The Game Has Begun Quotes

So scared of getting older I'm only good at being young So I play the numbers game to find a way to say that life has just begun.

I intercepted Chaol, and he informed me of your ‘condition.’ You’d think a man in his position wouldn’t be so squeamish, especially after examining all of those corpses.” Calaena opened an eye and frowned as Dorian sat on her bed. “I’m in a state of absolute agony and I can’t be bothered.” “It can’t be that bad,” he said, fishing a deck of cards from his jacket. “Want to play?” “I already told you that I don’t feel well.” “You look fine to me.” He skillfully shuffled the deck. “Just one game.” “Don’t you pay people to entertain you?” He glowered, breaking the deck. “You should be honored by my company.” “I’d be honored if you would leave.” “For someone who relies on my good graces, you’re very bold.” “Bold? I’ve barely begun.” Lying on her side, she curled her knees to her chest. He laughed, pocketing the deck of cards. “Your new canine companion is doing well, if you wish to know.” She moaned into her pillow. “Go away. I feel like dying.” “No fair maiden should die alone,” he said, putting a hand on hers. “Shall I read to you in your final moments? What story would you like?” She snatched her hand back. “How about the story of the idiotic prince who won’t leave the assassin alone?” “Oh! I love that story! It has such a happy ending, too—why, the assassin was really feigning her illness in order to get the prince’s attention! Who would have guessed it? Such a clever girl. And the bedroom scene is so lovely—it’s worth reading through all of their ceaseless banter!” “Out! Out! Out! Leave me be and go womanize someone else!” She grabbed a book and chucked it at him.

For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight

Sejanus. “My friend, your life has just begun!” And then Coriolanus was laughing; they both were. “So this isn’t our ruin?” “I’d call it our salvation.

A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope—the only obligation is honesty...

In fact, there are half as many wild animals on the planet as there were in 1970, an awesome and mostly unnoticed silencing.

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it- it's part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence.

A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning.

Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question.

Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says, “...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."

His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.

I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we've been able to forget that the natural world even exists...a great city seems to produce wealth out of thin air. This is illusion, of course, but powerful illusion.

Neither the Pilgrims nor the Indians new what they had begun. The Pilgrims called the celebration a Harvest Feast. The Indians thought of it as a Green Corn Dance. It was both and more than both. It was the first Thanksgiving. In the years that followed, President George Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving proclamation, and President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November a holiday of “thanksgiving and praise.” Today it is still a harvest festival and Green Corn Dance. Families feast with friends, give thanks and play games. Plymouth Rock did not fare as well. It has been cut in half, moved twice, dropped, split and trimmed to fit its present-day portico. It is a mere memento of its once magnificent self. Yet to Americans, Plymouth Rock is a symbol. It is larger than the mountains, wider than the prairies and stronger than all our rivers. It is the rock on which our nation began.

So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it's the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can't solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.

The human game is a team sport.

Privilege lies in obliviousness. (White privilege, for instance, involves being able to reliably forget that race matters.)

The game has already begun.

So scared of getting older I'm only good at being young So I play the numbers game To find a way to say that life has just begun

Day to day, we forget that if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilizations began about a fifth of a second ago.

Let's be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let's assume we're capable of acting together to do remarkable things.

We have, in other words, changed the energy balance of our planet, the amount of the sun’s heat that is returned to space. Those of us who burn lots of fossil fuel have changed the way the world operates, fundamentally.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

when investigative reporters proved that Exxon had known all about global warming and had covered up that knowledge. Plenty of people on the professionally jaded left told me, in one form or another, “Of course they did,” or “All corporations lie,” or “Nothing will ever happen to them anyway.” This kind of knowing cynicism is no threat to the Exxons of the world—it’s a gift. Happily, far more people reacted with usefully naïve outrage: before too long, people were comparing the oil giants with the tobacco companies, and some of the biggest cities in the country were suing them for damages. We don’t know yet precisely how it will end, only that giving them a pass because of their power makes no sense.

I thought you were dead,” I say. “It almost killed me.” “Did it?” His voice is neutral. “You made a pretty fast recovery.” “No. You don’t understand.” My throat is tight; I feel as though I’m being strangled. “I couldn’t keep hoping, and then waking up every day and finding out it wasn’t true, and you were still gone. I—I wasn’t strong enough.” He is quiet for a second. It’s too dark to see his expression: He is standing in shadow again, but I can sense that he is staring at me. Finally he says, “When they took me to the Crypts, I thought they were going to kill me. They didn’t even bother. They just left me to die. They threw me in a cell and locked the door.” “Alex.” The strangled feeling has moved from my throat to my chest, and without realizing it, I have begun to cry. I move toward him. I want to run my hands through his hair and kiss his forehead and each of his eyelids and take away the memory of what he has seen. But he steps backward, out of reach. “I didn’t die. I don’t know how. I should have. I’d lost plenty of blood. They were just as surprised as I was. After that it became a kind of game—to see how much I could stand. To see how much they could do to me before I’d—” He breaks off abruptly. I can’t hear any more; don’t want to know, don’t want it to be true, can’t stand to think of what they did to him there. I take another step forward and reach for his chest and shoulders in the dark. This time, he doesn’t push me away. But he doesn’t embrace me either. He stands there, cold, still, like a statue. “Alex.” I repeat his name like a prayer, like a magic spell that will make everything okay again. I run my hands up his chest and to his chin. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Suddenly he jerks backward, simultaneously finding my wrists and pulling them down to my sides. “There were days I would rather they have killed me.” He doesn’t drop my wrists; he squeezes them tightly, pinning my arms, keeping me immobilized. His voice is low, urgent, and so full of anger it pains me even more than his grip. “There were days I asked for it—prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you—the hope for it—was the only thing that kept me going.” He releases me and takes another step backward. “So no. I don’t understand.

And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.

Actually, the worst possible plan would also include trying to squash action in every other country, too. And that’s what the entire government-hating network managed to achieve in 2017, when President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. It was as shameful a moment as any in our recent history: the country that produces more carbon than any other announcing that it was now the only country on earth not willing to make even a modest international commitment to solving climate change.

Once upon a time there was a little king, whose dreams always brought him new wings, but his fate never knew what he could bring, so carried on a life that just delivered stings. One day he met the song he wished to sing, but didnt seem to understand this one little thing, how can the wind stop at the sound of broken strings, how can he spend a childhood alone on a swing. He stands alone empty with a promise in waiting, his story has just begun tall and refusing, he knows his game well but no dream is he using, but the sleep fate has taken has his dreams aging.

In the bourgeois democratic countries the need for using intrinsically good means to achieve desirable ends is more clearly realized than in Russia. But even in these countries enormous mistakes have been made in the past and still greater, still more dangerous mistakes are in process of being committed today. Most of these mistakes are due to the fact that, though professing belief in our ideal postulates, the rulers and people of these countries are, to some extent and quite incompatibly, also militarists and nationalists. The English and the French, it is true, are sated militarists whose chief desire is to live a quiet life, holding fast to what they seized in their unregenerate days of imperial highway-robbery. Confronted by rivals who want to do now what they were doing from the beginning of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, they profess and doubtless genuinely feel a profound moral indignation. Meanwhile, they have begun to address themselves, reluctantly but with determination, to the task of beating the Fascist powers at their own game. Like the Fascist states, they are preparing for war. but modern war cannot be waged or even prepared except by a highly centralized executive wielding absolute power over a docile people. Most of the planning which is going on in the democratic countries is planning designed to transform these countries into the likeness of totalitarian communities organized for slaughter and rapine. Hitherto this transformation has proceeded fairly slowly. Belief in our idea postulates has acted as a brake on fascization, which has had to advance gradually and behind a smoke screen. But if war is declared, or even if the threat of war becomes more serious than at present, the process will become open and rapid. "The defence of democracy against Fascism" entails inevitably the transformation of democracy into Fascism.

Then call me Pierce because we're friends." He bent in close in the turn, eyes gleaming as they dropped to her lips. "Intimate friends, if I get my wish." This time there was no mistaking his meaning. But he was so practiced and smooth that she couldn't help herself-she laughed. When that made him frown, she tried to suppress her amusement, but that only made her laugh harder. "What's so funny?" he muttered. "I'm sorry," she said, swallowing her amusement. "It's just that I've heard my brothers make such insinuations to women in that tone of voice for years, but I've never been on the receiving end." Pierce's smile would rival that of Casanova. "I don't know why not," he said in a lazy drawl. His gaze raked her appreciatively as they swirled about the room. "Tonight, in that purple gown, you look particularly fetching. The color suits you." "Thank you." Minerva had been trying to get her to stop wearing browns and oranges for years, but Celia had always pooh-poohed her sister's opinions. It was only after Virginia had said exactly the same thing last month that she'd begun to think she should listen. And to order new gowns accordingly. "You're a lovely woman with the figure of a Venus and a mouth that could make a man-" "You can stop now." Her amusement vanished. She'd be flattered if he meant a single word, but clearly this was just a game to him. "I don't need the full rogue treatment, I assure you." Interest sparked in his eyes. "Hasn't it occurred to you that I might be sincere?" "Only if you're sincerely trying to seduce me." He cast her a blatantly carnal glance as he held her tighter. "Well, of course I'm trying to seduce you. What else would I be doing?" She pitched her voice over the music. "I'm a respectable woman, you know." "What has that got to do with anything?" She arched an eyebrow at him as they moved in consort. "Even a respectable woman might be tempted into, say, slipping out with a gentleman for a walk in the moonlit courtyard. And if said gentleman should happen to steal a kiss or two-" "Lord Devonmont!" "Fine." He smiled ruefully. "Bu you can't blame me for trying. You do look ravishing this evening." "There you go again," she said, exasperated. "Can you never talk to a woman as if she's a normal person?" "How dull that would be." When she frowned, he shook his head. "Very well. What scintillating topics of conversation did you have in mind?

I pull on her tether all the time but it won’t sink in. I have a feeling I’m using too much magic. I can’t hold so many under my control and pull them in deep. Dean is the only one I have fully immersed. I am the puppet master. I am the only player on the board. Pacey doesn’t even know that the game has begun."-Lilith

The resonance of myth collapses the apparent distinction between the story told by one person to another and the story of their telling and listening. It is one thing for you to tell me the story of Muhammad; it is quite another for me to tell the story of your telling me about Muhammad. Ordinarily we confine the story to the words of the speaker. But in doing so we treat it as a story quoted, not a story told. In your relating, and not repeating, the story of Muhammad, I am touched, and I respond from my genius. Something has begun. But in touching, you are also touched. Something has begun between us. Our relationship has opened forward dramatically. Since this drama emerged from the telling of the story of Muhammad, our story resonates with Muhammad's, and Muhammad's with ours.

Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.

You paid for me? You can’t do that! I’m not for sale!” “You most certainly are—this whole planet is. Now that the lock put on your world by the Ancient Ones is being dissolved, your entire world’s female population is fair game.” “Lock? Ancient Ones?” I shook my head—I was getting more and more lost. “The ones who seeded your planet millennia ago,” Bambi said helpfully. “They traveled across the universe, planting the seeds of life on only the worlds they considered the most deserving. Their DNA lives on in many sectors but only on a few, rare, specially selected worlds has it been preserved in its purest form.” “And the ‘lock’ they put around your planet is what I believe you Earthlings refer to as an ‘ozone layer,’” said the proper butler voice, which seemed to be coming from the golden dragonfly. “Now that much of it has been removed and your planet has begun to heat, outside investors are free to harvest Earth’s females. Females such as yourself, who are most valuable because they have not bred with any of the other peoples of the known universe. This is why we dub you ‘Pure Ones’—because you have only the pure blood of the Ancient Ones running through your veins.” Forget

Will they win in 2019? It doesn’t matter. The key is that they need to do so well that the ruling party realises that if it does not up its game then it will be shouting from the opposition benches very soon. The bottom line is that we need competition in the system. We haven’t had enough of it in more than 21 years of democracy, and that has led to the lethargy, and disrespect of voters, that we constantly see in our country.

As your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to be depressed.” Humans, he continued, “crave connection—to other people, to meaning, to the natural world. So we have begun to live in ways that don’t work for us, and it is causing us deep pain.”7 If we wanted to somehow engineer

When the peak temperature in leafy suburbs can be lower by as much as fifteen degrees, "landscape is a predictor for mobidity in heatwaves," in the words of one study, which found that African Americans were "52% more likely than white people to live in areas of unnatural 'heat risk-related land cover.'" Imagine what it's like in a refugee camp, or a prison. It's hell, is what it is.

Rebelling against the wishes and hopes of your parents is how a great many of us define who we are. It may be hard, and it may be painful, and some people may never manage it. And some never need to, because their parents were wise and gentle enough to help them down a congenial path.

...we really do live on an unbearably beautiful planet. We don't think of it often as a planet - - we live our daily lives on flat and often prosaic ground, and when we're in the air, the flight attendant usually makes us lower the window shade so as not to interfere iwth the movie.

But after life has begun to run away from us, nothing is ever again really credible, nor does it matter.

But not every threat is like that. There’s a small category (a list with three items) of physical threats so different in quantity that they become different in quality, their effects so far-reaching that we can’t be confident of surviving them with our civilizations more or less intact. One is large-scale nuclear war; it’s always worth recalling J. Robert Oppenheimer’s words as he watched the first bomb test, quoting from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” So far, the cobbled-together and jury-rigged international efforts to forestall an atomic war have worked, and indeed, for much of the last fifty years those safeguards, formal and informal, have seemed to be strengthening.

taken and I might not be here now. We might still be living in the orphanage, or maybe I would have taken a job and started earning enough to become his official guardian, and for us to move into our own home. Tim might have begun an apprenticeship. Why has this man come to see me? He had entered armed with a crossbow and a shoulder bag. I eyed the bow's loaded tip. Perhaps I had been right about the wardens not wanting to wait until the main labs opened. Perhaps he was going to finish me off sooner: now. I had no idea why a man of such high status would do it personally though, and he didn't move any closer. He strode to a chair near the clock and sat down, his weapon resting casually on his knee. Then he let out a subdued cough, clearing his throat. "I have some news for you, Ms. Bates," he said, his voice nasally and off-puttingly high-pitched. “Ms. Bradbury passed away in the hospital about an hour ago.” My heart stilled. “I also have a proposal for you,” he went on. “A proposal that I suspect you will not refuse." He paused for a moment, scrutinizing me. "A situation has led Her Majesty and the Court to find use for a person with… your type of background. We have been watching the detention facilities, waiting for the right young woman to whom we may offer this opportunity." “Opportunity?" I managed. "You took defense lessons with Ms. Dale up until the age of fourteen, did you not?" he asked, as though I hadn't spoken. I nodded. "The opportunity involves embarking on a mission which, if successfully completed, would suspend your sentence. It would allow you another chance to redeem yourself and reintegrate into society. Your previous crimes would be erased from your record. Forgotten about.

She was just passing through when a long male arm emerged seemingly from out of nowhere, coiling like steel around her waist. She squealed, the sound reverberating in the air, as she twisted for a moment in Lord Jack's grasp. "Got you!" he exclaimed, triumph plain in his voice. "Oh, you scared me!" she said, breathless as she met his gaze. "You're as silent as a breeze." "And you are as lithe as a gazelle, slipping from row to row as though you were made of fog. For a few moments, I thought I'd lost track of you." "This is a tricky maze. The center is nearby, though. Shall we both dash to find it?" A gleam came into his eyes, along with an expression she'd never seen him wear before. He shook his head, his gaze roaming over her face before lowering to her lips. "No," he murmured in a tone as rough as gravel. "I have what I came to find." She trembled, abruptly aware that he was still holding her against him. Her heart leapt when he reached up and began untying the bow that anchored her bonnet in place. "What are you doing, my lord?" He smiled. "Claiming a forfeit. I caught you. I believe I deserve a reward." "B-but the game isn't finished." "You're right about that," he mused aloud, lifting her hat from her head. "The game has only just begun.

I was fortunate to have begun my career in the jewelry industry, where character is the most important aspect of the game. Often the people who look and feel the most honest are not. They’re simply selling the perception of honesty. Diamonds have their own set of four c’s, as anyone who has purchased an engagement ring knows: cut, clarity, carat, and color. But that fifth unspoken c—character—also matters in buying a diamond. You want to trust the person selling you the rock, as it’s the most asymmetrical deal you’ll ever do, in which you have no information and they have it all. A salesperson can be masterful at smiling and putting you at ease and selling you whatever he or she wants, yet because buying a diamond is a rare and special occasion, with little or no opportunity to build a relationship of trust through repeat business, you want to believe in the salesperson’s quality of character.

But we are here to tell you, in this postcard from the former paradise, that it won’t happen next year, or somewhere else. It will happen right where you live and it could happen today. No one will be spared.

I said before that the human game we’ve been playing has no rules and no end, but it does come with two logical imperatives. The first is to keep it going, and the second is to keep it human.

More recently, a new generation of languages has begun to emerge. These languages—Small-Talk, C++, Java—are object-oriented. They treat a data structure—for instance, a picture to be drawn on the screen—as an “object” with its own internal state, such as where it is to be drawn or what color it is. These objects can receive instructions from other objects. To understand why this is useful, imagine that you are writing a program for a video game involving bouncing balls. Each ball on the screen is defined as a different object. The program specifies rules of behavior that tell the object how to draw itself on the screen, move, bounce, and interact with other objects in the game. Each ball will exhibit similar behavior, but each will be in a slightly different state, because each will be in its own position on the screen and will have its own color, velocity, size, and so forth.

Zara wakes to find herself one with the transcendental realm, outside of reality. And as she does the photonic realms become clearer to her. She chooses the most beautiful one. It is the land of Beautiful Immortal Sunset. Her eyes glow as she opens them finding herself standing alone on a cliffs edge and carved into the mountain side are images of Titans past. She breathes in deeply admiring the magnificence of the monuments when in the sky descending with the breeze a red phoenix appears amidst rainbow hues of light. As she lands flowers bloom all over the cliff and with the flowers a transformation as the bird becomes an image of Zara only far more beautiful. It is the one known as Beautiful Immortal Sunset. “You are here to steal my power?” “I am,” Zara replies warily, as the immortal walks around her as if gazing into her very soul. “A world is born to what place or end?” “It’s born in the mind.” As Zara replies she looks down with a look of awe realising she now stands upon the palm of the immortal’s hand; now a giant before her. “And you. Are you born?” “Only in the mind.” “And what is the ultimate answer?” Zara looks down, then up at the giant, “All questions are born in the mind, but the mind already knows the answers. It’s a game it plays with itself.” “And what wins this game?” “Experience.” “And what is the mother of all ways?” “A forgotten way.” Beautiful Immortal Sunset raises her hand and holding Zara before her she smiles. “The world never really begun Zara, nor will it ever really end. There is no one seeking and no one who becomes. This power you wish is yours, it always has been.

It was a beautiful fall day at the soccer fields when I met Stacy for the first time. The game had just begun when she arrived carrying homemade pumpkin spice muffins with cream cheese frosting for everyone, photos of the jack-o’-lantern she had elaborately carved earlier that morning into the shape of a witch stirring a bubbling cauldron with the rising steam spelling out the word “Boo,” enough material and glue for each of the siblings not playing soccer to make adorable “easy no-sew” bat wings as a fun craft to fill their time, as well as little gift bags for every mother full of Halloween-themed wine charms and sleep masks that were embroidered with “Sleeping for a spell.” Besides her generous gifts, she also looked terrific. She was wearing the perfect fall outfit with just the right number of layers and textures and cool boots. Her hair was beautifully twisted into a loose braid casually thrown over one shoulder. While everyone sat in their lawn chair and screamed at their kid to “attack the ball,” Stacy ran up and down the sidelines taking (no doubt fabulous) photos of her son and overseeing the siblings’ craft bonanza. At this point I should also mention, in case you don’t feel bad enough about yourself, that Stacy has a full-time job outside the home. Like a really important one. I’m not sure what she does exactly, but from the thirty seconds that she slowed down long enough to talk to me, I learned that she works fifty hours a week or so and travels around the country every few days and then comes home and makes her kids pancakes in the shape of clovers for breakfast, because it’s International Clover Day or some shit like that.

the carrier to elevate the benefit of hanging out in the carrier. Offer A Treat. Many cats respond well to treat rewards. To make the carrier an even better experience, try tossing a few inside for your kitten to discover. If he figures out that every now and then, going inside brings a bonus of yummies, your kitten will be more likely to explore and figure out the crate is a terrific place. Make sure that the treats you use for crate training are irresistible, and reserve them for this situation only. Once your cat has begun to visit the crate on his own, try offering an occasional high-value meal (like pungent canned food) but only when he’s inside. Teach Him Tolerance. After your kitten spends time willingly inside, try shutting the door briefly. Most kitties tolerate the door shut at least as long as they have something to munch. Praise the dickens out of him! He should know that staying calmly inside the crate earns him good things, maybe even a game of chase-the-red-dot. Repeat several times over the next few days, each time letting the kitten out after a few minutes. Extend Crate Time. By the end of the first week, you can begin increasing the time the kitten spends in the crate. Some cats feel calmer when inside the carrier if you cover it with a towel because this shuts out at least the visual cues that may raise stress. Scent the towel with the Feliway. Carry Kitty Around. Once your kitten feels comfortable in the carrier with the door shut, drop in a couple of treats and then pick up the carrier while he’s in it and carry him around. Give him another treat or play a favorite game as soon as you let him out.

Silent Lucidity" Hush now, don't you cry Wipe away the teardrop from your eye You're lying safe in bed It was all a bad dream Spinning in your head Your mind tricked you to feel the pain Of someone close to you leaving the game of life So here it is, another chance Wide awake you face the day Your dream is over... or has it just begun? There's a place I like to hide A doorway that I run through in the night Relax child, you were there But only didn't realize and you were scared It's a place where you will learn To face your fears, retrace the years And ride the whims of your mind Commanding in another world Suddenly you hear and see This magic new dimension I- will be watching over you I- am gonna help you see it through I- will protect you in the night I- am smiling next to you, in Silent Lucidity (Visualize your dream) (Record it in the present tense) (Put it into a permanent form) (If you persist in your efforts) (You can achieve dream control) (Dream control) (How are we feeling today, better??) (Dream control, dream control) (Help me) If you open your mind for me You won't rely on open eyes to see The walls you built within Come tumbling down, and a new world will begin Living twice at once you learn You're safe from pain in the dream domain A soul set free to fly A round trip journey in your head Master of illusion, can you realize Your dream's alive, you can be the guide but... I- will be watching over you I- am gonna help to see it through I- will protect you in the night I- am smiling next to you.... Queensryche, Empire (1990)

The situation becomes even more fraught for women in their late thirties and forties whose biological clocks are ticking. Donovan told me that women at such gatherings often try to get to eligible men they want to meet early on, lest someone else get to them first and make a connection. On the rare instance when a new single guy enters the room, Donovan described an 'almost palpable, heightened state of awareness' among the women. They know - even if they're loath to admit it - 'that a competition has just begun

Me Time Zone It’s okay to be a “me-time mom.” ~Author Unknown The day has ended yet only just begun for I have two lives — one that hides behind the sun You may not see my secret life — the one lurking in the dark, the one that eagerly awaits its time to spark Daytime me puts the other me aside Daytime me doesn’t get to hide Daytime me washes all the clothes Daytime me kisses the injured toes I am a teacher, a maid and a cook I hand out the cuddles and the disconcerting looks I referee the arguments, the teasing and the fights I fasten the helmets to go ride the bikes Nighttime me relaxes in the chair Nighttime me reads books without a care Nighttime me watches comedy shows Nighttime me eats the treats that I chose I sometimes wonder whether I used to be bored when I had just one life and hardly any chores I want to do all the things that I did before but how do I fit them in now there’s so much more? I read books, played piano and swam I cycled and socialised and ran I wrote poetry, played video games and went to bars I knew popular culture and all the famous stars Now my me time has become so small sometimes I feel it’s hardly there at all When the children will not settle but the sun has gone away I throw my arms in the air, for daytime me has to stay. I count to ten and breathe in deep Why oh why won’t they go to sleep? Me time is a ship that has sailed past How could I be so foolish to think that it would last I tuck their hair behind their ears and then I begin to feel the tears Am I crying for my me time? That seems a little mad Surely it’s something else that’s making me sad Crying for my me time does seem a little daft As I leave the children’s room I begin to laugh. I’m trying to put me time into a time slot I precariously balance it on the top. But I realise my me time comes in different forms to be enjoyed even while daytime storms I read a book whilst I make the tea I play ukulele whilst the children dance with me I swim in the sea with the children under my wings I run around the park between pushing them on swings And there are famous stars that I know, even if they come from the children’s favourite show Yes the ultimate me time is when I’m on my own but me time can also be enjoyed when you’re not alone My me time is a state of mind When I’m in the me time zone who knows what I’ll find? — Anneliese Rose Beeson —

Remember that EVERY single data/information you receive, arrives to you with some header containing the source of that data/information. That source whence you took the data/information resembles the AUTHORITY for you of that data/information you now possess. So, whenever this happens to you, know that: IT IS NOW THE TIME TO PLAY WITH SOME CARDS SINCE THE GAME HAS JUST BEGUN!

They know—even if they are loath to admit it—“that a competition has just begun,” because good single guys are so hard to come by.

An arranged marriage. His bratty, meddling sister. A potential loose-lipped man. Nothing will snuff out what has begun to rage between us. An inferno. A fiery explosion of epic proportions.

Nothing will snuff out what has begun to rage between us. An inferno. A fiery explosion of epic proportions. We are the sun

And yet nothing slows us down—just the opposite. By most accounts, we’ve used more energy and resources during the last thirty-five years than in all of human history that came before.

So, why should you take seriously my fear that the game, in fact, may be starting to play itself out?

leverage.

no Roman emperor could change the pH of the oceans, but we’ve managed that trick in short order.

the entire history of human civilization thus far.”17 And as the Israeli historian and futurist Yuval Harari recently wrote, “Once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end, and a completely new process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend.

As a team of scientists pointed out recently in Nature, the physical changes we’re currently making by warming the climate will “extend longer than

Indeed, it’s much farther advanced than most people realize. In 2015, at the Paris climate talks, the world’s governments set a goal of holding temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius and, at the very least, below 2 degrees; by the fall of 2018 the IPCC reported that we might go past that 1.5 degree mark by 2030.

Particular people in particular places at a particular moment in time following a particular philosophic bent: that’s leverage piled on top of leverage. And their ability to skew our politics with their wealth is one more layer of leverage. It scares me.

If you back up far enough, it’s possible to be philosophical about anything—the sun is going to blow up eventually, after all.

Hope and Fear Are Inseparable.” ― Francois De La Rochefoucau Ludlum There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for. - J.R.R. Tolkien “For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent and set me high upon a rock. ― Psalms Twenty Seven : Five “ You will never forget a person who came to you with a torch in the dark.” ― Unknown “Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” ― Mark Twain “The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.”― Mark Twain “Family isn’t always blood, It's the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what. “ ― Maya Angelo “In spite of the shame, in spite of the sleepless nights, I'm coping. I'm not pretending it wasn't real. I'm not playing games in my mind. I wouldn't go back to the way I was, naive. I'm a different person now. I know I'm courageous, and without blame. I’ve realized I have it in me to stand up against this horror. — ADC "For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." ― Jeremiah Twenty-Nine: Eleven “The universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts - it gives you what you demand with your actions.” ― Steve Maraboli Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run, Go on, take the money and run! - Steve Miller Band “What separates us from the other killers, is we only kill bad people.”― Vigilante and “Some people just need killing.” ― Barry Eisler “In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.” ― George R. R. Martin “Wherever there is abuse there is also corruption. Politics, philosophy, theology, science, industry, any field with the potential to affect the well-being of others can be destroyed by abuse or saved by good will.” ― Criss Jami “True life is lived when tiny changes occur." ― Leo “You do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life, really? It is a vapor that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away” ― James Four: Fourteen “In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.” Buddha

A sixty-nine-year-old rancher walked among them with a rifle. “They’re gentle,” he said. “They know us. We know them. You just thought, ‘Wow, I am sorry.’ You think you’re done and the next day you got to go shoot more.

An easy rule of thumb is that for every drought, a flood.

That’s 127 billion tons, enough weight that Houston actually sank by a couple of centimeters. In places, the rainfall topped fifty-four inches, by far the largest rainstorm in American history.

the storm dumped the equivalent of all the water in Chesapeake Bay.

In the Northeast United States, where I live in landlocked Vermont, we’ve watched extreme precipitation (two inches or more of rain in twenty-four hours) grow 53 percent more common since 1996.

A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope—the only obligation is honesty—but I want those who pick up this volume to know that its author lives in a state of engagement, not despair.

Petrarch talked about the source of the Po, and so did Chaucer and Dante. But they lived on a planet with 40 percent less carbon dioxide.

173 people died in a blaze that raced through the suburbs.

So far, we’re not coping with them.

So far, we have warmed the earth by roughly two degrees Fahrenheit, which in a masterpiece of understatement the New York Times once described as “a large number for the surface of an entire planet.”9 This is humanity’s largest accomplishment, and indeed the largest thing any one species has ever done on our planet, at least since the days two billion years ago when cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) flooded the atmosphere with oxygen, killing off much of the rest of the archaic life on the planet.

They “cannot be controlled by any suppression resources that we have available anywhere in the world,” said one Australian researcher.

The earth seems, after all, like a robust place: its ice sheets are miles thick, its oceans miles deep. But the lesson of the last thirty years is unequivocal: the planet was actually finely balanced, and the shove we’ve given it has knocked it very much askew. Let’s look for a long minute at what has happened so far, remembering always that we’re still in the early stages of global warming and that things will proceed inevitably from worse to worse yet and then keep on going.

wholly healed by 2060. And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.

Even during the dramatic moments at the end of the Permian Age, when most life went extinct, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere grew at perhaps one-tenth the current pace.

So, let’s remember exactly what we’ve been up to, because it should fill us with awe; it’s by far the biggest thing humans have ever done.

We all have losses already. Where I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down.

the two women donned the traditional dress of their respective homelands and hiked farther up the glacier, till they could see both the ocean and the high ice. And there they performed a poem they’d composed, a cry from angry and engaged hearts about the overwhelming fact of their lives. The

Testimony submitted by climate scientists to a federal court in 2017, for instance, said that if we don’t take much stronger action now, future citizens would have to pay $535 trillion to cope with global warming.

When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in carbon dioxide

Several meters in the next fifty to 150 years,” said James Hansen, the planet’s premier climatologist, who added that such a rise would make coastal cities “practically ungovernable.”20 As Jeff Goodell (who in 2017 wrote the most comprehensive book to date on sea level rise) put it, such a rise would “create generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production

everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean.

The paper, in the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints that it was happening. But it seems to be true: when researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by about the same amount.

drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once

connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high.

director of University College London’s Hazard Centre.3

The army is mustered by the Kochs (the biggest leaseholders in the tar sands) and ConocoPhillips and PetroChina and the rest, and their enemy is all that is wild and holy.

A large-scale study found that, of the 4.4 million children in Delhi, fully half had irreversible lung damage from breathing the air.3 Around the world, pollution kills 9 million people a year, far more than AIDS, malaria, TB, and warfare combined.

I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic, just realistic—enough to know engagement is our only chance.

dinosaurs. If you back up far enough, it’s possible to be philosophical about anything—the sun is going to blow up eventually, after all. But that’s more philosophy than I can manage; for me, and for many others, the loss of this game is the largest conceivable tragedy, if, indeed, we can conceive it.

Much of the sea ice that filled the Arctic in the early pictures from space is gone now—viewed from a distance, Earth looks strikingly different.

A 2018 study concluded that even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, more than a third of the planet’s glacial ice would melt anyway in the coming decades.

Climate change is currently costing the U.S. economy about $240 billion a year,