Swept Away Book Quotes

My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.

I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

The waves may break upon the mountain, yet still they come, wave upon wave, and in the end only pebbles remain where once the mountain stood. And soon even the pebbles are swept away, to be ground beneath the sea for all eternity.

Maybe a crush can be like a book you find at the library. First, you're drawn in by the cover. Then, you try to find out what it's about, so you read a little description on the jacket. Maybe, it's says exactly what you want to read, or maybe it's mysteriously vague and even more curious. Either way, you decide that you're going to choose this book knowing very little about it, but you have this excited feeling that if you dive in, you might be swept away.

...books change lives, in big ways and small, from the simple desire to spend a few quiet hours in a comfy chair, swept away by a story, to the profound realization that the reader is not alone in the world, that there is someone else like him or her, someone who has faced the same fears, the same confusions, the same grief, the same joys. Reading is a way to live more lives, to experience more worlds, to meet people we care about and want to know more about, to understand others and develop a compassion for what they confront and endure. It is a way to learn how to knit or build a house or solve an equation, a way to be moved to laughter and wonder and to learn how to live...in all our fascination with technology we've forgotten that a simple book can make a difference.

as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other's keeping and both were unafraid.

Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday’s home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn’t. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing.

Before Lord Anomander Rake the crowd in the street shrank back, all thoughts of festivity swept away.

gazing down at the black water remembering all the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They'd done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it- in love- you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.

But somehow, books weren’t enough anymore. Staring at ink on a page and trying to get swept away was harder lately.

By around 480, as he put it, ‘now that the old degrees of official rank are swept away . . . the only token of nobility will henceforth be a knowledge of letters’; the official hierarchy had gone, only traditional Roman culture survived.

... because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, grabbed hold of you before you know it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it - in love - you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.

The strategy worked like a charm, and in 1980 Jimmy Carter was swept away like offal by the “Reagan Revolution,” which ushered in eight years of berserk looting of the federal treasury and the economic crippling of the middle class. That was the eighties, folks. That was the feeding frenzy of the New Rich, who found themselves wallowing in excess profits as their maximum income tax rate got chopped down to 31 percent and who were welcomed like brothers in the White House at all hours of the day or night.

Blessed are you who, among the numberless swept away in terror, permitted a few to suffer carefully.

When everything you think you own—your belongings, your life—can be swept away in an instant, you must ask yourself, What is real?

The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.

Originally printed in Valenda, capital city of the Meridian Empire, during the Second Year of the Scarlett Dynasty, by Legendary Publications. If you are a curmudgeon or have any sensitivities to merriment, fantasy, romance, dreams, and holiday magic, you may wish to put this book down immediately. This story has been known to infect readers with holiday spirit and dreams of being swept away. Some readers have even been known to break into song or spontaneously start baking holiday cookies. This book may be purchased, gifted, or borrowed, but under no circumstances should copies of this story be transported to the Magnificent North. The magic of this book does not mix well with the cursed story magic of the Magnificent North, and if the two are combined, Legendary Publications is not responsible for what will happen.

The more pain you deliver to others, the more shall be visited upon you. You sow your own misery, and because of that whatever sympathy you might rightly receive is swept away.

I won’t let you get swept away. I meant it when I said as one,” he whispers. “I won’t let it happen… I refuse to let you disappear.

To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United States between about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in their wake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, would openly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns and suburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.

Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she walked away from thinking, "I can do better that this. Hell, I am doing better than this!" What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize that his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff? Good writing on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy--"I'll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand"--but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing--of being flattened, in fact--is part of every writer's necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience different styles.

I couldn't motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn't remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon's shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back - a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.

Wretched, close to death from my youth, I have borne your trials; I am numb. Your fury has swept down upon me; your terrors have utterly destroyed me. They surround me all the day like a flood, they assail me all together. Friend and neighbour you have taken away: my one companion is darkness.

Our sin is our resistance to going along with God's initiative in making suffering reparative. We are deeply drawn towards God, but we also sense how following him will dislocate and transform beyond recognition the forms which have made life tolerable for us. We often react with fear, dismay, hostility. We are at war with ourselves, and responding differently to this inner conflict, we end up at war with each other. So it is undoubtedly true that the result of sin is much suffering. But this is by no means distributed according to desert. Many who are relatively innocent are swept up in this suffering, and some of the worse offenders get off lightly. The proper response to all this is not retrospective book-keeping, but making ourselves capable of responding to God's initiative. But now if that's what sin is, then one can sympathize with a lot of the modern critique of a religion which focuses on the evil tendencies of human nature, and the need for renunciation and sacrifice. This is not because humans are in fact angelic, or there is no point to sacrifice. It's just that focusing on how bad human beings can be, even if it's to refute the often over-rosy views of secular humanists with their reliance on human malleability and therapy, can only strengthen misanthropy, which certainly won’t bring you closer to God; and propounding sacrifice and renunciation for themselves takes you away from the main points, which is following God's initiative. That this can involve sacrifice, we well know from the charter act in this initiative, but renunciation is not is point.

481 I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been. After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing. Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life. The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.

The baby girl who lifted the flaps of Rod Campbell's Dear Zoo becomes the toddler charmed by Ludwig Behmelman's Madeline who turns into the sixth grader listening open-mouthed to Mark Halperin's A Kingdom Far and Clear who grows up to be the young woman swept away by Leo Tolstoy and the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of Anna Karenina. Each book makes straight the path for the next, opening out into sunlit literary meadows where, over time, young people will encounter beautiful writing and characters and scenes that may have been known, loved, and remembered by generations long since past. For the child, or teenager, or anyone else for that matter, getting these tickets to arcadia is a matter of simplicity. All they have to do is listen.

When a boy grows up in a “dysfunctional” family (perhaps there is no other kind of family), his interior warriors will be killed off early. Warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king. The King in a child stands for and stands up for the child’s mood. But when we are children our mood gets easily overrun and swept over in the messed-up family by the more powerful, more dominant, more terrifying mood of the parent. We can say that when the warriors inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, go into trance, or die. The inner warriors I speak of do not cross the boundary aggressively; they exist to defend the boundary. The Fianna, that famous band of warriors who defended Ireland’s borders, would be a model. The Fianna stayed out all spring and summer watching the boundaries, and during the winter came in. But a typical child has no such protection. If a grown-up moves to hit a child, or stuff food into the child’s mouth, there is no defense—it happens. If the grown-up decides to shout, and penetrate the child’s auditory boundaries by sheer violence, it happens. Most parents invade the child’s territory whenever they wish, and the child, trying to maintain his mood by crying, is simply carried away, mood included. Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. The child concludes that if it has no sovereignty, it must be worthless. Shame is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings. Gershen Kauffman describes that feeling brilliantly in his book, Shame, and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason in their book, Facing Shame, extend Kauffman’s work into the area of family shame systems and how they work. When our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overwhelming proof of our inadequacy. A slap across the face pierces deeply, for the face is the actual boundary of our soul, and we have been penetrated. If a grown-up decides to cross our sexual boundaries and touch us, there is nothing that we as children can do about it. Our warriors die. The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame. What is worse, one sexual invasion, or one beating, usually leads to another, and the warriors, if revived, die again. When a boy grows up in an alcoholic family, his warriors get swept into the river by a vast wave of water, and they struggle there, carried downriver. The child, boy or girl, unprotected, gets isolated, and has more in common with snow geese than with people.

A major defining factor was my wanting him to be part of the DC Universe. Because if someone as powerful as the Sandman was running all the dreams in the world, a natural question would be “Why haven’t we heard about him by now?” The answer I came up with was “He’s been locked away.” And that solution formed an image in my head of a naked man in a glass cell. My next question was “How long had he been trapped there?” The movie Awakenings hadn’t been made yet, but I’d read Oliver Sacks’s book a few months earlier, so I knew about the encephalitis lethargica, or “sleepy sickness,” that had swept Europe in 1916. Scientists to this day don’t understand what caused it, and I loved the idea of blaming it on the Sandman’s imprisonment, so I determined the length of his stay to be seventy-two years—ending in late 1988, when the series debuted. And so on; each plot point just seemed to naturally lead to the next one.

....though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. "To understand history," Chacko said, "we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells."... ..."But we can't go in," Chacko explained, "because we've been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

– I began to wander around by myself. I would march along by the riverbank, trying to pretend I had a destination, or stand on the Jubilee Bridge as if waiting for someone, gazing down at the black water and remembering the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They’d done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it – in love – you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.

The Mercy The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on, then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. "The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.

Stop staring at Kevin so much. You're making me fear for your life over here." "What do you mean?" "Andrew is scary territorial of him. He punched me the first time I said I'd like to get Kevin too wasted to be straight." Nicky pointed at his face, presumably where Andrew had decked him. "So yeah, I'm going to crush on safer targets until Andrew gets bored of him. That means you, since Matt's taken and I don't hate myself enough to try Seth. Congrats." "Can you take the creepy down a level?" Aaron asked. "What?" Nikcy asked. "He said he doesn't swing, so obviously he needs a push." "I don't need a push," Neil said. "I'm fine on my own." "Seriously, how are you not bored of your hand by now?" "I'm done with this conversation," Neil said. "This and every future variation of it. [...]" The stadium door slammed open as Andrew showed up at last. He swept them with a wide-eyed look as if surprised to see them all there. "Kevin wants to know what's taking you so long. Did you get lost?" "Nicky's scheming to rape Neil," Aaron said. "There are a couple flaws in his plan he needs to work out first, but he'll get there sooner or later." [...] "Wow, Nicky," Andrew said. "You start early." "Can you really blame me?" Nicky glanced back at Neil as he said it. He only took his eyes off Andrew for a second, but that was long enough for Andrew to lunge at him. Andrew caught Nicky's jersey in one hand and threw him hard up against the wall. [...] "Hey, Nicky," Andrew said in stage-whisper German. "Don't touch him, you understand?" "You know I'd never hurt him. If he says yes-" "I said no." "Jesus, you're greedy," Nicky said. "You already have Kevin. Why does it-" He went silent, but it took Neil a moment to realize why. Andrew had a short knife pressed to Nicky's Jersey. [...] Neil was no stranger to violence. He'd heard every threat in the book, but never from a man who smiled as bright as Andrew did. Apathy, anger, madness, boredom: these motivators Neil knew and understood. But Andrew was grinning like he didn't have a knife point where it'd sleep perfectly between Nicky's ribs, and it wasn't because he was joking. Neil knew Andrew meant it. If Nicky so much as breathed wrong right now, Andrew would cut his lungs to ribbons, any and all consequences be damned. Neil wondered if Andrew's medicine would let him grieve, or if he'd laugh at Nicky's funeral too. Then he wondered if a sober Andrew would act any different. Was this Andrew psychosis or his medicine? Was he flying too high to understand what he was doing, or did his medicine only add a smile to Andrew's ingrained violence? [...] Andrew let go of Nicky and spun away. [...] Aaron squized Nicky's shoulder on his way out. Nicky looked shaken as he stared after the twins, but when he realized Neil was watching him he rallied with a smile Neil didn't believe at all. "On second thought, you're not my type after all,” Nicky said [...]. "Don't let him get away with things like that." Nicky considered him for a moment, his smile fading into something small and tired. "Oh, Neil. You're going to make this so hard on yourself. Look, [...] Andrew is a little crazy. Your lines are not his lines, so you can get all huff and puff when he tramps across yours but you'll never make him understand what he did wrong. Moreover, you'll never make him care. So just stay out of his way." "He's like this because you let him get away with it," Neil said. [...] "That was my fault. [...] I said something I shouldn't have, and got what I deserved.

Pico and Lorenzo and Poliziano and the young Michelangelo. They held in each hand the new world and the old world. The library hunted down the last four books of Cicero. They imported a giraffe, a rhinoceros, a dodo. Toscanelli drew maps of the world based on correspondence with merchants. They sat in this room with a bust of Plato and argued all night. And then came Savonarola’s cry out of the streets: “Repentance! The deluge is coming!“ And everything was swept away—free will, the desire to be elegant, fame, the right to worship Plato as well as Christ. Now came the bonfires—the burning of wigs, books, animal hides, maps.

We’re taking a bath,” I said, removing my underwear and socks and adding them to the pile of clothing I was going to throw away at my earliest convenience. I never wanted to see her ruined pink sweater again. I’d buy her a new one. A dozen new ones. I’d rebuild her library brick by brick, book by book. And I would never let her face danger alone again. Something loosened in my chest. Something old and rusted. Like an ancient lock finally forced open. Fresh air swept inside, blowing aside the cobwebs, lighting the hearth. She’d always been mine. I was just now accepting that fact. Once something was mine, I never gave it up.

Nelson, do you remember the spring day when we climbed the barn gable so we could see the seagulls that mysteriously blew into our clay hills-- swept from an ocean neither of us had ever seen though it was scarcely a hundred miles away, each bird a genuine miracle high above the green barley? The time we saw that panther in the sycamore tree and Maw said it was the sign of war? Nelson, I am sixty-three years old, the same age that both Maw and Daddy were when they died. I have written this in testimony. With this book, I presume to be done now with such remembrance. But somehow I suspect it will go on, this peering down old wells, this excavation of memory and its shades.

The only people who remained there after the exodus that night were an assortment of lost, unclaimed souls. There was a boy from Iran who appeared very sad, his eyelashes clustered together in little wet starbursts. He sat in a chair in a corner of the first-floor lounge with his computer on his lap, gazing at it mournfully. When Greer entered the lounge—her room, a rare single, was too depressing to stay in all evening, and she’d been unable to concentrate on her book—she was startled to realize that he was merely looking at his screen saver, which was a picture of his parents and sister, all of them smiling at him from far away. The family image swept across the computer screen and gently bounced against one side, before slowly heading back

He passed the open library door, then stopped, returned. He pushed the door wider to see Kestrel more fully. A fire burned in the grate. The room was warm, and Kestrel was browsing the shelves as if this were her home, which Arin wanted it to be. Her back to him, she slid a book from its row, a finger on top of its spine. She seemed to sense his presence. She slid the book back and turned. The graze on her cheek had scabbed over. Her blackened eye had sealed shut. The other eye studied him, almond-shaped, amber, perfect. The sight of her rattled Arin even more than he had expected. “Don’t tell people why you killed Cheat,” she said. “It won’t win you any favors.” “I don’t care what they think of me. They need to know what happened.” “It’s not your story to tell.” A charred log shifted on the fire. Its crackle and sift was loud. “You’re right,” Arin said slowly, “but I can’t lie about this.” “Then say nothing.” “I’ll be questioned. I’ll be held accountable by our new leader, though I’m not sure who will take Cheat’s place--” “You. Obviously.” He shook his head. Kestrel lifted one shoulder in a shrug. She turned back to the books. “Kestrel, I didn’t come in here to talk politics.” Her hand trembled slightly, then swept along the titles to hide it. Arin didn’t know how much last night had changed things between them, or in what way. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Cheat should never have been a threat to you. You shouldn’t even be in this house. You’re in this position because I put you there. Here. Forgive me, please.” Her fingers paused: thin, strong, and still. Arin dared to reach for her hand, and Kestrel did not pull away.

Yes, I think a lot happened here. This fountain in the wall. Pico and Lorenzo and Poliziano and the young Michelangelo. They held in each hand the new world and the old world. The library hunted down the last four books of Cicero. They imported a giraffe, a rhinoceros, a dodo. Toscanelli drew maps of the world based on correspondence with merchants. They sat in this room with a bust of Plato and argued all night. And then came Savonarola's cry out of the streets: 'Repentance! The deluge is coming!' And everything was swept away – free will, the desire to be elegant, fame, the right to worship Plato as well as Christ. Now came the bonfires – the burning of wigs, books, animal hides, maps. More than four hundred years later they opened up the graves. Pico's bones were preserved. Poliziano's had crumbled into dust.

THE SPANISH JEW'S TALE. THE LEGEND OF RABBI BEN LEVI. Rabbi Ben Levi, on the Sabbath, read A volume of the Law, in which it said, "No man shall look upon my face and live." And as he read, he prayed that God would give His faithful servant grace with mortal eye To look upon His face and yet not die. Then fell a sudden shadow on the page And, lifting up his eyes, grown dim with age, He saw the Angel of Death before him stand, Holding a naked sword in his right hand. Rabbi Ben Levi was a righteous man, Yet through his veins a chill of terror ran. With trembling voice he said, "What wilt thou here?" The angel answered, "Lo! the time draws near When thou must die; yet first, by God's decree, Whate'er thou askest shall be granted thee." Replied the Rabbi, "Let these living eyes First look upon my place in Paradise." Then said the Angel, "Come with me and look." Rabbi Ben Levi closed the sacred book, And rising, and uplifting his gray head, "Give me thy sword," he to the Angel said, "Lest thou shouldst fall upon me by the way." The Angel smiled and hastened to obey, Then led him forth to the Celestial Town, And set him on the wall, whence, gazing down, Rabbi Ben Levi, with his living eyes, Might look upon his place in Paradise. Then straight into the city of the Lord The Rabbi leaped with the Death-Angel's sword, And through the streets there swept a sudden breath Of something there unknown, which men call death. Meanwhile the Angel stayed without, and cried, "Come back!" To which the Rabbi's voice replied, "No! in the name of God, whom I adore, I swear that hence I will depart no more!" Then all the Angels cried, "O Holy One, See what the son of Levi here has done! The kingdom of Heaven he takes by violence, And in Thy name refuses to go hence!" The Lord replied, "My Angels, be not wroth; Did e'er the son of Levi break his oath? Let him remain; for he with mortal eye Shall look upon my face and yet not die." Beyond the outer wall the Angel of Death Heard the great voice, and said, with panting breath, "Give back the sword, and let me go my way." Whereat the Rabbi paused, and answered, "Nay! Anguish enough already has it caused Among the sons of men." And while he paused He heard the awful mandate of the Lord Resounding through the air, "Give back the sword!" The Rabbi bowed his head in silent prayer; Then said he to the dreadful Angel, "Swear, No human eye shall look on it again; But when thou takest away the souls of men, Thyself unseen, and with an unseen sword, Thou wilt perform the bidding of the Lord." The Angel took the sword again, and swore, And walks on earth unseen forevermore.

She gives just enough hints about him to make you wonder why he became so villainous. And if he dies, I’ll never learnt the answer.” Oliver eyes her closely. “Perhaps he was born villainous.” “No one is born villainous.” “Oh?” he said with raised eyebrow. “So we’re all born good?” “Neither. We start as animals, with an animal’s needs and desires. It takes parents and teachers and other good examples to show us how to restrain those needs and desires, when necessary, for the greater good. But it’s still our choice whether to heed that education or to do as we please.” “For a woman who loves murder and mayhem, you’re quite the philosopher.” “I like to understand how things work. Why people behave as they do.” He digested that for a moment. “I happen to think that some of us, like Rockton, are born with a wicked bent.” She chose her words carefully. “That certainly provides Rockton with a convenient excuse for his behavior.” His features turned stony. “What do you mean?” “Being moral and disciplined is hard work. Being wicked requires no effort at all-one merely indulges every desire and impulse, no matter how hurtful or immoral. By claiming to be born wicked, Rockton ensures that he doesn’t have to struggle to be god. He can just protest that he can’t help himself.” “Perhaps he can’t,” he clipped out. “Or maybe he’s simply unwilling to fight his impulses. And I want to know the reason for that. That’s why I keep reading Minerva’s books.” Did Oliver actually believe he’d been born irredeemably wicked? How tragic! It lent a hopelessness to his life that helped to explain his mindless pursuit of pleasure. “I can tell you the reason for Rockton’s villainy.” Oliver rose to round the desk. Propping his hip on the edge near her, he reached out to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear. A sweet shudder swept over her. Why must he have this effect on her? It simply wasn’t fair. “Oh?” she managed. “Rockton knows he can’t have everything he wants,” he said hoarsely, his hand drifting to her cheek. “He can’t have the heroine, for example. She would never tolerate his…wicked impulses. Yet he still wants her. And his wanting consumes him.” Her breath lodged in her throat. It had been days since he’d touched her, and she hadn’t forgotten what it was like for one minute. To have him this near, saying such things… She fought for control over her volatile emotions. “His wanting consumes him precisely because he can’t have her. If he thought he could, he wouldn’t want her after all.” “Not true.” His voice deepening, he stroked the line of her jaw with a tenderness that roused an ache in her chest. “Even Rockton recognizes when a woman is unlike any other. Her very goodness in the face of his villainy bewitches him. He thinks if he can just possess that goodness, then the dark cloud lying on his soul will lift, and he’ll have something other than villainy to sustain him.” “Then he’s mistaken.” Her pulse trebled as his finger swept the hollow of her throat. “The only person who can lift the dark cloud on his soul is himself.” He paused in his caress. “So he’s doomed, then?” “No!” Her gaze flew to his. “No one is doomed, and certainly not Rockton. There’s still hope for him. There is always hope.” His eyes burned with a feverish light, and before she could look away, he bent to kiss her. It was soft, tender…delicious. Someone moaned, she wasn’t sure who. All she knew was that his mouth was on hers again, molding it, tasting it, making her hungry in the way that only he seemed able to do. “Maria…” he breathed. Seizing her by the arms, he drew her up into his embrace. “My God, I’ve thought of nothing but you since that day in the carriage.

....though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. 'To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.'... ...'But we can't go in,' Chacko explained, 'because we've been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

The storm which swept me into a hospital in December began as a cloud no bigger than a wine goblet the previous June. And the cloud—the manifest crisis—involved alcohol, a substance I had been abusing for forty years. Like a great many American writers, whose sometimes lethal addiction to alcohol has become so legendary as to provide in itself a stream of studies and books, I used alcohol as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria, and to the enhancement of the imagination. There is no need to either rue or apologize for my use of this soothing, often sublime agent, which had contributed greatly to my writing; although I never set down a line while under its influence, I did use it—often in conjunction with music—as a means to let my mind conceive visions that the unaltered, sober brain has no access to. Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of my intellect, besides being a friend whose ministrations I sought daily—sought also, I now see, as a means to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeons of my spirit.

One of these passages of Bergotte, the third or fourth which I had detached from the rest, filled me with a joy to which the meagre joy I had tasted in the first passage bore no comparison, a joy which I felt myself to have experienced in some innermost chamber of my soul, deep, undivided, vast, from which all obstructions and partitions seemed to have been swept away. For what had happened was that, while I recognised in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same bursts of music, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the earlier passages without my having taken them into account as the source of my pleasure, I now no longer had the impression of being confronted by a particular passage in one of Bergotte’s works, which traced a purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon the surface of my mind, but rather of the ‘ideal passage’ of Bergotte, common to every one of his books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own understanding seemed to be enlarged. I

Two things that weren’t even on the agenda survived every upheaval that followed. General Akhtar remained a general until the time he died, and all God’s names were slowly deleted from the national memory as if a wind had swept the land and blown them away. Innocuous, intimate names: Persian Khuda which had always been handy for ghazal poets as it rhymed with most of the operative verbs; Rab, which poor people invoked in their hour of distress; Maula, which Sufis shouted in their hashish sessions. Allah had given Himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more. But all these names slowly started to disappear: from official stationery, from Friday sermons, from newspaper editorials, from mothers’ prayers, from greeting cards, from official memos, from the lips of television quiz-show hosts, from children’s storybooks, from lovers’ songs, from court orders, from telephone operators’ greetings, from habeas corpus applications, from inter-school debating competitions, from road inauguration speeches, from memorial services, from cricket players’ curses; even from beggars’ begging pleas. In the name of God, God was exiled from the land and replaced by the one and only Allah who, General Zia convinced himself, spoke only through him. But today, eleven years later, Allah was sending him signs that all pointed to a place so dark, so final, that General Zia wished he could muster up some doubts about the Book. He knew if you didn’t have Jonah’s optimism, the belly of the whale was your final resting place.

Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of .05 or .10, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastesit made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.

[...] the chimps had many empty hours to fill. Time can seem endless and often cruel for caged animals. Nim and Sally did have some diversions in their enclosure: a small television set, rarely watched; a tire swing; a basketball set; and a variety of allegedly indestructible toys. But the chimps mainly passed the time interacting with each other—grooming, cuddling, playing, chasing. When occasional squabbles erupted, their high-pitched screeches could be heard from a distance. Minutes later the couple would make up and hug. Nim was frequently seen signing “sorry” to Sally, who always forgave her close friend. On his own, Nim spent hours flipping through the pages of old magazines, seeming particularly diverted by images of people. The magazines, which Nim tore to shreds, were swept away at the end of each day and replaced by new ones in the morning. But he did manage to keep two children's books intact—no small accomplishment. His prize possessions, they were carefully tucked away in the loft area of his cage. (WER would have appreciated Nim's affection for books.) During the day, Nim brought the books down from the loft and pored over them intently, as if studying for an exam. One was a Sesame Street book with an illustrated section on how to learn ASL. The other was in essence his personal photo album from his New York years, a battered copy of The Story of Nim: The Chimp Who Learned Language, published in 1980. In it, dozens of black-and-white photographs of Nim— with Terrace, LaFarge, Petitto, Butler, and a handful of others—tell the story of his childhood (or an idealized version of it) from his infancy to his return to Oklahoma. Nim appears dressed in little-boy clothes, doing household chores, and learning his first signs. The book ends with a photo of Nim and Mac playing together, cage-free, in Oklahoma. The accompanying text explains that Nim is a chimpanzee, not a human, which was why he had been sent back to IPS.

The sea and the albatross - continued For hanging this guilt around my neck would then weigh heavily on my boat, And then nothing, not even Gods of the sea can keep it afloat, So, I moved the boat closer to the still struggling master of the skies, And I could hear its agonising and painful cries, The boat was taking too long and the bird lay there where it did not belong, So I dived into the sea, and after a swim that lasted very long, I held the albatross in my hand and it finally clung to my shoulder, As I swam towards my boat splashing the water around with my arms in ways bolder, Finally I placed the albatross in the boat and as it dried its wings, It flew away by flapping them like the most beautiful swings, Then in its retreating flight it gave me a parting look, That only can be understood by the mariner and the master of the sky, because when it comes to life we read the same book, As it flew away a colossal wave swept me and my boat and we both sank into the sea, And now nothing was left, neither my boat nor me, Only the cross remains, that still floats in this area of the sea, And the albatross, whenever it is bearing its flight of freedom swoops down to kiss the cross and think of me, Maybe that is what it is or maybe that is what I want to believe in, Because at the bottom of the sea my soul does sometimes believe that even in death few mariners always win, It is then the albatross reveals to me the secret of its long flight, And to the soul of valour and the spirit of justice it brings that ultimate moment of delight, Now I may lie in the bottom of the sea with everything else right above and over me, But who can imagine, except the albatross and mariners few, that what an enormous world lies under me!

The tiny tea-shop beside the eleven water spouts was at the edge of the Dhorpatan Valley. From there we could see right across the wide, wind-swept peat-bog. The high mountain ridges that walled in the valley seemed to catch the rain and send it down here. Even the air we were breathing was wet. Golden eagles played on the updrafts. Two, one a little smaller than the other, circled on a thermal. They looked huge, but when others disappeared behind a mountain ridge, I realised they were further away and even bigger than I first thought. The nearest eagles half folded their wings and plummeted earthwards, still circling each other as they dived head first. They touched claws as they spiralled down, in complete control.

I tried to act unphased, fighting back a cold sweat. At least the smell of blood was long gone, but that was little relief. It felt like we’d been travelling a straight line, yet daring a glimpse back, I saw with horror the light of the entrance was now completely absent in darkness, so much thicker and more terrifying than night’s black cloak. It was the dark of the earth we found ourselves trapped by, a dark that would claim us all in the end, and we were walking deeper still with a man who seemed disturbingly at ease amongst the crypt’s inhabitants. More than once, he swept the light into our eyes and away, leaving us dazzled, which made each inevitable return of his hulking form all the more ominous. What fearful things might we discover if we ran, I wondered? Even ignoring that, how far could we get against someone who filled the space like him and carried our only means of sight? As it has been said, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man reigns as king. I looked to Macnaghten for reassurance and was met only by an empty void. ~ Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, The Ripper Lives, Into the Black (4/10)

Confucian rigour swept away the 'magical nonsense 'and Taoist liturgies of alchemical arts. None the less ,' if we now have powder metallurgy , beryllium alloys and liquid oxygen steel', this is owning to the Wizards ,not to the censorious apostles of common sense.

Some adventures begin easily. It is not hard, after all, to be sucked up by a tornado or pushed through a particularly porous mirror; there is no skill involved in being swept away by a great wave or pulled down a rabbit hole. Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world. Other adventures must be committed to before they have even properly begun. How else will they know the worthy from unworthy, if they do not require a certain amount of effort on the part of the ones who would undertake them? Some adventures are cruel, because it is the only way they know to be kind

stopped in his tracks, his eyes transfixed by the sight of the burning sails as they turned in the wind like a giant Catherine Wheel, the sparks shooting across the slope as the flames swept above the building. ‘What are you gawping at?’ Little shouted, his words tailing away as he caught sight of the windmill. ‘Well, you don’t see that everyday,’ he muttered, as he watched the sparks fizzing into the black sky.

Ah, yes, the Gods War.” I tilted my head to the side as I regarded him. “How did that go again? Oh, right: thousands of years ago, your world crashed, burned, and fell into our world, disrupting lives and technology. Now you and your kind pretty much make the rules, right? Now the world knows about gods and monsters, and you are the great do-gooders who keep all the bad guys under lock and key.” I moved closer, grabbing the back of the chair as he tried to tilt his head away from me. “Do you know what your fall did to my world? While you all rebuilt, a plague swept through my home in the deserts of Eoria. Do you know how many died? Do you care?

Books swept me away, one after the other, this way and that; I made endless vows according to their lights, for I believed them.

Clark often used chess as a means of fellowship with other students and professors, even if the matches were generally one-sided. One account of Clark’s chess prowess, given by family friend Tom Jones, is worth quoting at length: I bumped into Dr. Clark back in the late sixties when he was visiting his daughter Betsy on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, where Betsy taught at Covenant College. I knew he was a chess champion and suggested that it would be fun to play with him sometime. He was eager to do so, and later that week he dropped by our home for an evening of chess. My wife had gone shopping and left me at home with our two small children. We played two games. In the first game I thought I did reasonably well for about a half an hour but then, rather abruptly, the entire left side of my board seemed to collapse and Dr. Clark swept me away. So, we played a second game in which he defeated me unceremoniously in about ten minutes. Feeling properly humiliated I asked a question, “Dr. Clark, I want to learn from you. So, tell me if you will, in that first game I thought I did fairly well for a while but then you just clobbered me at the end. Can you remember anything about where I made my mistakes?” With that Dr. Clark proceeded to set up that first game and replay the entire thing. He reached a point where he said, “Now, at this point, I expected that you would move your queen thus so, at which point I was prepared to counter with my knight, like so, and then . . . ” (with this he made about six hypothetical moves which he had anticipated), “but you didn’t do that” (he said as he put all the pieces back in place). “Instead, you moved your rook over here” (and with that he finished the game, explaining each move in the swift demise of my game). It was by now at least forty-five minutes after the first game had been played and he had remembered every single move in that game! I was amazed and thoroughly in submission to the master by now. But the thing that humiliated me the most was that the entire time that we had been playing he was holding my four-year-old son, Bradley, on his lap and was reading a story book to him. He would glance up after my moves, take a brief look at the board, make his move nonchalantly, and go back to reading the story. HE HAD NOT EVEN BEEN PAYING ATTENTION! Or so it seemed. What a mind!

Thomas’s blood boiled. “That’s enough!” He bellowed, shooting out of his seat. The two actors jumped apart, their mouths agape. Kitty stared with round eyes. Jaw solid, he walked to Nathaniel and swiped the book from his hand. “Sit down, you’re terrible. I can’t stand to watch you. It’s my turn.” Nathaniel raised one eyebrow and dipped his chin. A bold, satisfied grin swept across his face as he took the seat where Thomas had been. “Continue, oh great one.” Thomas glared at his friend, calculating the different ways he could wipe the smirk off his face, then shuffled into Nathaniel’s previous position. His stomach turned weightless. Palms clammy, his breathing faltered. This was a mistake. Eliza’s face shone up at him, sparkling like the stars in the winter sky. The corners of her mouth lifted ever so slight. The orange glow of the fire kissed her supple cheek and made him want to do the same. He kicked away the dangerous thoughts, and carefully slipped his hand around her tiny waist, relishing the warm smoothness of her gown and spread his fingers across her back. Her dark eyes widened and she inhaled a sharp breath. In her gaze circled a mixture of nervousness and pleasure as the color in her cheeks deepened to scarlet. He smiled and pulled her body closer to his. Pure heaven! Perhaps this wasn’t a mistake after all. Thomas

Everything okay?” Hunter called to me. He sounded like a noncommittal friend asking after my health. I looked like a crazy person sitting at the table after everyone else had left, staring at “The Space Between.” I was going to sound like a crazy person no matter what I said to him next. It had to be said. I stood with my book bag, swept up “The Space Between” without a single mark on it, and crumpled it in one fist. Rounding the table, I showed his story at his chest. He took the wad of paper. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently. I thought of Sumer, Manohar, and Brian just outside the door, listening. I did not want them to hear this. But if I asked Hunter to step away from the door and close it so we could have a private conversation, I would be showing him how much I cared. I was through with that. I moved even closer to him and met his gaze. “I’m below you?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said evenly, looking me straight in the eye, obviously waiting at the door for exactly this altercation, which proved he did in fact know what I was talking about, and I had had enough. “I’ll tell you what I’m talking about.” I touched the thumb of my opposite hand. “I wrote a story about how much I liked you. I never meant for you to read it.” I touched my pointer finger. “You wrote a story about how much you hated me.” Hunter’s grin melted from his face. He took a breath to say something. “No, you’re right,” I interrupted him. “Not one story. You wrote three stories like that.” I touched my third finger. “I wrote a story about my mother, hoping we could talk about it.” I touched my fourth finger. “In response, you wrote a story about looking down on me.” I touched my pinkie, really banged on it with my other finger, until I bent it backward and hurt it. “Don’t write any more stories about me, Hunter. And I won’t write any more stories about you. Deal?” I whirled toward the door. “Wait,” he said. Whatever. I’d reached the threshold. The light was brighter in the hallway, and Summer, talking to Manohar and Brian, looked up at me with concern in her eyes. “Erin.” His hot hand was on my shoulder. He pulled me back into the room, against the door, out of their line of sight. He leaned close. This must have been because he didn’t want the others to hear, but I could almost have pretend that he wanted to be near me as he growled against my cheek, “If that’s all you got from my story, that I hate you, you’re not a careful reader.” Even though my heart raced with his closeness, I tilted my head and stared at him blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Two could play that game. I rolled away from him and stepped around the door frame. He caught me and pulled me back again. Pinned me against the door. Crushed my lips beneath his.

The history of the Bible is one of perpetual revolution. In that light, we might begin to think about the Bible not so much as a fixed thing but as a dynamic, vital tradition. In light of its history, the Bible looks less like a rock than a river, continually flowing and changing, widening and narrowing, as it moves downstream. For some, thinking about the Bible as a river and not a rock is liberating. That rock has been a millstone around the neck and a tombstone that won’t be rolled away. But for others, seeing it this way can be disorienting. That rock has promised solid foundation in a stormy world. Cling to it or be swept away.

Noah watched them walking away. A dark pall of realization swept over him. He said, “It is time for us to return to the land between the two rivers. Elohim’s work with us is not yet done.” She looked up at him. She knew what he meant and dreaded it. She also knew that their lives were in the hands of Elohim, had always been in the hands of Elohim. From the moment their tribe had been slaughtered, to her captivity in Uruk, and Noah’s descent into Sheol, God had delivered them at the last moment from the hands of Inanna and her minions. He had brought them safely through the waters of the Flood. He would take care of them now. It had taken many years for her to heal from what their son Ham had done to her. His violation was not only depraved in a personal sense of defilement, it was an act of evil that she knew would result in a generational curse that only began with the fruit of that unholy violation: Canaan.

So I pulled out my Kindle and got swept away in a book.

Autistic behaviour in men is better accepted, or swept under the rug with a dismissive “ah well, men…” This can also be seen in TV shows, Anna de Hooge argues in her thesis. She watched shows like Sherlock and The Big Bang Theory and concluded that the “autistic” characters get away with exceptionally dickish, aggressive or inappropriate behaviour, such as spying on the girl next door or completely ignoring someone else’s authority.

All street-level parking in the area has been flooded and vehicles swept away. Ground-level exits from the stadium are also blocked. Furthermore, the area surrounding the stadium has many hazards, including downed power lines, sink-holes of soft mud, and broken glass. There is also the risk of another tsunami if a big aftershock occurs.

Keefe’s smile was slower than usual—but it lit up his whole face. “Anytime, Foster. And I meant what I said. You’re not doing anything wrong. But if you change your mind and go ahead with the reset? I’ll be right there to make sure you get through safe.” Sophie nodded. And she’d just pulled Sandor into the light when Keefe called after her, “Oh, and don’t worry about the Fitzster. I’ll talk to him.” Lots of ogre curses filled the air as the rushing warmth swept Sophie away. Back

The earthquake shook us awake, and the tsunami washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken. Knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is, and love each other as we are—completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful this way, don’t you think?

down tower structure. “Ugh! What a waste of time!” I started running toward the battle again, but slower this time, due to the slow effect of the fireball. “So annoying!” In the distance, I saw the elder dragon whupping on my friends. I saw it swat one of the nightwings so hard that their cape came off. Then the boss swept the area with its tails as well as shot fireballs at the same time. Some of the troops got knocked off the island by the tails, some got teleported away, some got floated up and then swatted into the abyss. It was just a crazy dangerous situation, and we were losing troops so fast. “Take evasive maneuvers!” I yelled as I ran there. And right as I arrived, the boss dragon teleported again. I shook my head as I breathed heavily. “It’s like he knows to run out my rage timer.” “We need to stop him from teleporting,” said Arceus as he ran up to me. I nodded. “I agree.” “Let’s focus on his wings. I think they are the key to his teleportation powers.” “Got it.” Then Arceus turned to his squad and said, “Lily, Harper, keep both wings marked with Focus Fire.

Then I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I pulled away from Adam and looked down to see my own diamond sword buried in my belly. “I’m sorry,” Adam said, standing up with a grim look on his face. “But you gave me no choice.” I looked up at Adam, who looked down at me with eyes full of hate. “You, Dave and all your friends are all the same,” he said. “You’re just trying to ruin my life! I never asked for any of this—I was just trying to protect my wife!” He grabbed the hilt of his sword and pulled it out of me in one swift motion. And everything went black. ??????? I dreamed of time: of the first burst of light that emerged from the Void; the plants and trees that spread across the land; the first animals that roamed the world in peace; the rise of the Old People and their eventual fall into darkness, and the monsters that took their place when they were gone; the villagers who followed in the Old People’s place. All of time passed before my eyes, and it was glorious. Glorious and terrifying. I saw a thousand versions of myself, stretching back to the beginning of the world. Each was a man in blue clothes with brown hair. All the Steves who had lived and died: all my previous lives. “I want to wake up,” I told them. “I need to go back.” “You will,” they replied. “Although you will be changed. That cannot be helped.” And then a wind swept me up; up towards the light.  And I screamed… THURSDAY I jolted awake in bed. “What was that?” I said. “Some kind of a nightmare?

Now, you might be wondering, “How do you motivate people with brutal facts? Doesn’t motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision?” The answer, surprisingly, is, “No.” Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time. One of the dominant themes that runs throughout this book is that if you successfully implement its findings, you will not need to spend time and energy “motivating” people. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.

This is how I felt when I stepped into Cambridge’s library my first year and had an entirely different major lined up alongside a naive resolve to do something for me. Wonder. That’s the feeling. Like all these books hold possibilities and if I pick the right one, I’ll get swept away somewhere better and righter and truer.

In one respect the world seemed to have suffered material loss by the visitation of the deluge. Along with the agents and instruments of evil there had also been swept away by it the emblems of grace and hope—paradise with its tree of life and its cherubim of glory. We can conceive Noah and his household, when they first left the ark, looking around with melancholy feelings on the position they now occupied, not only as being the sole survivors of a numerous offspring, but also as being themselves bereft of the sacred memorials which bore evidence of a happy past, and exhibited the pledge of a yet happier future. An important link of communion with Heaven, it might well have seemed, was broken by the change thus brought through the deluge on the world" (P. Fairbairn).

when we see how little we really need - love and connection - then all the getting and grasping that we thought was so essential to our well-being takes its rightful place and no longer becomes the focus or the obsession of our lives. We must try to be conscious about how we live and not get swept away by the modern trance, the relentless march, the anxious accelerator. The Dalai Lama was urging us to be more realistic so we can come to some sense of inner peace now, rather than always chasing after our expectations and ambition for the next.

Aside from including several of Irving’s recipes in her book, they shared a number of overlapping themes: foremost among them was the idea that they were recording recipes rooted in a way of life that was on the verge of disappearing. In Honey from a Weed, Patience likened the endeavor to that of a musicologist who records old songs. It was an apt analogy: Just a few years before she and Irving took their trip to Lecce in 1958, American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and the Italian anthropologist Diego Carpitella had traveled through the south of Italy, including Puglia, recording folk songs. They started out in Martano, not far from Santa Maria di Leuca, and traveled north, documenting the songs of agricultural workers, shepherds, and peasants. In the text accompanying the recordings Lomax wrote, “It was a mythic time. None of us suspected that that world—made of music, songs, poverty, joy, desperation, custom, violence, injustice, love, dialect, and poetry, formed over the course of millennia—would be swept away in a couple of years . . . by the voodoo of ‘progress.’” Federman, Adam. Fasting and Feasting . Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[…] Although it’s hard to imagine it now, there was a time when horror was nearly unrivaled in popularity with the general reader. In the 1970s and ’80s, local bookstores had whole shelves devoted to it. You couldn’t miss them: they were the ones stocked between Mystery and Fantasy/Sci-Fi, with all the black and red covers, the raised titles dripping blood, and the leering skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons. These books had notoriously short shelf lives, but because there was such a demand for them—owing largely to the success of books like The Exorcist and writers like Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub—it was possible to hack a living if you could turn them out fast enough. A lot of folks tried their hand, and a lot of bad books were published. So many that the market eventually collapsed under its own weight. Among those bad books, though, were some truly great ones written by great writers—writers like Ramsey Campbell, Robert R. McCammon, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, to name just three—who delivered lasting contributions to the genre. While it would be nice to think that all the deserving books were saved from being swept away in the vast tide, that just wasn’t the case. [...] Excerpt from ”Introduction” to Michael McDowell’s ”Blackwater: The Complete Saga” (2017, Kindle edition)

This was another important lesson in the impermanence of all things. Japan lies in a seismically active zone, so earthquakes are not uncommon. Disaster can strike at any moment, but we forget this, distracted by the bright, shiny comforts of our everyday lives. Wrapped in a false sense of security, we fall asleep, and in this dream, our life passes. The earthquake shook us awake, and the tsunami washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken. Knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is, and love each other as we are—completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful this way, don’t you think?

Porters, patients, sisters, orderlies, novices, visitors, apothecaries, all were swept up by the force of her presence, to be tidied away into neat heaps, wherever Mother Hildegarde might decree.

he read and reread the definition of the word between timid and Timbuktu: “the general idea, relation, or fact of continuous or successive existence.” Impatiently, David snapped the book shut between his long fingers. The word was time. He ached to understand time, to defy it, to defeat it — to go back, not forward — to go back to the moments with his wife Jeanette, to the moments time had swept away.

He wasn't the kind of man to assume desire. Far be it for him to put words in another person's mouth, but as he met her gaze again, he devoured every other outward sign. The way her mouth parted, her cheeks warmed, her chest lifted with sudden breath - the bolt? And he wasn't looking away. Not this time. The beat of the music, the hum of the people, it all fell away. It was just them and this. The heated thread drawing them together.

Be ruthless, Highness,” he said. And the winds of the underworld, at last, swept him away.

Sometimes life is like a river, and you must use PURPOSE as a bridge to get to the other side . . . or get swept away.” ~ Elder Donald Edward Jenkins