Side Quest Quotes

Humility is my table, respect is my garment, empathy is my food and curiosity is my drink. As for love, it has a thousand names and is by my side at every window.

I have been finding treasures in places I did not want to search. I have been hearing wisdom from tongues I did not want to listen. I have been finding beauty where I did not want to look. And I have learned so much from journeys I did not want to take. Forgive me, O Gracious One; for I have been closing my ears and eyes for too long. I have learned that miracles are only called miracles because they are often witnessed by only those who can can see through all of life's illusions. I am ready to see what really exists on other side, what exists behind the blinds, and taste all the ugly fruit instead of all that looks right, plump and ripe.

Rather than loitering around, day by day, some prefer to crawl out of the shadow of their squirrel cage and try badly to cuddle up to a brighter side of life by searching out some wiggle room to empower their feeble stance, expecting to eke out some soothing moments of relish and buoyancy in the wings of their expectant quest. ( "Loss of urban benchmarks" )

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don't manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn't find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen.

On the way out to the car, Philip turns to me. “How could you be so stupid? I shrug, stung in spite of myself. “I thought I grew out of it.” Philip pulls out his key fob and presses the remote to unlock his Mercedes. I slide into the passenger side, brushing coffee cups off the seat and onto the floor mat, where crumpled printouts from MapQuest soak up any spilled liquid. “I hope you mean sleepwalking,” Philip says, “since you obviously didn’t grow out of stupid.

I felt like we were right at that place where you go from being regular friends to help-you-move-dead-bodies friends but we weren’t quite there yet, like we needed to do one more side quest together and earn a few more mutual approval points and then it would be something a little more comfortable, but we hadn’t figured out our friendship dynamic entirely.

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - evetually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you.

I have spent a lifetime looking for remedies to all manner of life's problems -- personal, social, political, global. I am deeply suspicious of those who offer simple solutions and statements of absolute certainty or who claim full possession of the truth. Yet I have grown equally skeptical of those who suggest that all is too nuanced and complex for us to learn any lessons, that there are so many sides to every thing that we can pursue knowledge every day of our lives and still know nothing for sure. I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not a first and not without ever relenting in our efforts to learn more. This is because the goal we seek, and the good we hope for, comes not as some final reward but as the hidden companion to our quest. It is not what we find, but the reason we cannot stop looking and striving, that tells us why we are here.

Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery

Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.

I’m guided by instinct and determination right now. It’s like I’m on a dark and twisted adventure run, and while the rules and regulations are vague, the quests are obvious.

I’m not procrastinating!” Ross called back, finishing attaching a very scary looking headdress onto a normally shy elf. “I’m doing side quests!

(Is this a side quest or a main quest? the voice in his head ponders)

Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops; but one small black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play, and curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed with fragrant drowsy herbs.

(Meli, are you sure these "humans" are on our side?) (No ... but at least they are not Khieevi.) (That is beginning to seem less and less of a recommendation. Like us in form, perhaps, but hardly in ethics.) (That may not be entirely a bad thing. If they meet their friends with weapons in both hands, what do you suppose they do to their enemies?)

In philosophy, “you’re either with us or against us” is considered a false dichotomy or a false dilemma. It’s a move to force people to take sides. If other alternatives exist (and they almost always do), then that statement is factually wrong. It’s turning an emotion-driven approach into weaponized belonging. And it always benefits the person throwing down the gauntlet and brandishing those forced, false choices.

Like all the other arrivals to the tournament, Hank had erected a banner in front. It was a long, tapering pennant with a blue and red circular design in the center and the words GO CUBS! on both sides. Interesting," said Hugo. "What does it mean?" It was a gift from Sam," Hank explained as they entered the tent. "He said it used to represent Triumph over Adversity, but now better represents Impossible Quests and Lost Causes." I think I preferred not knowing that," said Hugo. Hank grinned. "You're a Sox fan too, hey?

Collaborations work best this way; when there's a mutual desire to see what the other side adds. You know that what you're making on your own has value but the sum is more than the parts and every part knows it.

You awake Sep?" Beetle's whisper came from the other side of the teepee. "No. I always sleep sitting up." "Really?" "Of course I'm awake Beetle. You awake too?" "Nah. Fast asleep.

There's always another side to people, even people that look good on the outside. So don't put your own expectations on someone you don't know that we'll.

Walking away from people we know and love, because of our support for strangers we really don’t know, can barely believe, and definitely don’t love, who FOR SURE won’t be there to drive us to chemo or bring food over when the kids are sick; that is the shadow side of sorting.

If only Myrtle would pay attention to the Boy's Own Journal, Blackwood's Magazine, etc., she would know that these creatures were Threls, who come from a worldlet called Threlfall on the far side of the asteroid belt. This Threlfall is a cheerless, chilly spot, and the whole history and religion of the Threls has been concerened with their quest to knit a nice woolly coverlet for it.

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit has tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travelers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruits means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you leave the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open the gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.

Because INTPs are relatively ill-equipped to navigate emotionally-difficult situations, their inferior Fe is inclined to do all it can to defend itself. Hence, in emotionally intense or chaotic situations, INTPs may suddenly be overwhelmed with feelings of rage and anger, which, left unmitigated, may quickly transport them to the dark side.

Hitler fantasized that the United States so fully shared his racist views that it would ultimately side with the Third Reich. Nazi writers regularly pointed to America’s anti-Asian immigration quotas and bigoted Jim Crow laws to deflect foreign criticism of their own discriminatory statutes. Even the German quest for Lebensraum found its model in America’s westward expansion, during which, as Hitler noted, U.S. soldiers and frontiersmen “gunned down . . . millions of Redskins.

I'm on a weird quest to be sort of famous, like an indie movie star that only the hip people like to chat about.....I want to be underground famous," she wrote on Grrl.com, before working on her Sith promotions - she's genuinely on "our side.

A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.

you have also been extremely – make that miraculously – fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly – in you.

Also, don’t touch anything, and if you can help it, try not to look at anything either—not for longer than a second or two. Otherwise you might trigger some educational minigame or side quest that you’ll be forced to complete, and we’ll have to go on without you. We don’t have time to stop and play Blue’s Clues.

In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self. If perfectionism were a medication, the label would alert us to common side effects.

Ideally, the pursuit of truth is said to be at the heart of the intellectual's business, but this credits his business too much and not quite enough. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas consummation often turns out to be elusive. Truth captured loses its glamour; truths long known and widely believed have a way of turning false with time; easy truths are bore and too many of them become half truths. Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.

On the bright side, my slightly lower IQ means that I probably have worse recall. Maybe I'll soon forget that I have a depressed IQ.

Her name is Tom?" he continued. Eli closed his mouth. "Her name is traitor," he muttered.

A blush brightened the gold shimmer on Ambrose's cheek. Eli immediately made a resolution to compliment him more often.

Ames, will you please keep an eye on this man?" Ambrose slid off the counter and opened the door for them. Eli passed him with a wink, and he bit down a smile. "If I must.

I will have the minimum amount of fun.

Eli spun until he was upside down. "Ambrose, only you can say something so boring when you're floating with purple dragon wings.

Excuse me." Ambrose grinned and tugged on his shoe. "Could you not perish in there? That's going to be very inconvenient for me." "I'm your rival. I'm inconvenient even in death.

Fear and courage are not two sides of a coin where you get to choose one or the other.

Burn stepped up to the side of the horse and pulled Sora from Crash's arms. Crash was reluctant to let go.

Seeing and acknowledging how gifted assets can get out of control and become liabilities is possibly the most significant step in the quest to complete healing. Consequently we must deal with the shadow side of giftedness—our false-self reactions to people and situations when our primary wounds are reopened—or when our unmanaged assets turn against us in the form of disorderly conduct.

I know what i's like to want to be good, to want to be a good boy and a good son and think that God loves me because my teachers loves me, and my friends' parents trust me. You don't love God, man. You love feeling like you belong to something. That warm feeling of order in the universe. Of having the universe on your side, but really, having people on your side. I just want you to be free from all that shit.

When it’s dark I’ll sneak down the hill, he promised himself. Somehow Bree will slip over the side of the ship. Somehow I’ll get her away without anyone knowing. We’ll escape together. As he reached another clump

In our quest to become minimalists, we want to reduce the amount of things in our homes that require our care and attention. Fortunately, we have ample opportunity to do so—simply by shifting some of our pleasures and activities into the public realm. In fact, such action produces a pretty wonderful side effect. For when we hang out in parks, museums, movie houses, and coffee shops—instead of trying to create similar experiences in our own homes—we become significantly more socially active and civically engaged. By breaking down the walls of stuff around us, we’re able to get out into the world and enjoy fresher, more direct, and more rewarding experiences.

I see a design similar in nature to the yin-yang symbol. The yin or dark side represents the female and the yang, which is the light side, represents the male. These two sides are in perfect balance and harmony with one another.

Feeling drunk with the anticipation of being alone in the elevator with the blonde seductress, Jack turned back and flashed a wicked grin at Todd before disappearing down the hall. "I’m Shala. I was also hoping we'd have a private moment together, before your adventure begins.” She spoke softly and slipped her hand into the crook of Jack's arm. "Shala, you read my mind," Jack replied as they reached the elevator. "After Dr. Strong and I talk, how about you show me the sights of Landon." "The most exciting thing in Landon is in my suite.” Shala whispered and leaned hard against him, forcing his back to the wall. Shala’s hands explored Jacks chest then moved to his sides and round to his back sinking lower. Her fiery smile sent an unexpected chill through him. Jack squirmed uncomfortably as he glanced up at the panel above the elevator doors. The second floor indicator lit and held. The doors silently slid aside to reveal a large banquet hall just as Shala's hands reached a sensitive spot.

Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.

Evolutionaries and connectionists have something important in common: they both design learning algorithms inspired by nature. But then they part ways. Evolutionaries focus on learning structure; to them, fine-tuning an evolved structure by optimizing parameters is of secondary importance. In contrast, connectionists prefer to take a simple, hand-coded structure with lots of connections and let weight learning do all the work. This is machine learning’s version of the nature versus nurture controversy, and there are good arguments on both sides.

Intimidation (Journeyman I). You have learned that the most efficient method of dealing with people is saying exactly what you want. Honesty is key, and people have learned to respect that! This skill allows you to make new friends, gain better prices at shops, and speed up conversation. Sometimes people will even give you money for no particular reason! +2% chance to make a new friend, gain money, and get better prices per skill rank. Caution, sometimes people are afraid of the truth and will get mad about how friendly you are. They may even call guards to attack you!

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it... Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

If we let all the negative roadblocks influence us then it's only a matter of time before we end up detoured, lost, or possibly stranded on the side of the highway. Our positive attitude keeps our battery powered and our gas tank full, so that we can make it in one piece to our destination.

It can be hard to remember what one's anticipatory image of something was once you're on the other side. I'm no longer sure exactly what it was I was waiting for, but I do know that it was something wholly unfamiliar and thrilling. Like a new color. Not a mixture, no trace of blue or yellow or red. What would that look like? I have some basic understanding about light--how it can only be broken down and refracted into its seven constituent hues--and even though I know that the physical world makes the existence of such a thing basically impossible, I'd still really like to see that.

Bilbo and Frodo overcome the objections of the Baggins side of themselves in order to embrace the Quests that await them. Sometimes we have the same struggles as they do. The Took in us wants to pursue dreams, and the Baggins part wants to stay safe and conventional. Too often we heed the negative thinking that convinces us that we do not have the time, money, energy, or opportunity to make our desires come true. We think we have too many other obligations blocking our way. Sometimes we also saddle ourselves with the false guilt that tells us it is not right to do anything for ourselves, especially if we have a family to take care of first. We must not abandon our true responsibilities, of course, but would it not be better if we could fulfill them in a way that fed our soul and not just our pocketbook and got us excited about going to work rather than dreading the drudgery?

THE COUNCIL WAS NOTHING LIKE Jason imagined. For one thing, it was in the Big House rec room, around a Ping-Pong table, and one of the satyrs was serving nachos and sodas. Somebody had brought Seymour the leopard head in from the living room and hung him on the wall. Every once in a while, a counselor would toss him a Snausage. Jason looked around the room and tried to remember everyone’s name. Thankfully, Leo and Piper were sitting next to him—it was their first meeting as senior counselors. Clarisse, leader of the Ares cabin, had her boots on the table, but nobody seemed to care. Clovis from Hypnos cabin was snoring in the corner while Butch from Iris cabin was seeing how many pencils he could fit in Clovis’s nostrils. Travis Stoll from Hermes was holding a lighter under a Ping-Pong ball to see if it would burn, and Will Solace from Apollo was absently wrapping and unwrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist. The counselor from Hecate cabin, Lou Ellen something-or-other, was playing “got-your-nose” with Miranda Gardiner from Demeter, except that Lou Ellen really had magically disconnected Miranda’s nose, and Miranda was trying to get it back. Jason had hoped Thalia would show. She’d promised, after all—but she was nowhere to be seen. Chiron had told him not to worry about it. Thalia often got sidetracked fighting monsters or running quests for Artemis, and she would probably arrive soon. But still, Jason worried. Rachel Dare, the oracle, sat next to Chiron at the head of the table. She was wearing her Clarion Academy school uniform dress, which seemed a bit odd, but she smiled at Jason. Annabeth didn’t look so relaxed. She wore armor over her camp clothes, with her knife at her side and her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. As soon as Jason walked in, she fixed him with an expectant look, as if she were trying to extract information out of him by sheer willpower. “Let’s come to order,” Chiron said. “Lou Ellen, please give Miranda her nose back. Travis, if you’d kindly extinguish the flaming Ping-Pong ball, and Butch, I think twenty pencils is really too many for any human nostril. Thank you. Now, as you can see, Jason, Piper, and Leo have returned successfully…more or less. Some of you have heard parts of their story, but I will let them fill you in.” Everyone looked at Jason. He cleared his throat and began the story. Piper and Leo chimed in from time to time, filling in the details he forgot. It only took a few minutes, but it seemed like longer with everyone watching him. The silence was heavy, and for so many ADHD demigods to sit still listening for that long, Jason knew the story must have sounded pretty wild. He ended with Hera’s visit right before the meeting.

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,   How to divide the conquest of thy sight;   Mine eye my heart thy picture's sight would bar,   My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.   My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,—   A closet never pierc'd with crystal eyes—   But the defendant doth that plea deny,   And says in him thy fair appearance lies.   To side this title is impannelled   A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;   And by their verdict is determined   The clear eye's moiety, and the dear heart's part:     As thus; mine eye's due is thy outward part,     And my heart's right, thy inward love of heart.

Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth.

Of course, that is the question we have been asking for centuries,” Argon replied. “Can fate be changed? On the one hand, everything is destined, everything is written. On the other hand, we have free will. Our choices also determine our fate. It seems impossible for these two—destiny and free will—to live together, side by side, yet they do.

Our palms kissed and assured me that, even fighting the flames and the horrors from his past, Flame knew I was meant to be by his side. That I was his protector, and always would be. That any darkness he would travel through, I would follow behind, lamp in hand, on a quest to find him and bring him back into the light. This little light of mine…

The tabby rogue bounded alongside the river until he reached the fallen tree that Sky had used to cross a few days before. Leading Firestar over to the far bank, Scratch started to climb another trail that led up the cliff face on the opposite side. Firestar panted after him, wishing he had the rogue’s powerful haunches. Scratch was a true SkyClan cat!

We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author. He had defied his caste from on high and I, from below, and we had met at this moment in London at our own Maginot Line of equality, standing on different sides of the same quest to understand the forces that had sought to define us but had failed.

In pompous nothings on his side, and civil assents on that of his cousins, their time passed till they entered Meryton. The attention of the younger ones was then no longer to be gained by him. Their eyes were immediately wandering up in the street in quest of the officers, and nothing less than a very smart bonnet indeed, or a really new muslin in a shop window, could recall them.

إن كل إنسان عبارة عن كتاب مفتوح وكل واحد منا قران متنقل. إن البحث عن الله متأصل في قلوب الجميع سواء أكان ولياً أم قديسا أم مومسا. فالحب يقبع في داخل كل منا منذ اللحظة التي نولد فيها وينتظر الفرصة التي يظهر فيها منذ تلك اللحظة. وهذا ما تقوله إحدى القواعد الأربعين : يقبع الكون كله داخل كل إنسان - في داخلك. كل شي ترينه من حولك بما في ذلك الأشياء التي قد لا تحبيها ، حتى الأشخاص الذين تحتقرينهم أو تمقتينهم يقبعون في داخلك بدرجات متفاوتة، لذلك لا تبحثي عن الشيطان خارج نفسك، فالشيطان ليس قوة خارقة تهاجمك من الخارج بل هو صوت عادي ينبعث من داخلك. فإذا تعرفت على نفسك تمامًا وواجهت بصدقٍ وقسوة جانبيك المظلم والمشرق عندها تبلغين أرقى أشكال الوعي وعندما تعرفين نفسك فإنك ستعرفين الله. Every man is an open book, each and every one of us a walking Qur’an. The quest for God is ingrained in the hearts of all, be it a prostitute or a saint. Love exists within each of us from the moment we are born and waits to be discovered from then on. That is what one of the forty rules is all about: The whole universe is contained within a single human being—you. Everything that you see around, including the things you might not be fond of and even the people you despise or abhor, is present within you in varying degrees. Therefore, do not look for Sheitan outside yourself either. The devil is not an extraordinary force that attacks from without. It is an ordinary voice within. If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your dark and bright sides, you will arrive at a supreme form of consciousness. When a person knows himself or herself, he or she knows God.

She sat back again, a gentle loosening that made her straight spine seem effortless and restful. Again she did nothing. She simply sat across from me and unfurled herself. I felt her life brush up against me and flow around me. It was but the faintest touching, and had I not experienced both the Skill and the Wit, I do not think I would have sensed it. Cautiously, as softly as if I assayed a bridge made of cobweb, I overlay my senses on hers. She quested. Not as I did, toward a specific beast, or to read what might be close by. I discarded the word I had always given to my sensing. Kettricken did not seek after anything with her Wit. It was as she said, simply a being, but it was being a part of the whole. She composed herself and considered all the ways the great web touched her, and was content. It was a delicate and tenuous thing and I marveled at it. For an instant I, too, relaxed. I breathed out. I opened myself, Wit wide to all. I discarded all caution, all worry that Burrich would sense me. I had never done anything to compare it with before. Kettricken's reaching was as delicate as droplets of dew sliding down a strand of spiderweb. I was like a dammed flood, suddenly released, to rush out to fill old channels to overflowing and to send fingers of water investigating the lowlands. Let us hunt! The Wolf, joyfully. In the stables, Burrich straightened from cleaning a hoof, to frown at no one. Sooty stamped in her stall. Molly shrugged away and shook out her hair. Across from me, Kettricken started and looked at me as if I had spoken aloud. A moment more I was held, seized from a thousand sides, stretched and expanded, illuminated pitilessly. I felt it all, not just the human folk with their comings and goings, but every pigeon that fluttered in the eaves, every mouse that crept unnoticed behind the wine kegs, every speck of life, that was not and never had been a speck, but had always been a node on the web of life. Nothing alone, nothing forsaken, nothing without meaning, nothing of no significance, and nothing of importance.

Her pretty name of Adina seemed to me to have somehow a mystic fitness to her personality. Behind a cold shyness, there seemed to lurk a tremulous promise to be franker when she knew you better. Adina is a strange child; she is fanciful without being capricious. She was stout and fresh-coloured, she laughed and talked rather loud, and generally, in galleries and temples, caused a good many stiff British necks to turn round. She had a mania for excursions, and at Frascati and Tivoli she inflicted her good-humoured ponderosity on diminutive donkeys with a relish which seemed to prove that a passion for scenery, like all our passions, is capable of making the best of us pitiless. Adina may not have the shoulders of the Venus of Milo...but I hope it will take more than a bauble like this to make her stoop. Adina espied the first violet of the year glimmering at the root of a cypress. She made haste to rise and gather it, and then wandered further, in the hope of giving it a few companions. Scrope sat and watched her as she moved slowly away, trailing her long shadow on the grass and drooping her head from side to side in her charming quest. It was not, I know, that he felt no impulse to join her; but that he was in love, for the moment, with looking at her from where he sat. Her search carried her some distance and at last she passed out of sight behind a bend in the villa wall. I don't pretend to be sure that I was particularly struck, from this time forward, with something strange in our quiet Adina. She had always seemed to me vaguely, innocently strange; it was part of her charm that in the daily noiseless movement of her life a mystic undertone seemed to murmur "You don't half know me! Perhaps we three prosaic mortals were not quite worthy to know her: yet I believe that if a practised man of the world had whispered to me, one day, over his wine, after Miss Waddington had rustled away from the table, that there was a young lady who, sooner or later, would treat her friends to a first class surprise, I should have laid my finger on his sleeve and told him with a smile that he phrased my own thought. .."That beautiful girl," I said, "seems to me agitated and preoccupied." "That beautiful girl is a puzzle. I don't know what's the matter with her; it's all very painful; she's a very strange creature. I never dreamed there was an obstacle to our happiness--to our union. She has never protested and promised; it's not her way, nor her nature; she is always humble, passive, gentle; but always extremely grateful for every sign of tenderness. Till within three or four days ago, she seemed to me more so than ever; her habitual gentleness took the form of a sort of shrinking, almost suffering, deprecation of my attentions, my petits soins, my lovers nonsense. It was as if they oppressed and mortified her--and she would have liked me to bear more lightly. I did not see directly that it was not the excess of my devotion, but my devotion itself--the very fact of my love and her engagement that pained her. When I did it was a blow in the face. I don't know what under heaven I've done! Women are fathomless creatures. And yet Adina is not capricious, in the common sense... .So these are peines d'amour?" he went on, after brooding a moment. "I didn't know how fiercely I was in love!" Scrope stood staring at her as she thrust out the crumpled note: that she meant that Adina--that Adina had left us in the night--was too large a horror for his unprepared sense...."Good-bye to everything! Think me crazy if you will. I could never explain. Only forget me and believe that I am happy, happy, happy! Adina Beati."... Love is said to be par excellence the egotistical passion; if so Adina was far gone. "I can't promise to forget you," I said; "you and my friend here deserve to be remembered!

Then we are nothing to him,’ said the merchant, sorrow brimming in his eyes. ‘I surrendered everything, all my wealth, for yet another indifferent god. If he cannot protect us, what is the point?’ She wished that she had an answer to such questions. Were these not the very grist of priestly endeavours? To grind out palatable answers, to hint of promising paths to true salvation? To show a benign countenance gifted by god-given wisdom, glowing as if fanned by sacred breath? ‘It is my feeling,’ she said, haltingly, ‘that a faith that delivers perfect answers to every question is not a true faith, for its only purpose is to satisfy, to ease the mind and so end its questing.’ She held up a hand to still the objections she saw awakened among these six honest, serious believers. ‘Is it for faith to deliver peace, when on all sides inequity thrives? For it shall indeed thrive, when the blessed walk past blissfully blind, content in their own moral purity, in the peace filling their souls. Oh, you might then reach out a hand to the wretched by the roadside, offering them your own footprints, and you may see the blessed burgeon in number, grow into a multitude, until you are as an army. But there will be, will ever be, those who turn away from your hand. The ones who quest because it is in their nature to quest, who fear the seduction of self-satisfaction, who mistrust easy answers. Are these ones then to be your enemy? Does the army grow angered now? Does it strike out at the unbelievers? Does it crush them underfoot?

A husband looking for the perfect present is like a knight of the Round Table on a quest for the Holy Grail. He can saddle up his trusty steed and head off gamely into the Christmas chaos - with courage as his trusty companion. But as soon as leaves the comforts of his castle, he will find that his old pal, doubt, has saddled up the mule of confusion and is clip-clopping along at his side. and before he even gets to the malls, that old traitor, conviction, will have turned and fled. Deep in his anxious heart, our knight will begin to wonder if the thing he is looking for really exists. Oh, he has heard rumours. There was a man once, who said he heard of a fellow, who told a story about a guy, who found the perfect present. But no doubt that is just a legend. One of those stories people tell to promote hope among the recklessly faithful. If you ever tracked him down, you'd probably find out the man who found the perfect present was just another poor sod alone in his bedroom on Christmas Eve, with a roll of wrapping paper, some Scotch tape, and a waffle iron.

Crossing the small wooden bridge, just past the rubble, Gabe ducked off to the left and swooped underneath into hiding. Once sure he was secure, and could not be seen by those that passed overhead, Gabe collapsed on to the dirt and grass. Turning on his side, his body convulsed, and relieved itself of any food that had been in his belly. Rachel was right. He was a liability. Anyone who tried to protect him ended up paying a high price. He didn’t know if his old friends were dead, but he was certain whatever fate had found them must have been bad.

[Farmer] had problems with groups that on the surface would have seemed like allies, that often were allies in fact, with for example what he called "WL's"- white liberals, some of whose most influential spokespeople were black and prosperous. 'I love WL's, love 'em to death. They're on our side,' he had told me some days ago, defining the term. 'But WL's think all the world's problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don't believe that. There's a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It's what separates us from roaches.

Human beings, even apparently faithful Christians, too often want an almighty deity who will rule the universe with power, preferably on their terms, and with force when necessary. Such a concept of God and of sovereignty induces its adherents to side with this kind of God in the execution of (allegedly) divine might in the quest for (allegedly) divine justice. Understanding the reality of the Lamb as Lord—and thus of Lamb power—terminates, or should terminate, all such misperceptions of divine power and justice, and of their erroneous human corollaries.

your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. —HARRY G. FRANKFURT

Being real takes tremendous courage. We like approval, and we like respect, and to say otherwise is another form of denial. To wish for the admiration of others is normal. The problem is that this admiration can become a drug. Many of you are addicted to this drug, and the destruction to your wealth and financial well-being caused by your addiction is huge. Radical change in the quest for approval, which has involved purchasing stuff with money we don’t have, is required for a money breakthrough. Sara’s breakthrough came with family. Her family was upper-middle-crust and had always given Christmas gifts to every member. With twenty nieces and nephews and six sets of adults to buy for, just on her side, the budget was ridiculous. Sara’s announcement at Thanksgiving that this year Christmas giving was going to be done with the drawing of names, because she and Bob couldn’t afford it, was earth-shattering. Some of you are grinning as if this is no big deal. It was a huge deal in Sara’s family! Gift giving was a tradition! Her mother and two of her sisters-in-law were furious. Very little thanks were given that Thanksgiving, but Sara stood her ground and said, “No more.” Sara

We aren’t even seeing the other side of the world; that’s our complaint,” said Adela. Mrs. Moore agreed; she too was disappointed at the dullness of their new life. They had made such a romantic voyage across the Mediterranean and through the sands of Egypt to the harbour of Bombay, to find only a gridiron of bungalows at the end of it. But she did not take the disappointment as seriously as Miss Quested, for the reason that she was forty years older, and had learnt that Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. She said again that she hoped that something interesting would be arranged for next Tuesday.

Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization. A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism. It is possible that the term itself has been so nicely devised by Russians because of the cult of simplicity and good taste in old Russia. The Russia of today, a country of moral imbeciles, of smiling slaves and poker-faced bullies, has stopped noticing poshlism because Soviet Russia is so full of its special brand, a blend of despotism and pseudo-culture; but in the old days a Gogol, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov in quest of the simplicity of truth easily distinguished the vulgar side of things as well as the trashy systems of pseudo-thought. But poshlists are found everywhere, in every country, in this country as well as in Europe—in fact poshlism is more common in Europe than here, despite our American ads.

This term serves to contrast our worldview with philosophy in its usual sense, as a doctrine about the world that claims to stand side by side with the scientific disciplines, or possibly even above them. In our opinion, anything that can be sensibly said at all is a proposition of science, and doing philosophy just means examining critically the propositions of science to check whether they are or are not pseudo-propositions (that is, whether they really have the clarity and significance ascribed to them by the practitioners of the science in question); and it means, further, exposing as pseudo-propositions those propositions that lay claim to another type, and a higher degree, of significance than the propositions of science.

But what a thirty-four it was. Don Hume on the port side and Joe Rantz on the starboard were setting the pace with long, slow, sweet, fluid strokes, and the boys on each side were falling in behind them flawlessly. From the banks of Lake Carnegie, the boys, their oars, and the Husky Clipper looked like a single thing, gracefully and powerfully coiling and uncoiling itself, propelling itself forward over the surface of the water. Eight bare backs swung forward and backward in perfect unison. Eight white blades dipped in and out of the mirrorlike water at precisely the same instant. Each time the blades entered the lake, they disappeared almost without a splash or ripple. Each time the blades rose from it, the boat ghosted forward without check or hesitation.

What if the energy and resources used to preserve and tweak the civil religion was rather spent feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, befriending the drug addict, and visiting the prisoner? What if our focus was on sacrificing our resources to help inner-city schools and safety houses for battered women? What if our concern was to bridge the ungodly racial gap in our country by developing friendships and collaborating in endeavors with people whose ethnicity is different than our own? What if instead of trying to defend our religious rights, Christians concerned themselves with siding with others whose rights are routinely trampled? What if instead of trying to legally make life more difficult for gays, we worried only about how we could affirm their unsurpassable worth in service to them?

It is often a puzzle for foreigners why the United States has such a dismal performance when it comes to murder, guns, and mental illness, all features of American life that, when compared to most of the other wealthy countries, are so awful they do not require further documentation. You might wonder how those bad results square with America’s relatively strong performances on most social capital indices, such as trust, cooperation, and charitable philanthropy; on philanthropy, we even rate as the global number one. The truth is that those positive and negative facets are two sides of the same coin: Cooperation is very often furthered by segregating those who do not fit in. That creates some superclusters of cooperation among the quality cooperators and a fair amount of chaos and dysfunctionality elsewhere.

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit had tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travellers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you say goodbye to the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open a gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.

The Escalation Game is not an exotic brainteaser. Real life presents us with quandaries in which we are, as the saying goes, in for a penny, in for a pound. They include long-running labor strikes, dueling lawsuits, and literal wars of attrition, in which each nation feeds men and matériel into the maw of the war machine hoping the other side will exhaust itself first. The common rationale is “We fight so that our boys will not have died in vain,” a textbook example of the sunk-cost fallacy but also a tactic in the pathetic quest for a Pyrrhic victory. Many of the bloodiest wars in history were wars of attrition, showing once again how the infuriating logic of game theory may explain some of the tragedies of the human condition. Though persisting with a certain probability may be the least bad option once one is trapped in an Escalation Game, the truly rational strategy is not to play in the first place.

She was too narcoleptic to speak. Or move. How long had this been going on? Was she like this yesterday? Had I missed her illness in my quest to prove to my brain that my dick wasn’t the one behind this train wreck’s wheel? I touched her forehead again. It sizzled. “Sweetheart.” “Please get out.” The words clawed past her throat. “Someone needs to take care of you.” “That someone definitely isn’t you. You made that clear these past couple days.” I said nothing. She was right. I hadn’t bothered to check on her. Perhaps I’d wished she’d check on me. In truth, she’d already gone beyond any expectations in trying to make whatever it was between us work. Meanwhile, I’d shut her down. Repeatedly. “Shortbread, let me get you some medicine and tea.” “I don’t want you to nurse me to health. Do you hear me?” She must have hated that I’d seen her like this. Weak and ill. “Call Momma and Frankie. It’s them I want by my side.” I swallowed but didn’t argue. I understood she didn’t want to feel humiliated. To be taken care of by the man who ensured she understood her insignificance to him. How did her bullshit meter not fry? How could she think I really felt nothing toward her? “First, I’ll get you medicine, tea, and water. Then I’ll call for Hettie to stay with you. Then I’ll notify your mother.” I tugged her comforter up to her chin. “No arguments.” She tried to wave me out, groaning at the slightest movement. “Whatever. Just go. I don’t want to see your face.” I gave her what she wanted, though as always, not in the way she expected. The sequence of actions didn’t proceed as promised. First, I contacted Cara to dispatch the private jet to Georgia. Then I called my mother-in-law and Franklin—separately—demanding their presence. Only then did I enter the kitchen to grab water, tea, and ibuprofen for Shortbread’s fever. Naturally, like the chronic idler he often proved to be, Oliver still sat at the island, now enjoying an extra-large slice of red velvet cake I was pretty sure was meant to be consumed by Dallas. “What are you still doing here?” I demanded, collecting the things I needed for her. He scratched his temple with the handle of his fork, brows pulled together. “You invited me here. You wanted to watch a soccer game, remember?” I did not remember. I didn’t even remember my own address right now. “Get out.” “What about the—” I snatched the plate from his fingers, admitting to myself that I’d treaded into feral grounds. “This cake wasn’t for you to eat.” “You’ve gone insane in the ten minutes you were gone.” Oliver gawked at me, wide-eyed. “What happened to you? Did Durban not get her hands on the latest Henry Plotkin book and take her anger out on you?” Shit. The Henry Plotkin book. I shoved Oliver out with a fork still clutched in his grimy fist, dialing Hettie with my free hand. She half-yawned, half-spoke. “Yes?” “Dallas is ill. You need to come here and take care of her until my in-laws arrive in about two hours.” “Oh, yeah?” Her energy returned tenfold. “And what the hell are you gonna do during this time?” “Freeze my balls off.”(Chapter 58)

Power has always been a temptation, and I want to argue that majority rule in America carries with it an empire temptation for many Christian citizens. Those of us who know our American history might be tempted to say, “That’s precisely the opposite of what our democracy, or representative democracy, stands for.” True enough, at one level, because giving everyone a voice vastly surpasses anything less. But take any heated political issue, from abortion to same-sex marriage to national health care to free-market enterprise to nuclear build-up for security, and you may glimpse what I’m trying to say. The political left takes one posture on issues while the political right draws swords from another posture. If we step back we see that each side seeks to impose its view on the minority. This is ruling over the other. Now to a few questions. Is this imposition of power over others consistent with following Christ? Do we ever wonder if the right to vote is the right to coerce and impose, the right to use the power of the majority against the minority?17 Is the power of the majority that different from the power of King Charles when the pilgrims and Puritans left England to establish the “city on a hill”? We would all agree that empowering the people improved the conditions, but I want to ask another question: Does it make the political process of voting the source of seeking for power over others? What is the best Christian response to the drive for power? I call this quest for power through the political process the “eschatology of politics”—that is, the belief that if we usher in the right political candidates and the right laws, then kingdom conditions will arrive. Every two years America goes through convulsions as one candidate after another promises (all but) the kingdom if he or she is elected. Every two years Americans go through the same convulsions as they lather up for the election because they believe if they get their candidate, not only will they win, but (all but) the kingdom will come. This is idolatry and yet another example of Constantinianism

According to H.G. Wells, you either adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. It is not necessary to change, after all survival is not mandatory This generation might seem arrogant to the older generation due to some reasons. The older generation believes an older person or someone of higher authority is always right and being sceptical is an insult, lol Our generation is full of people who are so skeptical, they wanna know why this is this and that is that, they don't just hear and believe, they hear, hear from other sides, look at it critically and express their opinions based on their conviction. This generation is full of people who are somewhat confident cos they study, they observe and due to these, they are equipped with better information and like you know, knowledge is power. You know right from wrong, you know truth from lies. When you are with those in authority and have this knowledge, an ignorant person of higher authority would be scared of you, feel threatened and might resort to maltreating and frustrating you, defaming your character etc The older generation and the younger generation are usually having misunderstanding because the older generation are being deceived by pride, the younger generation due to their advanced education do not wanna give merit to whom it isn't due. While the older generation postulates that respect is not earned but compulsory for them to be accorded, the younger generation believes respect must be earned. lol The older generation rules by fiction but the younger generation lives by facts. The older generation uses age to oppress, the younger generation uses their knowledge to defend. The older generation believes they can never be wrong, the younger generation wants fair hearing, demands for it, if denied, they take it by force due to the confidence they've built around themselves. The older generation is unfair to the younger generation, there was once a time they were listened to without doubts and opposition, this is the time for the younger generation to be listened to due to advancement in education and exposure. The younger generation, due to their quest for higher knowledge through research, etc, they have realized the consequences of being ignorant and with their power of conviction, they are not letting the older generation have their autocratic ways affect them. To the younger generation, one should be able to prove whatever he says, no more latent heresies and this is what the older generation don't wanna hear of. The older generation wants to continue enslaving the younger generation but the younger generation is more equipped than the older generation and as such, not letting that happen. Technology advances every day, the younger generation are ever ready to adapt to the changes but the older generation is not ready for that, they wanna remain stagnant and still have the say of the day. Like George Bernard Shaw once said, the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man

The smoke stung at the corners of Uri’s eyes as he struggled to open them. He could hear the battle sounds all around him and smell the iron from the blood drenched warfare in the air. Much to his surprise, death had not yet claimed him. He could feel Raimie’s body under his own, no warmth came from him, however, and Uri feared the worse. Over his shoulder, he heard a large blast and the earth shook under him. The trackers had obviously followed someone through. There were hundreds of designated transportation locations as part of the evacuation drill. Absolutely nobody was allowed to transport directly to a primary facility for this exact reason. If a tracker were to follow your transportation signature to the next facility, the Guardians could be nearly wiped out in one night. The secrecy of the facilities and cloaking spells were key in their safety. Uri knew if he or Raimie had any chance of surviving, he needed to get clear of the fighting and find a healer. Attempting to sit up, he braced his weight on the earth just beside Raimie’s head. He quickly reconsidered as the unbearable pain shot through his side. Running his hand down to the source, he could feel the shaft of an arrow jutting out from his side; a warm wetness covered his fingertips. In the distance, Uri could hear someone crying out in agony, not a voice he recognized, yet the pain in it seemed all too familiar. Another blast rang out from behind him as Uri slumped to the ground, groaning in pain.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

Why didn’t they ask two of the guards to go with them?” Milo asked. “A soldier’s not a servant,” I told him. “The most loyal Spartan warrior would be insulted if he was asked to be a weapons bearer, even for a prince. It looks like Castor and Polydeuces will have to take care of themselves.” Milo looked away from me. I was puzzled by this sudden shyness and tried to catch his eye, but he deliberately avoided my gaze. He reeked of guilty secrets. “You’re the one,” I said. “You’re the scrawn--the boy Castor asked to go with him.” His silence was the same as shouting Yes! I knew it. “You just told me you wanted to join the quest for the fleece. You could have done it: Why didn’t you?” “I couldn’t,” he mumbled. “Why not? Because it’s safer to talk about dreams than to try making them real? What are you so afraid of?” “Nothing!” He yelled so fiercely that a pair of oxen grazing in a nearby field snorted and moved farther away from us. It was the first time I ever saw fire in Milo’s eyes. “I’m no coward. That’s not why I wouldn’t go with your brothers. I have to go with you.” “Who said so? You’re free now, Milo. Don’t you know what that means? You can come and go anywhere you like. You ought to appreciate it.” “I appreciate you, Lady Helen!” Once Milo raised his voice, he couldn’t stop. He shouted so loudly that the two oxen trotted to the far side of the pasture as fast as they could move their massive bodies. “You’re the one who gave me my freedom. If I love to be fifty, I’ll never be able to repay you!” Milo’s uproar attracted the attention of the two guards, but I waved them back when I saw them coming toward us. “Do you think you could be grateful quietly?” I asked. “This is between us, not us and all Delphi.

Convergent intelligence focuses on one line of thought, ignoring the more complex “divergent” form of intelligence, which involves measuring differing factors. For example, during World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces asked scientists to devise a psychological exam that would measure a pilot’s intelligence and ability to handle difficult, unexpected situations. One question was: If you are shot down deep in enemy territory and must somehow make it back to friendly lines, what do you do? The results contradicted conventional thinking. Most psychologists expected that the air force study would show that pilots with high IQs would score highly on this test as well. Actually, the reverse was true. The pilots who scored highest were the ones with higher levels of divergent thinking, who could see through many different lines of thought. Pilots who excelled at this, for example, were able to think up a variety of unorthodox and imaginative methods to escape after they were captured behind enemy lines. The difference between convergent and divergent thinking is also reflected in studies on split-brain patients, which clearly show that each hemisphere of the brain is principally hardwired for one or the other. Dr. Ulrich Kraft of Fulda, Germany, writes, “The left hemisphere is responsible for convergent thinking and the right hemisphere for divergent thinking. The left side examines details and processes them logically and analytically but lacks a sense of overriding, abstract connections. The right side is more imaginative and intuitive and tends to work holistically, integrating pieces of an informational puzzle into a whole.” In this book, I take the position that human consciousness involves the ability to create a model of the world and then simulate the model into the future, in order to attain a goal.

Violet’s not getting out of our sight,” Arion adds. There’s a moment of just staring…like everyone is trying to silently argue. “No one naked in my car,” Mom states when I just stand in my spot, waiting on them to hurry through the push and pull. You really can tell how thick the air is when too many alphas are in the room at one time, but weirdly it never feels this way when it’s just the four of them. Unless punches are thrown. Then it gets a little heavier than normal. Arion pulls on his clothes, and threads whir in the air as I quickly fashion Emit a lopsided toga that lands on his body. Everyone’s gaze swings to him like it’s weird for him and normal for me to be in a toga. Awesome. Damien muffles a sound, Emit arches an eyebrow at me, and Arion remains rigid, staying close to me but never touching me. All of us squeezing into a car together while most of them hate each other…should be fun. The storm finally stops before we board the elevator, and it’s one of those super awkward elevator moments where no one is looking at anyone or saying anything, and everyone is trying to stay in-the-moment serious. We stop on the floor just under us, after the longest thirty-five seconds ever. The doors open, and two men glance around at Emit and I in our matching togas, even though his is the fitted sheet and riding up in some funny places. He looks like a caveman who accidentally bleached and shrank his wardrobe. I palm my face, embarrassed for him. The next couple of floors are super awkward with the addition of the two new, notably uncomfortable men. Worst seventy-nine seconds ever. Math doesn’t add up? Yeah. I’m upset about those extra nine seconds as well. Poor Emit has to duck out of the unusually small elevator, and the bottom of his ass cheek plays peek-a-boo on one side. Damien finally snorts, and even Mom struggles to keep a straight face. That really pisses her off. “You’re seeing him on an off day,” I tell the two guys, who stare at my red boots for a second. I feel the need to defend Emit a little, especially since I now know he overheard all that gibberish Tiara was saying… I can’t remember all I said, and it’s worrying me now that my mind has gone off on this stupid tangent. I trip over the hem of my toga, and Arion snags me before I hit the floor, righting me and showing his hands to my mother with a quick grin. “Can’t just let her fall,” he says unapologetically. “You’re going to have to learn to deal with that,” she bites out. She has a very good point. I don’t trip very often, but things and people usually knock me around a good bit of my life. The two guys look like they want to run, so I hurry to fix this. “Really, it’s a long story, but I swear Emit—the tallest one in the fitted-sheet-toga—generally wears pants…er…I guess you guys call them trousers over here. Anyway, we had some plane problems,” I carry on, and then realize I have to account for the fact we’re both missing clothing. “Then there was a fire that miraculously only burned our clothes, because Emit put all my flames out by smothering me with his body,” I state like that’s exactly what happened. Why do they look so scared? I’m not telling a scary lie. At this point, I’ve just made it worse, and fortunately Damien takes mercy, clamping his hand over my mouth as he starts steering me toward the door before I can make it…whatever comes after worse but before the worst. “Thank you,” sounds more like “Mmdi ooooo,” against his hand, but he gets the gist, as he grins. Mom makes a frustrated sound. “Another minute, and she’d be bragging about his penis size in quest to save his dignity. Did you really want to hear that?” Damien asks her, forcing me to groan against his hand.

My route, Sior Francis—and don't be surprised when you hear it—my route when I set out to find God... was... laziness. Yes, laziness. If I wasn't lazy I would have gone the way of respectable, upstanding people. Like everyone else I would have studied a trade—cabinet-maker, weaver, mason—and opened a shop; I would have worked all day long, and where then would I have found time to search for God? I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack: that's what I would have said to myself. All my mind and thoughts would have been occupied with how to earn my living, feed my children, how to keep the upper hand over my wife. With such worries, curse them, how could I have the time, or inclination, or the pure heart needed to think about the Almighty? But by the grace of God I was born lazy. To work, get married, have children, and make problems for myself were all too much trouble. I simply sat in the sun during winter and in the shade during summer, while at night, stretched out on my back on the roof of my house, I watched the moon and the stars. And when you watch the moon and the stars how can you expect your mind not to dwell on God? I couldn't sleep any more. Who made all that? I asked myself. And why? Who made me, and why? Where can I find God so that I may ask Him? Piety requires laziness, you know. It requires leisure—and don't listen to what others say. The laborer who lives from hand to mouth returns home each night exhausted and famished. He assaults his dinner, bolts his food, then quarrels with his wife, beats his children without rhyme or reason simply because he's tired and irritated, and afterwards he clenches his fists and sleeps. Waking up for a moment he finds his wife at his side, couples with her, clenches his fists once more, and plunges back into sleep.... Where can he find time for God? But the man who is without work, children, and wife thinks about God, at first just out of curiosity, but later with anguish.

Ready yourselves!' Mullone heard himself say, which was strange, he thought, for he knew his men were prepared. A great cry came from beyond the walls that were punctuated by musket blasts and Mullone readied himself for the guns to leap into action. Mullone felt a tremor. The ground shook and then the first rebels poured through the gates like an oncoming tide. Mullone saw the leading man; both hands gripping a green banner, face contorted with zeal. The flag had a white cross in the centre of the green field and the initials JF below it. John Fitzstephen. Then, there were more men behind him, tens, then scores. And then time seemed to slow. The guns erupted barely twenty feet from them. Later on, Mullone would remember the great streaks of flame leap from the muzzles to lick the air and all of the charging rebels were shredded and torn apart in one terrible instant. Balls ricocheted on stone and great chunks were gouged out by the bullets. Blood sprayed on the walls as far back as the arched gateway, limbs were shorn off, and Mullone watched in horror as a bloodied head tumbled down the sloped street towards the barricade. 'Jesus sweet suffering Christ!' Cahill gawped at the carnage as the echo of the big guns resonated like a giant's beating heart. Trooper O'Shea bent to one side and vomited at the sight of the twitching, bleeding and unrecognisable lumps that had once been men. A man staggered with both arms missing. Another crawled back to the gate with a shattered leg spurting blood. The stench of burnt flesh and the iron tang of blood hung ripe and nauseating in the oppressive air. One of the low wooden cabins by the wall was on fire. A blast of musketry outside the walls rattled against the stonework and a redcoat toppled backwards onto the cabin's roof as the flames fanned over the wood. 'Here they come again! Ready your firelocks! Do not waste a shot!' Johnson shouted in a steady voice as the gateway became thick with more rebels. He took a deep breath. 'God forgive us,' Corporal Brennan said. 'Liberty or death!' A rebel, armed with a blood-stained pitchfork, shouted over-and-over.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants," wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. In the original and primary sense of lacks or needs, wants tend to structure our vision of government's responsibilities. The quest for security - whether economic, physical, psychological, or military - brings a sense of urgency to politics and is one of the enduring sources of passion in policy controversies. Need is probably the most fundamental political claim. Even toddlers know that need carries more weight than desire or deservingness. They learn early to counter a rejected request by pleading, "I need it." To claim need is to claim that one should be given the resources or help because they are essential. Of course, this raises the question "essential for what?" In conflicts over security, the central issues are what kind of security government should attempt to provide; what kinds of needs it should attempt to meet; and how the burdens of making security a collective responsibility should be distributed. Just as most people are all for equity and efficiency in the abstract, most people believe that society should help individuals and families when they are in dire need. But beneath this consensus is a turbulent and intense conflict over how to distinguish need from mere desire, and how to preserve a work - or - merit based system of economic distribution in the face of distribution according to need. Defining need for purposes of public programs become much an exercise like defining equity and efficiency. People try to portray their needs as being objective, and policymakers seek to portray their program criteria as objective, in order to put programs beyond political dispute. As with equity and efficiency, there are certain recurring strategies of argument that can be used to expand or contract a needs claim. In defense policy, relative need is far more important than absolute. Our sense of national security (and hence our need for weapons) depends entirely on comparison with the countries we perceive as enemies. And here Keynes is probably right: The need for weapons can only be satisfied by feeling superior to "them." Thus, it doesn't matter how many people our warheads can kill or how many cities they can destroy. What matters is what retaliatory capacity we have left after an attack by the other side, or whether our capacity to sustain an offense is greater than their capacity to destroy it. The paradox of nuclear weapons is that the more security we gain in terms of absolute capability (i.e., kill potential), the more insecure we make ourselves with respect to the consequences of nuclear explosions. We gain superiority only by producing weapons we ourselves are terrified to use.

Radiation from the Big Bang may give us a clue to dark matter and dark energy. First of all, the echo, or afterglow, of the Big Bang is easy to detect. Our satellites have been able to detect this radiation to enormous accuracy. Photographs of this microwave background radiation show that it is remarkably smooth, with tiny ripples appearing on its surface. These ripples, in turn, represent tiny quantum fluctuations that existed at the instant of the Big Bang that were then magnified by the explosion. What is controversial, however, is that there appear to be irregularities, or blotches, in the background radiation that we cannot explain. There is some speculation that these strange blotches are the remnants of collisions with other universes. In particular, the CMB (cosmic microwave background) cold spot is an unusually cool mark on the otherwise uniform background radiation that some physicists have speculated might be the remnants of some type of connection or collision between our universe and a parallel universe at the beginning of time. If these strange markings represent our universe interacting with parallel universes, then the multiverse theory might become more plausible to skeptics. Already, there are plans to put detectors in space that can refine all these calculations, using space-based gravity wave detectors. LISA Back in 1916, Einstein showed that gravity could travel in waves. Like throwing a stone in a pond and witnessing the concentric, expanding rings it creates, Einstein predicted that swells of gravity would travel at the speed of light. Unfortunately, these would be so faint that he did not think we would find them anytime soon. He was right. It took until 2016, one hundred years after his original prediction, before gravity waves were observed. Signals from two black holes that collided in space about a billion years ago were captured by huge detectors. These detectors, built in Louisiana and Washington State, each occupy several square miles of real estate. They resemble a large L, with laser beams traveling down each leg of the L. When the two beams meet at the center, they create an interference pattern that is so sensitive to vibrations that they could detect this collision. For their pioneering work, three physicists, Rainer Weiss, Kip S. Thorne, and Barry C. Barish, won the Nobel Prize in 2017. For even greater sensitivity, there are plans to send gravity wave detectors into outer space. The project, known as the laser interferometry space antenna (LISA), might be able to pick up vibrations from the instant of the Big Bang itself. One version of the LISA consists of three separate satellites in space, each connected to the others by a network of laser beams. The triangle is about a million miles on each side.

Similarly, we look for echoes from the tenth and eleventh dimension. Perhaps evidence for string theory is hidden all around us, but we have to listen for its echoes, rather than try to observe it directly. For example, one possible signal from hyperspace is the existence of dark matter. Until recently, it was widely believed that the universe is mainly made of atoms. Astronomers have been shocked to find that only 4.9 percent of the universe is made of atoms like hydrogen and helium. Actually, most of the universe is hidden from us, in the form of dark matter and dark energy. (We recall that dark matter and dark energy are two distinct things. Twenty-six point eight percent of the universe is made of dark matter, which is invisible matter that surrounds the galaxies and keep them from flying apart. And 68.3 percent of the universe is made of dark energy, which is even more mysterious, the energy of empty space that is driving the galaxies apart.) Perhaps evidence for the theory of everything lies hidden in this invisible universe. Search for Dark Matter Dark matter is strange, it is invisible, yet it holds the Milky Way galaxy together. But since it has weight and no charge, if you tried to hold dark matter in your hand it would sift through your fingers as if they weren’t there. It would fall right through the floor, through the core of the Earth, and then to the other side of the Earth, where gravity would eventually cause it to reverse course and fall back to your location. It would then oscillate between you and the other side of the planet, as if the Earth weren’t there. As strange as dark matter is, we know it must exist. If we analyze the spin of the Milky Way galaxy and use Newton’s laws, we find that there is not enough mass to counteract the centrifugal force. Given the amount of mass we see, the galaxies in the universe should be unstable and they should fly apart, but they have been stable for billions of years. So we have two choices: either Newton’s equations are incorrect when applied to galaxies, or else there is an unseen object that is keeping the galaxies intact. (We recall that the planet Neptune was found in the same way, by postulating a new planet that explained Uranus’s deviations from a perfect ellipse.) At present, one leading candidate for dark matter is called the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Among them, one likely possibility is the photino, the supersymmetric partner of the photon. The photino is stable, has mass, is invisible, and has no charge, which fits precisely the characteristics of dark matter. Physicists believe the Earth moves in an invisible wind of dark matter that is probably passing through your body right now. If a photino collides with a proton, it may cause the proton to shatter into a shower of subatomic particles that can then be detected.

The madness surged around him, and Rhy tore himself away from the breaking city and turned his sights again to his quest for the captain of the Night Spire. There were only two places Alucard Emery would go: his family estate or his ship. Logic said he’d go to the house, but something in Rhy’s gut sent him in the opposite direction, toward the docks. He found the captain on his cabin floor. One of the chairs by the hearth had been toppled, a table knocked clean of glasses, their glittering shards scattered in the rug and across the wooden floor. Alucard—decisive, strong, beautiful Alucard—lay curled on his side, shivering with fever, his warm brown hair matted to his cheeks with sweat. He was clutching his head, breath escaping in ragged gasps as he spoke to ghosts. “Stop … please …” His voice—that even, clear voice, always brimming with laughter—broke. “Don’t make me …” Rhy was on his knees beside him. “Luc,” he said, touching the man’s shoulder. Alucard’s eyes flashed open, and Rhy recoiled when he saw them filled with shadows. Not the even black of Kell’s gaze, but instead menacing streaks of darkness that writhed and coiled like snakes through his vision, storm blue irises flashing and vanishing behind the fog. “Stop,” snarled the captain suddenly. He struggled up, limbs shaking, only to fall back against the floor. Rhy hovered over him, helpless, unsure whether to hold him down or try to help him up. Alucard’s eyes found his, but looked straight through him. He was somewhere else. “Please,” the captain pleaded with the ghosts. “Don’t make me go.” “I won’t,” said Rhy, wondering who Alucard saw. What he saw. How to free him. The captain’s veins stood out like ropes against his skin. “He’ll never forgive me.” “Who?” asked Rhy, and Alucard’s brow furrowed, as if he were trying to see through the fog, the fever. “Rhy—” The sickness tightened its hold, the shadows in his eyes streaking with lines of light like lightning. The captain bit back a scream. Rhy ran his fingers over Alucard’s hair, took his face in his hands. “Fight it,” he ordered. “Whatever’s holding you, fight it.” Alucard folded in on himself, shuddering. “I can’t….” “Focus on me.” “Rhy …” he sobbed. “I’m here.” Rhy Maresh lowered himself onto the glass-strewn floor, lay on his side so they were face-to-face. “I’m here.” He remembered, then. Like a dream flickering back to the surface, he remembered Alucard’s hands on his shoulders, his voice cutting through the pain, reaching out to him, even in the dark. I’m here now, he’d said, so you can’t die. “I’m here now,” echoed Rhy, twining his fingers through Alucard’s. “And I’m not letting go, so don’t you dare.” Another scream tore from Alucard’s throat, his grip tightening as the lines of black on his skin began to glow. First red, then white. Burning. He was burning from the inside out. And it hurt—hurt to watch, hurt to feel so helpless. But Rhy kept his word. He didn’t let go.

During the chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, when northern France was decimated by English troops and the French monarchy was in retreat, a young girl from Orléans claimed to have divine instructions to lead the French army to victory. With nothing to lose, Charles VII allowed her to command some of his troops. To everyone’s shock and wonder, she scored a series of triumphs over the English. News rapidly spread about this remarkable young girl. With each victory, her reputation began to grow, until she became a folk heroine, rallying the French around her. French troops, once on the verge of total collapse, scored decisive victories that paved the way for the coronation of the new king. However, she was betrayed and captured by the English. They realized what a threat she posed to them, since she was a potent symbol for the French and claimed guidance directly from God Himself, so they subjected her to a show trial. After an elaborate interrogation, she was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen in 1431. In the centuries that followed, hundreds of attempts have been made to understand this remarkable teenager. Was she a prophet, a saint, or a madwoman? More recently, scientists have tried to use modern psychiatry and neuroscience to explain the lives of historical figures such as Joan of Arc. Few question her sincerity about claims of divine inspiration. But many scientists have written that she might have suffered from schizophrenia, since she heard voices. Others have disputed this fact, since the surviving records of her trial reveal a person of rational thought and speech. The English laid several theological traps for her. They asked, for example, if she was in God’s grace. If she answered yes, then she would be a heretic, since no one can know for certain if they are in God’s grace. If she said no, then she was confessing her guilt, and that she was a fraud. Either way, she would lose. In a response that stunned the audience, she answered, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The court notary, in the records, wrote, “Those who were interrogating her were stupefied.” In fact, the transcripts of her interrogation are so remarkable that George Bernard Shaw put literal translations of the court record in his play Saint Joan. More recently, another theory has emerged about this exceptional woman: perhaps she actually suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. People who have this condition sometimes experience seizures, but some of them also experience a curious side effect that may shed some light on the structure of human beliefs. These patients suffer from “hyperreligiosity,” and can’t help thinking that there is a spirit or presence behind everything. Random events are never random, but have some deep religious significance. Some psychologists have speculated that a number of history’s prophets suffered from these temporal lobe epileptic lesions, since they were convinced they talked to God.

THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENCE Many theories have been proposed as to why humans developed greater intelligence, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. According to one theory, the evolution of the human brain probably took place in stages, with the earliest phase initiated by climate change in Africa. As the weather cooled, the forests began to recede, forcing our ancestors onto the open plains and savannahs, where they were exposed to predators and the elements. To survive in this new, hostile environment, they were forced to hunt and walk upright, which freed up their hands and opposable thumbs to use tools. This in turn put a premium on a larger brain to coordinate tool making. According to this theory, ancient man did not simply make tools—“tools made man.” Our ancestors did not suddenly pick up tools and become intelligent. It was the other way around. Those humans who picked up tools could survive in the grasslands, while those who did not gradually died off. The humans who then survived and thrived in the grasslands were those who, through mutations, became increasingly adept at tool making, which required an increasingly larger brain. Another theory places a premium on our social, collective nature. Humans can easily coordinate the behavior of over a hundred other individuals involved in hunting, farming, warring, and building, groups that are much larger than those found in other primates, which gave humans an advantage over other animals. It takes a larger brain, according to this theory, to be able to assess and control the behavior of so many individuals. (The flip side of this theory is that it took a larger brain to scheme, plot, deceive, and manipulate other intelligent beings in your tribe. Individuals who could understand the motives of others and then exploit them would have an advantage over those who could not. This is the Machiavellian theory of intelligence.) Another theory maintains that the development of language, which came later, helped accelerate the rise of intelligence. With language comes abstract thought and the ability to plan, organize society, create maps, etc. Humans have an extensive vocabulary unmatched by any other animal, with words numbering in the tens of thousands for an average person. With language, humans could coordinate and focus the activities of scores of individuals, as well as manipulate abstract concepts and ideas. Language meant you could manage teams of people on a hunt, which is a great advantage when pursuing the woolly mammoth. It meant you could tell others where game was plentiful or where danger lurked. Yet another theory is “sexual selection,” the idea that females prefer to mate with intelligent males. In the animal kingdom, such as in a wolf pack, the alpha male holds the pack together by brute force. Any challenger to the alpha male has to be soundly beaten back by tooth and claw. But millions of years ago, as humans became gradually more intelligent, strength alone could not keep the tribe together.

What are you so afraid of?” “Nothing!” He yelled so fiercely that a pair of oxen grazing in a nearby field snorted and moved farther away from us. It was the first time I ever saw fire in Milo’s eyes. “I’m no coward. That’s not why I wouldn’t go with your brothers. I have to go with you.” “Who said so? You’re free now, Milo. Don’t you know what that means? You can come and go anywhere you like. You ought to appreciate it.” “I appreciate you, Lady Helen!” Once Milo raised his voice, he couldn’t stop. He shouted so loudly that the two oxen trotted to the far side of the pasture as fast as they could move their massive bodies. “You’re the one who gave me my freedom. If I love to be fifty, I’ll never be able to repay you!” Milo’s uproar attracted the attention of the two guards, but I waved them back when I saw them coming toward us. “Do you think you could be grateful quietly?” I asked. “This is between us, not us and all Delphi. You owe me nothing. Listen, if you leave now, you might still be able to catch up to my brothers. I’ll ask the Pythia for help. There must be at least one of Apollo’s pilgrims heading north today, one who’s going on horseback. If she tells him to carry you with him, you’ll overtake Prince Jason’s party in no time! I’ll give you whatever you’ll need for the road and--” “Then I will be in your debt,” Milo encountered. “If you say I’m free, why aren’t I free to stay with you, if that’s what I want?” “Because it’s stupid!” I forgot my own caution about keeping our voices low. I’d decided that if I couldn’t win our argument with facts, I’d do it with volume. “Don’t you see, Milo? This is a better opportunity than anything that’s waiting for you in Sparta! What could you become if you went there? A potter, a tanner, a metalsmith, maybe a farmer’s boy or a shepherd. But if you sail to Colchis with my brothers, you could be--” “Seasick,” Milo finished for me. I raised my eyebrows. “Is that why you won’t go? Not even if it means passing up a once-in-a-lifetime chance for adventures? For a real future? I’m disappointed.” Milo folded his arms. “Why don’t you just command me not to be seasick? Command me to go away and leave you, while you’re at it. Command me to join your brothers. It’s not what I want, but I guess that doesn’t matter after all.” I was about to launch into another list of reasons why he should rush after my brothers when his words stopped me. Lord Oeneus was open-handed with commands, I thought. And it was worse for Milo when his hand closed into a fist. I shouldn’t bully Milo into joining the quest for the fleece just because I wish I could do it myself. In that instant, a happy inspiration struck me with the force of one of Zeus’s own thunderbolts: Why can’t I? I found an unripe acorn lying on the ground beside me and flicked it at Milo. “All right,” I told him. “You win. You can stay with me.” A look of utter relief spread across his face until I added, “But I win too. You’re going to go with my brothers.” “But how can I do that if--?” “And so am I.

He concluded the speech with an irritated motion of his hands. Unfortunately, Evie had been conditioned by too many encounters with Uncle Peregrine to discern between angry gestures and the beginnings of a physical attack. She flinched instinctively, her own arms flying up to shield her head. When the expected pain of a blow did not come, she let out a breath and tentatively lowered her arms to find Sebastian staring at her with blank astonishment. Then his face went dark. "Evie," he said, his voice containing a bladelike ferocity that frightened her. "Did you think I was about to... Christ. Someone hit you. Someone hit you in the past---who the hell was it?" He reached for her suddenly---too suddenly---and she stumbled backward, coming up hard against the wall. Sebastian went very still. "Goddamn," he whispered. Appearing to struggle with some powerful emotion, he stared at her intently. After a long moment, he spoke softly. "I would never strike a woman. I would never harm you. You know that, don't you?" Transfixed by the light, glittering eyes that held hers with such intensity, Evie couldn't move or make a sound. She started as he approached her slowly. "It's all right," he murmured. "Let me come to you. It's all right. Easy." One of his arms slid around her, while he used his free hand to smooth her hair, and then she was breathing, sighing, as relief flowed through her. Sebastian brought her closer against him, his mouth brushing her temple. "Who was it?" he asked. "M-my uncle," she managed to say. The motion of his hand on her back paused as he heard her stammer. "Maybrick?" he asked patiently. "No, th-the other one." "Stubbins." "Yes." Evie closed her eyes in pleasure as his other arm slid around her. Clasped against Sebastian's hard chest, with her cheek tucked against his shoulder, she inhaled the scent of clean male skin, and the subtle touch of sandalwood cologne. "How often?" she heard him ask. "More than once?" "I... i-it's not important now." "How often, Evie?" Realizing that he was going to persist until she answered, Evie muttered, "Not t-terribly often, but... sometimes when I displeased him, or Aunt Fl-Florence, he would lose his temper. The l-last time I tr-tried to run away, he blackened my eye and spl-split my lip." "Did he?" Sebastian was silent for a long moment, and then he spoke with chilling softness. "I'm going to tear him limb from limb." "I don't want that," Evie said earnestly. "I-I just want to be safe from him. From all of them." Sebastian drew his head back to look down into her flushed face. "You are safe," he said in a low voice. He lifted one of his hands to her face, caressing the plane of her cheekbone, letting his fingertip follow the trail of pale golden freckles across the bridge of her nose. As her lashes fluttered downward, he stroked the slender arcs of her brows, and cradled the side of her face with his palm. "Evie," he murmured. "I swear on my life, you will never feel pain from my hands. I may prove a devil of a husband in every other regard... but I wouldn't hurt you that way. You must believe that." The delicate nerves of her skin drank in sensations thirstily... his touch, the erotic waft of his breath against her lips. Evie was afraid to open her eyes, or to do anything that might interrupt the moment. "Yes," she managed to whisper. "Yes... I---" There was the sweet shock of a probing kiss against her lips... another... She opened to him with a slight gasp. His mouth was hot silk and tender fire, invading her with gently questing pressure. His fingertips traced over her face, tenderly adjusting the angle between them.

Lady Thornton, how very good of you to find the time to pay us a social call! Would it be too pushing of me to inquire as to your whereabouts during the last six weeks?” At that moment Elizabeth’s only thought was that if Ian’s barrister felt this way about her, how much more hatred she would face when she confronted Ian himself. “I-I can imagine what you must be thinking,” she began in a conciliatory manner. He interrupted sarcastically, “Oh, I don’t think you can, madam. If you could, you’d be quite horrified at this moment.” “I can explain everything,” Elizabeth burst out. “Really?” he drawled blightingly. “A pity you didn’t try to do that six weeks ago!” “I’m here to do it now,” Elizabeth cried, clinging to a slender thread of control. “Begin at your leisure,” he drawled sarcastically. “here are only three hundred people across the hall awaiting your convenience.” Panic and frustration made Elizabeth’s voice shake and her temper explode. “Now see here, sir, I have not traveled day and night so that I can stand here while you waste time insulting me! I came here the instant I read a paper and realized my husband is in trouble. I’ve come to prove I’m alive and unharmed, and that my brother is also alive!” Instead of looking pleased or relieved he looked more snide than before. “Do tell, madam. I am on tenterhooks to hear the whole of it.” “Why are you doing this?” Elizabeth cried. “For the love of heaven, I’m on your side!” “Thank God we don’t have more like you.” Elizabeth steadfastly ignored that and launched into a swift but complete version of everything that had happened from the moment Robert came up behind her at Havenhurst. Finished, she stood up, ready to go in and tell everyone across the hall the same thing, but Delham continued to pillory her with his gaze, watching her in silence above his steepled fingertips. “Are we supposed to believe that Banbury tale?” he snapped at last. “Your brother is alive, but he isn’t here. Are we supposed to accept the word of a married woman who brazenly traveled as man and wife with another man-“ “With my brother,” Elizabeth retorted, bracing her palms on the desk, as if by sheer proximity she could make him understand. “So you want us to believe. Why, Lady Thornton? Why this sudden interest in your husband’s well-being?” “Delham!” the duchess barked. “Are you mad? Anyone can see she’s telling the truth-even I-and I wasn’t inclined to believe a word she said when she arrived at my house! You are tearing into her for no reason-“ Without moving his eyes from Elizabeth, Mr. Delham said shortly, “Your grace, what I’ve been doing is nothing to what the prosecution will try to do to her story. If she can’t hold up in here, she hasn’t a chance out there!” “I don’t understand this at all!” Elizabeth cried with panic and fury. “By being here I can disprove that my husband has done away with me. And I have a letter from Mrs. Hogan describing my brother in detail and stating that we were together. She will come here herself if you need her, only she is with child and couldn’t travel as quickly as I had to do. This is a trial to prove whether or not my husband is guilty of those crimes. I know the truth, and I can prove he isn’t.” “You’re mistaken, Lady Thornton,” Delham said in a bitter voice. “Because of its sensational nature and the wild conjecture in the press, this is no longer a quest for truth and justice in the House of Lords. This is now an amphitheater, and the prosecution is in the center of the stage, playing a starring role before an audience of thousands all over England who will read about it in the papers. They’re bent on giving a stellar performance, and they’ve been doing just that. Very well,” he said after a moment. “Let’s see how well you can deal with them.