Split Fiction Quotes

Only someone watching him closely like Celena would have noticed his intense preoccupation, and that something in a split second had happened to him.  She wondered where he had gone when he should have been listening to the sermon, where his soul had gone went it had left his body.

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.

His mouth went dry and for a split second he had a metallic taste on the sides of his tongue. He stood, turned, and gulped. A vision had appeared from somewhere. Was she real? She was tall, with long, glossy light-gold hair surrounding a perfectly shaped face. The front of her silk white robe was open down to a delightful cleavage where a long silver cross hung. As she walked slowly past Alec to sit at the desk, the robe parted for a fleeting glimpse of her leg. A scent of lily of the valley meandered over him. A hand with long graceful fingers indicated for him to sit again in his chair. She was real! She was, without doubt, the most beautiful woman Alec had ever seen.

Forgive me?” “Yeah,” I said, a split second too late. “Always.

You cannot hide from the world. It will find you. It always does. And now it has found me. My split second of immortality is over. All that's left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has.

Once I start thinking about splitting the skin apart, I literally cannot not do it. I apologize for the double negative, but it’s a real double negative of a situation, a bind from which negating the negation is truly the only escape.

Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like a scimitar he held. The picture had a caption 'Reproof of curiosity.

Emotion. It's a lethal weakness of our kind. A sickness that inhibits logic and eventually drives our minds toward the breaking point. It's our kryptonite – our fatal flaw and our saving grace. After all, emotions make us who we are. They make us capable of love and compassion and selflessness, bring out the best in us. At the same time, they ruin us. Make us feel hatred and pain and guilt. Cause our muscles to lock, our pulses to spike, our hearts to split in half. These things called…feelings…could break every single one of us, if we let them.

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.

Pluto claimed that in ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half - man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their whole lives searching for their other halves.

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.

Darla shook her head, a small smirk on her lips. “You’re such a mom,” she told Katherine. Katherine stared at her, puzzled. “You’re a mom, too,” she said softly. “No, I gave birth. That doesn’t make me a mom. Not like you.” A look passed between the two women like none they had ever shared before. For a split second, Katherine felt a slight connection. “Well, you rest. I’ll check on you later.” She turned and left the room, a funny, unexplainable feeling inside her.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.

There should be a Stage IV of black identity—Unmitigated Blackness. I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t sell. On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to succeed. It’s Donald Goines, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Alfre Woodard, and the serious black actor. It’s Tiparillos, chitterlings, and a night in jail. It’s the crossover dribble and wearing house shoes outside. It’s “whereas” and “things of that nature.” It’s our beautiful hands and our fucked-up feet. Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck. Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra, Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black-and-white Godard, Céline, Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations. Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It’s the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living. Sitting

We are living in a highly contentious period ... We have a split in our society – 50 percent say it’s night and 50 percent say it’s day – and it’s not only on the issue of Muslims, but this is true for almost any issue we have, from health care, to immigration, to the budget, to how we deal with the economy after a collapse.

We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains

Courage wasn't courage without fear ...

Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.

But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

Telling women’s stories was—and would always be—Jackson’s major fictional project. As she had in The Road Through the Wall and the stories of The Lottery, with Hangsaman Jackson continued to chronicle the lives of women whose behavior does not conform to society’s expectations. Neither an obedient daughter nor a docile wife-in-training, Natalie represents every girl who does not quite fit in, who refuses to play the role that has been predetermined for her—and the tragic psychic consequences she suffers as a result. During the postwar years, Betty Friedan would later write, the image of the American woman “suffered a schizophrenic split” between the feminine housewife and the career woman: “The new feminine morality story is . . . the heroine’s victory over Mephistopheles . . . the devil inside the heroine herself.” That is precisely what happens in Hangsaman. Unfortunately, it was a story that the American public, in the process of adjusting to the changing roles of women and the family in the wake of World War II, was not yet ready to countenance.

The pain breached through the indolence of mind. But the dizziness made reactions very slow and stretched, like a novice stage actor stretching his death scene for missing queue of actors, leaving audience in splits.

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division. ("Introduction")

In Brain Watch (1985), superpsychic powers are the result of splitting a doctor’s noggin into a quadruple brain, unlocking his ability to project illusions, become superstrong, and control the pigment in his skin to ensure a really great tan.

Roosevelt's productivity resulted from how he chose to spend his time. He read frequently due to his belief that efficiency did not come from packing in scheduled activities down to every last minute of the day. Rather, it was through the regular feeding of his intellect. Even during the height of a presidential campaign, he packed in nearly four hours of reading a day. He enjoyed works of fiction, science, political philosophy, and history. One can imagine a nervous political aide bursting in his study, telling Roosevelt to put down his copy of Cicero because he was scheduled to begin the day's fourth speech in only two minutes. Researcher Robert Talbert notes that a second explanation for Roosevelt's productivity was his method of splitting up his schedule. His reading times were broken up into 45 minute-increments, divided between three half-hour time slots and three one-hour time slots. There is no way that Roosevelt could have known this, but such a segmented approach to reading is the best way for the brain to retain information. A 2008 study from the University of Illinois found that the brain's attentional resources drop after a long period of focusing on a single activity. Even brief diversions can significantly increase one's ability to focus on a task for a long period of time.

A true leader is not meant to be greeted with unanimous praise by his people. A leader is meant to be questioned, to be suspect, to be hated. If he is not, then one can easily assume that either he has not challenged his abilities as a leader by making a decision that creates a split between the people, or he is forcing his subjects to bow before him.

It seems very straightforward when I say “I.” At the time, “I” meant Justice of Toren, the whole ship and all its ancillaries. A unit might be very focused on what it was doing at that particular moment, but it was no more apart from “me” than my hand is while it’s engaged in a task that doesn’t require my full attention. Nearly twenty years later “I” would be a single body, a single brain. That division, I–Justice of Toren and I–One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which “I” was one and after which “I” was “we.” It was something that had always been possible, always potential. Guarded against. But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable? On one level the answer is simple—it happened when all of Justice of Toren but me was destroyed. But when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets? Perhaps. Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that, though I can see hints of the potential split going back a thousand years or more, that’s only hindsight. The first I noticed even the bare possibility that I–Justice of Toren might not also be I–One Esk, was that moment that Justice of Toren edited One Esk’s memory of the slaughter in the temple of Ikkt. The moment I—“I”—was surprised by it.

The Ancestral Trail was split into two-halves of 26 issues each. The first half takes place in the Ancestral World and describes Richard's struggle to restore good to the world. After the initial international run, which sold over 30 million copies worldwide, Marshall Cavendish omitted the second part of the trilogy and used the third part (future) for the second series that followed. This part of the series, written up by Ian Probert and published in 1994, takes place in the Cyber Dimension. It deals with Richard's attempts to return home. Each issue centered on an adventure against a particular adversary, and each issue ended on a cliffhanger. The Ancestral Trail was illustrated by Julek and Adam Heller. Computer-generated graphics were provided by Mehau Kulyk for issues #27 through #52.

The Future is an illusion because, at the most fundamental level, Choice is an illusion. I am a believer in the theory, popular among physicists, that every time there is a Choice, the universe splits: both choices come to pass, but in now-separate universes. And so on, and on, with every choice of every particle, every atom, every molecule, every cell, every being, coming into being. In this universe of universes, everything happens, and every combination of things happens. Our universe is a mote of dust in an ever-growing dust-storm of possibilities, but each mote of dust in that storm is generating its own dust-storm of possibilities every instant, the motes of which in turn... But you get the general impression. Indeed to think of ourselves as single selves, and our universe as a single universe, is to be blinded, by the limitations of our senses and our consciousness, to the infinite-faceted truth: that we are infinite in a universe of universes that are each infinitely infinite..." "An intriguingly intricate view of the world," I said (...) Pat Sheeran nodded. "And it is astonishing how little practical difference it makes," he said. "All my other lives are as inaccessible to me as if they did not exist at all. No doubt in other universes I am a beggar, a revolutionary thinker, an academic, an accountant; a drinker, a thinker, a writer of books; I lose a freckle, gain a mole, shade off into men nothing like me at all; I have sons, fire guns, live forever, die too young. Whenever any particle in this universe changes state, I am split and travel in both directions, multiplied. But here I am, suffering the illusion of unity in this endlessly bifurcating moment. Yet sometimes, I wave my arms for the joy of creating a spray of universes." I said startled at the implications, “Though it may make no practical difference, the implications are nonetheless startling." "Indeed," said Pat Sheeran. "I had immediately to file all the fiction on my shelves under Non-Fiction. For it is an unavoidable corollary of this theory, that Fiction is impossible. For all novels are true histories of worlds as real as ours, but which we cannot see. All stories are possible, all histories have happened. I, billion-bodied, live a trillion lives every quantum instant. Those trillion lives branch out, a quintillion times a second, as every particle in every atom in each mote of dust on land, in sea, and sky, and space, and star, flickering in and out of being in the void, hesitates and decides its next stage. All tragedies, all triumphs, are mine, are yours." "It is a curious and difficult thing, to think that all is possible. No, probable. No, certain," I said, attempting to grasp the largeness of the thought."That nothing is improbable." "It is a comforting thought, some nights, to this version of me, now," said Pat Sheeran, and we roared on.

When Pat gave her ‘criminal-hero’ Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi (after he kills Dickie, Tom murders only when necessary), she was doing just what her fellow comic book artists were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment. And when she reimagined her own psychological split in Ripley’s character — endowing him with both her weakest traits (paralyzing self-consciousness and hero-worship) and her wildest dreams (murder and money) — she was turning the material of the ‘comic book’ upside down and making it into something very like a ‘tragic book.’ 'It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,’ Pat wrote in her diary– and everywhere else.

At the far end of the taxiway, B-17s began to roll out of their hardstands and onto the perimeter track. Karl nudged the throttles up to 1500 RPM to exercise the turbos. One by one, he eased back the prop control levers and watched for an RPM drop to make sure the propeller governors were working. Everything checked good; Hellstorm gave him no release from the dilemma splitting his heart in two. Good hydraulic pressure, good suction, good voltages. Good Lord.

Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.' 'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said. The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter. In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family. I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.

If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness', yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'daedal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.

Rather than returning to school, he drove straight to the psychologist. “You may need a bit of adjustment, but it’s nothing serious,” the doctor said, after listening to his lengthy narrative. “Nothing serious?” Luo Ji opened his bloodshot eyes wide. “I’m madly in love with a fictional person from a novel of my own creation. I’ve been with her, I’ve traveled with her, and I’ve even broken up with my real-life girlfriend over her. Is that nothing serious to you?” The doctor smiled tolerantly. “Don’t you get it? I’ve given my most profound love to an illusion!” “Are you under the impression that the object of everyone else’s love actually exists?” “Is that even a question?” “Sure. For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It’s as simple as that. You differ from the majority in one respect: You didn’t need a template.” “So this isn’t a sickness?” “Only in the way your girlfriend pointed out: You’ve got natural literary talent. If you want to call that a sickness, go right ahead.” “But isn’t imagining to this degree a little excessive?” “There’s nothing excessive about imagination. Especially where love is concerned.” “So what should I do? How can I forget about her?” “It’s impossible. You can’t forget her, so don’t make the effort. That will only lead to side effects, and maybe even mental disorders. Let nature take its course. Once more, for emphasis: Don’t try to forget about her. It won’t work. But as time passes, her influence on your life will decrease. And you’re actually quite lucky. Whether or not she really exists, you’re fortunate to be in love.” This

THE FAIRY REEL If I were young as once I was, and dreams and death more distant then, I wouldn’t split my soul in two, and keep half in the world of men, So half of me would stay at home, and strive for Fäerie in vain, While all the while my soul would stroll up narrow path, down crooked lane, And there would meet a fairy lass and smile and bow with kisses three, She’d pluck wild eagles from the air and nail me to a lightning tree And if my heart would run from her or flee from her, be gone from her, She’d wrap it in a nest of stars and then she’d take it on with her Until one day she’d tire of it, all bored with it and done with it She’d leave it by a burning brook, and off brown boys would run with it. They’d take it and have fun with it and stretch it long and cruel and thin, They’d slice it into four and then they’d string with it a violin. And every day and every night they’d play upon my heart a song So plaintive and so wild and strange that all who heard it danced along And sang and whirled and sank and trod and skipped and slipped and reeled and rolled Until, with eyes as bright as coals, they’d crumble into wheels of gold…. But I am young no longer now; for sixty years my heart’s been gone To play its dreadful music there, beyond the valley of the sun. I watch with envious eyes and mind, the single-souled, who dare not feel The wind that blows beyond the moon, who do not hear the Fairy Reel. If you don’t hear the Fairy Reel, they will not pause to steal your breath. When I was young I was a fool. So wrap me up in dreams and death.

With his tongue between his teeth, Officer Wally cocked his weapon and took aim. BANG! Mario felt the bullet enter his left foot, but carried on running undeterred. In place of screams, there was laughter. The golden ecstasy supplied by the drug was at its peak. It wouldn’t be long now; he could feel it. BANG! The second bullet caught him in his right foot, yet he dared not stop. It was near now, so near... BANG! “He missed,” Mario thought initially, but as he brought his hands to his lips, he tasted iron. Both his palms were bleeding profusely, and so were his feet. He laughed once again – head spinning, heart dancing, mind burdened by his search for meaning – his wet eyes on the velvet sky. The clouds were clearing. ‘The spear!’ he shouted to the heavens above. ‘Don’t forget the spear!’ It happened faster than any pair of eyes could capture it: the fourth bullet cut through the air with a tangible screech, and the nearby building exploded into applause. Like a marionette whose strings had been cut, Mario Fantoccio fell theatrically, the wound at his side painting the cobbles in Marsmeyer’s No.4 vermillion red. The ground beneath him split down the middle, and from the depths of asphalt, he heard music. It was the Music of Strings, of Celestial Spheres – an underworld rhapsody with dark aftertones, gushing out of the earth like puss from a wound. It was alluring, resplendent and at the same time, terrifying. Demonic and eternal, devastating and yet hypnotizing, the Sounds of Hell beckoned, and like an obedient child, Mario followed, sinking deeper and deeper into the Underworld. In a perfect moment of synchronicity, the orange sun of dusk broke through the rainclouds and cast a single beam of sunlight upon Mario’s forehead. He closed his eyes, his mind at ease, his head full of Music. The cobbles trembled under the approaching sound of footsteps. ‘Where is he? Where did he go?’ said the pursuing man. ‘H-he just vanished, sarge. In-into thin air!’ ‘Don’t be silly, Wally. People don’t just vanish into thin air. I know I got him. Heaven preserve me, I got him four times!’ ‘Yes, sarge.’ ‘What’s this now?’ ‘Rather looks like our man, sarge. Or at least, his rough outline filled out in blood. Well, except—’ ‘—except this one’s got wings,’ said the sergeant, his knees cracking as he crouched. He cautiously prodded the red shape with his index. ‘This ain’t blood, either.’ ‘Sir?’ The sergeant shoved the finger in his mouth. ‘Theatrical red paint.

An ear-splitting screech pierced the silence, followed by another, striking his ears like metal against a hollow bell. The woosh woosh of wind being displaced brought Andrew’s attention skyward, and a glacial gust of paralyzing terror raced up his spine. The creature opened its mouth, and a blazing shaft of fire bellowed from above. Andrew barely had enough time to back beneath an awning for protection. Egnatious and Sebastian dove to the side while Firen sidestepped her impending doom, raising the katana in challenge. The screeching returned, except now the howls were coming from every direction. Firen’s chest heaved. “Did you see that?” she asked, her stormy eyes glinting with rapture and daring as she held her katana out, preparing for the next attack. “Did I see the dragon?” Sebastian asked, hysteria dangerously rising to the surface. He stood and brushed himself off. “Yes, I bloody well did see that enormous, scaly, fire-breathing dragon.

The little car was soon free of the city, for the smear of suburbia that had once lain along the western highways for miles was gone. During the Plague Years of the eighties, when in some areas not one person in twenty remained alive, the suburbs were not a good place to be. Miles from the supermart, no gas for the car, and all the split-level ranch homes around you full of the dead. No help, no food. Packs of huge status-symbol dogs—Afghans, Alsatians, Great Danes—running wild across the lawns ragged with burdock and plantain. Picture window cracked. Who’ll come and mend the broken glass? People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned. Fireweed, from which bees make the finest honey of all, grew acre after acre over the sites of Kensington Homes West, Sylvan Oak Manor Estates, and Valley Vista Park.

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

In a widely viewed documentary titled Singularity or Bust, Hugo de Garis, a renowned researcher in the field of AI and author of The Artilect War, speaks of this phenomenon. He says: In a sense, we are the problem. We’re creating artificial brains that will get smarter and smarter every year. And you can imagine, say twenty years from now, as that gap closes, millions will be asking questions like ‘Is that a good thing? Is that dangerous?’ I imagine a great debate starting to rage and, though you can’t be certain talking about the future, the scenario I see as the most probable is the worst. This time, we’re not talking about the survival of a country. This time, it’s the survival of us as a species. I see humanity splitting into two major philosophical groups, ideological groups. One group I call the cosmists, who will want to build these godlike, massively intelligent machines that will be immortal. For this group, this will be almost like a religion and that’s potentially very frightening. Now, the other group’s main motive will be fear. I call them the terrans. If you look at the Terminator movies, the essence of that movie is machines versus humans. This sounds like science fiction today but, at least for most of the techies, this idea is getting taken more and more seriously, because we’re getting closer and closer. If there’s a major war, with this kind of weaponry, it’ll be in the billions killed and that’s incredibly depressing. I’m glad I’m alive now. I’ll probably die peacefully in my bed. But I calculate that my grandkids will be caught up in this and I won’t. Thank God, I won’t see it. Each person is going to have to choose. It’s a binary decision, you build them or you don’t build them.

The expression 'three is a crowd' holds true for both romance and politics. A three-way race is a disaster, because it splits the ballots, making it almost impossible to gain a majority of the votes. It usually results in a runoff.

A related point: The job of the imagination, in making a story from experience, may be not to gussy the story up but to tone it down. The fact is, the world is unbelievably strange and human behavior is frequently so weird that no kind of narrative except farce or satire can handle it. The function of the storyteller's imagination sometimes is simply to make it more plausible.

And that one guy, Martin that everyone liked, well he had a gash above his right eye and bruising near his jawline making him look even more corrupt. It took a moment for me to remember hearing he was a boxer. He caught me staring and stared back. No blinking. No movement. Just staring. Staring. I looked away blushing. From my periphery I could see him raise a hand to the cut above his eye then quickly shove his fists into the front pockets of his jeans. I turned my head to catch his eyes fall to the floor. It looked like he was focused on the leg of a barstool, but I think I saw a smile split his face.

Whatever She may have been thought to signify, its impact upon publication was tremendous. Everyone read it, especially men; a whole generation was influenced by it, and the generation after that. A dozen or so films have been based on it, and a huge amount of the pulp-magazine fiction churned out in the teens, twenties, and thirties of the twentieth century bears its impress. Every time a young but possibly old and/or dead woman turns up, especially if she’s ruling a lost tribe in a wilderness and is a hypnotic seductress, you’re looking at a descendant of She. Literary writers too felt Her foot on their necks. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness owes a lot to Her, as Gilbert and Gubar have indicated. James Hilton’s Shangri-La, with its ancient, beautiful, and eventually crumbling heroine, is an obvious relative. C. S. Lewis felt Her power, fond as he was of creating sweet-talking, good-looking evil queens; and in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, She splits into two: Galadriel, powerful but good, who’s got exactly the same water-mirror as the one possessed by She; and a very ancient cave-dwelling man-devouring spider-creature named, tellingly, Shelob

You surely don’t see the world so simplistically, Señorita. You must know that people are not split into good and evil, black and white. We are all shades of grey, every one of us. What you see as darkness, another would see as light. But if it’s kindness you want, I can do that. Treat me well, and I will do the same for you.

Ian believed that all actors were crazy. They had to be if they were any good. The truly great ones had to have a manageable version of split personality disorder. How else could they pretend to be someone else so fully that we not only believe it but we invest ourselves emotionally in what they are experiencing?

Last night, I had a dream that the forest split in two.

Obstacles start from the ground wherever he looks — his Jewishness, passport difficulties, trains, lack of sleep, her husband, his own office obligations, his state of health, his sister’s wedding. Disaster or distraction (and for him there is little difference between the two) surround him like a design for living. This is the design found in his fiction, which reflects a view of life as proliferation of obstacles splitting off into more obstacles, bewildering the brain by their multiplicity and movement.

Love makes us brave. And hope inspires our imaginations.

the Israelis and Palestinians were at a demographic tipping point, with more-or-less parity in the number of Jews and Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The century-long struggle over the land was only becoming more intractable. The Israeli Zionist left had long warned that the dream was at stake and that Israel could not have it both ways: Without partition into two separate homelands for Jews and Palestinians, Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish democracy, however compromised those terms were, could not be sustained and Israel would inevitably become a binational country. If all the Palestinians were given equal rights and the vote in Israel, it would not have a Jewish majority. Without partition and without allowing Palestinians to vote for the government that controlled fundamental aspects of their lives, Israel’s claim to be a democracy would eventually implode. The temporary occupation had gone on so long that many critics were already describing the separate statuses of Israel and the occupied territories as a fiction meant to obscure what was already a binational, one-state reality. Instead of a light unto the nations, Israel was being cast by its harshest liberal-left critics and human rights groups such as B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International as a single-state entity and territory that had already veered into a system of varying degrees of “Jewish supremacy” or racial “domination” over the Palestinians in different geographical areas that, they asserted, fit international definitions of apartheid and crimes against humanity. With a weak Palestinian leadership split between the increasingly autocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza, and after years without any semblance of a peace process, Israel, more than seventy years after its founding, was more divided over its endgame than it was on the eve of its independence. Esh Kodesh and a rash of other settlement outposts had stepped into the void to try to determine the outcome and doom Israel to victory, or at least to deepen the entanglement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The main character, a musician named Nicholas Brady, experiences being visited at night by a figure standing next to his bed and gazing down benevolently. “He had the impression that the figure, himself, had come back from the future, perhaps from a point vastly far ahead, to make certain that he, his prior self, was doing okay at a critical time in his life. The impression was distinct and strong and he could not rid himself of it.”4 In his classic 1954 book about a profound experience using mescaline, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley speculated that the brain served as a kind of filter or reducing valve for a more expanded, potentially omniscient consciousness he called Mind at Large.5 Increased understanding of the brain, altered states, and sleep states since that time has made it possible to push the kinds of questions Huxley asked about that reducing valve, and the special situations that may open or widen it, as well as the precognitive nature of some perceptual distortions and hallucinations, such as those that Dick chronicled and drew upon for his fiction. Expanding on Huxley’s insights, the writer Anthony Peake speculates that so-called REM intrusions in semi-awake states on the edge of sleep—as well as waking hallucinations experienced most commonly by people with neurological disorders and mental illness—reflect openings to our vaster consciousness, an inner guide he calls the Daemon.6 The Daemon, he notes, is often precognitive (among other things). What I am calling the Long Self is analogous to Peake’s Daemon, but I am placing greater emphasis on the biographical dimensions of this expanded sense of who we are. What precognitive dreams and dream-like phenomena suggest to me is the possibility that what Huxley called Mind at Large, and what mystics and shamans have often described as other realities and spirit worlds, may (at least partly) be our own transfigured lives, our biographies as they still lay untraversed and unlived ahead of us, including all the people and situations and emotions we have yet to encounter and experience. The reducing valve, in other words, might be a temporal thing, reducing our Long Self to something manageable by the mind in the moment, reflecting and refracting our entire biography through the present moment of conscious awareness. People who experience visitations by guardian protectors in dreams or waking visions may be unlikely to interpret these experiences as encounters with their future selves. It’s not an intuitive idea. They may interpret them instead in spiritual terms, as divine messengers. The Jungian tradition in psychotherapy, on the other hand, interprets them as split-off parts of the self. The Jungian analyst and writer Donald Kalsched describes an inner self-care system through which patients traumatized in childhood cordon off and protect a portion of the self from harm.7 That sequestered “regressed self”8 may reappear in dreams throughout life

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO READERS: TRUTH OR FICTION Everything in this book is true, except for what’s not. I thought I’d end this adventure by splitting those hairs. First, two elements gave birth to this story. I came upon each independently, but I knew there had to be a connection and that Sigma would need to investigate.

In the general fiction section Ava discovered a well-thumbed edition of the latest bestseller. One million copies sold! Pah again! She cracked the book open at the spine, knew just where the join was weakest. She laid it open like a sacrificial goat on the carped, hidden between the shelves of books. Then she unleashed her machete, samurai-warrior style, and raising it above her head brought it down, and cleaved the book in twain, splitting it down the middle like a coconut. And that was when, seeing the scimitar rise again, the librarian screamed.

She looked at Word. “You asked about X-it. He’s sleeping. There are no intruders in his consciousness. I’ve done a sweep. Several installations, their A-I and Super-Recognizers have all been rendered inoperable, but others will quickly pick up the slack. Some will malfunction. All are on high alert. They know contact has been made, that you are still alive, and a global search has begun. No A-I or human Super-Recognizer can penetrate the room that you were in and in which X-it is now sleeping. But he cannot come out of the room until we are ready to return to the second in time when Death saved you.

The unfortunate 8075 hadn't survived his assault, splintering apart, fragments of its casing skittering across the bench. The battery within had split along its plane, revealing something as out-of-place as a missile in a bathtub.

The standard theory is that DID is caused by trauma, especially childhood physical and sexual abuse. Painful thoughts and feelings connected to the trauma are then linked to imaginary friends, fanciful creations of the mind that are common among children. During highly stressful situations, the imaginary friends become more prominent and may function in place of the self. The child begins to dissociate, which means that he is experiencing the start of separate personalities or identities. During adolescence, the imaginary friends complete the split from self and develop their own personalities or identities. The identities, often called alters, develop as needed in response to the abuse and the emotions that go along with it. For example, shame may result in an alter that is weak and allows itself to be hurt; anger may produce one that seeks revenge and is hostile; fear may create an alter that is protective. The alter most closely associated with an individual’s original identity is called the host. Alters are usually aware of at least some of their fellow alters and of the host. The host often does not realize when a transition takes place between one identity and another. Months or years may pass with another identity in control while the host is not conscious of it. Some alters are described as frightening and violent. Their negative behaviors may include self-mutilation, suicide, violence, and murder.36

Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It's the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It's the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it's the nihilism that makes life worth living.

An axe delivers a huge amount of force to a small area of strong, very sharp metal. It is a weapon for attack rather than defence, and good at cleaving through armour. It can break enemy shields and kill a charging horse. Since they require intense training, the users are mostly highly skilled elite soldiers, often aristocrats, e.g. the Saxon huscarls. Type of fight scene: gritty, brutal, battles, attack, historical fiction, fantasy fiction, cutting through armour Typical user: tall brawny male with broad shoulders and bulging biceps, courageous, elite soldier, Viking, Saxon Mostly used in: European Dark Ages to Middle Ages Main action: cleave, hack, chop, cut, split Main motion: downwards Typical injury: severed large limbs, split skulls, cleaved torsos Strategy for lethal fight: severe the arm which holds the sword or the shield, or cleave torso from top to bottom, or cut off a leg then split the skull Disadvantages: big and heavy Watch battle axes in action Here are three connected videos about Viking and Saxon warriors with axes:

Fear.” The worn older man’s hoarse voice boomed out across the barren valley, its natural bass seeming to shake the debris around him. “Every species has experienced this natural instinct of self-preservation. Its origin dates back to even our earliest evolutionary ancestors, from the humans of our current era trailing backward through primates to the first tetrapod to make the revolutionary leap from water onto land, all the way back to the first single-celled organism that decided to seamlessly split down the middle to create an exact copy of itself in what can be considered the first fearful reaction of isolation. In all recorded history, very few beings have been exempted from this phenomenon, and those slim few are the great men and women who have shaped history so far.

Perhaps she had a hold on him,’ said Lisa. ‘Perhaps he owed her money or was her illegitimate son or was in love with Patricia and the Hudson knew he had a wife in a lunatic asylum and threatened to split on him.

Although sponges have many different types of cells, most are not organized into organs with discrete functions, like kidneys, livers, or ovaries (although the choanocyte chambers could be considered simple organs). For this reason, sponges are sometimes described as having a ‘tissue-level’ organization. Some sponges have astonishing powers of regeneration, so extreme that they were the inspiration for regenerating aliens in the science-fiction television series Doctor Who. The defining experiments that revealed this property were published in 1907 by Henry Van Peters Wilson of the University of North Carolina, USA. Wilson mashed up a living sponge and passed it through a fine cloth, the sort used for sieving flour, thereby splitting most of it into individual cells. Wilson then observed that these cells gradually crawled back together and reassembled into a new sponge! Furthermore, if the cells of two different species were mixed together, they would sort themselves out and regenerate into the two original sponges again. Although regeneration is found in many branches of the Animal Kingdom, no other animals are as expert as some of the sponges.

In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.

Penny beamed so widely, her smile threatened to completely encircle her head and split it in two.

The longer he stayed in this town, the less he was finding out. The point of diminishing returns was fast approaching. Yet now, as the trail ascended, as snowlines drew near and the wind became sovereign, he found himself waiting for some split-second flare out there at the edges of what he could see, a white horse borne against the sky, a black rush of hair streaming unruly as the smoke that marbles the flames of Perdition.

Nothing serious?” Luo Ji opened his bloodshot eyes wide. “I’m madly in love with a fictional person from a novel of my own creation. I’ve been with her, I’ve traveled with her, and I’ve even broken up with my real-life girlfriend over her. Is that nothing serious to you?” The doctor smiled tolerantly. “Don’t you get it? I’ve given my most profound love to an illusion!” “Are you under the impression that the object of everyone else’s love actually exists?” “Is that even a question?” “Sure. For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It’s as simple as that. You differ from the majority in one respect: You didn’t need a template.

1948: The Best Years of Our Lives. The characters in the film have retained a candour towards - and naive faith in - their feelings which we no longer possess. Our feelings, which we delightfully term emotions in order to salvage the fiction of an emotional life, are not affects any more, merely a psychological affectation, having lost all credence in our eyes. Or, alternatively, they are conversion emotions, betraying the melodrama going on in the body rather than the nuances of the soul. We do not even have this candour in our relations to our dreams, where we grapple with their interpretation, their splitting, their ironic reflexes. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. It knows only how to parody itself affectedly, and has veered towards psychodrama or visual melodrama. Retrospectively, these were then, also, the 'Best Years' of cinema.

Our apocalyptic fiction depicts a world in which humans revert to the savagery of the jungle the moment our institutions fall, survivors tearing each other to pieces even as they are dying of plague or stalked by the undead. In our real history, we have been in that situation many times—left without government or law enforcement, none of the modern institutions we take for granted. From each of these scenarios what emerged was not savagery, but cooperation. When the pillars of our culture crumble, we rebuild them. [...] Mankind is, and always has been, much greater than the sum of its parts. A lone human may appear to be nothing special if observed, say, blearily standing in line at a convenience store at two in the morning, or spitefully ripping a toy from the hands of a middle-aged woman in the chaos of a Black Friday sale. Yet, the combined efforts of these confused and volatile primates result in gleaming cities and majestic flying carriages. They have split the atom and peered across the universe. In the blink of an eye, they have acquired the powers of gods. This, I believe, is the fate of humanity: to colonize the stars over the next thousand years, to set down settlements in our solar system and others. Then, many centuries from now, one of our descendants will be strolling along some marvelous domed paradise on some distant planet and will see a drunken youth in offensive clothing, vomiting in an alley outside a pub. The man will look sidelong at the youth in that shameful state, shake his head, and mutter to himself that humanity is a ridiculous, doomed species, incapable of anything worthwhile. He will believe it, because the true, wonderful, terrible, fearsome power of humanity is otherwise almost too much to comprehend. I recognize that not all of you share my faith, but you must admit that if gods are real and have observed humanity’s evolution from afar, they must shudder at the possibilities.

For a split second, I was about to do it. Drop bombs on innocent people. Kill innocent people.

For those who have never visited it, the downtown Powell’s takes up a whole city block. A giant concrete split-level sarcophagus of books. There is a ghost that haunts the water fountain. An urn of cremated remains that moves from room to room. The shelves spill books, used and new, and the aisles buzz with the kind of diversity you’ll only find at the DMV: dudes in suits and dudes in mud-caked cowboy boots, a woman with dreads and a woman with a tiara and a woman with bright blue hair. A carnival of wonders for a kid from the boonies.

An old elm tree, its base split by lightning, provided him a comfortable resting place, and he eased his tired body into its caress. The lightning had blasted a hole in the tree nearly the size of a pup tent. The young man surveyed the vicinity from his new perch and saw that he could still see the general’s tent, and the cannon, and a hundred little campfires in the distance. He heard the order for the men to pitch their tents—a bugle call followed by a drum roll—they were here for the night. He closed his eyes and listened to the night sounds. It was calm, no wind. Then he heard the snapping of twigs again.

Kitty was torn when it came to their arrival in Cork. The only way they could stay on schedule was by splitting up. While Ambrose and Eugene went to the butterfly symposium at Cork University, Achar and Jedrek went to Cork English Market where the Irish food board, Bord Bia, had arranged a corporate adjudicator from Guinness World Records to recognise the largest number of people dressed as eggs ever to gather in the same place. This was part of a scheme to promote the local organic egg farmers. Kitty knew that she needed to be at both events, and that Steve needed to be too, and so she quickly hopped off the bus on a mission to push her way through the people dressed as eggs, their faces popping out of holes in the egg costumes, their legs in gold spandex leggings, to find the adjudicator. Jedrek and Achar were searching just as anxiously

She lowered her seat all the way back until she was lying down, and she turned on her side to face me, her arm tucked under her head. “She still has the ticket stubs from the first movie we went to, like, twelve years ago.” The way she was lying showed off the curve in her hips. I could almost picture her like that next to me in bed. Her lipstick was gone, but the stain was still on her lips, making them look pink and supple. I wanted to put a thumb to her mouth, see if it felt as soft as it looked. She looked out of place in this shitty car with torn, faded fabric on the seat under her, duct tape on the glove box. Like an elegant leading lady right out of a black-and-white movie, dropped into a scene that didn’t make any sense. I tore my gaze away, afraid she’d notice me staring. “Lie down with me,” she said. “We have what? A forty-five-minute wait? Might as well be comfortable.” I lowered my seat and stared up through the sunroof at the Los Angeles version of stars—the planes lining up to land at LAX. We sat in silence for a minute, and I thought of that scene in Pulp Fiction, when— “You know what this feels like?” she asked. “That scene in Pulp Fiction, when—” “Comfortable silences. When Mia Wallace says, ‘That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.’” She made a finger gun at me. “Disco.” We smiled and held each other’s gaze for a moment. A long, lingering moment. And then, just for a second—a split second—her eyes dropped to my lips. That’s all it took. In that moment, I knew. She’d thought about kissing me just then. This isn’t one-sided. It was the first hint I’d seen that she was interested. That she thought of me as more than just a friend.

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant, the second half still balmy and quite pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know.

How is it that after war and conquest the spoils are split evenly between the Emperor, the treasury and his Varangian Guard? True they are an unmatched commodity in war, but servants nonetheless, not so?Not so. They are tigers. Wild things we have allowed into our lands, our cities and our homes. They stand over our sleeping forms with their terrible axes poised. They have come to know all our secrets and entrenched themselves so deeply within the bosom of the Empire that it begs the question: are we paying them to guard us, or are we bribing them not to kill us?" - Justrudd Valusarian Excerpt from Varangian: Book One of the Byzantum Saga

Alex dragged her gaze away from the visuals to regard Nika curiously. “Each one of these points of view—they’re all you?” “Yes. And each one is mentally connected to the others, and to this instance. To me.” Her eyes drifted back to the frames. “How many were there?” “To start? Eight thousand.” Alex blinked. “Eight THOUSAND? Can all Asterions do this? Can you teach—” Caleb reached over and touched Alex’s arm. “No, baby. You’re not splitting yourself into eight thousand shards. The universe is barely surviving one of you.

There’s a reason that the world is predicated on good and evil,” Śakra responds clearly and gingerly, “in so much that I can say, everyone is composed of those elements. Realistically, there is never a solid good or evil. That's why fictional representations of those tropes are so comforting to the human species. We are split and that torments us, to the point that we lie to ourselves and create an antithesis of reality to go on believing. In all actuality, an audience at a movie theater knows that what they're seeing is fake, but they like to pretend that it's real. Those in the know try to nudge them along––because too quick of a revelation will lead to an existential crisis that will leave the recipient broken, or worse. Nevertheless, evil is universally understood by the general populace, while good is often left up to interpretation. Evil is just as gray, but social constructs purvey a fundamental sense of knowing.

The runes moved under my fingers as the fabric of space split and fluctuated within the confines of the portal.

whatever money we may need. We’ll figure out a split.” “That’s fine of you,” said Taine mechanically. “Not at all,” Henry insisted, grandly. “It’s just my aggressive, grasping sense of profit. I should be ashamed of myself, cutting in on this.

High cheek bones gave Queen Obadia's face a rare and exotic beauty, but her most riveting feature was her almond eyes. Large and hypnotic, they roamed over the faces of the visitors seated before her, settling for one magical instant on Nicholas’s face. In that split-second he thought he saw something register in the queen’s eyes. Then it was gone as she turned her attention to others.