Short Corridor Quotes

There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you. Nobody knew that better than Jackson Lamb. And nobody played it better than Di Taverner.

And what we learn about ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.

My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time, she went down again so soon, that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the utmost pain; for it heralded the moment which was to follow it, when she would have left me and gone downstairs again.

Since Sienna was in an unusually cooperative mood, the session went well. He was returning from it midmorning - after a short detour - when a small naked body barreled into him in one of the main corridors. Steadying the boy with Tk, he looked down. The child lifted a finger to his lips. "Shh. I'm hiding." With that, he went behind Judd and scrambled into a small alcove. "Quickly! Not sure why he obeyed the order, Judd backed up to stand in front of the alcove, arms crossed. A flustered Lara came running around the corner a few seconds later. "Have you seen Ben? Four-year-old. Naked as a jaybird?" "How tall is he?" Judd asked in his most overbearing Psy manner. Lara stared. "He's four. How tall do you think he is? Have you seen him or not?" "Let me think...did you say he was naked?" "He was about to be bathed. Slippery little monkey." A giggle from behind Judd. Lara's eyes widened and then her lips twitched. "So you haven't seen him?" "Without a proper description, I can't be sure." The healer was obviously trying not to laugh. "You shouldn't encourage him - he's incorrigible as it is." Judd felt childish hands on his left calf and then Ben poked his head out. "I'm incorwigeable, did ya hear?" Judd nodded. "I do believe you've been found. Why don't you go have your bath?" "Come on, munchkin." Lara held out a hand. Surprisingly strong baby arms and legs wrapped around Judd's leg. "No. I wanna stay with Uncle Judd." Lara anticipated his question. "Ben spends a lot of time with Marlee." "I spend a lot of time with Marlee," a small voice piped up.

Starling walked up and down the linoleum of the shabby lounge far underground. She was the only brightness in the room. We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom.

It was a long corridor and it branched into other corridors and it led her up short flights of steps which mounted to others again. There

ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.

Eventually, decades later, when the king was dying, the queen gently ushered everybody out into the corridor, closed the door to the royal bedchamber, and got into bed with her husband. She started singing to him. They laughed. He was short of breath, but he could still laugh. They asked each other, Is this silly? Is this...pretentious? But they both knew that everything there was to say had been said already, over and over, across the years. And so the king, relieved, released, free to be silly, asked her to sing him a song from his childhood. He didn't need to be regal anymore, he didn't need to seem commanding or dignified, not with her. They were, in their way, dying together, and they both knew it. It wasn't happening only to him. So she started singing. They shared one last laugh - they agreed that the cat had a better voice than she did. Still, she sang him out of the world.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom.

Oh, how I wish I had already regenerated to become the tall one with the dicky bow, thought the Doctor, who occasionally had visions of his future selves. He is always so fit and agile. I suppose all that incessant running down corridors that he does . . . will do . . . may do, in one of my possible futures . . . is good for something.

He slammed the door and ran blindly down the corridor, grabbing at handles. What exactly had he seen? They had been eating with their bare hands, but somehow the only thought he could hold on to was a kind of sickened gratitude that he had been unable to see their faces.

Stupefied, but unharmed, he allowed Mathis to lead him off towards the Splendide from which guests and servants were pouring in chattering fright. As the distant clang of bells heralded the arrival of ambulances and fire-engines, they managed to push through the throng and up the short stairs and along the corridor to Bond’s room.

Hand in hand they whispered for a while. The girl nodded and the bear laughed. Together, they made their way down the corridor and to the foot of the stairs.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtray, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

Not only did Peeves break easily through the giant bell jar, showering an entire corridor with broken glass, he also escaped the trap armed with several cutlasses, crossbows, a blunderbuss and a miniature cannon.

The uniformed man led him along a short corridor and turned right at an electronic display proclaiming “The new collection from Kelloggs” and portraying several variations of luminous crotchless panties. Grandfather frowned. “Can you eat those?” he asked the man, pointing at the display. The man grinned. “If you buy them, Sir, I am sure that you can do anything you want with them. Eat the panties, devour the contents …. This way, Sir.

There are things that upset us. That’s not quite what we’re talking about here, though. I’m thinking rather about those images or words or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of our safe, sane world into a place much more dark and less welcoming. Our hearts skip a ratatat drumbeat in our chests, and we fight for breath. Blood retreats from our faces and our fingers, leaving us pale and gasping and shocked. And what we learn about ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.

If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete.

I felt a warm hand touch mine. “Are you okay?” “If you mean am I injured, then the answer is no. If you mean am I ‘okay’ as in am-I-confident-I’m-still-sane, the answer is still no.” Ren frowned. “We have to find a way to get across the chasm.” “You’re certainly welcome to give it a try.” I waved him off and went back to drinking my water. He moved to the edge and peered across, looking speculatively at the distance. Changing back to a tiger, he trotted a few paces back in the direction we had come from, turned, and ran at full speed toward the hole. “Ren, no!” I screamed. He leapt, clearing the hole easily, and landed lightly on his front paws. Then he trotted a short distance away and did the same thing to come back. He landed at my feet and changed back to human form. “Kells, I have an idea.” “Oh, this I’ve got to hear. I just hope you don’t plan on including me in this scheme of yours. Ah. Let me guess. I know. You want to tie a rope to your tail, leap across, tie it off, and then have me pull my body across the rope, right?” He cocked his head as if considering it, and then shook his head. “No, you don’t have the strength to do something like that. Plus, we have no rope and nothing to tie a rope to.” “Right. So what’s the plan?” He held my hands and explained. “What I’m proposing will be much easier. Do you trust me?” I was going to be sick. “I trust you. It’s just-“ I looked into his concerned blue eyes and sighed. “Okay, what do I have to do?” “You saw that I was able to clear the gap pretty well as a tiger, right? So what I need you to do is to stand right at the edge and wait for me. I’ll run to the end of the tunnel, build up speed, and leap as a tiger. At the same time, I want you to jump up and grab me around my neck. I’ll change to a man in midair so that I can hold onto you, and we’ll fall together to the other side.” I snorted noisily and laughed. “You’re kidding, right?” He ignored my skepticism. “We’ll have to time it precisely, and you’ll have to jump too, in the same direction, because if you don’t, I’ll just hit you full power and drive us both over the edge.” “You’re serious? You seriously want me to do this?” “Yes, I’m serious. Now stand here while I make a few practice runs.” “Can’t we just find another corridor or something?” “There aren’t any. This is the right way.” Reluctantly, I stood near the edge and watched him leap back and forth a few times. Observing the rhythm of his running and jumping, I began to grasp the idea of what he wanted me to do. All too quickly Ren was back in front of me again. “I can’t believe you’ve talked me into doing this. Are you sure?” I asked. “Yes, I’m sure. Are you ready?” “No! Give me a minute to mentally write a last will and testament.” “Kells, it’ll be fine.” “Sure it will. Alright, let me take in my surroundings. I want to make sure I can record every minute of this experience in my journal. Of course, that’s probably a moot point because I’m assuming that I’m going to die in the jump anyway.” Ren put his hand on my cheek, looked in my eyes, and said fiercely, “Kelsey, trust me. I will not let you fall.

The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal man,” said I; “and that is, in all its nakedness — Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in the room —

You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is frightening. Of course she was raped. What kind of company do you think she was keeping? Of course out there she was going to get raped. This isn't Old Rimrock, old buddy - she's out there, old buddy, in the USA. She enters that world, that loopy world out there, with whats going on out there - what do you expect? A kid from Rimrock, NJ, of course she didn't know how to behave out there, of course the shit hits the fan. What could she know? She's like a wild child out there in the world. She can't get enough of it - she's still acting up. A room off McCarter Highway. And why not? Who wouldn't? You prepare her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial, all of it. Those assumptions you live with. You're still in your olf man's dream-world, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heaven. A household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life - ladies' gloves! Does he still tell the one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is?" Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive. Meredith Levov, 1964. "You wanted Ms. America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance - she's your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the sit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter," thunders Jerry into the phone - and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it's shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of hte hospital. He is one of the surgeons who shouts; if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shouts. He does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatred. In the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising; he is king. He does not spend time regretting what he has or has not done or justifying to others how loathsome he can be. The message is simple: You will take me as I come - there is no choice. He cannot endure swallowing anything. He just lets loose. And these are two brothers, the same parents' sons, one for whom the aggression's been bred out, the other for whom the aggression's been bred in. "If you were a father who loved your daughter," Jerry shouts at the Swede, "you would never have left her in that room! You would have never let her out of your sight!

Guests brought their own servants, too, so at weekends it was not unusual for the number of people within a country house to swell by as many as 150. Amid such a mass of bodies, confusion was inevitable. On one occasion in the 1890s Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom and with a lusty cry of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ leapt into the bed, only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. To avoid such confusions, guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes containing personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridors to help them find their way back to, or between, rooms.

If you like, you could call this the psychology of total equivalence, let’s say neuronics for short, and dismiss it as biological fantasy. However, I am convinced as we move back through geophysical time, so we reenter the amnionic corridor, and move back through spinal and archeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct ecological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as we reappear, we’ll be swept back helplessly in the floodtide like pieces of flotsam.

You can have mad thoughts in here. Like ... tell me, when I die, do they bring my corpse back to my cell to serve out the full term of my second sentence plus those seven years? Perhaps I've already been brought back and have just forgotten it? Maybe I'm already a corpse? A breathing cadaver? But no, no. A cadaver couldn't smile at himself this way. Somewhere, somehow, there's got to be something funny about all of this. Something horrendously funny. A wild cosmic joke on me, a real knee-slapper in some demonic heaven or hell. A while back someone was crying out eerily down the corridor in the echoing half-darkness. "Slur the buds!" he cried out dementedly, repeating those meaningless words over and over again in a ghostly voice, softly hissing and hollow. "Slur the buds! Slur the buds!" That's all I could make out. He must have called it out in that soft hollow hiss a dozen times in the course of fifteen minutes. Still other voices picked it up, and for a short while there was an impromptu ghostly chorus of "Slur the buds!" echoing down these unholy corridors. I never learned what the words meant. I never learned who it was who called out. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe that was just me myself calling out in the demented darkness of my own imagination. Doing time does this thing to you. But, of course, you don't do time. You do without it. Or rather, time does you. Time is a cannibal that devours the flesh of your years day by day, bite by bite. And as he finishes the last morsel, with the juices of your life running down his bloody chin, he smiles wickedly, belches with satisfaction, and hisses out in ghostly tones, "Slur the buds!"

In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University—most aged eighteen to twenty-two—to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example, “finds he it yellow instantly”). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.

Did you just spit on your hand before you patted down my hair?” he asked indignantly. “Oh, I did no such thing. Now be still. Of all the rude, impertinent accusations to make! Bend down lower. I will have you know that members of the aristocracy do not have ‘spit’ as you crudely refer to it, young man. We do not acknowledge saliva in any form. Straighten your collar. There, you look nearly presentable.” She grumbled in aggravation, “Do you even own a brush?” Grabbing his chin, she brusquely turned his face from side to side. “For heaven’s sake, Richard, what did you use to shave—a shovel?” “Leave now, Catherine, and I may spare your life.” There was a moment of quiet from behind the door. “Go, woman! I intend to begin ravishing my wife shortly; however, I will not even consider it before I see that little dwarflike body of yours waddling down this corridor! Away with you! Shoo!” “Oh, all right!” she finally capitulated. “By the way, mon chou, I should tell you that when you two finally get around to reconciling and retire upstairs, Amanda is occupying the large blue suite down the east corridor, not your usual bachelor room at the end of the west corridor.” She reached up to kiss his offered cheek then turned on her heels to leave. “You have finally earned an upgrade in accommodations, Richard. Well done, you.

Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.

She opened the door of the room and went into the corridor, and then she began her wanderings. It was a long corridor and it branched into other corridors and it led her up short flights of steps which mounted to others again. There were doors and doors, and there were pictures on the walls. Sometimes they were pictures of dark, curious landscapes, but oftenest they were portraits of men and women in queer, grand costumes made of satin and velvet. She found herself in one long gallery whose walls were covered with these portraits. She had never thought there could be so many in any house. She walked slowly down this place and stared at the faces which also seemed to stare at her. She felt as if they were wondering what a little girl from India was doing in their house. Some were pictures of children—little girls in thick satin frocks which reached to their feet and stood out about them, and boys with puffed sleeves and lace collars and long hair, or with big ruffs around their necks. She always stopped to look at the children, and wonder what their names were, and where they had gone, and why they wore such odd clothes. There was a stiff, plain little girl rather like herself. She wore a green brocade dress and held a green parrot on her finger. Her eyes had a sharp, curious look. "Where do you live now?" said Mary aloud to her. "I wish you were here." Surely no other little girl ever spent such a queer morning. It seemed as if there was no one in all the huge rambling house but her own small self, wandering about up-stairs and down, through narrow passages and wide ones, where it seemed to her that no one but herself had ever walked. Since so many rooms had been built, people must have lived in them, but it all seemed so empty that she could not quite believe it true.

The deafening crowd echoed through the pale stone corridors of the royal castle of Orynth. They were chanting her name, almost wailing it. Aelin. A two-beat pulse that sounded through each step she made up the darkened stairwell. Goldryn was heavy at her back, its ruby smoldering in the light of the sun trickling from the landing above. Her tunic was beautiful yet simple, though her steel gauntlets—armed with hidden blades—were as ornate as they were deadly. She reached the landing and stalked down it, past the towering, muscled warriors who lurked in the shadows just beyond the open archway. Not just warriors—her warriors. Her court. Aedion was there, and a few others whose faces were obscured by shadow, but their teeth gleamed faintly as they gave her feral grins. A court to change the world. The chanting increased, and the amulet bounced between her breasts with each step. She kept her eyes ahead, a half smile on her face as she emerged at last onto the balcony and the cries grew frantic, as overpowering as the frenzied crowd outside the palace, in the streets, thousands gathered and chanting her name. In the courtyard, young priestesses of Mala danced to each pulse of her name, worshipping, fanatic. With this power—with the keys she’d attained—what she had created for them, the armies she had made to drive out their enemies, the crops she had grown, the shadows she had chased away … these things were nothing short of a miracle. She was more than human, more than queen. Aelin. Beloved. Immortal. Blessed. Aelin. Aelin of the Wildfire. Aelin Fireheart. Aelin Light-Bringer. Aelin. She raised her arms, tipping back her head to the sunlight, and their cries made the entirety of the White Palace tremble. On her brow, a mark—the sacred mark of Brannon’s line—glowed blue. She smiled at the crowd, at her people, at her world, so ripe for the taking.

the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practising their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way. The monsters in our cupboards and our minds are always there in the darkness, like mould beneath the floorboards and behind the wallpaper, and there is so much darkness, an inexhaustible supply of darkness. The universe is amply supplied with night.

She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade—my shoulder blade!—as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring her face-to-face with some central revulsion, a revulsion of her husband or herself or both, a revulsion that had come from nowhere, or from her, or perhaps from something I’d done or failed to do, who knew, she didn’t want to know, it was too great a disappointment, far better to get on with the chores, with the baby, with the work, far better to leave me to my own devices, as they say, to leave me to resign myself to certain motifs, to leave me to disappear guiltily into a hole of my own digging. When the time came to stop her from leaving, I did not know what to think or wish for, her husband who was now an abandoner, a hole-dweller, a leaver who had left her to fend for herself, as she said, who’d failed to provide her with the support and intimacy she needed, she complained, who was lacking some fundamental wherewithal, who no longer wanted her, who beneath his scrupulous marital motions was angry, whose sentiments had decayed into a mere sense of responsibility, a husband who, when she shouted, “I don’t need to be provided for! I’m a lawyer! I make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year! I need to be loved!” had silently picked up the baby and smelled the baby’s sweet hair, and had taken the baby for a crawl in the hotel corridor, and afterward washed the baby’s filthy hands and soft filthy knees, and thought about what his wife had said, and saw the truth in her words and an opening, and decided to make another attempt at kindness, and at nine o’clock, with the baby finally drowsy in his cot, came with a full heart back to his wife to find her asleep, as usual, and beyond waking. In short, I fought off the impulse to tell Rachel to go fuck herself.

My short-term goals are to defend and even strengthen elements of state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically necessary right now to impede the dedicated efforts to "roll back" the progress that has been achieved in extending democracy and human rights. State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because it offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. Governments have a fatal flaw: unlike the private tyrannies, the institutions of state power and authority offer to the despised public an opportunity to play some role, however limited, in managing their own affairs. That defect is intolerable to the masters, who now feel, with some justification, that changes in the international economic and political order offer the prospects of creating a kind of "utopia for the masters," with dismal prospects for most of the rest. It should be unnecessary to spell out here what I mean. The effects are all too obvious even in the rich societies, from the corridors of power to the streets, countryside, and prisons. For reasons that merit attention but that lie beyond the scope of these remarks, the rollback campaign is currently spearheaded by dominant sectors of societies in which the values under attack have been realized in some of their most advanced forms, the English-speaking world; no small irony, but no contradiction either.

Janitorial" All morning he drifts the spacious lawns like a gleaner, picking up this and that, the summer clouds immense and building toward afternoon, when the heat drives him under the shade of the oak trees in the quad and then along cool corridors inside to pull down last term's flyers For the chamber recital, the poetry reading, the lecture on the ethics of cloning, the dinner with some ambassador, the debate between Kant and Heidegger, the frat party, the sorority party, the kegger, the weekend Bergman festival, the Wednesday screening of Dumb and Dumber. He says hello to fine young ladies, and tries not to dwell on their halter tops, their tanned thighs, shorts up to here. At five he climbs into an old, dumpster-colored olds, lights up and heads home across the barge-ridden river in its servitude to East St. Louis, where you know this poem—glib, well-meaning, trivial-- grows tongue-tied, and cannot follow.

They reached the eastern outskirts of the Dimmerskog on the afternoon of the next day. Although the forest was covered in a thick blanket of white snow, it nevertheless seemed, as Binabik had named it, a place of shadows. The company did not pass beneath its eaves, and might have chosen not to even had their path lain that way, so thick with foreboding was the wood’s atmosphere. The trees, despite their size—and some of them were huge indeed—seemed dwarfish and twisted, as though they squirmed bitterly beneath their burden of needled branches and snow. The open spaces between the contorted trunks seemed to bend away crazily like tunnels dug by some huge and drunken mole, leading at last to dangerous, secretive depths. Passing in near silence, his horse’s hooves crunching softly in the snow, Simon imagined following the gaping pathways into the bark-pillared, white-roofed halls of Dimmerskog, coming at last to—who could guess? Perhaps to the dark, malicious heart of the forest, a place where the trees breathed together and passed endless rumors with the scaly rub of branch on branch, or the malicious exhalation of wind through twigs and frozen leaves. They camped that night in the open again, even though the Dimmerskog crouched only a short distance away like a sleeping animal. None of them wanted to spend a night beneath the forest’s branches—especially Sludig, who had been raised on stories of the ghastly things that stalked the wood’s pale corridors. The Sithi did not seem to care, but Jiriki spent part of the evening oiling his dark witchwood sword. Again the company huddled around a naked fire, and the east wind razored past them all the long evening, sending great powdery spouts of snow whirling all around, and sporting among the Dimmerskog’s upper reaches. When they lay down that night to sleep it was to the sound of the forest creaking, and the wind-ridden branches sawing one against the other.

LITTLE TRIGGERS There are things that upset us. That’s not quite what we’re talking about here, though. I’m thinking rather about those images or words or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of our safe, sane world into a place much more dark and less welcoming. Our hearts skip a ratatat drumbeat in our chests, and we fight for breath. Blood retreats from our faces and our fingers, leaving us pale and gasping and shocked. And what we learn about ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way. The monsters in our cupboards and our minds are always there in the darkness, like mold beneath the floorboards and behind the wallpaper, and there is so much darkness, an inexhaustible supply of darkness. The universe is amply supplied with night. What do we need to be warned about? We each have our little triggers. I

I’ll go myself,” the sergeant said tersely. He was getting annoyed. The stairway went down underneath the ground floor to a depth of about eight feet. A short paved corridor ran in front of the boiler room at right angles to the stairs, where each end was closed off by unpainted panelled doors. Both the stairs and the corridor felt like loose gravel underfoot, but otherwise they were clean. Splotches of blood were more in evidence in the corridor and a bloody hand mark showed clearly on the unpainted door to the rear. “Let’s not touch anything,” the sergeant cautioned, taking out a clean white handkerchief to handle the doorknob. “I better call the fingerprint crew,” the photographer said. “No, Joe will call them; I’ll need you. And you local fellows better wait outside, we’re so crowded in here we’ll destroy the evidence.” “Ed and I won’t move,” Grave Digger said. Coffin Ed grunted. Taking no further notice of them, the sergeant pushed open the door. It was black and dark inside. First he shone his light over the wall alongside the door and all over the corridor looking for electric light switches. One was located to the right of each door. Taking care to avoid stepping in any of the blood splotches, the sergeant moved from one switch to another, but none worked. “Blown fuse,” he muttered, picking his way back to the open room. Without having to move, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed could see all they wanted through the open door. Originally made to accommodate a part-time janitor or any type of laborer who would fire the boiler for a place to sleep, the room had been converted into a pad. All that remained of the original was a partitioned-off toilet in one corner and a washbasin in the other. An opening enclosed by heavy wire mesh opened into the boiler room, serving for both ventilation and heat. Otherwise the room was furnished like a boudoir. There was a dressing-table with a triple mirror, three-quarter bed with chenille spread, numerous foam-rubber pillows in a variety of shapes, three round yellow scatter rugs. On the whitewashed walls an obscene mural had been painted in watercolors depicting black and white silhouettes in a variety of perverted sex acts, some of which could only be performed by male contortionists. And everything was splattered with blood, the walls, the bed, the rugs. The furnishings were not so much disarrayed, as though a violent struggle had taken place, but just bloodied. “Mother-raper stood still and let his throat be cut,” Grave Digger observed. “Wasn’t that,” Coffin Ed corrected. “He just didn’t believe it is all.

Old Hubert must have had a premonition of his squalid demise. In October he said to me, ‘Forty-two years I’ve had this place. I’d really like to go back home, but I ain’t got the energy since my old girl died. And I can’t sell it the way it is now. But anyway before I hang my hat up I’d be curious to know what’s in that third cellar of mine.’ The third cellar has been walled up by order of the civil defence authorities after the floods of 1910. A double barrier of cemented bricks prevents the rising waters from invading the upper floors when flooding occurs. In the event of storms or blocked drains, the cellar acts as a regulatory overflow. The weather was fine: no risk of drowning or any sudden emergency. There were five of us: Hubert, Gerard the painter, two regulars and myself. Old Marteau, the local builder, was upstairs with his gear, ready to repair the damage. We made a hole. Our exploration took us sixty metres down a laboriously-faced vaulted corridor (it must have been an old thoroughfare). We were wading through a disgusting sludge. At the far end, an impassable barrier of iron bars. The corridor continued beyond it, plunging downwards. In short, it was a kind of drain-trap. That’s all. Nothing else. Disappointed, we retraced our steps. Old Hubert scanned the walls with his electric torch. Look! An opening. No, an alcove, with some wooden object that looks like a black statuette. I pick the thing up: it’s easily removable. I stick it under my arm. I told Hubert, ‘It’s of no interest. . .’ and kept this treasure for myself. I gazed at it for hours on end, in private. So my deductions, my hunches were not mistaken: the Bièvre-Seine confluence was once the site where sorcerers and satanists must surely have gathered. And this kind of primitive magic, which the blacks of Central Africa practise today, was known here several centuries ago. The statuette had miraculously survived the onslaught of time: the well-known virtues of the waters of the Bièvre, so rich in tannin, had protected the wood from rotting, actually hardened, almost fossilized it. The object answered a purpose that was anything but aesthetic. Crudely carved, probably from heart of oak. The legs were slightly set apart, the arms detached from the body. No indication of gender. Four nails set in a triangle were planted in its chest. Two of them, corroded with rust, broke off at the wood’s surface all on their own. There was a spike sunk in each eye. The skull, like a salt cellar, had twenty-four holes in which little tufts of brown hair had been planted, fixed in place with wax, of which there were still some vestiges. I’ve kept quiet about my find. I’m biding my time.

the walls came alive with brightly hued paintings of ibis-headed men and lion-headed women. We moved along a dazzling corridor covered with Gods, Goddesses, solar disks, and all-seeing eyes. There were boats, birds, chariots, harps, plows, and rainbow wings—thousands of glyphs. I had the sensation of floating through a storied world. When we arrived in the first hall, I could barely take in the sprawling room with its cubicles reaching toward the ceiling, each one labeled and stuffed with scrolls and leather-bound codices. Enheduanna’s exaltation to Inanna was likely in here, as well as at least a few works by female Greek philosophers. It seemed absurd to think my own writings might be housed here one day, too, but I stood there and let myself imagine it. As we moved from hall to hall, I became aware of young men in short white tunics dashing about, some carrying armloads of papyri, others on ladders arranging scrolls in cubicles or dusting them with tufts of feathers. I noticed that Lavi watched them intently. “You are very quiet,” Yaltha said, sidling next to me. “Is the library all you hoped?” “It’s a holy of holies,” I said. And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

Bells Screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in midair, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur-colored light ex-ploded through the black windowpane and flashed away in darkness. Miranda waking from a dreamless sleep asked without expecting an answer, “What is happening?” for there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamour went on, a furious exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt. The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, “Hear that? They’re celebrating . It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.” Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, “My country, ’tis of thee…” Sweet land… oh terrible land of this bitter world where the sound of rejoicing was a clamour of pain, where ragged tuneless old women, sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, “Sweet land of Liberty-” “Oh, say, can you see?” their hopeless voices were asking next, the hammer strokes of metal tongues drowning them out. “The war is over,” said Miss Tanner, her underlap held firmly, her eyes blurred. Miranda said, “Please open the window, please, I smell death in here.

In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it's ramen. In fact, there's a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the basement of Tokyo Station, with eight top-rated ramen shops sharing one corridor. We stopped by one evening after a day of riding around on the Shinkansen. After drooling over the photos at establishments such as Junk Garage, which serves oily, brothless noodles hidden under a towering slag heap of toppings, we settled on Ramen Honda based on its short line and the fact that its ramen seemed to be topped with a massive pile of scallions. However, anything in Tokyo that appears to be topped with scallions is actually topped with something much better. You'll meet this delectable dopplegänger soon, and in mass quantities. The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point-bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you'll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You'll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks, we were meant to be together, and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.

On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.

In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University—most aged eighteen to twenty-two—to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example, “finds he it yellow instantly”). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others. The “Florida effect” involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness. When they were questioned afterward, none of the students reported noticing that the words had had a common theme, and they all insisted that nothing they did after the first experiment could have been influenced by the words they had encountered. The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. Although

I pull the fire escape door open, scoop my eyeshadow palette off the ground and slip back inside. For a moment, I pause in the corridor and catch my breath. Adrenaline is surging through me. Rage. A normal woman would call the police at this point. But a normal woman would never have been paranoid enough in the first place to pretend to go to the toilet, only to sneak out of the fire escape and spy through a window to watch what her date does when he has five minutes alone with her drink. Nope. A normal woman would have gone to the loo, done a pee and topped up her lipstick. Or she’d have texted a friend about her hot date, feeling giddy with hope and excitement. Now, let’s think about what would have happened to a normal woman. A normal woman would have headed back to her date, smiling prettily, before sitting down and drinking her drugged drink. Then, a short while later, that normal woman would have started feeling far more drunk than she normally does after just a couple of drinks, but she’d probably blame herself. She’d wonder if maybe she’d drunk too much. Or maybe she’d blame herself for having not eaten earlier in the day because she didn’t want to look fat in her dress. Or maybe she’d blame herself because that’s just what she does; she blames herself. And then, just as she started to feel woozy and a bit confused, her date would take her outside for some fresh air and she’d be grateful to him. She’d think he was caring and responsible, when really, he was just whisking her out of sight, before she started to look less like she was drunk and more like she’d been drugged. And then the next thing she’d know, she’d be staggering into the back of a cab and her date would be asking her to tell the driver where she lived. And when she’d barely be able to get the words out and her date made a joke to the driver about how drunk she was, she’d feel small and embarrassed. And then she’d find herself slumping into her date’s open arms, flopping against his big manly body, and she’d feel grateful once more that this man was taking care of her and getting her home safe. And then, once the taxi slowed down and she blinked her eyes open and found they’d pulled up outside her flat, she’d notice in a fleeting moment of clarity that when the driver asked for the fare, her date thrust two crisp ten-pound notes towards him in a weirdly premeditated move, as though he’d known this moment was going to happen all along. As though he’d had the cash lined up, the plan set, and she’d feel something. Something. But then she’d be staggering out of the taxi, even sloppier than when she got in, and her legs would be buckling, and she’d cling to her date for support, her make-up now smudged, her eyes half-closed, her hair messy. She’d look a state and he’d ask her which flat was hers, and she’d walk with him to her front door, to the flat where she lives alone. To the place that’s full of books and cute knick-knacks from charity shops and colourful but inexpensive clothes. She’d unlock her front door, her hand sliding drunkenly over the lock, and she’d lead him into the place she’s been using as a base to try to get ahead in life, and then he’d look around, keen-eyed, until he spotted her bedroom and he’d draw her in. And then all of a sudden he’d be in her bedroom and she wouldn’t be able to remember if she’d asked him back or not or quite how this happened, and it would all be moving so fast and her thoughts would be unable to keep up – they’d keep sliding away – and he’d be kissing her and she’d be unsure what was happening as he pulled off her dress and she’d wonder, did she ask for this? Does she want this? Has she been a ‘slut’ again? But the thoughts would be weak, they’d keep falling away and he’d be confident and he’d be certain and he’d be good-looking and he’d be pulling off her bra and taking off her knickers. He’d be pushing himself inside her. The next day, he’d be gone by the time she woke up. She’d be blocked, unmatched...

On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds. Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions. Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like. Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.

On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds.
 Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions.
 Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like.
 Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.

The middle classes did not go to public hospitals; those places were reserved for workers, child-mothers, and those unfortunates who had wasted their inheritance, ‘squandered the lot’, and thus deserved the worst punishments, those, in short, who had gone to rack and ruin. Families would warn their wastrel offspring, their prodigal sons, that ‘You’ll end up in hospital!’, that is, poor, alone and ashamed . Seeing the forbidding exteriors of these institutions, their gloomy corridors, the miserable huddles of mourners that sometimes emerged, used to make me think vaguely of leper colonies.

Professora, Madame Vorsoisson, I trust I shall see you both back in Vorbarr Sultana?” “Yes, certainly,” said Ekaterin, barely avoiding breathlessness. “I will look forward to it with great fascination,” said the Professora piously. His smile went crooked in trenchant appreciation of her tone; he backed out with a flourishing, self-conscious bow, a courtly effect slightly spoiled by his caroming off the doorjamb. His quick steps faded down the corridor. “A nice young man,” observed Aunt Vorthys, into a room seeming suddenly much emptier. “A pity he’s so short.” “He’s not so short,” said Ekaterin defensively. “He’s just . . . concentrated.

faster but the picture remained entirely static. The stillness of a deserted office descended and held steady as time rushed by. “When do the cleaners come in?” Reacher asked. “Just before midnight,” Froelich said. “That late?” “They’re night workers. This is a round-the-clock operation.” “And there’s nothing else visible before then?” “Nothing at all.” “So spool ahead. We get the picture.” Froelich operated the buttons and shuttled between fast-forward with snow on the screen and regular-speed playback with a picture to check the timecode. At eleven-fifty P.M. she let the tape run. The counter clicked ahead, a second at a time. At eleven fifty-two there was motion at the far end of the corridor. A team of three people emerged from the gloom. There were two women and a man, all of them wearing dark overalls. They looked Hispanic. They were all short and compact, dark-haired, stoic. The man was pushing a cart. It had a black garbage bag locked into a hoop at the front, and trays stacked with cloths and spray bottles on shelves at the rear. One of the women was carrying a vacuum cleaner. It rode on

Exclamations arose from the personnel as they recognized the lifeless legs hanging in the air above them as having once belonged to Slaughter.  Derek swore and reached up to pull the body out, but it did not budge.  He looked closely and noted that the body and clothing had fused into the vessel’s own metallic material.  Everyone’s attention was so riveted above that they failed to notice the shadows in time.  Once the dark forms reached the squad’s rear, the screams began.  Laser fire erupted next, but it had no effect.  Bodies of the dead fell about the corridor.  Anne’s hands shook as she assembled the cannon.  Derek covered her as best as he was able, but his weapon seemed useless. The laser would cut through a shadowy figure, then it would simply re-materialize.  He dropped the rifle and went for his backup weapon, which was an old .45 caliber handgun in his belt pouch.  He jammed the magazine in and chambered the round and fired twice into the darkness, punctuated with flashes of white light and fire.

Most of them [the soldiers—Warriors in New Pentagon Speak—of the all-volunteer military] come from small towns in the South or the rustbelt of the Midwest or the big city ghettoes. Many are following a family heritage of military service that has made veterans of past wars a relatively privileged class, enjoying special access to higher education, jobs, and a nationwide system of socialized medicine. But so many of them are so very young, enticed or strong-armed by smartly uniformed recruiters who work the corridors and classrooms of America's most impoverished and thoroughly militarized high schools. So many are badly educated, knowing nothing of the world and how it operates. So many are immigrants, risking their lives for a fast track to citizenship. So many are poor and short on promise. So many have such a slim chance of another job, another line of work [like the one who tells the author "where else can I get a job doing the stuff I love? . . . Shootin' people. Blowin' shit up. It's fuckin' fun. I fuckin' love it."], let alone a decent wage or a promotion. And because the Pentagon lowered standards to fill the ranks of the volunteer army, so many are high school dropouts, or gangbangers, or neo-Nazi white supremacists, or drug addicts, or convicted felons with violent crimes on their record. In just three years following the invasion of Iraq, the military issued free passes—so called "moral waivers"—to one of every five recruits, including more than 58,000 convicted drug users and 1,605 with "serious" felony convictions for offenses including rape, kidnapping, and murder. When the number of free passes rose in the fourth year, the Pentagon changed the label to "conduct waiver.

Florencio also knows how dangerous it is to wander around a mine alone, and concludes that Edison, as a Chilean expression puts it, “is one plank short of a bridge” (le falta un palo para el puente). For Edison, running through those corridors where a falling slab might kill you is his way of saying he’s going to stand up in the face of adversity.

Her whole body tenses, heaves, tries to scream, and her eyes burn with tears of frustration and terror. In the moonlit shadows of her bedroom, she hears a cat begin to purr. Kara runs, shaking, out into the short corridor. The cats are black and white, ginger and gray, fat and starved. They sit on tables, on chairs, on tatami mats. One sits so still beside a lamp that it looks carved from wood. She wants her father, wants to go into his room and wake him, but three of them sit, barring his door. As one, they follow her with their eyes as Kara weaves through the living room. As one, they hiss. As one, they begin to follow, stalking her.

Bloody hell,” Hanson said, but McGarvey jammed the muzzle of the big silencer hard against the base of the man’s head, and they headed slowly to where the corridor turned right. At the corner, McGarvey suddenly shoved Hanson away and stepped to one side as Sandberger’s other bodyguard stationed at the elevator realized that something unexpected was happening, and he grabbed for his pistol. McGarvey fired two shots, both hitting Alphonse in the head, knocking him backward against the wall where he collapsed to the floor, leaving a bloody streak as he fell. Hanson spun on his heel and started to charge, when McGarvey turned and pointed the gun at the man’s head, and the contractor pulled up short. “Lie to me again and you’re dead.” “You’re going to kill me anyway,” Hanson said

The short-barrel MP9 submachine gun released a cluster of silenced rounds that ran up Novakovich’s body, some of the bullets sparking off the case of the hard drive. Novakovich cried out and crumpled backward with a crash. The gunman pivoted sharply at the corner of the passage and turned the muzzle of the MP9 toward Marc. His night vision goggles would easily render the space visible, and there was no cover at all. Marc took the offensive and attacked as the weapon came toward him. With the Glock in his fist, he brought the heavy butt of the pistol across, smashing it into the lenses of the gunman’s NVG rig with such violence that broken shards were driven into the shooter’s cheek and eyes. The gunman jerked the MP9’s trigger, but the shots went wide, chugging into the wall and the ceiling of the corridor as the magazine emptied

She is shown to a small, grey room on a corridor of small grey rooms. Kriminalkommissar Leonhard Winterberg sits down opposite her. He has short ginger hair and large watery brown eyes. His suit, she notices, is bespoke.

The interior spaces aboard the Norego were as dilapidated as her outside. The floors were chipped linoleum, the walls bare metal with large swatches of peeled paint, and the fluorescent lights mounted to the ceilings buzzed loudly. Several of them flickered at erratic intervals, casting the narrow corridor in stark shadow. Esteban led Ghami and Khatahani up a tight companionway with a loose railing and onto another short corridor. He opened the door to his office and gestured for the men to enter. The captain’s cabin could be seen through an open door on the opposite side of the office. The bed was unmade, and the sheets that spilled onto the floor were stained. A single dresser stood bolted to the wall, and the mirror above it had a jagged crack running from corner to corner. The office was a rectangular room with a single porthole so rimed with salt that only murky light came through. The walls were adorned with paintings of sad-eyed clowns done in garish colors on black velvet. Another door led to a tiny bathroom that was filthier than a public washroom in a Tehran slum. So many cigarettes had been smoked in the office that the stale smell seemed to coat everything, including the back of Ghami’s mouth. A lifelong smoker himself, even the Iranian naval officer was disgusted.

Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.

He backed me against a wall that was covered in peeling band posters, and I groaned as his hands roamed my body. His hard length crushed against me, and I wanted nothing more than to climb him like a tree. There were way too many clothes between us. Way, way too many. "Bathrooms," I murmured as his lips left mine and trailed down my neck, sucking and biting at my pale skin. "Come on," I grabbed his hand and basically dragged him down the short corridor that led to the grungy bathrooms. The accessible stall was occupied, much to my irritation, but Lucas read my mind and dragged me around the corner into a supply closet instead.

Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you.

Our kiss is gentle, and entirely too short when there are more voices in the corridor, followed by shouts. It’s enough for liquid desire to run through my veins. He tastes divine, sweet and shy, and fresh like grass.

vice president, and secretary of the treasury beam down from the walls. Visitors pass a sequence of photographs and paintings detailing the history of paper money in the United States and culminating with a life-size re-creation of President Lincoln signing the legislation authorizing the federal government to print money. At the end of the long corridor, visitors watch a short video on the history of paper money, after which guides divide them into small groups before they enter the work area. These small groups wend their way through the carefully marked visitors’ corridors past glass-enclosed galleries from which they can watch the sheets of dollars being printed, examined, cut, and stacked as the guides dispense a constant flow of facts about America’s money: The dollar is printed on textile paper made by the Crane Company using a mixture of 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen with a polyester security thread. The printing machines are made by Germans and Italians. Nearly half of the bills printed in a day are one-dollar notes, and 95 percent of the bills are used to replace worn-out bills. The average life span of a bill varies from eighteen months for the one-dollar note to an ancient nine years for a one-hundred-dollar note. A bill can be folded four thousand times before it tears.

moment.’ She smiled. ‘How old are you, Ned?’ ‘Nineteen.’ ‘You risked your life for me.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips briefly but tenderly. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Then she left the room. * MOST PEOPLE BATHED twice a year, in spring and autumn, but princesses were fastidious, and Elizabeth bathed more often. It was a major operation, with maidservants carrying big two-handled laundry tubs of hot water from the kitchen fire to her bedchamber, hurrying up the stairs before the water cooled. She took a bath the day after Swithin’s visit, as if to wash away her disgust. She had said no more about Swithin, after kissing Ned, but Ned thought he had won her trust. Ned knew he had made an enemy of a powerful earl, but he hoped it would not last: Swithin was quick-tempered and vengeful but, Ned thought, he had a short attention span. With luck he would nurse his grudge against Ned only until a better one came along. Sir William Cecil had arrived shortly after Swithin left, and next morning he got down to work with Ned. Cecil’s office was in the same wing as Elizabeth’s private suite. He sent Ned to Tom Parry’s office to fetch a ledger of expenditure for another house Elizabeth owned. Coming back with the heavy book in his hand, Ned walked along Elizabeth’s corridor, where the floorboards were puddled with water spilled by the maids. As he passed her suite, he saw that the door was open, and – stupidly – he glanced in. Elizabeth had just got out of her bath. The tub itself was screened off, but she had stepped across the room to pick up a large white linen sheet with which to dry herself. There should have been a maid waiting beside the tub holding

A typhoid epidemic in the ghetto killed more than a hundred people a day. The same wagons that delivered the mildewed bread were used to cart away the corpses. Coffins were in such short supply that the dead were wrapped in shrouds and stacked in corridors, and the crematorium had to cope with a thousand corpses a month.

He left home early, as he always did, six days a week, fifty weeks a year. A cautious breakfast, appropriate to a short round man aiming to stay in shape through his forties. A long walk down the carpeted corridors of a lakeside house appropriate to a man who earned a thousand dollars on each of those three hundred days he worked. A thumb on the button of the garage-door

Be the First to Offer the Olive Branch—or the Peace Pipe Ever felt as though you were in a stalemate with someone with whom you’ve had a dust-up? It’s very likely she would like to put the situation behind her too. In most cases, people avoid each other after a wrangling because they are both afraid the other person will either do him more injury, or reject his overtures of apology. So, dig out the olive branch—or a peace pipe—and start that long walk down the company corridors to deliver it. Sometimes you don’t even need to say anything. Getting things back on track with someone might be as simple as dropping off a can of their favorite soda—without any pomp or circumstance. In short, find a way either directly or indirectly—depending on how bad the dustup was—to be the first to mend fences. Your efforts will very likely be rewarded.

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The metaphorical structuring of concepts is necessarily partial and is reflected in the lexicon of the language, including the phrasal lexicon, which contains fixed-form expressions such as "to be without foundation." Because concepts are metaphorically structured in a systematic way, e.g., THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, it is possible for us to use expressions (construct, foundation) from one domain (BUILDINGS) to talk about corresponding concepts in the metaphorically defined domain (THEORIES). What foundation, for example, means in the metaphorically defined domain (THEORY) will depend on the details of how the metaphorical concept THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS iS used to structure the concept THEORY. The parts of the concept BUILDING that are used to structure the concept THEORY are the foundation and the outer shell. The roof, internal rooms, staircases, and hallways are parts of a building not used as part of the concept THEORY. Thus the metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS has a "used" part (foundation and outer shell) and an "unused" part (rooms, staircases, etc.). Expressions such as construct and foundation are instances of the used part of such a metaphorical concept and are part of our ordinary literal language about theories. But what of the linguistic expressions that reflect the "unused" part of a metaphor like THEORIES ARE BUILD-INGS? Here are four examples: • His theory has thousands of little rooms and long, winding corridors. • His theories are Bauhaus in their pseudofunctional simplicity. • He prefers massive Gothic theories covered with gargoyles. Complex theories usually have problems with the plumbing. These sentences fall outside the domain of normal literal language and are part of what is usually called "figurative" or "imaginative" language. Thus, literal expressions ("He has constructed a theory") and imaginative expressions ("His theory is covered with gargoyles") can be instances of the same general metaphor (THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS). Here we can distinguish three different subspecies of imaginative (or nonliteral) metaphor: • extensions of the used part of a metaphor, e.g., "These facts are the bricks and mortar of my theory." Here the outer shell of the building is referred to, whereas the THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS metaphor stops short of mentioning the materials used. • instances of the unused part of the literal metaphor, e.g., "His theory has thousands of little rooms and long, winding corridors." • instances of novel metaphor, that is, a metaphor not used to structure part of our normal conceptual system but as a new way of thinking about something, e.g., "Classical theories are patriarchs who father many children, most of whom fight incessantly." Each of these subspecies lies outside the used part of a metaphorical concept that structures our normal conceptual system.