Showdown Quotes

Born of Black and White, Eaten with worms, I'm a Saint, a Sinner, a Siren of the Word, The Circle knows me, the rest just wanna trip on Grace Juice, Baby Showdown at midnight

Life is a conjurer’s trick that may become a playground for multifarious side-splitting acts; sometimes a showdown for a series of torturous, off the wall questions or often a terrain for tragic miscalculations. ("Wheeling and dealing." )

The four rules of writing... 1. Write to discover. 2. There is no greater discovery than love. 3. All love comes from the Creator. 4. Write what you will.

After facing the relentless pandemic showdowns, many long for the glow of a new dawn and crave bright life stories with liberating slapsticks to shatter silenced desolation and pent-up rage, restoring self-value and broken identity.

Common sense is our seventh sense that is guiding our personality. It embraces all other secured senses growing in the shadow of humbleness without being dissipated by disputes, showdowns, or down-right self-righteousness. ("Wit of the staircase")

When we start raising different inconsistent truths, life may tip into bewilderment and the brain may go haywire. The confrontation between what is, not is, and maybe is, might embed an enduring showdown, harboring an intense apprehension, and bring us sometimes unwittingly to our knees ("The hidden sides of his character" )

Humans are suspicious and jealous creatures. When they see something perfect, they want to find a flaw.

Live to discover, as long as discovery leads to a love that comes from the Creator... writing was the mirror to life.

I BELIEVE!!!!!!!" - Johnny

If you force me to pick one color, it'd be Black... It covers up the things inside of me that I don't want to be known. Well, for the same reason, black is the color I hate, too...

i mean talk about decadence," he declared, "how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world. Old Freud himself could never've dreamed up a more devoted bunch of disciples than the population of the United States - isn't that right? Our whole damn culture is geared to it; it's the new religion; it's everybody's intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit. And for all that, look what happens when a man really does blow his top. Call the Troopers, get him out of sight quick, hustle him off and lock him up before he wakes the neighbors. Christ's sake, when it comes to any kind of showdown we're still in the Middle Ages. It's as if everybody'd made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality -- and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened.

You act like they're especially unholy or something.Are you trying to tell me that in the final showdown between evil and good, the weapons of choice will be guns and..cats?

I catch fire and find the reserves of courage and assertiveness to speak up. When that happens I get quite carried away. My blood gets hot my brow wet I become unbearably and unconscionably sarcastic and bellicose I am girded for a total showdown.

I shall never be a dangerous woman; I can make men love, but I cannot make them suffer. It would be much better the other way about. I have seen women able to make men suffer who could not make them love. The more they suffered the more they hung around for a showdown. In the end they did better than I, for it is strange what people will do to be able to suffer and say to themselves, in the night, “I have suffered, I have lived indeed.

Tarver,” she whispers, her eyes on my face. “There’ll be cameras all the time. More questions. Everyone will want to hear your story. Your life will be different, no matter how far from Corinth we go.” A flashlight flickers through the trees, broken and jagged as it shines past the trunks. The light glances off her face, illuminating her eyes for a brief, brilliant moment. I step closer. “I don’t care.” “My father will try to—” She swallows, then lifts her chin, mouth firming to a straight, determined line. “No. I’ll figure out a way to handle him.” I can’t help but grin down at her, this steely assurance, my Lilac through and through. “I’d pay to see that showdown.

Love can only be found in freedom of choice. And for choice to exist, there must be an alternative to choose. Something as compelling as love.

Successful control means achieving a balance and avoiding a showdown where all-out force would be necessary.

anyone who has crammed for a school exam knows how easy it is to misquote in a showdown.

When it comes to a showdown between the shepherd and the wolf, the shepherd will always prevail. The wolf's speed, brute strength and cunning may give him a brief advantage, but in the end, the shepherd's genius and organisation will triumph every time. Be therefore wary off the Shepard, more than of the wolf.

The United States is baiting China and Russia, and the final nail in the coffin will be Iran, which is, of course, the main target of Israel. We have allowed China to increase their military strength and Russia to recover from Sovietization, to give them a false sense of bravado, this will create an all together faster demise for them. We’re like the sharp shooter daring the noob to pick up the gun, and when they try, it’s bang bang. The coming war will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that’s us folks. This is why the EU is in such a hurry to form a complete superstate because they know what is coming, and to survive, Europe will have to be one whole cohesive state. Their urgency tells me that they know full well that the big showdown is upon us. O how I have dreamed of this delightful moment.

Death stalked toward us on padded feet.        And it was not alone.

Love can only be found in freedom of choice.

While the morality of slavery alone might have eventually led to a showdown, it was America’s sprawling growth that made the issue explosive.

Armageddon (the final battle between good and evil; the word is taken from a plain near the Israeli city of Megiddo where the showdown is supposed to take place).

Some phrases just have a nice ring to them, y'know? Like, "The water sprite goes flowing down the river." Or, "Ahh, spring." "It's totally autumn." "Drop dead." "Stiff roundhouse kick." Or, "Thick soy broth." See?

It's time to grow uo. You might want some showdown like in the storybooks, but this is not a storybook. This is war. And I can tell you, as someone who watched our families blown out an air lock with my own eyes, war doesn't have a happy ending. Not for anyone.

We’ve had the works. Indy’s kidnappings and murder. Jet’s kidnappings and rape attempt. Roxie’s kidnapping and stalking. Car bombs. Grenades. Knife fights. Female wrestling at Chinese restaurants. Mayhem at a haunted house. Gunshots at a strip club. Showdowns at society parties. Now we got a vigilante on our hands.

Everything was really a story, penned or thought or acted out at some time by someone.

Chapter 10: Showdown

Death was here. The showdown wouldn't occur with the darkness of Halloween. It had come at dawn, and it bathed them in blood.

In that autumn of 1957, eight months before the real horrors began and twenty-eight years before the final showdown, Stuttering Bill was ten years old.

She used to write all the time,' Elizabeth explained, 'before she lost all that weight. Remember? When she was the butt of everyone’s jokes instead of the girl all the boys want to date?

the climax of their journey is a showdown with IT, the cold and calculating disembodied intelligence that has cast a black shadow over the universe in its quest to make everyone behave and believe the same.

Unlike an antibody, a gunslinging sheriff itching for a showdown with a gang of molecular criminals in the center of town, a T cell is the gumshoe detective going door to door to look for perpetrators hiding inside.

The Great Magician is very clear when he says there will always be trouble in the world. As for any human today, in my book, that is a call to action. That’s a call to our own inner hero. That hero is inside all of us whether we be fat, skinny, tall, short, black, white, olive, or yellow. We all have the capacity to be heroes in this life.

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

I felt like the sheriff in an old Western, gearing up for a showdown at high noon, only to find out the black-hat outlaw accidentally fell off his horse and died from a concussion on his way to the gunfight. No satisfaction, no closure.

As I look through my box of photos, my eyes well up with tears as I hold in front of me, the one of my brother Spence when he was five years old. He looks so cute in his cowboy outfit, drawing his toy pistols as if he were having a showdown with nasty outlaws.

Asking for help in this manner, after you’ve already been engaged in a dialogue, is an incredibly powerful negotiating technique for transforming encounters from confrontational showdowns into joint problem-solving sessions. And calibrated questions are the best tool.

If the plot is a machine that allows you to get from set piece to set piece, and the set pieces are things without which the reader or the viewer would feel cheated, then, whatever it is, it’s genre. If the plot exists to get you from the lone cowboy riding into town to the first gunfight to the cattle rustling to the showdown, then it’s a Western. If those are simply things that happen on the way, and the plot encompasses them, can do without them, doesn’t actually care if they are in there or not, then it’s a novel set in the old West.

A showdown meant war. The whole Positive Control system really depended on equipment that could never really be tested until the time came for its first use, and because of this nobody could ever really know in advance whether or not it would work right. The Fail-Safe machines could be truly tested only once: the single time they were used.

Iran also continues to provide seemingly “limitless support” to the Hezbollah terror organization in Lebanon. In 2006,

in damages to the families of the American victims. Yet

They couldn’t be any different from each other. One is an evil megalomaniac, and the other is the nicest and sweetest girl on the whole planet.

Yeah, I've seen you with Snoopy, you know,” Min said, a hint of annoyance in her voice. "You two seem to be spending a lot of time together.

Don’t do this,” I said. “Please don’t do this, Min.

You mean the one battling the kid ninja with his own kid ninja?” She asked.

Min set her tray down on the table next to me. "Do you want to talk about it?" She asked.

How was she going to respond? She leaned over, and kissed me on my left cheek.

Would you want to be an evil ninja or a good ninja?

Min stood and picked up her lunch tray. "Maybe I should go.

She shrugged nonchalantly. "Chores," she said. "The important thing is that we're here now. Have you seen anything suspicious?

We all know what we have to do what the inkling provokes us. We have to do the right thing. We have to make that extra push out of bed, or off the sofa. We must just do it.

Complacency leads to loss. Modesty brings profit.

Whenever that happened, Joey clung to Troy's hand, willing him to know that Riker meant nothing. Well, maybe not nothing. He'd given Joey a valuable gift; he'd taught him what love wasn't. During their showdown in the men's room, it had dawned on Joey what love was. Love took long walks, spent time together talking about nothing. It gave smiles, and hugs, and trips to the beach when it really didn't want to go, because it wanted to share a special place with someone else. Love gave away possessions it valued, knowing the receiver valued them more. Love admitted being wrong, said it was sorry, and did whatever it took to make things right. It called in favors and put a town on the map to make life better for one person who lived there. Love was Troy.

And for all that, look what happens when a man really does blow his top. Call the Troopers, get him out of sight quick, hustle him off and lock him up before he wakes the neighbors. Christ's sake, when it comes to any kind of a showdown we're still in the Middle Ages. It's as if everybody'd made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality—Daddy's a great man because he makes a living, Mummy's a great woman because she's stuck by Daddy all these years—and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened.

So once the zookeeper realized it was the monkeys who stole the bananas, he knew there was only one way he'd be able to get them back." "How?" I whispered. My throat was so sore. "Don't talk. He had to beat them in shuffleboard, of course." "What?" "I said don't talk. Monkeys love shuffleboard." He used a page from a homework assignment he'd failed and a stack of quarters to make a shuffleboard court. I watched the monkeys and the zookeepers have their showdown while I sipped the last of my applejuice. "Need more?" Graham asked me without looking up, when my straw skidded against the dry bottom of the box. "Uh uh." "You're supposed to drink juice." "I just drank some." "More, though." I shook my head. "Drink more juice or the monkeys are going to kill you. The only thing they love more than shuffleboard is beating up dehydrated sick boys.

Ohio was an apt forum for this showdown. By 2016, 2.3 million people in the state—approximately 20 percent of the total population—received a prescription for opioids. Half of the children who were in foster care across the state had opioid-addicted parents. People were dying from overdoses at such a rate that local coroners had run out of room in which to store all the bodies and were forced to seek makeshift alternatives.

Tigers, indeed all animals, do not favour violence as a means of settling scores. When animals fight, it is with the intent to kill and with the understanding that they may be killed. A clash is costly. And so animals have a full system of cautionary signals designed to avoid a showdown, and they are quick to back down when they feel they can. Rarely will a tiger attack a fellow predator without warning .... It will appraise the situation. If it decides there is no threat, it will turn away....

He was not up to the lecture he’d get from Ben, and he couldn’t call Ben without telling him he was headed to a midnight showdown with Anderson Layne. Not that Kitty wouldn’t lecture him, but the lecture would somehow be easier to take from her. Because you don’t have a lifetime of history with Kitty. When Kitty says you’re being reckless, you tell yourself she doesn’t know what she’s talking about and that she’s just being shrill. When Ben says you’re being reckless, you can’t ignore him because he knows you very, very well. And he’s usually right.

None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

There's no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed -- and pretty dramatically -- is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into political parties based on their ideological differences.

It wasn’t until Clay felt the sand under his talons and heard the roaring of the dragons in the stands that he realized he hadn’t quite thought this plan through. He had no idea what his fighting skills would be like against an unknown dragon. His mind went blank as the SkyWing guards dropped a hissing IceWing onto the ground opposite him. Did he know anything about IceWings? The sun was high in the sky, and it was much warmer in the arena than up on their prison spires. Clay could see beads of silvery liquid dripping through the IceWing’s glacier-blue scales. Above them, Queen Scarlet smirked from her balcony, with Glory sleeping serenely beside her. The same SkyWing announcer from the day before strutted to the center of the arena and bellowed at the crowd. “After last month’s battle with Blaze’s army, our queen’s dungeons were stuffed with IceWing prisoners of war. Only nine have survived. After two wins, I give you — Fjord of the IceWings!” Fjord lashed his tail and snarled at Clay. “And in this corner, an unusual case — a MudWing, but not one of our allies. No, this dragonet was found hiding under our mountains, protected by the Talons of Peace. Is he one of the dragonets of destiny? Not if he loses this battle!” A murmur of laughter rippled around the seats, but in the closest faces Clay could see expressions of uneasiness and, he thought, concern. He spotted a large MudWing in one of the balconies, frowning down at him. Try to stop this, Clay thought at him, praying hard. Do something! I’m one of you! But the MudWing shifted his gaze away, as if he didn’t want to watch but couldn’t afford to leave. The SkyWing announcer went on. “If these prophesied dragonets are as wonderful and legendary as they’re supposed to be, this should be a showdown to remember. I hope you’re prepared to impress us, dragon of the mud. I present to you … Clay of the MudWings! Claws up, teeth ready! Fight!” Clay

That fear was a major flaw in our negotiating mindset. There is some information that you can only get through direct, extended interactions with your counterpart. We also needed new ways to get things without asking for them. We needed to finesse making an “ask” with something more sophisticated than closed-ended questions with their yes-no dynamic. That’s when I realized that what we had been doing wasn’t communication; it was verbal flexing. We wanted them to see things our way and they wanted us to see it their way. If you let this dynamic loose in the real world, negotiation breaks down and tensions flare. That whole ethos permeated everything the FBI was doing. Everything was a showdown. And it didn’t work.

Since the dawn of time, nearly every man (and I'd wager to guess most women) has, at his most visceral level, secretly desired for one thing - to be standing triumphantly atop a heaping pile of his slain enemies, holding a gigantic axe aloft while some unbelievably attractive member of whatever gender he's attracted to desperately clutches his leg like it's the last life raft on the HMS Titanic.

In recent years a smaller share of young adults has been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking such trends in 1948. So it's not surprising that this generation of youthful protesters has a different focus for their grievances: the economy, stupid. But notice the targets they've chosen to demonize. It's all about class, not age. It's 1% versus 99%, not young versus old. Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Leisure World.

We live in the society of the capitalist spectacle, mate, the more spectacular the better. Build it and they will come, as that old baseball movie says. We worship the event, the occasion, the unmissable show. We want Super Sunday, the Thriller in Manila, the showdown of the century…the things that bring the highest profits for the capitalist organisers. If you’re not at the event, you’re nobody. Life has passed you by. That’s the tyranny of the spectacle. Yet, if you think about it, the spectacle is the biggest joke of all – because all the people at the event are desperate not to be losers. Who wants to be in a collection of people fleeing from fear of failure? Losers and the spectacle go together, the winners performing and the losers watching. The spectacle is how losers numb the pain, how they crave to be part of something, on the winning side for once. The LLN have decided to harness the society of the spectacle too, but not the capitalist version where small groups perform to large groups and get paid a fortune. Instead, the LLN offer the spectacle of life. And Revolution is the greatest spectacle of all.

Leonardo da Vinci, was brought to the Vatican in 1513 by the new pope, Leo X, and given a list of commissions to create for the greater glory of the pope and his family. After three years of living in the papal palace and exploring Rome, the great Leonardo had produced almost nothing. The furious Pope Leo decided to have a surprise showdown with the capricious artist and intimidate him into completing some of his commissions. In the middle of the night, surrounded by several imposing Swiss Guardsmen, the pope burst through the door to Leonardo’s private palace chambers, thinking to shake him out of a sound sleep. Instead, he was horrified to find Leonardo wide awake, with a pair of grave robbers, in the midst of dissecting a freshly stolen corpse—right under the pope’s own roof. Pope Leo let out a nonregal scream and had the Swiss soldiers immediately pack up Leonardo’s belongings and throw them and the divine Leonardo himself outside the fortress wall of the Vatican, never to return again. Shortly afterward, Leonardo decided it was probably healthier to get out of Italy and move to France, where he spent the rest of his days. This, by the way, is why the great Italian genius’s most famous oil paintings, including the Mona Lisa, are all in Paris, in the Louvre museum.

While the above term may seem too gimmicky for a subheading in an official file, it’s truly the best word to describe the strange relationship dynamic between Tam and Keefe Sencen. The two boys are decidedly not friends—in fact, reports suggest they disliked each other almost immediately (and the nicknames they use for each other range from the clever and witty to downright mean-spirited). Some suspect it’s because Tam violated Keefe’s privacy and read Keefe’s shadowvapor without his permission when they first met, while others would argue it’s because Keefe refused to have his shadowvapor read as though he had something to hide. Others still might suggest it’s actually because the two have quite a bit in common—but prefer to think of themselves as uniquely alone in their challenges and principles. Whatever the cause, it’s doubtful that Tam and Keefe will ever truly be friends. But it’s important to note that they have never appeared to truly be enemies, either—a fact that became increasingly vital when Tam was taken by the Neverseen and Keefe’s mom (Lady Gisela) forced him to use his ability on her son. Had there been true ill will between the boys, Tam wouldn’t have attempted to warn Keefe about what his mom was planning—and Keefe would’ve tried to harm Tam in their final showdown.

In a 1997 showdown billed as the final battle for supremacy between natural and artificial intelligence, IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue evaluated two hundred million positions per second. That is a tiny fraction of possible chess positions—the number of possible game sequences is more than atoms in the observable universe—but plenty enough to beat the best human. According to Kasparov, “Today the free chess app on your mobile phone is stronger than me.” He is not being rhetorical. “Anything we can do, and we know how to do it, machines will do it better,” he said at a recent lecture. “If we can codify it, and pass it to computers, they will do it better.” Still, losing to Deep Blue gave him an idea. In playing computers, he recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses. There is a saying that “chess is 99 percent tactics.” Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.

Whatever happened between you and Keefe yesterday—and I know something happened, so there’s no point trying to deny it—are you going to talk to him about it? And I mean really talk to him and tell him how you feel?” Sophie twisted free. “I don’t—” “Yes, you do,” Edaline insisted. “You don’t even know what I was going to say!” Edaline smiled. “Pretty sure I can guess. And I understand the instinct to hide these kinds of feelings—sometimes even from ourselves. But… I know they’re there. And not just for you.” She pointed to Sophie’s new stuffed elf as evidence—and Sophie could’ve sworn its little smile turned a bit smug. “I’m definitely not trying to tell you what to do or who to choose or put any pressure on you in any way,” Edaline assured her. “I also know that what I’m asking you to do isn’t easy. Having an open conversation about feelings with someone can be really scary. Especially when they’re also your friend. It’s natural to be afraid of getting hurt—or of ruining all the good things you already have. And I can’t guarantee that won’t happen. But”—she reached for Sophie’s arms again—“it’s still super important to have that conversation. Because it’s way too easy to jump to the wrong conclusion. So just… talk to him, okay? I’m not saying right this moment. But don’t let it go too long, either. And I know you’re going to tell me you have all these huge things going on and you need to focus on them, but… this is important. I can tell Keefe is important to you. So just… do what you always do when you’re getting ready to face some epic showdown with the Neverseen.” “You’re comparing this to a battle?” Sophie had to ask. “Why not? Sometimes relationships feel like that. So put your shields up if you need to. But don’t let that stop you from charging headfirst into the unknown. Be bold. Be brave. Be honest. And be you. You’re Sophie Foster. I know you can do this!

Netanyahu then explained to me why the stakes were so high. The Iranian leaders, he said, “want to concentrate on completing their nuclear program because once they have that, then they could threaten the West in ways that are unimaginable today. They could take over the Persian Gulf on all its sides and take control of the oil reserves of the world. They could topple Saudi Arabia and Jordan in short order and, of course, Iraq. All your internal debates in America on [the future of] Iraq would be irrelevant because nuclear-armed Iran would subordinate Iraq in two seconds. Then they would threaten to create a second Holocaust in Israel and proceed on their idea of building a global empire, producing twenty-five atomic bombs a year—250 bombs in a decade—with missiles that they are already working on [and that they want to develop] to reach the eastern seaboard of the United States. Everything else pales in comparison to this development. This has to be stopped, for the sake of the world, not only for the sake of Israel.

The tactical situation seems simple enough. Thanks to Marx’s prophecy, the Communists knew for certain that misery must soon increase. They also knew that the party could not win the confidence of the workers without fighting for them, and with them, for an improvement of their lot. These two fundamental assumptions clearly determined the principles of their general tactics. Make the workers demand their share, back them up in every particular episode in their unceasing fight for bread and shelter. Fight with them tenaciously for the fulfilment of their practical demands, whether economic or political. Thus you will win their confidence. At the same time, the workers will learn that it is impossible for them to better their lot by these petty fights, and that nothing short of a wholesale revolution can bring about an improvement. For all these petty fights are bound to be unsuccessful; we know from Marx that the capitalists simply cannot continue to compromise and that, ultimately, misery must increase. Accordingly, the only result—but a valuable one—of the workers’ daily fight against their oppressors is an increase in their class consciousness; it is that feeling of unity which can be won only in battle, together with a desperate knowledge that only revolution can help them in their misery. When this stage is reached, then the hour has struck for the final show-down. This is the theory and the Communists acted accordingly. At first they support the workers in their fight to improve their lot. But, contrary to all expectations and prophecies, the fight is successful. The demands are granted. Obviously, the reason is that they had been too modest. Therefore one must demand more. But the demands are granted again44. And as misery decreases, the workers become less embittered, more ready to bargain for wages than to plot for revolution. Now the Communists find that their policy must be reversed. Something must be done to bring the law of increasing misery into operation. For instance, colonial unrest must be stirred up (even where there is no chance of a successful revolution), and with the general purpose of counteracting the bourgeoisification of the workers, a policy fomenting catastrophes of all sorts must be adopted. But this new policy destroys the confidence of the workers. The Communists lose their members, with the exception of those who are inexperienced in real political fights. They lose exactly those whom they describe as the ‘vanguard of the working class’; their tacitly implied principle: ‘The worse things are, the better they are, since misery must precipitate revolution’, makes the workers suspicious—the better the application of this principle, the worse are the suspicions entertained by the workers. For they are realists; to obtain their confidence, one must work to improve their lot. Thus the policy must be reversed again: one is forced to fight for the immediate betterment of the workers’ lot and to hope at the same time for the opposite. With this, the ‘inner contradictions’ of the theory produce the last stage of confusion. It is the stage when it is hard to know who is the traitor, since treachery may be faithfulness and faithfulness treachery. It is the stage when those who followed the party not simply because it appeared to them (rightly, I am afraid) as the only vigorous movement with humanitarian ends, but especially because it was a movement based on a scientific theory, must either leave it, or sacrifice their intellectual integrity; for they must now learn to believe blindly in some authority. Ultimately, they must become mystics—hostile to reasonable argument. It seems that it is not only capitalism which is labouring under inner contradictions that threaten to bring about its downfall …

Our Hero Logan

beaten he was almost unrecognizable.

you exactly what he promised Moses: “I will be with you.”5 A powerful promise, especially when you are facing the showdown of a lifetime.

Reading Group Guide  1.   The river town of Hobnob, Mississippi, is in danger of flooding. To offset the risk, the townspeople were offered the chance to relocate in exchange for money. Some people jumped at the opportunity (the Flooders); others (the Stickers) refused to leave, so the deal fell through. If you lived in Hobnob, which choice would you make and why? If you’d lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina, would you have fled the storm or stayed to protect your house? Did the two floods remind you of each other in terms of official government response or media coverage?  2.   How are the circumstances during the Prohibition era (laws against consuming or selling alcohol, underground businesses that make and sell booze on the black market, corruption in the government and in law enforcement) similar to what’s happening today (the fight to legalize and tax marijuana, the fallout of the drug war in countries like Mexico and Colombia, jails filled with drug abusers)? How are the circumstances different? Do you identify with the bootleggers or the prohibitionists in the novel? What is your stance on the issue today?  3.   The novel is written in third person from two different perspectives—Ingersoll’s and Dixie Clay’s—in alternating chapters. How do you think this approach adds to or detracts from the story? Are you a fan of books written from multiple perspectives, or do you prefer one character to tell his/her side of the story?  4.   The Tilted World is written by two authors. Do you think it reads differently than a book written by only one? Do you think you could coauthor a novel with a loved one? Did you try to guess which author wrote different passages?  5.   Language and dialect play an important role in the book. Do you think the southern dialect is rendered successfully? How about the authors’ use of similes (“wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues”; “Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin.”). Do they provide necessary context or flavor?  6.   At the end of Chapter 5, when Jesse, Ham, and Ingersoll first meet, Ingersoll realizes that Jesse has been drinking water the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Of course, Ham and Ingersoll are both drunk from all the moonshine. How does this discovery set the stage for what happens in the latter half of the book?  7.   Ingersoll grew up an orphan. In what ways do you think that independence informed his character? His choices throughout the novel? Dixie Clay also became independent, after marrying Jesse and becoming ostracized from friends and family. Later, after Ingersoll rescues her, she reflects, “For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. . . . But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.” Are love and independence mutually exclusive? How did the arrival of Willy prepare these characters for the changes they’d have to undergo to be ready for each other?  8.   Dixie Clay becomes a bootlegger not because she loves booze or money but because she needs something to occupy her time. It’s true, however, that she’s not only breaking the law but participating in a system that perpetrates violence. Do you think there were better choices she could have made? Consider the scene at the beginning of the novel, when there’s a showdown between Jesse and two revenuers interested in making an arrest. Dixie Clay intercepts the arrest, pretending to be a posse of gunslingers protecting Jesse and the still. Given what you find out about Jesse—his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his womanizing—do you think she made the right choice? If you were in Dixie Clay’s shoes, what would you have done?  9.   When Ham learns that Ingersoll abandoned his post at the levee to help Dixie Clay, he feels not only that Ingersoll acted

Once you get far enough along in life, you’re likely to be struck by the distance between the views in front of you and the ones you can still dimly make out in your rear-view mirror. I turn 65 this year. The America of my childhood—with its expanding middle class, secure jobs, intact nuclear families, devout believers, distinct gender roles, polite politics, consensus-building media—is nothing like the country my year-old granddaughter will inherit.

In the shout-fest that passes for public discourse these days, politicians and pundits frequently claim to speak for the public.

The city of Gath was the earliest Philistine settlement in Canaan. It had a large urban populace on one hundred and twenty-five square miles of land. As the furthest inland stronghold, nearest the Valley of the Terebinth, it maintained a strong siege system that made it impregnable to hostile forces. The walls were thirty feet high, surrounded by a man-made siege trench and an earthen embankment called a “berm” that made approach to the walls by besiegers extremely difficult. It was guarded by a threefold entrance gate to the city, watched over by a regiment of Gittite warriors. All this fortification would be useless against the six figures who rode their horses to the city entrance. They would not be besieging the walls, and they would not be fighting the army of Gittites. They were simply nomadic travelers on a personal quest. They did not hide themselves, because they were not recognizable to any human inhabitants. They were archangels. Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, Saraqael, Raguel, and Remiel walked their horses through the large Phoenician carved gates and into the city. They made no attempt to disguise themselves from the gods of the Philistines because they wanted the gods to know they had arrived. They wanted a showdown.

She tapped her iPhone and showed me the screen. An aerial photograph looked down over a sprawling, dusty desert ranch. I half expected to see a tumbleweed rolling down the main thoroughfare, or maybe a couple of cowboys out for a high noon showdown.

He wasn't tough. A tough man has to win and lose. He has to come up after being knocked down, he has to have taken a few beatings, and know what it means to win the hard way. Anybody, he said dryly, can knock a man down. When you've been knocked down at least three times yourself, and then got up and floored the other man, then you can figure you're a tough hombre.

The Razorbacks would play Duke, the NCAA champs in 1991 and 1992. Duke had a host of great players, but their star was Grant Hill, a consensus pick for national Player of the Year honors. The day before the championship, Richardson grew pensive. He was reasonably proud of his accomplishments, but something was nagging him. Richardson had been the underdog so long that despite his team’s yearlong national ranking, he still felt dispossessed. He found himself pondering one of Arkansas’s little-used substitutes, a senior named Ken Biley. Biley was an undersized post player who was raised in Pine Bluff. Neither of his parents had the opportunity to go to college, but every one of his fifteen siblings did, and nearly all graduated. “I had already learned that everybody has to play his role,” Biley says of his upbringing. As a freshman and sophomore, Biley saw some court time and even started a couple of games, but his playing time later evaporated and he lost faith. “Everyone wants to play, and when you don’t you get discouraged,” he says. On two occasions, he sat down with his coach and asked what he could do to earn a more important role. “I never demanded anything,” Biley says, “and he told me exactly what I needed to do, but we had so many good players ahead of me. Corliss Williamson, for one.” Nearly every coach, under the pressure of a championship showdown, reverts to the basic strategies that got the team into the finals. But Richardson couldn’t stop thinking about Biley, and what a selfless worker he had been for four years. The day before the championship game against Duke, at the conclusion of practice, Richardson pulled Biley aside. Biley had hardly played in the first five playoff games leading up to the NCAA title match—a total of four minutes. “I’ve watched how your career has progressed, and how you’ve handled not getting to play,” Richardson began. “I appreciate the leadership you’ve been showing and I want to reward you, as a senior.” “Thanks coach,” Biley said. He was unprepared for what came next. “You’re starting tomorrow against Duke,” Richardson said. “And you’re guarding Grant Hill.” Biley was speechless. Then overcome with emotion. “I was shocked, freaked out!” Biley says. “I hadn’t played much for two years. I just could not believe it.” Biley had plenty of time to think about Grant Hill. “I was a nervous wreck, like you’d expect,” he says. He had a restless night—he stared at the ceiling, sat on the edge of his bed, then flopped around trying to sleep. Richardson had disdained book coaches for years. Now he was throwing the book in the trash by starting a benchwarmer in the NCAA championship game.

besieged

We’re heading for a world showdown, a worldwide confrontation. If we think we can solve our problems without God, then we’re living in a fool’s paradise.

stock runnin’ on the plains south of the Platte all the way

Scaredy Cat Do you think if a scaredy cat met a pussy they'll have a show-down, a stand-off or will they'll both retreat to snack on Purina Friskies Cat Food Pate?

The urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring. In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail.

It's time for a showdown.

She hurried to the front door, opened it, and stepped onto the porch. Dark cumulus clouds hovered low over the town, and a warm wind whipped through the trees, carrying stray leaves and dust through the street.

should. I learned a long time ago to never close my mind to possibilities. Every time I did it made a fool of me.

writes Michael Barone, author of a 2013 book on the impact of immigrants on politics.1

Time for a showdown with her mutinous brewmaster. She'd tried nice. She'd tried all business. She'd tried cajoling. Now, it was time to try bitch with big brass balls.

Becks had a pistol in either hand, making her look like an illustration from some fucked-up pre-Rising horror/Western. Showdown at the Decay Corral or something.

South of him, and below the Rim, Laredo

Recent developments, such as the tussle between the PAC and the PPP in Lyari, the showdown between the MQM and Muhammad Khan in Altaf Nagar or the eviction of the ANP from its former strongholds at the hands of the Taliban unequivocally demonstrated that mainstream political parties have lost some ground to a new breed of de facto sovereigns in several parts of the city. A growing number of stakeholders, all of whom have formidable economic and military resources, are determined to defend their sense of entitlement to the city.

+ Love + is like an old Wild West film Only you come to realize that You were always in the showdown + with yourself + And as the credits roll, It’s just your name over and over and over, you rub your eyes, Shake it off, smash the tv! Get back on your horse ~ ride into the sunset Time to exchange the scripted For the welcome unknown

In attacking populism, the object is not merely to resist President Donald Trump, the nation’s thinkers say. Nor is the conflict of our times some grand showdown of Left and Right. Questions like that, they tell us, were settled long ago when the Soviet Union collapsed. No, the political face-off of today is something different: it pits the center against the periphery, the competent insider against the disgruntled sorehead. In this conflict, the side of right is supposed to be obvious. Ordinary people are agitated, everyone knows this, but the ones whose well-being must concern us most are the elites whom the people threaten to topple.

tannoy

This was a showdown between things that had the shape of men, but weren’t men.