Simple Tastes Quotes

My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.

One is happy once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.

One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.

I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

I am a man of simple tastes easily satisfied with the best

The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment.

If you don't pray often, you won't gain a love for praying. Prayer is work, and therefore it is not very appealing to our natural sensibilities. But the simple rule for prayer is this: Begin praying and your taste for prayer will increase. The more you pray, the more you will acquire the desire for prayer, the energy for prayer, and the sense of purpose in prayer.

Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

Let things taste of what they are.

I’m a girl of simple tastes. I like cheap wine and expensive cheese.

I keep my kindness in my eyes Gently folded around my iris Like a velvety, brown blanket That warms my vision I keep my shyness in my hair Tucked away into a ponytail Looking for a chance to escape On a few loose strands in the air I keep my anger on my lips Just waiting to unleash into the world But trust me; it’s never in my heart It evaporates into words I keep my dignity upon my chin Like a torch held up high For those who have betrayed me Radiating a silent, strong message I keep my gratitude in my smile A glistening waterfall in the sun Gently splashing at that person Who made me happy for some reason I keep my sensitivity in my hands Reaching out for your wet cheek Holding you, with all the love The love I want to share, and feel I keep my passion in my writing My words breathing like fire Screeching against an endless road As I continue to be inspired I keep my simplicity in my soul Spread over me like a clear sky Reflecting all that I am And all that’s ever passed me by And I hope you will look Beyond my ordinary face My simple, tied hair My ordinary tastes And I hope you will see me From everyone...apart As I keep my beauty in my heart.

Killing people is simple. All you have to do is forget the taste of sugar.

I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn’t stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe and I couldn’t be that vulnerable, not again, not with this one. That waiting to have someone’s stolen seconds can burn you alive. That the shittiest thing you can do in the world is lie to someone you love; also that there are certain times you have no other choice – not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. That there is power in having someone risk everything for you. That there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this freefall. That it is not as simple as we were always promised. Love – at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love – does not conquer all.

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.

I wanted a taste of many different lives, sophisticated or simple, highbrow or low. Only then would this journey be worthwhile. (Although perhaps a life plain as porridge would never be an option for me.)

context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life. I mean, lets face it:when you're eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the backgroud, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion's face, you realize that in half an hour you're proably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better

...Tea. There is nothing saner than tea, he thought. ... Tea was the great leveler. It brought calm, quiet, contentment, warmth. And it was something to do. .....Tea-- so normal, so mundane, so hot... ...The heat and scent of it permeated his head and cleared his mind. He understood completely the attraction of ceremonies grounded in the ritual of drinking tea. It required both caution and abandonment of the senses. It demanded that you move into it slowly and savor the moment. And it rewarded you with warmth and delicacy of taste and refreshment. And after you were done, it could parse out your future.

My soul, will you ever be good, simple, individual, bare, brighter than the body that covers you? Will you ever taste the disposition to love and affection? Will you ever be complete and free of need, missing nothing, desiring nothing live or lifeless for the enjoyment of pleasure?

Augustus approved of Livia’s educative methods with Julia and of her domestic arrangements and economies. He had simple tastes himself. His palate was so insensitive that he did not notice the difference between virgin olive oil and the last rank squeezings when the olive-paste has gone a third time through the press.

Everybody asks why I started at the end and worked back to the beginning, the reason is simple, I couldn't understand the beginning until I had reached the end. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing, too much you would never tell. I could sell these things. People want to buy them, but I'd set all this on fire first. She'd like that, that's what she would do. She'd make it just to burn it. I couldn't afford this one, but the beginning deserves something special. But how do I show that nothing, not a taste, not a smell, not even the color of the sky, has ever been as clear and sharp as it was when I belonged to her. I don't know how to express the being with someone so dangerous is the last time I felt safe... (White Oleander)

Oh, good grief," said Vimes. "Look, it's quite simple, man. I was expected to go "At last, alcohol!", and chugalug the lot without thinking. Then some respectable pillars of the community" - he removed the cigar from his mouth and spat - "were going to find me, in your presence, too - which was a nice touch - with the evidence of my crime neatly hidden but not so well hidden that they couldn't find it." He shook his head sadly. "The trouble is, you know, that once the taste's got you it never lets go." "But you've been very good, sir," said Carrot. "I've not seen you touch a drop for -" "Oh, that," said Vimes. "I was talking about policing, not alcohol. There's lots of people will help you with the alcohol business, but there's no one out there arranging little meetings where you can stand up and say, "My name is Sam and I'm a really suspicious bastard.

Little things. The thought of losing them makes them unbearably dear ... I only think of the sweetness. Simple things. The quarter moon, the taste of an orange. The smell of the pages of a new book.

But it so happens that everything on this planet is, ultimately, irrational; there is not, and cannot be, any reason for the causal connexion of things, if only because our use of the word "reason" already implies the idea of causal connexion. But, even if we avoid this fundamental difficulty, Hume said that causal connexion was not merely unprovable, but unthinkable; and, in shallower waters still, one cannot assign a true reason why water should flow down hill, or sugar taste sweet in the mouth. Attempts to explain these simple matters always progress into a learned lucidity, and on further analysis retire to a remote stronghold where every thing is irrational and unthinkable. If you cut off a man's head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer. Learned excursions into anatomy and physiology only beg the question; it does not explain why the heart is necessary to life to say that it is a vital organ. Yet that is exactly what is done, the trick that is played on every inquiring mind. Why cannot I see in the dark? Because light is necessary to sight. No confusion of that issue by talk of rods and cones, and optical centres, and foci, and lenses, and vibrations is very different to Edwin Arthwait's treatment of the long-suffering English language. Knowledge is really confined to experience. The laws of Nature are, as Kant said, the laws of our minds, and, as Huxley said, the generalization of observed facts. It is, therefore, no argument against ceremonial magic to say that it is "absurd" to try to raise a thunderstorm by beating a drum; it is not even fair to say that you have tried the experiment, found it would not work, and so perceived it to be "impossible." You might as well claim that, as you had taken paint and canvas, and not produced a Rembrandt, it was evident that the pictures attributed to his painting were really produced in quite a different way. You do not see why the skull of a parricide should help you to raise a dead man, as you do not see why the mercury in a thermometer should rise and fall, though you elaborately pretend that you do; and you could not raise a dead man by the aid of the skull of a parricide, just as you could not play the violin like Kreisler; though in the latter case you might modestly add that you thought you could learn. This is not the special pleading of a professed magician; it boils down to the advice not to judge subjects of which you are perfectly ignorant, and is to be found, stated in clearer and lovelier language, in the Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley.

As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, -- the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

If only one could engrave entire memories in silver, thought Robin, to be manifested again and again for years to come – not the cruel distortion of the daguerreotype, but a pure and impossible distillation of emotions and sensations. For simple ink on paper was not enough to describe this golden afternoon; the warmth of uncomplicated friendship, all fights forgotten, all sins forgiven; the sunlight melting away the memory of the classroom chill; the sticky taste of lemon on their tongues and their startled, delighted relief.

She stepped back and frowned at me. "Open it." "Me?" I felt sure she was picking on me because I was the only enslaved god she had. "I'm not Hermes! I'm not even Valdez!" "Try." As if that were a simple request! I attempted to get my fingertips under the edge and prise it open. I spread my arms and yelled the standard magic words: MELLON! SHAZAM! SESAME STREET! None of these worked. At last I tried my infallible ace in the hole. I sang 'Love Is an Open Door' from the Frozen soundtrack. Even this failed. "Impossible!" I cried. "This door has no taste in music!

is a broken man an outlaw?" "More or less." Brienne answered. Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. "Then they get a taste of battle. "For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe. "They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. "If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chicken's, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world... "And the man breaks. "He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well

Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.

Mrs. Forbes said that hating yellow and brown is just being silly. And Siobhan said that she shouldn't say things like that and everyone has favorite colors. And Siobhan was right. But Mrs. Forbes was a bit right, too. Because it is sort of being silly. But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others. It is like being in a restaurant like when Father takes me out to a Berni Inn sometimes and you look at the menu and you have to choose what you are going to have. But you don't know if you are going to like something because you haven't tasted it yet, so you have favorite foods and you choose these, and you have foods you dno't like and you don't choose these, and then it is simple.

Look. Folks. It's simple. If you have poor taste in decorating, don't go nuts in the entryway. Wait until your guests are inside before you spring something unusual on them.

ladies, don't be a woman of simple taste particularly in the way you look, or at least keep that to the minimum. You are a goddess, after all. Stop trying to look all humbled or modest. You've got to look and smell like a goddess who, in my opinion, is a woman that is constantly in touch with her own sensuality, which also means she's always on top of her game.

But my favorite remained the basic roast chicken. What a deceptively simple dish. I had come to believe that one can judge the quality of a cook by his or her roast chicken. Above all, it should taste like chicken: it should be so good that even a perfectly simple, buttery roast should be a delight.

They are a generation that has tasted blood, and where horror fades, nostalgia seeps in. In war all is simple, and there is appeal in this. Who among us is comforted by confusion, uncertainty?

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery. Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self deception.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.

Back then life was simple and sweet. Everything was simple and sweet. The taste of cherries, the cool shade, the fresh smell of the river. That was how we lived, in a vale among the hills, sheltered from the storms. Ignorant of the world, as though on an island. Peaceful and untroubled. And then. Then everything changed.

When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.

Littlefinger laughed aloud. “With gold and boys and promises, of course. Ser Lyn is a man of simple tastes, my sweetling. All he likes is gold and boys and killing.

You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him--the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints--is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. And it has been just the same for me, my friend. I was a gifted girl. I was meant to live up to a high standard, to expect much of myself and do great things. I could have played a great part. I could have been the wife of a king, the beloved of a revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr. And life has allowed me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly good taste, and even that has been hard enough. That is how things have gone with me. For a while I was inconsolable and for a long time I put the blame on myself. Life, thought I, must in the end be in the right, and if life scorned my beautiful dreams, so I argued, it was my dreams that were stupid and wrong headed. But that did not help me at all. And as I had good eyes and ears and was a little inquisitive too, I took a good look at this so-called life and at my neighbors and acquaintances, fifty or so of them and their destinies, and then I saw you. And I knew that my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been. It was life and reality that were wrong. It was as little right that a woman like me should have no other choice than to grow old in poverty and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a money-maker, or to marry such a man for his money's sake, or to become some kind of drudge, as for a man like you to be forced in his loneliness and despair to have recourse to a razor. Perhaps the trouble with me was more material and moral and with you more spiritual--but it was the same road. Do you think I can't understand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz and the rest of it? I understand it only too well, and your dislike of politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and irresponsible antics of the parties and the press, your despair over the war, the one that has been and the one that is to be, over all that people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they play, the celebrations they hold, the education they carry on. You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours--

They understood that. They all understood it. This is not the same as comprehension, but it was good enough. When you stop to think, the whole idea of comprehension has a faintly archaic taste, like the sound of forgotten tongues or a look into a Victorian camera obscura. We Americans are much higher on simple understanding. It makes it easier to read the billboards when you're heading into town on the expressway at plus-fifty. To comprehend, the mental jaws have to gape wide enough to make the tendons creak. Understanding, however, can be purchased on every paperback-book rack in America.

Do you want some?" I ask him, offering up the little remaining liquor to him, since it's only polite. "It doesn't taste that disgusting once you get used to it." He gently pushes the bottle back down. "No, thanks." "What do you want, then? I can give it to you?" This should be a simple enough question. Multiple choice at most. But he falters as if he's received a three-thousand-word essay prompt. Swallows. Looks away. "Nothing," he says at last. "I don't—want anything.

Damn it, Gabe." Pagan wrenched out of his hold and grabbed his shoulders. "Tell me what you want." "To kiss you." The words tumbled from his lips, harsher than he intended. "Just once. To know what it's like. What you taste like." Pagan's eyes darkened. "Maybe then I'll be able to forget you." Pagan arched an eyebrow and stepped forward. "You think it's that simple?" Gabe held his ground. "Yeah." "So do it." They stood chest to chest. Pagan's warm breath caressed Gabe's forehead when he said softly, "Kiss me, cop. Then try to forget me.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible,” he said. He then made his point with the simple example of a taste for strawberries. “There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. . . . The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has.

Sour Milk You can't make it turn sweet again. Once it was an innocent color like the flowers of wild strawberries, and its texture was simple would pass through a clean cheesecloth, its taste was fresh. And now with nothing more guilty that the passage of time to chide it with, the same substance has turned sour and lumpy. The sour milk makes interesting & delicious doughs, can be carried to a further state of bacterial action to create new foods, can in its own right be considered complicated and more interesting in texture to one who studies it closely, like a map of the world. But to most of us: it is spoiled. Sour. We throw it out, down the drain-not in the backyard- careful not to spill any because the smell is strong. A good cook would be shocked with the waste. But we do not live in a world of good cooks. I am the milk. Time passes. You cannot make it turn sweet again. I sit guiltily on the refrigerator shelf trembling with hope for a cook who dreams of waffles, biscuits, dumplings and other delicious breads fearing the modern housewife who will lift me off the shelf and with one deft twist of a wrist... you know the rest. You are the milk. When it is your turn remember, there is nothing more than the passage of time we can chide you with.

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

No," he said, "look, it's very, very simple ... all I want ... is a cup of tea. You are going to make one for me. Keep quiet and listen." And he sat. He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting in the milk before the tea so it wouldn't get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the history of the East India Company. "So that's it, is it?" said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished. "Yes," said Arthur, "that is what I want." "You want the taste of dried leaves in boiled water?" "Er, yes. With milk." "Squirted out of a cow?" "Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose ...

Every human being is bound to taste death: and you shall receive your rewards in full on the Day of Resurrection. He who is kept away from the Fire and is admitted to Paradise, will surely triumph; for the life of this world is nothing but an illusory enjoyment.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the wizard Saruman turns from wisdom to rapacity in his taste for power. He rips out the ancient trees and flattens the land to make room for the industries of war. The lesson is simple: All technology, along with its blessings, also carries a temptation—an appetite for control, a willingness to flatten the world (if needed) to make space for the human will. And

Ye know as well as I that I lost whatever heart I once had long ago,” Mick replied without emotion, a simple statement of fact. “If the babe lives, or if she dies, it makes no difference to me. I’ll still eat sweetmeats on the morrow and taste the sugar on me tongue, still f*ck women and feel the pleasure in me bollocks. And, Charlie—mark me well, now—I’ll still kill ye and laugh in yer ugly face as I do it.

Part of the magic of the lake is that it isn’t home – it’s away, and away allows us to see the rhythms and dimensions of our lives more clearly. So it doesn’t necessarily work for us to live here at the lake, but I do want the way of living that I’ve tasted here to inform and ground how I live everywhere, all year long. The lake gives me something to aspire to – a reminder, a rhythm, a pattern. Simple, connected to God and His world and people, uncomplicated by lots of stuff.

Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone ... It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else's tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton." - Ann Patchett, "Dinner for One, Please, James

It was a time when I imagined getting married in a simple, wishful way. The time when someone promised to take care of you, promised they would notice if you were sad, or tired, or hated food that tasted like the chill of the refrigerator. Who promised their lives would run parallel to yours. My mother must have known and stayed anyway, and what did that mean about love? It was never going to be safe—all the mournful refrains of songs that despaired you didn’t love me the way I loved you.

The pleasure from eating, Dan, is more than the taste of the food and the feeling of a full belly. Learn to enjoy the entire process — the hunger beforehand, the careful preparation, setting an attractive table, chewing, breathing, smelling, tasting, swallowing, and the feeling of lightness and energy after the meal. You can even enjoy the full and easy elimination of the food after it’s digested. When you pay attention to all elements of the process, you'll begin to appreciate simple meals.

It [Badger's House] seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest House with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glaces with each other; plates of the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.

He watches me eat for a moment. “Let me see it again.” “No.” “Okay.” He pulls a can of carbonated water out of his backpack and pops the lid. Sometimes I want to punch him. I find the letter and slide it across the table. He reads it again. It makes me feel all jittery inside. His eyes flick up. “She likes you.” I shrug and steal his drink. It tastes like someone drowned an orange in a bottle of Perrier, and I cough. Rev smiles. “You like her.” “How can you drink this crap?” His smile widens. “Is it making you crazy that she won’t reveal herself?” “Seriously, Rev, do you have any regular water?” He’s no fool. “What do you want to do?” I take a long breath and blow it out. I run a hand through my hair. “I don’t know.” “You know.” “I want to stake out the grave. This waiting between letters is killing me.” “Suggest email.” “She doesn’t want to tell me anything more than her age. She’s not going to give me her email address.” “Maybe not her real email. But you could set up a private account and give her the address. See if she writes you.” It’s so simple it’s brilliant. I hate that I didn’t think of it. “Rev, I could kiss you.” “Brush your teeth first.” He reclaims his bizarre can of water.

Perhaps, some day, humanity can start afresh, a new world, a tabula rasa, a world with a mind without prior experiences. No memories and no pain. A day when the ones with abundance do not look down at the poor and the needy, a day when we learn to care for the victims, the fallen souls of civilization and advancement, a day when the world will be pure. When all of humanity becomes a clean sheet of parchment, without knowledge and prejudice, simple, hungry for knowing, tasting, and feeling; hungry for life and ready to absorb the ink of experience.

Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.

Once we got to eating, the idea of happiness returned to me. Not the feeling, the idea. Would a regular girl be happy simply eating a hot meal with a great deal of chew to it? Maybe happiness is a simple thing. Maybe it's as simple as the salty taste of pork, and the vast deal of chewing in it, and how, when the chew is gone, you can still scrape at the bone with your bottom teeth and suck at the marrow.

A great blow it was,' he said in expensive tones, 'worthy of the mightiest warrior and truly struck upon the nose of the foe. The bright blood flew, and the enemy was dismayed and overcame. Like a hero, Garion stood over the vanquished, and, like a true hero, did not boast nor taunt his fallen opponent, but offered instead advice for quelling that crimson blood. with simple dignity then, he quit the field, but the bright-eyed maid would not let him depart unrewarded for his valor. hastily, she pursued him and fondly clasped her snowy arms about his neck. And there she lovingly bestowed that single kiss that is the true hero's greatest reward. Her eyes flamed with admiration, and her chaste bosom heaved with newly wakened passion. But modest Garion innocently departed and tarried not to claim those other sweet rewards the gentle maid's fond demeanor so clearly offered. And thus the adventure ended with our hero tasting victory but tenderly declining victory's true compensation.

Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone, like going to the movies by yourself in the afternoon or, back in those golden days of youth, having a cigarette in the bathtub. It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else's tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton. Eating, after all, is a matter of taste, and taste cannot always be good taste. The very thought of maintaining high standards meal after meal is exhausting. It discounts all the peanut butter that is available in the world.

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses. By thy might, there return into us treasures that we had abandoned. By thy grace, there are released in us all the dried-up runnels of our heart. Of the riches that exist in the world, thou art the rarest and also the most delicate - thou so pure within the bowels of the earth! A man may die of thirst lying beside a magnesian spring. He may die within reach of a salt lake. He may die though he hold in his hand a jug of dew, if it be inhabited by evil salts. For thou, water, art a proud divinity, allowing no alteration, no foreignness in thy being. And the joy that thou spreadest is an infinitely simple joy.

I'm a simple (wo)man with complex tastes

Noor, for all her complexity, had simple tastes. Chaat and ganne ka ras. Paan and gajra. Rajnigandha and Bata. She was both easy and impossible to please.

She has a simple taste – only black. In black, she looks the brightest.

The essence of meditation practice in Dzogchen is encapsulated by these four points: ▪ When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn’t there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair’s breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness? Well, that is what Rigpa is! ▪ Yet it doesn’t stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn’t it? This is the self-radiance of that Rigpa. ▪ However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before. This is called the “chain of delusion,” and is the root of samsara. ▪ If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated. Clearly this takes a lifetime of practice to understand and realize the full richness and majesty of these four profound yet simple points, and here I can only give you a taste of the vastness of what is meditation in Dzogchen. … Dzogchen meditation is subtly powerful in dealing with the arisings of the mind, and has a unique perspective on them. All the risings are seen in their true nature, not as separate from Rigpa, and not as antagonistic to it, but actually as none other–and this is very important–than its “self-radiance,” the manifestation of its very energy. Say you find yourself in a deep state of stillness; often it does not last very long and a thought or a movement always arises, like a wave in the ocean.  Don’t reject the movement or particulary embrace the stillness, but continue the flow of your pure presence. The pervasive, peaceful state of your meditation is the Rigpa itself, and all risings are none other than this Rigpa’s self-radiance. This is the heart and the basis of Dzogchen practice. One way to imagine this is as if you were riding on the sun’s rays back to the sun: …. Of couse there are rough as well as gentle waves in the ocean; strong emotions come, like anger, desire, jealousy. The real practitioner recognizes them not as a disturbance or obstacle, but as a great opportunity. The fact that you react to arisings such as these with habitual tendencies of attachment and aversion is a sign not only that you are distracted, but also that you do not have the recognition and have lost the ground of Rigpa. To react to emotions in this way empowers them and binds us even tighter in the chains of delusion. The great secret of Dzogchen is to see right through them as soon as they arise, to what they really are: the vivid and electric manifestation of the energy of Rigpa itself. As you gradually learn to do this, even the most turbulent emotions fail to seize hold of you and dissolve, as wild waves rise and rear and sink back into the calm of the ocean. The practitioner discovers–and this is a revolutionary insight, whose subtlety and power cannot be overestimated–that not only do violent emotions not necessarily sweep you away and drag you back into the whirlpools of your own neuroses, they can actually be used to deepen, embolden, invigorate, and strengthen the Rigpa. The tempestuous energy becomes raw food of the awakened energy of Rigpa. The stronger and more flaming the emotion, the more Rigpa is strengthened.

Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste— his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart;

My soul, will you ever be good, simple, individual, bare, brighter than the body covers you? Will you ever taste the disposition to love and affection? Will you ever be complete and free of need, missing nothing, desiring nothing live or lifeless for the enjoyment of pleasure?

Lewis, anything but dull, suffered from an excess of misguided cleverness: he could disparage himself brilliantly in a matter of seconds. He knew literature, art, the theater, history; and his knowledge surpassed what a college normally provides. His knowledge led nowhere, certainly not into the world where he was supposed to earn a living. Lewis had once gone to work in the bookstore of his school because he loved handling books and looked forward to being immersed in them. He was then instructed to keep careful accounts of merchandise that might as well have been canned beans. He soon lost interest in his simple task, failed to master it, and quit after three days. Eight years later, he was still convinced of his practical incompetence. College friends familiar with his tastes would suggest modest ways for him to get started: they knew of jobs as readers in publishing houses, as gofers in theatrical productions, as caretakers at galleries. Lewis rejected them all. While he saw that they might lead to greater things, they sounded both beneath and beyond him--the bookstore again. Other chums who had gone on to graduate school urged their choice on him. Lewis harbored an uneasy scorn for the corporation of scholars, who seemed as unfit for the world as he. He remained desperate, lonely, and spoiled.

Wisdom is not to be found in the art of oratory, or in great books, but in a withdrawal from these sensible things and in a turning to the most simple and infinite forms. You will learn how to receive it into a temple purged from all vice, and by fervent love to cling to it until you may taste it and see how sweet That is which is all sweetness. Once this has been tasted, all things which you now consider as important will appear as vile, and you will be so humbled that no arrogance or other vice will remain in you. Once having tasted this wisdom, you will inseparably adhere to it with a chaste and pure heart. You will choose rather to forsake this world and all else that is not of this wisdom, and living with unspeakable happiness you will die.

...you can have all the right notions in your head without ever tasting in your heart the realities to which they refer; and a simple Bible reader and sermon hearer who is full of the Holy Spirit will develop a far deeper acquaintance with his God and Saviour than a more learned scholar who is content with being theologically correct. The reason is that the former will deal with God regarding the practical application of truth to his life, whereas the latter will not.

I was now well prepared to be a career criminal. I had the proper training and a natural feel for the business. I had a respect for the old-liners like Angelo and Don Frederico. I had been a witness to both murder and betrayal and had my appetite whetted for acts of revenge. I just didn't have the stomach for any of it. I didn't want my life to be a lonely and sinister on, where even the closest of friends could overnight turn into an enemy who needed to be eliminated. If I went the way Angelo had paved, I would earn millions, but would never be allowed to taste the happiness and enjoyment such wealth often brings. I would rule over a dark world, a place where treachery and deceit would be at my side and never know the simple pleasures of an ordinary life. p368.

Does it seem like things were better when you were younger?” Huck asked. “Did life really make more sense then?” “Yeah,” Tress whispered. “I remember…calm nights, watching the spores fall from the moon. Lukewarm cups of honey tea. The thrill of baking something new.” “I remember not being afraid,” Huck said. “I remember waking each day to familiar scents. I remember thinking I understood how my life would go. Same as my parents’. Simple. Maybe not wonderful, but also not terrifying.” “I don’t think things were really better though,” Tress said softly, still staring at the ceiling. “We just remember it that way because it’s comforting.” “And because we couldn’t see the troubles,” Huck agreed. “Maybe we didn’t want to see them. When you’re young, there’s always someone else to deal with the problems.” Tress nodded. Beyond that, memories have a way of changing on us. Souring or sweetening over time—like a brew we drink, then recreate later by taste, only getting the ingredients mostly right. You can’t taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.

Just a taste. That was the Cambion policy, our credo. 'Just take enough to appease the spirit, then move on.' It sounded simple enough, but sometimes taking a little was worse than taking none at all.

The explanation is that I consider cooking to be an act of love. I do enjoy the craft of cooking, of course, otherwise I would not have done so much of it, but that is a very small part of the pleasure it brings me. What I love is to cook for someone. To put a freshly made meal on the table, even if it is something very plain and simple as long as it tastes good and is not a ready-to-eat something bought at the store, is a sincere expression of affection, it is an act of binding intimacy directed at whoever has a welcome place in your heart. And while other passions in your life may at some point begine to bank their fires, the shared happiness of good homemade food can last as long as we do.

The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple,authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is he beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony.

Every young woman should dress well, that is, neatly, tastefully, modestly, whether she be rich or poor. Conspicuous dressing is vulgar. True refinement avoids anything showy and flashy: it never dresses better than it can afford, and yet it is always well dressed, even in simple muslin or plain calico. Another

With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his countenance yet had something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.

I picked up scallop shells in diverse colors and sizes — warm reds and yellows; cool, stippled grays — and reflected on the diversity of God’s creation, and what might be the use and meaning of his making so many varieties of a single thing. If he created scallops simply for our nourishment, why paint each shell with delicate and particular colors? And why, indeed, trouble making so many different things to nourish us, when in the Bible we read that a simple manna fed the Hebrews day following day? It came to me then that God must desire us to use each of our senses, to take delight in the varied tastes and sights and textures of his world.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel.

Russkie, promise me a simple thing?" Out of the blue when they had finished, after a mouthful from the mug. Dan seemed relaxed, leaning on his side. Resting back, savoring the taste, Vadim turned his head to look at Dan. Oh, that body. The effect it had on him, all the time, even when Dan wasn't there. Twelve months. "Promise what?" Sometimes, that kind of thing was about letters. Tell my girl I love her. Tell my mother I didn't suffer. Almost painful. Letters. Words that would hurt worse than the killing bullet. "Simple." Dan nodded, "if I'm unlucky, and if you find my body, will you bury it? Some rocks would do, I can't stand the thought of carrion's. As if that mattered, eh? I'd be fucking dead." Dan shrugged, tossed a grin towards the other, made light of an entirely far too heavy situation. He took the bottle once more, washing down the taste of death and decay, chasing away unbidden images. Vadim felt a shudder race over his skin. The thought of death chilled him to the bone, like a premonition. For a moment he saw himself stagger through enemy territory, looking for something that had been Dan. Minefields, snipers, fucking Hind hellfire. He might be able to track him. He might be able to guess where he had gone, where he had fallen. He had found the occasional pilot. But he had had help. Finding a dead man in a country full of dead people was more of a challenge. "I'll send you home," he murmured. Stay alive, he thought. Stay alive like you are now. I don't want to carry your rotting body to fucking Kabul and hand myself in to whatever bastard is your superior or handler there, but it must be Kabul. I can't hand myself over. But I will. Fuck you. He felt his face twitch, and turned away, breathing. "No, I have no home anymore." Dan's hand stopped Vadim from turning over fully. Fingers digging into the muscular thigh. "Not my brother's family. Nowhere to send the body to. Forget it." Grip tightening while he moved closer. Ignored the heat, the damned fan and its monotonous creaking, pressed his body behind the other. "You're as close to a fucking home as I get.

Nothing fills Vera with quite as much joy as watching loved ones eat her food. It’s one of the many things she misses about Jinlong and Tilly. When it was the three of them at home, she’d cook every day and watch as Jinlong and Tilly ate, and food always tasted so much better that way. Living alone, Vera finds that much of the joy of cooking has leached out of her, to the point where she mostly eats plain rice and simple sauteed vegetables for dinner. Why bother cooking elaborate meals for just one person? But now she has so many people to cook for. Her days are filled to bursting and she’s constantly rushing here and there, and she can’t possibly be happier than this.

Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, 'You love beer so much. I'll bet some day you'll go in and order a beer milk shake.' It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn't let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn't forget it...If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn't known--they might call the police.

My dream, even now, is to walk for weeks with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from place to place, with no route arranged and no object in view, with liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose; but the question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry, "How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!" The relative of five hundred years back would have said "How Holy!

In our relationships, weatherproofing typically plays itself out like this: You meet someone and all is well. You are attracted to his or her appearance, personality, intellect, sense of humor, or some combination of these traits. Initially, you not only approve of your differences with this person, you actually appreciate them. You might even be attracted to the person, in part because of how different you are. You have different opinions, preferences, tastes, and priorities. After a while, however, you begin to notice little quirks about your new partner (or friend, teacher, whoever), that you feel could be improved upon. You bring it to their attention. You might say, “You know, you sure have a tendency to be late.” Or, “I’ve noticed you don’t read very much.” The point is, you’ve begun what inevitably turns into a way of life—looking for and thinking about what you don’t like about someone, or something that isn’t quite right. Obviously, an occasional comment, constructive criticism, or helpful guidance isn’t cause for alarm. I have to say, however, that in the course of working with hundreds of couples over the years, I’ve met very few people who didn’t feel that they were weatherproofed at times by their partner. Occasional harmless comments have an insidious tendency to become a way of looking at life. When you are weatherproofing another human being, it says nothing about them—but it does define you as someone who needs to be critical. Whether you have a tendency to weatherproof your relationships, certain aspects of your life, or both, what you need to do is write off weatherproofing as a bad idea. As the habit creeps into your thinking, catch yourself and seal your lips. The less often you weatherproof your partner or your friends, the more you’ll notice how super your life really is.

Cooking can be an act of love and delight, or it can be yet another exercise in racing through life on automatic pilot—never stopping for a moment to notice, feel, or taste. Cooking performed as an act of love brings us renewed energy and vigor.

Is it simple that I can’t stop thinking about you? About the kiss in that hospital room?” He took one step, eating up the small space separating them until he knew she could hear his whisper. “About how you taste? How you feel? Is that simple, Kerris?

Just that winter she had found herself saying to a young woman who worked with her at the tasting bar on Saturdays that between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. 'That doesn't mean the weaker one doesn't love the stronger,' she'd pleaded. The girl looked at her blankly. But for my mother what mattered was that as she spoke, she had suddenly identified herself as the weaker one. This revelation sent her reeling. What had she thought all those years but the opposite? She pulled her chair as close to his head as she could and laid her face on the edge of his pillow to watch him breathing, to see the flutter of the eye beneath his eyelid when he dreamed. How could it be that you could love someone so far from home? She had put billboards and roads in between them, throwing roadblocks behind her and ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that that would make him disappear? erase their life and children? It was so simple, as she watched him, as his regular breathing calmed her, that she did not even see it happening at first. She began to think of the rooms in our house and the hours that she had worked so hard to forget spent inside of them. Like fruit put up in jars and forgotten about, the sweetness seemed even more distilled as she returned. There on that shelf were all the dates and silliness of thier early love, the braid that began to form of their dreams, the solid root of a burgeoning family. The first solid evidence of it all. Me.

I quit eating meat in 1976, the same year I turned fifteen, came out, and went to my first gay rights rally (not in that order). When I say that I 'came out,' I mean that I resolved to never lie about my love for women, never deliberately pass for straight, and never deny a lover by calling her 'him.' To do so, I felt, would be to betray not only the women I desired, but my deepest self. My decision to quit meat was equally simple. Somehow, through the confluence of midseventies influences, I knew that vegetarianism was a particularly healthy way to eat. One day, quite suddenly, I realized: If I didn't need to eat meat to stay alive, then eating meat was killing for pleasure. I couldn't live with myself, wouldn't be the nonviolent person I believed myself to be, if I killed other beings--beings who had their own desires--merely to satisfy my desire for the taste of their flesh. Looking back, I see that both decisions, coming out and quitting meat, are about the interplay of desire and integrity. Sometimes integrity means being true to your desires, and sometimes integrity requires you to refuse your desires. I also notice that both decisions were about bodies and consent. A primary tenet of gay liberation is that what consenting people do with each other's bodies is nobody else's business. And, of course, eating meat is something you do to somebody else's body without their consent.

The desire to be famous is infantile, and humanity has never lived in an age when infantilism was more sanctioned and encouraged than now. Infantile foods in the form of crisps, chips, sweet fizzy drinks and pappy burgers or hot dogs smothered in sugary sauce are considered mainstream nutrition for millions of adults. Intoxicating drinks disguised as milkshakes and soda pops exist for those whose taste buds haven't grown up enough to enjoy the taste of alcohol. As in food so in the wider culture. Anything astringent, savoury, sharp, complex, ambiguous or difficult is ignored in favour of the colourful, the sweet, the hollow and the simple.

His hands cupped her cheeks, holding her steady so that he might drink in the sight of her. It was too dark to see the exact colors that made her unforgettable face, but Simon knew that her lips were soft and pink, with just a tinge of peach at the corners. He knew that her eyes were made up of dozens of shades of brown, with that one enchanting circle of green constantly daring him to take a closer look, to see if it was really there or just a figment of his imagination. But the rest— how she would feel, how she would taste— he could only imagine. And Lord, how he’d been imagining it. Despite his composed demeanor, despite all of his promises to Anthony, he burned for her. When he saw her across a crowded room, his skin grew hot, and when he saw her in his dreams, he went up in flames. Now— now that he had her in his arms, her breath fast and uneven with desire, her eyes glazed with need she couldn’t possibly comprehend— now he thought he might explode. And so kissing her became a matter of self-preservation. It was simple. If he did not kiss her now, if he did not consume her, he would die. It sounded melodramatic, but at the moment he would have sworn it to be true. The hand of desire twisting around his gut would burst into flame and take him along with it. He needed her that much.

Moss is 300m yrs old. Home on every continent. No roots. No towering trunks, yet it tasted the air before the first feather, before shrews stirred the leaf litter. When your mind hisses like a kettle, look to your elder, to the green lessons of soft, simple quiet beneath the sun.

Miss Althea?" "I don't blame you, Jesse," she said at last, taking control of her whirling emotions. "I must have…I must have led you astray somehow. But you must never touch me again." Jesse's disappointment was palpable. "Never?" That seemed impossible. To be allowed to know how wonderful it was to feel and smell and taste her and then to never be allowed that again. It was so unfair. Jesse wanted to cry. It was too unfair.

The conservative social critique always boils down to the same simple message: liberalism - meaning everything from racy TV to deconstructionists in the Yale French Department - is an affectation of the loathsome rich, as bizarre as their taste for Corgi dogs and extra-virgin olive oil.

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one’s fellow creatures. All the other claims—the service of the state, the glorification of the gods or the ruler, the arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice—are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent. The militarism and the taste for violent sports that characterized his own culture seemed to Lucretius in the deepest sense perverse and unnatural. Man’s natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more.

She thought of the women at Chicken Little's funeral. The women who shrieked over the bier and at the lip of the open grave. What she had regarded since as unbecoming behavior seemed fitting to her now; they were screaming at the neck of God, his giant nape, the vast back-of-the-head that he had turned on them in death. But it seemed to her now that it was not a fist-shaking grief they were keening but rather a simple obligation to say something, do something, feel something about the dead. They could not let that heart-smashing event pass unrecorded, unidentified. It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.

It was foolish to think some things were beyond happening, even being attracted to Negroes. I’d honestly thought such a thing couldn’t happen, the way water could not run uphill or salt could not taste sweet. A law of nature. Maybe it was a simple matter of being attracted to what I couldn’t have.

Pies are so much fun to make—and so simple! All it takes to make a tender, flaky crust is the right amount of vegetable shortening, cut into flour with a sprinkle of cold water, and just a pinch of salt. Cherries have the right sweet-to-tart taste—and are also a good source of poison! Just crush the pits or stems. There you’ll find prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide: easy to sprinkle into both the filling and the crust. How sweet it is!

Like Okakura, I know that tea is no minor beverage. When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment? The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.

He probably wanted real power, the power to direct one's environment towards a harmonious end, and not fictitious power, the power to order and be obeyed; and he must have known that he had not been able to exercise real power over Rome. It would have been easier for him if what we were told when we were young was true, and that the decay of Rome was due to immorality. Life, however, is never as simple as that, and human beings rarely so potent. There is so little difference between the extent to which any large number of people indulge in sexual intercourse, when they indulge in it without inhibitions and when they indulge in it with inhibitions, that it cannot often be a determining factor in history. The exceptional person may be an ascetic or a debauchee, but the average man finds celibacy and sexual excess equally difficult. All we know of Roman immorality teaches us that absolute power is a poison, and that the Romans, being fundamentally an inartistic people, had a taste for pornography which they often gratified in the description of individuals and families on which that poison had worked.

(Pericles:) For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.Wealth we employ, not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it. (Book 2 Chapter 40.1)

Grounding refers to using your ability to sense your body and feel your feet on the earth in order to calm your nervous system. Grounding is a key resource for trauma and emotional overwhelm. Your senses (hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching) are the only necessary tools for anchoring yourself in the present moment. One simple practice involves naming five things you see, four things you hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, and taking one deep slow breath.

We move through the world in a narrow groove, preoccupied with the petty things we see and hear, brooding over our prejudices, passing by the joys of life without even knowing that we have missed anything. Never for a moment do we taste the heady wine of freedom. We are as truly imprisoned as if we lay at the bottom of a dungeon, heaped with chains.

Her own home was simple, a marker of good taste.

People who can’t make the simple distinction between what tastes good or bad have disqualified themselves from the human race,” was one of his pet theories.

Your face expresses a simple majesty, Your look is that of a captive princess, Your lips have a slight smile and This shows your glory of being a woman.

Daisy, simple and discreet flower, That earned the heart of this poet.

However, over the years, in many restaurants, the sublimely simple combination of butter and cheese has been altered to satisfy American palates. Cream has crept its way in (unnecessary), as well as chicken (yuck), broccoli (why?), and turkey (really? Fuck off). At any rate, fettucini Alfredo was basically all I ate for the entire summer, and as a college student, I thought it was just dandy.

I am not asking you to do that because the tree is ugly—actually it is just as attractive as the other trees. I don’t create ugly, ever!11 You won’t be able to look at the fruit and think, That must taste horrible. It is a fine-looking tree. So it’s simple. Trust me, obey me, and love me because of who I am and because you are enjoying what I have given to you. Trust me, obey me, and you will grow.

Almost all men are over anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor and on they go as their fathers went before them till weary and sick at heart they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood.

Paradise,’ he began, and the p meant a spray. ‘The old legend about Paradise—that was about us, about right now. Yes! Just think about it. Those two in Paradise, they were offered a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness, nothing else. Those idiots chose freedom. And then what? Then for centuries they were homesick for the chains. That’s why the world was so miserable, see? They missed the chains. For ages! And we were the first to hit on the way to get back to happiness. No, wait ... listen to me. The ancient God and us, side by side, at the same table. Yes! We helped God finally overcome the Devil—because that’s who it was that pushed people to break the commandment and taste freedom and be ruined. It was him, the wily serpent. But we gave him a boot to the head! Crack! And it was all over: Paradise was back. And we’re simple and innocent again, like Adam and Eve. None of those complications about good and evil: Everything is very simple, childishly simple —Paradise! The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians: All those things represent good, all that is sublime, splendid, noble, elevated, crystal pure. Because that is what protects our nonfreedom, which is to say, our happiness.

Suspicious: that’s what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. When they ran quickly under your nose like startled hares and you didn’t pay too much attention, you might believe them to be simple and reassuring, you might believe that there was real blue in the world, real red, a real perfume of almonds or violets. But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves. The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart.

I do not like the studied air and artificial inflexions of voice which your very popular and most admired preachers generally have. A simple delivery is much better calculated to inspire devotion, and shows a much better taste.

The small Japanese immortal sat cross-legged, his two swords resting flat on the ground before him. He folded his hands in his lap, closed his eyes and breathing through his nose, forcing the chill night air deep into his chest. He held it for a count of five, then shaped his lips into an O and blew it out again, puncturing a tiny hole in the swirling fog before his face. Even though he would never admit it to anyone, Niten loved this moment. He had no affection for what was to come, but this brief time, when all preparations for battle were made and there was nothing left to do but wait, when the world felt still, as if it was holding its breath, was special. This moment, when he was facing death, was when he felt completely, fully alive. He’d still been called Miyamoto Musashi and had been a teenager when he’d first discovered the genuine beauty of the quiet moment before a fight. Every breath suddenly tasted like the finest food, every sound was distinct and divine, and even on the foulest battlefields, his eyes would be drawn to something simple and elegant: a flower, the shape of a branch, the curl of a cloud. A hundred years ago, Aoife had given him a book as a birthday present. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she’d missed his birthday by a month, but he had treasured the book, the first edition of The Professor by Charlotte Bronte. It included a line he had never forgotten: In the midst of life we are in death. Years later, he’d heard Ghandi take the same words and shift them around to create something that resonated deeply within him: In the midst of death life persists.

French parents are provided with very different information about food, and about children's eating habits, than American parents. This is because French doctors, teachers, nutritionists, and scientists, view the relationship between children, food and parenting very differently than do North Americans. They assume, for example, that all children will learn to like vegetables. And they have carefully studied strategies for getting them to do so. French psychologists and nutritionists have systematically assessed the average number of times children will have to taste new foods before they willingly agree to eat them: the average is seven, but most parenting books recommend between ten and fifteen.

Ah, the future good!” Leebig’s eyes glowed with passion and he seemed to grow less conscious of his listener and correspondingly more talkative. “A simple concept, you think. How many human beings are willing to accept a trifling inconvenience for the sake of a large future good? How long does it take to train a child that what tastes good now means a stomach-ache later, and what tastes bad now will correct the stomach-ache later? Yet you want a robot to be able to understand?

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

I have missed it my little Chinese book. Forty-four. What is more important, fame or integrity. What is more valuable, money or happiness. What is more dangerous, success or failure. If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never be fulfilled. If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy. Be content with what you have and take joy in the way things are. When you realize you have all you need, the World belongs to you. Thirty-six. If you want to shrink something, you must first expand it. If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish. If you want to take something, you must allow it to be given. The soft will overcome the hard. The slow will beat the fast. Don’t tell people the way, just show them the results. Seventy-four. If you understand that all things change constantly, there is nothing you will hold on to, all things change. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t do. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the place of the Master Carpenter. When you handle the Master Carpenter’s tools, chances are that you’ll cut your hand. Thirty-three. Knowing other people is intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom. Mastering other people is strength, mastering yourself is power. If you realize that what you have is enough, you are rich truly rich. Stay in the center and embrace peace, simplicity, patience and compassion. Embrace the possibility of death and you will endure. Embrace the possibility of life and you will endure. This little book feeds me. It feeds me food I didn’t know existed, feeds me food I wanted to taste, and have never tasted before, food that will nourish me and keep me full and keep me alive. I read it and it feeds me. It lets me see what my life is in simple terms, it simply is what it is, and I can deal with my life on those terms. It is not complicated unless I make it so. It is not difficult unless I allow it to be. A second is no more than a second, a minute no more than a minute, a day no more than a day. They pass. All things and all time will pass. Don’t force or fear, don’t control or lose control. Don’t fight and don’t stop fighting. Embrace and endure. If you embrace, you will endure.

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment? The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accesion to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind

Suspicious: that's what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. When they ran quickly under your nose like startled hares and you didn't pay too much attention, you might believe them to be simple and reassuring, you might believe that there was real blue in the world, real red, a real perfume of almonds or violets. But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves.

This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.

And all this business about what knife and fork you eat from, it’s a deliberate puzzle set out to make a simple bloke like me feel like a stranger. Whatever you pick up isn’t going to change what the food tastes like, but Effie presses my knee hard if I gets it wrong.

He held no illusions. Lazarevo was not going to come again, neither for him nor for her. Tatiana held those illusions. And he thought—it was better to have them. Look at him. And look at her. Tatiana so ceaselessly and happily did for him, so constantly smiled and touched him and laughed—even as their twenty-nine moon-cycle days spun faster around the loop of grief—that Alexander had to wonder if she ever even thought about the future. He knew she sometimes thought about the past. He knew she thought about Leningrad. She had a stony sadness around her edges that she had not had before. But for the future, Tatiana seemed to harbor a rosy hope, or at the very least a sense of humming unconcern. What are you doing? she would ask him when he was sitting on the bench and smoking. Nothing, Alexander would reply. Nothing but growing my pain. He smoked and wished for her. It was like wishing for America when he was a few years younger. Wishing for a life with her, a life that was full of nothing else but her, a simple, long, married life of being able to smell her and taste her, to hear the lyre of her voice and see the honey of her hair. To feel her staggering comfort. All of it, every day. Could he find a way to turn his back on Tatiana and have her faithful face free him? Would she forgive him? For leaving her, for dying, for killing her? He felt punched in the gut when he watched her skip stark naked out of the cabin in the morning, and throw herself squealing into the river, and then get out and head across the clearing to him, sitting on his stump of a heart. Watching her nipples hard from the cold, her flawless body trembling to be held by him, Alexander gritted his teeth and smiled and thanked God that when he pressed her to him, she could not see his contorted face. Alexander smoked and watched her from his tree stump bench. What are you doing? she would ask him. Nothing, he would reply. Nothing but growing my pain into madness.

The taste of fresh orange juice. A fig. the sight of a flower. The sound of music. A slab of sunlight on floorboards. Cats and dogs and goats and lizards and dolphins. Harrison Ford’s face. Imagine if you were from a planet with none of those things. Imagine how full of wonder everything would seem. How unjaded we would be by everything in front of us. How a picture of a sunset would never seem corny again. How a simple walk in an orchard would be utopia. How a cool breeze on a hot day would be a lottery win. How each and every bird song would be a symphony.

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

How many ills, how many infirmities, does man owe to his excesses, his ambition – in a word, to the indulgence of his various passions! He who should live soberly in all respects, who should never run into excesses of any kind, who should be always simple in his tastes, modest in his desires, would escape a large proportion of the tribulations of human life. It is the same with regard to spirit-life, the sufferings of which are always the consequence of the manner in which a spirit has lived upon the earth. In that life undoubtedly he will no longer suffer from gout or rheumatism; but his wrong-doing down here will cause him to experience other sufferings no less painful. We have seen that those sufferings are the result of the links which exist between a spirit and matter; that the more completely he is freed from the influence of matter – in other words, the more dematerialized he is – the fewer are the painful sensations experienced by him. It depends, therefore, on each of us to free ourselves from the influence of matter by our action in this present life. Man possesses free-will, and, consequently, the power of electing to do or not to do. Let him conquer his animal passions; let him rid himself of hatred, envy, jealousy, pride; let him throw off the yoke of selfishness; let him purify his soul by cultivating noble sentiments; let him do good; let him attach to the things of this world only the degree of importance which they deserve – and he will, even under his present corporeal envelope, have effected his purification, and achieved his deliverance from the influence of matter, which will cease for him on his quitting that envelope. For such a one the remembrance of physical sufferings endured by him in the life he has quitted has nothing painful, and produces no disagreeable impression, because they affected his body only, and left no trace in his soul. He is happy to be relieved from them; and the calmness of a good conscience exempts him from all moral suffering.

Pear and Arugula Salad Although it sounds like a weird combination at first, this salad is delicious. It combines the pears with arugula and walnuts and the final result is rich and filling.   Time: 20 minutes Servings: 4   Ingredients: ·       1 pound arugula ·       2 pears, sliced ·       ½ lemon, juiced ·       1 teaspoon honey ·       1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar ·       1 tablespoon Dijon mustard ·       Salt and pepper to taste ·       ¼ cup walnuts, chopped   Directions: 1     Place the arugula on a platter. Arrange the pear slices over the arugula. 2     In a small glass jar, mix the lemon juice, honey, vinegar and mustard. Add salt and pepper to taste and cover the jar with a lid. 3     Shake well then drizzle the dressing over the salad. 4     Top with walnuts and serve immediately.   Nutritional information per serving Calories: 145 Fat: 5.7g Protein: 5.4g Carbohydrates: 22.8g

Mr. Severin smiled, tiny constellations of reflected chandelier lights glinting in his eyes. "Since I've told you about my tastes... what are yours?" Cassandra looked down at her folded hands in her lap. "I like trivial things, mostly," she said with a self-deprecating laugh. "Handiwork, such as embroidery, knitting, and needlepoint. I sketch and paint a little. I like naps and teatime, and taking a lazy stroll on a sunny day, and reading books on a rainy afternoon. But I would like two have my own family someday, and... I want to help other people far more than I'm able to now. I take baskets of food and medicine to tenants and acquaintances in the village, but that's not enough. I want to provide real help to people who need it." She sighed shortly. "I suppose that's not very interesting. Pandora's the exciting, amusing twin, the one people remember. I've always been... well, the one who's not Pandora.

As you might imagine, our brains are adept at filtering out irrelevant information. Emotion gets out attention through our senses-which then influence out decision-making processes. Brands that create an emotional connection to consumers are much stronger than those that don't- it's as simple (and complicated) as that.

… but not a single one of them is more or less remarkable or ridiculous than everything already here. The taste of fresh orange juice. A fig. the sight of a flower. The sound of music. A slab of sunlight on floorboards. Cats and dogs and goats and lizards and dolphins. Harrison Ford’s face. Imagine if you were from a planet with none of those things. Imagine how full of wonder everything would seem. How unjaded we would be by everything in front of us. How a picture of a sunset would never seem corny again. How a simple walk in an orchard would be utopia. How a cool breeze on a hot day would be a lottery win. How each and every bird song would be a symphony.

Amylase is one of the most important; it breaks down starch and turns it into simple sugars, which is why bread tastes sweeter the longer you chew it. The amylase continues to break down the carbohydrates long after you’ve swallowed, and it continues picking apart whatever small fragments remain in your mouth or got stuck between your teeth.

Actually, the urban dweller today is more isolated in the big city than his ancestors were in the countryside. The city man in the modern metropolis has reached a degree of anonymity, social atomization, and spiritual isolation that is virtually unprecedented in human history. Today man's alienation from man is almost absolute. His standards of co-operation, mutual aid, simple human hospitality, and decency have suffered an appalling amount of erosion in the urban milieu. Man's civic institutions have become cold, impersonal agencies for the manipulation of his destiny, and his culture has increasingly accommodated itself to the least common denominator of intelligence and taste.

Culture is critical in marriage because in a real sense, culture is the behavioral expression of one's values, appreciations, tastes, and relational style in both simple and serious matters of life. Add to this the dimensions of language and cultural memory, and you have worlds within worlds. In effect, culture provides the how and why of an individual's behavior.

Phaethon asked: “Do you think there is something wrong with the Sophotechs? We are Manorials, father! We let Rhadamanthus control our finances and property, umpire our disputes, teach our children, design our thoughtscapes, and even play matchmaker to find us wives and husbands!” “Son, the Sophotechs may be sufficient to advise the Parliament on laws and rules. Laws are a matter of logic and common sense. Specially designed human-thinking versions, like Rhadamanthus, can tell us how to fulfill our desires and balance our account books. Those are questions of strategy, of efficient allocation of resources and time. But the Sophotechs, they cannot choose our desires for us. They cannot guide our culture, our values, our tastes. That is a question of the spirit.” “Then what would you have us do? Would you change our laws?” “Our mores, not our laws. There are many things which are repugnant, deadly to the spirit, and self-destructive, but which law should not forbid. Addiction, self-delusion, self-destruction, slander, perversion, love of ugliness. How can we discourage such things without the use of force? It was in response to this need that the College of Hortators evolved. Peacefully, by means of boycotts, public protests, denouncements, and shunnings, our society can maintain her sanity against the dangers to our spirit, to our humanity, to which such unboundried liberty, and such potent technology, exposes us.” (...) But Phaethon certainly did not want to hear a lecture, not today. “Why are you telling me all this? What is the point?” “Phaethon, I will let you pass through those doors, and, once through, you will have at your command all the powers and perquisites I myself possess. The point of my story is simple. The paradox of liberty of which you spoke before applies to our entire society. We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when they do, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you; you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are all-powerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone. It is for this reason that the Silver-Gray School was formed; it is for this reason that we practice the exercise of self-discipline. Once you pass those doors, my son, you will be one of us, and there will be nothing to restrain you from corruption and self-destruction except yourself. “You have a bright and fiery soul, Phaethon, a power to do great things; but I fear you may one day unleash such a tempest of fire that you may consume yourself, and all the world around you.

Eliminate simple carbohydrates—sugar, candy, cookies, muffins, cakes, breads, pasta, crackers, white potatoes, grains, soft drinks (both regular and diet, since artificial sweeteners disrupt your gut health), fruit juices, alcohol, processed foods, and anything with high-fructose corn syrup. As you limit your intake of simple carbohydrates, you’ll be surprised to find that you fairly quickly lose your desire for sweet-tasting food.

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.

In the past few decades we’ve learned to recognise the many hazards of poor nutrition: insulin resistance, obesity, susceptibility to inflammation and fatigue. All of these factors can contribute to an early death. We’ve altered our diets and learned to resist the siren call of sugar and other simple carbohydrates. We’ve now reached a similar point with the news; we think about it today much as we thought about sugar and fast food twenty years ago. News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, easily digestible and extremely damaging. The media is feeding us titbits that taste palatable but do nothing to satisfy our hunger for knowledge. Unlike books and well-researched long-form articles, the news cannot satiate us. We can gobble down as many articles as we like, but we will never be doing more than gorging on sweets. As with sugar, alcohol, fast food and smoking, the side effects only become apparent later.

Remember how those who bent on denying the truth plotted against you to imprison you or kill you or expel you: they schemed—but God also schemed. God is the best of schemers. 31 Whenever Our revelations are recited to them, they say, ‘We have heard them. If we wished, we could produce the like. They are nothing but the fables of the ancients.’ 32 They also said, ‘God, if this really is the truth from You, then rain down upon us stones from heaven, or send us some other painful punishment.’ 33 But God would not punish them while you [Prophet] were in their midst, nor would He punish them so long as they sought forgiveness. 34 Yet why should God not punish them when they debar people from the Sacred Mosque, although they are not its guardians? Its rightful guardians are those who fear God, though most of them do not realize it. 35 Their prayers at the Sacred House are nothing but whistling and clapping of hands. ‘So taste the punishment because of your denial.’ 36 Those who are bent on denying the truth are spending their wealth in debarring others from the path of God. They will continue to spend it in this way till, in the end, this spending will become a source of intense regret for them, and then they will be overcome. And those who denied the truth will be gathered together in Hell. 37 So that God may separate the bad from the good, He will heap the wicked one upon another and then cast them into Hell. These will surely be the losers. 38 Tell those who are bent on denying the truth that if they desist, their past shall be forgiven, but if they persist in sin, they have an example in the fate of those who went before.b 39 Fight them until there is no more [religious] persecution,c and religion belongs wholly to God: if they desist, then surely God is watchful of what they do, 40 but if they turn away, know that God is your Protector; the Best of Protectors and the Best of Helpers!

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

It was the language that left us first. The Great Migration of words. When people spoke they punched each other in the mouth. There was no vocabulary for love. Women became masculine and could no longer give birth to warmth or a simple caress with their lips. Tongues were overweight from profanity and the taste of nastiness. It settled over cities like fog smothering everything in sight. My ears begged for camouflage and the chance to go to war. Everywhere was the decay of how we sound.

What a pretty color... A kind of goldish-green, with an emerald tint to it... Mmm...! A sweet, gentle, slightly bitter flavor with a soft aftertaste... It's as if a breeze from a mountain stream has just blown through my body... I probably wouldn't have understood this flavor if you had just given it to me the moment I arrived here after walking under the sun. It's all because I drank that hot hōjicha first... Now I get it! You made me walk under the scorching sun so that I'd understand the flavor of this tea... This house... the mild breeze from the rice paddies... the sound of cicadas... the dragonflies... What luxury..." "This gyokuro is the last thing I've prepared for you today." "Ōhara, I'm going to get angry if you give me anything else. I've just had a taste of real Japan. The spirit of Japan. As long as the Japanese do not lose this spirit, they'll be fine. This is that essential ingredient all those expensive feasts were lacking. So what more could I ask for?

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would he unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

Since the members of Christ’s flock are subjected to much suffering for their faith’s sake and are humbled and oppressed and despised by all, God manifests His loving-kindness toward them so that after much humiliation they taste and experience ever more how good, loving, and kind God is. Thus the many abasements and sufferings teach the simple believers to become ever better acquainted with God, to trust Him and believe in Him and thereby grow strong and rich and established in their confidence in God’s kindness.

I want to be known as the 23 year-old who is foolishly in love with a Prince she can't see. I want to rejoice while holding the rose of singleness, even when my hands bleed from its thorns. I want to resist the urge to envy the pairs growing in the middle of my neighbors' gardens. I want to be rooted in the simple truth that unripen pairs taste like lies and lingering loneliness. 
I want to put Jesus on my bullet wound and cling to His heart wrenching hope because He was kind enough to be a Band-Aid when He should have stayed a King.

To love is to lose, Sam. Unfortunately, it’s just that simple. Maybe not today but someday. Maybe not when she’s too young and you’re too young, but you see that being old doesn’t help. Maybe not your wife or your girlfriend or your mother, but you see that friends die, too. I could not spare you this any more than I could spare you puberty. It is the inevitable condition of humanity. It is exacerbated by loving but also simply by leaving your front door, by seeing what’s out there in the world, by inventing computer programs that help people. You are afraid of time, Sam. Some sadness has no remedy. Some sadness you can’t make better.” “So what the hell do I do?” “Be sad.” “For how long?” “Forever.” “But then why isn’t everyone walking around miserable all the time?” “Because ice cream still tastes good. And sunny and seventy-five is still a lovely day. And funny movies make you laugh, and work is sometimes fulfilling, and a beer with a friend is nice. And other people love you too.” “And that’s enough?” “There is no enough. You are the paragon of animals, my love. You aspire to such greatness, to miracle, to newness and wonder. And that’s great. I’m so proud of you. But you forgot about the part that’s been around for time immemorial. Love, death, loss. You’ve run up against it. And there’s no getting around or over it. You stop and build your life right there at the base of that wall. But it’s okay. That’s where everyone else is too. Everyone else is either there or on their way. There is no other side, but there’s plenty of space there to build a life and plenty of company. Welcome to the wall, Sam.

I don't worry about how other people perceive me. I figure out what I want, and I work very hard to make it happen. Simple recipe. I didn't achieve any goals by having it given to me on a silver platter, through fibbing or exaggeration, nor through favours. When you work hard, the universe almost always brings people to you - synergy. The universe will reflect the energy you give it. Stop worrying about what other people think of you, or worrying about the limit(s) they have, in their heads, about your potential. The universe will bring you into your purpose organically. Nothing out of force tastes as good as what you have worked your ass off to achieve, and for which the universe synergistically opens up for you, and brings into your world. As well it is not about proving other people wrong; first and foremost prove your own negative inner voice wrong. The inner voice that internalized the negative energies of others. Sometimes we are our own biggest hurdle. And as a subsequent outcome of rewiring your inner voice, you'll leave others speechless at contesting their limitations of you...seeing the supernova you are.

A brick could be used to show you how to live a richer, fuller, more satisfying life. Don’t you want to have fulfillment and meaning saturating your existence? I can show you how you can achieve this and so much more with just a simple brick. For just $99.99—not even an even hundred bucks, I’ll send you my exclusive life philosophy that’s built around a brick. Man’s used bricks to build houses for centuries. Now let one man, me, show you how a brick can be used to build your life up bigger and stronger than you ever imagined. But act now, because supplies are limited. This amazing offer won’t last forever. You don’t want to wake up in ten years to find yourself divorced, homeless, and missing your testicles because you waited even two hours too long to obtain this information. Become a hero today—save your life. Procrastination is only for the painful things in life. We prolong the boring, but why put off for tomorrow the exciting life you could be living today? If you’re not satisfied with the information I’m providing, I’m willing to offer you a no money back guarantee. That’s right, you read that wrong. If you are not 100% dissatisfied with my product, I’ll give you your money back. For $99.99 I’m offering 99.99%, but you’ve got to be willing to penny up that percentage to 100. Why delay? The life you really want is mine, and I’m willing to give it to you—for a price. That price is a one-time fee of $99.99, which of course everyone can afford—even if they can’t afford it. Homeless people can’t afford it, but they’re the people who need my product the most. Buy my product, or face the fact that in all probability you are going to end up homeless and sexless and unloved and filthy and stinky and probably even disabled, if not physically than certainly mentally. I don’t care if your testicles taste like peanut butter—if you don’t buy my product, even a dog won’t lick your balls you miserable cur. I curse you! God damn it, what are you, slow? Pay me my money so I can show you the path to true wealth. Don’t you want to be rich? Everything takes money—your marriage, your mortgage, and even prostitutes. I can show you the path to prostitution—and it starts by ignoring my pleas to help you. I’m not the bad guy here. I just want to help. You have some serious trust issues, my friend. I have the chance to earn your trust, and all it’s going to cost you is a measly $99.99. Would it help you to trust me if I told you that I trust you? Well, I do. Sure, I trust you. I trust you to make the smart decision for your life and order my product today. Don’t sleep on this decision, because you’ll only wake up in eight hours to find yourself living in a miserable future. And the future indeed looks bleak, my friend. War, famine, children forced to pimp out their parents just to feed the dog. Is this the kind of tomorrow you’d like to live in today? I can show you how to provide enough dog food to feed your grandpa for decades. In the future I’m offering you, your wife isn’t a whore that you sell for a knife swipe of peanut butter because you’re so hungry you actually considered eating your children. Become a hero—and save your kids’ lives. Your wife doesn’t want to spread her legs for strangers. Or maybe she does, and that was a bad example. Still, the principle stands. But you won’t be standing—in the future. Remember, you’ll be confined to a wheelchair. Mushrooms are for pizzas, not clouds, but without me, your life will atom bomb into oblivion. Nobody’s dropping a bomb while I’m around. The only thing I’m dropping is the price. Boom! I just lowered the price for you, just to show you that you are a valued customer. As a VIP, your new price on my product is just $99.96. That’s a savings of over two pennies (three, to be precise). And I’ll even throw in a jar of peanut butter for free. That’s a value of over $.99. But wait, there’s more! If you call within the next ten minutes, I’ll even throw in a blanket free of charge. . .

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

What happened?” Violet asked Jay, when Mike went to join the girls in the kitchen, giving them a moment alone in front of the fire. Jay shook his head, his expression dark. “You tell me. One minute you were leaning on me, and the next you passed out. It freaked the shit out of me.” “Claire actually screamed,” Chelsea added, rejoining them. She sat down on a wooden chair across from Violet. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear her. I’m with Jay though-it was pretty scary. You’re lucky he caught you before you hit the ground.” Violet cringed. She glanced up at Jay, humiliated. “You…caught me?” He nodded, and she could tell from the look on his face that he was enjoying this part. A lot. “You’re welcome,” he said with a completely straight face. She looked at him again and rolled her eyes, stubbornly refusing to thank him after he’d already so clearly patted himself on the back. Megan came back in, carrying a mug of hot chocolate, and Claire trailed behind her. “Be careful,” Megan warned quietly, handing it to Violet. “It’s kind of hot.” Their fingertips brushed as the mug exchanged hands. Violet locked eyes with the younger girl. “Thank you.” She imparted as much meaning as she could in the two simple words and hoped that it was gesture enough, even if only for herself. She felt bad for the things she’d suspected her of doing. Megan pulled her hand away and glanced down nervously. “You’re welcome.” Her voice was timid and hesitant. “So she gives you hot chocolate and you thank her. I save your life and get nothing. That’s messed up,” Jay complained. Violet smirked at him over the top of her hot cocoa. “Hers tastes better,” she teased, blowing on the steaming liquid and then taking a sip. “Besides, I think you’ve already thanked yourself.

Consider the fact that we care deeply about what happens to the world after we die. If self-interests were the primary source of meaning in life, then it wouldn’t matter to people if an hour after their death everyone they know were to be wiped from the face of the earth. Yet, it matters greatly to most people. We feel that such an occurrence would make our lives meaningless. The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater; a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror, but if you do, it is not. Loyalty, said Royce, solves the paradox of our ordinary existence, by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves, the will which delights to do this service, and is not thwarted, but enriched and expressed in such service… Above the level of self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they suggest the existence in people of a transcendent desire to see and help other beings achieve their potential. As our time winds down, we all seek comfort in simple pleasures; companionship, everyday routines, the taste of good food, the warmth of sunlight on our faces. We become less interested in the awards of achieving and accumulating and more interested in the rewards of simply being. Yet, while we may feel less ambitious, we also have become concerned for our legacy, and we have a deep need to identify purposes outside ourselves that make living feel meaningful and worthwhile. In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments, which after all is mostly nothing much, plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments; the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute by minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self, which is absorbed in the moment, your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery, but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out.

He would have his followers, of course; that was nothing new. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzing fireworks. They would not be apt to notice, these apprentice unshapers, that like a neon sign, he only made the same simple patterns over and over again. They would not be apt to realize that, if you release the gas which makes the pretty patterns from its complex assortment of tubes, it floats silently away and dissipates, leaving not a taste or so much as a whiff of smell behind.

In Memory of My Feelings" My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart! though in winter they are warm as roses, in the desert taste of chilled anisette. At times, withdrawn, I rise into the cool skies and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape, speaks, but I do not hear him, I'm too blue. An elephant takes up his trumpet, money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired." One of me rushes to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes, and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust, definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs of earth. So many of my transparencies could not resist the race! Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets, a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth, the imperceptible moan of covered breathing, love of the serpent! I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud and animal death whips out its flashlight, whistling and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent's eyes redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth! My transparent selves flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic, with a certain justice of response and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.

There was nothing wrong with being able to handle things herself. Nothing wrong with wanting to.And she did appreciate Brian's help. And she didn't need caffeine. "I like caffeine," she grumbled. "I enjoy it, and that's entirely different from needing it.Entirely.I could give it up anytime I wanted, and I'd barely miss it." Annoyed,she snagged the soft drink she'd left on a shelf and guzzled. All right,so maybe she would miss it. But only beause she liked the taste. It wasn't like a craving or an addiction or... She couldn't say why Brian popped into her head just then.She was certain if he'd seen her staring in a kind of horror at a soft drink bottle, he'd have been amused.It was debatable what his reaction would be if he'd realized she wasn't actually seeing the bottle, but his face. No,that wasn't a need, either, she thought quickly. She did not need Brian Donnelly. It was attraction.Affection-a cautious kind of affection.He was a man who interested her, and whom she admired in many ways. But it wasn't as if she needed... "Oh God." It had to be overreaction, she decided, and set the bottle aside as carefully as she would have a container of nitro. What she was going through was something as simple as overromanticizing an affair. That would be natural enough, she told herself, particularly sice this was her first. She didn't want to be in love with him. She began wielding the pitchfork vigorously now, as if to sweat out a fever.She didn't choose to be in love with him. That was even more important.When her hands trembled she ignored them and worked harder still. By the time her mother joined her, Keeley had herself under control enough to casually ask Adelia to work in the office while she exervised Sam. Keeley Grant had never run from a problem in her life,and she wasn't about to start now.She saddled her mount,then rode off to clear her head before she dealt with the problem at hand.

Your first sign something may be amiss comes quickly, the moment you get off the plane at the airport in Baltimore. After months of deprivation, American excess is overwhelming. Crowds of self-important bustling businessmen. Shrill and impatient advertising that saturates your eyes and ears. Five choices of restaurant, with a hundred menu items each, only a half-minute walk away at all times. In the land you just left, dinners are uniformly brown and served on trays when served at all. I was disoriented by the choice, the lights, the infinite variety of gummy candy that filled an entire wall of the convenience store, a gluttonous buffet repeated every four gates. The simple pleasure of a cup of coffee after a good night’s sleep, sleep you haven’t had since you received your deployment orders, seems overly simple when reunited with such a vast volume of overindulgent options. But the shock wears off, more quickly for some, but eventually for most. Fast food and alcohol are seductive, and I didn’t fight too hard. Your old routine is easy to fall back into, preferences and tastes return. It’s not hard to be a fussy, overstuffed American. After a couple of months, home is no longer foreign, and you are free to resume your old life. I thought I did. Resume my old life, that is. I was wrong.

The feline passion for pyrophosphates might explain the animal’s reputation as a picky eater. “We make [pet food] choices based on what we like,” says Reed, “and then when they don’t like it, we call them finicky.” There is no way to know or imagine what the taste of pyrophosphate is like for cats. It’s like a cat trying to imagine the taste of sugar. Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can’t taste sweetness. There’s no need, since the cat’s diet in the wild contains almost nothing in the way of carbohydrates (which include simple sugars). Either cats never had the gene for detecting sweet, or they lost it somewhere down the evolutionary road. Rodents,

Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt. It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus.

Sal and Henry return with a gust of warm garden air and I settle down to create miniature roses from sugarpaste using tiny ivory spatulas and crimpers. I will have no antique tester bed crowning my cake, only a posy of flowers: symbols of beauty and growth, each year new-blossoming. I let Henry paint the broken pieces with spinach juice, while I tint my flowers with cochineal and yellow gum. As a pretty device I paint a ladybird on a rose, and think it finer than Sèvres porcelain. At ten o'clock tomorrow, I will marry John Francis at St. Mark's Church, across the square. As Sal and I rehearse our plans for the day, pleasurable anticipation bubbles inside me like fizzing wine. We will return from church for this bride cake in the parlor, then take a simple wedding breakfast of hot buttered rolls, ham, cold chicken, and fruit, on the silver in the dining room. Nan has sent me a Yorkshire Game Pie, so crusted with wedding figures of wheatsheafs and blossoms it truly looks too good to eat. We have invited few guests, for I want no great show, and instead will have bread and beef sent to feed the poor. And at two o'clock, we will leave with Henry for a much anticipated holiday by the sea, at Sandhills, on the southern coast. John Francis has promised Henry he might try sea-bathing, while I have bought stocks of cerulean blue and burnt umber to attempt to catch the sea and sky in watercolor.

Fishing has never lent itself to the kind of satisfaction on demand that technology has trained us to expect for the simple reason that fish don’t want to be caught and go to great lengths to avoid it. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to take up fly-fishing for the bragging rights alone; it’s better to see it as an acquired taste that reintroduces the chaos of uncertainty back into our well-regulated lives. Fishermen who care too much about the size and numbers of fish they catch are insufferable on good days and as harried as overworked executives on slow ones. On the other hand, it’s possible to be a happy angler who doesn’t catch many fish; it’s just that no one will ever say you’re good at it.

I've read every letter that you've sent me these past two years. In return, I've sent you many form letters, with the hope of one day being able to give you the proper response you deserve. But the more letters you wrote to me, and the more of yourself you gave, the more daunting my task became. I'm sitting beneath a pear tree as I dictate this to you, overlooking the orchards of a friend's estate. I've spent the past few days here, recovering from some medical treatment that has left me physically and emotionally depleted. As I moped about this morning, feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me, like a simple solution to an impossible problem: today is the day I've been waiting for. You asked me in your first letter if you could be my protege. I don't know about that, but I would be happy to have you join me in Cambridge for a few days. I could introduce you to my colleagues, treat you to the best curry outside India, and show you just how boring the life of an astrophysicist can be. You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar. I would be happy to do anything possible to facilitate such a path. It's wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination toward scientific ends. But Oskar, intelligent people write to me all the time. In your fifth letter you asked, "What if I never stop inventing?" That question has stuck with me. I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers.But I wish I were a poet. Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, "Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open." I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you're not inventing at all. I'm being called in for breakfast, so I'll have to end this letter here. There's more I want to tell you, and more I want to hear from you. It's a shame we live on different continents. One shame of many. It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Your friend, Stephen Hawking

Thirty years ago, people could disappear into America and reinvent themselves. Now it took meticulous planning and a commitment never to reach out to your old life. For most, the lure of the Internet proved too great to resist—the urge to Google yourself, or search Facebook for the people you’d left behind. The simple truth was there was no such thing as starting a new life. The best you could manage was a convincing rebranding. A fresh coat of paint, but that was all. You might change your name. You might even change your face. But you couldn’t change the person underneath, and the person underneath would still have the same needs and wants, the same habits and tastes, the same strengths and weaknesses.

Are you okay? What’s wrong? Melo?" she asked as she looked at me. "I’m sorry, Lydia. This food nasty as hell. I don’t mean no harm, but I can't stand that fucking taste. How the hell you don’t know how to fry a simple piece of pork chop? "That’s rude as fuck, Carmelo. At least you can appreciate me for standing over that hot fucking stove and cooking for your ungrateful ass," she said as the baby started crying, and she walked into his bedroom to get him. I sat there wondering how all that time I was sneaking around with her the food was good as fuck and this shit was nasty. I slid from under the table to go into the bathroom to wash my mouth out since my appetite was gone. I was just going to lie down for the night.

Galen doesn’t get truly nervous until he senses the size of the Syrena mass coming toward them. Up until this point, he’d been worried about Emma. What she thought about all this. Her mother’s reunion with Grom. What she planned to do while they were gone. Whether or not she was going to keep her promise and stay out of the water. And…his thoughts keep wandering back to their kiss between the sand dunes. It was an exquisite torture, the way she tasted like a mixture of salt water and herself. A combination of two things he’s come to cherish. Water and land. Syrena world and human world. Love for his kind and love for Emma. Only now, as the party of Syrena approaches, its presence seems to encroach on Galen’s options. For some reason, it feels like a choice between water or land, Syrena world or human world, love for his kind or love for Emma. According to the law, there never was a choice. But that was before Emma. And Galen has the feeling that the time for truly deciding between the two is closing in on him. But haven’t I already made that decision? He steals a glance at Toraf, who’s been wearing the same grim expression since they left Emma’s house. Toraf is never grim. Since they were fingerlings, he’s always had a special talent for finding the positive in a situation, and if not the positive, then he can certainly find mischief in a situation. But not now. Now he’s keeping to himself. Toraf never keeps to himself. Even Grom, the usual sealed-up clam, has become boisterous and enlivened while he and Nalia chatter to each other, laughing and whispering and holding hands, all the while speculating over the events that separated them so long ago. But Toraf seems oblivious to the chatter and to Galen’s internal war of emotions and to the swarm of jellyfish he just narrowly avoided. Galen had thought Toraf might have been anxious about leaving Rayna behind. Usually, though, he comforts himself by talking about her until Galen wishes he’d had a twin brother instead of a twin sister. No, what’s troubling Toraf has nothing to do with leaving Rayna behind. He even persuaded her to stay. Which means he thinks it’s safer for her on land right now. Toraf’s motives are always simple: do what’s best for Rayna, in spite of Rayna.

Georgia's fingers drifted to the charm at her throat, the four worn little clover leaves. She rubbed the metal edges, sending a prayer of gratitude heavenward. Faith, hope, love, and luck--- the recipe for a charmed life. Once Georgia had thought she could make it happen on her own by planning and striving, by attaining concrete measures of success. Now she saw how wrong she had been. The real recipe for a charmed life was simple. Not easy, but simple. To do the work that filled her with wonder and delight. To walk lightly through the world, giving generously to those around her. To love all in her care as best she could. That's what she had been seeking all along. And Georgia found that now her life, which had once seemed so bitter, tasted so very sweet indeed.

She lifted the cup to her lips. “You make good coffee.” “You haven’t tasted it yet.” “I can smell it. And I love the way it smells.” It’s not the coffee, he thought. Not all of it, at any rate. “Well, I love your perfume,” he said, because he was a dolt. She frowned. “I’m not wearing any. I mean, other than the soap and shampoo I use.” “Well, I like them, then. And I’m glad you stayed.” “Is this what you planned?” Their eyes met. Shit, she was perfect. Radiant as the candles had been. “You making it all the way to the coffee? Yeah, I guess a date was what I was after.” “I thought you agreed with me.” Man, that breathless quality in her voice made him want to have her up against his naked chest. “Agreed with you?” he said. “Hell, if it would make you happy, I’d say yes to anything. But what are you specifically referring to?” “You said…I shouldn’t date anyone.” Ah, right. “You shouldn’t.” “I don’t understand.” Fuck him, but he went for it. Rehv put his numb elbow on the table and leaned into her. As he closed the distance, her eyes got wider, but she didn’t pull back. He paused, to give her a chance to tell him to cut the shit. Why? He had no clue. His symphath side was into pauses only for analysis or to better capitalize on a weakness. But she made him want to be decent. Ehlena didn’t tell him to step off, however. “I don’t…understand,” she whispered. “It’s simple. I don’t think you should date anyone.” Rehv moved in even closer, until he could see the flecks of gold in her eyes. “But I’m not just anyone.” -Ehlena & Rehv

The will to truth is enshrined in the mind. It is undeniable, inescapable, mutable only if one’s humanity itself is rejected, itself muted. Yet the form of this truth, whether it be elaborate, simple, exclusive and regulatory or comprehensive and positive… this is a matter of aesthetics, taste... ...It is all inherently meaningless, the puzzle just as much as the pieces themselves, ephemeral. Yet more than this it is concrete, eternal, heavy and inescapable, a preponderous amalgam of things small and large, the actuality of which is imminent, the meaning of which is too great to acknowledge, let alone comprehend. So we tell stories. We read stories, write them, consider them and like them, or not. Simply ways, simple ways, to limit the All to that which can be understood.

The day before alcohol prohibition was introduced, the most popular drink in the United States was beer, but as soon as alcohol was banned, hard liquor soared from 40 percent of all drinks that were sold to 90 percent. People responded to a change in the law by shifting from a milder drink to a stronger drink. This seems puzzling. Why would a change in the law change people’s tastes in alcohol? It turns out it didn’t change their tastes. It changed something else: the range of drinks that were offered to them. The reason is surprisingly simple. One of the best analysts of the drug war, the writer Mike Gray, explains it in his book Drug Crazy. When you are smuggling a substance into a country, and transporting it in secret, “you have to put the maximum bang in the smallest possible package,” he writes.

Dismissed as a philistine, a boor, a drunk, and an incompetent, Grant has been subjected to pernicious stereotypes that grossly impede our understanding of the man. As a contemporary newspaper sniffed, Grant was “an ignorant soldier, coarse in his taste and blunt in his perceptions, fond of money and material enjoyment and of low company.”14 In fact, Grant was a sensitive, complex, and misunderstood man with a shrewd mind, a wry wit, a rich fund of anecdotes, wide knowledge, and penetrating insights. Many acquaintances remembered the “silent” Grant as the most engaging raconteur they ever met. His weather-beaten appearance during the war, when he wore simple military dress, often caked with mud, could be misleading, for an inner fineness and delicacy lay beneath the rough-hewn exterior. At the same time, Grant could be surprisingly naive and artless in business and politics.

Then just when I thought I was going to really break down for a good cry, I remembered a large bag of pistachio nuts in the back of the pantry. I don't know what made me think of them. I had hidden them beneath several packages of dried pasta. Sam liked pistachio nuts. I bought them for a cake recipe I had seen in Gourmet. I stood up like a sleepwalker, my hands empty of sheets or shoes. I would take care of all this once the cake was in the oven. The recipe was from several months ago. I didn't remember which issue. I would find it. I would bake a cake. My father liked exotic things. On the rare occasions we went out to dinner together over the years, he always wanted us to go to some little Ethiopian restaurant down a back alley or he would say he had to have Mongolian food. He would like this cake. It was Iranian. There was a full tablespoon of cardamom sifted in with the flour, and I could imagine that it would make the cake taste nearly peppered, which would serve to balance out all the salt. I stood in the kitchen, reading the magazine while the sharp husks of the nuts bit into the pads of my fingers. I rolled the nut meat between my palms until the bright spring green of the pistachios shone in my hands, a fist full of emeralds. I would grind the nuts into powder without letting them turn to paste. I would butter the parchment paper and line the bottom of the pan. It was the steps, the clear and simple rules baking, that soothed me. My father would love this cake, and my mother would find this cake interesting, and Sam wouldn't be crazy about it but he'd be hungry and have a slice anyway. Maybe I could convince Camille it wasn't a cake at all. Maybe I could bring them all together, or at least that's what I dreamed about while I measured out the oil.

Darwin’s Bestiary PROLOGUE Animals tame and animals feral prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral: the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile, rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile. Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride—every peril was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural, while Courage, Devotion, Thrift—every bright laurel crowned a creature in some mythological mural. Scientists think there is something immoral in singular brutes having meat that is plural: beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral. Yet between the lines there’s an implicit demurral; the habit stays with us, albeit it’s puerile: when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel. 1. THE ANT The ant, Darwin reminded us, defies all simple-mindedness: Take nothing (says the ant) on faith, and never trust a simple truth. The PR men of bestiaries eulogized for centuries this busy little paragon, nature’s proletarian— but look here, Darwin said: some ants make slaves of smaller ants, and end exploiting in their peonages the sweating brows of their tiny drudges. Thus the ant speaks out of both sides of its mealy little mouth: its example is extolled to the workers of the world, but its habits also preach the virtues of the idle rich. 2. THE WORM Eyeless in Gaza, earless in Britain, lower than a rattlesnake’s belly-button, deaf as a judge and dumb as an audit: nobody gave the worm much credit till Darwin looked a little closer at this spaghetti-torsoed loser. Look, he said, a worm can feel and taste and touch and learn and smell; and ounce for ounce, they’re tough as wrestlers, and love can turn them into hustlers, and as to work, their labors are mythic, small devotees of the Protestant Ethic: they’ll go anywhere, to mountains or grassland, south to the rain forests, north to Iceland, fifty thousand to every acre guzzling earth like a drunk on liquor, churning the soil and making it fertile, earning the thanks of every mortal: proud Homo sapiens, with legs and arms— his whole existence depends on worms. So, History, no longer let the worm’s be an ignoble lot unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Moral: even a worm can turn. 3. THE RABBIT a. Except in distress, the rabbit is silent, but social as teacups: no hare is an island. (Moral: silence is golden—or anyway harmless; rabbits may run, but never for Congress.) b. When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit, kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit. (Moral: to thine own self be true—or as true as you can; a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.) c. He populates prairies and mountains and moors, but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors. (Moral: to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles; to understand purity, ponder your freckles.) d. Survival developed these small furry tutors; the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters. (Conclusion: you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.) 4. THE GOSSAMER Sixty miles from land the gentle trades that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay sift a million gossamers, like tides of fluff above the menace of the sea. These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean; the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging, small aeronauts on some elusive mission. The Megatherium, done to extinction by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson: for survival, it’s the little things that count.

In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A

It didn't matter how much he liked being Neil Josten. He'd stayed here too long as it was. Neil should be used to this by now. He'd spent the last eight years on the run, spinning lie after lie to leave a twisted trail behind him. Twenty-two names stood between him and the truth, and he knew what would happen if anyone finally connected the dots. Signing with a college team meant more than standing still. It meant he'd be stepping into a spotlight. [...] The math was simple, but that didn't make this any easier. That contract was a one-way ticket to a future, something Neil could never have, and he wanted it so badly he ached. For a blinding moment he hated himself for ever trying out for Millport's team. He'd known better than to step on a court. [...] But what else was he supposed to do? [...] This was the only thing he had left that was real. Now that he'd had a taste of it again, he didn't know how to walk away from it.

Chirality matters. In the curious case of the artificial fragrance limonene, the right-handed form smells like an orange, whereas the left-handed version of this simple ring-shaped molecule smells like a lemon. The smell receptors in your nose are sensitive to chirality, so right- and left-limonene transmit slightly different signals to your brain. Taste buds are less sensitive to the differences between right- and left-handed sugars. They both taste sweet, but our body’s fine-tuned digestive system can process only the right-handed forms. The artificial sweetener tagatose, a zero-calorie left-handed sugar substitute, exploits these properties. The tragic story of thalidomide also rests on handedness. The right-handed version of this drug alleviated morning sickness in pregnant women, but the left-handed variant that inevitably tagged along caused birth defects. Today the FDA imposes strict requirements for chirally pure drugs—regulations

Well, a man’s life is divided into two parts: there is his work and there is his own private life. Two small worlds which he has to make for himself. And it is only when he is old, and the time for decision is over, that he may realize he did not need to neglect one for the other. For if he concentrated too much on one of them, then he really confused their purposes. He had thought that either a successful career was life, or life itself was a career. He hadn’t realized that his work and his own private life should be given the same amount of thought, that they should grow along with each other, each influencing the other, each developing the other. Without that balance, he will find himself an incomplete man. That’s the tragic thing about age: to realize you have somehow never seen what is happiness until it was too late to start building it up. For it has to be built. Pleasure is a simple thing: you can choose it, buy it, even have it as a gift. It only depends on your taste. But happiness is much more complicated; you have to build it yourself.

What do you remember most about what your pai put in his lamb chops?" "I think it was basically salt, pepper, and garlic." He squeezed his eyes shut and focused so hard that not dropping a kiss on his earnestly pursed mouth was the hardest thing. His eyes opened, bright with memory. "Of course. Mint." "That's perfect. Since we're only allowed only five tools, simple is good." "My mãe always made rice and potatoes with it. How about we make lamb chops and a biryani-style pilaf?" Ashna blinked. Since when was Rico such a foodie? He shrugged but his lips tugged to one side in his crooked smile. "What? I live in London. Of course Indian is my favorite cuisine." Tossing an onion at him, she asked him to start chopping, and put the rice to boil. Then she turned to the lamb chops. The automatic reflex to follow Baba's recipe to within an inch of its life rolled through her. But when she ignored it, the need to hyperventilate didn't follow. Next to her Rico was fully tuned in to her body language, dividing his focus between following the instructions she threw out and the job at hand. As he'd talked about his father's chops, she'd imagined exactly how she wanted them to taste. An overtone of garlic and lemon and an undertone of mint. The rice would be simple, in keeping with the Brazilian tradition, but she'd liven it up with fried onions, cashew nuts, whole black cardamom, cloves, bay leaves, and cinnamon stick. All she wanted was to create something that tasted like Rico's childhood, combined with their future together, and it felt like she was flying. Just like with her teas, she knew exactly what she wanted to taste and she knew exactly how to layer ingredients to coax out those flavors, those feelings. It was her and that alchemy and Rico's hands flying to follow instructions and help her make it happen. "There's another thing we have to make," she said. Rico raised a brow as he stirred rice into the spice-infused butter. "I want to make tea. A festive chai." He smiled at her, heat intensifying his eyes. Really? Talking about tea turned him on? Wasn't the universe just full of good news today.

You are terrifying. Gods help me if I cross you, Kestrel.” “You already have,” she pointed out. “But am I your enemy?” Arin crossed the space between them. Softly, he repeated, “Am I?” She didn’t answer. She concentrated on the feel of the table’s edge pressing into the small of her back. The table was simple and real, joined wood and nails and right corners. No wobble. No give. “You’re not mine,” Arin said. And kissed her. Kestrel’s lips parted. This was real, yet not simple at all. He smelled of woodsmoke and sugar. Sweet beneath the burn. He tasted like the honey he’d licked off his fingers minutes before. Her heartbeat skidded, and it was she who leaned greedily into the kiss, she who slid one knee between his legs. Then his breath went ragged and the kiss grew dark and deep. He lifted her up onto the table so that her face was level with his, and as they kissed it seemed that words were hiding in the air around them, that they were invisible creatures that feathered against her and Arin, then nudged, and buzzed, and tugged. Speak, they said. Speak, the kiss answered.

Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved. Ambiguous use of pronouns. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.” Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.” Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.” Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.” The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.” The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.” False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.” Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.” Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.” The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.” Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.” Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.” Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its. Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.

How do you build peaks? You create a positive moment with elements of elevation, insight, pride, and/ or connection. We’ll explore those final three elements later, but for now, let’s focus on elevation. To elevate a moment, do three things: First, boost sensory appeal. Second, raise the stakes. Third, break the script. (Breaking the script means to violate expectations about an experience—the next chapter is devoted to the concept.) Moments of elevation need not have all three elements but most have at least two. Boosting sensory appeal is about “turning up the volume” on reality. Things look better or taste better or sound better or feel better than they usually do. Weddings have flowers and food and music and dancing. (And they need not be superexpensive—see the footnote for more.IV) The Popsicle Hotline offers sweet treats delivered on silver trays by white-gloved waiters. The Trial of Human Nature is conducted in a real courtroom. It’s amazing how many times people actually wear different clothes to peak events: graduation robes and wedding dresses and home-team colors. At Hillsdale High, the lawyers wore suits and the witnesses came in costume. A peak means something special is happening; it should look different. To raise the stakes is to add an element of productive pressure: a competition, a game, a performance, a deadline, a public commitment. Consider the pregame jitters at a basketball game, or the sweaty-hands thrill of taking the stage at Signing Day, or the pressure of the oral defense at Hillsdale High’s Senior Exhibition. Remember how the teacher Susan Bedford said that, in designing the Trial, she and Greg Jouriles were deliberately trying to “up the ante” for their students. They made their students conduct the Trial in front of a jury that included the principal and varsity quarterback. That’s pressure. One simple diagnostic to gauge whether you’ve transcended the ordinary is if people feel the need to pull out their cameras. If they take pictures, it must be a special occasion. (Not counting the selfie addict, who thinks his face is a special occasion.) Our instinct to capture a moment says: I want to remember this. That’s a moment of elevation.

What tempts you, Pippa?" "I-" She hesitated. "I care a great deal for meringue." He laughed, the sound bigger and bolder than she expected. "It's true." "No doubt you do. But you may have meringue anytime you like." He stood back and indicated that she should enter the carriage. She ignored the silent command, eager to make her point. "Not so. If the cook has not made it, I cannot eat it." A smile played on his lips. "Ever-practical Pippa. If you want it, you can find it. That's my point. Surely, somewhere in London, someone will take pity upon you and satisfy your craving for meringue." Her brow furrowed. "Therefore, I am not tempted by it?" "No. You desire it. But that's not the same thing. Desire is easy. It's as simple as you wish to have meringue, and meringue is procured." He waved a hand toward the interior of the carriage but did not offer to help her up. "In." She ascended another step before turning back. The additional height brought them eye to eye. "I don't understand. What is temptation, then?" "Temptation..." He hesitated, and she found herself leaning forward, eager for this curious, unsettling lesson. "Temptation turns you. It makes you into something you never dreamed, it presses you to give up everything you ever loved, it calls you to sell your soul for one, fleeting moment." The words were low and dark and full of truth, and they hovered in the silence for a long moment, an undeniable invitation. He was close, protecting her from toppling off the block, the heat of him wrapping around her despite the cold. "It makes you ache," he whispered, and she watched the curve of his lips in the darkness. "You'll make any promise, swear any oath. For one... perfect... unsoiled taste." Oh, my. Pippa exhaled, long and reedy, nerves screaming, thoughts muddled. She closed her eyes, swallowed, forced herself back, away from him and the way he... tempted her. Why was he so calm and cool and utterly in control? Why was he not riddled with similar... feelings? He was a very frustrating man. She sighed. "That must be a tremendous meringue." A beat followed the silly, stupid words... words she wished she could take back. How ridiculous. And then he chuckled, teeth flashing in the darkness. "Indeed," he said, the words thicker and more gravelly than before.

But you're a poet, and I'm a simple mortal, and so I say one must look at the thing from the simplest, most practical point of view. I, for instance, have long since freed myself from all shackles, and even obligations. I only recognize obligations when I see I have something to gain by them. You, of course, can't look at things like that, your legs are in fetters, and your taste is morbid. You talk of the ideal, of virtue. Well, my dear fellow, I am ready to admit anything you tell me to, but what am I to do if I know for a fact that at the root of all human virtues lies the completest egoism? And the more virtuous anything is, the more egoism there is in it. Love yourself, that's the one rule I recognize. Life is a commercial transaction, don't waste your money, but kindly pay for your entertainment, and you will be doing your whole duty to your neighbour. Those are my morals, if you really want to know them, though I confess that to my thinking it is better not to pay one's neighbour, but to succeed in making him do things for nothing. I have no ideals and I don't want to have them; I've never felt a yearning for them. One can live such a gay and charming life without ideals . . .

Starting with the chocolate version, I swap out some of the cocoa powder with melted bittersweet chocolate and add some sour cream for balance and moistness, as well as some instant espresso powder, my secret ingredient for anything chocolate, which doesn't so much make something taste like coffee, but rather just makes chocolate taste more chocolaty. While the chocolate cupcakes are baking, I turn my attention to the vanilla recipe, adding some vanilla bean paste to amp up the vanilla flavor and show off those awesome little black-speck vanilla seeds, and mixing some buttermilk into the batter to prevent it from being overly sweet and unbalanced. The banana version uses very ripe bananas that I've been stashing in the freezer, as well as a single slice of fresh banana that has been coated in caramel and is pushed halfway into each cup of batter for a surprise in the middle of the cupcakes. Herman's frostings are close to the frostings of my youth, simple faux buttercreams made with softened butter and confectioners' sugar. Nothing fancy. In my newer versions, the chocolate gets melted chocolate and chocolate milk mixed in, the vanilla gets more vanilla bean paste and a tiny hit of lemon zest, and the peanut butter gets a blend of butter and cream cheese for some tang.

SECTION XI.--The Strength of Simplicity. The soul in the state of abandonment knows how to see God even in the proud who oppose His action. All creatures, good or evil, reveal Him to it. __________________________________________________________________ The whole practice of the simple soul is in the accomplishment of the will of God. This it respects even in those unruly actions by which the proud attempt to depreciate it. The proud soul despises one in whose sight it is as nothing, who beholds only God in it, and in all its actions. Often it imagines that the modesty of the simple soul is a mark of appreciation for itself; when, all the time, it is only a sign of that loving fear of God and of His holy will as shown to it in the person of the proud. No, poor fool, the simple soul fears you not at all. You excite its compassion; it is answering God when you think it is speaking to you: it is with Him that it believes it has to do; it regards you only as one of His slaves, or rather as a mask with which He disguises Himself. Therefore the more you take a high tone, the lower you become in its estimation; and when you think to take it by surprise, it surprises you. Your wiles and violence are just favours from Heaven. The proud soul cannot comprehend itself, but the simple soul, with the light of faith, can very clearly see through it. The finding of the divine action in all that occurs at each moment, in and around us, is true science, a continuous revelation of truth, and an unceasingly renewed intercourse with God. It is a rejoicing with the Spouse, not in secret, nor by stealth, in the cellar, or the vineyard, but openly, and in public, without any human respect. It is a fund of peace, of joy, of love, and of satisfaction with God who is seen, known, or rather, believed in, living and operating in the most perfect manner in everything that happens. It is the beginning of eternal happiness not yet perfectly realised and tasted, except in an incomplete and hidden manner. The Holy Spirit, who arranges all the pieces on the board of life, will, by this fruitful and continual presence of His action, say at the hour of death, "fiat lux," "let there be light" (Gen. i, 14), and then will be seen the treasures which faith hides in this abyss of peace and contentment with God, and which will be found in those things that have been every moment done, or suffered for Him. When God gives Himself thus, all that is common becomes wonderful; and it is on this account that nothing seems to be so, because this way is, in itself, extraordinary. Consequently it is unnecessary to make it full of strange and unsuitable marvels. It is, in itself, a miracle, a revelation, a constant joy even with the prevalence of minor faults. But it is a miracle which, while rendering all common and sensible things wonderful, has nothing in itself that is sensibly marvellous.

If loneliness or sadness or happiness could be expressed through food, loneliness would be basil. It’s not good for your stomach, dims your eyes, and turns your mind murky. If you pound basil and place a stone over it, scorpions swarm toward it. Happiness is saffron, from the crocus that blooms in the spring. Even if you add just a pinch to a dish, it adds an intense taste and a lingering scent. You can find it anywhere but you can’t get it at any time of the year. It’s good for your heart, and if you drop a little bit in your wine, you instantly become drunk from its heady perfume. The best saffron crumbles at the touch and instantaneously emits its fragrance. Sadness is a knobby cucumber, whose aroma you can detect from far away. It’s tough and hard to digest and makes you fall ill with a high fever. It’s porous, excellent at absorption, and sponges up spices, guaranteeing a lengthy period of preservation. Pickles are the best food you can make from cucumbers. You boil vinegar and pour it over the cucumbers, then season with salt and pepper. You enclose them in a sterilized glass jar, seal it, and store it in a dark and dry place. WON’S KITCHEN. I take off the sign hanging by the first-floor entryway. He designed it by hand and silk-screened it onto a metal plate. Early in the morning on the day of the opening party for the cooking school, he had me hang the sign myself. I was meaning to give it a really special name, he said, grinning, flashing his white teeth, but I thought Jeong Ji-won was the most special name in the world. He called my name again: Hey, Ji-won. He walked around the house calling my name over and over, mischievously — as if he were an Eskimo who believed that the soul became imprinted in the name when it was called — while I fried an egg, cautiously sprinkling grated Emmentaler, salt, pepper, taking care not to pop the yolk. I spread the white sun-dried tablecloth on the coffee table and set it with the fried egg, unsalted butter, blueberry jam, and a baguette I’d toasted in the oven. It was our favorite breakfast: simple, warm, sweet. As was his habit, he spread a thick layer of butter and jam on his baguette and dunked it into his coffee, and I plunked into my cup the teaspoon laced with jam, waiting for the sticky sweetness to melt into the hot, dark coffee. I still remember the sugary jam infusing the last drop of coffee and the moist crumbs of the baguette lingering at the roof of my mouth. And also his words, informing me that he wanted to design a new house that would contain the cooking school, his office, and our bedroom. Instead of replying, I picked up a firm red radish, sparkling with droplets of water, dabbed a little butter on it, dipped it in salt, and stuck it into my mouth. A crunch resonated from my mouth. Hoping the crunch sounded like, Yes, someday, I continued to eat it. Was that the reason I equated a fresh red radish with sprouting green tops, as small as a miniature apple, with the taste of love? But if I cut into it crosswise like an apple, I wouldn't find the constellation of seeds.

Although my own position is, I believe, clearly enough implied in the text, I may perhaps briefly formulate what seems to me the most important principles of humanitarian and equalitarian ethics. (1) Tolerance towards all who are not intolerant and who do not propagate intolerance. This implies, especially, that the moral decisions of others should be treated with respect, as long as such decisions do not conflict with the principle of tolerance. (2) The recognition that all moral urgency has its basis in the urgency of suffering or pain. I suggest, for this reason, to replace the utilitarian formula 'Aim at the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number', or briefly, 'Maximize happiness' by the formula 'The least amount of avoidable suffering for all', or briefly, 'Minimize suffering'. Such a simple formula can, I believe, be made one of the fundamental principles (admittedly not the only one) of public policy. (The principle 'Maximize happiness', in contrast, seems to be apt to produce a benevolent dictatorship.) We should realize that from the moral point of view suffering and happiness must not be treated as symmetrical; that is to say, the promotion of happiness is in any case much less urgent than the rendering of help to those who suffer, and the attempt to prevent suffering. (The latter task has little to do with 'matters of taste', the former much.) (3) The fight against tyranny; or in other words, the attempt to safeguard the other principles by the institutional means of a legislation rather than by the benevolence of persons in power.

My poor darling, you must forgive me; I know I’ve distressed you, but it’s all over now; I won’t think of it any more.” But she saw that his eyes remained fixed upon the things that he did not know, and on that past era of their love, monotonous and soothing in his memory because it was vague, and now rent, as with a gaping wound, by that moment on the Island in the Bois, by moonlight, after his dinner with the Princesse des Laumes. But he was so imbued with the habit of finding life interesting—of marvelling at the strange discoveries that there are to be made in it—that even while he was suffering so acutely that he did not believe he could bear such agony much longer, he was saying to himself: “Life is really astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that vice is far more common than one has been led to believe. Here is a woman I trusted, who seems so simple, so straightforward, who, in any case, even allowing that her morals are not strict, seemed quite normal and healthy in her tastes and inclinations. On the basis of a most improbable accusation, I question her, and the little that she admits reveals far more than I could ever have suspected.” But he could not confine himself to these detached observations. He sought to form an exact estimate of the significance of what she had just told him, in order to decide whether she had done these things often and was likely to do them again. He repeated her words to himself: “I knew quite well what she was after.” “Two or three times.” “I’ve heard that tale before.” But they did not reappear in his memory unarmed; each of them still held its knife, with which it stabbed him anew.

Every few months or so at home, Pops had to have Taiwanese ’Mian. Not the Dan-Dan Mian you get at Szechuan restaurants or in Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, but Taiwanese Dan-Dan. The trademark of ours is the use of clear pork bone stock, sesame paste, and crushed peanuts on top. You can add chili oil if you want, but I take it clean because when done right, you taste the essence of pork and the bitterness of sesame paste; the texture is somewhere between soup and ragout. Creamy, smooth, and still soupy. A little za cai (pickled radish) on top, chopped scallions, and you’re done. I realized that day, it’s the simple things in life. It’s not about a twelve-course tasting of unfamiliar ingredients or mass-produced water-added rib-chicken genetically modified monstrosity of meat that makes me feel alive. It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more. These noodles were transcendent not because he used the best produce or protein or because it was locally sourced, but because he worked his dish. You can’t buy a championship. Did this old man invent Dan-Dan Mian? No. But did he perfect it with techniques and standards never before seen? Absolutely. He took a dish people were making in homes, made it better than anyone else, put it on front street, and established a standard. That’s professional cooking. To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard. That’s what that Dan-Dan Mian did. If I had the honor of cooking my father’s last meal, I wouldn’t think twice. Dan-Dan Mian with a bullet, no question.

You’re awfully quiet,” Travis said, glancing up from the road. “Are you falling asleep on me?” “Not yet.” Cat swallowed a yawn. “Just thinking.” “About what?” “This and that. Mostly that.” Travis smiled. “Sounds important.” Cat gave up and yawned openly. “Nope. You’ve unraveled my brain.” He changed lanes to pass a huge motor home that belonged on the multilane interstate highway, not on Laguna’s crowded street. She enjoyed watching him control the car with ease and precision. When he downshifted, sunlight ran like gold water over the tawny hair on his arm. As he transferred his grip from gearshift to steering wheel, the tendons on the back of his hand moved beneath tanned skin. His fingers closed firmly over the leather-sheathed wheel. Cat remembered the intense pleasure Travis could give to her with a simple caress. Sudden, stark need coursed through her, leaving her shaken. She wanted to touch him, taste him, take him so deeply into her body that she could feel every wild pulse of his release. “If you keep looking at me like that,” Travis said, “I’m going to pull over to the side of the road and do things to you that will get us arrested.” His husky drawl did nothing to cool Cat’s blood. She looked away from his knowing hands to his lips smiling beneath his tawny mustache. She remembered the feel of his beard sliding down her skin, the exciting silky roughness against her neck, her breasts, her stomach. She wondered what it would be like to feel him . . . everywhere. With a small groan Cat closed her eyes. “What am I going to do with you?” “I’ll pull over so we can find out.” “Not a good idea.” “Chicken.” “Cluck cluck. I can’t afford bail.” “I can.” “They’ll put us in separate cells.” “Damn. I didn’t think of that.

Despite the popularity of this view, the DeValoises felt it was only a partial truth. To test their assumption they used Fourier's equations to convert plaid and checkerboard patterns into simple wave forms. Then they tested to see how the brain cells in the visual cortex responded to these new wave-form images. What they found was that the brain cells responded not to the original patterns, but to the Fourier translations of the patterns. Only one conclusion could be drawn. The brain was using Fourier mathematics—the same mathematics holography employed—to convert visual images into the Fourier language of wave forms. 12 The DeValoises' discovery was subsequently confirmed by numerous other laboratories around the world, and although it did not provide absolute proof the brain was a hologram, it supplied enough evidence to convince Pribram his theory was correct. Spurred on by the idea that the visual cortex was responding not to patterns but to the frequencies of various wave forms, he began to reassess the role frequency played in the other senses. It didn't take long for him to realize that the importance of this role had perhaps been overlooked by twentieth-century scientists. Over a century before the DeValoises' discovery, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had shown that the ear was a frequency analyzer. More recent research revealed that our sense of smell seems to be based on what are called osmic frequencies. Bekesy's work had clearly demonstrated that our skin is sensitive to frequencies of vibration, and he even produced some evidence that taste may involve frequency analysis. Interestingly, Bekesy also discovered that the mathematical equations that enabled him to predict how his subjects would respond to various frequencies of vibration were also of the Fourier genre.

For four hours, Andrew and I were presented with course after course of delightful creations, imaginative pairings, and, always, dramatic presentations. Little fillets of sturgeon arrived under a glass dome, after which it was lifted, applewood smoke billowed out across the table. Pretzel bread, cheese, and ale, meant to evoke a picnic in Central Park, was delivered in a picnic basket. But my favorite dish was the carrot tartare. The idea came, along with many of the menu's other courses, while researching reflecting upon New York's classic restaurants. From 21 Club to Four Seasons, once upon a time, every establishment offered a signature steak tartare. "What's our tartare?" Will and Daniel wondered. They kept playing with formulas and recipes and coming close to something special, but it never quite had the wow factor they were looking for. One day after Daniel returned from Paffenroth Gardens, a farm in the Hudson Valley with the rich muck soil that yields incredibly flavorful root vegetables, they had a moment. In his perfect Swiss accent, he said, "What if we used carrots?" Will remembers. And so carrot tartare, a sublime ode to the humble vegetable, was added to the Eleven Madison Park tasting course. "I love that moment when you clamp a meat grinder onto the table and people expect it to be meat, and it's not," Will gushes of the theatrical table side presentation. After the vibrant carrots are ground by the server, they're turned over to you along with a palette of ingredients with which to mix and play: pickled mustard seeds, quail egg yolk, pea mustard, smoked bluefish, spicy vinaigrette. It was one of the most enlightening yet simple dishes I've ever had. I didn't know exactly which combination of ingredients I mixed, adding a little of this and a little of that, but every bite I created was fresh, bright, and ringing with flavor. Carrots- who knew?

I stepped back suddenly, snapping the band of energy that had seemed to be drawing me closer to her as I unbuckled my belt and unbuttoned my fly. “What are you doing?” she gasped, staring at me as I dropped my jeans, knocking my boxers off with them and letting her get a good eyeful of the full length of my cock. Her gaze stayed glued on it and blood began to rush that way at the feeling of her attention, like that part of me still hadn't agreed to my decision to have nothing more to do with her beyond making sure she left this place. I gritted my teeth as my dick continued to get all kinds of ideas about the things it could do with her if I just made her bow for me now and I tried not to let my gaze linger on her mouth while I considered how much I'd like to fuck it. “When you stop eye-fucking me I’ll show you what you’re so desperate to know,” I mocked, forcing her attention back up to my face and earning myself a scowl. “People don’t tend to whip their junk out in the middle of a conversation,” she snapped like she was pissed at me for it. “So if you didn’t want me catching an eyeful of little Darius then you shouldn’t have brought him into our discussion.” I released a breath of laughter before I could help myself, my mind and dick wandering down all kinds of out of bounds roads as I gave myself two seconds to consider whether or not I could convince her to bow for me after all. I leaned closer to her as she scowled back, but her breaths were speeding up and her pupils were wide with what I could have sworn was desire of her own. I wanted that. I wanted it more than I could say and it was so fucking tempting to just step forward, catch her by the back of the neck and kiss her roughly until she gave in and bowed to me the way I ached for her to. I could see it in her eyes. The temptation despite the hatred and I wanted to hate fuck her so much that I almost took that final step. But as my own pulse thundered like a war drum in my ears, I knew it wouldn't be so simple. One taste of her and I'd be addicted. And I couldn't afford that no matter how tempting a sin she might have been. “If you come to my room uninvited again then it had better be because you’re ready to bow to us or to beg me to bend you over that headboard and make you scream my name,” I said with all the confidence I felt in knowing that she was getting as wet for me as I was getting hard for her. She pressed herself back against my door, her thighs clenching together like she was trying to fight her reaction, but I felt it humming in the air between us no matter how deeply she scowled. (Darius POV)

Which reminds me that you’ve never said how you dueled at Needles against the city’s finest fighter and won.” It would be a mistake to tell him. It would defy the simplest rule of warfare: to hide one’s strengths and weaknesses for as long as possible. Yet Kestrel told Arin the story of how she had beaten Irex. Arin covered his face with one floured hand and peeked at her between his fingers. “You are terrifying. Gods help me if I cross you, Kestrel.” “You already have,” she pointed out. “But am I your enemy?” Arin crossed the space between them. Softly, he repeated, “Am I?” She didn’t answer. She concentrated on the feel of the table’s edge pressing into the small of her back. The table was simple and real, joined wood and nails and right corners. No wobble. No give. “You’re not mine,” Arin said. And kissed her. Kestrel’s lips parted. This was real, yet not simple at all. He smelled of woodsmoke and sugar. Sweet beneath the burn. He tasted like the honey he’d licked off his fingers minutes before. Her heartbeat skidded, and it was she who leaned greedily into the kiss, she who slid one knee between his legs. Then his breath went ragged and the kiss grew dark and deep. He lifted her up onto the table so that her face was level with his, and as they kissed it seemed that words were hiding in the air around them, that they were invisible creatures that feathered against her and Arin, then nudged, and buzzed, and tugged. Speak, they said. Speak, the kiss answered. Love was on the tip of Kestrel’s tongue. But she couldn’t say that. How could she ever say that, after everything between them, after fifty keystones paid into the auctioneer's hand, after hours of Kestrel secretly wondering what it would sound like if Arin sang while she played, after wrists bound together and the crack of her knee under a boot and Arin confessing in the carriage on Firstwinter night. It had felt like a confession. But it wasn’t. He had said nothing of the plot. Even if he had, it still would have been too late, with everything to his advantage. Kestrel remembered again her promise to Jess. If she didn’t leave this house now, she would betray herself. She would give herself to someone whose Firstwinter kiss had led her to believe she was all that he wanted, when he had hoped to flip the world so that he was at its top and she was at its bottom. Kestrel pulled away. Arin was apologizing. He was asking what he had done wrong. His face was flushed, mouth swollen. He was saying something about how maybe it was too soon, but that they could have a life here. Together. “My soul is yours,” he said. “You know that it is.” She lifted a hand, as much to block his face from her sight as to stop those words. She walked out of the kitchen. It took all of her pride not to run.

Orion threw a grin back at me as headed to the bar, ducking behind it. “What would madam like?” he asked in a formal tone which was a damn good impression of the Acruxes' butler. I giggled hurrying over to take a stool in front of the bar and placing my clutch down, relishing the cool breeze against my burning neck. “Hmm...a Manhattan?” I teased and he cocked his head. “I'm afraid we're fresh out of bullshit, how about a white wine spritzer with a tiny umbrella in it?” I laughed, nodding eagerly as he made up my drink then poured himself a measure of bourbon. He held it out for me and I leaned across the bar to take it. As I took hold of the glass, he didn't let go and I gazed up at him under my lashes questioning why. “Have I told you have exceptionally beautiful you look tonight, Darcy?” Darcy. He'd said my name. For the first time ever. And why did it sound like so much more than a name when he spoke it? It was like he'd fired an arrow and it had punctured a flesh wound in me at the exact same moment. Hell. I needed to get over this guy. Why was I so caught up on him? Unavailable, that's what it was. We always want what we can't have and Professor Orion was off limits. Simple as that. And those muscles. And the beard. And the dark eyes. And the dimple. But that was it. “That's the first I've heard of it, Professor,” I whispered, unable to make my voice rise any louder. “Don't do that,” he grunted, releasing the drink. I eyed him curiously as he walked around the bar with his bourbon in hand. He took the stool beside mine, his arm butting up against me. “Do what?” I asked, swivelling around to face the pool and taking a sip of my spritzer. It fizzed on my tongue and sent a deep kick of heat through my chest. “You know what.” “You're very presumptuous, Orion. You think I'm far more aware of your chaotic way of thinking than I really am.” I sipped my drink again, spying on him from the corner of my eye. He took a swig of his own drink and the familiar waft of bourbon drifted over me, tingling my senses. It was becoming a trigger, like the moment I walked into his office and he uncorked a bottle, it made me want to taste it on his mouth. And then that led to me wondering whether his fangs would brush my tongue when we kissed, and that always led to me mentally undressing him, then me conjuring an image of what those muscles looked like beneath that shirt... “I have something for you,” he said and I turned, blinking out of my dark fantasy. “You do?” He nodded, reaching into his inside pocket and taking out my coil of blue hair. My heart combusted and a choked noise escaped me. I reached for it and he slid it onto my wrist. He kept my hand in his, his eyes downcast as they remained on the band of hair. “I want you to know, I believe you would have gotten this back yourself when you were ready. But I took a lot of pleasure in retrieving it for you all the same.” I stared at him in complete shock, unsure what to say, my tongue tied in knots. “But Fae don't fight battles for other Fae,” I blurted, completely astonished that his actions that day had been to take this back from Seth. For me. And nothing else. He finished his drink and planted the glass on the bar, rising to his feet. He didn't reply to what I'd said and I barely even remembered what it was as he started pulling his clothes off. “Err, what are you doing?” I half laughed as he shed his jacket and kicked off his shoes, pulling off his socks. Oh my god. “I hate parties, but I like swimming.” He started undoing the buttons of his shirt and thought his back was to me, I was still captivated as he dropped it to the floor like a silken sheet. My eyes scraped down his skin to where his muscles etched an upside down v into his lower back, disappearing beneath his waistband. His shoulders were tanned and heavenly broad, making me long to explore all of those muscles with my hands.(Darcy)