Single Inverted Quotes

Guts,” never much of a word outside the hunting season, was a favorite noun in literary prose. People were said to have or to lack them, to perceive beauty and make moral distinctions in no other place. “Gut-busting” and “gut-wrenching” were accolades. “Nerve-shattering,” “eye-popping,” “bone-crunching”—the responsive critic was a crushed, impaled, electrocuted man. “Searing” was lukewarm. Anything merely spraining or tooth-extracting would have been only a minor masterpiece. “Literally,” in every single case, meant figuratively; that is, not literally. This film will literally grab you by the throat. This book will literally knock you out of your chair… Sometimes the assault mode took the form of peremptory orders. See it. Read it. Go at once…Many sentences carried with them their own congratulations, Suffice it to say…or, The only word for it is…Whether it really sufficed to say, or whether there was, in fact, another word, the sentence, bowing and applauding to itself, ignored…There existed also an economical device, the inverted-comma sneer—the “plot,” or his “work,” or even “brave.” A word in quotation marks carried a somehow unarguable derision, like “so-called” or “alleged…” “He has suffered enough” meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too… Murders, generally, were called brutal and senseless slayings, to distinguish them from all other murders; nouns thus became glued to adjectives, in series, which gave an appearance of shoring them up… Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn’t remember it, but if they had done it or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether. It was in the interest of absolutely nobody to get to the bottom of anything whatever. People were no longer “caught” in the old sense on which most people could agree. Induction, detection, the very thrillers everyone was reading were obsolete. The jig was never up. In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, “You’re being too hard on yourself.

The things sane societies loved, it hated. The things sane societies hated, it loved; the things sane societies tried to do, it tried to avoid; the things sane societies tried to avoid, it did with relish. It pursued chaos and hated order, it worshipped ugliness and loathed beauty. If sane people wished to dress as neatly and well as they could, these people were persuaded to dress as hideously and grotesquely as possible; if sane people wanted music to be melodious, these people (whether we are speaking of their "popular" or their "serious" music) were cozened into believing they liked raucous and tuneless noise. If women had been feminine, if home life had been secure, if children had been innocent, if men had been gallant, if art had been beautiful, if love had been romantic, then all these things must be stood on their heads. Of course, life was not always like that. Of course things had often fallen short of their ideals, or even of their minimal norms; but at least most people tried to do things properly and at least the surrounding civilisation encouraged them to try. Never before had the deliberate aim been an inverted parody of all that should be. Everywhere, in every area of life, a single principle reigned: inversion; the worship of chaos; the creed of the madhouse.

Live by old Ethicks and the classical Rules of Honesty. Put no new names or notions upon Authentick Virtues and Vices. Think not that Morality is Ambulatory; that Vices in one age are not Vices in another; or that Virtues, which are under the everlasting Seal of right Reason, may be Stamped by Opinion. And therefore though vicious times invert the opinion of things, and set up a new Ethicks against Virtue, yet hold thou unto old Morality; and rather than follow a multitude to do evil, stand like Pompey's pillar conspicuous by thyself, and single in Example of Virtue; since no Deluge of Vice is like to be so general but more than eight will escape; Eye well those Heroes who have held their Heads above Water, who have touched Pitch, and have not been defiled, and in the common Contagion have remained uncorrupted.

For Dylan, this electric assault threatened to suck the air out of everything else, only there was too much radio oxygen to suck. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the giant, all-consuming anthem of the new “generation gap” disguised as a dandy’s riddle, a dealer’s come-on. As a two-sided single, it dwarfed all comers, disarmed and rejuvenated listeners at each hearing, and created vast new imaginative spaces for groups to explore both sonically and conceptually. It came out just after Dylan’s final acoustic tour of Britain, where his lyrical profusion made him a bard, whose tabloid accolade took the form of political epithet: “anarchist.” As caught on film by D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, the young folkie had already graduated to rock star in everything but instrumentation. “Satisfaction” held Dylan back at number two during its four-week July hold on Billboard’s summit, giving way to Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” come August, novelty capstones to Dylan’s unending riddle. (In Britain, Dylan stalled at number four.) The ratio of classics to typical pop schlock, like Freddie and the Dreamers’ “I’m Telling You Now” or Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual,” suddenly got inverted. For cosmic perspective, yesterday’s fireball, Elvis Presley, sang “Do the Clam.” Most critics have noted the Dylan influence on Lennon’s narratives. Less space gets devoted to Lennon’s effect on Dylan, which was overt: think of how Dylan rewires Chuck Berry (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) or revels in inanity (“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”). Even more telling, Lennon’s keening vocal harmonies in “Nowhere Man,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “Dr. Robert” owed as much to the Byrds and the Beach Boys, high-production turf Dylan simply abjured. Lennon also had more stylistic stretch, both in his Beatle context and within his own sensibility, as in the pagan balalaikas in “Girl” or the deliberate amplifier feedback tripping “I Feel Fine.” Where Dylan skewed R&B to suit his psychological bent, Lennon pursued radical feats of integration wearing a hipster’s arty façade, the moptop teaching the quiet con. Building up toward Rubber Soul throughout 1965, Beatle gravity exerted subtle yet inexorable force in all directions.

No, not even a line. It was a single word, inked thinly and carefully between the lines of the inventory, like a spider hanging barely visible in a corner. אהבתי‏ An assault, a rebuke across the years. An outstretched hand. The inverted letters spelled the single Hebrew word that meant “I loved.

Inverted totalitarianism follows a different route. Instead of pursuing unanimity, it encourages divisiveness; instead of rule by a single master race, it promotes predomination—that is, rule by diverse powers which have found it in their interests to combine while retaining their separate identities.

Valdrada’s inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror-image, which possesses the special dignity of images, and this awareness prevents them from succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness. Even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not so much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating and murdering of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror. At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored. The twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face and gesture inverted, point by point. The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them.

Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living; their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence. “Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collective countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.

was a single word, inked thinly and carefully between the lines of the inventory, like a spider hanging barely visible in a corner. אהבתי‏ An assault, a rebuke across the years. An outstretched hand. The inverted letters spelled the single Hebrew word that meant “I loved.

The following is a quotation from the Mahābhārata that describes our present era and the immediately preceding yuga, revealing a progressive deterioration of humanity’s moral fiber. Again, in the dvāpara-yuga the moral order (dharma) exists [only] half. [God] Vishnu becomes yellow, and the Veda is now fourfold [i.e., the original wisdom is split into the four Vedic hymnodies]. Thence, some [adhere to] four Vedas, others to three Vedas, or two Vedas, or a single Veda, while yet others have no hymns [at all]. Thus, owing to the broken traditions, rites become manifold and creatures, fond of austerities and almsgiving, become rajas-motivated2. Due to ignorance about the single Veda, the Vedas become multiple and because of the collapse of truth, few adhere to truthfulness. Many diseases appear for those who have fallen from truth, and there are desires and disasters caused by fate. Afflicted by these, [some] men perform very severe austerities; others, filled with [worldly] desires or desiring heaven, conduct sacrifices. Thus with the onset of the dvāpara, creatures perish through their lawlessness. In the kali-yuga, O Kaunteya, the moral order (dharma) exists by one quarter only. With the onset of this tamas-motivated3 age, O Keshava [i.e., God Vishnu] becomes black (krishna). The Vedic ways of life end, and so do the moral order, sacrifice, and rites. Plagues, disease, sloth, blemishes such as anger, as well as calamities, sickness, and afflictions prevail. In the course of the yugas, the moral order diminishes increasingly. With the diminution of the moral order, the people (loka) diminish. This description of the kali-yuga is not as daunting as it is in some other scriptures. But the message is clear enough: Ours is a sinister age. What thinking person would not agree? Can we not, by now, fill a whole library with tales of human foolishness, of humanity’s thoughtless interference with the life-world and its almost unbelievable lack of concern for fellow beings, both human and nonhuman? Is there no hope, then, for humankind? Is historian Oswald Spengler’s dark prophecy of the decline of the West (and with it, also of the East) coming true?4 Or are there, today, forces at work that countermand the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age? This latter appears to be the case. It could not be otherwise. Or else our species would have perished long ago, right at the outset of the kali-yuga. The kali-yuga, then, does not signal total spiritual darkness or inevitable doom. Inverting a popular maxim, one can perhaps say that where there is shadow there is also light. Here and there, the present dark age is pierced by shafts of light. It is not without its benign counterbalancing influences.

If they are to be turned into bread, grains have to be ground. When I was a little girl, my father decided to make some flour from the wheat we had grown on the farm. He tried pounding it with a pestle and mortar but all he got was broken grains, not flour. He put it through the hand mincer screwed to the edge of the table with the same result. Finally, he attacked it with a hammer on the flagstone floor. After he gave up, defeated, my mother cleared up the mess. It was sobering to realize that if the commercial millers had vanished, we could have starved even with barns full of sacks of wheat. To turn wheat into flour, you have to shear, not pound, the hard grains, which requires a grindstone, as the people of Lake Kinneret had discovered. A friend in Mexico, where hand grinding still goes on, showed me how it works. She knelt at the upper end of a grindstone, called a metate—a saddle-shaped platform on three inverted pyramidal legs, hewn from a single piece of volcanic rock (fig. 1.7). She mounded a handful of barley, took the mano, a stone shaped like a squared-off rolling pin, in both hands with her thumbs facing back to nudge the grain into place, and, using the whole weight of her upper body, sheared the mano over the grain. After half a dozen motions, she had broken the grains, which now clustered at the bottom end of the metate. Carefully scraping them up with her fingertips, she moved them back to the top, and started shearing again, this time producing white streaks of flour. By the time she had sheared the grain from top to bottom five or six times, she had produced a handful of flour.

Then a spotlight came on over a table near the front of the room. It had a white tablecloth and there was a single red rose in a vase with a yellow ribbon tied around the top. A place setting with an upside down glass, a single candle, and an empty chair completed the setup. The lights dimmed and a man at the front of the room began to speak. “The cloth is white—symbolizing the purity of their motives when answering the call to serve. The single red rose reminds us of the lives of these Americans…and their loved ones and friends who keep the faith, while seeking answers. The yellow ribbon symbolizes our continued uncertainty, hope for their return and determination to account for them. A slice of lemon reminds us of their bitter fate, captured and missing in a foreign land. A pinch of salt symbolizes the tears of our missing and their families—who long for answers after decades of uncertainty. The lighted candle reflects our hope for their return—alive or dead. The glass is inverted—to symbolize their inability to share a toast. The chair is empty—they are missing. A moment of silence for the lost heroes.

He showed her things she'd never known about things she'd always thought she understood. And she adored it... even as it terrified her. Even as it made her question everything she thought true. She resisted the thought, her gaze rising to one large wall of the club, where the Angel's namesake fell in beautiful glass panels from Heaven to Hell, from good to evil, from sainthood to sin. It was the most beautiful window Pippa had ever seen, the work of true artisans, all reds and golds and violets, at once hideous and holy. It was the angel himself who fascinated her, the enormous, beautiful man crashing to Earth, without the gifts he'd had for so long. In the hands of a poorer artist, the detail of him would have been less intricate, the hands and feet and face would have been shaped with glass of a single color, but this artist had cared deeply for his subject, and the swirls of darks and lights in the panels were finely crafted to depict movement, shape, and even emotion. She could not help but stare at the face of the fall- inverted as he fell to the floor of the hell- the arch of his brow, the complex shade of his jaw, the curve of his lip. She paused there, thinking on another pair of lips, another fall. Another angel. Cross. Emotion flared, one she did not immediately recognize. She let out a long breath. She wanted him- in a way she knew she should not. In a way she knew she should want another. A man destined to be her husband. To be the father of her children. And yet, she wanted Cross. This angel.