Slip Through The Net Quotes

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Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991)
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.
Terence McKenna
We believe in an aristocracy... Not an aristocracy of power, based on rank or wealth, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Our members are found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between us when we meet... We represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. We're an invincible army, but not a victorious one. We've had different names throughout history, but all the words that describe us are false and all attempts to organize us fail. Right now we're called V.F.D., but all our schisms and arguments might cause us to disappear. It won't matter. People like us always slip through the net. Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world.
Lemony Snicket (Shouldn't You Be in School? (All the Wrong Questions, #3))
Do not trust your memory, it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.
Georges Duhamel
A nightmare was a needle plunging through the net of human memory; it slipped past one strand and caught up another on its point, stitching up dark dreams out of the unlikeliest recollections.
Kate Quinn (The Huntress)
senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.
Ursula K. Le Guin (Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way)
When we carry a safety net made of cash, we allow the one made of community to slip through our fingers.
Ben Hewitt
Life, to me, is like fishing: you won’t catch anything until you start, and every year you get older is another year the fish might slip through the net.
Alex Staniforth (Icefall: The True Story of a Teenager on a Mission to the Top of the World)
I had a special English teacher who let me believe that my ideas were important. She introduced me to writers who wound their words around my wrists and refused to let me slip through the net.
Jessica Andrews
[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.
Salman Rushdie
According to this theory then, senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.
Terry Eagleton (Literary Theory: An Introduction)
So you keep running after the things you want, because you think they will satisfy you - and you truly do think that in the past they gave you satisfaction. But the satisfaction itself, the real feeling of it, somehow slips the net. It's anticipated and remembered but almost never experienced.
Kate Morgenroth (Through the Heart)
If a child has ‘slipped through the net’ and hasn’t done well during childhood, it’s not too late to start intervening and providing extra support in adolescence.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain)
She’d like to think a child on the autistic spectrum would receive much stronger support at an earlier age these days, but the sad truth of it was they still slipped through the net.
Diane Saxon (My Little Brother)
You know in this moment that Gabriel is at your mercy, you can do what you want, he is completely yours and with the knowledge of that something goes,you can feel it slip from you like a fish through the net.
Nikki Gemmell (The Bride Stripped Bare (Bride Trilogy, #1))
Do you believe that there is any absolute standard in this world? Despise mankind and find out the meshes that you can slip through in the net of the Code. The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
Around this time, a young man named Samuel Slater slipped through the tight protective net thrown by British authorities around their textile business. As a former apprentice to Sir Richard Arkwright, Slater had sworn that he would never reveal his boss’s trade secrets. Flouting this pledge, he sailed to New York and made contact with Moses Brown, a Rhode Island Quaker. Under Slater’s supervision, Brown financed a spinning mill in Rhode Island that replicated Arkwright’s mill. Hamilton received detailed reports of this triumph, and pretty soon milldams proliferated on New England’s rivers. With patriotic pride, Brown predicted to Hamilton that “mills and machines may be erected in different places, in one year, to make all the cotton yarn that may be wanted in the United States.” 29 Hamilton
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
So,” Will begins, “do you play ball as well as you run?” I laugh a little. I can’t help it. He’s sweet and disarming and my nerves are racing. “Not even close.” The conversation goes no further as we move up in our lines. Catherine looks over her shoulder at me, her wide sea eyes assessing. Like she can’t quite figure me out. My smile fades and I look away. She can never figure me out. I can never let her. Never let anyone here. She faces me with her arms crossed. “You make friends fast. Since freshman year, I’ve spoken to like . . .” She paused and looks upward as though mentally counting. “Three, no—four people. And you’re number four.” I shrug. “He’s just a guy.” Catherine squares up at the free-throw line, dribbles a few times, and shoots. The ball swished cleanly through the net. She catches it and tosses it back to me. I try copying her moves, but my ball flies low, glides beneath the backboard. I head to the end of the line again. Will’s already waiting it half-court, letting others go before him. My face warms at his obvious stall. “You weren’t kidding,” he teases over the thunder of basketballs. “Did you make it?” I ask, wishing I had looked while he shot. “Yeah.” “Of course,” I mock. He lets another kid go before him. I do the same. Catherine is several ahead of me now. His gaze scans me, sweeping over my face and hair with deep intensity, like he’s memorizing my features. “Yeah, well. I can’t run like you.” I move up in line, but when I sneak a look behind me, he’s looking back, too. “Wow,” Catherine murmurs in her smoky low voice as she falls into line beside me. “I never knew it happened like that.” I snap my gaze to her. “What?” “You know. Romeo and Juliet stuff. Love at first sight and all that.” “It’s not like that,” I say quickly. “You could have fooled me.” We’re up again. Catherine takes her shot. It swishes cleanly through the hoop. When I shoot, the ball bounces hard off the backboard and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap. With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line. Will’s there, fighting laughter. “Nice,” he says. “Glad I’m downcourt of you.” I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. “Happy to amuse you.” His smile slips then, and he’s looking at me with that strange intensity again. Only I understand. I know why. He must remember . . . must recognize me on some level even though he can’t understand it. “You want to go out?” he asks suddenly. I blink. “As in a date?” “Yes. That’s what a guy usually means when he asks that question.
Sophie Jordan (Firelight (Firelight, #1))
A great civilization lived on Midgard long before the Asteri conquered it.” He could have sworn she sounded sad. “One that prized knowledge in all its forms. So much so that a hundred thousand humans marched at Parthos to save these books from the Asteri and Vanir who came to burn them.” She shook her head, face distant. “A world where people loved and valued books and learning so much that they were willing to die for them. Can you imagine what such a civilization was like? A hundred thousand men and women marched to defend a library—it sounds like a bad joke these days.” Her eyes blazed. “But they fought, and they died. All to buy the library priestesses enough time to smuggle the books out on ships. The Vanir armies intercepted most of them, and the priestesses were burned, their precious books used as kindling. But one ship …” Her lips curved upward. “The Griffin. It slipped through the Vanir nets. Sailed across the Haldren and found safe harbor in Valbara.” Ithan slowly shook his head. “How do you know all this, when no one else does?” “The mer know some of it,” she hedged. “The mer aided the Griffin across the sea, at the behest of the Ocean Queen.
Sarah J. Maas (House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3))
The men in grey were powerless to meet this challenge head-on. Unable to detach the children from Momo by bringing them under their direct control, they had to find some roundabout means of achieving the same end, and for this they enlisted the children's elders. Not all grown-ups made suitable accomplices, of course, but plenty did. [....] 'Something must be done,' they said. 'More and more kids are being left on their own and neglected. You can't blame us - parents just don't have the time these days - so it's up to the authorities.' Others joined in the chorus. 'We can't have all these youngsters loafing around, ' declared some. 'They obstruct the traffic. Road accidents caused by children are on the increase, and road accidents cost money that could be put to better use.' 'Unsupervised children run wild, declared others.'They become morally depraved and take to crime. The authorities must take steps to round them up. They must build centers where the youngsters can be molded into useful and efficient members of society.' 'Children,' declared still others, 'are the raw material for the future. A world dependent on computers and nuclear energy will need an army of experts and technicians to run it. Far from preparing children from tomorrow's world, we still allow too many of them to squander years of their precious time on childish tomfoolery. It's a blot on our civilization and a crime against future generations.' The timesavers were all in favor of such a policy, naturally, and there were so many of them in the city by this time that they soon convinced the authorities of the need to take prompt action. Before long, big buildings known as 'child depots' sprang up in every neighborhood. Children whose parents were too busy to look after them had to be deposited there and could be collected when convenient. They were strictly forbidden to play in the streets or parks or anywhere else. Any child caught doing so was immediately carted off to the nearest depot, and its parents were heavily fined. None of Momo's friends escaped the new regulation. They were split up according to districts they came from and consigned to various child depots. Once there, they were naturally forbidden to play games of their own devising. All games were selected for them by supervisors and had to have some useful, educational purpose. The children learned these new games but unlearned something else in the process: they forgot how to be happy, how to take pleasure in the little things, and last but not least, how to dream. Weeks passed, and the children began to look like timesavers in miniature. Sullen, bored and resentful, they did as they were told. Even when left to their own devices, they no longer knew what to do with themselves. All they could still do was make a noise, but it was an angry, ill-tempered noise, not the happy hullabaloo of former times. The men in grey made no direct approach to them - there was no need. The net they had woven over the city was so close-meshed as to seem inpenetrable. Not even the brightest and most ingenious children managed to slip through its toils. The amphitheater remained silent and deserted.
Michael Ende, Momo
In the Black Palace, in the capital city below, the man know as the Patron – Martel the Mighty, ruler of this dark world - had packed his coffers and was now also, presumably, making good his escape. For the Corsair elite and ruling class – those whose hands were literally dripping blood, profiteering from the bloodshed and violence that terrorized dozens of worlds - escape was the only option left and he would not be the only one to mount an escape attempt, nor be the only one to succeed. For years to come, there would be countless bounties offered on missing prominent Corsairs that had slipped through the net, with the occasional report of so-and-so being spotted on some or other rim world, presumably sporting a new beard and a pair of sunglasses – which might have raised a few eyebrows in the case of the many female Corsairs.
Christina Engela (Dead Beckoning)
I had hoped to the very last minute I would slip through the net, but there was no escape – Yngve and I had decided she would get a speech from both of us. I dreaded it like the plague. Sometimes when I had to do a reading or an interview or participate in a discussion on stage I was so nervous I could barely walk. But ‘nervous’ in no way covered my state, nervousness was a transient phase of nerves, a minor aberration, a quivering of the spirit. This was painful and unyielding. It would pass though.
Karl Ove Knausgård (Min kamp 2 (Min kamp, #2))
Politics and social systems cast only the coarsest of nets over the world, and humans are the type of fish that will forever slip through the holes. Even should we demolish that contrivance that is the emperor system and institute some new structure in its place; that, too, would be nothing more than a more highly evolved contrivance. While it is our fate to be forever trapped within this cycle, humans will always slip through the cracks. They will be decadent, and the systems will thereby get their comeuppance
James Dorsey (Literary Mischief)
And I remember some passage being read out somewhere, that there's no sinner so bad, so worthless, that God will ever let them slip through the net of his love... And whether he's up there or not, and whether he's got a net I don't know. But I think it's how it ought to be just between us. There ought to be at least one other person who won't let us slip through their net. No matter what we do, no matter what we've done. It's not a question of right or wrong. It's not a question of justice.
Graham Swift (The Light of Day)
Even if the position is a net profit, the trader or investor can go through the Five Stages. Consider when a market position is profitable but not as profitable as it once was. When that happens, he becomes married to the price at which it was the most profitable. He denies that the move is over, gets angry when the market starts to sell off, makes a bargain that he’ll get out if the market moves back to that arbitrary point, gets depressed that he didn’t get out, and maybe even lets the profit turn into a loss, thus slipping again into denial, then anger, etc. He creates a chain reaction of loops that result in further losses.
Jim Paul (What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars)
Through the years I experimented with all different types of materials and frames. Finally, I settled upon one that was so simple, easy, and inexpensive to use that it was almost ridiculous. Then I began growing all different types of plants vertically. I originally thought I would need to design some special way to hold up and accommodate heavier fruits such as winter squash and pumpkins, but as it turned out, these plant vines seemed to understand the situation; the stem supporting the heavy fruit grows thicker and heavier as the fruit becomes larger. If you have a framework and support that will hold the plant, the plant will hold the fruit; it is as simple as that! Mother Nature always seems to know best. Pea and bean netting can be stretched taut across a box frame and held in place by four metal posts. Plants will then grow up through the netting and be supported. Best Material I use the strongest material I can find, which is steel. Fortunately, steel comes in tubular pipe used for electrical conduit. It is very strong and turns out to be very inexpensive. Couplings are also available so you can connect two pieces together. I designed an attractive frame that fits right onto the 4 × 4 box, and it can be attached to the wooden box with clamps that can be bought at any store. Or, steel reinforcing rods driven into the existing ground outside your box provide a very steady and strong base; then the electrical conduit slips snugly over the bars. It’s very simple and inexpensive to assemble. Anyone can do it—even you! To prevent vertically grown plants from shading other parts of the garden, I recommend that tall, vertical frames be constructed on the north side of the garden. To fit it into a 4 × 4 box, I designed a frame that measured 4 feet wide and almost 6 feet tall. Tie It Tight Vertically growing plants need to be tied to their supports. Nylon netting won’t rot in the sun and weather, and I use it exclusively now for both vertical frames and horizontal plant supports. It is very strong—almost unbreakable—and guaranteed for twenty years. It is a wonderful material available at garden stores and in catalogs. The nylon netting is also durable enough to grow the heavier vine crops on vertical frames, including watermelons, pumpkins, cantaloupes, winter and summer squashes, and tomatoes. You will see in Chapter 8 how easy it is to train plants to grow vertically. To hold the plants to the frame, I have found that nylon netting with 7-inch square openings made especially for tomato growing works well because you can reach your hand through. Make sure it is this type so it won’t cut the stem of the plant when it blows against it in the wind. This comes in 4-foot widths and can easily be tied to the metal frame. It’s sometimes hard to find, so call around.
Mel Bartholomew (All New Square Foot Gardening: The Revolutionary Way to Grow More In Less Space)
Even in the first morning after the catastrophe began, security teams were calling on Liev’s underlings, sweeping them up for questioning. Some, they held. Others, they released.  Burton had no way of knowing which of those who had been set free had cut deals with security and which had been lucky enough to slip through the net. It hardly mattered. That branch of the business had been compromised, and so it would die.
James S.A. Corey (The Churn (The Expanse, #3.5))
Thoughts slip easily through a lazy mind, just as fish might slip through a net with holes in it.
Anthony T. Hincks
We lost sight of some of the principal reasons for government: to protect the rights of the minority against the majority; to invest in things the market doesn’t like paying for, like education, infrastructure, and deep research; and to provide a safety net for those who slip through the cracks of the capitalist marketplace. Many came to see government as a threat to liberty, not its protector.
Scott Galloway (Adrift: America in 100 Charts)
Years passed—or was it just a moment? Hard to say. Phyllis’s cognitive mind slipped farther and farther away and a different kind of awareness bloomed. The swamp breathed and she breathed with it. She saw everything: the creatures, the flowers, the tender shoots of green and the towering trees, the depths of the water. All that was dead and dying. All that was bursting with life. Her notebooks, tucked away in their plastic container, were gradually forgotten. The urge to record, to quantify, left her. Instead, she returned to the inclination that had guided her through all the years when her mind was sharp. The root of her curiosity: a simple and enduring desire to notice. There were moments during this last stretch when she occupied herself so completely that she forgot there had been any other time than now, any other way to exist but this. And there were also moments when she fought against the ebbing of logic and analysis, feeling adrift and upset, as if something precious had been taken from her that she would never have again. All of this was true. All of it was right. Memories of childhood dusted her skin like pollen. All it took was a brisk gust of wind to send it all scattering. She remembered learning—the crispness of a washed blackboard, a good mark on her paper, the perfect loneliness of a library; she remembered men she’d known and she remembered intimacy; she remembered her parents, having them and losing them; she remembered her sister, pretty and harsh and unwilling to imagine the future Phyllis had foreseen; she remembered teaching—the way her hands shook at the start of every term, her students and their litany of excuses; she remembered her research—working in the field, working at her desk, the minutiae of life glimpsed through a microscope; she remembered every forest she’d ever walked through; she remembered every city she’d ever visited; she remembered preparing, preparing, preparing. And then all of this was gone. Piece by piece, Phyllis said goodbye to each part of her life that had come before. She held on to Wanda the longest. As long as she could. She replayed every moment they had spent together. She repeated Wanda’s name to herself when Wanda left her alone in the tree house, reciting it like a chant, a prayer, so that when she came home, it would already be on her tongue. This didn’t always work. Sometimes Phyllis arrived in a moment she hadn’t been aware of—like time travel, hopping from one place to another with smooth, easy leaps. It was only when she saw the exhaustion on Wanda’s face that she realized she had missed something in between. “I’m sorry,” Phyllis said. “I think I…was somewhere else.” “That’s all right.” “What are we doing?” “We’re weaving nets. Do you want to help?” “Yes. Yes, please.” They sat
Lily Brooks-Dalton (The Light Pirate)
After landing and collecting our bags Santha and I were met groundside by our local connection, Sergey Kurgin. I say “connection” because you have to have one if you’re going to travel in Russia. You can’t just get up and go. Some solid citizen, or business, or tour operator must take responsibility for you and officially invite you, and you must have a prearranged and preplanned itinerary to preapproved destinations or your visa won’t be issued—nor, if you somehow manage to slip through the net, will any hotel accommodate you on your route. Sergey owns a small private travel business called Sibalp, and I’d contacted him on the internet to help set up the trip.
Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
He broke up with me. It was over between us. No more net… I became an instant danger to my own heart. I tossed the phone onto the sofa, took off my heels, and bolted to the door. Josh was already coming up my steps at a jog. As soon as he saw me in the doorway, he started in on me. “You can’t go walking around alone in the middle of the night, Kristen. It’s not sa—” I collided with him, throwing my arms around his neck, and crushed my lips to his. He didn’t even pause. Not for a second. He kissed me back. His mouth was urgent and didn’t ask questions, like he knew this moment was a gift and he didn’t want to risk having to return it. But I needed him to know. I broke away, gasping for air, my forehead to his. “Tyler and I broke up. He left me a message. He reenlisted. I told him if he did that, we were through. And he reenlisted.” I didn’t care. In that intoxicated moment, I did not give one fuck that Tyler and I were over. He studied my face for a split second before he answered by kissing me again. He was like slipping into warm sheets. It was everything safe and perfect. All the tiny, stolen, fragmented pieces of him that I’d collected over the last few weeks, his smell, the feel of his breathing against my body in the tow truck, the contours of his shirtless chest in the garage, the roughness of his hand on my bare knee, the study of his mouth when he wasn’t looking—all came together into a familiar and exhilarating rush as he pressed against me and kissed me. Hands plunged down my back to cradle my ass and he ground into me. Only sex. That’s all it can be.
Abby Jimenez
Jolyon played his part, passing from group to group, accepting their condolences. It was him the guests had come to see – few of them knew her. Would they really notice if she slipped away? Perhaps she should go and find her old companion, the starved cow. At least that miserable creature had shown some interest in her. She stood for a moment, gazing abstractedly through the net squares of her veil. Birds she did not even have a name for called in the trees beyond. Fat, inquisitive ones that looked like London pigeons except they were beige. Bold, black scavengers. Rooks? Jackdaws? Ravens? She had never really known the difference. One she did recognise – a magpie – rattled at her from the lychgate. The cobalt stripe on his tail pointed to the poorest of the gravestones: lopsided, devoured by lichen and thistle. ‘You are wondering about the gravestones.’ The voice made her start. She swivelled round to see Mr Underwood, standing unobtrusively by her side. His hands were tucked under his surplice; either he was cold or he was hiding the holes in his sleeves.
Laura Purcell (The Silent Companions)
Us crones need to sit and stick together. Maidens think they know everything when they have learned nothing. Mothers aren’t much better. The crones, though. Crones know. That’s why people are so scared of us, try to keep us invisible. But that’s when we have the most power. They can’t stop us if they don’t see us. We slip through the net. We’re like ghosts through locked doors.
Alexandra Benedict (Murder On the Christmas Express)
(Vampires can run at an extra-fast speed, a magic kind of running, where they slip through space like eels through a net. They call it “flitting.”)
Darren Shan (Cirque Du Freak: Vampire Mountain)
We rowed out through the harbor, past bobbing boats weeping rust from their seams, past juries of silent seabirds roosting atop the barnacled remains of sunken docks, past fishermen who lowered their nets to stare frozenly as we slipped by, uncertain whether we were real or imagined; a procession of waterborne ghosts, or ghosts soon to be.
Ransom Riggs (Hollow City (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children Graphic Novels, #2))
Many of the things that appear in this book exist because of the widely accepted creed of meritocracy. In this view of the world, it is primarily the job of politicians to sort the sheep from the goats. It is perfectly acceptable for someone to toil away hopelessly in a rotten job, as long as that person has been judged to lack the requisite merit to do anything better. Our entire political vocabulary – social mobility, bright but poor kids, grammar schools – is geared towards pulling a few people out of the soup without changing its basic ingredients. The debate in 2017 around grammar schools in instructive in this regard: it is not seen as wrong that a child who fails the 11-Plus team should have to spend a lifetime doing soul-destroying work; rather, the tragedy is that it should happen to the wrong child. Woe betide if a 'bright but poor child' should slip through the net, so to speak. One can do what one likes with the other lot.
James Bloodworth (Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain)
The air echoed with the sounds of fury: Drums beat, bugles sounded the charge, mobs shrieked, and guerrilla patroles crisscrossed the roads, bayonets glinting at the tips of their rifles. The guerrillas kept their weapons cocked, threatening, ready to do battle. Their bayonets reflected in the gleam of their eyes as they glared suspiciously at every passerby. NO LANDLORAD WILL SLIP THROUGH OUR NET. That was the new slogan, scrawed in lurid colors across the roads. Whomever they stopped shuddred under the violence of their gaze, this blind hatred that needed no basis, no justification.
Dương Thu Hương (Paradise of the Blind)
Do not live in the world, In distraction and false dreams, Outside the law. Arise and watch. Follow the way joyfully Through this world and beyond. Follow the way of virtue. Follow the way joyfully Through this world and on beyond! For consider the world– A bubble, a mirage. See the world as it is, And death shall overlook you. Come, consider the world, A painted chariot for kings, A trap for fools. But he who sees goes free. As the moon slips from behind a cloud And shines, So the master comes out from behind his ignorance And shines. This world is in darkness. How few have eyes to see! How few the birds Who escape the net and fly to heaven! Swans rise and fly toward the sun. What magic! So do the pure conquer the armies of illusion And rise and fly. If you scoff at heaven And violate the law, If your words are lies, Where will your mischief end? The fool laughs at generosity. The miser cannot enter heaven. But the master finds joy in giving And happiness is his reward. And more– For greater than all the joys Of heaven and of earth, Greater still than dominion Over all the worlds, Is the joy of reaching the stream.
The Dhammapada (The Dhammapada)