Sorting Hat Quotes

But if it matters to you, you'll be able to choose Gryffindor over Slytherin. The Sorting Hat takes your choice into account." "Really?" "It did for me," said Harry. He had never told any of his children that before, and he saw the wonder in Albus's face when he said it.

Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, if you've a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind.

Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart!

Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.' 'Why not?' 'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.

Connor and Rose would belong to the smartest house in the wizarding world. No question. Before the sorting hat even touched their heads, it’d scream Ravenclaw!

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

SORTING HAT: "Albus Potter." He puts his hat on Albus’s head — and this time he seems to take longer — almost as if he too is confused. "SLYTHERIN!" There’s a silence. A perfect, profound silence. One that sits low, twists a bit, and has damage within it.

Oh,you may not think I'm pretty, But don't judge on what you see, I'll eat myself if you can find A smarter hat than me. You can keep your bowlers black, Your tops hats sleek and tall, For I'm the Hogwarts Sorting Hat And I can cap them all. There's nothing hidden in your head The Sorting Hat can't see, So try me on and I will tell you Where you ought to be. Y ou might belong in Gryffindor, Where dwell brave of heart, Their daring, nerve, and chivalry Set Gryffindors apart; You might belong in Hufflepuff, Where they are just and loyal, Those patient Hufflepuffs are true And unafraid of toil; Or yet wise old Ravenclaw, If you've a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind; Or perhaps in Slytherin You'll make your real friends, Those cunning folk use any means To achive their ends. So put me on! Don't be afraid! And you won't get in a flap! You're safe in my hands(though I have none) For I'm a Thinking Cap!!

It doesn't work like that. You don't just pick your song. The song picks you. Like the Sorting Hat.

Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!

Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria: 1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable ... They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don't make a scandal when they leave. (...) 2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. (...) 3) They respect other people's property, and therefore pay their debts. 4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don't tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don't put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don't show off to impress their juniors. (...) 5) They don't run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don't play on other people's heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted ... that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it's vulgar, old hat and false. (...) 6) They are not vain. They don't waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar ... They regard prases like 'I am a representative of the Press!!' -- the sort of thing one only hears from [very minor journalists] -- as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing's work they don't pass it off as if it were 100 roubles' by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don't boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren't allowed in (...) True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight ... As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. (...) 7) If they do possess talent, they value it ... They take pride in it ... they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others] rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. (...) 8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility ... Civilized people don't simply obey their baser instincts ... they require mens sana in corpore sano. And so on. That's what civilized people are like ... Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings. [From a letter to Nikolay Chekhov, March 1886]

Umm … well, how do you, like, choose if you’re a top or a bottom?” “There’s a sorting hat. Like in Harry Potter. It wasn’t even placed on my head before it screamed, ‘Top!’ and then all the other tops welcomed me to their house.

When I was all set to go, when I had my bags and all, I stood for a while next to the stairs and took a last look down the goddam corridor. I was sort of crying. I don't know why. I put my red hunting hat on, and turned the peak around to the back, the way I liked it, and then I yelled at the top of my goddam voice, "Sleep tight, ya morons!" I'll bet I woke up every bastard on the whole floor. Then I got the hell out. Some stupid guy had thrown peanut shells all over the stairs, and I damn near broke my crazy neck.

Magnus shrugged. "He also made inappropriate amorous advances to a startled grandmotherly sort selling flowers, an Irish wolfhound, and innocent hat stand in a dwelling he broke into, and myself.

On the other hand the Nac Mac Feegle were always looking for a fight, in a cheerful sort of way, and when they had no one to fight they fought one another, and if one was all by himself he’d kick his own nose just to keep in practice.

Since I spent much of my childhood being left behind and ignored, one might think that, as an adult, moments of perceived abandonment would feel old hat. The truth is, as an adult, I am always waiting to be left behind. I’m always ready to be discarded and, therefore, I spend a significant amount of time preparing for this eventuality. I lower my expectations, I don’t seek out meaningful relationships, and I don’t engage in any sort of real intimacy, physical or otherwise. Engage is the key word here. Except, when I engage, when it happens, when I’m left behind it doesn’t feel old hat. It feels like it did the first time and it takes me by surprise. So, I don’t let it happen.

Mistress Weatherwax is the head witch, then, is she?’ 'Oh no!’ said Miss Level, looking shocked. 'Witches are all equal. We don’t have things like head witches. That’s quite against the spirit of witchcraft.’ 'Oh, I see,’ said Tiffany. 'Besides,’ Miss Level added, 'Mistress Weatherwax would never allow that sort of thing.

I'm not going to touch her," he said "She's not mine.She never will be." "Indeed." Bruiser rolled his eyes and dusted off his hat. "Definitely no years of pent-up lusting there. Glad we have that sorted.

And upon his return, Gherkins, who had always considered his uncle as a very top-hatted sort of person, actually saw him take from his handkerchief-drawer an undeniable automatic pistol. It was at this point that Lord Peter was apotheosed from the state of Quite Decent Uncle to that of Glorified Uncle

Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake," he said. "That's a deer shooting hat." "Like hell it is." I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. "This is a people shooting hat," I said. "I shoot people in this hat.

A thousand years or more ago, When I was newly sewn, There lived four wizards of renown, Whose name are still well-known: Bold Gryffindor from wild moor, Fair Ravlenclaw from glen, Sweet Hufflepuff from valley broad, Shrewd Slytherin from fen. They share a wish, a hope, a dream, They hatched a daring plan, To educate young sorcerers, Thus Hogwarts school began. Now each of these four founders Formed their own house, for each Did value different virtues, In the ones they had to teach. By Gryffindor, the bravest were Prized far beyond the rest; For Ravenclaw, the cleverest Would always be the best; For Hufflepuff, hardworkers were Most worthy of admission; And power-hungry Slytherin Loved those of great ambition. While still alive they did divide Their favourates from the throng, Yet how to pick the worthy ones When they were dead and gone? 'Twas Gryffindor who found the way, He whipped me off his head The founders put some brains in me So I could choose instead! Now slip me snug around your ears, I've never yet been wrong, I'll have alook inside your mind And tell where you belong!

Oh my god. Don’t tell me you don’t know your Hogwarts house. Pottermore? The Sorting Hat Quiz? "When Darcy stared, Elle groaned and covered her face." You don’t do social media, you don’t believe in astrology, and now you don’t like Harry Potter. On behalf of our generation, I am offended, you rock dweller.

And then Harry Potter had launched in to a speech that was inspiring, yet vague. A speech to the effect that Fred and George and Lee had tremendous potential if they could just learn to be weirder. To make people's live surreal, instead of just surprising them with the equivalents of buckets of water propped above doors. (Fred and George had exchanged interested looks, they'd never thought of that one.) Harry Potter had invoked a picture of the prank they'd pulled on Neville - which, Harry had mentioned with some remorse, the Sorting Hat had chewed him out on - but which must have made Neville doubt his own sanity. For Neville it would have felt like being suddendly transported into an alternate universe. The same way everyone else had felt when they'd seen Snape apologize. That was the true power of pranking.

I’ve done this job for centuries On every student’s head I’ve sat Of thoughts I take inventories For I’m the famous Sorting Hat I’ve sorted high, I’ve sorted low, I’ve done the job through thick and thin So put me on and you will know Which House you should be in 

A lady both callous and brash Met a man with a vast black moustache; She cried, 'Shave it, O do! And I'll put it with glue On my hat as a sort of panache.

Then the Communists set up a front organization, the National Rifle Association, to encourage the wide usage of guns of all sorts, and to battle any attempt to control guns as “unconstitutional.” Thus, they guaranteed that the murder rate in Unistat would always be the highest in the world. This kept the citizens in perpetual anxiety about their safety both on the streets and in their homes. The citizens then tolerated the rapid growth of the Police State, which controlled almost everything, except the sale of guns, the chief cause of crime.

Moreover, he had a peculiar knack, as he walked along the street, of arriving beneath a window just as all sorts of rubbish were being flung out of it: hence he always bore about on his hat scraps of melon rinds and other such articles.

I was born by the sea," I said. "I'd go to the beach the morning after a typhoon and find all sorts of things that the waves had tossed up. There'd be bottles and wooden geta and hats and cases for glasses, tables and chairs, things from nowhere near the water. I liked combing through the stuff, so I was always waiting for the next typhoon. I put out my cigarette. The strange thing is, everything washed up from the sea was purified. Useless junk, but absolutely clean. There wasn't a dirty thing. The sea is special in that way. When I look back over my life so far, I see all that junk on the beach. It's how my life has always been. Gathering up the junk, sorting through it, and then casting it off somewhere else. All for no purpose, leaving it to wash away again. This was in your hometown? This is all my life. I merely go from one beach to another. Sure I remember the things that happen in between, but that's all. I never tie them together. They're so many things, clean but useless.

Sometimes the church talks about singleness as if it were similar to being chosen for Hufflepuff by the Magic Sorting Hat in Harry Potter. The good news is that you still are at Hogwarts, but the bad news is that pretty much everyone else there will avoid you and make it clear they feel sad for you and would never, ever want to be you.

That’s not the song it sang when it Sorted us,” said Harry, clapping along with everyone else. “Sings a different one every year,” said Ron. “It’s got to be a pretty boring life, hasn’t it, being a hat? I suppose it spends all year making up the next one.

All Librarians are members of the Catalogue. That's what you call a coven when it's made up of Librarians instead of witches. Librarians have sorted and alphabetized all the magic that ever thought to put a rabbit and a hat together. Who do you think invented Special Collections?

Aidan was fascinated by Mr. Stock's hat. Perhaps it had once been a trilby sort of thing. It may once hace even been a definite color. Now it was more like something that had grown - like a fungus - on Mr. Stock's head, so mashed and used and rammed down by earthy hands that you could have thought it was a mushroom that had accidentally grown into a sort of gnome-hat. It had a slightly domed top and a floppy edge. And a definite smell

It's entirely possible that the Great Sorting Hat at the End of Time won't give a damn which side we thought we were on - Rebel or stormtrooper, Red Pill or Blue - but only our intentions. Which flag we flew, which uniform we wore will yield to something much simpler. Were we coming from fear or love? Were we standing for all of us or only some of us? Were we playing Team Finite, or Team Infinite?

That’s a deer shooting hat.' 'Like hell it is.' I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. 'This is a people shooting hat,' I said. 'I shoot people in this hat.

When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I'd turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I'm sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can't help feeling that if the two had ever met they'd have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage's world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?

My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, "Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures." Well, I went, but the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat, that I rested a little--I rested here with Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys. Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.

How I wish we could spend a couple of Christmas days together, for instance — I would also dearly like to have you in my studio once more. I, too, have been toiling quite hard recently, precisely because I was full of the Christmas feeling, and feeling isn’t enough, one must bring it into one’s work. So I’m now occupied with two large heads of an orphan man, with his white beard and old-fashioned, old top hat. This chap has the sort of old, lively face that one would wish for beside a cosy Christmas fire.

In times of old when I was new And Hogwarts barely started The founders of our noble school Thought never to be parted: United by a common goal, They had the selfsame yearning, To make the world’s best magic school And pass along their learning. “Together we will build and teach!” The four good friends decided And never did they dream that they Might someday be divided, For were there such friends anywhere As Slytherin and Gryffindor? Unless it was the second pair Of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw? So how could it have gone so wrong? How could such friendships fail? Why, I was there and so can tell The whole sad, sorry tale. Said Slytherin, “We’ll teach just those Whose ancestry is purest.” Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose Intelligence is surest.” Said Gryffindor, “We’ll teach all those With brave deeds to their name.” Said Hufflepuff, “I’ll teach the lot, And treat them just the same.” These differences caused little strife When first they came to light, For each of the four founders had A House in which they might Take only those they wanted, so, For instance, Slytherin Took only pure-blood wizards Of great cunning, just like him, And only those of sharpest mind Were taught by Ravenclaw While the bravest and the boldest Went to daring Gryffindor. Good Hufflepuff, she took the rest, And taught them all she knew, Thus the Houses and their founders Retained friendships firm and true. So Hogwarts worked in harmony For several happy years, But then discord crept among us Feeding on our faults and fears. The Houses that, like pillars four, Had once held up our school, Now turned upon each other and, Divided, sought to rule. And for a while it seemed the school Must meet an early end, What with dueling and with fighting And the clash of friend on friend And at last there came a morning When old Slytherin departed And though the fighting then died out He left us quite downhearted. And never since the founders four Were whittled down to three Have the Houses been united As they once were meant to be. And now the Sorting Hat is here And you all know the score: I sort you into Houses Because that is what I’m for, But this year I’ll go further, Listen closely to my song: Though condemned I am to split you Still I worry that it’s wrong, Though I must fulfill my duty And must quarter every year Still I wonder whether Sorting May not bring the end I fear. Oh, know the perils, read the signs, The warning history shows, For our Hogwarts is in danger From external, deadly foes And we must unite inside her Or we’ll crumble from within. I have told you, I have warned you. . . . Let the Sorting now begin. The hat became motionless once more;

Not Slytherin, eh?...Are you sure? You could be great, you know, it's all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that no? Well, if you're sure...better by... GRYFFINDOR!

Magnus,” he said. “What on earth happened to James?” “What happened?” Magnus asked musingly. “Well, let me see. He stole a bicycle and rode it, not using his hands at any point, through Trafalgar Square. He attempted to climb Nelson’s Column and fight with Nelson. Then I lost him for a brief period of time, and by the time I caught up with him, he had wandered into Hyde Park, waded into the Serpentine, spread his arms wide, and was shouting, ‘Ducks, embrace me as your king!’” “Dear God,” said Will. “He must have been vilely drunk. Tessa, I can bear it no longer. He is taking awful risks with his life and rejecting all the principles I hold most dear. If he continues making an exhibition of himself throughout London, he will be called to Idris and kept there away from the mundanes. Does he not realize that?” Magnus shrugged. “He also made inappropriate amorous advances to a startled grandmotherly sort selling flowers, an Irish wolfhound, an innocent hat stand in a dwelling he broke into, and myself. I will add that I do not believe his admiration of my person, dazzling though I am, to be sincere. He told me I was a beautiful, sparkling lady. Then he abruptly collapsed, naturally in the path of an oncoming train from Dover, and I decided it was well past time to take him home and place him in the bosom of his family. If you had rather I put him in an orphanage, I fully understand.

Listen to me, Harry. You happen to have many qualities Salazar Slytherin prized in his hand-picked students. His own very rare gift, Parseltongue — resourcefulness — determination — a certain disregard for rules,” he added, his mustache quivering again. “Yet the Sorting Hat placed you in Gryffindor. You know why that was. Think.” “It only put me in Gryffindor,” said Harry in a defeated voice, “because I asked not to go in Slytherin. . . .” “Exactly,” said Dumbledore, beaming once more. “Which makes you very different from Tom Riddle. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

there was a sort of embarrassment about storytelling that struck home powerfully about one hundred years ago, at the beginning of modernism. We see a similar reaction in painting and in music. It's a preoccupation suddenly with the surface rather than the depth. So you get, for example, Picasso and Braque making all kinds of experiments with the actual surface of the painting. That becomes the interesting thing, much more interesting than the thing depicted, which is just an old newspaper, a glass of wine, something like that. In music, the Second Viennese School becomes very interested in what happens when the surface, the diatonic structure of the keys breaks down, and we look at the notes themselves in a sort of tone row, instead of concentrating on things like tunes, which are sort of further in, if you like. That happened, of course, in literature, too, with such great works as James Joyce's Ulysses, which is all about, really, how it's told. Not so much about what happens, which is a pretty banal event in a banal man's life. It's about how it's told. The surface suddenly became passionately interesting to artists in every field about a hundred years ago. In the field of literature, story retreated. The books we talked about just now, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Vanity Fair -- their authors were the great storytellers as well as the great artists. After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's..." So there was a great split that took place. Story retreated, as it were, into genre fiction-into crime fiction, into science fiction, into romantic fiction-whereas the high-art literary people went another way. Children's books held onto the story, because children are rarely interested in surfaces in that sort of way. They're interested in what-happened and what-happened next. I found it a great discipline, when I was writing The Golden Compass and other books, to think that there were some children in the audience. I put it like that because I don't say I write for children. I find it hard to understand how some writers can say with great confidence, "Oh, I write for fourth grade children" or "I write for boys of 12 or 13." How do they know? I don't know. I would rather consider myself in the rather romantic position of the old storyteller in the marketplace: you sit down on your little bit of carpet with your hat upturned in front of you, and you start to tell a story. Your interest really is not in excluding people and saying to some of them, "No, you can't come, because it's just for so-and-so." My interest as a storyteller is to have as big an audience as possible. That will include children, I hope, and it will include adults, I hope. If dogs and horses want to stop and listen, they're welcome as well.

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story.

Sunday is a fixed star," he said. "You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his hat. The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet. "Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment, "exactly where you are going?" "Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being thrown in Paris." "Have you any conception how?" inquired the other. "No," said Syme with equal decision.

Don't let your life be steered by your reluctance to do a little extra thinking.

Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.

And yes, it could be a solidarity thing, like some kind of Kinsey scale Sorting Hat. “Better be . . . GAY!!!!!!” *cue cheers and rainbow flag waving from Hudson of Gay House*

You, and you alone, have reported this mysterious sense of doom. You, and you alone, are a chaos magnet the likes of which I have never seen. After our little shopping trip to Diagon Alley, and then the Sorting Hat, and then today's little episode, I can well foresee that I am fated to sit in the Headmaster's office and hear some hilarious tale about Professor Quirrell in which you and you alone play a starring role, after which there will be no choice but to fire him. I am already resigned to it, Mr. Potter. And if this sad event takes place any earlier than the Ides of May, I will string you up by the gates of Hogwarts with your own intestines and pour fire beetles into your nose. Now do you understand me completely?

But what my car needs is gas, not memories! How can you make a car go on memories?' B.D. scratched under her Admiral's hat. 'What'd you think gas was, girl? 'Course there's all sorts of fuel, wind and wishes and chocolate cake and collard greens and water and brawn, but you're wanting the kind that burns in an engine. That kind of gas is nothing more than the past stored up and fermented and kept down in the cellar of the earth till it's wanted. Gas is saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons and cyclopses and werewhales drank up the sun as it shone on their backs a million years ago and used it to be a bigger fern or make more werewhales or drop seeds of improbability.' Her otter's paws moved quick and sure, selecting a squat, square bottle here and a round rosy one there. 'It so happens sunshine has a fearful memory. It sticks around even after its favorite dimetrodon dies. Gets hard and wily. Turns into something you can touch, something you can drill, something you can pour. But it still remembers having one eye and slapping the ocean's face with a great heavy tail. It liked making more dinosaurs and growing a frond as tall as a bank. It likes to make things alive, to make things go.

There's no need to tell me I'm not brave enough to be in Gryffindor, Malfoy's already done that," Neville choked out. Harry felt in the pocket of his robes and pulled out a Chocolate Frog. The very last one from the box Hermione had given him for Christmas. He gave it to Neville who looked as though he might cry. "You're worth twelve of Malfoy," Harry said. "The Sorting Hat chose you for Gryffindor, didn't it?

Starkly in an instant she saw herself as she really was-alone in a wood standing among blue shadows with no sounds and the air a sort of black ice. She had no coat. All the people she’d known had forgotten her. Her mother, biting off thread between her teeth, couldn’t hear her, and her father with his eyes turned sorrowfully inward did not see her. They never had. Those she loved did not need her. Lila and Carl danced together in a bubble. Ralph Eastman picked lint from his sleeve. Buddy tucked in his shirttails, jumped in a truck and drove away. Fiona Speed showed the back of her hat, heading downtown in a cab. They all had more important concerns, they were all in their own lives, and there was no room for her. At night their doors were shut and through lit windows she could see them consulting one another, checking the baby, looking after business, licking envelopes, turning back the bedcover, shutting off the light switch, while she was left stranded out in the chill night in the true human state, lost, in the dark, alone.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing . . . (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s . . .) LUIS BUÑUEL This moving and frightening segment in Buñuel’s recently translated memoirs raises fundamental questions – clinical, practical, existential, philosophical: what sort of a life (if any), what sort of a world, what sort of a self, can be preserved in a man who has lost the greater part of his memory and, with this, his past, and his moorings in time?

What I'd saved: lost. Worse: I lost it. Can't even tell myself that I sort of lost it that lost I keep it still. I lost the saved. I've lost. I'm lost. This is pain, one dies of or kills. Kill it and one kills oneself. Splashes of bloody skin all over my notebooks. I haven't forgotten a dream, as it is written happens in the realm of dreams. One forgets a dream, then one forgets one has forgotten, nothing dies of this. I've lost The Dream. I cannot tell a soul. I will not enter alive into the beyond. I search for an explanation. To the labyrinth I descend with the chapeau. Maleficent remains but remains, therefore blessed. If I could ask my friend. No one else. He and only he knows the extraordinary value of what is lost, greater by far that the value of what one keeps. Suddenly I'm only this torch consuming itself. What to do? I had the papers, I took them from myself, I threw them in the Trash, I threw out my own being, I had the memory of the future at the window I broke me, I tore up the secret into a thousand pieces, I tweezed the sublime out of me, I had god I squashed him with a hat, this is not the first time I take myself to the labyrinth but this is the first time I go down into the labyrinth. I went right by the very trash bin of my being, how can you do away with your own eyes, I did it, who knows how

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

In front of the group was a legless man on a small wheeled trolley, who was singing at the top of his voice and banging two saucepans together. His name was Arnold Sideways. Pushing him along was Coffin Henry, whose croaking progress through an entirely different song was punctuated by bouts of off-the-beat coughing. He was accompanied by a perfectly ordinary-looking manin torn, dirty and yet expensive looking clothing, whose pleasant tenor voice was drowned out by the quaking of a duck on his head. He answered to the name of Duck Man, although he never seemed to understand why, or why he was always surrounded by people who seemed to see ducks where no ducks could be. And finally, being towed along by a small grey dog on a string, was Foul Ole Ron, generally regarded in Ankh-Morpork as the deranged beggars' deranged beggar. He was probably incapable of singing, but at least he was attempting to swear in time to the beat, or beats. The wassailers stopped and watched them in horror. People have always had the urge to sing and clang things at the dark stub of the year, when all sorts of psychic nastiness has taken advantage of the long grey days and the deep shadows to lurk and breed. Lately people had taken to singing harmoniously, which rather lost the affect. Those who really understood just clanged something and shouted. The beggars were not in fact this well versed in folkloric practice. They were just making a din in the well-founded hope that people would give them money to stop. It was just possible to make out consensus song in there somewhere. "Hogswatch is coming, The pig is getting fat, Please put a dollar in the old man's hat If you ain't got a dollar a penny will do-" "And if you ain't got a penny," Foul Ole Ron yodeled, solo, 'Then- fghfgh yffg mfmfmf..." The Duck man had, with great Presence of mind, clamped a hand over Ron's mouth.

Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity. Not because … God is love, but because of his love, of the predicate, … ; thus love is a higher power and truth[.] Love conquers God. It was love to which God sacrificed his divine majesty. … [W]hat sort of love was that? … [I]t was love to man. … [T]hough there is … a self-interested love among men, still true human love … is that which impels the sacrifice of self to another. Who then is our saviour … ? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil being – of religious fanaticism.

Oh, you may not think I’m pretty, But don’t judge on what you see, I’ll eat myself if you can find A smarter hat than me. You can keep your bowlers black, Your top hats sleek and tall, For I’m the Hogwarts Sorting Hat And I can cap them all.

this sentence I'm reading is terrific" i can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood. He didn't get it, though. He started walking around the room again, picking up all my personal stuff, and Stradlater's. Finally, I put my book down on the floor. you couldn't read anything with a guy like Ackley around. It was impossible. I slid way the hell down in my chair and watched old Ackley making himself at home. I was feeling sort of tired from the trip to New York and all, and I started yawning. then horsing around a little bit. Sometimes I horse around quite a lot, just to keep from getting bored. what i did was, I pulled the old peak of my hunting hat around to the front, then pulled it way down over my eyes. that way i couldn't see a goddam thing."I think I'm going blind,"I said in this very hoarse voice."Mother darling, everything's getting do dark in here." "You're nuts. I swear to God,"Ackley said. "Mother darling, give me your hand, Why won't you give me your hand?" "For Chrissake, grow up." I started groping around in front of me, like a blind guy, but without getting up or anything. I kept saying,"mother darling, why wont you give me you're hand ?" I was only horsing around, naturally.

To her, I’m a coarse, barely literate brute with few redeeming qualities. As for her . . . She’s so innocent and tightly laced, she probably bathes in her shift and dresses in the dark. What would I do with a woman like that?” Everything. He’d do everything with a woman like that. Twice. “I’m not going to touch her,” he said. “She’s not mine. She never will be.” “Indeed.” Bruiser rolled his eyes and dusted off his hat. “Definitely no years of pent-up lusting there. Glad we have that sorted.

With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered… . What matters is that people would remember it, and that would give them a clue

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes be content with less?

[W]hat with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business. But Newport represented the escape from duty...

Minerva drew unusual attention to herself on her very first evening, when she was revealed to be a Hatstall. After five and a half minutes, the Sorting Hat, which had been vacillating between the houses of Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, placed Minerva in the latter. (In later years, this circumstance was a subject of gentle humour between Minerva and her colleague Filius Flitwick, over whom the Sorting Hat suffered the same confusion, but reached the opposite conclusion. The two Heads of House were amused to think that they might, but for those crucial moments in their youths, have exchanged positions).

But why would they do that? What is to be asked? He was a man who sees into things -- very ordinary things. A hat left on the floor of a café in Kingstown, a proverb overheard, an old fisherman mending a net: these, for him, were a kind of incitement. There are no answers other than that. He was not like the rest of us. Not even like himself. His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet. He needed the very ordinary. He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze.

Don't let your life be steered by your reluctance to do a little extra thinking.

Mit machen Leuten Mit machen Leuten lohnt es sich zu leben. Mit andern wieder macht es keinen Spaß. Auslauter Angst, sich etwas zu vergeben, Vergibt sich dieser Sorte immer was.

Oh shit, that's right I'm a hat. (In reference to the hat's attempted suicide)

As I never wear a hat myself, it is indifferent to me what sort of hat I don't wear.

The captain’s sister-in-law had traded her mechanic’s coveralls for a colorful shirt, shorts, and a huge straw hat. She looked like a tourist, and because I’m the helpful sort, I told her so.

He had no business to look so sound. I thought to myself — well, if this sort can go wrong like that . . . and I felt as though I could fling down my hat and dance on it from sheer mortification,

Are you annoyed because I didn’t tell you earlier? I’m sorry. But it’s not the sort of thing one can just blurt out over tea, or in the entrance hall …‘Here’s your hat, and by the way, I’m a virgin

All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants at home or those I saw coming through France and Germany, with short jackets and round hats and home-made trousers; but others were very picturesque. The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist.

So where is it?” Harry asked suspiciously. “Unfortunately,” said Scrimgeour, “that sword was not Dumbledore’s to give away. The sword of Godric Gryffindor is an important historical artifact, and as such, belongs—” “It belongs to Harry!” said Hermione hotly. “It chose him, he was the one who found it, it came to him out of the Sorting Hat—” “According to reliable historical sources, the sword may present itself to any worthy Gryffindor,” said Scrimgeour. “That does not make it the exclusive property of Mr. Potter, whatever Dumbledore may have decided.” Scrimgeour scratched his badly shaven cheek, scrutinizing Harry. “Why do you think—?” “—Dumbledore wanted to give me the sword?” said Harry, struggling to keep his temper. “Maybe he thought it would look nice on my wall.” “This is not a joke, Potter!” growled Scrimgeour. “Was it because Dumbledore believed that only the sword of Godric Gryffindor could defeat the Heir of Slytherin? Did he wish to give you that sword, Potter, because he believed, as do many, that you are the one destined to destroy He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?” “Interesting theory,” said Harry. “Has anyone ever tried sticking a sword in Voldemort? Maybe the Ministry should put some people onto that, instead of wasting their time stripping down Deluminators or covering up breakouts from Azakaban. So is this what you’ve been doing, Minister, shut up in your office, trying to break open a Snitch? People are dying—I was nearly one of them—Voldemort chased me across three counties, he killed Mad-Eye Moody, but there’s been no word about any of that from the Ministry, has there? And you still expect us to cooperate with you?” “You go too far!” shouted Scrimgeour, standing up; Harry jumped to his feet too. Scrimgeour limped toward Harry and jabbed him hard in the chest with the point of his wand: It singed a hole in Harry’s T-shirt like a lit cigarette. “Oi!” said Ron, jumping up and raising his own wand, but Harry said, “No! D’you want to give him an excuse to arrest us?” “Remembered you’re not at school, have you?” said Scrimgeour, breathing hard into Harry’s face. “Remembered that I am not Dumbledore, who forgave your insolence and insubordination? You may wear that scar like a crown, Potter, but it is not up to a seventeen-year-old boy to tell me how to do my job! It’s time you learned some respect!” “It’s time you earned it,” said Harry.

The hat, above all, struck me; it is a sort of truncated column, and does not adapt itself in the least to the shape of the head; but I am told it is easier to bring about a revolution than to invent a graceful hat.

Nac Mac Feegle were always looking for a fight, in a cheerful sort of way, and when they had no one to fight they fought one another, and if one was all by himself he’d kick his own nose just to keep in practice. Technically

I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story," said Ford. "Eh?" "Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?" "Yes of course I do." "Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting `Gotcha'. It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it." "Why not?" "Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end." "What are you talking about?" "Never mind, eat the fruit.

The Sorting Hat is notorious for refusing to admit it has made a mistake in its sorting of a student. On those occasions when Slytherins behave altruistically or selflessly, when Ravenclaws flunk all their exams, when Hufflepuffs prove lazy yet academically gifted and when Gryffindors exhibit cowardice, the Hat steadfastly backs its original decision. On balance, however, the Hat has made remarkably few errors of judgement over the many centuries it has been at work.

Guess what song they picked for their first dance.” “What song?” “‘From This Moment On’ by Shania Twain.” He frowns. “I never heard of that before.” “It’s really cheesy, but they love it, apparently. Do you realize that we don’t have a song? Like, a song that’s ours.” “Okay, then let’s pick one.” “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t just pick your song. The song picks you. Like the Sorting Hat.” Peter nods sagely. He finally finished reading all seven Harry Potter books and he’s always eager to prove that he gets my references. “Got it.” “It has to just…happen. A moment. And the song transcends the moment, you know? My mom and dad’s song was ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton. They danced to it at their wedding.” “So how did it become their song, then?” “It was the first song they ever slow danced to in college. It was at a dance, not long after they first started dating. I’ve seen pictures from that night. Daddy’s wearing a suit that was too big on him and my mom’s hair is in a French twist.” “How about whatever song comes on next, that’s our song. It’ll be fate.” “We can’t just make our own fate.” “Sure we can.” Peter reaches over to turn on the radio. “Wait! Just any radio station? What if it’s not a slow song?” “Okay so we’ll put on Lite 101.” Peter hits the button. “Winnie the Pooh doesn’t know what to do, got a honey jar stuck on his nose,” a woman croons. Peter says, “What the hell?” as I say, “This can’t be our song.” “Best out of three?” he suggests.

The Sinhalese were perplexed by their endemic restlessness and their eating habits, declaring the Portuguese to be “a very white and beautiful people, who wear hats and boots of iron and never stop in one place. They eat a sort of white stone and drink blood.” Such

Er Lang examined his shoes in dismay. “You should have told me there was mud down here.” “Is that all you can say?” But I was glad, so glad to see him that I hugged him tightly. Despite his concern about his shoes, he didn’t seem to mind as I pressed my grimy face against his shoulder. “Last time it was a cemetery, and now the bottom of a well,” he remarked. “What were you doing anyway?” As I explained, his tone became icy. “So, you saved a murderer and let yourself be abandoned. Do you have some sort of death wish?” “Why are you so angry?” Pushing back his hat, I searched his face. It was a mistake, for faced with his unnerving good looks, I could only drop my eyes. “You might have broken your neck. Why can’t you leave these things to the proper authorities?” “I didn’t do it on purpose.” Incredibly, we were arguing again. “And where were you all this time? You could have sent me a message!” “How was I supposed to do that when you never left the house alone?” “But you could have come at any time. I was waiting for you!” Er Lang was incensed. “Is this the thanks I get?” If I had thought it through, I would never have done it. But I grasped the collar of his rope and pulled his face to mine. “Thank you,” I said, and kissed him. I meant to break away at once, but he caught me, his hand behind my head. “Are you going to complain about this?” he demanded. Wordlessly, I shook my head. My face reddened, remembering my awkward remarks about tongues last time. He must have recalled them as well, for he gave me an inscrutable look. “Open your mouth then.” “Why?” “I’m going to put my tongue in.” That he could joke at a time like this was really unbelievable. Despite my outrage, however, I flung myself into his arms. Half laughing, half furious, I pressed my mouth fiercely against his. He pinned me against the well shaft. The stone chilled my back through my wet clothes, but my skin burned where he held my wrists. Gasping, I could feel the heat of him as his tongue slipped inside. My pulse raced; my body trembled uncontrollably. There was only the hard pressure of his mouth, the slick thrust of his tongue. I wanted to cry, but no tears came. A river was melting in me, my core dissolving like wax in his arms. My ears hummed, I could only hear the rasping of our breaths, the hammering of my heart. A stifled moan escaped my lips. He gave a long sigh and broke away.

He was sitting at one of the tables. He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all that motley assemblage he sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years.

Women in the past have used all sorts of phrases to describe me: cute. Sexy, but in a nerdy way. Hot as hell when I slide a blindfold over their eyes. The man of their dreams when I kiss their wrists, untying them from the ropes I like to use to keep them still while I eat them out.

She knows - or rather, is haunted by - all sorts of things she'll never talk about to anyone. Mainly because she's frightened of these revelations that go coursing through her, but also because naming them would give them a reality, an existence. She's more interested in casting them out.

Here's what I want you to learn from this: Never let someone answer a question for you. Jump in with anything at all to make sure hat you're the one talking. Say, 'That's an interesting question', or 'I'm glad you asked that question,' or 'Oh goody, my favorite subject.' Say anything that will guarantee that you're in the conversation about yourself and not out of it like a teenager standing next to her mother at a cocktail party. You must tell your own story, never let someone, even someone as familiar to you as your sister-in-law think she knows you better than you know yourself. She only sees what you do, she doesn't' see who you are inside. If I regret anything when I look back, it's how often I allowed people to think what they wanted to thing. I should've stopped them sort. I should've laughed at their assumptions. I should've hooted with laughter, 'Hoo hoo hoo,' and followed with twinkling, mischievous smile just to throw them off, just to keep them guessing, The problem is they watch what you do, who you love, how you cook, what you read and what you don't read, and they decide what it means, and sometimes you're not there to stop them, or you get the timing wrong. I've always wondered why people look so much to action for meaning. When people tell you a story, something that happened to them, something important, don't ask them what they did , ask them what they wanted to do, what they want to do is who they are. Actions are whispers compared to dreams.

One by one across the vast room, women stepped forward out of the crowd, discarding shirts, hats, or dresses to reveal their Malevolent Guard uniform beneath. They’d been there all along, hidden behind the misplaced idea that women did not need to be watched so closely, that they couldn’t be any sort of true risk.

[Ackley] took another look at my hat . . . “Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That’s a deer shooting hat.” “Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.

His perceptions of copperhood were formed by the dream of England, still. A copper was a bloke in a slightly silly hat who walked the beat, talked to shopkeepers about the price of fish, and sorted out young ruffians. You didn't attack him. It was like attacking a field of wheat, and anyway, you'd have to answer to his mum.

They were nothing but ravens—I knew that—what they thought of me could be a matter of no consequence—and yet when even a raven shouts after you, "What a hat!" "Oh, pull down your vest!" and that sort of thing, it hurts you and humiliates you, and there is no getting around it with fine reasoning and pretty arguments. Animals

Oh, they never look at anything that folks like we can understand," the carter continued, by way of passing the time. "On'y foreign tongues used in the days of the Tower of Babel, when no two families spoke alike. They read that sort of thing as fast as a night-hawk will whir. 'Tis all learning there—nothing but learning, except religion. And that's learning too, for I never could understand it. Yes, 'tis a serious-minded place. Not but there's wenches in the streets o' nights… You know, I suppose, that they raise pa'sons there like radishes in a bed? And though it do take—how many years, Bob?—five years to turn a lirruping hobble-de-hoy chap into a solemn preaching man with no corrupt passions, they'll do it, if it can be done, and polish un off like the workmen they be, and turn un out wi' a long face, and a long black coat and waistcoat, and a religious collar and hat, same as they used to wear in the Scriptures, so that his own mother wouldn't know un sometimes. … There, 'tis their business, like anybody else's.

It's the sort of thing that if it has to be explained, you're not going to understand... I've lived the literal meaning of the "land of the free" and "home of the brave". It's not corny for me. I feel it in my heart. I feel it in my chest. Even at a ball game, when someone talks during the anthem or doesn't take off his hat, it pisses me off.

What would you like for your own life, Kate, if you could choose?” “Anything?” “Of course anything.” “That’s really easy, Aunty Ivy.” “Go on then.” “A straw hat...with a bright scarlet ribbon tied around the top and a bow at the back. A tea-dress like girls used to wear, with big red poppies all over the fabric. A pair of flat, white pumps, comfortable but really pretty. A bicycle with a basket on the front. In the basket is a loaf of fresh bread, cheese, fruit oh...and a bottle of sparkly wine, you know, like posh people drink. “I’m cycling down a lane. There are no lorries or cars or bicycles. No people – just me. The sun is shining through the trees, making patterns on the ground. At the end of the lane is a gate, sort of hidden between the bushes and trees. I stop at the gate, get off the bike and wheel it into the garden. “In the garden there are flowers of all kinds, especially roses. They’re my favourite. I walk down the little path to a cottage. It’s not big, just big enough. The front door needs painting and has a little stained glass window at the top. I take the food out of the basket and go through the door. “Inside, everything is clean, pretty and bright. There are vases of flowers on every surface and it smells sweet, like lemon cake. At the end of the room are French windows. They need painting too, but it doesn’t matter. I go through the French windows into a beautiful garden. Even more flowers there...and a veranda. On the veranda is an old rocking chair with patchwork cushions and next to it a little table that has an oriental tablecloth with gold tassels. I put the food on the table and pour the wine into a glass. I’d sit in the rocking chair and close my eyes and think to myself... this is my place.” From A DISH OF STONES

Having never had dealings with Bow Street, Lady Fieldhurst was not quite certain what to expect: perhaps a stout fellow past his prime, befuddled with sleep or spirits, with a bulbous red nose—the same sort as might be found in any number of watchmen’s boxes across the metropolis. The individual who entered the room in [the footman's] wake, however, was very nearly her own age. To be sure, his nose was somewhat crooked, as if it had been broken at some point, but it was far from bulbous, and it was certainly not red. He was quite tall, almost gangly, with curling brown hair tied at the nape of his neck in an outmoded queue. He wore an unfashionably shallow-crowned hat and a black swallow-tailed coat of good cloth but indifferent cut; indeed, his only claim to fashion lay in the quizzing glass which hung round his neck from a black ribbon, and which he now raised, the resulting magnification revealing his eyes to be a warm brown. Julia might have been much reassured as to his competence, had it not been for the fact that his mouth hung open as from a rusty hinge.

Well, once again we are invaded. And, humiliatingly, by a lifeform which is absurd. My colleague Tim Powers once said that Martians could invade us simply by putting on funny hats, and we'd never notice. It's a sort of low-budget invasion. I guess we're at the point where we can be amused by the idea of Earth being invaded. (And this is when they really zap you.

I've learned that God sometimes allows us to find ourselves in a place where we want something so bad that we can't see past it. Sometimes we can't even see God because of it. When we want something so bad, it's easy to mistake what we truly need for the thing we really want. When this sort of thing happens, and it seems to happen to everyone, I've found it's because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road. In the Bible, the people following God had the same problem I did. They swapped the real thing for an image of the real thing. We target the wrong thing and our misdirected life's goal ends up looking like a girl or a wide-brimmed hat or a golden calf. All along, what God really wants for us is something much different, something more tailored for us. [...] And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I don't think it looks like a series of folded-overs that have shaped our lives. Instead I think we'll conclude in the end that maybe we're all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better.

Because there’s a silent, shrugging, stoical acceptance of all the things in the world we can never be part of: shorts, swimming pools, strappy dresses, country walks, roller-skating, ra-ra skirts, vest tops, high heels, rope climbing, sitting on a high stool, walking past building sites, flirting, being kissed, feeling confident. And ever losing weight, ever. The idea of suggesting we don’t have to be fat –that things could change –is the most distant and alien prospect of all. We’re fat now and we’ll be fat forever and we must never, ever mention it, and that is the end of it. It’s like Harry Potter’s Sorting Hat. We were pulled from the hat marked ‘Fat’ and that is what we must now remain, until we die. Fat is our race. Our species. Our mode. As a result, there is very little of the outside world –and very little of the year –we can enjoy. Summer is sweaty under self-conscious layers. On stormy days, wind flattens skirts against thighs, and alarms both us and, we think, onlookers and passers-by. Winter is the only time we feel truly comfortable: covered head to toe in jumpers, coats, boots and hat. I develop a crush on Father Christmas. If I married him, not only would I be expected to stay fat, but I’d look thin standing next to him, in comparison. Perspective would be my friend. We all dream of moving to Norway, or Alaska, where we could wear massive padded coats all the time, and never reveal an inch of flesh. When it rains, we’re happiest of all. Then we can just stay in, away from everyone, in our pyjamas, and not worry about anything. The brains in jars can stay inside, nice and dry.

I’ve noticed that most Scottish people don’t inquire beyond “down south,” and I can only assume that this description encapsulates some sort of generic Englandshire for them, boat races and bowler hats, as though Liverpool and Cornwall were the same sorts of places, inhabited by the same sorts of people. Conversely, they are always adamant that every part of their own country is unique and special. I’m not sure why.

What if I’m in Slytherin?” The whisper was for his father alone, and Harry knew that only the moment of departure could have forced Albus to reveal how great and sincere that fear was. Harry crouched down so that Albus’s face was slightly above his own. Alone of Harry’s three children, Albus had inherited Lily’s eyes. “Albus Severus,” Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear, and she was tactful enough to pretend to be waving to Rose, who was now on the train, “you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.” “But just say--” “--then Slytherin House will have gained an excellent student, won’t it? It doesn’t matter to us, Al. But if it matters to you, you’ll be able to choose Gryffindor over Slytherin. The Sorting Hat takes your choice into account.” “Really?” “It did for me,” said Harry. He had never told any of his children that before, and he saw the wonder in Albus’s face when he said it. But now the doors were slamming all along the scarlet train, and the blurred outlines of parents were swarming forward for final kisses, last-minute reminders. Albus jumped into the carriage and Ginny closed the door behind him. Students were hanging from the windows nearest them. A great number of faces, both on the train and off, seemed to be turned toward Harry. “Why are they all staring?” demanded Albus as he and Rose craned around to look at the other students. “Don’t let it worry you,” said Ron. “It’s me. I’m extremely famous.” Albus, Rose, Hugo, and Lily laughed. The train began to move, and Harry walked alongside it, watching his son’s thin face, already ablaze with excitement.

The rest of the crowd was watching the entertainment unfold. Not him, though. He had other things to do. The pretty girl with heart-shaped lips and the sort of curves that made him ache with longing was by herself now, leaving her family and heading away from the beach. He stood up, swinging his haversack over his shoulder and pulling his hat down low. He'd been waiting for an opportunity like this one and he didn't intend to waste it.

Riddle said I'm like him. Strange likenesses, he said...." "Did he now?" said Dumbledore, looking thoughtfully at Harry from under his thick silver eyebrows. "And what do you think, Harry?" "I don't think I'm like him!" said Harry, more loudly than he'd intended. "I mean, I'm- I'm in Gryffindor, I'm..." But he fell silent, a lurking doubt resurfacing in his mind. "Professor," he started again after a moment. "The Sorting Hat told me I'd- I'd have done well in Slytherin. Everyone thought I was Slytherin's heir for a while... because I can speak Parseltongue...." "You can speak Parseltongue, Harry," said Dumbledore calmly, "because Lord Voldemort- who is the last remaining ancestor of Salazar Slytherin- can speak Parseltongue. Unless I'm much mistaken, he transferred some of his own powers to you the night he gave you that scar. Not something he intended to do, I'm sure..." "Voldemort put a bit of himself in me?" Harry said, thunderstruck. "It certainly seems so." "So I should be in Slytherin," Harry said, looking desperately into Dumbledore's face. "The Sorting Hat could see Slytherin's power in me, and it-" "Put you in Gryffindor," said Dumbledore calmly. "Listen to me, Harry. You happen to have many qualities Salazar Slytherin prized in his hand-picked students. His own very rare gift, Parseltongue- resourcefulness- determination- a certain disregard for rules," he added his mustache quivering again. "Yet the Sorting Hat placed you in Gryffindor. You know why that was. Think." "It only put me in Gryffindor," said Harry in a defeated voice, "because I asked not to go in Slytherin...." "Exactly," said Dumbledore, beaming once more. "Which makes you very different from Tom Riddle. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

Although it may seem like you're losing your individuality when you part with your belongings, the reality seems to be the other way around. Take the people you see in old European photographs as an example. All the men are generally wearing the same types of suits and hats, and they're all smoking cigarettes with the same sort of possessions around them. Yet the art and literature that those people created was incredibly original, to say the least.

ON THE A TRAIN There were no seats to be had on the A train last night, but I had a good grip on the pole at the end of one of the seats and I was reading the beauty column of the Journal-American, which the man next to me was holding up in front of him. All of a sudden I felt a tap on my arm, and I looked down and there was a man beginning to stand up from the seat where he was sitting. "Would you like to sit down?" he said. Well, I said the first thing that came into my head, I was so surprised and pleased to be offered a seat in the subway. "Oh, thank you very much," I said, "but I am getting out at the next station." He sat back and that was that, but I felt all set up and I thought what a nice man he must be and I wondered what his wife was like and I thought how lucky she was to have such a polite husband, and then all of a sudden I realized that I wasn't getting out at the next station at all but the one after that, and I felt perfectly terrible. I decided to get out at the next station anyway, but then I thought, If I get out at the next station and wait around for the next train I'll miss my bus and they only go every hour and that will be silly. So I decided to brazen it out as best I could, and when the train was slowing up at the next station I stared at the man until I caught his eye and then I said, "I just remembered this isn't my station after all." Then I thought he would think I was asking him to stand up and give me his seat, so I said, "But I still don't want to sit down, because I'm getting off at the next station." I showed him by my expression that I thought it was all rather funny, and he smiled, more or less, and nodded, and lifted his hat and put it back on his head again and looked away. He was one of those small, rather glum or sad men who always look off into the distance after they have finished what they are saying, when they speak. I felt quite proud of my strong-mindedness at not getting off the train and missing my bus simply because of the fear of a little embarrassment, but just as the train was shutting its doors I peered out and there it was, 168th Street. "Oh dear!" I said. "That was my station and now I have missed the bus!" I was fit to be fled, and I had spoken quite loudly, and I felt extremely foolish, and I looked down, and the man who had offered me his seat was partly looking at me, and I said, "Now, isn't that silly? That was my station. A Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street is where I'm supposed to get off." I couldn't help laughing, it was all so awful, and he looked away, and the train fidgeted along to the next station, and I got off as quickly as I possibly could and tore over to the downtown platform and got a local to 168th, but of course I had missed my bus by a minute, or maybe two minutes. I felt very much at a loose end wandering around 168th Street, and I finally went into a rudely appointed but friendly bar and had a martini, warm but very soothing, which cost me only fifty cents. While I was sipping it, trying to make it last to exactly the moment that would get me a good place in the bus queue without having to stand too long in the cold, I wondered what I should have done about that man in the subway. After all, if I had taken his seat I probably would have got out at 168th Street, which would have meant that I would hardly have been sitting down before I would have been getting up again, and that would have seemed odd. And rather grasping of me. And he wouldn't have got his seat back, because some other grasping person would have slipped into it ahead of him when I got up. He seemed a retiring sort of man, not pushy at all. I hesitate to think of how he must have regretted offering me his seat. Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do.

Ah,” she said, “that explains it.” She seemed happy with this. I’ve noticed that most Scottish people don’t inquire beyond “down south,” and I can only assume that this description encapsulates some sort of generic Englandshire for them, boat races and bowler hats, as though Liverpool and Cornwall were the same sorts of places, inhabited by the same sorts of people. Conversely, they are always adamant that every part of their own country is unique and special. I’m not sure why.

Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting ‘Gotcha.’ It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.” “Why not?” “Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.

Snegiryov, fussing and bewildered, ran after the coffin in his old, short, almost summer coat, bare-headed, with his old wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand. He was in some sort of insoluble anxiety, now reaching out suddenly to support the head of the coffin, which only interfered with the bearers, then running alongside to see if he could find a place for himself. A flower fell on the snow, and he simply rushed to pick it up, as if God knows what might come from the loss of this flower.

Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, “Do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple.” Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting, “Gotcha.” It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.

Here you will meet singular side-whiskers, tucked with extraordinary and amazing art under the necktie, velvety whiskers, satiny whiskers, black as sable or coal, but, alas, belonging only to the foreign office. Providence has denied black side-whiskers to those serving in other departments; they, however great the unpleasantness, must wear red ones. Here you will meet wondrous mustaches, which no pen or brush is able to portray; mustaches to which the better part of a lifetime is devoted––object of long vigils by day and by night; mustaches on which exquisite perfumes and scents have been poured, and which have been anointed with all the most rare and precious sorts of pomades, mustaches which are wrapped overnight in fine vellum, mustaches which are subject to the most touching affection of their possessors and are the envy of passers-by. A thousand kinds of hats, dresses, shawls––gay-colored, ethereal, for which their owners' affection sometimes lasts a whole two days––will bedazzle anyone on Nevsky Prospect.

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do. “Make ’em dry” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.” It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.

The young man was sort of ... well ... peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know.

When Nature makes a chump like dear old Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump when, but for it, he might cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I’m a chump. Well, if I had remembered half the things people have tried to teach me during my life, my size in hats would be about number nine. But I didn’t. I forgot them. And it was just the same with Bobbie.

Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?” “Yes, of course I do.” “Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting ‘Gotcha.’ It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.” “Why not?” “Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.

We’re not evenly matched.” I pointed to his tie then put my hands on my hips and mimicked his stance. I hoped bravado and wine-haze would prop up my resolve. So far so good. He glared at me, looking resentful, and his voice was steely as he asked, “What, specifically, makes you think so?” I lifted my chin and indicated his tie again, “Your tie, Quinn. I have on nine pieces of clothing and, assuming you’re wearing underwear of some sort, you have on ten. Now I can either put on my hat or you can take off your tie.” His glare morphed into a perplexed frown as I spoke but then, when I reached the end of the last sentence, his features transitioned into something like petulant yet amused understanding and most of the rigidity left his shoulders and neck. We stared at each other, again almost for a half minute, before I broke the silence. “Or, you could take off your jacket…?” Quinn’s mouth hooked to the side and he smoothly removed his jacket; he tossed it to the pile created by my discarded clothes. He began unfastening his cufflinks at his sleeves and the breath he released while pinning me with an irritated stare sounded relieved.

I advise two modifications for seniors. First, wear sunglasses during morning exercise outdoors. This will reduce the influence of morning light being sent to your suprachiasmatic clock that would otherwise keep you on an early-to-rise schedule. Second, go back outside in the late afternoon for sunlight exposure, but this time do not wear sunglasses. Make sure to wear sun protection of some sort, such as a hat, but leave the sunglasses at home. Plentiful later-afternoon daylight will help delay the evening release of melatonin, helping push the timing of sleep to a later hour.

There is a lovely old-fashioned pearl set in the treasure chest, but Mother said real flowers were the prettiest ornament for a young girl, and Laurie promised to send me all I want," replied Meg. "Now, let me see, there's my new gray walking suit, just curl up the feather in my hat, Beth, then my poplin for Sunday and the small party, it looks heavy for spring, doesn't it? The violet silk would be so nice. Oh, dear!" "Never mind, you've got the tarlaton for the big party, and you always look like an angel in white," said Amy, brooding over the little store of finery in which her soul delighted. "It isn't low-necked, and it doesn't sweep enough, but it will have to do. My blue housedress looks so well, turned and freshly trimmed, that I feel as if I'd got a new one. My silk sacque isn't a bit the fashion, and my bonnet doesn't look like Sallie's. I didn't like to say anything, but I was sadly disappointed in my umbrella. I told Mother black with a white handle, but she forgot and bought a green one with a yellowish handle. It's strong and neat, so I ought not to complain, but I know I shall feel ashamed of it beside Annie's silk one with a gold top," sighed Meg, surveying the little umbrella with great disfavor. "Change it," advised Jo. "I won't be so silly, or hurt Marmee's feelings, when she took so much pains to get my things. It's a nonsensical notion of mine, and I'm not going to give up to it. My silk stockings and two pairs of new gloves are my comfort. You are a dear to lend me yours, Jo. I feel so rich and sort of elegant, with two new pairs, and the old ones cleaned up for common." And Meg took a refreshing peep at her glove box. "Annie Moffat has blue and pink bows on her nightcaps. Would you put some on mine?" she asked, as Beth brought up a pile of snowy muslins, fresh from Hannah's hands. "No, I wouldn't, for the smart caps won't match the plain gowns without any trimming on them. Poor folks shouldn't rig," said Jo decidedly. "I wonder if I shall ever be happy enough to have real lace on my clothes and bows on my caps?" said Meg impatiently. "You said the other day that you'd be perfectly happy if you could only go to Annie Moffat's," observed Beth in her quiet way. "So I did! Well, I am happy, and I won't fret, but it does seem as if the more one gets the more one wants, doesn't it?

About four o’clock a stranger entered the village from the direction of the downs. He was a short, stout person in an extraordinarily shabby top hat, and he appeared to be very much out of breath. His cheeks were alternately limp and tightly puffed. His mottled face was apprehensive, and he moved with a sort of reluctant alacrity. He turned the corner of the church, and directed his way to the “Coach and Horses.” Among others old Fletcher remembers seeing him, and indeed the old gentleman was so struck by his peculiar agitation that he inadvertently allowed a quantity of whitewash to run down the brush into the sleeve of his coat while regarding him

I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story,” said Ford. “Eh?” “Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?” “Yes, of course I do.” “Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting ‘Gotcha.’ It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.” “Why not?” “Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.” “What are you talking about?” “Never mind, eat the fruit.

I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story,’ said Ford. ‘Eh?’ ‘Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?’ ‘Yes of course I do.’ ‘Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, “Do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple.” Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting, “Gotcha.” It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Never mind, eat the fruit.

You know, I've never known much about fashion, living in the country and all," she said innocently. "What sort of hat would a lady like myself wear to an afternoon tea outside, in the garden, with other ladies? Assuming I'm ever invited, of course." "Oh, that's easy... a lovely straw number, with a wide brim, en grecque curls if you're dining amongst the ruins, or piles of flowers and feathers, and tipped, just so..." Belle allowed herself a little smile. "No one has worn hats like that, even in this remote part of the world, for at lest ten years. Not even Madame Bussard has pulled one out of her own wardrobe recently. And she is very thrifty with her accessories. So whatever happened here must have happened at least a decade ago.

Drelmere and sons, fine outfitters for the discerning magician!” he was shouting, his voice barely carrying over the hubbub. “Robes! Pointy hats! Beard grooming supplies! Yes, you sir, how can OH GOD HURRAAARRGLAB.” I waited patiently for him to finish decorating the pavement with his stomach contents. “Sorry,” he said, bent double and gulping. Impressively, he immediately continued his sales pitch from that position. “Looking for a new robe?” “Yes, this one’s starting to whiff a bit.” “Yes, I . . . gathered that, sir.” He took a few deep, groaning breaths into a star-patterned hanky and seemed to gather himself. “What sort of price range were you OH GOD YOUR EYES HURRAAARRGLAB.” I tapped my now bile-sodden foot. “Shall I come back later?

Readin' all those books makes me wonder whether anyone ever dies natural." " They don't," said William mysteriously. " Robert says so. At least he says there's hundreds an' thousands of murders what no one finds out. You see, you c'n only find out a person's died nacheral by cuttin' 'em up an' they've not got time to cut everyone up what dies. They've simply not got the time. They do it like what they do with our desks at school. They jus' open one sometimes to see if it's all right. They've not got time to open 'em all every day. An' same as every time they do open a desk they find it untidy, jus' in the same way whenever they do cut anyone dead up they find he's been poisoned. Practically always. Robert says so. He says that the amount of people who poison people who aren't cut up and don't get found out mus' be enormous. Jus' think of it. People pois'nin' people all over the place an' no one findin' out. If I was a policeman I'd cut everyone dead up. But they aren't any use, policemen aren't. Why, in all those books I've read there hasn't been a single policeman that was any good at all. They simply don't know what to do when anyone murders anyone. Why, you remember in ' The Mystery of the Yellow Windows,' the policemen were s' posed to have searched the room for clues an' they di'n't notice the cigarette end what the murd'rer had left in the fender and what had the address of the people what made it on it an' what was a sort they made special for him. Well, that shows you what the policemen are, dun't it ? I mean, they look very swanky in their hats an' buttons an' all that, but when it comes to a murder or cuttin' dead people up or findin' out murd'rers, they aren't any good at all. Why, in all those myst'ry tales we've read, it's not been the police that found the murd'rers at all. It's been ordinary people same as you an' me jus' usin' common sense an' pickin' up cigarette ends an' such-like. . . . Tell you what it is," he said, warm- ing to his theme, " policemen have gotter be stupid 'cause of their clothes. I mean, all the policemen's clothes are made so big that they've gotter be very big men to fit 'em an' big men are always stupid 'cause of their strength all goin' to their bodies 'stead of their brains. That stands to reason, dun't it ?

There was Bobbie, ambling gently through life, a dear old chap in a hundred ways, but undoubtedly a chump of the first water. And there was Mary, determined that he shouldn’t be a chump. And Nature, mind you, on Bobbie’s side. When Nature makes a chump like dear old Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump, when, but for it, he might cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I’m a chump. Well, if I had remembered half the things people have tried to teach me during my life, my size in hats would be about number nine. But I didn’t. I forgot them. And it was just the same with Bobbie.

Harry's thoughts flashed back to possibly the worst moment of his life to date, those long seconds of blood-freezing horror beneath the Hat, when he thought he'd already failed. He'd wished then to fall back just a few minutes in time and change something, anything before it was too late... And then it had turned out to not be too late after all. Wish granted. You couldn't change history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the first time around. This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And that was where it all started going wrong.' And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice... Wish granted. Now what?

Good Morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat. “What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” “All of them at once,” said Bilbo. “And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain. If you have a pipe about you, sit down and have a fill of mine! There’s no hurry, we have all the day before us!” Then Bilbo sat down on a seat by his door, crossed his legs, and blew out a beautiful grey ring of smoke that sailed up into the air without breaking and floated away over The Hill. “Very pretty!” said Gandalf. “But I have no time to blow smoke-rings this morning. I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.” “I should think so—in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them,” said our Mr. Baggins, and stuck one thumb behind his braces, and blew out another even bigger smoke-ring. Then he took out his morning letters, and began to read, pretending to take no more notice of the old man. He had decided that he was not quite his sort, and wanted him to go away. But the old man did not move. He stood leaning on his stick and gazing at the hobbit without saying anything, till Bilbo got quite uncomfortable and even a little cross. “Good morning!” he said at last. “We don’t want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water.” By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.

I tried to pray, but my mind kept wandering. Under all these brims and bows, what were people really thinking? There were few clues, only the fantasies I spun out. Did any of these women ever worry, as I did, that too much thinking might unravel their lives? You were supposed to believe that this way of life was the only true one. You were supposed to tell yourself that the rituals and restrictions were binding and beautiful. And if you felt any rumblings of dissatisfaction, you were supposed to believe that the problem lay with you. My own discontent, I hoped, remained well hidden. It wasn't the sort of thing I would have shared with my mother-in-law or sisters-in-law, who sat beside me wearing hats of their own. Along with the actual rules, there was another set of laws, equally stringent yet more unforgiving, enforced not by a belief in God but by communal eyes that were just as all-seeing and all-knowing. Inside my head, a voice constantly whispered: What will they think?

I’m very hungry, Sir Wulf,’ she whispered hopefully. ‘Is that soup?’ ‘Don’t you dare!’ breathed Goodbye. ‘It’s our spell, and you can’t have any.’ September brightened a little. This was what she had come for: witches and spells and wairwulves. ‘What sort of spell?’ All three looked at her as though she had asked what color a carrot is. ‘We’re witches,’ said Hello. Manythanks pointed meaningfully at his hat. ‘But witches do all kinds of spells—’ ‘That’s sorceresses,’ corrected Goodbye. ‘And magic—’ ‘That’s wizards,’ sighed Hello. ‘And they change people into things—’ ‘That’s thaumaturgists,’ huffed Manythanks. ‘And make people do things—’ ‘Enchantresses,’ sneered Goodbye. ‘And they do curses and hexes—’ ‘Stregas,’ hissed both sisters. ‘And change into owls and cats—’ ‘Brujas,’ growled Manythanks. ‘Well . . . what do witches do, then?’ September refused to feel foolish. It was hard enough for a human to get into Fairyland. True stories must be nearly impossible to get out. ‘We look into the future,’ grinned Goodbye. ‘And we help it along.

I’m talking to God here, be with ye as soon as we’re done,— Is Mason going to get angry and into a fight? Will he stand and announce, “This is none of God’s judgment,— to be offended as gravely by Calendar Reform as by Mortal Sin, requires a meanness of spirit quite out of the reach of any known Deity,— tho’ well within the resources of Stroud, it seems.” And walk out thro’ their stunn’d ranks to the Embrace of the Night, and never enter the place again? No.— He buys ev’ryone another Pint, instead, and resigns himself to seeking out his Family tomorrow,— tho’ sure Agents of Melancholy, they sooner or later feel regretful for it, whilst Regret is just the sort of Sentiment that regular life at The George depends on having no part of. The Landlord is kind and forthright, the Ale as good as any in Britain, the Defenestration of the Clothiers in ’56 has inscrib’d the place forever in Legend, and Good Eggs far outnumber Bad Hats,— yet so dismal have these late Hours in it been for Mason, as to make him actually look forward to meeting his Relations again.

Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it out to centre field; and that there, after a minute's pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt towards the pitcher's mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to handle radioactive isotopes, and a mattress strapped to each leg. Imagine moreover that if this batsman fails to hit the ball in a way that heartens him sufficiently to try to waddle sixty feet with mattresses strapped to his legs he is under no formal compulsion to run; he may stand there all day, and as a rule, does. If by some miracle he is coaxed into making a misstroke that leads to his being put out, all the fielders throw up their arms in triumph and have a hug. Then tea is called and everyone retires happily to a distant pavilion to fortify for the next siege. Now imagine all this going on for so long that by the time the match concludes autumn has crept in and all your library books are overdue. There you have cricket.

Considering how shaky was his moral outlook and how marked his tendency to weave low plots at the drop of a hat, you would have expected Bingley's headquarters to have been one of those sinister underground dens lit by stumps of candles stuck in the mouths of empty beer bottles such as abound, I believe, in places like Whitechapel and Limehouse. But no. Number 5 Ormond Crescent turned out to be quite an expensive-looking joint with a nice little bit of garden in front of it well supplied with geraniums, bird baths and terracotta gnomes, the sort of establishment that might have belonged to a blameless retired Colonel or a saintly stockbroker. Evidently his late uncle hadn't been just an ordinary small town grocer, weighing out potted meats and raisins to a public that had to watch the pennies, but something on a much more impressive scale. I learned later that he had owned a chain of shops, one of them as far afield as Birmingham, and why the ass had gone and left his money to a chap like Bingley is more than I can tell you, though the probability is that Bingley, before bumping him off with some little-known Asiatic poison, had taken the precaution of forging the will.

Suddenly, he wanted some credit for it. He wanted someone to thank him for not crapping on the institution of love. He wanted someone to thank him for not being yet another dilettante. He wanted someone to thank him for quitting poetry. He wanted some great poet to thank him for quitting poetry instead of desecrating it with his amateurishness. He wanted some unborn child to thank him for not conceiving her and not leaving her a hope chest full of mawkish villanelles. He wanted some sort of organization of martyrs to give him an award. He wanted to be decorated for not putting up a fuss. He wanted to be the president of forgettable people. He wanted there to be a competition for the least competitive person, and he wanted to win that competition. He wanted some sort of badge or outfit or medal or key or hat. He wanted to be asked to stand. He wanted to be considered. He wanted to be considered in earnest before being ignored. He wanted all the insane and beautiful and passionate people in the world to take one moment of silence in gratitude for the ones who had ceded them the stage-- he, the unread poet, the sacrifice, the schoolteacher-- he wanted one goddamned moment of appreciation.

How goes the investigation into Lady Lynden?" Hughe asked. "We saw her yesterday in the village." "She saw you too," Orlando said. "She thought your hat was ridiculous by the way." She'd said no such thing, but Orlando knew the sort of hat Hughe usually wore when he was playing the part of the fop and they were always elaborate and impractical. "That was my best hat." "She's very beautiful," Cole said, unexpectedly. He never noticed beautiful things, not even women. Or if he did, he never commented. For him to say Susanna was a beauty meant he'd certainly noticed. "So?" Orlando snapped. "So I was expecting a murderess to look more...bitter. Shrew-ish." Orlando's head began to pound inside his skull. "Perhaps she's not a murderess then," he heard himself say. "If she isn't," Hughe said lightly, "I wonder if she'd agree to become the next Lady Oxley. I wouldn't mind that slender body wrapped around my-" He slammed back into a tree trunk and his muttered oomph echoed through the woods. Orlando shook out his hand. It hurt, but it felt bloody good shutting Hughe up. It wasn't often he caught him unawares like that. "I win," Cole said. Hughe rubbed his jaw and grunted. "That wasn't a wager I wanted to lose." -Hughe, Orlando and Cole. (The Charmer)

Unfortunately, the Hospital Fund Raising Committee, to which Elizabeth was assigned, spent most of its time mired down in petty trivialities and rarely made a decision on anything. In a fit of bored frustration, Elizabeth finally asked Ian to step into their drawing room one day, while the committee was meeting there, and to give them the benefit of his expertise. “And,” she laughingly warned him in the privacy of his study when he agreed to join them, “no matter how they prose on about every tiny, meaningless expenditure-which they will-promise me you won’t point out to them that you could build six hospitals with less effort and time.” “Could I do that?” he asked, grinning. “Absolutely!” She sighed. “Between them, they must have half the money in Europe, yet they debate about every shilling to be spent as if it were coming out of their own reticules and likely to send them to debtors’ gaol.” “If they offend your thrifty sensibilities, they must be a rare group,” Ian teased. Elizabeth gave him a distracted smile, but when they neared the drawing room, where the committee was drinking tea in Ian’s priceless Sevres china cups, she turned to him and added hastily, “Oh, and don’t comment on Lady Wiltshire’s blue hat.” “Why not?” “Because it’s her hair.” “I wouldn’t do such a thing,” he protested, grinning at her. “Yes, you would!” she whispered, trying to frown and chuckling instead. “The dowager duchess told me that, last night, you complimented the furry dog Lady Shirley had draped over her arm.” “Madam, I was following your specific instructions to be nice to the eccentric old harridan. Why shouldn’t I have complimented her dog?” “Because it was a new fur muff of a rare sort, of which she was extravagantly proud.” “There is no fur on earth that mangy, Elizabeth,” he replied with an impenitent grin. “She’s hoaxing the lot of you,” he added seriously. Elizabeth swallowed a startled laugh and said with an imploring look, “Promise me you’ll be very nice, and very patient with the committee.” “I promise,” he said gravely, but when she reached for the door handle and opened the door-when it was too late to step back and yank it closed-he leaned close to her ear and whispered, “Did you know a camel is the only animal invented by a committee, which is why it turned out the way it has?” If the committee was surprised to see the formerly curt and irascible Marquess of Kensington stroll into their midst wearing a beatific smile worth of a choir boy, they were doubtlessly shocked to see his wife’s hands clamped over her face and her eyes tearing with mirth.

AT: oKAYYYY, mY BROMO SAPIEN, AT: r U READY, AT: tO GET STRAIGHT IN, FLAT DOWN, BROAD SIDE, SCHOOL FED UP THE BONE BULGE, AT: bY A DOPE SMACKED, TRINKED OUT, SMOTHER FUDGING, AT: tROLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL, TG: dont care AT: oK, lET ME, AT: oRGANIZE MY NOTES HERE, AT: oKAYYY, AT: (tURN ON SOME STRICT BEATS MAYBE, iT WILL HELP TO LISTEN TO THEM WHILE i DESTROY YOU,) AT: wHEN THE POLICE MAN BUSTS ME, aND POPS THE TRUNK, AT: hE'S ALL SUPRISED TO FIND I'M TOTING SICK BILLY, AT: wHOSE, AT: gOAT IS THAT, hE ASKS, wHILE HE STOPS TO THUNK AT: aBOUT IT, aND i'S JUST SAY IT'S DAVE'S, yOU SILLY AT: gOOSE, AT: bUT THE MAN SAYS, gOOSE! wHERE, lET ME SEE YOUR HANDS, AT: aND i SAY SHIT SORRY, i DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS HONKTRABAND, AT: wOW, oK, AT: i AM GETTING OFF THE POINT, wHICH WAS, AT: aBOUT THIS HOT MESS DAVE, tHAT YOU GOT LANDED IN, AT: lIKE THE COP i MENTIONED, bUT INSTEAD OF YOUR BADGE, AT: aND YOUR GUN, IT'S YOUR ASS THAT YOU HANDED IN, AT: (aND THEN GOT HANDED BACK TO YOU,) AT: cAUSE THAT'S HOW HUMANS GET SERVED, AT: aND GUYS LIKE YOU DESERVE TO UNDERSTAND THAT iT'S, AT: a CIRCLE AND HORNS IN YOUR BUTT THAT GOT BRANDED IN, AT: (uMM, bEFORE i GAVE YOUR ASS BACK TO YOU, i DID THAT, iS WHAT i MEAN,) AT: bUT i MEAN, gETTING BACK TO THE POINT, oR MAYBE TWO ACTUALLY, AT: tHE FIRST IS YOU SUCK, aND THE SECOND IS HOW i SMACKEDYOUFULLY, AT: (oH YEAH, tHAT RHYME WAS SO ILLLLLLLLL,) AT: bUT NO, jUST JOKING, lET'S SEE, hOW CAN i PUT THIS TACTFULLULLY, AT: i MEAN THE POINTS ON THE HORNS ON MY HEAD, AT: cOMING AT YOU THROUGH TRAFFIC, AT: aIMED AT THE TARGET ON YOUR SHIRT THAT IS RED, AT: wE'RE ABOUT TO GET MAD HORNOGRAPHIC, AT: (i MEAN SORT OF LIKE A GRAPHIC CRIME SCENE, nOT LIKE,) AT: (aNYTHING SEXUAL,) AT: (eRR, wHOAAAAA,) AT: (nEVERMIND,) AT: oK, gETTING BACK TO THE ACTUAL, tACTICAL, vERNACULAR SMACKCICLE, AT: i'M FORCING YOU TO BE LICKING, (aND lIKING,) AT: gRAB MY HORNS AND START KICKING, lIKE YOU'RE RIDING A VIKING, AT: cAUSE i'M YOUR BULLY, aND YOU'RE NOT IN CHARGE, AT: yOU THINK YOU'RE IN CHARGE BUT YOU'RE NOT IN CHARGE, AT: i'M IN CHARGE, cAUSE i'M CHARGING IN, AT: yOUR CHINASHOP, AT: bREAKING, uH, yOUR PLATES AND STUFF, WHICH i DON'T REALLY KNOW, AT: wHAT THE PLATES ARE SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT, bUT, AT: (fUCK,) AT: iT'S JUST THAT YOU THINK YOU ARE THE COCK OF THE WALK'S HOT SHIT AT: bUT WHEN IN FACT YOU ARE NOT, mORE LIKE YOU ARE, AT: sOMETHING THAT RHYMES WITH THE COCK OF THE WALK'S HOT SHIT, AT: bUT IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN THE COCK'S SHIT, AT: sO, gIVEN THAT, lET ME BE THE FIRST, AT: tO SAY YOU ACT LIKE YOU'RE GOLD FROM PROSPIT, AT: wHEN YOU'RE REALLY COLD SHIT FLUSHED FROM DERSE,

I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.

Hey, I have an idea,” Lex said. “Give me a sec.” He kept trying. “Idea as in ‘good idea,’ or idea as in ‘let’s take the Ferris wheel, everyone, I’m sure it’ll be a carefree ride of thrills and delights and whimsy’—” “Does this help?” Driggs opened his eyes and, in the space of a yoctosecond, popped right into a solid body. Lex half expected to hear a wacky boing sound effect. She grabbed his arm to keep him that way, while he kept on staring at her bare chest. “So,” he said, swallowing, “good idea, then.” “Thank you.” He pulled her close and gave her a kiss. “And thank you for sparing me your devil corset.” She held it up and waved it in his face. “It’s a standard bra, Driggs. From, like, Target.” “Satan employs many disguises.” “Like you’re from the Land of Superior Underwear. Let’s see what sort of designer boxers you’ve chosen to grace my presence with today.” She unzipped his pants and looked. “Dude. Penguins?” “Um, penguins are officially recognized as the most adorable bird on the planet,” he said, a hint of anxiety creeping into his voice. “What’s wrong with penguins?” “Nothing—” “And igloos. See their little igloos?” “Yes—” “The Santa hats are a bit much, I’ll give you that, but they were a Christmas present, okay? And if I’d known that I was going to die while wearing them and be forever doomed to their Arctic quirkiness—and of hypothermia, too, how’s that for irony—” “Driggs,” she interrupted, grabbing his chin and boring her eyes into his. “I thought we were on a tight time frame here.” “Right.” He scratched his head. “I think that perhaps, since I’m talking way too much, there is the slightest chance that I might be a tiny bit nervous.” Lex smirked. “Relax, spaz.” “Oh, no way. You do not get to use that against me.

Only then did Shukhov catch on to what was up. He glanced at Kilgas. He'd understood, too. The roofing felt. Der had spotted it on the windows. Shukhov feared nothing for himself. His squad leader would never give him away. He was afraid for Tiurin. To the squad Tiurin was a father, for them he was a pawn. Up in the North they readily gave squad, leaders a second term for a thing like this. Ugh, what a face Tiurin made. He threw down his trowel and took a step toward Der. Der looked around. Pavlo lifted his spade. He hadn't grabbed it for nothing. And Senka, for all his deafness, had understood. He came up, hands on hips. And Senka was built solid. Der blinked, gave a sort of twitch, and looked around for a way of escape. Tiurin leaned up against him and said quite softly, though distinctly enough for everyone to hear: "Your time for giving terms has passed, you bastard. If you say one word, you blood-sucker, it'll be your last day on earth. Remember that." Tiurin shook, shook uncontrollably. Hatchet-faced Pavlo looked Der straight in the eyes. A look as sharp as a razor. "Now, men, take it easy." Der turned pale and edged away from the ramp. Without another word Tiurin straightened his hat, picked up his trowel, and walked back to his wall. Pavlo, very slowly, went down the ramp with his spade. Slo-o-owly. Der was as scared to stay as to leave. He took shelter behind Kilgas and stood there. Kilgas went on laying blocks, the way they count out pills at a drugstore--like a doctor, measuring everything so carefully--his back to Der, as if he didn't even know he was there. Der stole up to Tiurin. Where was all his arrogance? "But what shall I tell the superintendent, Tiurin?". Tiurin went on working. He said, without turning his head: "You will tell him it was like that when we arnved. We came and that's how it was." Der waited a little longer. They weren't going to bump him off now, he saw. He took a few steps and puthis hands in his pockets. "Hey, S 854," he muttered. "Why are you using such a thin layer of mortar?" He had to get back at someone. He couldn't find fault with Shukhov for his joints or for the straightness of his line, so he decided he was laying the mortar too thin.

Leo was at her side in an instant, crouching on the floor as he sorted through the hissing tangle of limbs and skirts. “Are you hurt? I feel certain there’s a woman in here somewhere. … Ah, there you are. Easy, now. Let me—” “Don’t touch me,” she snapped, batting at him with her fists. “I’m not touching you. That is, I’m only touching you with the—ow, damn it—with the intention of helping.” Her hat, a little scrap of wool felt with cheap corded trim, had fallen over her face. Leo managed to push it back to the top of her head, narrowly missing a sharp blow to his jaw. “Christ. Would you stop flailing for a moment?” Struggling to a sitting position, she glared at him. Leo crawled to retrieve the spectacles and returned to hand them to her. She snatched them from him without a word of thanks. She was a lean, anxious-looking woman. A young woman with narrowed eyes, from which bad temper flashed out. Her light brown hair was pulled back with a gallows-rope tightness that made Leo wince just to see it. One would have hoped for some compensating feature—a soft pair of lips, perhaps, or a pretty bosom. But no, there was only a stern mouth, a flat chest, and gaunt cheeks. If Leo were compelled to spend any time with her—which, thankfully, he wasn’t—he would have started by feeding her. “If you want to help,” she said coldly, hooking the spectacles around her ears, “retrieve that blasted ferret for me. Perhaps I’ve tired him enough that you may be able to run him to ground.” Still crouching on the floor, Leo glanced at the ferret, which had paused ten yards away and was watching them both with bright, beady eyes. “What is his name?” “Dodger.” Leo gave a low whistle and a few clicks of his tongue. “Come here, Dodger. You’ve caused enough trouble for the morning. Though I can’t fault your taste in … ladies’ garters? Is that what you’re holding?” The woman watched, stupefied, as the ferret’s long, slender body wriggled toward Leo. Chattering busily, Dodger crawled onto Leo’s thigh. “Good fellow,” Leo said, stroking the sleek fur. “How did you do that?” the woman asked in annoyance. “I have a way with animals. They tend to acknowledge me as one of their own.” Leo gently pried a frilly bit of lace and ribbon from the long front teeth. It was definitely a garter, deliciously feminine and impractical. He gave the woman a mocking smile as he handed it to her. “No doubt this is yours.

The Man-Moth Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light. (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Jackaby was still engrossed in his examination when I came back inside. “Books. Books. Just books,” he was muttering. Jenny was hovering by the window. I joined her. “How did you manage it, by the way?” I asked. “All those Bibles, all across town? It is a remarkable feat.” “It looks more impressive than it is,” she said, still not meeting my eyes. “I borrowed Jackaby’s special satchel, the one that holds anything. The whole pile took just one trip. The real trick was keeping myself solid all the way home. That’s the bit I’m really proud of—” She turned to face me. “Oh, Abigail, it was amazing. People saw me!” “People saw you?” “I was in disguise, of course. I wore my long coat and gloves, and I had that floppy white hat on, so they didn’t see much, but still—people saw me and they didn’t gasp or make a scene. Someone even mumbled Good day to me as I was crossing the footbridge! It was exhilarating! I have never been so excited to have somebody see me—actually see me—and not care at all!” She glanced at Jackaby. “Although you would think I would be used to it by now.” “Jenny, that is absolutely amazing!” I said. “It is, isn’t it?” she said wistfully. “Just a little bit, at least? Oh, Abigail, I’m exhausted, I’m not ashamed to tell you. I had planned on setting my spoils out in nice triumphant rows when I got back, but it was all I could do to hold myself intact by then. Solidity is sort of like flexing a muscle, except the muscle is in your mind, and your mind is really just an abstract concept. I was basically flexing my entire body into existence the whole way home. But did it merit so much as a Good job, Jenny from that infuriating man?” Jackaby surfaced from his perusal and looked up at last. His cloud gray eyes found focus on Jenny. From his expression, I couldn’t tell if he had been following our conversation or not. “Completely unexceptional,” he said. “Nothing at all in this batch. We will need to scrutinize them more closely, of course, just to be sure. Oh, and Miss Cavanaugh . . .” She raised an eyebrow skeptically. “You performed . . . quite adequately,” he said, “despite expectations.” Jenny opened her mouth to reply, but then closed it again. Her face fluttered through a series of potential reactions. Finally she just threw up her hands and vanished from sight with a muffled whuph of air closing into the space where she suddenly wasn’t. “What in heaven’s name was all that?” said Jackaby. “Exquisite frustration, I believe, sir.” “Ah. Right.” He slumped into the desk chair and began to fidget absently with the spine of one of the Bibles. “Miss Cavanaugh is a singular and exceptional spirit, you know.” “Only a suggestion, sir, but that is precisely the sort of thing you might consider saying when she is still present and corporeal.

He went straight to ‘his alley,’ and when he reached the end of it he perceived, still on the same bench, that wellknown couple. Only, when he approached, it certainly was the same man; but it seemed to him that it was no longer the same girl. The person whom he now beheld was a tall and beautiful creature, possessed of all the most charming lines of a woman at the precise moment when they are still combined with all the most ingenuous graces of the child; a pure and fugitive moment, which can be expressed only by these two words,— ‘fifteen years.’ She had wonderful brown hair, shaded with threads of gold, a brow that seemed made of marble, cheeks that seemed made of rose-leaf, a pale flush, an agitated whiteness, an exquisite mouth, whence smiles darted like sunbeams, and words like music, a head such as Raphael would have given to Mary, set upon a neck that Jean Goujon would have attributed to a Venus. And, in order that nothing might be lacking to this bewitching face, her nose was not handsome— it was pretty; neither straight nor curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose, that is to say, spiritual, delicate, irregular, pure,— which drives painters to despair, and charms poets. When Marius passed near her, he could not see her eyes, which were constantly lowered. He saw only her long chestnut lashes, permeated with shadow and modesty. This did not prevent the beautiful child from smiling as she listened to what the white-haired old man was saying to her, and nothing could be more fascinating than that fresh smile, combined with those drooping eyes. For a moment, Marius thought that she was another daughter of the same man, a sister of the former, no doubt. But when the invariable habit of his stroll brought him, for the second time, near the bench, and he had examined her attentively, he recognized her as the same. In six months the little girl had become a young maiden; that was all. Nothing is more frequent than this phenomenon. There is a moment when girls blossom out in the twinkling of an eye, and become roses all at once. One left them children but yesterday; today, one finds them disquieting to the feelings. This child had not only grown, she had become idealized. As three days in April suffice to cover certain trees with flowers, six months had sufficed to clothe her with beauty. Her April had arrived. One sometimes sees people, who, poor and mean, seem to wake up, pass suddenly from indigence to luxury, indulge in expenditures of all sorts, and become dazzling, prodigal, magnificent, all of a sudden. That is the result of having pocketed an income; a note fell due yesterday. The young girl had received her quarterly income. And then, she was no longer the school-girl with her felt hat, her merino gown, her scholar’s shoes, and red hands; taste had come to her with beauty; she was a well-dressed person, clad with a sort of rich and simple elegance, and without affectation. She wore a dress of black damask, a cape of the same material, and a bonnet of white crape. Her white gloves displayed the delicacy of the hand which toyed with the carved, Chinese ivory handle of a parasol, and her silken shoe outlined the smallness of her foot. When one passed near her, her whole toilette exhaled a youthful and penetrating perfume.

Stepan Arkadyevich had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were in style. And for him, living in a certain social environment, where a desire for some sort of mental activity was part of maturity, to hold views was just as indispensable as to have a hat.

Rowling says when she took an online Sorting Hat quiz, it sorted her into Hufflepuff.

I always assumed hat responsible "grown-ups" had good reasons for their behavior. By the time I turned thirty, I realized that adults are seldom driven by rational choice, but rather by mysterious forces that only psychologists and psilocybin mushrooms can sort out.

Mistress Weatherwax is the head witch, then, is she?’ ‘Oh no!’ said Miss Level, looking shocked. ‘Witches are all equal. We don’t have things like head witches. That’s quite against the spirit of witchcraft.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ said Tiffany. ‘Besides,’ Miss Level added, ‘Mistress Weatherwax would never allow that sort of thing.

What do you think of Lord St. Vincent?” Pandora asked eagerly. West’s gaze moved to a man who appeared to be a younger version of his sire, with bronze-gold hair that gleamed like new-minted coins. Princely handsome. A cross between Adonis and the Royal Coronation Coach. With deliberate casualness, West said, “He’s not as tall as I expected.” Pandora looked affronted. “He’s every bit as tall as you!” “I’ll eat my hat if he’s an inch over four foot seven.” West clicked his tongue in a few disapproving tsk-tsks. “And still in short trousers.” Half annoyed, half amused, Pandora gave him a little shove. “That’s his younger brother Ivo, who is eleven. The one next to him is my fiancé.” “Aah. Well, I can see why you’d want to marry that one.” Folding her arms across her chest, Pandora let out a long sigh. “Yes. But why does he want to marry me?” West took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “Why wouldn’t he?” he asked, his voice gentling with concern. “Because I’m not the sort of girl everyone expected him to marry.” “You’re what he wants, or he wouldn’t be here. What is there to fret about?” Pandora shrugged uneasily. “I don’t really deserve him,” she confessed. “How splendid for you.” “Why is that splendid?” “There’s nothing better than having something you don’t deserve. Just say to yourself, ‘Hooray for me, I’m so very lucky. Not only do I have the biggest piece of cake, it’s a corner piece with a sugar-paste flower on top, and everyone else is sick with envy.’” A slow grin spread across Pandora’s face. After a moment, she said in an experimental undertone, “Hooray for me.

I think that all that time I’d spent accepting the fact that I was already dead made me sort of a walking zombie among the living back home. Every person I looked at I would see as horribly disfigured, shot, maimed, bleeding, and needing my help. In some ways it was worse than being in Iraq, because the feelings were not appropriate to the situation and because I no longer had my buddies around to support me emotionally. I spent a good deal of time heavily dependent on alcohol and drugs, including drugs such as Clonazepam prescribed by well-meaning psychiatrists at the VA, drugs that were extremely addictive and led to a lot of risky behavior. However, I still had a dream of learning how to meditate and entering the spiritual path, a dream that began in college when I was exposed to teachings of Buddhism and yoga, and I realized these were more stable paths to well-being and elevated mood than the short-term effects of drugs. I decided that I wanted to learn meditation from an authentic Asian master, so I went to Japan to train at a traditional Zen monastery, called Sogen-ji, in the city of Okayama. Many people think that being at a Zen monastery must be a peaceful, blissful experience. Yet though I did have many beautiful experiences, the training was somewhat brutal. We meditated for long hours in freezing-cold rooms open to the snowy air of the Japanese winter and were not allowed to wear hats, scarves, socks, or gloves. A senior monk would constantly patrol the meditation hall with a stick, called the keisaku, or “compassion stick,” which was struck over the shoulders of anyone caught slouching or closing their eyes. Zen training would definitely violate the Geneva Conventions. And these were not guided meditations of the sort one finds in the West; I was simply told to sit and watch my breath, and those were the only meditation instructions I ever received. I remember on the third day at the monastery, I really thought my mind was about to snap due to the pain in my legs and the voice in my head that grew incredibly loud and distracting as I tried to meditate. I went to the senior monk and said, “Please, tell me what to do with my mind so I don’t go insane,” and he simply looked at me, said, “No talking,” and shuffled off. Left to my own devices, I was somehow able to find the will to carry on, and after days, weeks, and months of meditation, I indeed had an experience of such profound happiness and expanded awareness that it gave me the faith that meditation was, as a path to enlightenment, everything I had hoped for, everything I had been promised by the books and scriptures.

And naturally we wish to preserve a stately ignito, Panzer – dislike adulation of the crowd and that sort of thing.

A smarter hat than me. You can keep your bowlers black, Your top hats sleek and tall, For I’m the Hogwarts Sorting Hat And I can cap them all. There’s nothing hidden in your head The Sorting Hat can’t see, So try me on and I will tell you Where you ought to be. You might belong in Gryffindor, Where dwell the brave at heart, Their daring, nerve, and chivalry Set Gryffindors apart; You might belong in Hufflepuff, Where they are just and loyal, Those patient Hufflepuffs are true And unafraid of toil; Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, If you’ve a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind; Or perhaps in Slytherin You’ll make your real friends, Those cunning folk use any means To achieve their ends. So put me on! Don’t be afraid! And don’t get in a flap! You’re in safe hands (though I have none) For I’m a Thinking Cap!

You’re worth twelve of Malfoy,’ Harry said. ‘The Sorting Hat chose you for Gryffindor, didn’t it? And where’s Malfoy? In stinking Slytherin.

He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all the motely assemblage he sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years.

Lloyd got the ball in the USA’s half. She turned and flicked it past a Japanese defender and then ran around the player to receive the ball, almost as if Lloyd passed it to herself. When she got the ball back at her feet, she picked her head up and noticed goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori was way out of goal. In a moment of pure audacity, Lloyd took a full swing at it from the center line and kicked the ball nearly 50 yards. Kaihori desperately tried to scramble back in place but could barely get a hand on the ball. Goal, USA! It was the sort of goal that was so brazen it would happen once in a while in a random high school game—no one would ever try such a thing in a World Cup. But Lloyd did. She had a hat trick . . . in 15 minutes . . . in a World Cup final. That sort of performance on the world’s biggest stage was simply unheard of. It looked like the USA had been playing a video game on easy mode.

He should have a red hat,” said Twoflower. “And he certainly ought to be cleaner and more, more sort of jolly. He doesn’t look like any sort of gnome to me.” “What are you going on about?” “Look at that beard,” said Twoflower sternly. “I’ve seen better beards on a piece of cheese.” “Look, he’s six inches high and lives in a mushroom,” snarled Rincewind. “Of course he’s a bloody gnome.” “We’ve only got his word for it.

Good news. Paisley has designed Milla a new outfit, to better suit the Happy Apples brand she’s working on. It’s a bright green suit, complete with a hat, that makes Milla look like some sort of human-apple mutant. Paisley is rather proud of it, and Happy thinks it’s marvellous. Muck thinks it actually is a giant apple, but we’ll let that go.

That’s the sort of thing they go on about in the High Energy Magic building. And they call themselves wizards! You should hear them talk. The buggers wouldn’t know a magic sword if it bit them on the knee. That’s young wizards today. Think they bloody invented magic.” “Yes? You should see the girls that want to be witches these days,” said Granny Weatherwax. “Velvet hats and black lipstick and lacy gloves with no fingers to ’em. Cheeky, too.

Oh, you may not think I’m pretty, But don’t judge on what you see, I’ll eat myself if you can find A smarter hat than me. You can keep your bowlers black, Your top hats sleek and tall, For I’m the Hogwarts Sorting Hat And I can cap them all. There’s nothing hidden in your head The Sorting Hat can’t see, So try me on and I will tell you

I paused. This wasn’t the kind of thing I liked to jaw about. “Is it any wonder that a man might think back to another time?” I asked, tipping my hat back down over my eyes. “A time when there were some people who had the guts to stand up to the mob?” Alici sat in silence for a moment, shivering occasionally. “You know,” she said, “that’s almost noble—in a twisted sort of way.” “Yeah, well, me and Quixote,” I said. “You could ease up on the misogyny, though.

Umm … well, how do you, like, choose if you’re a top or a bottom?” “There’s a sorting hat. Like in Harry Potter. It wasn’t even placed on my head before it screamed, ‘Top!’ and then all the other tops welcomed me to their house.

How come you’re not in Ravenclaw?” he demanded, staring at Hermione with something close to wonder. “With brains like yours?” “Well, the Sorting Hat did seriously consider putting me in Ravenclaw during my Sorting,” said Hermione brightly, “but it decided on Gryffindor in the end.

Is the child having some sort of hat-related fit?

Oh, you may not think I’m pretty, But don’t judge on what you see, I’ll eat myself if you can find A smarter hat than me. You can keep your bowlers black, Your top hats sleek and tall, For I’m the Hogwarts Sorting Hat And I can cap them all. There’s nothing hidden in your head The Sorting Hat can’t see, So try me on and I will tell you Where you ought to be. You might belong in Gryffindor, Where dwell the brave at heart, Their daring, nerve, and chivalry Set Gryffindors apart; You might belong in Hufflepuff, Where they are just and loyal, Those patient Hufflepuffs are true And unafraid of toil; Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, If you’ve a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind; Or perhaps in Slytherin You’ll make your real friends, Those cunning folk use any means To achieve their ends. So put me on! Don’t be afraid! And don’t get in a flap! You’re in safe hands (though I have none) For I’m a Thinking Cap!

Thus Sampath was gradually provided with all sorts of comforts and, the more elaborate his living arrangements, the happier he was. He made a lovely picture, seated there amidst the greenery, reclining upon his cot at a slight angle to the world; propped against numerous cushions; tucked up, during chilly evenings, in a glamorous satin quilt covered with leopard-skin spots, chosen by Ammaji in the bazaar. On his head, he sported a tea-cosy-like red woollen hat, also given to him by Ammaji, who had knitted it and raised it to him on a stick.

I could have done without Khandi Kayne. “We know things,” Khandi said now, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The women in my family, I mean. We can just sense them.” I drew a little witch’s hat with an arrow poking through the crown. “You mean supernatural things?” She nodded. “Personally I wasn’t one but surprised to walk into that theater and see Jo O’Connor’s ghost. I knew as soon as I put my hand on the door handle that something funny was going on. I got all sort of lightheaded.” Probably the blood trying to find its way through the labyrinth of your brain.

He might have mocked himself if he hadn’t been tired of always mocking at what others took seriously. It was easier to mock, of course, but other people refrained, and not always because they lacked the imagination or sense of humor required to mock. Sometimes they refrained because they dared to long for something that was not easily grasped, something that might slip away if one did not pay it the proper respect—prayerful respect, the sort that moved one to remove one’s hat by the side of a grave, or to bow one’s head to soldiers marching off to war, even while damning the fat MPs that sent them to die. Life was not all for mockery. Nor was laughter. But it was harder to spot the prayerful moments when they called for laughter instead of tears. Tears spelled an end. Laughter could spell a beginning.

what sort of a life (if any), what sort of a world, what sort of a self, can be preserved in a man who has lost the greater part of his memory and, with this, his past, and his moorings in time? It

Rebekah was standing on a chair cleaning out the top of her closet when she heard her bedroom door open. “Rebekah?” Mouse called out as she was half-hidden by a pile of clothes. “What are you doing up there?” “Sorry, can't talk now Mouse,” Rebekah said sternly. “I have to make room for some of RJ's hats, since he's going to stay with us this weekend!” “RJ's coming?” he said happily. “That's fantastic!” “I know,” Rebekah grinned as she glanced over her shoulder. “You know,” Mouse said as he watched Rebekah sort through her old detective books and shove them over in the closet. “I've been thinking. You and RJ are always working together on the mysteries that you solve. It doesn't seem

We went down, down, down, faster and faster, and just as we were going to crash I felt something. I can’t say I saw anything, but I got the feel of a pair of eyes. Can you realize what I mean? And when I came round from my three days’ down-and-out I was in love.” “What do you dream about?” asked Taverner. “All sorts of things; nothing especially nightmary.” “Do you notice any kind of family likeness in your dreams?” “Now you come to mention it, I do. They all take place in brilliant sunshine. They aren’t exactly Oriental, but that way inclined.” Taverner laid before him a book of Egyptian travel illustrated in water-colours. “Anything like that?” he inquired. “My hat!” exclaimed the man. “That’s the very thing.” He gazed eagerly at the pictures, and then suddenly thrust the book away from him. “I can’t look

Do you have a frying pan? Not Teflon, I hate that stuff. Cast iron? Or stainless steel?" I found River an old cast iron pan in the cabinet by the sink. I put it on the stove, and I imagined, for a second, Freddie, young, wearing a pearl necklace and a hat that slouched off to one side, standing over that very pan and making an omelet after a late night spent dancing those crazy, cool dances they did back in her day. "Brilliant," River said. He lit the gas stove and threw some butter in the pan. Then he cut four pieces of the baguette, rubbed them with a clove of garlic, and tore a hole out in each. He set the bread in the butter and cracked an egg onto the bread so it filled up the hole. The yolks of the eggs were a bright orange, which, according to Sunshine's dad, meant the chickens were as happy as a blue sky when they laid them. "Eggs in a frame," River smiled at me. When the eggs were done, but still runny, he put them on two plates, diced a tomato into little juicy squares, and piled them on top of the bread. The tomato had been grown a few miles outside of Echo, in some peaceful person's greenhouse, and it was red as sin and ripe as the noon sun. River sprinkled some sea salt over the tomatoes, and a little olive oil, and handed me a plate. "It's so good, River. So very, very good. Where the hell did you learn to cook?" Olive oil and tomato juice were running down my chin and I couldn't have cared less. "Honestly? My mother was a chef." River had the half smile on his crooked mouth, sly, sly, sly. "This is sort of a bruschetta, but with a fried egg. American, by way of Italy.

You,” said Henrietta, regarding the Gardener with the sort of venom usually reserved for people who ignore the queue at lending libraries. “What are you doing here?” The Gardener doffed his hat. “Lady Henrietta. How lovely to see you again.” Jane couldn’t echo the sentiment. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Henrietta; Henrietta was like a sister to her, or at least the closer kind of cousin. But she wasn’t exactly the person Jane would have chosen for a sensitive mission to a French-occupied country. And where Henrietta was . . . “Hullo! Did I hear voices?” Miles careened into his wife’s back. Catching sight of the Gardener and his wife’s Medusa stare, Miles prudently backed up a step. “Does anyone have any port on hand?” Miles inquired of no one in particular. “And perhaps a biscuit.” Lady Henrietta plunked her hands on her hips. “You’re going to feed him?” “No,” said Miles, hiding behind his floppy hair. “For me. I feel in need of fortification.

Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, it seemed completely self-evident that the bad old days were over, that torture and massacre, slavery, and the persecution of heretics, were things of the past. Among people who wore top hats, traveled in trains, and took a bath every morning such horrors were simply out of the question. After all, we were living in the twentieth century. A few years later these people who took daily baths and went to church in top hats were committing atrocities on a scale undreamed of by the benighted Africans and Asi­atics. In the light of recent history it would be foolish to suppose that this sort of thing cannot happen again. It can and, no doubt, it will. But in the immedi­ate future there is some reason to believe that the punitive methods of 1984 will give place to the rein­forcements and manipulations of Brave New World.

Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, “Nobody’s.” In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin, possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of material they used, the work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world maybe flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks.

If you’re so fired up about playing host,” Zane said, his expression both fierce and closed. “I’ll let you take care of her luggage and show her to her room.” He put his hat on his head, nodded once at Phoebe and stalked away. She stared after him for a second. He looked as good from the back as he had from the front. Her hormones yelled out catcalls of appreciation which--fortunately--only she could hear. But however impressed she might be with him, Zane obviously didn’t return her feelings. He practically burned rubber in his haste to get away. Chase brightened the second Zane was gone. “How was the drive?” he asked as he walked around to the other side of the truck and pulled her suitcases out from behind the driver’s seat where Zane had placed them. “Good.” “Did Zane talk?” Phoebe glanced at him, not sure of the question. Chase hoisted her luggage with the same ease Zane had shown and started for the house. “He’s not much of a talker,” he explained as he walked. “I can’t figure out if the act of forming words is physically painful, or if he just doesn’t have anything to say.” She thought about the drive from the airport. “Things started out well,” she admitted. “Then we sort of stalled about twenty minutes into the drive.” Yup--nothing like asking about bull sperm to shut down a conversational exchange. “Twenty minutes, huh?” Chase glanced back at her over his shoulder and grinned. “I’m impressed. Most people get a grunt. He must really like you.” Phoebe laughed again. “Yeah. He was so overpoweringly impressed he couldn’t wait to get away.

Ich erfinde keine Geschichten. Ich schreibe eine andere Sorte Geschichten. Ich schreibe so wahrhaftig wie der Mann mit seinen Fingern, wenn ich nur alles behalten und sagen kann; aber ich bin nicht auf seiner Seite. Ich bin auf einer anderen Seite. Ich sage die Wahrheit, aber aus einer anderen Sicht. Ich bin diejenige, der er es angetan hat. Der Köder spricht, Süßer.

He rose to his feet; his height was staggering. Fionna sucked in a breath. She wasn't quite so confident as she appeared. He seemed even taller than he had last night when he wore his top hat, now tucked under an arm. Perhaps her own short stature made him seem so. And she was surely losing her mind, for in all honesty, the man was quite splendid-looking-- though in a rugged sort of way, not a perfect sort of way. Her breath was lost as she took in the width of his shoulders; they seemed to fill the entire gap between the shelves. Every part of him, every inch of him was so blatantly masculine it nearly set her heart to fluttering. His face was deeply tanned, leaving her a trifle puzzled given that it was the middle of winter. His eyes were several shades deeper than turquoise, like blue ink, set off even further by the bronzed hue of his skin.

The class of dishonest bees which I have been describing, may be termed the "Jerry Sneaks" of their profession, and after they have followed it for some time, they lose all disposition for honest pursuits, and assume a hang-dog sort of look, which is very peculiar. Constantly employed in creeping into small holes, and daubing themselves with honey, they often lose all the bright feathers and silky plumes which once so beautifully adorned their bodies, and assume a smooth and almost black appearance; just as the hat of the thievish loafer, acquires a "seedy" aspect, and his garments, a shining and threadbare look.

The captain’s sister-in-law had traded her mechanic’s coveralls for a colorful shirt, shorts, and a huge straw hat. She looked like a tourist, and because I’m the helpful sort, I told her so. “And

my view of medical experts has become extremely jaundiced. At times I feel they are like those highly decorated generals in North Korea with the funny hats. They look splendid, and important, but the only point of their existence is to suppress dissent and keep an idiotic regime in place.

Officer Gurney ran a strip of yellow tape around the back area of the café, roping it off so no one could disturb the site. Then he scanned the crowd. His eyes lit on a comfortably plump woman wearing a red down jacket that made her look even plumper. She had a short brownish-blond ponytail that stuck out through a hole in her red baseball hat. “Brenda,” said Officer Gurney. “What do you think?” Grover was in danger of being late for school by this time. He’d already been late twice this month. If he was late again, he might get a note sent home to his parents. But he had to risk it. This was too interesting to miss. The woman stepped forward. Grover knew her, of course; everyone did. Mrs. Brenda Beeson was the one who had figured out the Prophet’s mumbled words and explained what they meant. She and her committee—the Reverend Loomis, Mayor Orville Milton, Police Chief Ralph Gurney, and a few others—were the most important people in the town. Officer Gurney raised the yellow tape so Mrs. Beeson could duck under it. She stood before the window a long time, her back to the crowd, while everyone waited to see what she would say. Clouds sailed slowly across the sun, turning everything dark and light and dark again. To Grover, it seemed like ages they all stood there, holding their breath. He resigned himself to being late for school and started thinking up creative excuses. The front door of his house had stuck and he couldn’t get it open? His father needed him to help fish drowned rats out of flooded basements? His knee had popped out of joint and stayed out for half an hour? Finally Mrs. Beeson turned to face them. “Well, it just goes to show,” she said. “We never used to have people breaking windows and stealing things. For all our hard work, we’ve still got bad eggs among us.” She gave an exasperated sigh, and her breath made a puff of fog in the chilly air. “If this is someone’s idea of fun, that person should be very, very ashamed of himself. This is no time for wild, stupid behavior.” “It’s probably kids,” said a man standing near Grover. Why did people always blame kids for things like this? As far as Grover could tell, grown-ups caused a lot more trouble in the world than kids. “On the other hand,” said Mrs. Beeson, “it could be a threat, or a warning. We’ve heard the reports about someone wandering around in the hills.” She glanced back at the bloody rag hanging in the window. “It might even be a message of some sort. It looks to me like that stain could be a letter, maybe an S, or an R.” Grover squinted at the stain on the cloth. To him it looked more like an A, or maybe even just a random blotch. “It might be a B,” said someone standing near him. “Or an H,” said someone else. Mrs. Beeson nodded. “Could be,” she said. “The S could stand for sin. Or if it’s an R it could stand for ruin. If you’ll let me have that piece of cloth, Ralph, I’ll show it to Althea and see if she has anything to say about it.” Just then Wayne Hollister happened to pass by, saw the crowd, and chimed in about what he’d seen in the night. His story frightened people even more than the blood and the broken glass. All around him, Grover heard them murmuring: Someone’s out there. He’s given us a warning. What does he mean to do? He’s trying to scare us. One woman began to cry. Hoyt McCoy, as usual, said that Brenda Beeson should not pronounce upon things until she was in full possession of the facts, which she was not, and that to him the

He could put up with his meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. God knew how or when, he was going to break free of it. After all, there was always his “writing.” Some day, perhaps, he might be able to make a living of sorts by “writing;” and you’d feel you were free of the money-stink if you were a “writer,” would you not? The types he saw all around him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That is what it meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical bowler-hatted sneak – Strube’s “little man” – the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears, half an hour’s listening-in to the BBC Symphony Concert, and then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife “feels in the mood!” What a fate! No, it isn’t like that that one was meant to live. One’s got to get right out of it, out of the money stink.

Colombe is the elder Josse daughter. Colombe Josse is also a sort of tall blonde leek who dresses like a penniless bohemian. If there is one thing I despise, it's the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes that hang on them all crookedly and grey wooly hats, socks full of holes and flowery shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man's scorn for a poor man's longing.

Chapter Eight Jack shifted his gaze between the packet and Fabien’s pale face, then slowly got to his feet. Go to the police, that was what they should do. Let them deal with it. But what kind of trouble would that land Fabien in? “I’ll sort it.” Jack made his way up to the chimney, stuffed the packet into the black bin liner he found up there, and wedged it between the pots. That would buy them some time to think about how to help Fabien. He returned to the others. Fabien was still looking green and shaky, but was on his feet and putting on his hat. “I’ll help you get down to the street,” said Beth. “It’s okay. I’ll go back through the attic. Grandad will be wondering where I am.” The boy hobbled up the incline, back the way he’d come, and they heard him stagger down the other side. Jack banged his fist against the chimney wall, sending loose cement dust showering onto the tiles. “I wish he’d told me what was going on. I could have helped. I wondered why he wanted me to teach him shadow jumping.” “He’s scared,” said Beth. “Don’t be too hard on him. Kai’s got him where he wants him. It’s Kai you should be angry with, not Fabien.” “Who’s Kai working for?” Jack let out a worried breath. “I mean, he might be a thug, but he’s not got a lot of brains, has he?” Beth pressed her lips together in thought. “You’re right. He can’t be doing this alone.” Jack’s encounter with Kai from a few months ago was inked on his memory like a tattoo. He touched his ribs as if the bruising was still there, but of course the physical injuries were gone. Not so for Fabien, Jack thought, remembering the livid mark blooming on the

He looks like one of Bobby Ewing’s buddies straight out of 1980s Texas, just without the cowboy hat—a sort of anachronism in a cowboy shirt plunked down in a small town in Sweden.

You know,” he says after a moment, “I sort of thought that if you ever did show up, it would be to murder me.” “Murder you?” I squeak. “Why?” “You’re the second son now—your title is in jeopardy! Your land! Your inheritance! Your lordly honor! All those things men of your stature care so very much about. Not literal stature. But really—how tall are you?” I must look horrified at his accusations, for he amends, “Don’t worry, I haven’t any interest in my claim. But if you’re so inclined, we’re notoriously bad at locking our doors, and I sleep very soundly. All it would take is a quiet step and a pillow over my head and the job would be done. Consider that advice gratis.” He drains the rest of his coffee, then stands. “So, I suppose I’ll see you then.” “See me when?” “When you come to murder me.” He slings his coat around his shoulders, fishing around for that strange hedgehog hat again. “I’d say it was good to meet you but honestly it’s been really goddamn stressful, so let’s leave it here.” He starts to walk away, then seems to remember his pie, reconsiders, and hefts the entire thing from the table. I’m shocked its weight doesn’t pull him over.

Every year, this aged old hat, patched, frayed and dirty, sorted new students into the four Hogwarts houses (Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin).

Well, the Sorting Hat did seriously consider putting me in Ravenclaw during my Sorting,” said Hermione brightly, “but it decided on Gryffindor in the end.

You Belong in Slytherin

J.K. Rowling took an online sorting hat test; she was placed in Hufflepuff.

Perhaps a long, long time. Perhaps many years. But what better way could there be to spend our lives?” I turned to stare at her. “Whatever are you talking about?” “These young women. That girl back at the bunkers. Corrie, if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love! We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes. . . .” She went on, almost forgetting in her excitement to keep her voice to a whisper, while I slowly took in the fact that she was talking about our guards. I glanced at the matron seated at the desk ahead of us. I saw a gray uniform and a visored hat; Betsie saw a wounded human being. And I wondered, not for the first time, what sort of a person she was, this sister of mine . . . what kind of road she followed while I trudged beside her on the all-too-solid earth.

You Belong in Ravenclaw The house of the wise and the curious. Ravenclaws value wisdom, intellect, learning and creativity. They are always eager to acquire new knowledge and skills and to explore new ideas and possibilities. They are also original, eccentric and witty, but sometimes aloof and detached. Some famous Ravenclaws are Luna Lovegood, Cho Chang, Gilderoy Lockhart and Filius Flitwick. You are a total brainiac, and you feel like there is always more to learn. You are very curious about the world. To say you are a big reader is putting things mildly; you are addicted to books. You read everything you can get your hands on. You enjoy being around good friends, but you can spend tons of time alone too. Your ideas, thoughts, and theories occupy you. You are quite independent and open to new ways of thinking. You get frustrated with people who are closed-minded. The water signs of Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces are most suited for Ravenclaw, as they share the traits of wisdom, creativity, learning and curiosity. They are also intuitive, imaginative and sometimes aloof. Luna Lovegood is a Cancer, which explains her wisdom and eccentricity.

yourself?

You Belong in Gryffindor

Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the body. The soul for Thomas is not some ghostly extra, as it was for the platonizing Christians of his time; it is not to be seen as a spiritual kidney or spectral pancreas. The question “Whereabouts in the body is the soul?” would to his mind involve a category mistake, as though one were to ask how close to the left armpit one’s envy was located. For Aquinas, the soul is everywhere in the body precisely because it is what he calls, after Aristotle, the “form” of it, meaning the way in which it is uniquely organized to be expressive of meaning. The soul is not some sort of thing, but the distinctive way in which a particular piece of matter is alive. It is quite as visible as a club foot. To claim that a spider has a different sort of soul from a human being is in Thomas’s view simply to say that it has a different form of life. What distinguishes an animal body from a hat or a hosepipe is the fact that it is signifying, communicative, self-transformative stuff, in contrast to the meaninglessly dumb matter of so much contemporary materialism. It is, in Turner’s phrase, “matter articulate.

For as I looked down to see what sort of people were about, I caught sight of a strange couple. A man of rather advanced years, judging by his back which was turned towards me, dressed in a thin, yellow swanskin jacket, pale blue trousers, heavy shoes and a little round hat, as he walked down the street. He was leading a girl, dressed no less oddly than himself in a brown cope which was draped about her shoulders almost like a toga. But the girl had so large a head, enough to startle anyone, that it kept causing people to stare at it. Both of them went their way at a moderate pace; but both were so clumsy and awkward that it was immediately evident they were not used to Vienna and that they were incapable of behaving like other folk.

They were treated like royalty – not the sort who get dragged off to be beheaded or have something nasty done with a red-hot poker, but the other sort, when people walk away dazed, saying, ‘She actually said hello to me, very graciously! I will never wash my hand again!

Do you realize that we don't have a song? Like a song that's ours?" "Okay, then let's pick one." "It doesn't work like that. You don't just pick your song. The song picks you. Like the Sorting Hat.

Do I need a wand or something?” Honey smirked. “No, no wand, no robes, no Hogwarts sorting hat.

Those among you who have read Das grüne Gesicht by Meyrinck will remember perhaps that the same phenomenon is found there. It is something like a whirlwind catching up dust, but it is not dust. Chidr, the Green Face, is the whirlwind, and the dust consists of a swarm of ants. That figure is the center of Meyrinck's story, and he shows how Chidr works in ordinary human circumstances, how he comes in as a sort of sorcerer. The whole thing is a manifestation of the collective unconscious, the way the collective unconscious breaks into an ordinary human existence, the way it transforms and influences human existence. Then in the end there is a great catastrophe, a storm which devastates the whole town; and at the very end this whirlwind catches up a swarm of ants, the swarm of ants being the mob. Chidr is a whirl of mob psychology that carries people off to a distance like a swarm of ants. The Brausewind, then, is this catastrophic wind that breaks into social existence. Whenever the opposites meet, whenever a cold layer of air touches a warm layer of air there is most probably movement, there will be a cyclone, or a wandering whirlwind; one sees those wandering columns of water on the ocean, and in the desert one sees columns of dust. That is the simile for the peculiar collective movement by which people are seized, ergriffen. Here and there spouts of air gather up dust that moves and dies down, and then in another place it starts up again, like the little whirls of water on the sea or on our lakes when the Fohn is coming. And that is so in human society when the Föhnwind begins to blow. Since it shows in very different places one doesn't connect these phenomena, but it is one and the same wind really. Of course when it is in the desert it gathers up sand, and in the garden it gathers up leaves, and in a library it gathers up papers in heaps, and in crowds it gathers up hats, so each time one thinks it is something different; but it is always the same meteorological phenomenon: when opposites meet there is a whirlwind. That is the manifestation of the spirit in its most original form. So a savior is one who seizes, the Ergreifer who catches people like objects and whirls them into a form which lasts as long as the whirlwind lasts, and then the thing collapses and something new must come. That is the great wind described in the Pentecostal miracle, because there two worlds were clashing together, the world of the slaves and the world of the highly differentiated mind. You see, the teaching Christ received through his teacher, John the Baptist, must have been the ripe fruit of the time; otherwise it could not have been so in tune with the surroundings, with all the great problems of the time. And it is also absolutely out of the question that one man alone could have invented it in his own lifetime without making use of an enormous tradition. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1029-1030). Princeton University Press

Now, when I die, bury me in my straight-leg britches, Put on a box-back coat and a Stetson hat, They sang the old blues song slowly, their robes swaying, their eyes closed as though in a sort of ecstasy. An’ give me six crap-shooting pall bearers, Let a chorus girl sing me a song. Put a red hot jazz band at the top of my head So we can raise Hallelujah as we go along. It was beautiful, soulful, but not wise. “I’m thinking their robes and that article in the local paper might not have been the only problems,” said Gamache, handing the phone back. “It looks like Robert is the leader of the group.” “Oui. So I wonder why Sébastien was the one made to leave.” “So do I.” “Want me to come with you, patron?” “To Blanc-Sablon? Non, merci. I want you to coordinate the investigation into Paolo Parisi. I’ll send you what the head of the Anti-Mafia task force in Italy passes along, as soon as I get it.” Though Gamache was beginning to wonder if the fellow would actually send anything. It had been a couple of hours since their conversation. “And see what you can find out about the woman who signaled Parisi at Open Da Night.” “And probably killed him. I’m on it.” They were almost at Gamache’s gate. “Parisi must’ve had help getting across the border. Either a fake ID or…” “The frontier is a federal responsibility,” said Beauvoir. “Caron?” “Maybe. I want to know his movements once he got here.” “I’ll go to The Mission.” They could hear the final boarding call for Gamache’s flight and picked up their pace. “Why?” “He had to stay somewhere. So far the hotels are a bust, so where better than a place where you don’t need to register or pay, and they ask no questions. If he was working for Caron, she’d have told him to go there.” “And where her showing up

She pulled the silken cord and the drape parted. Behind the soft folds there hung a huge painting in a wide dull gold frame, —the painting of a lovely lady in velvet draperies, her reddish-brown hair curling over her shoulder, and a string of pearls at her neck. A hat with a sweeping plume was in one hand, —held by long slender fingers that tapered at the ends. "My, my, Kathie, tears on your wedding day. Whatever will you think? How selfish of me,— I'm that ashamed! But when I saw... when I saw the lovely lady that I used to dream about... it just came over me... in s sort of wave... all the wonderful things I planned to do when I was younger... and never did.

She doesn’t really take in the scenery, except in a desultory sort of way. It’s inside herself that she looks, astonished at the sight of this dark turmoil, puzzled to be harboring such a thing, understandably a bit skeptical, but doing what she can to acknowledge its incredible existence.

As it turns out, skiing trips are pretty bloody annoying anyway. It’s mostly about queuing, skiing. You queue to get your breakfast in the stupid wooden hotel, you queue to get on the minibus or find a taxi to take you to the stupid skiing place at the bottom of the stupid hill. You queue to buy a pass, which you lose later in the day and then you get down to the serious queuing, at the point where you get on the lift at the bottom of the mountain to take you to the top. This, technically, isn’t queuing, it’s something more akin to fighting, so I preferred this bit. You hang around in a big crowd on a sort of train platform. Except there are no tracks, just a big wire overhead. Eventually, the cable car device lumbers into view and disgorges a load of really annoying people with stupid smiles under their stupid hats on to the other side of the platform. The car never stops; it just swings around the bottom of the platform on a huge, horizontal wheel until it comes up the side on which you and several million Germans are loitering, ready to get on board. Then there is a really massive fight, lots of shouting, some vicious pushing and, the next thing you know, you’re on the cable car, face pressed to the frosted glass, staring through it at crying kids back on the platform, disappointed mothers and bereft lovers waving mournfully as the other half of their life is transported away on the carriage that someone, usually you, prevented them from getting on by elbowing them in the face and jabbing a ski pole into their groin. It’s really rather good fun. But only that part is fun; the rest of it is terrible.

House Hufflepuff… It’s a Harry Potter reference. You huff out a lot. I just wondered if you were hoping to get picked by the Sorting Hat.

few more Slipperen friends too, though the more time I spent with them, the more I felt maybe the Sorting Hat had put me in the wrong house.