Simply Beautiful Girl Quotes

Giordino...simply sighed in resignation. "Who else," he asked no one in particular, "but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?

This isn’t about romance. A proper kiss, a proper courtship. There’s a way these things should be done.” “For proper thieves?” The corners of her beautiful mouth curled and for a moment he was afraid she would laugh at him, but she simply shook her head and drew even nearer. Her body was the barest breath from his now. The need to close that scrap of distance was maddening. “The first day you showed up at my house for this proper courtship, I would have cornered you in the pantry,” she said. “But please, tell me more about Fjerdan girls.” “They speak quietly. They don’t engage in flirtations with every single man they meet.” “I flirt with the women too.” “I think you’d flirt with a date palm if it would pay you any attention.” “If I flirted with a plant, you can bet it would stand up and take notice. Are you jealous?” “All the time.

ONCE UPON A time, there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. He loved each of them dearly. One day, when the young ladies were of age to be married, a terrible, three-headed dragon laid siege to the kingdom, burning villages with fiery breath. It spoiled crops and burned churches. It killed babies, old people, and everyone in between. The king promised a princess’s hand in marriage to whoever slayed the dragon. Heroes and warriors came in suits of armor, riding brave horses and bearing swords and arrows. One by one, these men were slaughtered and eaten. Finally the king reasoned that a maiden might melt the dragon’s heart and succeed where warriors had failed. He sent his eldest daughter to beg the dragon for mercy, but the dragon listened to not a word of her pleas. It swallowed her whole. Then the king sent his second daughter to beg the dragon for mercy, but the dragon did the same. Swallowed her before she could get a word out. The king then sent his youngest daughter to beg the dragon for mercy, and she was so lovely and clever that he was sure she would succeed where the others had perished. No indeed. The dragon simply ate her. The king was left aching with regret. He was now alone in the world. Now, let me ask you this. Who killed the girls? The dragon? Or their father?

It's the smell of him in the bathroom, all I need to get ready for the day. Watching him get dressed, and the sound in the kitchen; a slow hum of a song and his movements, picking things to eat. The way I could observe him, for hours, just go on with his day – or as he sleeps – simply breathing in and out, in and out, and it's like the hymn that sings me to peace. I know the world is still out there and I know I'm not yet friendly to its pace, but as long as I know him with me, here, there, somewhere – us – I know I have a chance.

Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat.

Lane himself lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person. Franny was among the first of the girls to get off the train, from a car at the far, northern end of the platform. Lane spotted her immediately, and despite whatever it was he was trying to do with his face, his arm that shot up into the air was the whole truth.

You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life.

Dear Karen, I've been thinking about Us, the story of us. How the fuck do I sum it up? Has it been perfect? Hardly. Any story with me at the center of it will never be anything less than a big smiling mess. But here's what I know for sure—our time in the sun has been a thing of absolute fucking beauty. The nightmares, the hangovers, the fucking and the punching. The gorgeous shimmering insanity of the city of ours. Where for years I woke up, fucked up, said I was sorry, passed out and did it all over again. As a writer, I'm a sucker for happy endings. The guy gets the girl, she saves him from himself, fade to fucking black. As a guy who loves a girl, I realize there's no such thing. There's no sunset. There's just now, and there's just the two of us, which can be scary fucking ugly sometimes. But if you close your eyes and listen for the whisper of your heart—if you simply keep trying and never ever give up, no matter how many times you get it wrong, until the beginning and the end blur into something called until we meet again -- and that's it. I didn't know how to finish it, because it's not over. It'll never be over, as longs as there's you, and there's me, and there's hope, and grace.

His daughters watched in the rain. The prettiest, shyest one hid far back in the field to watch and she had good reason because she was absolutely the most beautiful girl Dean and I ever saw in all our lives. She was about sixteen, and had Plains complexion like wild roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the modesty and quickness of a wild antelope. At every look from us she flinched. She stood there with the immense winds that blew clear down from Saskatchewan knocking her hair about her lovely head like shrouds, living curls of them. She blushed and blushed... 'Oh a girl like that scares me,' I said. 'I'd give up everything and throw myself on her mercy and if she didn't want me I'd just as simply go and throw myself off the edge of the world'.

There are far too many beautiful women in the world out there who don’t get how attractive they are simply because stupid men are too busy being too intimidated to talk to them. Lucky for my girl, I’m a cocky son of a bitch. - Jonathan di Luca

Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! Even my parents acted embarrassed by me. But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me. With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom. No one would talk to me anymore because I was I was too ugly. My long hair was a big part of what people liked – I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot… shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had take her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.

Somehow I cannot help being reminded of a frail, consumptive girl, at whom one sometimes looks with compassion, sometimes with sympathetic love, whom sometimes one simply does not notice; though suddenly in one instant she becomes, as though by chance, inexplicably lovely and exquisite, and, impressed and intoxicated, one cannot help asking oneself what power made those sad, pensive eyes flash with such fire? What summoned the blood to those pale, wan cheeks? What bathed with passion those soft features? What set that bosom heaving? What so suddenly called strength, life and beauty into the poor girl's face, making it gleam with such a smile, kindle with such bright, sparkling laughter? You look round, you seek for some one, you conjecture.... But the moment passes, and next day you meet, maybe, the same pensive and preoccupied look as before, the same pale face, the same meek and timid movements, and even signs of remorse, traces of a mortal anguish and regret for the fleeting distraction.... And you grieve that the momentary beauty has faded so soon never to return, that it flashed upon you so treacherously, so vainly, grieve because you had not even time to love her....

Snow is...a beautiful reminder of life and all its quirks. It makes me pause. Think. Stay still. Even my mind takes the hint. It makes me feel giddy. Like a kid. I bring my hot cocoa to the window and simply sit and reminisce...It brings me back to days of school cancellations and snow igloos and King of the Mountain games in my childhood neighborhood...That for this one moment in time, I’m not an adult with all the headaches that can accompany that responsibility, but instead, I’m still the girl in pigtails with the handmade hat and mittens, just waiting to build her next snowman.

Daniel chuckled. Whoever that poor girl was, he hoped his family was paying her well. And then, finally, she lifted her fingers from the keys as Daisy began her painful violin solo. He watched her exhale, stretching her fingers, and then . . . She looked up. Time stopped. It simply stopped. It was the most maudlin and clichéd way of describing it, but those few seconds when her face was lifted toward his . . . they stretched and pulled, melting into eternity. She was beautiful. But that didn’t explain it. He’d seen beautiful women before. He’d slept with plenty of them, even. But this . . . Her . . . She . . . Even his thoughts were tongue-tied.

I was never afraid of my monsters. I controlled them. I slept with them in the dark, and they never stepped beyond their boundaries. My monsters had never asked to be bora with bolts in their necks, scaly wings, blood hunger in their veins, or deformed faces from which beautiful girls shrank back in horror. My monsters were not evil; they were simply trying to survive in a tough old world. They reminded me of myself and my friends: ungainly, unlovely, beaten but not conquered. They were the outsiders searching for a place to belong in a cataclysm of villagers’ torches, amulets, crucifixes, silver bullets, radiation bombs, air force jets, and flamethrowers. They were imperfect, and heroic in their suffering.

Replacing the girl reading the book on the porch was this beautiful, closed-off, honest, waiting-to-be-cracked open woman who challenged his contentment simply by living her life. He didn’t want to be challenged. He was just fine with the status quo. Why did she have to go around inspiring him? It was not what he’d signed up for.

To put it simply, my mother worried. She worried about our neighbors’ reactions. Would they break me with their disparaging glances, their cruel intolerance? She worried I was just like every other teenage girl, all tender heart and fragile ego. She worried I was more myth and figment than flesh and blood. She worried about my calcium levels, my protein levels, even my reading levels. She worried she couldn’t protect me from all of the things that had hurt her: loss and fear, pain and love. Most especially from love.

true. I believe God loves each of us unconditionally, but I don’t think that means we get to squander the gifts and talents he’s given us simply because we’re good enough already. A caterpillar is awesome, but if the caterpillar stopped there—if she just decided that good is good enough—we would all miss out on the beautiful creature she would become.

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.” ― Albert Einstein

I would run to rejoin the children. Especially when it was time for the kite-flying contests- where the boys would skilfully try to cut down their competitors' kite strings. It plunges. It was beautiful, and also a bit melancholy for me to see the pretty kites sputter to the ground. Maybe it was because I could see a future that would be cut down just like those kites- simply because I was a girl.

She was not the sort of woman guys settle for. She was the one they lust after and strive for. She was the one who ruins other people's relationships simply by existing, but she will always be surmounted as guys come to realize the virtues of the approachable girl next door. She was, in brief, too pretty to be trusted or had.

If she were a broken girl whose life was a wreck and would never be the same, their vigor for her story would simply be unacceptable. They couldn't allow themselves to be so attracted to her narrative if it ended any way but beautifully.

He tells us life is beautiful. Did he also tell us what made it beautiful? I cannot remember. He simply said, "Life is a beautiful thing." What its beauty will bring us, and what its beauty will take from us, he does not say. Simply beautiful, is all he says.

I’ve gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen. The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other — the lady and her maid, the soldier and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light — that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light. Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat. The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.

Most morality, thought Mma Ramotswe, was about doing the right thing because it had been identified as such by a long process of acceptance and observance. You simply could not create your own morality because your experience would never be enough to do so. What gives you the right to say that you know better than your ancestors? Morality is for everybody and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual person, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave it.

And here is the mother tree, " A-ma continues. Her voice is at once softer and filled with more emotion than it ever is during ceremonial sacrifices. She places her palms on the trunk as delicatly as she did on De-jas' belly. "Isn't she beautiful?" "These trees are sacred", A-ma states simply. "And those yellow threads are the mother tree's most precious gift. I've helped many with the leaves and threads of the mother tree when all else failed.

Pete slept too, his chin resting on his chest. He dreamed as well. A diamond turned on his forehead. A tree. He was a landscape. He was covered with trees. He was the Yaak. He was Glacier. He was all the tremendous valleys of western Montana, cloud shadows grazing over him. Storm fronts broke against his nose. He was sparsely populated. He was a city. He teemed with highways and lights. He dreamed he had a sister, a beautiful girl, and in the dream he reasoned out that the girl was Rachel and what he was actually dreaming was a spirit inside of his, a sibling she’d never had, a son. He dreamed that we all contain so many masses and that people are simply potentialities, instances, cases. That all of life can be understood as casework. That DFS was a kind of priesthood.

You’re not simply pretty, Braxton. That would be a goddamn insult. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

Polly was the same age as Alma, but daintier and startlingly beautiful. She looked like a perfect figurine carved out of fine French soap, into which someone had inlaid a pair of glittering peacock-blue eyes. But it was the tiny pink pillow of her mouth that made this girl more than simply pretty; it made her an unsettling little voluptuary, a Bathsheba wrought in miniature.

Julia wondered if all four girls’ voices lived inside their mother. Emeline’s earnestness, Julia’s clear directives, Cecelia’s excitement about the palette of colors that made up the world, Sylvie’s romantic yearning. Perhaps Rose simply masked her daughters’ voices with her own gruff tone, her own twist of anger and disappointment, but they were all there, buried within her.

can’t help but be reminded of that weak and sickly girl, at whom you sometimes look with pity, sometimes with a compassionate love, and sometimes you simply do not notice her, but then suddenly, for a moment, she somehow, unexpectedly, becomes inexplicably, wonderfully beautiful, and you, startled and intoxicated, unwittingly ask yourself: What power caused those sad, thoughtful eyes to shine with such fire?

Giordino, on the other hand, simply sighed in resignation. “Who else,” he asked no one in particular, “but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?

After my initial disappointment, I realized that Milicent being a normal, non-royal was more important to her position as a role model. It was more inspirational. She didn't have superpowers or a magic wand. She was simply intelligent and savvy and good at what she did. We need women to be allowed to be simply good at what they do. We need them on set, in meetings, behind cameras and pens and paintbrushes. We need them to be themselves, to be human: ordinary and flawed. That way, more girls can see them and think "I can do that." That way, no one can look at them and say " She got that job because she's beautiful. She got that gig because she slept with someone." Actually, she got hired because she was damn good.

Susan essentially said no. And she said that with her husband sitting right there in the audience. She said she and her husband believed they were a cherished prize for each other, and they would probably drive any other people mad. But then she said something I thought was wise. She said she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all her problems go away, because he was just a guy. And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver. And because her husband believed she was just a girl, he was free to really love her too. Neither needed the other to make everything okay. They were simply content to have good company through life’s conflicts. I thought that was beautiful. There

I looked at the eyes of the ghosts sitting around the fire and at Beeta, and suddenly I realized that we dead are the sorrowful part of life, while the living are the joyful side of death. And yet, Beeta was not joyful and it was the sad side of life that she didn't even know she should be joyful in life because there was nothing else she could do. I wanted to tell her this, but was afraid of bringing her damaged spirit down even further. Fortunately, she herself eventually spoke and said, "It seems that from among you, I am the more fortunate because nobody killed me. But I don't feel happy at all." She looked at we who had died. The dead who had been the first to meet her in the world of the living outside Razan. An old man in the group responded, "This is because you don't yet realize how beautiful, young, and healthy you are." Beeta smiled and her cheeks reddened by the light of the fire in silent emotion; and all of us who were dead saw how good the smile looked on her. But as she recalled dark memories, her smile faded and she said, "But the man who loved me simply turned his back on me and married a young girl." The middle-aged man said, "All the better! It means you were lovable enough but he wasn't smart enough to realize it.

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two. Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic. Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl — or the girl you wanted to score with — for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told. You see, I'd never actually been to Florida before the war, much less Miami. I was a newspaper reporter from Chicago before the war and had never even seen the ocean until I was flying over the Pacific for the Air Corp. There wasn't much time for admiring the waves when Japanese Zeroes were trying to shoot you out of the sky and bury you at the bottom of that deep blue sea. It was because of my friend Pete that I knew so much about Miami. Florida was his home, so when we both got leave in '42 I followed him to the warm waters of Miami to see what all the fuss was about. It would be easy to say that I skipped Chicago for Miami after the war ended because Pete and I were such good pals and I'd had such a great time there on leave. But in truth I decided to stay on in Miami because of Veronica Lake. I'd better explain that. Veronica Lake never knew she was the reason I came back with Pete to Miami after the war. But she had been there in '42 while Pete and I were enjoying the sand, sun, and the sweet kisses of more than a few love-starved girls desperate to remember what it felt like to have a man's arm around them — not to mention a few other sensations. Lake had been there promoting war bonds on Florida's first radio station, WQAM. It was a big outdoor event and Pete and I were among those listening with relish to Lake's sultry voice as she urged everyone to pitch-in for our boys overseas. We were in those dark early days of the war at the time, and the outcome was very much in question. Lake's appearance at the event was a morale booster for civilians and servicemen alike. She was standing behind a microphone that sat on a table draped in the American flag. I'd never seen a Hollywood star up-close and though I liked the movies as much as any other guy, I had always attributed most of what I saw on-screen to smoke and mirrors. I doubted I'd be impressed seeing a star off-screen. A girl was a girl, after all, and there were loads of real dolls in Miami, as I'd already discovered. Boy, was I wrong." - Where Flamingos Fly

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

You see I’m wearing the tie,’ said Bingo. ‘It suits you beautiful,’ said the girl. Personally, if anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard, regardless of their age and sex; but poor old Bingo simply got all flustered with gratification, and smirked in the most gruesome manner. ‘Well,

[This] beautiful girl asleep on my chest, her ear over my heart, needs me right now. So I hold her close and let me eyes shut as the sun lowers over “the greatest mountain.” I don’t really know her. I don’t have any right to her. I shouldn’t get attached to her. In a handful of days she will be gone. But right now, there is simply nowhere else on earth I’d rather be.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.

I walked all the way around the zoo, and then came back to a girl with a round face and fluffy hair, who looked like a baby owl. I like owls. I was about to say hello when along came Very Cool Girl, with her beautiful hair swinging. She smiled at me, and so did the baby owl. But oh no…My throat closed up. I simply could not speak. I can’t talk to strangers! I swerved off, and pretended I’d been headed for a nearby drinks machine.

I'll see you when you're done with your interrogation." "I am not going to interrogate anyone!" Jack grinned. "Of course not.You're just going to ask questions." He cast a glance at Perkins. "Lady Kincaid will be with our guest shortly." "Yes,my lord." The butler bowed and left. Fiona frowned at the steady beat of rain against the window. "Dougal will catch his death,riding in such a rain." Jack shrugged. "He made it; let him swim in it." He pressed a kiss to his wife's forehead. "I'll be curious to hear about this woman." Fiona absently nodded.If what Jack suspected wer true and Miss MacFarlane was the cause of Dougal's gloom, then woe betide the lady! Chin high, she swept into the entryway. Standing in the center of the hall was a woman with gray curly hair and freckles, broad as a barn and dressed as a servant. Fiona almost tripped over her own feet. Surely,this was not the sort of woman Dougal pursued? But perhaps...perhaps it was true love. Was that why Dougal had been so surly? Fiona gathered her scattered wits and put a polite smile on her face. "Miss MacFarlane? Welcome to-" A soft cough halted Fiona, and the woman before her pointed behind Fiona. She turned around and knew instantly that she was indeed facing the cause of Dougal's storms. Miss MacFarlane wasn't simply beautiful; the girl was breathtaking.

Can—” She caught her lip in her teeth. “Can you tell me . . . ? How does one breathe?” Very unsteadily while those eyes gazed up at him. “Breathe?” “While kissing.” Not easy. He tried to moderate his voice. “In the usual manner, I imagine.” Her slender brows dipped. “At opportune moments,” he suggested. Her lips twisted up in that manner he both dreaded and longed for. “Through one’s nose, perhaps,” he said, because his only refuge was to continue speaking or to walk away. “Really?” She appeared unconvinced. And so, because her skepticism suited his need to have her lips beneath his again, he showed her how one breathed while kissing. To her soft gasp of surprise, he took her waist in his hands, bent to her mouth, and kissed her in truth this time. Her lips were warm and still, and then not still as he felt her eager beauty, tasted her, and made her respond. She held back at first, and then she gave herself up to it. Her mouth opened to him as though by nature, offering him a sweet breath of the temptation within. If he’d gone seeking an innocent with more ready hunger he could not have found her. But he had not wanted an innocent. He’d wanted no one, yet here he was with his hands on a girl he could not release, his tongue tracing the seam of sweet, full lips that she parted for him willingly. “Now, breathe,” he whispered against those lips, then he sought her deeper. She made sounds of surrender in the back of her throat. He wanted to run his hands over her body, to pull her to him and make her know what a real kiss could be. “Breathe.” God, she smelled so good. He could press his face against her neck and remain there simply breathing her. But he feared that if he enjoyed much more of Diantha Lucas he would be in a very bad way when it came to giving her over to her stepfather and subsequently her intended. A very bad way indeed. And she didn’t deserve it. Rule #9: A gentleman must always place a lady’s welfare before his own. She slipped her tongue alongside his, gasped a little whimper of pleasure, and he coaxed her lips open and showed her more than how to breathe. He showed her how he wanted her. It was a pity for Miss Lucas’s welfare that no gentleman could be found here, after all.

...Women have preserved this `baby look' for as long as possible so as to make the world continue to believe in the darling, sweet little girl she once was, and she relies on the protective instinct in man to make him take care of her. As with everything a woman undertakes on her own initiative, this whole maneuvre is as incredible as it is stupid. It is amazing, in fact, that it succeeds. It would appear very shortsighted to encourage such an ideal of beauty. For how can any woman hope to maintain it beyond the age of twenty-five? Despite every trick of the cosmetics industry, despite magazine advice against thinking or laughing (both tend to create wrinkles), her actual age will inevitably show'- through in the end. And what on earth is a man to do with a grown-up face when he has been manipulated into considering only helpless, appealing little girls to be creatures of beauty? What is a men to do with a woman when the smooth curves have become flabby tires of flesh, the skin slack and pallid, when the childish tones have grown shrill and the laughter sounds like neighing? What is to become of this shrew when her face no longer atones for her ceaseless inanities and when the cries of `Ooh' and Ah' begin to drive him out of his mind? This mummified `child' will never fire a man's erotic fantasy again. One might think her power broken at last. But no, she still manages to get her own way - and for two reasons. The first is obvious: she now has children, who enable her to continue feigning helplessness. As for the second - there are simply not enough young women to go around. It is a safe bet that, given the choice, man would trade in his grown-up child-wife for a younger model, but, as the ratio between the sexes is roughly equal, not every man can have a younger woman. And as he has to have a wife of some sort. he prefers to keep the one he already possesses. This is easy to prove. Given the choice, a man will always choose a younger woman.

A staunch determinist might argue that between a magazine in a democratic country applying financial pressure to its contributors to make them exude what is required by the so-called reading public—between this and the more direct pressure which a police state brings to bear in order to make the author round out his novel with a suitable political message, it may be argued that between the two pressures there is only a difference of degree; but this is not so for the simple reason that there are many different periodicals and philosophies in a free country but only one government in a dictatorship. It is a difference in quality. If I, an American writer, decide to write an unconventional novel about, say, a happy atheist, an independent Bostonian, who marries a beautiful Negro girl, also an atheist, has lots of children, cute little agnostics, and lives a happy, good, and gentle life to the age of 106, when he blissfully dies in his sleep — it is quite possible that despite your brilliant talent, Mr. Nabokov, we feel [in such cases we don't think, we feel] that no American publisher could risk bringing out such a book simply because no bookseller would want to handle it. This is a publisher's opinion, and everybody has the right to have an opinion. Nobody would exile me to the wilds of Alaska for having my happy atheist published after all by some shady experimental firm; and on the other hand, authors in America are never ordered by the government to produce magnificent novels about the joys of free enterprise and of morning prayers.

It’s a girl!” Cecelia cried. The elephant evaporated, the squeezing stopped, and Julia was herself again. Mostly herself, anyway. She realized that she was most certainly a mammal and had the ability to shake the world apart and create a human when she unleashed her power. She was a mother. This identity shuddered through her, welcome like water to a dry riverbed. It felt so elemental and true that Julia must have unknowingly been a mother all along, simply waiting to be joined by her child. Julia had never felt like this before. Her brain was a gleaming engine, and her resources felt immense. She was clarity. Julia held the baby for what felt like only a few seconds before the nurse whisked the infant to the nursery to be washed and wrapped in a blanket. Cecelia left the room to tell the others the news. Julia shook her head, in disbelief and joy. She couldn’t believe how fast her mind was moving, but perhaps these truths had been inside her all along and were accessible now because she’d given birth. She saw everything so clearly.

And with awe he saw her lose her battle with that smile. It fought first with one corner of her mouth, then the other, and then it broke all over her like a sunrise. The very shape of her face changed. Or rather, she came into focus at last in that moment; she'd simply been awaiting illumination from within. There were dimples, and a pointed chin, and elegant cheekbones. Her face was heart-shaped, sweetly drawn, very 'alive.' She was 'incandescent' with wicked amusement. In that moment was an entirely different girl. He stared, stunned.

The gentleman offered her a fond smile. "I apologize, mademoiselle, but we are closing our doors soon. What you ask is simply impossible." "Improbably perhaps. But not impossible. I will wait outside all night if need be. It is a sad state of affairs when a girl must resort to threats in order to be given the attention she is due." She folded her ungloved hands in her lap. "If I'm outside all night, I hope it weighs on your conscience." "Rather uncompromising of you, mademoiselle," he said. "Hmmmm. Rather like looking in the mirror, I'd wager.

Negative body image in adolescent girls is of growing concern in the modern society. As girls go through puberty, their bodies gain adipose and move farther away from the thin childish appearance. You simply need to take a look at a fashion magazine to see how the fake ideal feminine body represented in it is often asexual and childlike. Such a medium influences the girls and causes them to become dissatisfied with their natural appearance. And this leads to depression. Importantly, depression is a significant risk factor for substance abuse and suicide attempts.

Ana Magdalena nods. For an instant the blue eyes fix on his. 'She sees straight through me', he thinks with a jolt. 'Sees through me and doesn't like me'. It hurts him. It is not something he is used to, being disliked, and being disliked moreover on no grounds. But perhaps it is not a personal dislike. Perhaps the woman dislikes the fathers of all her students, as rivals to her authority. Or perhaps she simply dislikes men, all save the invisible Arroyo. Well, if she dislikes him he dislikes her too. It surprises him: he does not often take a dislike to a woman, particularly a beautiful woman. And this woman is beautiful, no doubt about that, with the kind of beauty that stands up to the closest scrutiny: perfect features, perfect skin, perfect figure, perfect bearing. She is beautiful yet she repels him. She may be married, but he associates her nevertheless with the moon and its cold light, with a cruel, persecutory chastity. Is it wise to be giving their boy - any boy, indeed any girl - into her hands? What if at the end of the year the child emerges from her grasp as cold and persecutory as herself? For that is his judgement on her - on her religion of the stars and her geometric aesthetic of the dance. Bloodless, sexless, lifeless.

I wanted to write not because I thought writing would bring about change. I simply loved it. Writing, in itself, allowed me to dream about things that in reality were impossible to achieve, things that were forbidden. From where had that dream seeped in? I consider myself as a member of society. If I can dream through my writing, doesn't that mean the society can dream, too? Oppa. When I think about writing, I think I am reminded of the penetrating eyes of a dog gazing at his master. The beauty of the face in those eyes, the sadness that comes from submitting to love, the silence that comes from having seen what it should not have.

s death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists . . . A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer’s day while I cannot?

Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists . . . A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer’s day while I cannot?

Simply by being there and looking beautiful, they generate enormous value for the club industry, the individual men operating within it, and the larger urban economy of New York City. Their value emerges from the very specific conditions in which they are seen. Most importantly, these “girls” exist in an altogether different social category from women. And because I want readers to experience this difference, I strategically use the term “girl” from here on without quotation marks to refer to this category of women in the VIP arena. Because in this rarefied world there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.

the vision I hold in my heart goes a little something like this: I see women the world over waking up on Sunday mornings feeling alive, grateful and filled with energy. They find their drug of choice at the farmers’ markets, or on their yoga mats, or while in intimate conversations with their most cherished friends. Their health radiates, their skin glows, and they effortlessly melt into their ideal body shape simply because they’ve decided to no longer run from themselves; no longer hide from feelings they would rather suppress. These women become magnets who attract beautiful, soulful people into their lives as a result of turning around and recognising the soulful beauty within themselves first. They

You see I'm wearing the tie," said Bingo. "It suits you beautiful," said the girl. Personally, if anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard, regardless of their age and sex; but poor old Bingo simply got all flustered with gratification, and smirked in the most gruesome manner. "Well, what's it going to be today?" asked the girl, introducing the business touch into the conversation. Bingo studied the menu devoutly. "I'll have a cup of cocoa, cold veal and ham pie, slice of fruit cake, and a macaroon. Same for you, Bertie?" I gazed at the man, revolted. That he could have been a pal of mine all these years and think me capable of insulting the old tum with this sort of stuff cut me to the quick. "Or how about a bit of hot steak-pudding, with a sparkling limado to wash it down?" said Bingo. You know, the way love can change a fellow is really frightful to contemplate. This chappie before me, who spoke in that absolutely careless way of macaroons and limado, was the man I had seen in happier days telling the head-waiter at Claridge's exactly how he wanted the chef to prepare the sole frite au gourmet au champignons, and saying he would jolly well sling it back if it wasn't just right. Ghastly! Ghastly! A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn't been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them, and Mabel hopped it.

Your charming charm is a super sexy mega power that is simply impossible to overcome. Sweetest gourmet, I adore your gorgeous body, when I see you, only one word sounds in my head: yum, I will give myself completely to you. I will always love only you unconsciously, unconsciously, your gently erotic image sat in the depths of my mind completely. From your amazingly contagious beauty, your mouth opens and speechless is lost. Dizzyingly, stunningly beautiful, you are like a giant tornado, from which everything attracts you. And the heart and soul yearn all the time only for you. It doesn't matter if you love me or not, the main thing is that I still love you, and in my subconscious mind, I will only love you forever. Your luxurious appearance of the highest quality, this is a workshop, the filigree work of Mother Nature, this is just a masterpiece that constitutes a unique example of true beauty, you have no equal, you are a girl of high caliber. You are absolutely beautiful to such an extent, so beautiful, so exotic, erotic, and your image sounds poetic like very beautiful music of love, that I’m just afraid and shy to come to you, I’m afraid to talk to you, as if standing next to a goddess, or with a super mega star, a world scale model that even aliens probably know. My heart beats more often, I can’t talk normally, from excitement, goosebumps all over my body, and it just shakes. All these are symptoms of true love for you, well, simply: oh), wow). To be your boyfriend and husband is the greatest honor in the world, he knelt before you with flowers in his hands. Your appearance is perfect just like Barbie. You are so beautiful that only you want to have sex forever, countless, infinite number of times. You are unattainable, you are like a star whose light of the soul, like a searchlight, illuminates me in the deep darkness of solitude. In love with you thorough. You are simply amazingly beautiful. You are the best of the best. Goddess of all goddesses, empress of all empresses, queen of all queens. More beautiful you just can not imagine a girl. Sexier than you just can not be anything. Beautiful soul just is not found. There was nothing more perfect than you and never will be, simply because I think so. Laponka, I'm your faithful fan, you are my only idol, idol, icon of beauty. It doesn't matter who you are, I will accept you any. Because in any case I am eager to be only with you. You have a sexy smile, and your sensual look is just awesome. And from your voice and look a pleasant shiver all over your body. You are special, the best that is in all worlds, universes and dimensions. You're just a sight for sore eyes. To you I feel the most powerful, love and sexual inclination. You're cooler than any Viagra and afrodosiak. From your beauty just cling to the constraints and embarrassment.

What’re you thinking about?” she asked, arching back against him and making shivers run down his spine. “You,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her neck. “How much better my life is with you in it.” A long moment passed when they simply lay together in the quiet of her bedroom, skin to skin, his heart pumping against her back and his lips resting lazily on her shoulder. “I’m falling in love with you too,” she finally said quietly with her back to him. Her words ricocheted in his brain like too much awesome to bear. He didn’t expect them, didn’t anticipate them, and his heart—which had quietly longed for the words for days—didn’t know how to believe it was possible that a creature as lovely as Savannah could fall for a creature as broken as him. “Say it again,” he whispered, closing his burning eyes so that all that existed was her voice in his ears. She rolled back, and he moved slightly so that she could lie on her back beside him. He opened his eyes to look at her, and with her messy hair and fat lip, she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. “I’m falling in love with you, Asher.” Without breaking eye contact with her, he reached out to push her hair gently off her forehead. “You take my breath away.

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright. So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough.

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.

You see, I don’t have a personality. I’m so dull inside. Faded...” It’s no use fighting it, and it drives me mad with the unassailability of its tenets. “Take Ginger, for example...” That is, take someone for whom controlling her emotions is a daily losing battle, who bursts into fireworks at the slightest touch or even without it, jumps from laughter to tears and back with nothing in between, wears all her loves and hatreds on her sleeve: now that’s beautiful, that’s feminine, that’s attractive, like bright patterns of a butterfly’s wing, it’s a whirlwind, a torrent, a trap; but very few people can stand Ginger’s flamboyant personality for more than a couple of hours at a time, even when her feelings are directed not at them but elsewhere. Long live Noble, Noble’s patience and everything else that he has and I don’t, I guess this is something that he knows and understands, because he used to be that way too, until he went in for a stint where the real crazies live, and yes, they do look great together, this couple always at the point of combustion, firehaired Isolde and sapphire-eyed Tristan, both on the edge, both wide open, breathe in deeply and hide the breakables, but one thing I don’t understand in all of this is why should anyone envy it and agonize about it, I could never understand this and in my attempts to convince Mermaid rose almost to the Noble-Gingerish heights of passion, except it always ended up the same. “It’s nerves, simply nerves, and in this case they hang out like live wires, so anyone passing by trips them; it’s got nothing — nothing — to do with personality and its richness, you silly little girl!

The reason for which a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It was Beethoven’s Quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and enlarging a public for Beethoven’s Quartets, marking in this way, like every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least in intellectual society, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of enjoying it. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for brevity’s sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at the same time be working along parallel lines to create a more instructed public in the future, a public from which other men of genius shall reap the benefit) shall create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half-a-century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist (and this is what Vinteuil had done), if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, shall launch it, wherever he may find sufficient depth, confidently outward bound towards the future. And yet this interval of time, the true perspective in which to behold a work of art, if leaving it out of account is the mistake made by bad judges, taking it into account is at times a dangerous precaution of the good. No doubt one can easily imagine, by an illusion similar to that which makes everything on the horizon appear equidistant, that all the revolutions which have hitherto occurred in painting or in music did at least shew respect for certain rules, whereas that which immediately confronts us, be it impressionism, a striving after discord, an exclusive use of the Chinese scale, cubism, futurism or what you will, differs outrageously from all that have occurred before. Simply because those that have occurred before we are apt to regard as a whole, forgetting that a long process of assimilation has melted them into a continuous substance, varied of course but, taking it as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo blends with Molière. Let us try to imagine the shocking incoherence that we should find, if we did not take into account the future, and the changes that it must bring about, in a horoscope of our own riper years, drawn and presented to us in our youth. Only horoscopes are not always accurate, and the necessity, when judging a work of art, of including the temporal factor in the sum total of its beauty introduces, to our way of thinking, something as hazardous, and consequently as barren of interest, as every prophecy the non-fulfillment of which will not at all imply any inadequacy on the prophet’s part, for the power to summon possibilities into existence or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the competence of genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed in the future of railways or of flight, or, although a brilliant psychologist, in the infidelity of a mistress or of a friend whose treachery persons far less gifted would have foreseen.

My stutter started soon after, and the doctors said it was from the head injury. My mom said that when I stuttered it looked like my brain and I were trying to say ten things at once. My voice just wouldn’t work. “You can’t focus on the one idea you need to talk about,” she told me. “Just say the one thing, Jess.” She is the youngest of three—the Drew girls of McGregor, Texas—and her middle sister Connie was a speech therapist. Aunt Connie advised her to get me to calm down. “Take a breath,” my mother would say, getting down to my level to look me in the eye. That only worked so well. If you want someone to calm down, try telling them “calm down” and see where it gets you. But Connie had another idea, something that worked with other people who stuttered. Singing. “What you’re trying to say,” Mom said to me one day, “sing it to me.” I turned the phrase over in my mind, smoothing the edges of its consonants and vowels until the words became the breaths of a song. A lyric I could control. “I want Cheeeeeeri-ohhhhs,” I sang. I can’t describe that release. The rush of simply being understood. “Yes, you can have Cheerios,” my mother yelled. “You can have whatever you want! You sound so beautiful.” For the next two years, singing was the only time I didn’t stutter. I sang for everything I wanted, like some Disney princess making a wish. Around four, the stutter became more pronounced and my parents took me to a therapist. He used art therapy and asked me to draw myself in the family. I drew my parents standing in front of our house, then put myself inside looking out from a window. He told my parents I had a fear of abandonment. Looking back, I know my parents never left me alone, and maybe I was even around them too much. But somehow, I still had a fear that they would leave me.

PROLOGUE Some years ago in the Planet Orfheus ... It was dark when Lucius reached the rendezvous which had been chosen to be the new hideout. The latter had been used for several months and they were concerned that they were being followed and were close to being discovered. "I thought you were not coming. I've been waiting for you for almost an hour. I was getting anxious," Sofia said, relieved. "Sorry, love. It is becoming increasingly difficult. I almost didn't make it today. The troops were ambushed in the last invasion. Igor and many warriors returned seriously injured," Lucius replied. He looked worried. Why this sudden encounter? They had agreed that the next would be the following week. Lucius gave her a big hug, pulled her close to him, and remained silent for a few moments. His longing and desire consumed him. She meant the world to him. Without Sofia, his life would never make sense. He would never forget those eyes, serene and sincere, with a blue so bright and clear that were able to see the soul of the tormented warrior that was he. With her golden hair, Sofia looked like an angel. "Is there a problem? You're so quiet and deep in thought," she asked, puzzled. He answered, "I'm thinking about us. How long are we keeping it secret?" He walked away from her, sighing. "We can't keep lying and pretending that all is well. You have no idea how much I have to endure when you are away from me, or when I see you with him." "Love, not now. We have already discussed this subject several times. You know that our only alternative would be to flee and pray they will never find us," she replied. Sofia knew very well that the laws of the kingdom could not be disregarded. Love, respect, and loyalty were key factors that were part of the hierarchy of Orfheus. Although she had always been in love with Lucius who had never shown any interest in her, Sofia was bound to his brother Alex as a result of a pact. Over the centuries, Lucius began to change and express loving feelings for her. She never ceased to love him and both succumbed to the temptation and passion of it. Inevitably, a love affair developed between the two. Interrupting her thoughts, Lucius grabbed her by the hand and led her into the hut. This hut was located inside a vast and beautiful forest. He pulled her by the waist, gave her a passionate kiss, stroked her hair, and said softly, "Love, I missed you so much." "I also felt homesick but the real reason I came here today is to tell you something very important. I need you to listen carefully and keep calm," she said as she ran her hands through her hair which contrasted with her pale skin. Sofia did not want to scare him. However, she imagined that he would be upset and angry with the news. Unfortunately, the revelation was inevitable and sooner or later, everything would come out. "I'm pregnant," she said unceremoniously. For a brief moment, Lucius said nothing. He just stared at her without any reaction. He seemed to be in a silent battle with his own thoughts. "But how?" he babbled, not believing what he had just heard. It was surely a bombshell revelation. That would be the end for them. Sofia said, "Stay calm, love. I know this changes everything. What we were planning for months is no longer possible." She sat on a makeshift stool and continued with tears in her eyes. "With the baby coming, I cannot simply go through the portal. The baby and I would die during the crossing." Lucius replied, "Could we ask for help from Aunt Wilda? She is very powerful. Probably she would be able to break through the magic of the portals." Sofia had already thought of that. She was well aware that it was the only choice left. Aunt Wilda had always been like a mother to her. The sorceress adopted her when she was a girl, soon after her family had died in combat.

It was marijuana that drew the line between us and them, that bright generational line between the cool and the uncool. My timidity about pot, as I first encountered it in Hawaii, vanished when, a few months later, during my first year of high school, it hit Woodland Hills. We scored our first joints from a friend of Pete's. The quality of the dope was terrible -- Mexican rag weed, people called it -- but the quality of the high was so wondrous, so nerve-end-opening, so cerebral compared to wine's effects, that I don't think we ever cracked another Purex jug. The laughs were harder and finer. And music that had been merely good, the rock and roll soundtrack of our lives, turned into rapture and prophecy. Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, the Doors, Cream, late Beatles, Janis Joplin, the Stones, Paul Butterfield -- the music they were making, with its impact and beauty amplified a hundredfold by dope, became a sacramental rite, simply inexplicable to noninitiates. And the ceremonial aspects of smoking pot -- scoring from the million-strong network of small-time dealers, cleaning "lids," rolling joints, sneaking off to places (hilltops, beaches, empty fields) where it seemed safe to smoke, in tight little outlaw groups of three or four, and then giggling and grooving together -- all of this took on a strong tribal color. There was the "counterculture" out in the greater world, with all its affinities and inspirations, but there were also, more immediately, the realignments in our personal lives. Kids, including girls, who were "straight" became strangers. What the hell was a debutante, anyway? As for adults -- it became increasingly difficult not to buy that awful Yippie line about not trusting anyone over thirty. How could parents, teachers, coaches, possibly understand the ineluctable weirdness of every moment, fully perceived? None of them had been out on Highway 61.

Try as he did at such times, his thoughts would inevitably turn to the pretty girl named Annie. Tony was always able to sense when the cowboy's deep longing for the girl was at its worst, and nudged him with his nose. He reached up and stroked the horse's mane absently, his thoughts further away than those stars above him. A pretty girl like that was probably at some dance, courted by a long list of admirers. A mere cowboy stood nary a chance, and one with a reputation like Wyn's even less. Even being seen with a man like Wyn should give Annie pause. With this sad realization he dozed, his gun always within reach. Even the quickest and most accurate of men could take nothing for granted in a land whose beauty often  masked its danger. Wyn knew the biggest danger, however, was the men who rode these untamed lands, which were often a haven for outlaws and bad men, as well as men like himself who simply loved the land. A wanted man could disappear completely in the wild country.

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two. Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic. Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl — or the girl you wanted to score with — for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told.

When a work of painting, music or other form attains two-way communication, it is truly art. One occasionally hears an artist being criticized on the basis that his work is too 'literal' or too 'common.' But one has rarely if ever heard any definition of 'literal' or 'common.' And there are many artists simply hung up on this, protesting it. Also, some avant-garde schools go completely over the cliff in avoiding anything 'literal' or 'common'—and indeed go completely out of communication! The return flow from the person viewing a work would be contribution. True art always elicits a contribution from those who view or hear or experience it. By contribution is meant 'adding to it.’ An illustration is 'literal' in that it tells everything there is to know. Let us say the illustration is a picture of a tiger approaching a chained girl. It does not really matter how well the painting is executed, it remains an illustration and it is literal. But now let us take a small portion out of the scene and enlarge it. Let us take, say, the head of the tiger with its baleful eye and snarl. Suddenly we no longer have an illustration. It is no longer 'literal.' And the reason lies in the fact that the viewer can fit this expression into his own concepts, ideas or experience: he can supply the why of the snarl, he can compare the head to someone he knows. In short, he can CONTRIBUTE to the head. The skill with which the head is executed determines the degree of response. Because the viewer can contribute to the picture, it is art. In music, the hearer can contribute his own emotion or motion. And even if the music is only a single drum, if it elicits a contribution of emotion or motion, it is truly art.

The word reality is also beautiful to understand. It comes from the root, res; it means thing or things. Truth is not a thing. Once interpreted, once the mind has grabbed it, defined it, demarked it, it becomes a thing. When you fall in love with a woman there is some truth – if you have fallen absolutely unaware, if you have not “done” it in any way, if you have not acted, managed, if you have not even thought about it. Suddenly you see a woman, you look into her eyes, she looks into your eyes, and something clicks. You are not the doer of it, you are simply possessed by it, you simply fall into it. It has nothing to do with you. Your ego is not involved, at least not in the very, very beginning, when love is virgin. In that moment there is truth, but there is no interpretation. That’s why love remains indefinable. Soon the mind comes in, starts managing things, takes possession of you. You start thinking about the girl as your girlfriend, you start thinking of how to get married, you start thinking about the woman as your wife. Now these are things; the girlfriend, the wife – these are things. The truth is no longer there, it has receded. Now things are becoming more important. The definable is more secure, the indefinable is insecure. You have started killing, poisoning the truth. Sooner or later there will be a wife and a husband, two things. But the beauty is gone, the joy has disappeared, the honeymoon is over. The honeymoon is over at that exact moment when truth becomes reality, when love becomes a relationship. The honeymoon is very short, unfortunately – I’m not talking about the honeymoon that you take. The honeymoon is very short. Maybe for a single moment it was there, but the purity of it, the crystal purity of it, the divinity of it, the beyondness of it – it is from eternity, it is not of time. It is not part of this mundane world, it is like a ray coming into a dark hole. It comes from the transcendental. It is absolutely appropriate to call love God, because love is truth. The closest that you come to truth in ordinary life is love.

What otaku enjoy is not making fiction into material form. Nor, as is often claimed, do they derive enjoyment from confusing reality and fiction. Their goal is simply to take fictions that are out there and promote them to fictions that are theirs alone.

When he finished he had a magnificent house, perched on the edge of a precipice at whose feet the ocean thundered, but it was a house that knew no happiness, for shortly after Whip had moved in with his third wife, the Hawaiian-Chinese beauty Ching-ching, who was pregnant at the time, she had caught him fooling around with the brothel girls that flourished in the town of Kapaa. Without even a scene of recrimination, Ching-ching had simply ordered a carriage and driven back to the capital town of Lihune, where she boarded an H & H steamer for Honolulu. She divorced Whip but kept both his daughter Iliki and his yet-unborn son John. Now there were two Mrs. Whipple Hoxworths in Honolulu and they caused some embarrassment to the more staid community. There was his first wife, Iliki Janders Hoxworth, who moved in only the best missionary circles, and there was Ching-ching Hoxworth who lived within the Chinese community. The two never met, but Howxworth & Hale saw to it that each received a monthly allowance. The sums were generous, but not so much so as those sent periodically Wild Whip's second wife, the fiery Spanish girl named Aloma Duarte Hoxworth, whose name frequently appeared in New York and London newspapers... p623 When the polo players had departed, when the field kitchens were taken down, and when the patient little Japanese gardeners were tending each cut in the polo turf as if it were a personal wound, Wild Whip would retire to his sprawling mansion overlooking the sea and get drunk. He was never offensive and never beat anyone while intoxicated. At such times he stayed away from the brothels in Kapaa and away from the broad lanai from which he could see the ocean. In a small, darkened room he drank, and as he did so he often recalled his grandfather's words: "Girls are like stars, and you could reach up and pinch each one on the points. And then in the east the moon rises, enormous and perfect. And that's something else, entirely different." It was now apparent to Whip, in his forty-fifth year, that for him the moon did not intend to rise. Somehow he had missed encountering the woman whom he could love as his grandfather had loved the Hawaiian princess Noelani. He had known hundreds of women, but he had found none that a man could permanently want or respect. Those who were desirable were mean in spirit and those who were loyal were sure to be tedious. It was probably best, he thought at such times, to do as he did: know a couple of the better girls at Kapaa, wait for some friend's wife who was bored with her husband, or trust that a casual trip through the more settled camps might turn up some workman's wife who wanted a little excitement. It wasn't a bad life and was certainly less expensive in the long run than trying to marry and divorce a succession of giddy women; but often when he had reached this conclusion, through the bamboo shades of the darkened room in which he huddled a light would penetrate, and it would be the great moon risen from the waters to the east and now passing majestically high above the Pacific. It was an all-seeing beacon, brillant enough to make the grassy lawns on Hanakai a sheet of silver, probing enough to find any mansion tucked away beneath the casuarina trees. When this moon sought out Wild Whip he would first draw in his feet, trying like a child to evade it, but when it persisted he often rose, threw open the lanai screens, and went forth to meet it. p625

It seemed strange to me, to suddenly be so protective of the rights of refusal of a girl I was dying to sink my teeth into, a girl who would probably love to see me crawl and beg and suffer. But I decided on the spot that if I was going to be a monster, I was going to be an elegant one, like my beloved De Lafontaine. There was no sense descending into an animalistic frenzy without the full agreement of my blood donor; there was no art in it, no beauty. And I would die before I sacrificed art and beauty. Life simply wasn't worth living if it wasn't by those principles.

Did I develop my own set of random assumptions by utilizing the very little information available to me? For example, Leo Vodnik had held a magazine titled Construction Engineering Australia. Men are ten times more likely than women to die at work. Is that all it took for me to predict a “workplace accident” as his cause of death? Ethan Chang had his arm in a cast. Was it his injury that made me choose “assault,” together with the fact that injury and violence is a leading cause of death for young adult men? I know I watched Kayla Halfpenny at the airport and saw her knock over her drink and then her phone. Was it my observation of the sweet girl’s clumsiness together with the fact that road traffic injuries are one of the leading causes of death among young adults that led me to say “car accident”? Did I simply make random choices? Is that what led me to pancreatic cancer, the most feared cancer, for the vibrant woman who reminded me of my friend Jill, and breast cancer for the pregnant woman? Did I temporarily believe I was Madame Mae? I must have been thinking of my mother, because I kept saying “fate won’t be fought.” Had I somehow become a strange alchemy of the two of us? Both of us, after all, specialized in predictions. There are certain events in my life that I believe may have had a profound effect on me. For example: the little boy who drowned at the blowhole when I was a child. I have never forgotten the sound of his mother screaming. That boy had brown eyes and dark hair. When I saw that dear little brown-eyed, dark-haired baby, did I think of that poor boy and therefore predict the baby would drown at the same age? Did I look at the young bride, Eve, and remember the charming woman who came to my mother for readings, who was so excited about her forthcoming wedding, the first wedding I ever attended? Did I think of the time I saw her at the shops, her inner light snuffed out, and remember how she died in a fire believed to have been lit by her husband? Why did I choose self-harm for Allegra, the beautiful flight attendant? Was it simply that I saw repressed pain in her eyes from the back injury I now know she suffered on that flight? Was it because I knew the rate of suicide in young females has been steadily increasing over recent years? Was I thinking of death as I boarded the plane and contemplating the fact that everyone on that plane would one day die, and wondering what their causes of death would ultimately be? Well. That’s the only one of my questions I can answer with certainty. Of course I was thinking of death. I had my husband’s ashes in my carry-on bag. I was missing my two best friends. I was thinking of every person I had ever lost throughout my life.

She did not now say those former terrible words to him, but looked simply, merrily, and inquisitively at him. And Prince Andrew, crossing his arms behind him, long paced the room, now frowning, now smiling, as he reflected on those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as a crime, which altered his whole life and were connected with Pierre, with fame, with the girl at the window, the oak, and woman’s beauty and love. And if anyone came into his room at such moments he was particularly cold, stern, and above all unpleasantly logical.

I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio’s age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ’s Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared ‘above a common bound’. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.

Her friend who treated her maid badly was not a wicked person. She behaved well towards her family and she had always been kind to Mma Ramotswe, but when it came to her maid—and Mma Ramotswe had met this maid, who seemed an agreeable, hardworking woman from Molepolole—she seemed to have little concern for her feelings. It occurred to Mma Ramotswe that such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspirations of others. That understanding, thought Mma Ramotswe, was the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain in such circumstances would be like hurting oneself. Mma Ramotswe knew that there was a great deal of debate about morality, but in her view it was quite simple. In the first place, there was the old Botswana morality, which was simply right. If a person stuck to this, then he would be doing the right thing and need not worry about it. There were other moralities, of course; there were the Ten Commandments, which she had learned by heart at Sunday School in Mochudi all those years ago; these were also right in the same, absolute way. These codes of morality were like the Botswana Penal Code; they had to be obeyed to the letter. It was no good pretending you were the High Court of Botswana and deciding which parts you were going to observe and which you were not. Moral codes were not designed to be selective, nor indeed were they designed to be questioned. You could not say that you would observe this prohibition but not that. I shall not commit theft—certainly not—but adultery is another matter: wrong for other people, but not for me.

What about ‘The Girl I Left Behind’?” Abigail suggested. “I found the music in the piano bench.” She had heard that when soldiers used to leave the post, heading for battle, the company band would play that song. Oliver shook his head. “I don’t want to leave my girl behind. I want her by my side.” He gave Abigail a look so filled with longing that a lump formed in her stomach. Oh no, Oliver. You don’t mean it. You know I’m not your girl, and I won’t ever be. Oblivious to the thoughts that set Abigail’s insides churning, Charlotte nodded vigorously. “That shouldn’t stop us from singing it,” she insisted. “It’s a pretty song.” And it was. Were it not for her concerns that Oliver wanted something she could not give, Abigail could have spent hours listening to him and her sister, for their voices blended beautifully. At the end of the evening, Abigail accompanied Oliver to the door. Though she hoped he would simply say good night as he had before, the way he cleared his throat and the uneasiness she saw on his face made Abigail fear that her hopes would not be realized. Perhaps if she kept everything casual, he would take the cue. “Thank you for coming,” she said as they walked onto the front porch. “Charlotte always enjoys your duets.” “And you?” They were only two words, but Oliver’s voice cracked with emotion as he pronounced them. Please, Oliver, go home. Don’t say something you’ll regret. Though the plea was on the tip of her tongue, Abigail chose a neutral response. “I enjoy listening to both of you.” Oliver stroked his nose in a gesture Abigail had learned was a sign of nervousness. “That’s not what I meant. I hope you enjoy my company as much as I do yours. I look forward to these visits all day.” His voice had deepened, the tone telling Abigail he was close to making a declaration. If only she could spare him the inevitable pain of rejection. “It’s good to have friends,” she said evenly. Oliver shook his head. “You know I want to be more than your friend. I want to marry you.” “I’m sorry.” And she was. Though Ethan claimed Oliver bounced back from rejection, she hated being the one to deliver it. “You know marriage is not possible. Woodrow . . .” Abigail hesitated as she tried and failed to conjure his image. “Woodrow isn’t here.” Oliver completed the sentence. “I am. I lo—” She would not allow him to continue. While it was true that Oliver’s visits helped lift Charlotte’s spirits and filled the empty space left by Jeffrey’s absence, Abigail could not let him harbor any false hopes. “Good night, Lieutenant Seton.” Perhaps the use of his title would tell him she regarded him as a friend, nothing more. What appeared to be sadness filled Oliver’s eyes as his smile faded. “Is there no hope for me?” Abigail shook her head slowly. “I’m afraid not.” He stood for a moment, his lips flattened, his breathing ragged. At last, he reached out and captured her hand in his. Raising it to his lips, Oliver pressed a kiss to the back. “Good night, Miss Harding,” he said as he released her hand and walked away.

Diablos: the name given to the igniting of, and ignited, farts. Trevor Hickey is the undisputed master of this arcane and perilous art. The stakes could not be higher. Get the timing even slightly wrong and there will be consequences far more serious than singed trousers; the word backdraught clamours unspoken at the back of every spectator’s mind. Total silence now as, with an almost imperceptible tremble (entirely artificial, ‘just part of the show’ as Trevor puts it) his hand brings the match between his legs and – foom! a sound like the fabric of the universe being ripped in two, counterpointed by its opposite, a collective intake of breath, as from Trevor’s bottom proceeds a magnificent plume of flame – jetting out it’s got to be nearly three feet, they tell each other afterwards, a cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment that for an instant bathes the locker room in unearthly light. No one knows quite what Trevor Hickey’s diet is, or his exercise regime; if you ask him about it, he will simply say that he has a gift, and having witnessed it, you would be hard-pressed to argue, although why God should have given him this gift in particular is less easy to say. But then, strange talents abound in the fourteen-year-old confraternity. As well as Trevor Hickey, ‘The Duke of Diablos’, you have people like Rory ‘Pins’ Moran, who on one occasion had fifty-eight pins piercing the epidermis of his left hand; GP O’Sullivan, able to simulate the noises of cans opening, mobile phones bleeping, pneumatic doors, etc., at least as well as the guy in Police Academy; Henry Lafayette, who is double-jointed and famously escaped from a box of jockstraps after being locked inside it by Lionel. These boys’ abilities are regarded quite as highly by their peers as the more conventional athletic and sporting kinds, as is any claim to physical freakishness, such as waggling ears (Mitchell Gogan), unusually high mucous production (Hector ‘Hectoplasm’ O’Looney), notable ugliness (Damien Lawlor) and inexplicably slimy, greenish hair (Vince Bailey). Fame in the second year is a surprisingly broad church; among the two-hundred-plus boys, there is scarcely anyone who does not have some ability or idiosyncrasy or weird body condition for which he is celebrated. As with so many things at this particular point in their lives, though, that situation is changing by the day. School, with its endless emphasis on conformity, careers, the Future, may be partly to blame, but the key to the shift in attitudes is, without a doubt, girls. Until recently the opinion of girls was of little consequence; now – overnight, almost – it is paramount; and girls have quite different, some would go so far as to say deeply conservative, criteria with regard to what constitutes a gift. They do not care how many golf balls you can fit in your mouth; they are unmoved by third nipples; they do not, most of them, consider mastery of Diablos to be a feather in your cap – even when you explain to them how dangerous it is, even when you offer to teach them how to do it themselves, an offer you have never extended to any of your classmates, who would actually pay big money for this expertise, or you could even call it lore – wait, come back!

...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m glad we got the chance to see it.” “It reminds me of the country. Of home.” He heard the wistful note in her voice. “Gwen misses it, too. She wishes you could all be home for Christmas at Easton Manner.” He turned toward her, leaning against the window frame. She’d never really noticed it before, but his shoulders were quite nicely broad. “Is that what you’d like for Christmas too, Amelia? To be home with your family?” She thought for a moment, then decided to tell the truth. “No, I would like not to have to marry Lord Broadmore.” The sudden intensity in Nigel’s gaze set her already pounding heart tripping over itself. “Then why should you?” he asked in a low voice. She returned her gaze to the snowy square, avoiding his eye. “I suspect you already know the answer—my unfortunate reputation. Besides, my parents approve of Broadmore and are eager to see us married. In their eyes, he will make the perfect husband.” His hand came to her arm and gently turned her to face him. “Amelia, no true friend would think less of you for ending your previous engagements. They were simply mistakes you learned from.” “I’ve been called a heartless jilt by more than one person, you know,” she said, trying to make a joke of a label that had wounded her deeply. “They were wrong,” he said, looking stern. “But tell me why your parents are so eager for you to marry Broadmore. We both know he’s an unrepentant ass.” His blunt speech surprised a laugh out of her. “True, but an ass with a title and several magnificent estates. Papa is determined that I marry as well as possible.” She grimaced. “He says a girl of my looks and fortune deserves the very best.” Nigel smiled. “Your father is correct, but not for those reasons. You do have a very pretty face and your fortune is enviable, but those are not the best part of you.” She had to force the words from her tight throat. “What is?” He took her hand, intertwining their fingers. The breath whooshed out of her lungs and she clutched his hand in a convulsive grip. “It’s your heart, Amelia. Your lovely, kind heart,” he said with a smile that melted her from the inside out. “And now that you’ve told me what you don’t want for Christmas, tell me what you do want.” When Amelia thought of all the obstacles facing them, her courage almost failed. But it was Christmas, the time for wishes and dreams to come true. “I want to marry a kind, loving man who will be a good husband and father. A man who will see me as I truly am, and not as a decorative knick-knack and a means for plumping up his bank account.” Nigel gently cupped her chin with his free hand. “My sweet girl that is only what you deserve.” She stared at him, mesmerized. “And what do you want for Christmas, Mr. Dash?” she finally whispered. His lips parted in a devastatingly tender smile. “A kiss, Amelia. One kiss for Christmas.” She felt her mouth curl up in a silly grin. “Only one?” He let out a husky laugh. “To start.” Then he bent and gently, carefully—as if he didn’t want to frighten her—brushed a kiss across her lips.

Hello,” he said. “…hello,” she replied, perplexed. “I thought I should start off with hello, seeing as I neglected to say it earlier.” Her brow came down in confusion. Where was he going with this? “Not because you took me by surprise,” he continued. “Although you did. But because I didn’t think I needed to have a beginning with you. Since we began so long ago, you see.” One eyebrow rose. “But I was wrong, and for that, I apologize.” His eyes became suddenly sad, and it was all Susannah could do to not reach out and touch his cheek. But she restrained herself. “I was away too long,” he whispered. “Three Christmases, six birthdays. However many weeks…” “One hundred fifty-six.” She found the corner of her mouth ticking up. “You were missed,” she concurred. “At home.” “Did you miss me?” he asked suddenly, and a thrill of heat ran through her. Between them. “Yes.” Her answer was frank. Calm. “Did you miss me?” “I missed far too much of you,” he answered. “I did not even realize how much until I came here and found the little girl that I knew had gone.” “She’s not gone,” Susannah conceded. “Not entirely. I still ride Clarabelle at home.” “Do you now?” The corner of his mouth ticked up. “In breeches,” she whispered. Something lit in his eyes. Some kind of… anticipation. And now she knew why her Aunt Julia had ordered her to not wear breeches while riding with other people. Not because they would offend. But because they could entice. She blushed at the thought, broke his gaze, looked at her shoes, at the little bench, and the candles dripping festive red wax in the wall sconce, looked at the eave they stood under, and the vines of ivy and garland that hung there. “I want the chance to start again with you, Susannah,” Sebastian whispered. “This new Susannah. I am a bit off-kilter here, and if you would simply give me the opportunity to catch up, I think you and I… I think we could…” He let that sentence drift off. Left her breathless at what he might have said. “Oh, I’m making a complete bungle of it, aren’t I?” He dropped her hand – had he been holding it this whole time? Ever since he pulled her in here? – and crossed his arms over his chest. “No, you’re not.” She reached out and put her hand on his arm, unwilling to break the connection. “And yes, I suppose a fresh start is fair.” After all, she reasoned, she’d had years to nurse her feelings. He’d had approximately ten minutes. A grin spread across his face, sending her heart into a hummingbird’s pace. She found herself smiling too. No, it was not him falling to his knees professing his love. But it was a start. “Then perhaps I should ask the beautiful Miss Westforth to dance.” The fast-paced reel was in its final notes now. A new dance would start up in minutes. “I would love to.” After

I know this is hard to believe,” said Toadling, when he had been silent for far too long. “I know. I…I am very ugly and she will be beautiful and there is no reason that you should believe the fairy instead of the girl. The stories go the other way.” She had heard the stories that the people of the keep told each other, tales of fairies stealing children and causing mischief, souring the milk and spoiling the harvest. After a year or two, when they had forgotten to be afraid of her, they would tell the stories without remembering that she was there. She did not contradict them. What would she say? That a great lord of Faerie would hardly stoop to cursing a cow, that if a fairy was angry—a real one, not her weak, croaking self—they would be more likely to turn the cow into an armored beast that smashed down the walls; or curse the king with a desperate, humiliating passion for the cow, or simply blast cow, keep, and all living things around it into a fine gray dust. “Not all the stories,” said Halim. “There is the one of the monster that comes to the knight, and when he gives her everything she asks, she turns into a beautiful lady.” Toadling gave a hoarse laugh that turned into a toad’s croak— harr-uccc-kk! The sound startled Halim a little, she could tell. “No,” she said. “I won’t turn into a beautiful lady at the end of this. This is what I look like.” “It’s all right,” said Halim. “This is what I look like, too. And I think that knight was a king or prince or something. Um. I’m not going to turn into one of those, either, I’m afraid. I’m well out of the line of succession.

Reading was something I did only as a girl back when my mother was alive. Back then it seemed there was more time in the day and more things to do for pleasure. I know part of that was simply being a child and not knowing how harsh the world could be.

Had he felt pride in Sofia before? Of course he had. On a daily basis. He was proud of her success in school, of her beauty, of her composure, of the fondness with which she was regarded by all who worked in the hotel. And that is how he could be certain that what he was experiencing at that moment could not be referred to as pride. For there is something knowing in the state of pride. Look, it says, didn’t I tell you how special she is? How bright? How lovely? Well, now you can see it for yourself. But in listening to Sofia play Chopin, the Count had left the realm of knowing and entered the realm of astonishment. On one level he was astonished by the revelation that Sofia could play the piano at all; on another, that she tackled the primary and subordinate melodies with such skill. But what was truly astonishing was the sensitivity of her musical expression. One could spend a lifetime mastering the technical aspects of the piano and never achieve a state of musical expression—that alchemy by which the performer not only comprehends the sentiments of the composer, but somehow communicates them to her audience through the manner of her play. Whatever personal sense of heartache Chopin had hoped to express through this little composition—whether it had been prompted by a loss of love, or simply the sweet anguish one feels when witnessing a mist on a meadow in the morning—it was right there, ready to be experienced to its fullest, in the ballroom of the Hotel Metropol one hundred years after the composer’s death. But how, the question remained, could a seventeen-year-old girl achieve this feat of expression, if not by channeling a sense of loss and longing of her own? As Sofia began the third iteration of the melody, Viktor Stepanovich looked over his shoulder with his eyebrows raised, as if to say: Can you believe it? Have you ever in all your years even imagined? Then he quickly looked back to the piano and dutifully turned the page for Sofia almost in the manner of an apprentice turning the page for his master.

No matter how much otaku may appear to be pedophiles, we cannot simply write them off as sexual perverts. The problem of otaku desire has to be considered first in relation to “fictional context.” Let us not forget that even as otaku adore images of beautiful young girls, they maintain quiet every¬day lives as ordinary heterosexuals. The “Lolita complex” of the otaku is just an alibi for sexual perversion, or a method of fictionalizing sex.

No matter how much otaku may appear to be pedophiles, we cannot simply write them off as sexual perverts. The problem of otaku desire has to be considered first in relation to “fictional context.” Let us not forget that even as otaku adore images of beautiful young girls, they maintain quiet everyday lives as ordinary heterosexuals. The “Lolita complex” of the otaku is just an alibi for sexual perversion, or a method of fictionalizing sex.

Needless to say, bringing up the “Japanese Lolita complex” is the wrong answer. Ethical considerations aside, attributing a given perverse tendency to an entire nation based on a mere impression is simply an unscientific fallacy.

Cinnamon girl, I hope you learn to love the warmth and richness your presence exudes. Do not let anyone tell you that you are not worth the fight. I hope you learn to unhate your appearance, and embrace it like a lover does to thighs. Your beauty is truly, simply bonafide.

[Earlier in the novel, Anodos meets a girl with the lightness of a child, carrying her prized possession - a precious globe that made music when touched. As the Shadow took over him, he reached out and broke her globe. This excerpt happens toward the end of the novel]: Hardly knowing what I did, I opened the door. Why had I not done so before? I do not know. At first I could see no one; but when I had forced myself past the tree which grew across the entrance, I saw, seated on the ground, and leaning against the tree, with her back to my prison, a beautiful woman. Her countenance seemed known to me, and yet unknown. She looked at me and smiled, when I made my appearance. “Ah! were you the prisoner there? I am very glad I have wiled you out.” “Do you know me then?” “Do you not know me? But you hurt me, and that, I suppose, makes it easy for a man to forget. You broke my globe. Yet I thank you. Perhaps I owe you many thanks for breaking it. I took the pieces, all black, and wet with crying over them, to the Fairy Queen. There was no music and no light in them now. But she took them from me, and laid them aside; and made me go to sleep in a great hall of white, with black pillars, and many red curtains. When I woke in the morning, I went to her, hoping to have my globe again, whole and sound; but she sent me away without it, and I have not seen it since. Nor do I care for it now. I have something so much better. I do not need the globe to play to me; for I can sing. I could not sing at all before. Now I go about everywhere through Fairy Land, singing till my heart is like to break, just like my globe, for very joy at my own songs. And wherever I go, my songs do good, and deliver people. And now I have delivered you, and I am so happy.” She ceased, and the tears came into her eyes. All this time, I had been gazing at her; and now fully recognised the face of the child, glorified in the countenance of the woman. I was ashamed and humbled before her; but a great weight was lifted from my thoughts. I knelt before her, and thanked her, and begged her to forgive me. “Rise, rise,” she said; “I have nothing to forgive; I thank you. But now I must be gone, for I do not know how many may be waiting for me, here and there, through the dark forests; and they cannot come out till I come.” She rose, and with a smile and a farewell, turned and left me. I dared not ask her to stay; in fact, I could hardly speak to her. Between her and me, there was a great gulf. She was uplifted, by sorrow and well-doing, into a region I could hardly hope ever to enter. I watched her departure, as one watches a sunset. She went like a radiance through the dark wood, which was henceforth bright to me, from simply knowing that such a creature was in it. She was bearing the sun to the unsunned spots. The light and the music of her broken globe were now in her heart and her brain. As she went, she sang; and I caught these few words of her song; and the tones seemed to linger and wind about the trees after she had disappeared: Thou goest thine, and I go mine– Many ways we wend; Many days, and many ways, Ending in one end. Many a wrong, and its curing song; Many a road, and many an inn; Room to roam, but only one home For all the world to win. And so she vanished. With a sad heart, soothed by humility, and the knowledge of her peace and gladness, I bethought me what now I should do.

All of this made Tyrone a complete outcast with the other kids. I wanted to tell him that I had been like him in Hong Kong, that I knew what it was to be admired and hated at the same time, that I knew it simply amounted to being alone. I wanted to tell him I thought he had beautiful eyes. Like so many things I wanted to say, I never did.

At the end of her speech, a fellow student raised her hand to ask: “My family is Japanese American and has been in Hawai’i for many generations. What can we do to support the sovereignty movement? What can we do to help?” And Haunani-Kay Trask simply responded: “Get out.” And then she followed up by proudly and unapologetically stating: “I have zero aloha. None.” The way she used humor and spoke with such strength, all while in her sarong and long hair flowing down to her elbows, really inspired me and influenced how I perform. I loved how she didn’t try to repress her beauty or femininity in order to appear more authoritative. In fact, she channeled it into this goddess-queen energy that made her come off as a captivating maternal figure fighting for her beliefs and her people. I had never been so moved by a single speaker. Then I gained five more pounds because fuck it.

But if, for me, this desire that a woman should appear added something more exalting to the charms of nature, they in their turn enlarged what I might have found too restricted in the charms of the woman. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and that her kisses would reveal to me the spirit of those horizons, of the village of Roussainville, of the books which I was reading that year; and, my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire no longer had any bounds. Moreover - just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of things set aside, we believe with the profoundest faith in the originality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may happen to be - the passing figure whom my desire evoked seemed to be not just any specimen of the genus "woman," but a necessary and natural produce of this particular soil. For at that time everything that was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinction. [...] But to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That girl whom I invariably saw dappled with the shadows of their leaves was to me herself a plant of local growth, merely of a higher species than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to get closer than through them to the intimate savour of the country. I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would bring that savour to my senses would themselves be of a special kind, yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from anyone else) since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not even exist, isolated, distinct, formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate aim for which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the preliminary perturbation that one feels. Scarcely does one think of it as a pleasure in store for one; rather does one call it her charm; for one does not think of oneself, but only of escaping from oneself. Obscurely awaited, immanent and concealed, it simply raises to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those kisses, of the woman by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for her kindness of heart and for her touching predilection for us, which we measure by the blessings and the happiness that she showers upon us.

And while she could see that he was fit, muscular, and beautiful, she also didn't care. He simply wasn't Jason.

Sacré, Belle!" Marguerite had exclaimed upon entering, and though the grandeur of the room had never dulled for Belle, it was a treat to see it through Marguerite's eyes, and only made Belle more certain that opening it to the public was the right decision. "I know. It's magnificent, isn't it?" Belle replied dreamily. Marguerite ran her hands along the gilded banisters encircling the spiral staircase. "I've never seen so many books in all my life." She turned back to Belle and gave her a wry grin. "Is it true that your husband simply gave it to you during your courtship?" A blush crept up her neck. She had thought of her time in the castle as many things, but a courtship was never one of them. "Something like that," she admitted. She wondered if she would ever feel close enough to Marguerite to tell her the truth. Marguerite let out an appraising whistle. "No wonder you married him." Belle blushed as she pulled her through the stacks, pointing out favorite books along the way. She ushered Marguerite to her favorite chaise nestled in her favorite alcove. "This spot is best for a gloomy afternoon," Belle told her, pointing to a red velvet settee next to a small fireplace, framed by a window almost as tall as the room itself. "The patter of raindrops on the glass mixed with the warmth of the fire..." "It must be heavenly," said Marguerite. "It is." Marguerite spun back around, head tilted to the ceiling, before collapsing in a heap on the plush carpet and motioning for Belle to join her on the floor. Belle acquiesced, lying down beside her friend and noting the view was even more remarkable from that new vantage.

She would bathe in the moonlight falling so beautifully over Paris, and she would think of the girl who had so badly wanted to live, the girl who had simply wanted more, and she would thank her, then, for promises made and promises kept.

She’d always been my girl. It didn’t matter who she was with or how long we were separated by time or distance, Ava would always be mine. I knew in my heart that nobody could ever love her the way I do. It simply wasn’t possible.

Let's face it--the beauty queens and young girls touting virginity pledges are simply purity porn stars. Whether it's actual porn or mythologized purity, the end goal is to be desirable to men, and what women may actually want for themselves, sexually or otherwise, is lost.