyes,” I said. “They have that gentle look.”
“Thanks, chum,” he said, and quietly went away.
I saw him talking into a phone at the end of the bar. Then I saw him working with a shaker. When he came back with the drink he was all right again.
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Raymond Chandler (The High Window (Philip Marlowe #3))
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reward system But there’s a reward system you can use to keep yourself motivated. Here are some suggestions: Buy yourself an advent calendar, and for each day you don’t look at his profile or engage with him in any capacity, enjoy the treat for that day. If you can’t afford an advent calendar or can’t find one in the shops, make yourself a journal – on each successful day, write something amazing about yourself, and on a day where you did trip up, write something that reminds you of why you started doing this thirty-day challenge. Getting into the habit of saying nice things about yourself prepares you to become so used to compliments that you aren’t dangerously swooned when others recognise your greatness. Every ten days that pass without you breaking the rule, take yourself on a really nice solo date to an upscale bar, or your favourite club or restaurant, and imagine the room is full of men who are all waiting to be picked by you, the goddess. For even spicier results, wear something red so you feel even sexier. Getting into the habit of going out to bars and social environments alone will not just put you in a position of meeting new people, it will also quell your fear of being alone. There’s nothing more powerful than a woman who knows how to hold her own in a room full of strangers. Or, if you feel ready, each time you make it to the ten-day mark, why don’t you try practising your new confidence on your dating apps and let yourself be taken out? By the time the thirty-day window ends, you will have gone on three different dates with three new guys, which will significantly lower the hype around the man you’ve been thinking of. You never know: one of these guys could end up being far more interesting, way hotter and maybe even richer. As you get closer to the end of the thirty-day period, why not have a spa booked to mark the last day? It will be a period of reflection, relaxation, and remembering how far you’ve come within just a month of leaving a situation that could have dragged your life in a completely different direction. You deserve to meet the woman you’re destined to become: take the time to do so. Set a reminder on your phone every couple of days that says ‘It’s time to finally choose yourself for once. Don’t let him win!’ When it gets hard, ask yourself: At what point will I be the victor here? When will I finally walk away with my head held high? This must end at some point – why not now?
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Chidera Eggerue (How To Get Over A Boy)
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That said, our housing efforts got off to a rough start, and I set too high a bar for expanding them later on.
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Timothy F. Geithner (Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises)
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He led not through a dynamic, engaging personality but through example. He set a high bar for himself and met or exceeded it.
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David M. Rubenstein (The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians (Gift for History Buffs))
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Isaac Asimov’s ability to take the Big Ideas so crucial to the sense of wonder in science fiction and embody them in compellingly human stories and settings—particularly in his robot stories, Foundation works, and other speculative fiction both long and short—raised the bar high for all of us who have followed him in the tradition of idea-driven science fiction. Asimov was a law unto himself, yet he gave his fellow writers laws—of robotics, and psychohistory—that have shaped all of us who have tried to write of machine intelligence or of human civilizations vast in time and space. That is his great and vital legacy.” —Howard V. Hendrix
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Isaac Asimov (Nightfall and Other Stories)
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Let your determination push you to stand for what you were created to be in life. Refuse to be counted out, refuse to stay down, and refuse not to set the bar very high. You are a child of the Most High. Walk with your head held high, and live a rewarding life.
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Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
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While Jesus does set a high bar, he's incredibly in tune with the limits of our humanity. Jesus assumes that we will lust and want to get a divorce and call people names and love money and worry about our future. But what's easy to miss is that Jesus also assumes that living his Way is going to take practice.
One of the first things Jesus says, right before his opening command, is: "Whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven."
And the literal last thing Jesus says is an echo: "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice..."
Jesus begins and ends the Sermon on the Mount with a call to practice.
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John Mark Comer (Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did)
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But what actually happens is that this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high. It suggests that in order to count as having been “well spent,” your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations—or at the very least that it must, in the words of the philosopher Iddo Landau, “transcend the common and the mundane.” Clearly, it can’t just be ordinary: After all, if your life is as significant in the scheme of things as you tend to believe, how could you not feel obliged to do something truly remarkable with it?
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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In that case, never kiss a spirit,” he says at the base of my ear. “It might set the bar too high for poor mortal men.
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Cortney L. Winn (Vesselless (The Merciless Realms #1))
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Often when I do interviews and press events from space, I’m asked what I miss about Earth. I have a few answers I always reach for that make sense in any context: I mention rain, spending time with my family, relaxing at home. Those are always true. But throughout the day, from moment to moment, I’m aware of missing all sorts of random things that don’t even necessarily rise to the surface of my consciousness. I miss cooking. I miss chopping fresh food, the smell vegetables give up when you first slice into them. I miss the smell of the unwashed skins of fruit, the sight of fresh produce piled high in grocery stores. I miss grocery stores, the shelves of bright colors and the glossy tile floors and the strangers wandering the aisles. I miss people. I miss the experience of meeting new people and getting to know them, learning about a life different from my own, hearing about things people experienced that I haven’t. I miss the sound of children playing, which always sounds the same no matter their language. I miss the sound of people talking and laughing in another room. I miss rooms. I miss doors and door frames and the creak of wood floorboards when people walk around in old buildings. I miss sitting on my couch, sitting on a chair, sitting on a bar stool. I miss the feeling of resting after opposing gravity all day. I miss the rustle of papers, the flap of book pages turning. I miss drinking from a glass. I miss setting things down on a table and having them stay there. I miss the sudden chill of wind on my back, the warmth of sun on my face. I miss showers. I miss running water in all its forms: washing my face, washing my hands. I miss sleeping in a bed—the feel of sheets, the heft of a comforter, the welcoming curve of a pillow. I miss the colors of clouds at different times of day and the variety of sunrises and sunsets on Earth.
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Scott Kelly (Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery)
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Counterintuitively, emotional mastery can sometimes look to the outside world like doing nothing at all. We’re going to set a high bar for this one, which is to take leadership lessons from Abraham Lincoln. As our colleague Nancy Koehn explores in her fascinating study of crisis leadership, Lincoln was able to resist taking immediate action, even in the face of extraordinary pressure to do something, anything in response to apparent disaster. Koehn writes, “In our own white-hot moment, when so much of our time and attention is focused on instantaneous reaction, it seems almost inconceivable that nothing might be the best something we can offer.”33 And yet history suggests that it’s sometimes the right move. Slowing down your reaction time can allow you to move faster as an organization, particularly when it helps you avoid unforced errors, a topic for tomorrow.
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Frances Frei (Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems)
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Shepherds are not perfect men. Though God sets the bar for pastoral ministry necessarily high, he uses the poles of grace to support that bar.
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Thabiti M. Anyabwile (Finding Faithful Elders and Deacons (9Marks))
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Self worth can only be measured by you, set the bar high
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L.J. Vanier (Ether: Into the Nemesis)
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The challenges I’ve set myself throughout my career have been quite big, quite bold. There had to be a huge risk of failure, because that is what would make me think it was worth pushing myself. I’ve always felt that the bar had to be set really high, to make sure that I truly had to respect what I was doing.
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Bradley Wiggins (My Hour)
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Life is an adventure. No-one knows if you can do it but yourself. Set a high bar.
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Dale Jacobsen
“
Self worth can only be measured by you, set the bar high.
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L.J. Vanier (Ether: Into the Nemesis)
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Are the Scriptures clear (perspicuous)? That is, can a literate, faithful Christian read the Bible and understand what God is saying? The answer depends upon how high or low we set the bar for “understanding” and how much or how little we allow for differences in that understanding. For example, setting the bar low, all Christians would agree that the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ came for our salvation by dying on the Cross. Further, the belief that Jesus was both truly God and truly man is a teaching that most Christians throughout history have held, though both of those doctrines were challenged in significant ways in early Christian history. But once we go a bit more in-depth and get into such questions as how Jesus saves a person and what, exactly, one needs to do in order to be saved by Christ, we run into all manner of differences among Christian traditions.
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Devin Rose (If Protestantism is True)
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This is Los Angeles. I think the bar for 'odd' is set pretty high at this point.
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Torie N. James (Timeless Night (New Camelot, #1))
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We should be leaders in all aspects of our society, not followers. If you’re a public schoolteacher, then through the gift of grace you constantly come up with fresh, creative, and innovative ways to communicate knowledge and wisdom to your students that none of the other educators in your school system have thought of. You set the bar high and inspire your students in such a way that others marvel. Your fellow educators cannot help but discuss among themselves, “Where is he (or she) getting such great ideas?” If
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John Bevere (Relentless: The Power You Need to Never Give Up)
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The Invitational Church In the invitational church, the focus is on growth. The goal of the church is to reach out and gather people into the church. Therefore, the church is designed as a consumer-oriented place that takes special care to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for visitors and guests. A highly trained staff puts forth great effort to ensure the very best experience for everyone who comes to the church, with special attention paid to visitors. Invitational churches are often successful at growth because this is a large part of their goal and focus. There are many wonderful aspects of the invitational church. I believe God sovereignly birthed the church growth and seeker movements to help the institutional church get beyond itself and start caring about the millions of people trying to find God who were unable to fit into the institutional church. I deeply appreciate and value invitational churches, because they have come up with a way to re-create a modern day “Court Of The Gentiles” aspect of the temple, a place where God-seekers can come and find God. They have unselfishly set aside their desire for church to be about themselves, and they have designed church services for lost people and seekers. What a refreshing change when invitational churches hit the scene! They have really harvested many people for Jesus and helped thousands of churches become outward-focused. This is a good thing! The difficulty with the invitational church is that the individual is essentially irrelevant. What I mean is, when most people walk into an invitational church, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they show up. Why is this true? Because the invitational church has, by default, set the bar very low to make sure that whosoever will may come. However, the inadvertent message is that the individual is not really needed. Little is asked or required of people, and it is very clear that if they aren’t part of the overall goal to facilitate growth, their gifts may not be needed. To prove the point: where do many of the people who have left institutional churches go? They often sit in the back of invitational churches where they can go unnoticed and where they can have very little asked of them. The invitational church is a great place to recover from the institutional church. Some go on and become involved in meaningful ways. But often over time, two negative things happen to believers who have been in invitational churches. One, they become sedentary, consumer-oriented Christians. Those who joined the institutional church and who wanted to make a difference have all but lost their initial fire. Often they no longer burn with zeal for God and His purposes. Instead, they unwittingly adopt the culture of the invitational church into their Christianity, and they, too, lower the bar to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they are now just showing up at a weekend service. Or two, they begin to feel the need for a more personal, relational church, and they move on to something more personal and meaningful to them.
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Mark Perry (Kingdom Churches: New Strategies For A Revival Generation)
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the AUP is the only communication from school to home about the vision of technology use, and yet, it’s a negative document, full of complex legalese and threats of punishment. If that’s the only message parents get from your school about technology, you are missing an opportunity to set the bar high and share your vision.
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Sylvia Libow Martinez (Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom)
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To keep this from happening, establish a culture of Yes. Growing companies spawn chaos, which most managers try to control by creating more processes. While some of these processes may be necessary to help the company scale, they should be delayed for as long as possible. Set the bar high for that new process or approval gate; make sure there are very compelling business reasons for it to be created. We like this quote from American academic and former University of Connecticut president Michael Hogan: “My first word of advice is this: Say yes. In fact, say yes as often as you can. Saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to new experiences, and new experiences will lead you to knowledge and wisdom. … An attitude of yes is how you will be able to go forward in these uncertain times.”48 A few years ago the former head of YouTube, Salar
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Eric Schmidt (How Google Works)
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Once the bar gets set too high, simply lower it so you can keep on hitting your goals. You could get a lot more chin-ups done this way.
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Jarod Kintz (At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.)
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In the blink of an eye, Barbara had turned ninety-five. Taking her final breath in the Ottowan Nursing Home in Goodsprings, Nevada, she couldn’t believe her life would end like this. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She had had so many plans growing up. Where did it all go wrong? Looking back, she realized it was all Roger’s fault. Roger, that bastard.
Her mother had told her once that she could be anything she wanted, as long as she set her mind to it. Barbara had wanted to be a nurse. She enjoyed helping people, and even as a young girl, felt that she could make a difference in people’s lives. After finishing high school in 1915, she had enrolled at the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, only a short distance from where she had grown up, a little town called Fort Howard, Maryland.
That had been before The Great War.
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Jamie Schoffman (John at The Bar)
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Once you set the bar high for yourself, you cannot go back to mediocrity. You must give world-class performance in all that you do. Your work ethic, persistence, effort and dedication will glow on your behalf. Do not brag about your accomplishments; allow your reputation to speak of your magnificence.
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Luis Enrique Cavazos (The Five Virtues That Awaken Your Life)
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So his nerves were set on high before he walked in. When he opened the door, scanned the room, he quickly spotted what was his. Flirting heavily at the bar. And obviously waiting and watching for Prophet, since he waved happily to him. Seemed like Tom’s hurt and anger over last night’s admissions had faded away somewhat easily. Too easily. And Prophet wasn’t fooled, but he was pissed that Tom would try to fool him to get him pissed. Because really, Tom was here, the place that was literally the whole source of the fight. And even though it was more of a symbol of a bigger issue, it was still fucking weird being here with Tom, because this wasn’t a place he associated with Tom. He wouldn’t do this with Tom—not in a club, anyway, and not even in a private room. And Tom wouldn’t want it here, either. Having Tom here was . . . Prophet didn’t know how to explain it. Because Tom and Mal needed a lot of the same things, but they weren’t the same. No way. “Hey baby. Looking for a daddy?” Prophet looked up at a big man wearing full leathers. A definite bear. Handsome too. “Saw you here a couple of weeks ago. I’m Ray.” “Yeah?” Prophet had two options here, and the one that’d piss Tom off the most won. “Why don’t you buy me a drink, Ray?” He was a quick three shots in when a hand clasped on the back of his neck. Normally, the urge to grab it, twist it, and slam whoever it was to the bar would hit him immediately. But this place was all about touching. Besides, Prophet knew that touch. “S’up Tom?” Tom moved beside him, eyes narrowed. “What’re you doing?” “You said to come for a drink.” Prophet held up another shot. “’S’what I’m doing. With Ray.
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S.E. Jakes (Not Fade Away (Hell or High Water, #3.5))
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It is important to desire a whole love story and not just any love story, setting the bar up high
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Carol Wambui Ngabura (Bravehearted Musings)
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Let’s take the case of US law schools as an example. If you were to say to someone educated, “There are too many law schools producing too many lawyers in the US,” she would probably agree, in part because there have been dozens of articles over the past several years about the precipitous drop in positions at law firms and the many unemployed law school graduates.9 The general response to this problem is, “Well, people will figure it out and eventually stop applying to law school,” the suggestion being that the market will clear and self-correct if given enough time. On the surface it looks like this market magic is now happening. In 2013, law school applications are projected to be down to about 54,000 from a high of 98,700 in 2004.10 That’s a dramatic decrease of 45 percent. However, a closer look shows that the number of students who started law school in 2011 and are set to graduate in 2014 was 48,697, about 43,000 of whom will graduate, based on historical graduation rates.11 We’ll still be producing 36,000–43,000 newly minted law school grads a year, not far from the peak of 44,495 set in 2012, from now until the current entering class graduates in 2016. Meanwhile, in 2011, only 65.4 percent of law school graduates got jobs for which they needed to pass the bar exam, and estimates of the number of new legal jobs available run as low as 2,180 per year.12 Bloomberg Businessweek has projected a surplus of 176,000 unemployed or underemployed law school graduates by 2020.13 So even as applications plummet, there will not be dramatically fewer law school graduates produced in the coming several years, though it will have been easier to get in as acceptance rates rise due to the diminished applicant pool.14 We’ll still be producing many more lawyers than the market requires, but now they’ll be less talented. If anything, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. Human capital markets don’t self-correct very quickly, if at all. At a minimum there’s a massive time lag that spans years, for several reasons.
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Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
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Let your determination push you to stand for what you were created to be in life. Refuse to be counted out, refuse to stay down and refuse not to set the bar very high. You are a child of the Most High. Walk with your head held high and live a rewarding life.
”
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Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
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Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.
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Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
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the leather stool at the bar, and sighed as her bare feet touched the cool brass footrest running the length of the dark wood counter. Lethe hadn’t changed in the two years since she’d last set foot on the floor that lent itself to an optical illusion, painted with black, gray, and white cubes. The cherrywood pillars still rose like trees to form the carved, arched ceiling high above, looming over a bar made from fogged glass and black metal, all clean lines and square edges.
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Sarah J. Maas (Crescent City ebook Bundle: A 3 Book Bundle)
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Lord Devil God was warlike and his skill in literature was slightly lacking. It was quite normal for there to be a problem in his usage of rhetoric so you couldn't set the bar too high.
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Little Phoenix Is Not An Immortal
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To stimulate problem solving and spur people to greater achievement, set ambious goals, even if it means some quarterly targets will be missed. But don't set the bar so high that an OKR is obviously unrealistic. Morale suffers when people know they can't succeed.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters, Blitzscaling, Scale Up Millionaire, The Profits Principles 4 Books Collection Set)
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Living up to people's expectations limits your potential. You'll find they are unreasonably high or set so low you should consider it an insult. Be your own "bar"; decide how you'll reach your goal. Then no one can lay claim to your success. Don't worry about meeting the standard when you are the standard
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Carlos Wallace
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One of the great sadnesses in my life is that she died young, of cancer, just as we were beginning to do well in business. Mother must have been a pretty special motivator, because I took her seriously when she told me I should always try to be the best I could at whatever I took on. So, I have always pursued everything I was interested in with a true passion—some would say obsession—to win. I’ve always held the bar pretty high for myself: I’ve set extremely high personal goals.
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Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
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Layout Timers A drill that simulates the feel of a skill, or the set for a skill without the risk of completing the skill. Lines Straight, perfect lines of the body. Overshoot, also known as Bail A transition from the high bar facing the low bar. The gymnast swings up and over the low bar with a half-turn to catch the low bar ending in a handstand. Pike The body bent forward at the waist with the legs kept straight, an L position. Pirouette Used in both gymnastics and dance to refer to a turn around the body's longitudinal axis. It is used to refer to a handstand turning moves on bars. Rips In gymnastics, a rip occurs when a gymnast works so hard on the bars or rings they tear off a flap of skin from their hand. The injury is like a blister that breaks open. Release Leaving the bar to perform a skill before re-grasping it. Relevé This is a dance term that is often used in gymnastics. In a relevé, the gymnast is standing on toes and has straight legs.
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Lucia Franco (Balance (Off Balance, #1))
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Apple has a consistent and exquisite concept of using the God curve in everything. The God curve is the curvature of the rounded corners that you can see in many places. For example, in the iPhone, you can see the God curve in the metal frame, the physical buttons, the rear bump, the camera, the receiver, the display, the Lighting connector, and even some internal components.
In the software, you can see the God curve in the app icon, the dock, the search bar, the settings bar, the control center, the notification bar in notification center, the widget, and the notch (or dynamic island).
The God curve is also present in other products, such as the Macbook and its software. And even in Apple's buildings and facilities, such as the Apple Park visitor center and its trash cans and seats.
The God curve is a legacy of Mr. Jobs, who made sure that everything Apple does has a high level of consistency and elegance across hardware, software, product, and enterprise.
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Shakenal Dimension (The Art of iPhone Review: A Step-by-Step Buyer's Guide for Apple Lovers)
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Who you surround yourself with greatly affects how you see your world and how high you set the bar for yourself.
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Jen Sincero (You Are a Badass®: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life)