Slate Board Quotes

We all spend our lives kicking the crap out of ourselves for not being this way or that way, not having this thing or that thing, not being like this person or that person. For not living up to some standard we think applies across the board to all of us. We all spend our lives trying to follow the same path, live by the same rules. I think we believe that happiness lies in following the same list of rules. In being more like everyone else. That? Is wrong. There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.

It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this." I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself. "Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea." "The board-schools." "Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.

Every time you place a stone on the board you are exposing something of yourself. It is not just a piece of slate, shell or plastic. You have entrusted to that stone your feelings, your individuality, your will power, and once it is played there is no going back. Each stone carries a great responsibility on your behalf.

...I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest. As to going a visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have we not been, when we would; starting our fancy away from our Christmas Tree!

The Constitution created a framework, not a Ouija board, precisely because the Framers understood that prospect of a nation ruled for centuries by dead prophets would be the very opposite of freedom.

But the benefit of starting from rock bottom is that you've basically been handed a gift: a clean slate. Your pride's been demolished, your ego is pulverized, your fear of failure has been realized in its most brutal forms, you are...free. Suddenly you're able to shake the judgment of others in a way you never could before, because you no longer give a shit what they think! You've entered a primal survival stage, one you didn't even realize existed. Now all your energy must be reserved for action, for making things happen.

We have a gray stone house with stone slates on the roof and wooden beams inside, and whitewashed bumpety walls and pots for flowers everywhere; the boards creak and he loves me, and there is something about having a child and being in a valley, and being loved, that is more marvelous than anything you or I ever knew about in our flittery days.

When an entire segment of the world is burned and reduced to a lawless battleground for thugs and mercenaries, a land where government does not exist, where the slate of history is being wiped out and hope has drowned in gallons of innocent blood, the only respite comes in the form of the open seas and what lies beyond the horizon. So ships are boarded and pain is tolerated just a little while longer.

Arm in arm with a fellow who's had the mishap, To forget, when he shagged her, to button his flap. Nor I don't like to see, though some think it a treat. A young woman scratching her thing in the street; And a boarding-school miss, with no sense in her pate. Sit and chalk a man's tool on the back of her slate. I don't like to see, in the bright face of the day, A man stand and piss in the public highway; Nor a Newfoundland dog, without any disguise. Tied fast to a bitch not a quarter his size. Nor I don't like to see, little sisters and brothers Get playing at what they call fathers and mothers; And I don't like to see, though at me you might scoff, An old woman trying to toss herself off. I don't like to see - it's a fact that I utter - That nasty word — written up on a shutter: And I don't like to see a man, drunk as an Earl. Getting into a lamp-post thinking it's a girl. I don't like to see, 'cause my feelings it shocks. Two girls busy playing with each other's c-; Nor I don't like to see, though it may be a whim. A hole like a pit-mouth in place of a q-. But I fear I'm encroaching too much on your time, So I'll put an end to my quizzical rhyme; Though with my way of taste you'll perhaps not agree, I've told you the things I don't like to see.

More to the point: the Backshift doesn’t happen only to single words; it happens to pairs of them, and knits them together in the process. An example is the difference between black board and blackboard. A black board is some board that someone painted black. A blackboard is the particular thing made of slate that hangs on a schoolroom wall. Black board is pronounced “black BOARD,” while the thing on the wall is a “BLACK-board,” and that’s no accident. The way we mark blackboard as “a thing,” different from just any old board that happens to be black, is with the Backshift. A blackboard is something very specific—“a thing,” as it were.

To me, the board has always been profoundly three-dimensional, an effect enhanced by the chalk dust which drifts up from the tray, or is inadequately removed when the slate is washed, so that its normal blue-black monochrome is full of subtle variations, grays which suggest faraway galaxies or a nebula's gaseous clouds. And when I begin to draw a line across a freshly cleaned section, my hand follows the chalk in, as though like fish it swam there, and then, in the curve of an encircled word, it returns toward its source, and the simpler surface of the classroom world. That may be one reason why I lose my way while spelling the most common terms, for the letters will not remain in a row on the same plane as they do on the page, but sink or rise or float away, becoming curlicues and bows of string, whorls of suspended weed in which I lose all sense of the word's original identity.

Through the other he could see the hazy, white-topped hills of Fife in the distance, the austere, dark blue calm of the Forth, and the snow-specked slate rooftops of Leith. In between there was a corpse in blood-drenched pyjama trousers, with most of its nose bitten off, two severed fingers stuffed up what remained of its nostrils, the rest of its face a swollen mass of bruising, and a wide gash around half the circumference of its neck. It was lying on the missing door, which sat at thirty degrees to the horizontal, propped up by the twisted metal frame of what had recently been a cheesy smoked-glass coffee table. The blood had run off the door and collected on the polished wood below, and might have lapped its way gently down to meet the postman’s spew if much of it had not drained through a gap in the floorboards, from where it ran along an electrical flex into the main-door flat underneath, dripping off the end of the living room light-fitting. The police would find the unconscious Mrs Angus a few hours later amidst the damp fragments of a broken tea-set, and once revived she would swear never to let her clairvoyant sister-in-law bring the ouija board round again, before phoning a Catholic priest to come out and exorcise the place. And so what if she was C of S, when it came to this sort of thing, nothing less than a Tim would do.

Hamilton was more persuasive than he realized, and a delegation of business leaders soon approached him to subscribe to a “money-bank” that would thwart Livingston’s land bank. “I was a little embarrassed how to act,” Hamilton confessed sheepishly to Church, “but upon the whole I concluded it best to fall in with them.” 51 Instead of launching a separate bank, Hamilton decided to represent Church and Wadsworth on the board of the new bank. Ironically, he held in his own name only a single share of the bank that was long to be associated with his memory. On February 23, 1784, The New-York Packet announced a landmark gathering: “It appearing to be the disposition of the gentlemen in this city to establish a bank on liberal principles . . . they are therefore hereby invited to meet tomorrow evening at six o’clock at the Merchant’s Coffee House, where a plan will be submitted to their consideration.” 52 At the meeting, General Alexander McDougall was voted the new bank’s chairman and Hamilton a director. Snatching an interval of leisure during the next three weeks, Hamilton drafted, singlehandedly, a constitution for the new institution—the sort of herculean feat that seems almost commonplace in his life. As architect of New York’s first financial firm, he could sketch freely on a blank slate. The resulting document was taken up as the pattern for many subsequent bank charters and helped to define the rudiments of American banking. In the superheated arena of state politics, the bank generated fierce controversy among those upstate rural interests who wanted a land bank and believed that a money bank would benefit urban merchants to their detriment. Within the city, however, the cause of the Bank of New York made improbable bedfellows, reconciling radicals and Loyalists who were sparring over the treatment of confiscated wartime properties.

deaf president now Most of you have probably seen the phrase, but what do you know about the “Deaf President Now” movement? Despite being the first Deaf university in the world, Gallaudet had never had a Deaf president before, and in March 1988 that was finally about to change. The Board of Trustees was slated to choose the next president from a list of three finalist candidates, two Deaf, one hearing. In the lead-up to the board meeting, students and faculty had been campaigning and rallying in support of a Deaf president. THE CANDIDATES DR. ELIZABETH ZINSER, hearing, Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs at University of North Carolina DR. HARVEY CORSON, Deaf, Superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf DR. I. KING JORDAN, Deaf, Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at Gallaudet On March 6th, the board selected Zinser. No announcement was made. Students found out only after visiting the school’s PR office to extract the information. Students marched to the Mayflower hotel to confront the Board. Chair Jane Spilman defended the selection to the crowd, reportedly saying, “deaf people can’t function in the hearing world.” WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? MARCH 7TH: Students hot-wire buses to barricade campus gates, only allowing certain people on campus. Students meet with Board, no concessions made. Protesters march to the Capitol. MARCH 8TH: Students burn effigies, form a 16-member council of students, faculty, and staff to organize the movement. THE FOUR DEMANDS: Zinser’s resignation and the selection of a Deaf president Resignation of Jane Spilman A 51% Deaf majority on the Board of Trustees No reprisals against protesters WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? MARCH 9TH: Movement grows, gains widespread national support. Protest is featured on ABC’s Nightline. MARCH 10TH: Jordan, who’d previously conceded to Zinser’s appointment, joins the protests, saying “the four demands are justified.” Protests receive endorsements from national unions and politicians. DEAF PRESIDENT NOW! MARCH 10TH: Zinser resigns. MARCH 11TH: 2,500 march on Capitol Hill, bearing a banner that says “We still have a dream.” MARCH 13: Spilman resigns, Jordan is announced president. Protesters receive no punishments, DPN is hailed as a success and one of the precursors to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).