Smiley's People Quotes

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Animals might put up with that smiley shit, but people will eventually kill you for it.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

Smiley Bone: You can't feel safe unless there's something to be safe against! Phoney Bone: Exactly! People like to be victims! There's a certain unassailable moral superiority about it...

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse.

[Smiley contemplates graffiti:]'Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.' The assertion caused him a moment's indecision. 'Oh, but society does,' he wanted to reply; 'society is an association of minorities.

My, my," he said, looking the note over. "If only students would write this much in their essays. One of you has considerably worse writing than the other, so forgive me if I get anything wrong here." He cleared his throat."'So, I saw J last night,' begins the person with bad handwriting, to which the response is,'What happened,' followed by no fewer than five question marks. Understandable, since sometimes one—let alone four—just won't get the point across, eh?" The class laughed, and I noticed Mia throwing me a particularly mean smile. "The first speaker responds:'What do you think happened? We hooked up in one of the empty lounges.'“ Mr. Nagy glanced up after hearing some more giggles in the room. His British accent only added to the hilarity. "May I assume by this reaction that the use of 'hook up' pertains to the more recent, shall we say,carnal application of the term than the tamer one I grew up with?” More snickers ensued. Straightening up, I said boldly, "Yes, sir, Mr. Nagy. That would be correct, sir." A number of people in the class laughed outright. "Thank you for that confirmation, Miss Hathaway. Now, where was I? Ah yes, the other speaker then asks,'How was it?' The response is,'Good,' punctuated with a smiley face to confirm said adjective. Well. I suppose kudos are in order for the mysterious J, hmmm?'So, like, how far did you guys go?' Uh, ladies," said Mr. Nagy, "I do hope this doesn't surpass a PG rating.'Not very.We got caught.'And again, we are shown the severity of the situation, this time through the use of a not-smiling face.'What happened?' 'Dimitri showed up. He threw Jesse out and then bitched me out.'“ The class lost it, both from hearing Mr. Nagy say "bitched" and from finally getting some participants named. "Why, Mr.Zeklos, are you the aforementioned J? The one who earned a smiley face from the sloppy writer?

I believe the day Einstein feared the most is when people circulate pictures of dead bodies of relatives on WhatsApp and get Thumbs Down and Crying smileys as response.

I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other's frotiers, we are the no-men of this no-man's land.

He hated to be alone, but people bored him. Being alone was like being tired, but unable to sleep.

George, you won,' said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car. 'Did I?' said Smiley. 'Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

Why and earth should an unshaven young man in a track suit be carrying a basket of oranges and yesterday's newspaper? The whole boat must of noticed him!

I hate it! I hate the air. I hate the sand. I hate the stupid people. I hate the way they work. I hate their bloody smiley bloody faces. I hate the never ending sky!

Evil people must spread their evil everywhere.

One signal conversation, which she had lingered near for ten minutes, between two woman German professors, had concerned a support group they both belonged to for people with an overwhelming compulsion to tear up their clothes and braid them into rag rugs.

When we deny our pain, losses, and feelings year after year, we become less and less human. We transform slowly into empty shells with smiley faces painted on them. Sad to say, that is the fruit of much of our discipleship in our churches. But when I began to allow myself to feel a wider range of emotions, including sadness, depression, fear, and anger, a revolution in my spirituality was unleashed. I soon realized that a failure to appreciate the biblical place of feelings within our larger Christian lives has done extensive damage, keeping free people in Christ in slavery.

My stomach twitches as I type out the smiley face, cuteness gives me indigestion, but I read somewhere that people like that shit,

But it’s not always enough, you know? And sometimes, it spills over because you can’t control it, because you need to make others feel your pain, your hurt, your rage, because it’s tough to walk around all scarred up, in a world full of slick billboards and bright, smiley toothpaste ads and shiny, happy people. Life’s not always fair. So suck it, lick it, stroke it, fuck it.

Dave put his head down and ate his eggs. He heard his mother leave the kitchen, humming Old MacDonald all the way down the hall. Standing in the yard now, knuckles aching, he could hear it too. Old MacDonald had a farm. And everything was hunky-dory on it. You farmed and tilled and reaped and sowed and everything was just fucking great. Everyone got along, even the chickens and the cows, and no one needed to talk about anything, because nothing bad ever happened and nobody had any secrets because secrets were for bad people, people who climbed in cars that smelled of apples with strange men and disappeared for four days, only to come back home and find everyone they'd known had disappeared, too, been replaced with smiley-faced look-alikes who'd do just about anything but listen to you.

They never understand it, do they? They never know what it costs—the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people. They think you can run on their kind of fuel—the flag waving and the music. But you need a different kind of fuel, don't you, when you're alone? You've got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you're not a part of it.

The state fair was all very well, but it shouldn’t be the last thing you saw in your life. At first you thought of people like Eloise and Frank and Lillian as runaways, and then, after a bit, you knew they were really scouts.

I remember reading an article years ago about a study done on the shape of people’s eyes that found people with smiley eyes wound up happier overall. Statistically

George, this is history," Lacon protested weakly. "This is not today.

We just don't know what people are like, we can never tell; there isn't any truth about human beings, no formula that meets each one of us.

not unlike a bomb blast, two years after that, where was he, northern France, if you called Cambrai France (some people didn’t, they called it “Kamerijk

hurricane down in Florida somewhere. Who in Iowa thought about Florida? People in Iowa had problems of their own—maybe not dust storms like the ones out in Nebraska and Oklahoma,

I think the sorts of people who honestly think that service workers should be more smiley and gracious just don’t get it. They don’t get it because they can take so much for granted in their own lives—things like respect, consideration, and basic fairness on the job. Benefits. Insurance. They’re used to the luxury of choosing the most aesthetically pleasing item on the shelf, of caring what color their car is rather than simply whether it runs or not. They don’t understand how depressing it is to be barely managing your life at any given moment of the day. So forgive me if I don’t tell you to have a pleasant day with unfeigned enthusiasm when I hand you your fucking hamburger. You’ll have to settle for the fake sort.

He read as far into his own past as into Karla’s, and sometimes it seemed to him that the one life was merely the complement to the other; that they were causes of the same incurable malady.

Rosie and Mary had taken only a 10 percentage of this privilege - they were three minutes late leaving their room and took the second bus that went past rather than the first just so they could feel themselves standing at a bus stop in Manhattan, New York, surrounded by people who were short, dark and voluble rather than tall, blond and silent. The fatal part was the bus they got on. They, of course stood, because they had been taught to do so, out of respect to everyone else in the whole world - they were from the Midwest and deference was their habit and their training. ......."Did you see that?" "What?" replied Mary "That woman." "God, she was rude," said Mary. And from that statement Rosalind knew that Mary would live the rest of her life in the Midwest, which she did.

Clicking on "send" has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals ("I AM joking!") to compensate. That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne. You will know all about emoticons. Emoticons are the proper name for smileys. And a smiley is, famously, this: :—) Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader's attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind. Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What's this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a pair of eyes. What's this curvy thing for? It's a mouth, look! Hey, I think we're on to something. :—( Now it's sad! ;—) It looks like it's winking! :—r It looks like it's sticking its tongue out! The permutations may be endless: :~/ mixed up! <:—) dunce! :—[ pouting! :—O surprise! Well, that's enough. I've just spotted a third reason to loathe emoticons, which is that when they pass from fashion (and I do hope they already have), future generations will associate punctuation marks with an outmoded and rather primitive graphic pastime and despise them all the more. "Why do they still have all these keys with things like dots and spots and eyes and mouths and things?" they will grumble. "Nobody does smileys any more.

And so I have three separate regrets. What does Lizzie see? What does Stephanie hear? What unsatisfied, yearning tension does Leah feel in my flesh when she snuggles against me and puts her hands on my shoulders? There is no hiding from them, is there? And there is no talking to them. They don’t understand what they understand. I am afraid. I should call the pediatrician, but I don’t. I think, as people do, that everything will be all right. But even so, I can’t stop being afraid. They are so beautiful, my daughters, so fragile and attentive to family life.

Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.

When Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked black talk-show host Tavis Smiley in October of 2013 if black Americans were “better off five years into the Obama presidency,” Smiley responded: “Let me answer your question very forthrightly: No, they are not. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”2

Epic Steam is easily offended. He has high standards of behavior with regard to his own person, and every human he has met so far has offended them. Other horses aren’t so bad—they have been capable of learning, and so they don’t offend him, and he isn’t mean with them, only bossy. It’s the people who are blind and stubborn.

Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.

Fundamentally, this story is about two boys, each of whom was going through his own personal journey and searching for help. One of them received it; the other didn't. And now the world stands witness to the results. Small interactions and effortless acts of kindness can mean the difference between failure and success, pain and pleasure - or becoming the people we loathe or love to become. We are more powerful than we realize, and I urge you to internalize the meaning of this remarkable story and unleash your own power. (Tavis Smiley)

Some problems—take Ireland—were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble.

You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all.

All he could think of was how all people require attention. All people require respect. All people require acknowledgment. All people require love.

Give these people a try, Smiley, they might have you and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.

let us honour if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one. Or

Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.

And he added, in a phrase which found a modest place in Circus folklore—“George has got too many heads under his hat.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Well, Jesus never did a single bad thing, but when he was crucified, he made up for all the bad things that other people had done. That’s why he was crucified.

Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.” The assertion caused him a moment’s indecision. “Oh, but society does,” he wanted to reply; “society is an association of minorities.

Iowa City was a place where people could and did stall out forever. Seated along the bar in the Mill Restaurant was a line of customers that hadn’t changed in thirty years, being served by bartenders ten years older than Guthrie was. If you were from Oelwein or Spencer or Denby, you could wash ashore in Iowa City and be so sated with ease and pleasure that you would never move on, which was not the case in Ames. Ames took them in and popped them out. Iowa City took them in and kept them—that was the difference between pain and pleasure, Guthrie supposed.

The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man’s Land. I send you my greetings. -- the closing lines of Smiley's letter to Karla persuading him to defect.

But you know, one of the weird things about being in a psych hospital is you gradually start to feel like you have permission to say whatever you're thinking. You feel like it's OK or maybe even in some way expected to act crazy or uninhibited, which at first feels kind of liberating and good; there's this feeling like no more smiley masks, no more pretending, which feels good, except it gets kind of seductive and dangerous, and actually it can make people worse in there - some inhibitions are good, they're normal, he said, and part of the syndrome they call some people eventually getting institutionalized is that they get put in a nut ward at a young age or a fragile time when their sense of themselves is not really very fixed or resilient, and they start acting the way they think people in nut wards are expected to act, and after a while they really are that way, and they get caught in the system, the mental-health system, and they never really get out.

4. Reward appropriate behavior openly and generously If you want to persuade people to do the right thing, add some sort of public display which acknowledges the right kind of behavior. Even adding a simple smiley face to their bill whentheir account is in order, for example, will encourage people to keep doing the right thing. This kind of positive feedback can be proven scientifically to be more effective than complaining about bad behavior. Find something good to focus on and build on that. 5.

Beaming into the thick of a tree without becoming a lifelong tree hugger was a tricky business. A precision job. Scrooby’s job at the Time Saving Agency was a tough one. Billions of lives depended on him not screwing up. Literally billions and billions. Once, he’d screwed up in only a very small way and people wore those little yellow smiley faces on t-shirts for decades afterwards – and that was just a small screw up. He sighed. Here he sat, in the branches of an apple tree in an apple tree orchard – and without a single apple in sight. Below him, Isaac was waiting to get bonked on the noggin with an apple so that he could fulfill history by toddling off to invent gravity and shape scientific and mathematical principles for generations to come. Only one problem – no apples.

He was in late age, yet his tradecraft had never been better; for the first time in his career, he held the advantage over his old adversary. On the other hand, that adversary had acquired a human face of disconcerting clarity. It was no brute whom Smiley was pursuing with such mastery, no unqualified fanatic after all, no automaton. It was a man; and one whose downfall, if Smiley chose to bring it about, would be caused by nothing more sinister than excessive love, a weakness with which Smiley himself, from his own tangled life, was eminently familiar.

And I get it. I can be cynical myself. Every time I see some smiley TV preacher talk about God’s plan for me or hear Sarah Palin say something irretrievably mean and stupid about poor people, or every time I pass an embarrassing billboard featuring Jesus and a fetus, I totally get why reasonable people would keep their distance.

I always remember the words of a Berlin comedian when, against all prediction, the Berlin Wall did finally come down. “The right side lost but the wrong side won.” He meant, I suppose, that having defeated Communism, we are left with the problem of how to tackle our own greed, and our indifference to human suffering in the world outside our own.

There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,” Ann liked to say—it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours—“There is only one reason for doing something. And that’s because you want to.” Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people’s heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The

I was born in the Year of the Smiley Face: 1963. That’s when a graphic designer from Worcester, Massachusetts, named Harvey Ball invented the now-ubiquitous grinning yellow graphic. Originally, Ball’s creation was designed to cheer up people who worked at, of all places, an insurance company, but it has since become synonymous with the frothy, quintessentially American brand of happiness.

The obsession of the two great economic systems with each other’s identity, intentions, strengths, and weaknesses had produced by the 1970s a state of mutual watch-fulness and paranoia that seemed to know no bounds. Each side was ready to pay any sum, take any risk, tell any lie, to gain a seeming intelligence advantage over the other. Neither seemed able to grasp the utter sterility of this situation.

Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It’s all very nice to say you’re an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make sure we do what you say, think how you think, and remember you’re the boss. You ask me why you wear that jacket or give away that piece of crap on the street, even though you know that when people take it they just throw it in the next trash can, or why you wear those glasses right out of Doctor Zhivago? You just want to get laid, like every guy. My brother, Dean, thinks playing hockey is going to get him laid. You think pretending you are some Russian is going to get you laid—big fucking difference.” She tossed her head. “You wouldn’t mind running General Motors. You hate big business just because you’re not the boss. If, by some magic trick, you got to be the president of…of…of Dow, you’d do it, and you would be happy to make napalm, too, because if you don’t care about one person getting killed, then you don’t care about any person getting killed. You’re just a heartless asshole.

Hope is not desire.… You may desire money, but you hope for peace. You may desire sex, but you hope for freedom. You may desire beautiful clothes, but you hope for the ringing of justice. You see, desire has an ‘I’ quality, but hope has a ‘we’ quality.… I’ve seen people who have lost hope. They wander through life, but somehow they never live life.… They merely exist.… I have seen hate, and all the time I see it, I say to myself, ‘Hate is too great a burden to bear.’ I don’t want to be like that.… It is only through love that we keep hope alive.… Hope is based on faith that life has ultimate meaning.

For example, say you have a child whose peers’ parents routinely bake homemade cookies for class fund-raisers. Cookies with little icing smiley faces and a separate batch of gluten-free ones for the pussies. Well, maybe you have neither the TIME nor the ENERGY to bake homemade cookies. And maybe you do have twenty dollars but you’re worried about what the other parents will think if you contribute store-bought Oreos to the bake sale. You see where I’m going with this, right? You need to (a) stop worrying about what other people think and (b) budget your fucks accordingly. No time and no energy? Oreos it is!

Her six-year-old brain had lost her father at sweet and was still stuck trying to decipher lemonade. "But lemon is pretty, Dad. It's yellow. Like sun." Her father nodded, his lips curved up at the corners. "Sun is pretty and it has a smiley face. Sun is not bad." "No, I guess it's not." Her father chuckled. "I love sun." "Of course you do, sweetie-pie." "So lemon is nice, too." "I believe so, but some people don't like the taste. It's too sour, they say." She looked back at her father and said with a tone that suggested what other people thought about lemon was crazy. "Then add sugar. No need to blame the lemon.

Because he was good!’ Smiley snapped, and there was a startled silence everywhere, while he recovered himself. ‘Vladimir’s father was an Estonian and a passionate Bolshevik, Oliver,’ he resumed in a calmer voice. ‘A professional man, a lawyer. Stalin rewarded his loyalty by murdering him in the purges. Vladimir was born Voldemar but he even changed his name to Vladimir out of allegiance to Moscow and the Revolution. He still wanted to believe, despite what they had done to his father. He joined the Red Army and by God’s grace missed being purged as well. The war promoted him, he fought like a lion, and when it was over, he waited for the great Russian liberalisation that he had been dreaming of, and the freeing of his own people. It never came. Instead, he witnessed the ruthless repression of his homeland by the government he had served. Scores of thousands of his fellow Estonians went to the camps, several of his own relatives among them.’ Lacon opened his mouth to interrupt, but wisely closed it. ‘The lucky ones escaped to Sweden and Germany. We’re talking of a population of a million sober, hard-working people, cut to bits. One night, in despair, he offered us his services. Us, the British. In Moscow. For three years after that he spied for us from the very heart of the capital. Risked everything for us, every day.

Some faces, as Villem had suggested this morning, are known to us before we see them; others we see once and remember all our lives; others we see every day and never remember at all

The café was the last in the street, if not in all Paris, to lack both a juke-box and neon lighting – and to remain open in August – though there were bagatelle tables that bumped and flashed from dawn till night. For the rest, there was the usual mid-morning hubbub, of grand politics, and horses, and whatever else Parisians talked; there was the usual trio of prostitutes murmuring among themselves, and a sullen young waiter in a soiled shirt who led them to a table in a corner that was reserved with a grimy Campari sign. A moment of ludicrous banality followed. The stranger ordered two coffees, but the waiter protested that at midday one does not reserve the best table in the house merely in order to drink coffee; the patron had to pay the rent, monsieur! Since

You don’t buy photographs from Otto Leipzig, you don’t buy Degas from Signor Benati, follow me?” “Do

Enemies I do not fear, Villem. But friends I fear greatly.’” Smiley

Probably she said yes. Afterwards she was not sure. She saw his scared gaze lift and stare at the approaching bus. She saw an indecision near to panic seize him, and it occurred to her – which in the long run was an act of near clairvoyance – that he proposed to push her under it. He didn’t, but he did put his next question in Russian – and in the brutal accents of Moscow officialdom.

But she did not say it, she kept rigidly silent. Ostrakova had already sworn to herself that she would restrain both her quick temper and her quick tongue, and she now physically enjoined herself to this vow by grabbing a piece of skin on the soft inside of her wrist and pinching it through her sleeve with a fierce, sustained pressure under the table, exactly as she had done a hundred times before, in the old days, when such questionings were part of her daily life – When did you last hear from your husband, Ostrakov, the traitor? Name all persons with whom you have associated in the last three months! With bitter experience she had learned the other lessons of interrogation too. A

I asked her why she didn’t pursue her love for writing full-time and how she managed to find time to write her book with her nine-to-five job. “Right now, I’m a better artist when I know how I’m going to pay my rent and buy my bus pass and all that,” Janet told me. “I also know some people who feel like better artists when their income is dependent on their art because it forces them into action, and maybe one day I’ll feel like that. For me, it’s really great right now to not worry about where my income is coming from, because I’ve gotten really stressed about that in the past when I was having trouble supporting myself. Right now, I feel like I have the best of both worlds. I’m learning what I’m supposed to be learning from my paid work, while I also pursue my creative goals on a concurrent track.

I suddenly remember what my mom used to repeat to me on a daily basis when I was in high school: nothing good can come from staying out past 11:00 p.m. or going on Craigslist. But where else could I test this idea with real results? I could post a Facebook status about it, but all people would do is comment with an LOL or smiley face emojis. I could call up my closest friends, but I’d probably be interrupting them in the middle of clinking glasses of some fancy vintage of Merlot with their SigNif to celebrate the end of a long workweek. But Kerri thought it sounded good, and she’s my voice of reason, even if she does have a 102-degree fever. “What section, Moose?” I say. Moose sits there, stuffed and still, not trying to stop me, so I proceed. Women looking for women. That seemed like a good home for this sort of thing. I open up a new post and I begin typing.

What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing their rights and wrongs?

In one recent study, people who were given the feedback that their electricity use was above average cut their use, but people who were below average actually increased their use when given information that they were below the neighborhood average (this demonstrates the power of the social norm to influence behavior; people don’t want to be too different, no matter how different is defined). However, this was overcome with a simple “smiley face” drawn on the energy bill. The smiley face indicated social approval for lower energy consumption. People who received the smiley face continued to use less energy.

study done on the shape of people’s eyes that found people with smiley eyes wound up happier overall. Statistically.

In the old days, when people wrote letters to each other on paper, they would occasionally write “ha ha” after a joke, to make sure the recipient knew the writer was being funny. When email took over the world in the 1980s, there were millions of instances of people writing jokes in their mail and the recipient being hurt or offended, not realizing that a joke had been made. Without standard verbal and visual cues, people had trouble consistently recognizing comedy as comedy. Thus the smiley face started appearing after any line that was meant to be a joke. This was joined by the winking face and a host of other expressions designed to give the reader a sense of the attitude beneath the words.

The man who has been to ‘No House’ is as significant as the man who’s been to Morehouse.… The person who picks up our garbage is as significant as the physician.… All labor has worth.… You are reminding not only Memphis but the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.… The vast majority of Negroes in our country are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in a vast ocean of material prosperity.…

Doing what he wanted to do and his boundless affinity for everything made Clay Demodocus a happy guy, but he was also shrewd enough not to be too open about his happiness. Animals might put up with that smiley shit, but people will eventually kill you for it.

Since time immemorial wise people have been saying that all comparisons are odious. When we compare, we set up a winner-loser dynamic. If my crisis is greater than yours, then yours is belittled and insignificant. I say that’s nonsense. Each crisis has its own power, its own unique reality.

The draft,” he shouts, “is white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend the land they stole from red people. The draft must end: not tomorrow, not next week, but today.

Put it this way, George,” he suggested, when he had savoured the night air for a moment. “You traveling on business, or for pleasure in this thing? Which is it? Smiley’s reply was also slow in coming, and as indirect: “I was never conscious of pleasure,” he said. “Or perhaps I mean: of the distinction.

I decided to skip it and head to the library to do some research on Keepers. The place was practically deserted at this time of day, giving me my pick of computer terminals. I sat down at one in the corner and woke up the screen with a push of the mouse. A pop-up box with a smiley face and the words “Hello, student!” immediately displayed on the screen. The animation phenomenon was particularly prevalent in the library. I gritted my teeth and contemplated switching to another terminal in the hopes that it would be less lively than this one, but decided it wasn’t worth the time. None of the computers in here were new. In the text box below the greeting I typed “hi thanks” and pressed enter. The pop-up disappeared, giving me access to the library’s custom search engine. I typed “keeper” and “ring” in the box and pressed the search button. Another pop-up appeared on the screen: “Are you sure you want to search for that?” “Yes,” I typed. “Lots of people aren’t, you know, sure.” The smile on the smiley face widened. “I’m sure.” “Sure, sure?” “YES!!!” I pounded on the keys, trying to get the point across. The smiley face frowned. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” At last, the stupid thing displayed the results, and I sighed in relief.

White America has told Doc: We have created a space for you. We have allowed you to be the leader of your people for your cause. We have become comfortable seeing you in this space. This space has resulted in your receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. But that leadership and prize do not allow you to address issues outside your space.

This is what many women are socialized to do in church: please people, not God. They come to church experiencing ongoing pressure from the world to be plastic Nice Girls, and the church, instead of freeing women to emulate the 360-degree Jesus, influences them to become even more of a smiley-face doormat, by teaching them that this is what God expects from women: quiet, sweet, unrelenting compliance.

You can’t eat politics, you can’t sell them, and you can’t sleep with them,’ Drake liked to say. So you might as well make money out of them.

Dealing with beautiful women, Your Grace, Craw had warned, is like dealing with known criminals, and the lady you are about to solicit undoubtedly falls within that category.

While the culture is constantly focused on fluff and positivity, God’s Word offers not just a competing worldview but a contrary one. The Bible is not some retouched photo of the human condition, sanitized to save everyone the heartache of reality. The Bible brings far more than a smiley preacher with platitudes that fade before sunset. The Scriptures bring stark reality, the depravity of the human heart apart from God. His Word declares the dangers of sin using the lives of men and women who needed a front-row seat to learn that all sin brings suffering. These real people are not presented to us as perfect but as those whom God was working on.

Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things.” He grinned like a schoolboy. “And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can’t compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you now?

Coffee he drinks—nothing else—just coffee all the time. He says Germans are too introspective to make good agents, and it all comes out in counterintelligence. He says counterintelligence people are like wolves chewing dry bones—you have to take away the bones and make them find new quarry—I see all that, I know what he means. But he’s gone too far.

Then the people in this prison are intellectuals?” The woman smiled. “Yes,” she said, “they are reactionaries who call themselves progressive: they defend the individual against the state. Do you know what Khrushchev said about the counterrevolution in Hungary?” Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she must make the woman talk. “He said it would never have happened if a couple of writers had been shot in time.

Some people keep canaries, some people join the Party,

Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships’ engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided. “George!

How can I win? he asked himself; alone, restrained by doubt and a sense of decency—how can any of us—against this remorseless fusillade?

He preferred the trial and error of exposing the negative for too long, then for too little, under the main room light. Of using as a measure the cumbersome kitchen timer, which ticked and grumbled like something from Coppélia. He preferred grunting and cursing in irritation and sweating in the dark and wasting at least six sheets of resin-coated paper before the developer in the washing-up bowl yielded an image even half-way passable, which he laid in the rapid fixer for three minutes. And washed it. And dabbed it with a clean teacloth, probably ruining the cloth for good, he wouldn’t know. And took it upstairs and pegged it to the clothesline.

But as my knight errant he cast too old an eye on the world. Where he saw change, it pained him.

So many nights, he thought. So many streets till here. He thought of Hesse: strange to wander in the fog . . . no tree knows another.

A scriptwriter was supposed to love people and their stories. After all, their job was to write about human connections.

And is that laundromat some community centre? Why are you always bringing food there to share? Those people are nothing but trouble

I’m hopeful that this time will also serve as a reminder of what matters most: our interconnectedness. That we can’t afford to take our people or our planet for granted. That our existence is not guaranteed. That we won’t survive without looking out for one another. That we will approach our lives less from a place of “Ugh! I have to go to work, school, or a friend’s birthday party,” and more from, “Wow! I get to go to work, school, or a friend’s birthday party.” That we will celebrate our shared humanity and cherish the simple yet profound freedom to congregate in public, to go see live music, to sit inside a restaurant, to visit family, to hug an old friend, to pass countless hours with our people, and realize just how lucky we are to be alive together.