Stranger Things References Quotes

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result--and you criticize!

When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’: that is, one in which all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king. Turning erstwhile strangers into part of the royal household, or denying them their own ancestors, are thereby ultimately two sides of the same coin. Or to put things another way, a ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship.

In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 3.6 percent of the city’s blocks. That made two examples. Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: New York. Seattle. Cincinnati. Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dallas. Anytime someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers. And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments. Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different—culturally, geographically, economically. His family was Israeli, so he thought Tel Aviv. Same thing. “I said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that! Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime? There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’” Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration.6 Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

We know that Moses spoke less after God had talked with him than before, and did not wish to speak on divine matters until an aid was given to speak for him.[1043] He thus gave an example to spiritual men who should say little of their consolations from God, and when they are bound to manifest them, should treat of them as though they referred to others let them give examples of such things from the Scriptures to prevent other people from guessing the truth. The holy child Samuel would not tell Heli the priest what God had said to him without much entreaty and persuasion. [1044] King Ezechiel was much to blame for showing the treasures of his palace and God's house to strangers. This warns you to take advice and keep a prudent silence about both your natural graces and those you acquire through contemplation.   The

Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature, which is established by Divine wisdom. Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it: thus fire heats most what is next to it. In like manner God pours forth the gifts of His goodness first and most plentifully on the substances which are nearest to Him, as Dionysius declares (On the Celestial Hierarchy, VII). But the bestowal of benefits is an act of charity towards others. Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us. Now one man's connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which men are engaged together; (thus the intercourse of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow-citizens is in civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters, and so forth): and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected with us. And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.

In the sphere of rights the irresistible trend is towards a situation where, if something can be taken for granted, all rights are otiose, whereas if a right must be demanded, it means that the battle is already lost; thus the very call for rights to water, air and space indicates that all these things are already on the way out. Similarly the evocation of a right to reply signals the absence of any dialogue, and so on. The rights of the individual lose their meaning as soon as the individual is no longer an alienated being, deprived of his own being, a stranger to himself, as has long been the case in societies of exploitation and scarcity. In his postmodern avatar, however, the individual is a self-referential and selfoperating unit. Under such circumstances the human-rights system becomes totally inadequate and illusory: the flexible, mobile individual of variable geometric form is no longer a subject with rights but has become, rather, a tactician and promoter of his own existence whose point of reference is not some agency of law but merely the efficiency of his own functioning or performance. Yet it is precisely now that the rights of man are acquiring a worldwide resonance. They constitute the only ideology that is currently available - which is as much as to say that human rights are the zero point of ideology, the sale outstanding balance of history. Human rights and ecology are the two teats of the consensus. The current world charter is that of the New Political Ecology. Ought we to view this apotheosis of human rights as the irresistible rise of stupidity, as a masterpiece which, though imperilled, is liable to light up the coming fin de siecle in the full glare of the consensus?

Motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again. Motion in time only proceeds in one direction in the everyday world, whatever seems to be going on at the particle level. It’s hard to visualize the four dimensions of spacetime, each at right angles to the other, but we can leave out one dimension and imagine what this strict rule would mean if it applied to one of the three dimensions we are used to. It’s as if we were allowed to move either up or down, either forward or back, but that sideways motion was restricted to shuffling to the left, say. Movement to the right is forbidden. If we made this the central rule in a children’s game, and then told a child to find a way of reaching a prize off to the right-hand side (“backward in time”) it wouldn’t take too long for the child to find a way out of the trap. Simply turn around to face the other way, swapping left for right, and then reach the prize by moving to the left. Alternatively, lie down on the floor so that the prize is in the “up” direction with reference to your head. Now you can move both “up” to grasp the prize and “down” to your original position, before standing up again and returning your personal space orientation to that of the bystanders.* The technique for time travel allowed by relativity theory is very similar. It involves distorting the fabric of space-time so that in a local region of space-time the time axis points in a direction equivalent to one of the three space directions in the undistorted region of space-time. One of the other space directions takes on the role of time, and by swapping space for time such a device would make true time travel, there and back again, possible. American mathematician Frank Tipler has made the calculations that prove such a trick is theoretically possible. Space-time can be distorted by strong gravitational fields,and Tipler’s imaginary time machine is a very massive cylinder, containing as much matter as our sun packed into a volume 100 km long and 10 km in radius, as dense as the nucleus of an atom, rotating twice every millisecond and dragging the fabric of space-time around with it. The surface of the cylinder would be moving at half the speed of light. This isn’t the sort of thing even the maddest of mad inventors is likely to build in his backyard, but the point is that it is allowed by all the laws of physics that we know. There is even an object in the universe that has the mass of our sun, the density of an atomic nucleus, and spins once every 1.5 milliseconds, only three times slower than Tipler’s time machine. This is the so-called “millisecond pulsar,” discovered in 1982. It is highly unlikely that this object is cylindrical—such extreme rotation has surely flattened it into a pancake shape. Even so, there must be some very peculiar distortions of space-time in its vicinity. “Real” time travel may not be impossible, just extremely difficult and very, very unlikely. That thin end of what might be a very large wedge may, however, make the normality of time travel at the quantum level seem a little more acceptable. Both quantum theory and relativity theory permit time travel, of one kind or another. And anything that is acceptable to both those theories, no matter how paradoxical that something may seem, has to be taken seriously. Time travel, indeed, is an integral part of some of the stranger features of the particle world, where you can even get something for nothing, if you are quick about it.

One warm June morning, during rush hour, a man appeared at the entrance to the rag picker's shack. 'I am intruding,' the mysterious man said, startling the rag picker. The first thing Sam noticed was the green tie. Sam had seen green ties before certainly, it was just that Sam wasn't sure that he had ever seen that particular shade of green. It made him think of the green in a rainbow he had once seen, sparkling and brilliant, or a flash of green he once saw in a botanical garden. Sam wasn't sure, but the essence of the color resonated deep inside Sam. The tie was paired with shoes the shade and shine of the was red lips children sometimes wear at Halloween. With the conservative black suit and shirt, the outfit should have looked ridiculous. On this man it did not. Sam tried to collect his wits. 'O my soul. Who are you?' he asked more in wonder at the visitor than in fear. Sam was no longer used to people. He didn't give many people the time of day. Nevertheless, there was something about this one that was fascinating. It was as if he exuded life from every pore in his body. 'My name is Mr. Khadir. I am from the Middle East.' Sam thought the stranger was referring to the East End of Long Island. He figured the man was a commuter whose car had probably overheated on the Expressway. 'I am a stranger,' Mr Khadir continued, 'and so are you; come with me in these deserts so that you may seek God.

All those personal pronouns and social relationships, for one thing. But there are other clues: females tend to progress information using the negative, such as “I don’t think”, or “our future is not as a couple”. They hedge – you know, use polite forms – to soften the information – “perhaps”, or “I’m sorry if …” – and they refer more to cognitive and emotional processes: think, feel, hope.

The crucial thing to remember with fibromyalgia is that the nervous system is stuck in the stress response (Martínez-Lavín 2012, 1998). In fact, all symptoms of fibromyalgia, including excessive pain, are the result of a complex chain reaction set off by a hyperactive stress response. The stress response is an automatic brain reflex that is commonly referred to as the “fight or flight” instinct. It has little to do with feeling stressed out. Rather, it refers to the body’s automatic response to danger, triggered by a primal brain area whose only focus is on survival. When a potential threat is detected—a loud banging on your front door, a stranger moving quickly toward you on the street—the brain prepares the body by pumping adrenaline and tightening muscles, readying your whole system for action. This is the body’s normal response to danger—great for a short-term response, and activated only when there is an imminent threat. In fibromyalgia, however, the stress response never stops, like a smoke alarm that goes off incessantly even though there’s no fire.

The ‘magic’ of Lothlórien has many roots (some of them to be discussed later on), but there is one thing about it which is again highly traditional, but also in a way a strong re-interpretation and rationalization of tradition. There are many references to elves in Old English and Old Norse and Middle English, and indeed in modern English – belief in them seems to have lasted longer than is the case with any of the other non-human races of early native mythology – but one story which remains strongly consistent is the story about the mortal going into Elfland, best known, perhaps, from the ballads of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’. The mortal enters, spends what seems to be a night, or three nights, in music and dancing. But when he comes out and returns home he is a stranger, everyone he once knew is dead, there is only a dim memory of the man once lost in Elf-hill. Elvish time, it seems, flows far slower than human time. Or is it far quicker? For there is another motif connected with elves, which is that when their music plays, everything outside stands still. In the Danish ballad of ‘Elf-hill’ (Elverhøj), when the elf-maiden sings: ‘The swift stream then stood still, that before had been running; the little fish that swam in it played their fins in time’. Tolkien did not at all mind deciding that ancient scribes had got a word wrong, and correcting it for them, but he was at the same time reluctant ever to think that they had got the whole story wrong, just because it did not seem to make sense: it was his job to make it make sense. Lothlórien in a way reconciles the two motifs of the ‘The Night that Lasts a Century’ and ‘The Stream that Stood Still’. The Fellowship ‘remained some days in Lothlórien, as far as they could tell or remember’. But when they come out Sam looks up at the moon, and is puzzled: ‘The Moon’s the same in the Shire and in Wilderland, or it ought to be. But either it’s out of its running, or I’m all wrong in my reckoning.’ He concludes, it is ‘as if we had never stayed no time in the Elvish country…Anyone would think that time did not count in there!’ Frodo agrees with him, and suggests that in Lothlórien they had entered a world beyond time. But Legolas the elf offers a deeper explanation, not from the human point of view but from the elvish (which no ancient text had ever tried to penetrate). For the elves, he says: ‘the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.’ What Legolas says makes perfect sense, from the viewpoint of an immortal. It also explains how mortals are deceived when they enter into elvish time, and can interpret it as either fast or slow. All the stories about elves were correct. Their contradictions can be put together to create a deeper and more unpredictable image of Elfland, at once completely original and solidly traditional.

On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds. Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions. Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like. Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.

On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds.
 Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions.
 Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like.
 Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.

In his book Ethics, which he worked on during this time, Bonhoeffer wrote about the way people worship success. The topic fascinated him. He referred to it in his letter from Barcelona many years earlier, in which he observed the fickleness of the crowds at bullfights, how they roared for the toreador one moment and for the bull the next. It was success they wanted, success more than anything. In Ethics, he wrote: In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things the figure of Him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger and is at best the object of pity. The world will allow itself to be subdued only by success. It is not ideas or opinions which decide, but deeds. Success alone justifies wrongs done. . . . With a frankness and off-handedness which no other earthly power could permit itself, history appeals in its own cause to the dictum that the end justifies the means. . . . The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard. God was interested not in success, but in obedience. If one obeyed God and was willing to suffer defeat and whatever else came one’s way, God would show a kind of success that the world couldn’t imagine. But this was the narrow path, and few would take it.

Back in North Carolina, the small office in the English Department I shared with another graduate student for our teaching assignments looked like a decorator's version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one where Jekyll loved Stranger Things, Funko Pops, and artistically desaturated wedding photos, and Hyde loved death row cinder block walls.

From the outside how might our lives have appeared to strangers? I say our, which in June 2015 meant my mother and me, but I could just as easily have been referring to any number of the interchangeable bodies that populated our corner of Bedok. We still lived in the same house I grew up in, but you didn't actually have to see it to know how it looked, nor to understand the number of steps needed to cross from the bed to the bathroom - after all, it was the same prefabricated apartment everyone else lived in, too, organized and replicated within the thousands of high-rise concrete slabs across the country. If you came closer, small things might start to distinguish this neighborhood from the next-you might notice the exercise corner outfitted with new, granulated rubber flooring that stunk under the noonday sun, or realize the HDB flats had gone from blue to beige in the latest five-year paint cycle. But no matter how individual elements blinked in and out of existence, the overall physical character of the neighborhood stayed the same. In the afternoons, the streets would flood with students released from nearby schools, rushing to various enrichment centers or back to their homes and desks, weaving in their oblivious, rowdy manner around the implements of the neighborhood, among which I counted myself. Perhaps their pace picked up a little as they hurried past me, but they never looked up and into my face. I didn't mind. It had taken me a long time to get to this point, to be able to exist unscrutinized and uninterfered with. To lift the lid of the neighborhood and look more closely at the ordinary lives swarming the earth like ants, to come close to the churning infernos of their minds, would be to realize that the nutty auntie squatting by the drain and tenderly shampooing the roots of a plant she was propagating remained constantly surprised to find herself aged, would be to realize that within the humming fish ball uncle lived the suppressed spirit of an operatic tenor weeping for the stage. How vast the legion of unrealized, contradictory, impractical ghosts crammed within each mortal body was. How it scalded one to look so closely. It was too much. Just thinking about it was enough to make me cry.